rs. North! to Charlotte, when Sheila
had gone. "I predicted a phenomenal future for her--I had her tingling
to her finger tips. Then--quite suddenly--the light, the fire was
quenched. And do what I would, I couldn't kindle it again. It was
very strange--unless----"

"Unless----?"

"Unless she's going to have a child. I told her that she mustn't have
children."

"You mean," cried Charlotte incredulously, "that you advised her to
shirk the greatest experience possible to a woman? You advised her to
forego _that_?"

But Alice North lifted her pretty brows and shrugged her histrionic
shoulders with an air of fine distaste. "Really, Charlotte," she
drawled, "I hadn't suspected you of being so primitive."

Walking homeward through the sweet summer dusk, Sheila was far from the
listless, extinguished creature whom Alice North had described,
however. Never in her life had such a tempest of emotion swept through
her being. For she was face to face, at last, with life.

The first night of Ted's courtship returned to her now; she smelt the
fragrance of climbing roses; she felt his head again upon her
breast--the indescribable first touch of love that is unlike all
others!--she heard a voice deep within her exulting: "_This_ is
_life_!" Ah, how ignorant she had been--how pitifully innocent! To
have thought _that_ life!

For life was a thing that laid brutal, compelling hands upon you; that
destroyed you and created you again; that rent you with unspeakable
pangs, with unimaginable terrors, with frantic and powerless
rebellions. It was not joy; it was not peace; it was not fulfillment.
It was a _force_. Merciless, implacable, irresistible, it seized upon
you and _used_ you. For that you were put into the world; for that you
dreamed and hoped and struggled--for that moment out of an eternity,
that moment of _use_!

As she hurried onward, stumbling now and then with a clumsiness alien
to her, the sense of lying helpless in the grasp of this force almost
drove her to cry out. More than once she lifted her hands to her
mouth, and even then little shuddering murmurs broke from her.

Helpless? Oh, yes! yes! For that had come to her from which there was
no escape. She was trapped. She, too, was to be put to use. Her own
work must make way for Nature's. She saw that now.

Her own work must make way. For Alice North herself had said that one
could not serve art and Nature, too--and Nature had exacted ser