ing to mind? What was that fleeting cobweb of
thought that seemed a recurrence of a sensation only recently passed?
When she had tried to tell herself that full-fruited passion was worth
all else in life, was the one great and real thing worth all the many
small shams . . . what was it she had felt?

She groped among the loose-hanging filaments of impression and brought
it out to see. It seemed to be . . . could it have been, the same startled
recoil as at the notion of getting back the peace of childhood by giving
up her home for the toy-house; her living children for the dolls?

* * * * *

Now, for the great trial of strength. Back! Push back all those
thick-clustering, intruding, distracting traditional ideas of other
people on both sides; the revolt on one hand, the feeble resignation on
the other; what other women did; what people had said. . . . Let her wipe
all that off from the too-receptive tablets of her mind. Out of sight
with all that. This was _her_ life, _her_ question, hers alone. Let her
stand alone with her own self and her own life, and, with honesty as
witness, ask herself the question . . . would she, if she could, give up
what she was now, with her myriads of roots, deep-set in the soil of
human life, in order to bear the one red rose, splendid though it might
be?

That was the question.

With no conscious volition of hers, the answer was there, plain and
irrefutable as a fact in the physical world. No, she would not choose to
do that. She had gone on, gone on beyond that. She was almost bewildered
by the peremptory certainty with which that answer came, as though it
had lain inherent in the very question.

* * * * *

And now another question crowded forward, darkly confused, charged with
a thousand complex associations and emotions. There had been something
displeasing and preposterous in the idea of trying to stoop her grown
stature and simplify her complex tastes and adult interests back into
the narrow limits of a child's toy-house. Could it be that she felt
something of the same displeasure when she set herself fully to conceive
what it would be to cramp herself and her complex interests and adult
affections back to . . .

But at this there came a wild protesting clamor, bursting out to prevent
her from completing this thought; loud, urgent voices, men's, women's,
with that desperate certainty of their ground which always st