Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/228

 know that my father was one of the cleverest doctors in the whole of England? He was. If he hadn't drunk he might have been anywhere and done anything. But sometimes when he was drunk and the boys were away at school, and the house was in such a mess, and the servant wouldn't stay because of father, I felt I couldn't go on—I couldn't!—and that I'd run down the road leaving everything as it was, into the town and hide so that they'd never find me.... And now," she suddenly broke out, "I have run away—and see what I've made of it!"

"It isn't over yet," he said to her quietly. "Life's just beginning for you."

"Well, anyway," she answered, with a sudden resolute calm that made her seem ever so much older and more mature, "I've helped the boys to start in life, and I won't have to go back to all that again—that's something. It's fine to love some one and work for them as you said just now, but if it's always dirty, and there's never enough money, and the servants are always in a bad temper, and you never have enough clothes, and all the people in the village laugh at you because your father drinks, then you want to stop loving for a little while and to escape anywhere, anywhere to anybody where it isn't dirty. Love isn't enough—no, it isn't—if you're so tired with work that you haven't any energy to think whether you love or not."

She hesitated there, looking away from him, and