tear-stained, injured, implacable and dignified.

"You love her?" she asked once, and jerked that doubt into my mind.

I struggled with tangled ideas and emotions. "I don't know what love
is. It's all sorts of things--it's made of a dozen strands twisted in a
thousand ways."

"But you want her? You want her now--when you think of her?"

"Yes," I reflected. "I want her--right enough."

"And me? Where do I come in?"

"I suppose you come in here."

"Well, but what are you going to do?"

"Do!" I said with the exasperation of the situation growing upon me.
"What do you want me to do?"

As I look back upon all that time--across a gulf of fifteen active
years--I find I see it with an understanding judgment. I see it as if
it were the business of some one else--indeed of two other
people--intimately known yet judged without passion. I see now that this
shock, this sudden immense disillusionment, did in real fact bring out
a mind and soul in Marion; that for the first time she emerged
from habits, timidities, imitations, phrases and a certain narrow
will-impulse, and became a personality.