he said she was. She KNEW it. If she had
been able to think of one thing but Martin and that girl and her own
chaos, she must have guessed it at Easthampton from the look in his
eyes when he helped her into his car.... He had lost his balance, gone
over the dividing hue between soundness and unsoundness. And it was her
fault for having fooled with his feelings. Everything was her fault,
everything. And now she stood on what Gilbert had called the lip of
Eternity. "Who Cares?" had come back at her like a boomerang. And as to
a choice between giving herself to Gilbert or to death, what was the
good of thinking that over? She didn't love this man and never could.
She loved Martin, Martin. She had always loved Martin from the moment
that she had turned and found him on the hill. She had lost him, that
was true, He had been unable to wait. He had gone to the girl with the
white face and the red lips and the hair that came out of a bottle. She
had sent him to her, fool that she had been. Already she had decided to
creep back to the old prison house and thus to leave life. Without
Martin nothing mattered. Why put up a fight for something that didn't
count? Why continue mechanically to live when living meant waiting for
death? Why not grasp this opportunity of leaving it actually, at once,
and urge Gilbert on to stop the beating of her wounded and contrite
heart? ... Death, the great consoler. Sleep, endless sleep and peace.

But as she stood there, tempted, with the weight of Martin's discarded
armor on her shoulders and the sense of failure hanging like a
millstone round her neck, she saw the creeper bursting into buds on the
wall beneath the window of her old room, caught the merry glint of
young green on the trees below her hill, heard the piping of birds to
their nesting mates, the eager breeze singing among the waving grasses
and the low sweet crooning of baby voices--felt a tiny greedy hand upon
her breast, was bewildered with a sudden overwhelming rush of
mother-longing ... young, young? Oh, God, she was young, and in the
springtime with its stirring sap, its call to life and action, its urge
to create, to build, its ringing cry to be up and doing, serving,
sowing, tending--the pains of winter forgotten, hope in the warming sun.

She must live. Even without Martin she must live. She was too young for
death and sleep and peace. Life called and claimed and demanded. It had
need of the young for a good spring, a ripe summ