“There, that will do, thank you.... We have become serious and incomprehensible. Let us talk of other things. I want to be gay.... Amuse me.”
Arrived at the hotel, she told Justine that she must not be disturbed till near dinner-time, and withdrew to her sitting-room. There she sat and thought, as she had never done in her life before. She thought upon everything that had happened since the day when she met Galt Roscoe on the ‘Fulvia’; of a certain evening in England, before he took orders, when he told her, in retort to some peculiarly cutting remark of hers, that she was the evil genius of his life: that evening when her heart grew hard, as she had once said it should always be to him, and she determined again, after faltering many times, that just such a genius she would be; of the strange meeting in the rapids at the Devil’s Slide, and the irony of it; and the fact that he had saved her life--on that she paused a while; of Ruth Devlin--and here she was swayed by conflicting emotions; of the scene at the mill, and Phil Boldrick’s death and funeral; of the service in the church where she meant to mock him, and, instead, mocked herself; of the meeting with Tonga Sam; of all that Justine had said to her: then again of the far past in Samoa, with which Galt Roscoe was associated, and of that first vow of vengeance for a thing he had done; and how she had hesitated to fulfil it year after year till now.
Passing herself slowly back and forth before her eyes, she saw that she had lived her life almost wholly alone; that no woman had ever cherished her as a friend, and that on no man’s breast had she ever laid her head in trust and love. She had been loved, but it had never brought her satisfaction. From Justine there was devotion; but it had, as she thought, been purchased, paid for, like the labour of a ploughboy. And if she saw now in Justine’s eyes a look of friendship, a note of personal allegiance, she knew it was because she herself had grown more human.
Her nature had been stirred. Her natural heart was struggling against her old bitterness towards Galt Roscoe and her partial hate of Ruth Devlin. Once Roscoe had loved her, and she had not loved him. Then, on a bitter day for him, he did a mad thing. The thing became--though neither of them knew it at the time, and he not yet--a great injury to her, and this had called for the sharp retaliation which she had the power to use. But all had not happened as she expected; for something called Love had been conceived in her very slowly, and was now being born, and sent, trembling for its timid life, into the world.