Yet the girl, no less, remained a rival, since she
represented all the things that Charity felt herself most incapable of
understanding or achieving. Annabel Balch was, if not the girl Harney
ought to marry, at least the kind of girl it would be natural for him to
marry. Charity had never been able to picture herself as his wife; had
never been able to arrest the vision and follow it out in its daily
consequences; but she could perfectly imagine Annabel Balch in that
relation to him.
The more she thought of these things the more the sense of fatality
weighed on her: she felt the uselessness of struggling against the
circumstances. She had never known how to adapt herself; she could only
break and tear and destroy. The scene with Ally had left her stricken
with shame at her own childish savagery. What would Harney have thought
if he had witnessed it? But when she turned the incident over in her
puzzled mind she could not imagine what a civilized person would have
done in her place. She felt herself too unequally pitted against unknown
forces.
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