She was still a scarcely recovered invalid, and it was pathetic that she
should be commencing the struggle of life with strength so little
proportioned to the demand upon it; and the calling she had taken up was
of a fantasticality in some aspects which was equally pathetic. But all
the undertakings of women, he mused, were piteous, not only because women
were unequal to the struggle at the best, but because they were hampered
always with themselves, with their sex, their femininity, and the
necessity of getting it out of the way before they could really begin to
fight. Whatever they attempted it must be in relation to the man's world
in which livings were made; but the immemorial conditions were almost
wholly unchanged. A woman approached this world as a woman, with the
inborn instinct of tempting it as a woman, to win it to love her and make
her a wife and mother; and although she might stoically overcome the
temptation at last, it might recur at any moment and overcome her. This
was perpetually weakening and imperilling her, and she must feel it at
the encounter with each man she met. She must feel the tacit and even
unconscious irony of his attitude towards her in her enterprise, and the
finer her make the crueller and the more humiliating and disheartening
this must be.

Of course, this Miss Shirley felt Verrian's irony, which he had guarded
from any expression with genuine compassion for her. She must feel that
to his knowledge of life she and her experiment had an absurdity which
would not pass, whatever their success might be. If she meant business,
and business only, they ought to have met as two men would have met, but
he knew that they had not done so, and she must have known it. All that
was plain sailing enough, but beyond this lay a sea of conjecture in
which he found himself without helm or compass. Why, should she have
acted a fib about his being an actor, and why, after the end, should she