There lay the canker which made her energy and
cheerfulness a mere task to hide the real disease. Half unconsciously
she had loved Stafford and half unconsciously she had built her life
upon him. When he had been taken from her, the foundations had been
shaken, and she found herself crippled by a horrible sense of
emptiness and purposelessness. In England she would have flung herself
into some intellectual pursuit, as other women do who have suffered
heart shipwreck. But she was in India, and in India intellectual food
is scarce. Pleasure is the one serious occupation for the womenkind;
and though pleasure may be a good narcotic for some, for Lois it was
worse than useless. She needed one being for whom she could bring
sacrifices and endless patient devotion, and there was no one. Her two
guardians lived for her, and that was not what she hungered after with
all the thwarted energy of her soul. She wanted to work for somebody,
not to be worked for--and no one needed her, no one except this man. She
looked at him. She saw that her long silence was torture to him; she saw
that he was suffering genuinely, and her heart went out to him in pity.
Pity is a woman's invariable undoing. How many women--sometimes happy,
sometimes unhappy, according to the rulings of an inscrutable Fate--have
married, partly out of flattered vanity, but chiefly because they are
good-hearted, and labor under the mistaken conviction that a man's
happiness rests on their decision? And in this particular instance
Lois was honestly attached to Travers.
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