Raising her head, she leaned against the bole of a tree and looked, with dimmed eyes, at the October morning. Around her she heard the murmurous rustle of leaves, the liquid notes of a wood robin, like the sprinkling of rain on the air, the distant shrill chanting of insects; all the natural country sounds which she would have called silence. Smooth as silk the shadows lay on the red clay road. Over the sky there was a thin haze, as if one looked at the sun through smoked glasses. "You've got to do something," repeated a derisive voice in her brain. "You've got to do something, or you'll go out of your mind." It seemed to her that the whole landscape waited, inarticulate but alive, for her decision. Despair overwhelmed her; yet through all her misery there persisted a dim, half conscious recognition that she was living with only a part of her being. Deep down in her, beneath the rough texture of experience, her essential self was still superior to her folly and ignorance, was superior even to the conspiracy of circumstances that hemmed her in. And she felt that in a little while this essential self would reassert its power and triumph over disaster. Vague, transitory, comforting, this premonition brooded above the wilderness of her thoughts. Yes, she was not broken. She could never be broken while the vein of iron held in her soul. For a long while she sat there by the roadside, with her eyes on the pale sunshine and the transparent shadows. What would her mother say if she knew? When would she know? Who would have the courage to tell her? For twenty years they had lived in the house together, yet they were still strangers. For twenty years they had not spent a night apart, and all the time her mother had dreamed of coral strands and palm trees, while she herself had grown into a thing as strange and far away as Africa. Were people like this everywhere, all over the world, each one a universe in one's self separate like the stars in a vast emptiness? XVI Far over the autumn fields, she heard the whistle of the train as it rounded the long curve at the station. Before the sound had floated past her she had come to one of those impetuous decisions which were characteristic of her temperament. "I'll go away in the morning," she resolved. "I'll go on the first train, the one that whistles at sunrise. If I take that, I can leave the house before light."