d to be in return cast aside
by life like a broken tool: that was tragic.

The thing was to defy life; to fly in the face of the fool nature, break
her absurd rules, and wrest out of the breakage something for oneself by
which to live at the last.

Neville flung her challenge to the black sea that slowly brightened under
the moon's rising eye.

CHAPTER III

FAMILY LIFE

1

If you have broken off your medical studies at London University at the
age of twenty-one and resume them at forty-three, you will find them (one
is told) a considerably tougher job than you found them twenty-two
years before. Youth is the time to read for examinations; youth is used
to such foolishness, and takes it lightly in its stride. At thirty you
may be and probably are much cleverer than you were at twenty; you will
have more ideas and better ones, and infinitely more power of original
and creative thought; but you will not, probably, find it so easy to grip
and retain knowledge out of books and reproduce it to order. So the world
has ordained that youth shall spend laborious days in doing this, and
that middle age shall, in the main, put away these childish things, and
act and work on in spite of the information thus acquired.

Neville Bendish, who was not even in the thirties, but so near the brink
of senile decay as the forties, entered her name once more at the London
University School of Medicine, and plunged forthwith into her interrupted
studies. Her aim was to spend this summer in reacquiring such knowledge
as should prepare her for the October session. And it was difficult
beyond her imaginings. It had not been difficult twenty-two years ago;
she had worked then with pleasure and interest, and taken examinations
with easy triumph. As Kay did now at Cambridge, only more so, because she
had been cleverer than Kay. She was a vain creature, and had believed
that cleverness of hers to be unimpaired by life, until she came to try.
She supposed that if she had spent her married life in head work, her
head would never have lost the trick of it. But she hadn't. She had spent
it on Rodney and Gerda and Kay, and the interesting, amusing life led by
the wife of a man in Rodney's position, which had brought her always into
contact with people and ideas. Much more amusing than grinding at
intellectual work of her own, but it apparently caused the brain to
atrophy. And she was, anyhow, tired of doing nothing in particular. After
for