She thought of her failures in New York. The House became a reality upon her ... a sort of scarlet flower upon her black tree of failures.--I have a will. I have a soul. I shall not let them die. What she possessed of strength she forced herself to give, now, wholly to the House.--It must mean something! She studied her men and women. All of them. All of them, despite their falsity of life, held a grain of loveliness. Perhaps because this grain had been so stubborn to live, their life in the world was false? She did not know.--But it shall grow! The House shall mean something! She made herself comfortable. There was plenty of money. She went to old shops, glowing in walls of dusty woodcuts, classic figures steel-engraved; shops that were a litter of ripe yesterdays crippled out of shape, beyond words, still mellow. Here, piece by piece, leisuredly, she picked together things for her room:--pictures, a Pembroke table, a Hepplewhite desk, a set of slender American Windsor chairs. She picked up three graceful glass goblets, three candlesticks of pewter. She made her room lovely. She watched her language. She kept her language pure. She watched the furrows in her cheeks and the grayness. The great illness and the years before it were gone, but they had taken her bloom and her hair’s wave. She used paint ... judiciously at first. But here, her taste failed, unnourished in the tasteless world about her, and by the world of her own past where they did not paint at all: so that she came to use paint badly. She was past thirty-five. She was a little stooped, a little brittle, broken. All of her body had gone from curve to angle. Man moved her not at all. She thought of the body of man without memory, without desire. She bought a Bible. She bought a copy, bound in crumbling black Levant, of a certain Pascal’s _Thoughts_ she had found once, browsing. It was Englished from the French. She liked him, whoever he was. He knew life. Yet he seemed young. As her face grew sallow and the roundness of her cheeks sagged long, as her hair became hard and her knees went stiff, all of this resilience of fire drew to the eyes of Fanny. They were larger, blacker. They were hot wells of thought, sealed fountains of vision that leaped at times upward through the gray earth slumber of men. And her hands had fingers sensitized like filaments of seed. They seemed, as her eyes saw, to spin with their faint tremor of response a woman’s clasp about the reach of her seeing.