be gone through. And
her imagination had never conceived its horror. She was to be taken at
her word. The neglected gift was beginning to show signs of decay and
enfeeblement. It had given fair warning for many a year, by the
persistent appeal that it made, the persistent pain that it caused; but
the famine had told upon it at last. It was dying. As this fact
insinuated itself into the consciousness, in the teeth of a wild effort
to deny it, despair flamed up, fierce and violent. She regretted that
she had not thrown up everything long ago, rather than endure this
lingering death; she cursed her hesitation, she cursed her fate, her
training, her circumstances, she cursed herself. Whatever there was to
curse, she cursed. What hideous nonsense to imagine herself ready to
face this last insult of fate! She was like a martyr, who invites the
stake and the faggot, and knows what he has undertaken only when the
flames begin to curl about his feet. She had offered up her power, her
imperious creative instinct, to the Lares and Penates; those greedy
little godlets whom there was no appeasing while an inch of one remained
that they could tear to pieces. She clenched her hands, in agony. The
whole being recoiled now, at the eleventh hour, as a fierce wild
creature that one tries to bury alive. She looked back along the line of
the past and saw, with too clear eyes, the whole insidious process, so
stealthy that she had hardly detected it, at the time. She remembered
those afternoons at the Priory, when the restless, ill-trained power
would assert itself, free for the moment, from the fetters and the
dismemberment that awaited it in ordinary life. But like a creature
accustomed to the yoke, she had found it increasingly difficult to use
the moments of opportunity when they came. The force of daily usage, the
necessary bending of thoughts in certain habitual directions, had
assisted the crippling process, and though the power still lay there,
stiffer than of yore, yet the preliminary movements and readjustments
used up time and strength, and then gradually, with the perpetual
repetition of adverse habits, the whole process became slower, harder,
crueler.

"Good heavens! are _all_ doors going to be shut against me?"

It was more than she could bear! And yet it must be borne--unless--no,
there was no "unless." It was of no use to coquet with thoughts of
suicide. She had thought all that out long ago, and had sought, at more
than one