f her stupor refreshed. The cloud had rolled away, and she
could work again. She sat down to the last pile of Vincent's proofs.

When she had finished them, she turned over the pages again. The reading
had brought back to her the last eighteen months, with all the meaning
that they had for her now. She looked back and thought of the years when
she had first worked for Ted, of the precious time that Audrey had
wasted. The fatalism that was her mood so often now told her that these
things _had to be_. And it was better, infinitely better, for Ted to
have had that experience. She looked back on the year that Vincent had
wasted out of his own life, and saw that that too had to be. There had
been vicarious salvation even there. Ted had once told her that there
was a time when, as he expressed it, he would have walked calmly to
perdition, if Vincent had not gone before him and shown him what was
there. She looked back on that year of her own life, "wasted," as she
had once thought--the year she had given up so grudgingly at the
beginning, so freely at the end--and she was content.

And now she was giving up, not time alone, and thought, and labour, but
love--love that could have no certain reward but pain. And she was still
content. At first she had been astonished and indignant at her own
capacity for emotion; it was as if her nature had suddenly revealed
itself in a new and unpleasant light. Then she had grown accustomed to
it. Yesterday she was even amused at the strangeness and the fatuity of
it all. She described herself as a bungling amateur wandering out of her
own line and attempting the impossible. Clearly she should have left
this sort of thing to people like Audrey, to whose genius it was suited,
and who might hope to attain some success in it; but for her the love of
art was quite incompatible with the art of love. She could have imagined
herself entertaining these feelings for some one like Percival Knowles,
for instance, who was clever and had an educated sense of humour, who
wrote verses for her and flattered her artistic vanity; but to have
fixed upon Vincent of all people in the world! She must have done it
because it was impossible. That was what she had said yesterday; but
to-day she understood. Had she not helped to make Vincent a man that she
could love without shame? He was the work of her hands, that which her
own fingers had made. It was natural that she should love her own work.
Was she not an artist