After that she tried to make the best of her position, to keep her mind fixed upon the advantages of her defeat. But the persistent image of Larry, the memory of his thousand ways of being dear and The Only, with the thought of never seeing him again or knowing anything further about him, made her struggle for an ordinary exterior at moments more than difficult. She came to learn the measure of the cheated feminine tenderness which, denied any natural channel, had fastened so hungrily upon that child of strangers, when it was thrown back useless upon her heart. She selected finally, to dwell upon, the best of all the possibilities: that among the people who had claimed him back--of fine race, if he resembled them--he would find all for the absence of which he had been pitied: the tender love of parents, the opportunities of a privileged life. She agreed that his case would be better than if he had been left to her. But after she had by arguments persuaded herself, when by her own logic she had reason for rejoicing, there closed down upon her a melancholy such as she had at intervals in her life suffered from before. The experience was like going into a tunnel, of which nothing could avail to lighten the darkness until by the grace of God one came out at the other side of the hill. There was no fighting it off by reason, no discovering an adequate cause for it, no foreseeing the moment of its end. One endured it like a prolonged bad dream, wherein the magnified affections shake one in one's helplessness at their will. At such times all that had ever been pain, disappointment, defeat, however long recovered from, came again to perfect life in memory, while all that had been happy, diminished to insignificant proportions, retreated out of sight. "Why do I feel like this?" Celia could still ask herself by daylight, and repeat, "Everything is all right." But in the night time the power of the thing was complete.