Anne began to be aware that with every increase of weariness to her trudging legs and feet a bit of mental misery petered out, got dropped off. Her mind, after a while, even began to function again. Since the moment when Prescott had struck her—and run away from her on the New Haven street, her mind had played almost no part in her actions, at least her conscious mind hadn’t. As she went on beside silent Ariel, suddenly, unaccountably, she recalled an incident of one of her summers at the shore. She was at the extreme outer edge of a dock when a sloop emerged from thick fog before her very face, as if it had taken its form and motion from the mists themselves. And now it seemed to her that her thoughts—the vehicle, that is, that made up her thought-feeling-self—was such a sloop, sailing toward her out of a foggy nothingness, coming clear, taking shape. But then there must be something else, something detached from self, that could see self returning—and indeed, something for self to return to. Any instant now the two would merge. The sloop would slide alongside the dock, and self would step into self. And when she did join this self, taking form and moving swiftly upon her now after absence, would she lose the present sense of detachment? Would she be whole again—less of self-consciousness and more of self? But by now physical weariness had increased to a point which seemed final. If she dragged her feet another step forward through the sticky snow her legs would snap off at the hips. She came to a dead halt, too exhausted even to get onto the side of the road out of the path of possible motors. “Ariel!” she called. “I’m done up. Now what do you want? What’s next?” Anne’s tone and the words themselves sounded hopeless, and certainly her physical self was hopeless. But in the instant of giving in to sheer physical defeat she had also given in to an eerie kind of delight of the spirit. She knew that good was coming, coming, coming, creaming up toward her from every side into a surf of light in her heart. Ariel turned back to her. “I’m tired too,” she confessed. “How far have we come, do you suppose? Where are we?” “A hundred miles or so, and we can’t be any distance at all from Scarborough, if it’s still on the map and not taking a holiday. If we can win on to that burg we can get a snack to eat and then catch a local to New York. But why aren’t there any automobiles out? Too thick a storm? If we could get picked up! What was exactly your idea, anyway, in this form of recreation, Ariel? I’m just begun to get brains enough to inquire into it.” “I don’t know, myself,” Ariel murmured. “Only, after last night, you know, I had to walk, run, or swim. It was the only way to—to uncoil it from me. Let’s start on and pray for a motor to come along, a kind one.”