Long after Mr. Orme had left the topic, Kate remained lost in its
contemplation. She had begun to perceive that the fair surface of life was
honeycombed by a vast system of moral sewage. Every respectable household
had its special arrangements for the private disposal of family scandals;
it was only among the reckless and improvident that such hygienic
precautions were neglected. Who was she to pass judgment on the merits
of such a system? The social health must be preserved: the means devised
were the result of long experience and the collective instinct of
self-preservation. She had meant to tell her father that evening that her
marriage had been put off; but she now abstained from doing so, not from
any doubt of Mr. Orme's acquiescence--he could always be made to feel the
force of conventional scruples--but because the whole question sank into
insignificance beside the larger issue which his words had raised.

In her own room, that night, she passed through that travail of the soul
of which the deeper life is born. Her first sense was of a great moral
loneliness--an isolation more complete, more impenetrable, than that in
which the discovery of Denis's act had plunged her. For she had vaguely
leaned, then, on a collective sense of justice that should respond to
her own ideas of right and wrong: she still believed in the logical
correspondence of theory and practice. Now she saw that, among those
nearest her, there was no one who recognized the moral need of expiation.
She saw that to take her father or Mrs. Peyton into her confidence would
be but to widen the circle of sterile misery in which she and Denis moved.
At first the aspect of life thus revealed to her seemed simply mean
and base--a world where honour was a pact of silence between adroit
accomplices. The network of circumstance had tightened round her, and every
effort to escape drew its meshes closer. But as her struggles subsided she
felt the spiritual release which comes with acceptance: not connivance in
dishonour, but recognition of evil. Out of that dark vision light was to