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Walpole, Hugh, Sir, 1884-1941

"The Captives"


She gave her father something from a little bottle, kneeling in
front of him.
At last she turned to her brother. "You'd better go," she said. "You
can do nothing here."
Miserable, repentant, feeling as though he had no place in the world
and yet eager too to defend himself, he left the room.


CHAPTER VII
THE OUTSIDE WORLD

Maggie had a week.
She did not need it. From the first half-hour after Martin's leaving
her her mind was made up. This question of marriage did not, on
further reflection, very greatly disturb her. She had known, in her
time, a number of married people and they had been invariably
unhappy and quarrelsome. The point seemed to be that you should be,
in some way, near the person whom you loved, and she had only loved
one person in all her life, and intended never to love another. Even
this question of love was not nearly so tangled for her as it would
be for any more civilised person. She knew very little about
marriage and only in the most sordid fashion about sexual relations
which were definitely connected in her mind with drunken peasants
and her father's cook.


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