complicated will dealing with a small estate
regards the testator. Marion shook with rage at the weak girl of thirty
years ago who lay on the sofa and stared at the grained panels of the
closed door and let the walls of her will fall in. Then it was that her
life had been given its bias towards her misery. Then it was there was
conceived the tragedy which would come to a birth at which all present
should die. "What tragedy? What tragedy?" she said derisively, sitting
up in bed. There spoke in her the voice of her deepest self. "The
tragedy," it answered composedly. "The tragedy. Did you not know almost
as soon as Richard stirred in you that he would have eyes like black
fire? Were you not perfectly acquainted long before his birth with all
the modes in which his body and soul were to move, so that nothing he
has done has ever surprised you? Even so, you have always known that the
end of you and yours will be tragedy." "What could happen to my
Richard?" she argued. "He is well, he is prosperous, he has this lovely
Ellen who will be a watchdog to his happiness. Tragedy cannot touch him
unless the gods send down fire from heaven, and there are no gods. There
are no gods, but there are men, and fire that comes from the will." She
groaned, and lay back and wrapped the sheets round her closely like
cerements, as if by shamming dead she could cast off the hot
thoughtfulness of life. But indeed she gained some comfort from this
dialogue with that uncomfortable self, for she knew again how wise it
was, and its predictions seemed irrational only because it had
remembered all that her consciousness had determined to forget for fear
it threw so strong a light on her fate that she would lose her courage
to live.

Her reasoning self was a light, irreligious thing, and thought about
what she should eat and what she should drink and where she should
sleep, but this other self had never awakened save to speak of Harry or
Richard. She trusted it, and she could recall quite definitely that on
that afternoon thirty years before it had sanctioned her decision to
abandon conflict and do what people wished to do. It knew, what her
consciousness had forgotten, of how she herself had felt when she was
within her mother's womb, and it was able to warn her that her unborn
baby was seriously thinking of revising its decision to live. While she
had staggered under the stones, the child had quailed in the midst of
her terror like a naked man above