"Yes, yes, I've wanted to. You see it was after your father came home from the war and we were all broken up. Forester was sickly, and there was the one that died. So when I knew you were coming, I--hated you, Olivia. I wanted things different. I hated you ... until I heard you cry. You cried all the time when you were little, Olivia, and it was I that was crying in you. I've expected some punishment would come of it." "Oh, hush, hush mother! I shouldn't have liked it either in your place. Besides, they say--the scientists--that it isn't so that things before you are born can affect you as much as that." She moved her head feebly on the pillows in deep-rooted denial. "They can say that, but we've never got on. There's things in you that aren't natural for any daughter of mine. They can say that, Olivia, but we--we know." "Yes, mother, we know." I took her hands again and nursed them against my cheek; after a time tears began to drip down her flaccid cheeks and I wiped them away for her. "Don't, mother, don't! We get along now, anyway! And as for the things in me which are different, do you know, mother, I'm getting to know that they are the best things in me." I honestly thought so; and after all these years I think so now. I wheeled her into the bedroom presently, where she fell into the light slumber of the feeble, and seemed afterward hardly to remember, but I was glad then to have talked it all out with her, for though she lived nearly two years after, before I saw her again another stroke had deprived her of articulateness. CHAPTER VIII I went home to my husband after it began to seem certain that my mother's condition would not change for some time, but I knew in the going that neither Tommy nor Higgleston could ever present themselves to me again in the aspect of an absolute destiny. By the incidents of the past few weeks I had been pulled free from the obsession of inevitableness with which my life had clothed itself until now; I stood outside of it and questioned it in the light of what it might have been, what it might yet become. Suppose I had received Helmeth Garrett's letter; suppose my interest in Mr. O'Farrell had wavered a hair's breadth out of the community of work into that more personal and particular passion----? I quaked in the cold blasts which blew on me out of unsuspected doors opening on my life.