Mary gazed after her with wide eyes, then sank limply into a chair. She had won--for the time being; but that she had won did not at this moment even touch her thoughts; nor just then was her mind trying to justify her by saying that Maisie, as now she saw her, was too good for Jack, and that her own action, whatever its motives, had saved Maisie from a life of certain unhappiness. Just then she was dazed by the uncalculated twist of the girl’s action; unsuspected, unanalyzable things were tumultuously stirring, quickened into life by that swift, tear-wet kiss which still thrilled her cheek--by the fervid declaration that she was fine and wonderful. That girl, tears in her eyes, had called her fine and wonderful!... She seemed, with all those sudden strange things surging within her, to be sitting there a woman unknown to herself. And then out of this chaos, there rose a clear-cut, definite sentence, that remained fixed before her mind--a sentence of Clifford’s, spoken with impersonal grimness: “There is a big woman in you--but if you are to be changed, only Life can do it.”... Was this what it meant, that chaos within her? After all, had Clifford been right? Was Life doing something to her? Bewildered, breathless, almost fearfully, she sat regarding this strange, unknown woman stirring within herself.... CHAPTER XIX MARY THINKS THINGS OUT Mary awoke with a start to certain practical and immediate dangers of her situation. Mr. Morton knew she was here at the Grantham, and so did Peter Loveman; whatever she might do in the end, she had a desire to avoid both of these men for the present--at least until she had determined upon her course. There was but one way to escape them, and that was to disappear from the Grantham before either of the pair had time to return upon their different enterprises. Within an hour she and her baggage were at another hotel. Within a second hour she was being shown about by a representative of a renting agency. That same evening she was installed in a little furnished apartment in the Nineties just west of Central Park. The better to protect her privacy she decided she would do her own housework and would go out rarely except in the evening. Here her mind began once more to review her situation--as it was to keep on doing for many a long day to come. She had won, by an unbelievable twist of human nature. Yet she had not won; she was, as she now perceived, only at the beginning of an enterprise that was hourly becoming more complex and difficult--and that was also leading into what for her were undiscovered and uncomfortable areas of the human soul.