Having watched through the window her father pass down the avenue on his
way to town, Miss Guion reseated herself mechanically in her place at
the breakfast-table in order to think. Not that her thought could be
active or coherent as yet; but a certain absorption of the facts was
possible by the simple process of sitting still and letting them sink
in. As the minutes went by, it became with her a matter of sensation
rather than of mental effort--of odd, dream-like sensation, in which all
the protecting walls and clearly defined boundary-lines of life and
conduct appeared to be melting away, leaving an immeasurable outlook on
vacancy. To pass abruptly from the command of means, dignity, and
consideration out into a state in which she could claim nothing at all
was not unlike what she had often supposed it might be to go from the
pomp and circumstance of earth as a disembodied spirit into space. The
analogy was rendered the more exact by her sense, stunned and yet
conscious, of the survival of her own personality amid what seemed a
universal wreckage. This persistence of the ego in conditions so vast
and vague and empty as to be almost no conditions at all was the one
point on which she could concentrate her faculties.

It was, too, the one point on which she could form an articulated
thought. She was Olivia Guion still! In this slipping of the world from
beneath her feet she got a certain assurance from the affirmation of her
identity. She was still that character, compounded of many elements,
which recognized as its most active energies insistence of will and
tenacity of pride. She could still call these resources to her aid to
render her indestructible. Sitting slightly crouched, her hands clasped
between her knees, her face drawn and momentarily older, her lips set,
her eyes tracing absently the arabesques chased on the coffee-urn, she
was inwardly urging her spirit to the buoyancy that cannot sink, to the
vitality that rides on chaos. She was not actively or consciously doing
this; in the strictest sense she was not doing it at all; it was doing
itself, obscurely and spontaneously, by the operation of subliminal
forces of which she knew almost nothing, and to which her personality
bore no more than the relation of a mountain range to unrecordable
volcanic fusions deep down in the earth.

When, after long withdrawal within herself, she changed her position,
sighed, and glanced about her, she had a curious feeling of