w again the touch
of the artificial red.

"Dear Seymour! My true self! I wonder what sort of self you think that
is?"

"That's easily told. It is the self I have been loving for so many
years. And now--"

He got up, still alert in his movement, out of his chair.

"You are going?"

"Yes. I have to meet 'Better not' at the Marlborough to talk over His
Majesty's visit to Manchester."

"Ah!" she said.

"Better not" was the nickname given at Court to a certain much-valued
gentleman about the king.

She did not try to detain Seymour. But when he had gone deep depression
overcame her. She was the helpless victim of a tremendous reaction. So
long as she had been in activity she had been able to endure. Even the
horror of the _Bella Napoli_, complex and cruelly intense as the probing
of steel among the nerves of the body, she had been able to live through
without obvious flinching. But then there had been something to do,
something to deal with, something to get the better of. There had been
a necessity for action. And now there was nothing. Her activities were
over. Seymour had broken the curious spell which for a short time had
bound her, and now she realized everything with unnatural acuteness.

What was the good of coming into possession of her true self? What was
the good of anything? Life was activity. Her late close contact with
youth, her obligation to do something difficult and, to her, tremendous
for youth had taught her that anew, and now she must somehow reconcile
herself to extinction. For this was really what lay before her
now--extinction while still alive. Better surely to be struggling with
horrors than to be merely dying away. She even looked back to the scene
with Beryl and thought of it almost with longing. For how she had lived
in that scene! At moments during it she had entirely forgotten herself.

Was that perhaps life, the only real life--entire forgetfulness of self?
If so, how seldom she had lived! In all her sixty years, in all her
so-called "great life," for how short a time she had lived!

She had just then, even in the midst of her reaction, a feeling of
illumination. She was in darkness, but around the darkness, as if
enclosing it and her in it, there was light, a light she had never been
really aware of till now. Something within her said:

"I see!"

She went up to her bedroom, shut herself in, went to a bookshelf, and
took down a Bible which stood on it. She turned its pages till