appeared transformed in words, a statement of the case that might be made to them, “anyone’s” statement of the case, beginning with “after all”; and leaving everything unstated. Applied to her own experience they seemed to have no meaning at all. Summaries were no good. Actual experience must be brought home to make anything worth communicating. “When he first kissed me,” started her mind “those women were all about him. They have come between us forever.” She flushed towards the garden. The mere presence in her mind of such vileness was an outrage on the Broom atmosphere. She could not again face the girls. For some time she sat, driving from point to point in the garden the inexorable fact that she had reached a barrier she could not break down. She could, if she were alone, face the possibility of dashing her life out against it. If she were to turn back from it, she would be rent in twain, and how then, base and deformed could she find spirit to face anyone at all? At last, still with her eyes on the garden, she told them, she must go and think in the open air. They cherished and indulged her in their unaltered way and she escaped, exempted from coming back to tea.
Suppose, said the innumerable voices of the road, as she wandered down it relieved and eager in the first moments of freedom, he had not told you? It was sincere and fine of him to tell. Not at all. He wanted to have an easy mind. He has only explained what it was that came between us at the first, and has been waiting ever since to be there again. …
“Remember; I did not know you would come.”
Why did men not know? That was the strange thing. Why did they make their first impressions of women such as would sully everything that came after? That was the extraordinary thing about the average man and many men who were not average at all. Why?
The answer must be there if she could only get through to it. Some immovable answer. The wrong one perhaps, but sufficient to frame an