There was something in you that would go on, whatever happened. Whatever happened it would still be happy. Its happiness was not like the queer, sudden, uncertain ecstasy. She had never known _what_ that was. It came and went; it had gone so long ago that she was sure that whatever it had been it would never come again. She could only remember its happening as you remember the faint ecstasies of dreams. She thought of it as something strange and exciting. Sometimes she wondered whether it had really happened, whether there wasn't a sort of untruthfulness in supposing it had. But that ecstasy and this happiness had one quality in common; they belonged to some part of you that was free. A you that had no hereditary destiny; that had got out of the net, or had never been caught in it. You could stand aside and look on at its happiness with horror, it didn't care. It was utterly indifferent to your praise or blame, and the praise or blame of other people; or to your happiness and theirs. It was open to you to own it as your self or to detach yourself from it in your horror. It was stronger and saner than you. If you chose to set up that awful conflict in your soul that was your own affair. Perhaps not your own. Supposing the conflict in you was the tug of the generations before you, trying to drag you back to them? Supposing the horror was _their_ horror, their fear of defeat? She had left off being afraid of what might happen to her. It might never happen. And supposing it did, supposing it had to happen when you were forty-five, you had still thirteen years to write in. "It shan't happen. I won't let it. I won't let them beat me." IV. Last year the drawer in the writing-table was full. This year it had overflowed into the top left-hand drawer of the dressing-table. She had to turn out all the handkerchiefs and stockings. Her mother met her as she was carrying them to the wardrobe in the spare room. You could see she felt that there was something here that must be enquired into. "I should have thought," she said, "that writing-table drawer was enough." "It isn't." "Tt-t--" Mamma nodded her head in a sort of exasperated resignation. "Do you mean to say you're going to _keep_ all that?" "All that? You should see what I've burnt." "I should like to know what you're going to do with it!" "So should I. That's just it--I don't know." That night the monstrous thought came to her in bed: Supposing I published those poems--I always meant to do it some day. Why haven't I? Because I don't care? Or because I care too much? Because I'm afraid? Afraid that if somebody reads them the illusion they've created would be gone? How do I know my writing isn't like my playing? This is different. There's nothing else. If it's taken from me I shan't want to go on living. You didn't want to go on living when Mark died. Yet you went on. As if Mark had never died.... And if Mamma died you'd go on--in your illusion.