dden to her; and it would be the
better for all the hours of pure suffering for itself alone.

She had suffered for the loss of her work--Oh, very really! Even
through years that had been altogether happy otherwise, the
restlessness and hunger and depression of a talent unappeased had come
upon her at times, come upon her almost unbearably. Though she had set
her little son between it and her, it had reached her; it had harassed
her unspeakably with demands that she had, perforce, refused to
gratify. The sudden note of a violin, the sight of a flowering tree
pearly against an April sky, a glimpse of tranquil stars through her
window at night--such things as these had been enough to bring her
gift's importuning and torment upon her. Earnestly and sincerely as
she had tried to steel herself from such importunity and torment, they
had come upon her again and again; they still came; they would come
always--unless she flung off the shackles of that foolish, unnecessary
vow.

Fling off its shackles she did, with a sudden, blessed sense of liberty
and strength. With neither confession to Ted, nor any attempt at
concealment, she set herself to write. For the first time since her
marriage--at least since her motherhood--she felt her life, in some
measure, her own. That she made no announcement of her independence to
Ted was significant of the complete independence she had begun to feel.
Perhaps it was significant of it, also--of the extent to which she
conveyed, without words, her emancipation--that Ted, discovering, in
the ensuing days, what she was about, said nothing of it either.

When she sat down, at last, to her writing-table, to her clean sheaf of
paper, it was with the conviction of her individual rights spurringly
upon her. But though she was finally so sure of her right to set free
her gift, she felt within her no stir and flutter of a thing mad to fly
and now released to do it. No winged words sprang upon her paper to
leave bright traces of a heavenly flight. At the end of a long,
uninterrupted morning, there was upon her paper no word at all.

Not for lack of ideas did the paper remain thus bare. There were ideas
enough and to spare in the treasure chamber of her brain, ideas long
hoarded, but still fresh with the glamour of their first conception.
There was one idea which had especially tantalized and allured her
through years of resistance on her part, an idea for a story really
insolently quiet and