erstand all, share all. But Rosemary had been dead these
twenty years....

"Drive me a little, William, please.... For half an hour, and then
home...."

The car went far over familiar streets that she had first seen from a
perambulator. She sat almost motionless, the tangible world faded out.
It was good to be alone; this was a solitude peopled with fancies. Her
mind dreamed back over the long strange year, while her steadfast face
was shining toward the Future.

* * * * *

Strange enough it seemed now; but till the other day Hugo and Dr. Vivian
had hardly once met in the thoughts of Cally Heth. They had hardly met
in life, never exchanged a word since the night in the summer-house: so
she, untrained to discernment, had supposed that they had nothing to do
with each other. Now, in the last few days, it had come to seem that
these two had, in her, been pitted against each other from the
beginning.

Forces not of her making had cut and patterned her life; and she, driven
on by feelings which she herself had hardly understood, had crumpled up
that pattern and seized the shears of destiny in her own hand. The
groove she had been set and clamped so fast into ran straight as a
string into Hugo Canning's arms; but she had broken out of her groove,
and Hugo was gone, to cross her path no more. And her mother thought,
and Hugo had said almost with his parting breath, that she had been
driven to these madnesses by mere foolish femininisms, new little ideas
picked up from Cooneys or elsewhere.

It was true that she had these ideas; true, too, that she was not alone
with them. She had been drilled from birth to the ranks of the beguilers
of men, their sirens but their inferiors; and something in her, even
before this year, had rebelled at that rating of herself, dimly
perceiving--as she had heard a man say once--that marriage was better
regarded as a career than as a means of livelihood. She had been drilled
again to believe that her happiness depended on money in quantities,
things had; but then, at the first pinch of real trouble, these things
had seemed to sag beneath her, and she perceived dimly, once more, that
she had built her house upon something like sand. And if her particular
experiences here had been unique, she had seen that her experience was,
after all, a common one. As if with eyes half-opened, she had divined
all about her other people making the discoveries she had made; or,