on. This withdrawal had once
been her agony, the dissolution of her world; she had struggled against
it, striving with a vain and ruinous tension to hold the perishing
vision, to preserve it from destruction. Now she contemplated its
disappearance with a curious indifference. She had no desire to recover
it.

She remembered how she had once regarded the immolation of her genius as
the thing of all things most dangerous, most difficult, a form of
terrible self-destruction, the sundering of passionate life from life.
That sacrifice, she had said, would be the test of her love for Hugh
Brodrick. And now, this thing so difficult, so dangerous, so impossible,
had accomplished itself without effort and without pain. Her genius had
ceased from violence and importunity; it had let go its hold; it no
longer moved her.

Nothing moved her but Brodrick; nothing mattered but Brodrick; nothing
had the full prestige of reality apart from him. Her heart went out to
the things that he had touched or worn; things that were wonderful,
adorable, and at the same time absurd. His overcoat hanging in the hall
called on her for a caress. Henry, arriving suddenly one afternoon,
found her rubbing her cheek against its sleeve. His gloves, which had
taken on the shape of Brodrick's hands, were things to be stroked
tenderly in passing.

And this house that contained him, white-walled, green-shuttered,
red-roofed, it wore the high colours of reality; the Heath was drenched
in the poignant, tender light of it.

That house on the Heath continued in its incomprehensible beauty. It was
not to be approached without excitement, a beating of the heart. She
marvelled at the power that, out of things actual and trivial, things
ordinary and suburban, had made for her these radiances and
immortalities. She could not detect the work of her imagination in the
production of this state. It was her senses that were so exquisitely
acute. She suffered an exaltation of all the powers of life. Her state
was bliss. She loved these hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock.
She had discovered that it struck the quarters. She said to herself how
odd it was that she could bear to live with a clock that struck the
quarters.

She was trying hard to be as punctual and perfect as Gertrude Collett.
She had gone to Gertrude to learn the secret of these ordered hours. She
had found out from Gertrude what Brodrick liked best for dinner. She had
listened humbly while Gertr