tching the fingers twitch across the
eternal, mechanical, monotonous clock-face of time. She never really
lived, she only watched. Indeed, she was like a little, twelve-hour
clock, vis-a-vis with the enormous clock of eternity--there she was,
like Dignity and Impudence, or Impudence and Dignity.

The picture pleased her. Didn't her face really look like a clock
dial--rather roundish and often pale, and impassive. She would have got
up to look, in the mirror, but the thought of the sight of her own
face, that was like a twelve-hour clock-dial, filled her with such deep
terror, that she hastened to think of something else.

Oh, why wasn't somebody kind to her? Why wasn't there somebody who
would take her in their arms, and hold her to their breast, and give
her rest, pure, deep, healing rest. Oh, why wasn't there somebody to
take her in their arms and fold her safe and perfect, for sleep. She
wanted so much this perfect enfolded sleep. She lay always so
unsheathed in sleep. She would lie always unsheathed in sleep,
unrelieved, unsaved. Oh, how could she bear it, this endless unrelief,
this eternal unrelief.

Gerald! Could he fold her in his arms and sheathe her in sleep? Ha! He
needed putting to sleep himself--poor Gerald. That was all he needed.
What did he do, he made the burden for her greater, the burden of her
sleep was the more intolerable, when he was there. He was an added
weariness upon her unripening nights, her unfruitful slumbers. Perhaps
he got some repose from her. Perhaps he did. Perhaps this was what he
was always dogging her for, like a child that is famished, crying for
the breast. Perhaps this was the secret of his passion, his forever
unquenched desire for her--that he needed her to put him to sleep, to
give him repose.

What then! Was she his mother? Had she asked for a child, whom she must
nurse through the nights, for her lover. She despised him, she despised
him, she hardened her heart. An infant crying in the night, this Don
Juan.

Ooh, but how she hated the infant crying in the night. She would murder
it gladly. She would stifle it and bury it, as Hetty Sorrell did. No
doubt Hetty Sorrell's infant cried in the night--no doubt Arthur
Donnithorne's infant would. Ha--the Arthur Donnithornes, the Geralds of
this world. So manly by day, yet all the while, such a crying of
infants in the night. Let them turn into mechanisms, let them. Let them
become instruments, pure machines, pure wills, that w