Yet in her restlessness she could think nothing out.
Moreover, the chain that galled and curbed her was a chain of character.
In spite of her modernness, and the complexity of many of her motives, there was certain inherited simplicities of nature at the bottom of her.
In her wild demonic childhood you could always trust Marcie Boyce, if she had given you her word--her schoolfellows knew that.

If her passions were half-civilised and southern, her way of understanding the point of honour was curiously English, sober, tenacious.

So now.

Her sense of bond to Aldous had never been in the least touched by any of her dissatisfactions and revolts.

Yet it rushed upon her to-night with amazement, and that in four weeks she was going to marry him! Why?
how ?--what would it really _mean_ for him and for her?
It was as though in mid-stream, she were trying to pit herself for an instant against the current which had so far carried them all on, to see what it might be like to retrace a step, and could only realise with dismay the force and rapidity of the water.
Yet all the time another side of her was well aware that she was at that moment the envy of half a county, that in another ten minutes hundreds of eager and critical eyes would be upon her; and her pride was rising to her part.