ism from
being the counsel of perfection--in which, curiously enough, Joe would
agree with me more than Ishmael, who fights against the individual in
life to an extraordinary extent. I wish something would happen to make
him succumb to it again. I don't want him to grow inhuman...."

"I wish it were possible to grow inhuman," said Judy.

"If you knew," said Boase slowly, "that besides doing--as I must tell
you--a right action by leaving off all connection with Joe Killigrew,
you could also cease at once to feel anything for him, would you then
leave him?"

"Ah! not yet ..." said Judith. "I must have a little longer. Wait till
I'm older--till I can't make him want me...."

As she went home, comforted more than she could have thought possible by
the mere telling of what had accompanied her so long, she knew that she
had not been wholly disingenuous. That Killigrew would cease to want her
for at least a good while to come she did not believe, and it was not
that dread which had sent her shaking for the first time to the help
from which she had hitherto held proudly aloof. As a matter of fact she
kept up the illusion of youth better with Killigrew than with the rest
of the world, and she knew it. For one thing, he was never away from her
long enough at a time to get a thoroughly new vision of her on his
return, a vision apart from that which he was expecting to see. For
another, she took more care with him. Other people might see her
unpowdered, bleak--never he. And for this, too, she had paid the
penalty. Sometimes when he held her, gazing down into the face she had
prepared with so much skill to meet that look--counting half upon the
material aids upon her skin and half upon the state she should have
evoked in him before she courted that gaze--then she would think to
herself: "And if I were not 'tidied,' if I were 'endy,' looking greasy,
as I have all day, he would not be feeling like this...." Then with that
thought would flash into her aching heart: "On so frail a thread hangs
love...."

But it was not anything in Killigrew which had eaten into her
consciousness this past week--it was something in herself. Something
which had risen to its crest that night among the bracken had failed
ever since, was falling on deadness, and that something was her own
power to feel the love which had made her life for so long. There were
always periods of deadness--she knew that--but this held a quality none
of them had had. What i