Her depression that morning was itself a mystery. What did it mean? Whence did it proceed? She had not lost her voice. Owen did not love her less. Ulick was coming to see her; but within her was an unendurable anxiety. It proceeded from nothing without; it was her own mind that frightened her. But just now she had been exalted and happy in the memory of that deeply emotional music. She tried to remember the exact moment when this strange, penetrating sorrow had fallen upon her. Whence had it come, and what did it mean? A few minutes ago it was not with her. She knew that it would not always be with her, yet it did not seem as if it would ever leave her. She could not think of herself as ever being happy again. But Ulick would distract this misery from her brain. She would send him to the piano, and the exalted sorrow in the music, which she could but faintly remember, would raise her above sorrow, would bear her out of and above the circle of personal despondency. Ulick might help her; she could not help herself. She was incapable of going to the piano, though she was fully conscious that her mood would pass away in music. She walked across the room, her eyes contracted with suffering, and she stretched herself like one who would rid herself of a burden. She felt as if she could resign with a little smile the part that she had to play in life. Not the past, that was no longer hers either to preserve or to blot out; she could not wish herself different from what she had been; but the future--was that to be the same as the past? Then, with an apparent contradiction to what she had been thinking a few moments before regarding the worthlessness of life, she began to think that her unhappiness was possibly the result of her eccentric life. She had lived in defiance of rules, governed by individual caprice. Apparently it had succeeded, but only apparently. Underneath the surface of her life she had always been unhappy. All her talent, all her intelligence had not been able to save her. And Owen? All that pride of intelligence had resulted in unhappiness in his case as in hers. Both had disobeyed the law which we feel to be right when we look into the very recesses of our soul, and that these laws seem foolish and illogical when criticised by the light of reason does not prove their untruth. There is something beyond reason, and to become concentric, to enter into the conventions, seemed to her in a vague and distant manner to be indispensable. She was weary of living in the inhospitable regions outside of prejudice and authority.... She felt that it was prejudice and authority that gave a meaning, or a sufficient semblance of a meaning, to life as it was; she was a helpless atom tossed hither and thither by every gust of passion as a leaf in a whirlwind, and she longed to understand herself and her mission in life.