_ shall be the new formula. She will be of use; will do the
daily task, forgetting the unattainable ideals. She cannot keep her
husband's love, any more than she can draw the perfect hand; then she
will not waste her life in sighing for either gift. She will be useful;
she will gain cheer _that_ way, since all the others fail her.

"Go, little girl with the poor coarse hand!
I have my lesson, shall understand."

This is the last hope--to be of humble use; this the last formula for
survival.

IX.--ON DECK

And this has failed like the rest. She is on board the boat that carries
her away from him, she has found the last formula: _set him free_. Well,
it in its turn has been followed: she is gone. Gone--in every sense.

"There is nothing to remember in me,
Nothing I ever said with a grace,
Nothing I did that you care to see,
Nothing I was that deserves a place
In your mind, now I leave you, set you free."

No "_petite fleur dans la pensee_"--none, none: she grants him all her
dis-grace. But will he not grant her something too--now that she is
gone? Will he not grant that men have loved such women, when the women
have loved them so utterly? It _has_ been: she knows that, and the more
certainly now that she has yielded finally her claim to a like miracle.
His soul is locked fast; but, "love for a key" (if he could but have
loved her!), what might not have happened? She might have grown the same
in his eyes as he is in hers!

So strange it is to think of _that_. . . . She can think anything when
such imagining is once possible to her. She can think of _him_ as the
"harsh, ill-favoured one!" For what would it have mattered--her
ugliness--if he had loved her? They would have been "like as pea and
pea." Ever since the world began, love has worked such spells--that is
so true that she has warrant to work out this strange, new dream.

Imagine it. . . . If he had all her in his heart, as she has all him in
hers! He, whose least word brought gloom or glee, who never lifted his
hand in vain--that hand which will hold hers still, from over the
sea . . . if, when _he_ thinks of her, a face as beautiful as his own
should rise to his imagination--with eyes as dear, a mouth like that, as
bright a brow. . . .

"Till you saw yourself, while you cried ''Tis she!'"

But it will not be--and if it could be, she would not know or care, for
the joy would have killed her.

Or turn it aga