She had been thinking of the night, a year ago this month, to which everything in her life since seemed to run straight back.  She had not certainly calculated the ruin of Dalhousie that night:  rather her lack was that she had hardly cared what she did to him.  In that narrow circle of engrossments where she had moved, mistaking it for the living universe, the great want, so it seemed now, was that she had never been asked to measure herself by moral standards at all.  What she got:  this was all that people looked at here, and according to this she had well managed her affairs, snug in the snugness of the horse-leech’s daughters.  She had been all for the walled little island,—­as she had heard it called,—­the island of the upward bound, where self-propelment was the test of right or wrong, and a marriage well above her the touchstone of a girl’s sound morality.  On this island such as Jack Dalhousie had no merit.  What simpler than to kick him off, and turn away with your fingers in your ears?...

Improbable people these, no doubt, if you were of those who judged people by what they did, and never by what they had; hell-cats, perhaps, if you happened to be a father thus made sonless....

Her abasement now fairly met the portrait of her sketched by a stranger two hours since; outran what another stranger had said to her, one night in a summer-house.  She looked back over a year, and seemed to see herself as truly one empty within, a poor little thing; common in her whole outlook, vulgar in her soul....  Yes, vulgar.  Let her hug the hateful word to her bosom.  How else could she have been made to feel so again and again, by an obscure youth who had no power over anybody but that he had kept his own face turned toward the stars?...

And when Cally’s thoughts turned toward this present, struggling to show beyond doubt that that girl and this were not one, they ran perpetually into that new cloud of her own weakness which had unrolled above her to-day, and now spread and blackened over the skies.

And yet she felt that it was not cowardice that tied her hands against the fainting girls in the bunching-room.  Her strung nerves had carried it all deeper than that.  She had spied on her father, found him out in guilt; he, it seemed, must for years have been leading a double life that would not bear looking at.  How bring herself to confront papa, who had always been so affectionate and generous to her, with his discovered secret?...

If she but had some right, even, some standing from which to speak....  And here her new resolve was that when she saw Dr. Vivian at the Settlement next week, she would consult him directly:  now asking him to say, not that she had no responsibilities about her father’s business, but that she had them in abundance.

But deeper than this, beneath all the flutterings of her mind, there ran the increasing sense that, whatever the logic of it might be, responsibility was on her nevertheless:  the supreme responsibility put upon free beings by the trust of a friend....