Why was she so absurd as to let herself be upset? she angrily asked of herself, beginning to unfasten the dress she was wearing that she might get into something loose and try to relax. A hook caught in some lace and in her vexation at not being able at once to unfasten it she gave it a jerk that tore the lace. She bit her lips and could have cried. Those were the things she did these days!--since that boy came and blunderingly broke into guarded places. She sat in a low, deep chair before the open fire that burned in the sitting-room adjoining her bedroom. It was the room that had been her husband's. After he went away she took it for an upstairs sitting-room--a part of her program of unconcern. As she sank down into the gracious chair she told herself that she would rest for that evening, not think about things. But not to think about things was impossible that night. Stella Cutting had brought old things near and made them newly real: her girlhood, her falling in love with Stuart Williams, her wedding. Those reminiscences caught her and swept her on to other things. She thought of her marriage; thought of things that, ever since that boy came and made her know how insecure she really was in the defences she had put up for herself, it had been a struggle to keep away from. She had not done much thinking--probing--as to why it was her marriage had failed. That was another one of the things her pride shut her out from. When it failed she turned from it, clothed in pride, never naked before the truth. There was something relaxing in just letting down the barriers, barriers which had recently been so shaken that she was fretted with trying to hold them up. She wondered why Stella Cutting's marriage had succeeded and hers had failed. The old answer that her marriage had failed because her husband was unfaithful to her--answer that used always to leave her newly fortified, did not satisfy tonight. She pushed on through that. There was a curious emotional satisfaction in thus disobeying herself by rushing into the denied places of self-examination. She was stirred by what she was doing. Her long holding back from this very thing was part of that same instinct for restraint, what she had been pleased to think of as fastidiousness, that had always held her back in love. It was alien to her to let herself go; she had an instinct that held her away from certain things--from the things themselves and from free thinking about them. What she was doing now charged her with excitement.