sentences about not caring a hang what people said. 'Why should one, if one knows one's right? And let 'em all go to blazes! Them's my opinions!'
She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms were twitching nervously. It was evident that she was only waiting for the door to shut to tell Rachel all about it. Indeed, directly they were inside her room, she sat on the end of the bed and said, 'I suppose you think I'm mad?'
Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about any one's state of mind. She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever occurred to her without fear of the consequences.
'Somebody's proposed to you,' she remarked.
'How on earth did you guess that?' Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure mingling with her surprise. 'Do as I look as if I'd just had a proposal?'
'You look as if you had them every day,' Rachel replied.
'But I don't suppose I've had more than you've had,' Evelyn laughed rather insincerely.
'I've never had one.'
'But you will--lots--it's the easiest thing in the world--But that's not what's happened this afternoon exactly. It's-- Oh, it's a muddle, a detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!' She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold water; for they were burning hot. Still sponging them and trembling slightly she turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous excitement: 'Alfred Perrott says I've promised to marry him, and I say I never did. Sinclair says he'll shoot himself if I don't marry him, and I say,
'Well, shoot yourself!' But of course he doesn't--they never do. And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott, and told me I'd no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities of pleasant things like that. So at last I said to him, 'Well, Sinclair, you've said enough now. You can just let me go.' And then he caught me and kissed me--the disgusting brute--I can still feel his nasty hairy face just there--as if he'd any right to, after what he'd said!'
She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.
'I've never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!' she cried; 'they've no dignity, they've no courage, they've nothing but their beastly passions and their brute strength! Would any woman have behaved like that--if a man had said he didn't want her?
We've too much self-respect; we're infinitely finer than they are.' She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. Tears were now running down with the drops of cold water.
'It makes me angry,' she explained, drying her eyes.
Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evelyn's position; she only thought that the world was full or people in torment.
'There's only one man here I really like,' Evelyn continued; 'Terence Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him.'
At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart seemed to be pressed together by cold hands.
'Why?' she asked. 'Why can you trust him?'
'I don't know,' said Evelyn. 'Don't you have feelings about people? Feelings you're absolutely certain are right? I had a long talk with Terence the other night. I felt we were really friends after that. There's something of a woman in him--' She paused as though she were thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her, so at least Rachel interpreted her gaze.
She tried to force herself to say, 'Has to be proposed to you?' but the question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn was saying that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler than men--for example, one couldn't imagine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a mean thing or having anything base about her.
'How I'd like you to know her!' she exclaimed.
She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. 'Lillah runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,' she continued. 'She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it's now the biggest of its kind in England. You can't think what those women are like--and their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of the day and night. I've often been with her. . . . That's what's the matter with us. . . . We don't _do_ things. What do you _do_?' she demanded, looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile. Rachel had scarcely listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and unhappy. She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her work in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love affairs.
'I play,' she said with an affection of stolid composure.
