or a week, felt his willing lips on her passive ones,
felt his long moustache, his warm breath, his reviving passion. Then she
found herself standing alone, quivering and pulsating, watching him as he
walked away with the waddling walk of the horseman.

In her heart, madly beating, two intense feelings fought and struggled.
The dominant thought of years, to end with herself the life that seems a
curse and not a blessing, to be always maid, to die in the forlorn hope
and to leave none to sorrow through having lived by her, was shaken to
its base by a new-born furious desire to yield herself utterly. It came
to her to run after Ned, to go with him, to Queensland, to the bush, to
prison, to the gallows if need be. An insane craving for him raged within
her as her memory renewed his kisses on her lips, his crushing arm-clasp,
the strength that wooed with delicious bruisings, the strong personality
that smote against her own until she longed to stay the smiting. It
flashed through her mind that crowning joy of all joys would be to have
his child in her arms, to rear a little agitator to carry on his father's
fight when Ned himself was gone for ever.

Then--she stamped her foot in self-contempt and walked resolutely to
her door. When she got up to her room she went to the open window and,
kneeling down there, watched with tearless eyes the full white moon that
began to descend towards the roofs amid the gleaming stars of the
cloudless sky.

The hours passed and she still knelt watching, tearless and sleepless,
mind and body numbed and enwrapped by dull gnawing pain.

* * * * *

Pain is to fight one's self and to subdue one's self. Nellie fought with
herself and conquered.

A paradox this seems but is not, for in truth each individual is more
than one, far more. Every living human is a bundle of faggot faculties,
in which bundle every faculty is not an inert faggot but a living,
breathing, conscious serpent. The weakling is he in whose forceless
nature one serpent after another writhes its head up, dominant for a
moment only, doomed to be thrust down by another fancy as fickle. The
strong man is he whose forceful nature casts itself to subdue its own
shifting desires by raising one supreme above the others and holding it
there by identifying the dearest aspirations with its supremacy. And we
call that man god-like whose heart yearns towards one little ideal,
struggling for existence amid the tumultuous passions that clas