trust.

To-night she wrote: "I have done all I can for you, or, if you like, for
Laura. She's at the breaking point. If you think there's anything you
can do for her yourself you'd better do it and lose no time."

She wrote brutally; for mixed with her jealousy there was a savage anger
with Owen as the cause of Laura's suffering. She hated the Kiddy, but
she couldn't bear to see her suffer.

There were two days yet before the mail went; but she posted her letter
at once, while her nerve held out. The thing done, she sat up till
midnight brooding over it. It had taken all her nerve. For she did not
want Prothero to come back, and that letter would bring him. Bodily
separation from Owen had not killed her; it had become the very
condition of her life; for there was a soul of soundness in her. Her
blood, so vehement in its course, had the saving impetus of recoil.

She dreaded its dominion as the whipped slave dreads the lash.

Latterly she had detached herself even spiritually from Owen. She
remembered what she had been before, without him, and what, without him,
she had possessed. Her genius was a thing utterly removed from her, a
thing that belonged to Owen rather than to her, since he had said it was
his youth. She thought of it tenderly, as of a thing done for and
departed; for it was so that she had come to think of Owen's youth. She
was not like Jane, she felt no hatred of it and no jealousy. It had not
given her cause. It had not stood in her way. It had not struggled in
her against her passion. If it had, she knew that she would have swept
it aside and crushed it. It had lain always at the mercy of her
passions; she had given it to her passions to destroy, foreseeing the
destruction. But now she relented. She felt that she would save it if
she could.

It was in her hour of sanity and insight that she had said virginity was
the law, the indispensable condition. Virginity--she had always seen it,
not as a fragile, frustrate thing, but as a joyous, triumphing energy,
the cold, wild sister of mountain winds and leaping waters, subservient
only to her genius, guarding the flame in its secret, unsurrendered
heart.

Her genius was the genius of wild earth, an immortal of divinely pitiful
virgin heart and healing hand; clear-eyed, swift-footed, a huntress of
the woods and the mountains, a runner in the earth's green depths, in
the secret, enchanted ways. To follow it was to know joy and deliverance
and peace. It w