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Patricia thought: How difficult it is to be good! And it's so easy to be wicked. Some people want to be wicked, and can't. It's ... it's easy.

She was standing in her little brown room and looking at her own reflection in the mirror with the gilded frame. And as she looked at herself, she saw a hardness come, and a new glitter in her eye. And it was then that she realised how easy it was to be wicked, and how difficult to be good. How easy it was to drift into wickedness that made one defiant afterwards, and a little afraid! That made one continue avid of excitement!

Patricia felt that she could not keep still. Such nervous restlessness as she was now experiencing was strange; but she could not keep still. If she sat down she found herself immediately again standing, moving about the room; and stopping, lost in a dream. She could not think consecutively. If she began to think, ridiculous words came into her head from nowhere, and fragments of the speech of somebody else; and cross currents of her own thought interrupted and distracted her attention.

"I'm going mad!" she suddenly thought. And from somewhere came the comment, "Ah, I've noticed that, have I?... Pengewith.... As if it could be helped.... Monty was ... of course, women ... I wonder how the name Saskatchewan is really pronounced: I suppose it's.... Yes, mad. Mad, because all this ... I could go to Africa, Biskra—isn't that where they go? Or Samarkand.... What beautiful names they have. ... I'd like to go travelling on and on, and the moon at night shining on the desert.... All very quiet, and stars, and peace.... Horrible insects.... Stop! Stop!"

Patricia put her hands to her ears, as if in that way to check the nightmare of her thoughts. She forced herself to sit quietly down, to take up a book. Every noise in the house and street was subdued; and after a few moments her eyes would not attend to the page, and her brain would not accept the meaning of the printed word; and these idiotic thoughts came stealthily back as little devils might have done. She was trying hard not to think of something in particular. She was trying not to think of what had happened on the previous evening, of what might still happen. She did not want to face her own actions, or their consequences; and all these devilish little thoughts that so frightened her came because she had as it were locked up the only thing she wanted most desperately to think about, and was refusing to let her mind have free play.