He laughed. “Oh, I say, that’s nonsense. Every girl must marry. You may as well make up your mind to it, close your eyes, shut your teeth, and dash in.”
“You might not think it,” she said after a pause, “but I am like you English--I’m horribly, incurably sentimental. I know it’s foreign to my bringing up, but----” Her jaw set, and her eyes fixed upon something visible only to her in the blackness beyond the rail. “My bringing up was all wrong and rotten,” she went on presently. “I don’t know just how or where, but I know it’s so. I began to feel it dimly when I visited my aunt in America four years ago. My mother died when I was a baby, and I was trained by my father and governesses--governesses that suited him. My father---- But I needn’t tell you, and you probably don’t sympathise with me. His one idea in life is social position. It seems to me a contemptible ambition for a man. With women--there’s some excuse for it. We’re naturally petty. And, so far as I can see it, as the world is made up, if we haven’t got that we haven’t got anything. We can’t have any other ambition--it’s the only one open to us. Well, I haven’t got even ambition. I want--that is, I wanted----”
She paused again, resisting the mood that was urging her on to confidence. “By Jove,” thought Frothingham, “it wouldn’t be hard for a man to like her.”
“No matter what it was I wanted,” she went on, “I didn’t get it--and sha’n’t, ever.” She turned her face toward him. “You may misunderstand me--may think I am in love and hopelessly disappointed--there’s a story of that kind going round. But I’m not in love. I was--but I’m not now.”
“Do you think one ever gets over it?” he asked absently.
“I’m afraid not--at least, not thoroughly,” he answered himself. There were two faces out there in the blackness into which they were staring, but each was seeing only one.
“One ought to get over it--one _must_,” she said slowly, “when one finds that the person one cared for is a bad lot. But”--she sighed under her breath--“I might marry, yes, would, if I needed a home or money. But I don’t. So I shall be much better contented alone. I’ll never believe deeply in any human being again.”
“You mustn’t take life so seriously,” he said gently. “You’ll change before----”
