me for a long day, or she might get Vere
to ask him.

Vere must surely be longing to have a talk with her secret mentor, with
her admirer and inspirer. And then Hermione remembered how often she had
encouraged Emile, how they had discussed his work together, how he had
claimed her sympathy in difficult moments, how by her enthusiasm she
had even inspired him--so at least he had told her. And now he was
fulfilling in her child's life an office akin to hers in his life.

The knowledge made her feel desolate, driven out. Yes, she felt as
if this secret shared by child and friend had expelled her from their
lives. Was that unreasonable? She wished to be reasonable, to be calm.

Calm? She thought of the old Oriental, and of his theory of resignation.
Surely it was not for her, that theory. She was of different blood. She
did not issue from the loins of the immutable East. And yet how much
better it was to be resigned, to sit enthroned above the chances of
life, to have conquered fate by absolute submission to its decrees!

Why was her heart so youthful in her middle-aged body? Why did it still
instinctively clamor for sympathy, like a child's? Why could she be so
easily and so cruelly wounded? It was weak. It was contemptible. She
hated herself. But she could only be the thing she at that moment hated.

Her surreptitious act of the afternoon seemed to have altered her
irrevocably, to have twisted her out of shape--yet she could not wish it
undone, the knowledge gained by it withheld. She had needed to know what
Emile knew, and chance had led her to learn it, as she had learned it,
with her eyes instead of from the lips of her child.

She wondered what Vere would have said if she had been asked to reveal
the secret. She would never know that now. But there were other things
that she felt she must know: why Vere had never told her--and something
else.

Her act of that day had twisted her out of shape. She was awry, and she
felt that she must continue to be as she was, that her fearless honesty
was no longer needed by her, could no longer rightly serve her in the
new circumstances that others had created for her. They had been secret.
She could not be open. She was constrained to watch, to conceal--to be
awry, in fact.

Yet she felt guilty even while she said this to herself, guilty and
ashamed, and then doubtful. She doubted her new capacity to be furtive.
She could watch, but she did not know whether she could watch w