Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/299

 'I feel from now on,' she said aloud, 'that life will be very correct and very certain. And I feel as if you really understand me as no one else ever has. I am like a—glass person, almost. And you know everything, even "what is best," like those unpleasant papas Miss Bigley and I used to put in our stories. You know everything, almost everything I have ever done or thought, and everything I ever will be...' Both thought guiltily as she spoke of the sombre young man from Arabia.

'Lanice,' he said, 'once you wanted to tell me something, and I was afraid to hear. But now, no matter what you say, no matter what the truth is, I promise it will make no difference. Because,' he added stubbornly, 'you are you, and nothing else matters.'

'And I love you,' said Lanice rather tigerishly, for marriage had increased a hundred fold her feeling for him, 'and he...is nothing now...nothing. Would you understand how little he is to me if I told you that for years in Amherst I was really in love with Rochester? "Jane Eyre" was considered a sinful book, but Mamma used to read it. She would try to hide it from me in a dilatory way; I mean, just lay a handkerchief over it, or put it upside down in the bookcase, so of course I read it. Well, at fifteen I loved Rochester. I could not believe he was dead, or rather had never lived. I used to plan how some day I would meet him, and how much more he'd love me than Jane. And later I loved Captain Jones, but now one seems as unreal as the other, and the girl who was so...foolishly infatuated is not me—some one else—not Mrs.