ers. This was not something
called up in vindication, a mere escape from hard thinking, her own way
out from things she could not bear; it was deeper than that, far less
facile. It came from that inner quiet--from that strange new
assurance--this feeling that her love should not have devastated, that
it was too purely of life for that; that it was a thing to build up
life, to give to it; this wondering, at once timid and bold, if there
was not something wrong with an order that could give it no place, that
made it life's enemy.

She had been afraid of rebellious thinking, of questionings. There had
been so much to fight, so much to make her afraid. At first all the
strength of her feeling had gone into the fight for Stuart's health; she
was afraid of things that made her rebellious--needing all of herself,
not daring to break through. The circumstances had seemed to make her
own life just shut down around her; and even after those first years,
living itself was so hard, there were so many worries and
disappointments--her feeling about it was so tense, life so stern--that
her thoughts did not shoot a long way out into questionings. She had
done a thing that cut her off from her family; she had hurt other people
and because of that she herself must suffer. Life could not be for her
what it was for others. She accepted much that she did not try to
understand. For one thing, she had had no one to talk to about those
things. Seeing how Stuart's resentment against the state of things
weakened him, keeping him from his full powers to meet those hard
conditions, she did not encourage their talking of it and had tried to
keep herself from the thinking that with him went into brooding and was
weakening. She had to do the best she could about things; she could not
spend herself in rebellion against what she had to meet. Like a man who
finds himself on a dizzy ledge she grew fearful of much looking around.

But now, in these last few days, swept back into the wreckage she had
left, something fluttered to life and beat hard within her spirit,
breaking its way through the fearfulness that shut her in and sending
itself out in new bolder flights. Not that those outgoings took her away
from the place she had devastated; it was out of the poignancy of her
feeling about the harm she had done, out of her new grief in it that
these new questionings were born. The very fact that she did see so
well, and so sorrowingly, what she had done, b