stretched to the sea.

But Delia was looking at herself, in a long pier-glass that represented
almost the only concession to the typical feminine needs in the room.
She was not admiring her own seemliness; far from it; she was rating
and despising herself for a feather-brained waverer and
good-for-nothing.

"Oh yes, you can _talk_!" she said, to the figure in the glass--"you
are good enough at that! But what are you going to _do_!--Spend your
time at Maple's and Waring--matching chintzes and curtains?--when
you've _promised_--you've _promised_! Gertrude's right. There _are_ all
sorts of disgusting cowardices and weaknesses in you! Oh! yes,
you'd like to go fiddling and fussing down here--playing the
heiress--patronising the poor people--putting yourself into beautiful
clothes--and getting heaps of money out of Mr. Winnington to spend.
It's in you--it's just in you--to throw everything over--to forget
everything you've felt, and everything you've vowed--and just _wallow_
in luxury and selfishness and snobbery! Gertrude's absolutely right.
But you shan't do it! You shan't put a hand to it! Why did that man
take the guardianship? Now it's his business. He may see to it! But
_you_--you have something else to do!"

And she stood erect, the angry impulse in her stiffening all her young
body. And through her memory there ran, swift-footed, fragments from a
rhetoric of which she was already fatally mistress, the formulae too of
those sincere and goading beliefs on which her youth had been fed ever
since her first acquaintance with Gertrude Marvell. The mind renewed
them like vows; clung to them, embraced them.