The scarlet demon changed her life and its meanings and energies and outlooks more effectually than if she had been trapped by a game-at-law and gaols and courts had had their toll of her. But after months, a year and a half of months, her health came back perfect if not vigorous, and her good looks--the few she ever had, and even the humanizing incongruous curls, though changed, grew long and covered her head again in a heathen frivol. A so magnificent mystery is this blood-and-flesh. It grows up again out of its ashes. Burn all of it but one cell in the scorchingest sickness and so that bones are still whole it will renew itself from that, perfect as the sweet-bay. But this mind, less magnificent and less mysterious and more delicate and dubious, rallies only by aid of the heart beneath it and the soul beyond it. Her mind came slowly out of darkened apathy. It lived in a high-walled cloister telling its languid beads by rote. But as if it sensed the sweet aura of her renewed body it at last woke strong and cold overnight and was aware again of itself and the mourning magic of being. It was this Mary MacLane. And after a year or two more it is this Mary MacLane. It is I myself. I walk my floor in leaden retrospect-days with a feel in my throat of damned and damning unfulfillment and at my eyebrows the twisted frown. In it is dread and anguish and worriment: in it is hideous altering breaking prepollence of death. --if my hair, just my hair, had not come back after that red fever I’d have decided--not capriciously like God but determinedly like myself--to have died by my own hand one night. It is no brave thought and it would have been no brave deed. Though it wants a lowering courage to leave life when, despite all, one loves its very textureless _color_, its bodiless air: not to speak of the yellow hot deathless sunshine that can not reach one in her dark grave-- But the look and feel of my hair are the look and feel of positive life, opposed to death. To live up to my hair would keep me brave. But the retrospects, which I can’t escape, come and wrap me in the Winding Sheet. _The Dover road_ To-morrow