ot;
and if you are not, what are you doing with life? Have you found any
secret that makes living tolerable and understandable? Write to me,
write to me at least and tell me that.... Please write to me.

"Do you remember how long ago you and I sat in the old Park at Burnmore,
and how I kept pestering you and asking you what is all this _for_? And
you looked at the question as an obstinate mule looks at a narrow bridge
he could cross but doesn't want to. Well, Stephen, you've had
nearly--how many years is it now?--to get an answer ready. What _is_ it
all for? What do you make of it? Never mind my particular case, or the
case of Women with a capital _W_, tell me _your_ solution. You are
active, you keep doing things, you find life worth living. Is publishing
a way of peace for the heart? I am prepared to believe even that. But
justify yourself. Tell me what you have got there to keep your soul
alive."

Sec. 3

I read this letter to the end and looked up, and there was my home about
me, a room ruddy-brown and familiar, with the row of old pewter things
upon the dresser, the steel engravings of former Strattons that came to
me from my father, a convex mirror exaggerating my upturned face. And
Rachel just risen again sat at the other end of the table, a young
mother, fragile and tender-eyed. The clash of these two systems of
reality was amazing. It was as though I had not been parted from Mary
for a day, as though all that separation and all that cloud of bitter
jealousy had been a mere silence between two people in the same room.
Indeed it was extraordinarily like that, as if I had been sitting at a
desk, imagining myself alone, reading my present life as one reads in a
book at a shaded lamp, and then suddenly that silent other had spoken.

And then I looked at the page of my life before me and became again a
character in the story.

I met the enquiry in Rachel's eyes. "It's a letter from Mary Justin," I
said.

She did not answer for a few moments. She became interested in the flame
of the little spirit lamp that kept her coffee hot. She finished what
she had to do with that and then remarked, "I thought you two were not
to correspond."

"Yes," I said, putting the letter down; "that was the understanding."

There was a little interval of silence, and then I got up and went to
the fireplace where the bacon and sausages stood upon a trivet.

"I suppose," said Rachel, "she wants to hear from you again."

"She th