f
phrase, no cunning art of construction, no conviction of truth, no
throb of vitality within it. As surely as a still-born child had it
been brought into the world dead. And it was incredibly ugly and
deformed. There was not a gleam of gold upon it!

She recognized all this with unsparing clearness. Not one illusion was
left to her, not one merciful deception; with a single glance at her
completed story, illusions and self-deceptions were swept from her--and
hope was swept from her with them.

Her gift was dead--or, at the least, it was forever ineffectual. There
would be no more mad, glad flights; no more songs high in the sunlit
heavens. The flights and songs and ecstasies were over for all time.
Not for an instant did she cheat herself with sophistries of an
eventual recovery. She knew that if it lived at all--this gift of hers
which had once been more alive than she herself--it would but live
within her as the pain of a thing balked and futile, restless still
perhaps, but not restless with any power. Always--always now--the too
exquisite note of a violin, the sight of blossoming trees at dawn, of
silver, inscrutable stars at night would waken in her the hunger, the
grief, of the unsatisfied. There would never be a time when she could
look on poignant beauty with the peace of one who is herself a part of
all beauty--having created something beautiful. For the ultimate
calamity had befallen her; her gift had been killed, or hopelessly
maimed.

Under the tremendous impact of this blow she was curiously unresentful.
She wondered a little how it had happened. She wondered if she had
suffered too much, suffered to the point of numbness--a thing fatal to
one whose work had been fine largely through her capacity for emotion;
or if the habit, the superstition, of her vow, persisting within her
after the vow itself had been cast aside, had thus finally broken the
wings of her talent. She wondered if her marriage alone, or her
motherhood, or her shamed and hopeless love for Peter had been most
disastrous to her. She had been conscious of them all as she had sat
there trying to write. Eric's face and Peter's had drifted between her
and her pages. Ted's cold declaration that talent was a bad thing for
a married woman, and her own impassioned promise to God to renounce her
work for Eric's life had both drowned for her the voice of her gift.
It was as if all these factors in her destiny had had too much of her;