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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
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