Though her feet burned and her muscles throbbed with fatigue, she lay
awake for hours, with her eyes wide open in the moonlight. All the small
harassing duties of the morrow, which usually swarmed like startled bees
through her brain at night, were scattered now by this vague terror
which assumed no definite shape. The delicacy of Lucy's chest, Harry's
stubborn refusal to learn to spell, and even the harrowing certainty
that the children's appetites were fast outstripping the frugal fare she
provided--these stinging worries had flown before a new anxiety which
was the more poignant, she felt, because she could not give it a name.
The Pendleton idealism was powerless to dispel this malign shadow which
corresponded so closely to that substance of evil whose very existence
the Pendleton idealism eternally denied. To battle with a delusion was
virtually to admit one's belief in its actuality, and this, she
reflected passionately, lying awake there in the darkness, was the last
thing she was prepared at the moment to do. Oliver was changed, and yet
her duty was plainly to fortify herself with the consoling assurance
that, whatever happened, Oliver could never really change. Deep down in
her that essential fibre of her being which was her soul--which drew its
vitality from the racial structure of which it was a part, and yet which
distinguished and separated her from every other person and object in
the universe--this essential fibre was compacted of innumerable
Pendleton refusals to face the reality. Even with Lucy's chest and
Harry's lessons and the cost of food, she had always felt a soothing
conviction that by thinking hard enough about them she could make them
every one come out right in the morning. As a normal human being in a
world which was not planned on altruistic principles, it was out of the
question that she should entirely escape an occasional hour of
despondency; but with the narrow outlook of women who lead intense
personal lives, it would have been impossible for her to see anything
really wrong in the universe while Oliver and all the children were
well. God was in His heaven as long as the affairs of her household
worked together for good. "It can't be that he is different--I must have
imagined it," she thought now, breathing softly lest she should disturb
the sleeping Oliver. "It is natural that he should be worried about his
debts, and the failure of the play went very hard with him, of
course--but if he