e indeed. It was her inmost
being--her realest self--that had locked thus vise-like.

Had she desired to with all her might she could not have dragged it
open. One may not love, or hate, or even be wroth at will. Here her will
was powerless, or rather, this _was_ her will, the irresistible law of
her nature acting with a sort of divine mechanism--as undefiable as the
law of gravitation.

Under this revelation of personality acting in utter disregard of the
person--of any wish or will of the ratiocinating individual--she rested
breathless. Quite independently of her reason or her conscious will,
this inmost, vital nature had solved all, come to an immutable
resolution. "I will be free. I _am_ free," it had announced. "I have a
supreme right to be myself. I refuse further humiliation. I repudiate
further self-sacrifice."

In the vigorous reaction of her whole being, she wondered at her past
meekness, as at the unworthy subservience of another. How had she borne
it all so long? _Why_ had she borne it? She had behaved towards Morris
just as his parents and relatives had behaved from his childhood. She
had criticised them unsparingly in her thought, and all the time, she,
too, had been victimising herself that he might be content, untroubled,
indulged, easy in his boundless egotism.

When she thought of her long patience in certain matters, she shrivelled
with shame. Reaction is a terrible exaggerater. Under its influence
Sophy saw herself as a wretched puppet sewn together of rags of
sentiment. If at the first she had been courageous, if she had said to
him fearlessly: "Either things must be different or we must part," how
much better it would have been than this long-suffering condonement of
what she despised!

What was it in her nature, what hidden spring that had led her to act
Griselda to two such men as Chesney and Loring? She knew herself
fundamentally imperious, impulsive, not to be commandeered. Why, then,
had she coerced herself to sit meekly in two houses of bondage, and for
long, long years?

She wondered and wondered over it. Yet the answer was very simple. She
was tender-hearted, and she was one of the women who watch long by the
sepulchre of Love, lest perchance he may be not dead but sleeping, and
she not there to roll away the stone.

She gave up trying to solve the riddle of her own state at last, and set
to work to put her thoughts in order.

First of all, then, she must be free again.

To be f