uch vehement haste that they dashed against each other
brutally, to her entire confusion.

When she tried to think out an answer to this perfectly preposterous
idea of old Mr. Welles, why should a thousand other horrifying ideas
which she had been keeping at bay pour in through the door, once opened
to probing thought? What possible connection could there be between such
a fantastic crazy notion as his, and those other heaving, looming
possibilities which rolled themselves higher and murkier the longer she
refused to look at them? She snatched at the weeds, twitching them up,
flinging them down, reaching, straining, the sun molten on her back, the
sweat stinging on her face. It was a silly impression of course, but it
seemed to her that if she hurried fast enough with the weeds, those
thoughts and doubts could not catch up with her.

She had put them off, and put them off while Neale was away, because
they scared her, and she didn't want to look at them without Neale. But
he had been back for weeks now and still she put them off. All those
tarnishing sayings, those careless, casual negations of what she had
taken for axioms; that challenge to her whole life dropped from time to
time as though it were an accepted commonplace with all intelligent
beings. . . .

Was her love for the children only an inverted form of sensual egotism,
an enervating slavery for them, really only a snatched-up substitute for
the personal life which was ebbing away from her? Was her attitude
towards her beloved music a lazy, self-indulgent one, to keep it to
herself and the valley here? Was that growing indifference of hers to
dress and trips to the city, and seeing Eugenia's smart crowd there, a
sign of mental dry-rot? Was it a betrayal of what was alive in her own
personality to go on adapting herself to the inevitable changes in her
relations with Neale, compromising, rather than . . ."

"Aren't you awfully hot to go on doing that?" asked Neale, coming up
behind her, from the road. She was startled because she had not heard
him approach on the soft, cultivated ground of the garden. And as she
turned her wet, crimson face up to his, he was startled himself. "Why,
what's the matter, dear?" he asked anxiously.

She sank back to a sitting position, drawing a long breath, mopping her
forehead with her sleeve, as unconscious of her looks before Neale as
though she had still been alone. She motioned him down beside her. "Oh,
Neale, I'm so glad