No; her parents had but small place in that dramatic autobiography that Daphne was now constructing for herself. She was not their daughter in any but the physical sense; she was the daughter of her own works and efforts.
She leant forward to the fire, her face propped in her hands, going back in thought to her father's death, when she was fifteen; to her three years of cloying convent life, and her escape from it, as well as from the intriguing relations who would have kept her there; to the clever lawyer who had helped to put her in possession of her fortune, and the huge sums she had paid him for his services; to her search for education, her hungry determination to rise in the world, the friends she had made at college, in New York, Philadelphia, Washington. She had been influenced by one _milieu_ after another; she had worked hard, now at music, now at philosophy; had dabbled in girls' clubs, and gone to Socialist meetings, and had been all through driven on by the gadfly of an ever-increasing ambition.
Ambition for what! She looked back on this early life with a bitter contempt. What had it all come to? Marriage with Roger Barnes!--a hasty passion of which she was already ashamed, for a man who was already false to her.
What had made her marry him? She did not mince matters with herself in her reply. She had married him, influenced by a sudden, gust of physical inclination--by that glamour, too, under which she had seen him in Washington, a glamour of youth and novelty. If she had seen him first in his natural environment she would have been on her guard; she would have realized what it meant to marry a man who could help her own ideals and ambitions so little. And what, really, had their married life brought her? Had she ever been _sure_ of Roger?--had she ever been able to feel proud of him, in the company of really distinguished men?--had she not been conscious, again and again, when in London, or Paris, or Berlin, that he was her inferior, that he spoiled her social and intellectual chances? And his tone toward women had always been a low one; no great harm in it, perhaps; but it had often wounded and disgusted her.
And then--for climax!--his concealment of the early love affair with Chloe Fairmile; his weakness and folly in letting her regain her hold upon him; his behaviour at the Brendon ball, the gossip which, as Agnes Farmer declared, was all over the neighbourhood, ending in the last baseness--the assignation, the lies, the hypocrisy of the afternoon!