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With the expression of a baby that is afraid and is trying not to confess it; with eyes that seemed to grow larger each minute and a mouth that was pursed in fear that masqueraded as courage, Patricia stood alone in that ugly little room with the highly coloured furnishings and the gilded mirror. She knew she had her friends, who would welcome her rich or poor, but they would welcome a happy Patricia, and not one who was cowed by disaster. Such a Patricia as this would be unfamiliar. She could never bear to go among them starving or wretched. Where she had queened it, she could never play Cinderella. But when her imagination darted ever so little forward—to the day when the money which had seemed such wealth was exhausted,—Patricia heard pity, and shrank from it. Hers was the panic cry: "All is lost!" She had been bold; her way had seemed so clear, so conquering. In that minute of discovery it was not surprising that confidence vanished. She was not one used to hardship, to the canvassing of expedients. All her life had been spent thoughtlessly so far as provision for anything beyond the moment was involved. She had no preparation at all for this emergency. She had awakened to nightmare.

With nerves shaken, and despair almost at her elbow, ready to plunge into her heart at a motion, Patricia tried to think. If her money went, what prospects were there? Harry's help—no! She could never appeal to Harry. That was a new thought, and one which confirmed her decision. In no circumstances whatever could she ever have gone to Harry as one humiliated. Nor could she have married him except for love, as an equal—as a superior, the adored, the shining wonderful of her own dreams. Marriage occurred to her—marriage as a way out of want—as it has occurred many times to women;—and it was only without true imagination that she saw it. It was a suggestion made by her inexperience—the sort of careless, unrealised notion that trips off the mind's surface. She knew that at any time she could have married Jacky; and the notion almost, even in the midst of her distress, made her laugh. It was absurd. Jacky! Jacky as a husband, a perpetual companion! There was nobody whom she could marry. A situation? Who would employ her? Now, when men and women were clamouring for work! And how, after so much liberty, endure the constraints and disciplines of office life! Impossible.

Dry-eyed and wretched, Patricia received her shock. She was stunned. A day earlier—in full panoply, deliciously happy, self-enchanted, inspired with the greatest ambitions, now she was amazed to find how insubstantial were the foundations of her confidence. In an instant, from independence, she had fallen to a paralysing discovery. Patricia was terrified. The knowledge that she was only a frightened, inexperienced little girl was borne in upon her.