e floor behind her, and the fan of white ostrich plumes, which she
had forgotten to leave in the car, was still in her hand. Her face was
wan and drawn; there were violet circles under her eyes; and she looked
as if she had grown ten years older since the evening before. It was the
outward impression of the night, he knew. In this house one passed back
again into the power of time; youth could not be prolonged here for a
single night.

"I don't know what it means," he said, with a mixture of exasperation
and curiosity. "I wish you would tell me what it means."

"I feel," she answered, in an expressionless tone, as if the
insensibility of her nerves had passed into her voice, "that I have
faced life for the first time."

"Tell me what it means," he reiterated impatiently.

Dropping into the chair from which he had risen, she drew her train
aside while the doctor passed them hurriedly, with a muttered apology,
and went into the house. Then, leaning forward, with the fan clasped in
her hands, and her eyes on the straight deserted street, which ended
abruptly on the brow of a hill, she repeated word for word all that the
dying woman had said. The sun had not yet risen, but a faint opalescent
glow suffused the sky in the east, and flushed with a delicate colour
the round cobblestones in the street and the herring-bone pattern of the
pavement, where blades of grass sprouted among the bricks. Though she
did not look up at Stephen's face, she was aware while she talked of
some subtle emanation of thought outside of herself, as if the struggle
in his mind had overflowed mechanical processes and physical boundaries,
and was escaping into the empty street and the city beyond. And this
silent struggle, so charged with intensity that it produced the effect
of a cry, became for her merely a part, a single voice, in that greater
struggle for victory over circumstances which went on ceaselessly day
and night in the surrounding houses. Everywhere about her there was the
vague groping toward some idea of freedom, toward independence of
spirit; everywhere there was this perpetual striving toward a universe
that was larger. The dwellers in this crowded house, with their vision
of space and sunlight; the village with its vision of a city; the city
with its vision of a country; the country with its vision of a republic
of the world--all these universal struggles were condensed now into the
little space of a man's consciousness. To Corinna