Patience Sparhawk and her Times

Hal arrived on Tuesday afternoon. Patience for twenty-four hours after Beverly Peele's visit looked upon life through grey spectacles. She had an impression of being a solitary figure on a sandy waste, illimitable in extent. Life was ugly practical reality. It frightened her, and she cowered before it, hating the future, her blood chilled, her nerves blunt, her brain stagnant.

But by Tuesday morning, being young and buoyant, she revived, and roamed through the woods, entirely loyal to the Stranger. She made up her mind that she would find him, that he could not be married. He must have waited for her. "Oh! " she thought, "if I could not believe that something existed in this world as I have imagined it, some man good enough to love and look up to, I believe I'd jump into the river. At least I have heard Him talk. He could not be a disappointment, like that hollow bronze. If there are many men in the world like Beverly Peele I don't wonder women are in revolt. Women start out in life with big ideals of man, and if they are disappointed I suppose they unconsciously strive to make themselves what they should have found in man. But it is unnatural. It seems to me that man must be able to give woman the best she can find in life, whether he does or not. Something in civilisation has gone wrong."