But very soon they got their second wind. Their legs still felt that they might break off at hip or knee, but this had gradually become only an interesting sensation, for their bodies as units began to discount the thousands of separate fatigue messages sent by separate nerves and had grown beautifully light. The girls were moving ahead now—on, on, on, with no need to whip up their wills. If they should learn that they must walk on like this until night they would not rebel. And they began talking as freely as without effort they walked. “I know what you mean about uncoiling it—all that last night’s stuff,” Anne exclaimed. “Every step uncoils me. But I feel, Ariel, as if my feet must leave a trail of slimy sticky awfulness behind me in the snow. Only why should you need to uncoil, Ariel? You weren’t going to slide down into the dark water to slip out under the ice. _You_ hadn’t separated from yourself.” “No. But you’d always horrified me a little. I felt that you were trapped in some dangerous, dreadful way, when I first saw you. And last night it all got real for me. It’s more than as if you’d told me, Anne. It’s as if I’d been in your trap with you and had wanted to die too—and all. I can’t explain myself. But it’s all uncoiling now, every step we take, and the snow is blotting it up. Don’t you feel it?” “Life is strange, isn’t it!” Anne observed, with as fresh a wonder as though the idea itself were fresh. “Do you know, I hardly was aware of _you_ at all during vacation except toward the last, when I hated you so. Before that I only thought of you in your relation with Hugh. I thought it a pity you weren’t colorful enough to make some sort of a stab at cutting Joan out with him. Not colorful! Stupid, even! Imagine! And now I know that you’re the best thing in the Weyman family, except, possibly, Grandam. But you and Grandam might be sisters. No, not family—race! You are beings of the same race. That’s it. The angel race.” “Oh, hush! How idiotic!” Ariel wasn’t flattered. She was humiliated. “Ariel! Have you ever been in love?” “Yes. As much as you....” “As much? But not like me, I know. You’ve never been lost. You haven’t been what Prescott said I was—eaten into by love as though love was a cancer and a destruction. He said that the people who let it take them like that were disgusting slaves, and not worth anybody’s loving. He was right. My love was cancerous, not beautiful. You know, yourself. You saw it without understanding it and you say it horrified you. Then no wonder Prescott was put off by it. But it’s not like that with you. I can sense things as well as you can, you see! You’ve stayed yourself, kept the integrity of your personality. And your pride. I know it. You’re pure, clear like a diamond. And by ‘pure’ I mean your will is untouched. Unsmirched. Diamond-hard and diamond-clean. Aren’t I right?”