wick which tied it to the
candle, reaching up, reaching up, never for a moment flagging in that
transmutation of the dead matter below it, into something shining and
alive.

She felt the quiet strength come into her like a tide. And presently, as
naturally as a child wakes in the morning, refreshed, and feels the
impulse to rise to active effort again, she sat up in bed, folded her
arms around her knees, and began to think.

Really to think this time, not merely to be the helpless battle-field
over which hurtling projectiles of fierce emotions passed back and
forth! She set her life fairly there before her, and began to try to
understand it.

As she took this first step and saw the long journey stretching out
before her, she knew on what staff she leaned. It was Neale's belief
that she was strong and not weak, that she could find out, if she tried,
what was deepest and most living in her heart. With this in her hand,
with that great protecting hush about her, she set forth. She was afraid
of what she might find, but she set forth.

She must begin at the beginning this time, and go steadily forward from
one step to the next, not her usual involuntary plunge, not the usual
closing over her head of those yelling waters of too vivid impression.

The beginning had been . . . yes, the first conscious beginning had been
the going away of little Mark, out of his babyhood into his own
child-life. He had gone out and left an empty place behind him, which
till then had been filled with the insistent ever-present need for care
for the physical weakness of babyhood. And she had known that never
again would Mark fill that place.

Emptiness, silence, solitude in the place of constant activity; it had
frightened her, had set before her a vision that her life had reached
its peak, and henceforth would go down the decline. Into that empty
place had come a ringing, peremptory call back to personal and physical
youth and excitement and burning sensations. And with that blinding
rebirth of physical youth had come a doubt of all that had seemed the
recompense for the loss of it, had come the conception that she might be
letting herself be fooled and tricked out of the only real things.

There had been many parts to this: her revolt from the mere physical
drudgery of her life, from giving so much of her strength to the dull,
unsavory, material things. This summer, a thousand times in a thousand
ways, there had been brought home to her