that enough? It had been for thousands of
other women. . . .

No, not that; honesty woke to menace again. What thousands of other
women had done had no bearing here. She was not thousands of other
women. She was herself, herself. Would it be enough for her?

Honesty issued a decree of impartial justice. Let her look at it with a
mature woman's experienced divination of reality, let her look at it as
it would be and see for herself if it would be enough. She was no girl
whose ignorance rendered her incapable of judging until she had
literally experienced. She was no bound-woman, bullied by the tyranny of
an outgrown past, forced to revolt in order to attain the freedom
without which no human decision can be taken. Neale's strong hand had
opened the door to freedom and she could see what the bound-women could
not . . . that freedom is not the end, but only the beginning.

It was as though something were holding her gripped and upright there,
staring before her, motionless, till she had put herself to the last
supreme test. She closed her eyes, and sat so immobile, rapt in the
prodigious effort of her imagination and will, that she barely breathed.
How would it be? Would it be enough? She plunged the plummet down, past
the fury and rage of the storm on the surface, past the teeming life of
the senses, down to the depths of consciousness. . . .

And what she brought up from those depths was a warning distaste, a
something offending to her, to all of her, now she was aware of it.

She was amazed. Why should she taste an acrid muddy flavor of dregs in
that offered cup of heavy aromatic wine, she who had all her life
thanked Heaven for her freedom from the ignominy of feeling it debasing
to be a woman who loved? It was glorious to be a woman who loved. There
had been no dregs left from those sweet, light, heady draughts she and
Neale had drunk together in their youth, nor in the quieter satisfying
draughts they knew now. What was the meaning of that odor of decay about
what seemed so living, so hotly more living than what she had? Why
should she have this unmistakable prescience of something stale and
tainting which she had never felt? Was she too old for passion? But she
was in the height of her physical flowering, and physically she cried
out for it. Could it be that, having spent the heritage of youth, she
could not have it again? Could it be that one could not go back, there,
any more than . . .

Oh, what did that br