She ran. Before her tripped a sandpiper, his fine web of footprints following him. Shadows of gulls, swept across the sand, were like great blown leaves. She had put her whole life into a failure! She had lost him! She heard the soft sucking of wet sand under her feet. The point of rocks before her made three ragged steps down to the sea. Above them that cypress had a shape of human agony. The breakers rising over the lower rock were like a succession of slippery, watery stairs meeting the stones. And oh, the thunder of the coast! The strong voice of the ocean, the breakers’ shock, the biting taste, the long sigh of subsiding waves, the eternal iteration of great sounds, encompassed her. Wild, unthinkably vast! Ordered commotion! Inevitable change! What, in the face of sky and sea, did it matter if this one man loved one woman, or another? “One man, one man!” She said it over. And his voice, his face, and small forgettable things—tricks of eye, of manner—came back upon her and possessed her. The woman the years had made rose in her. The man was hers. Because she had willed it, the boy had been drawn to her; because of her, again, he had found himself; with her he had fashioned the beginning of his man’s life; he and she had laid the foundations of it. Could she let go all that had been so understandingly wrought to—what? Had the girl anything but her glorious flesh—any latent possibility of power to meet his need? She asked herself, with increasing calm, could she be sure her stimulated imagination had not deceived her. But when that look of his had first been hers, had she not known it as a fact, tangible as a hand to grasp? And was she so feeble as to repudiate the new fact because it stung? No! She saw laid on him, ever so lightly, the touch of a younger, stronger vitality; and yet how fully aware was he? She knew so well his oblivious self-absorption, his mind incurious, slow to recognize the possibility of change. They had so grown to take each other for granted. She knew that anything threatening their mutual dependence could not come to him and leave him steady. But her own position? It was that she sought in the labyrinth of her mind; but where reason had been was only a succession of violent emotions. She had been generous while she had been sure of him. Now the feeling of right that custom gives, the passion of possession, was fermenting in her. It consumed everything else. What her strength could hold was hers. She wondered how strong she was. The strength of suffering! The wisdom of failure! Oh, she would hold him! How long? She put it away. She turned back along the ringing beach. It was better, she thought, to be rooted like the cypress, even to be fastened in a great melancholy unrest, than to be as one of the gulls, flying on every wind, fishing at random.