Only once at this time did she give way to uttermost despair. And that was when a second-hand bookseller bought all her library for five pounds. There were shelves stocked with Wells and Shaw and Ibsen and Galsworthy and Bennett and Hardy and Granville Barker. The whole was worth at least twice what she received for it. But it was not that that made her unhappy. It was the realization that this was her tacit withdrawal from the long struggle to lift herself on to a higher plane. She had tried to educate herself, to stock her mind with wisdom beyond her comprehension, to reconstitute herself in a mould that nature had never intended for her. And there had been times when the struggle, vain and fruitless though it ever was, was a thing of joy to her, of joy even when she was most conscious of failure. But now these books held all her dead dreams, and she cared for them with an aching tenderness. All the things she had tried hard to understand and had never more than half understood were doubly precious now that she was beginning to forget them all.... One book alone she kept, and justified her action in so doing on the ground that the dealer would only give her sixpence for it. It was Ray Verreker’s _Growth of the Village Community_. It had a good binding, she argued, and it would be a shame to let it go for sixpence. But after all, it was a mere piece of sentimentality that she should keep it. It was no use to her at all. Even in the old days, when a strange enthusiasm had prompted her to seek to make herself mistress of its contents, it had been woefully beyond her understanding. And now, when she tried to re-read its opening chapter, every word seemed cruel. All the technical jargon about virgates and demesnelands and manorial courts inflicted on her a sense of despair deeper than she had ever felt before. Finally, when she came to a quotation from a mediæval trade charter in Latin, she cried, for no very distinct reason save that she could not help it. After all the issue was plain, and in a certain sense comforting. However low she might descend in the social scale, she was not sacrificing intellectual distinction, for that had never been more than a dream and a mirage. If ever anyone by taking thought could have added one cubit to her intellectual stature that person must have been she. Time and effort and her heart’s blood had gone into the struggle. And nought had availed.... But she put _Growth of the Village Community_ amongst the little pile of personal articles that she intended to take with her when she moved into lodgings.... CHAPTER XXI FALLEN § 1