But even that did not help her.  It seemed in some mysterious way to be no longer her room, but the room of someone she had known and half forgotten:  who would never come back.  It gave her the same feeling she had experienced on returning to the house in London:  that the place was haunted.  The high cheval glass from her mother’s dressing-room had been brought there for her use.  The picture of an absurdly small child—­the child to whom this room had once belonged—­standing before it naked, rose before her eyes.  She had wanted to see herself.  She had thought that only her clothes stood in the way.  If we could but see ourselves, as in some magic mirror?  All the garments usage and education has dressed us up in laid aside.  What was she underneath her artificial niceties, her prim moralities, her laboriously acquired restraints, her unconscious pretences and hypocrisies?  She changed her clothes for a loose robe, and putting out the light drew back the curtains.  The moon peeped in over the top of the tall pines, but it only stared at her, indifferent.  It seemed to be looking for somebody else.

Suddenly, and intensely to her own surprise, she fell into a passionate fit of weeping.  There was no reason for it, and it was altogether so unlike her.  But for quite a while she was unable to control it.  Gradually, and of their own accord, her sobs lessened, and she was able to wipe her eyes and take stock of herself in the long glass.  She wondered for the moment whether it was really her own reflection that she saw there or that of some ghostly image of her mother.  She had so often seen the same look in her mother’s eyes.  Evidently the likeness between them was more extensive than she had imagined.  For the first time she became conscious of an emotional, hysterical side to her nature of which she had been unaware.  Perhaps it was just as well that she had discovered it.  She would have to keep a stricter watch upon herself.  This question of her future relationship with Phillips:  it would have to be thought out coldly, dispassionately.  Nothing unexpected must be allowed to enter into it.

It was some time before she fell asleep.  The high glass faced her as she lay in bed.  She could not get away from the idea that it was her mother’s face that every now and then she saw reflected there.

She woke late the next morning.  Her father had already left for the works.  She was rather glad to have no need of talking.  She would take a long walk into the country, and face the thing squarely with the help of the cheerful sun and the free west wind that was blowing from the sea.  She took the train up north and struck across the hills.  Her spirits rose as she walked.

It was only the intellectual part of him she wanted—­the spirit, not the man.  She would be taking nothing away from the woman, nothing that had ever belonged to her.  All the rest of him:  his home life, the benefits that would come to her from his improved means, from his social position:  all that the woman had ever known or cared for in him would still be hers.  He would still remain to her the kind husband and father.  What more was the woman capable of understanding?  What more had she any right to demand?