"When one is sick of the whole question, and the way life is supposed to be built round it? Yes; but when a woman feels like that it generally is in reaction from too much of it. She doesn't feel it purely academically, so to speak, as a man can." Judy's voice was suddenly very weary. Her eyes met Ishmael's, and in that look a comprehension was born between them that was never quite to fail, that was, in its best moments, to mean true intimacy. Judy blinked at him with her sad monkey-eyes, smiled a little, and held out her hand in farewell. He took it--suddenly ejaculated a "Good-night" accompanied by a "Thank you" which he felt, though he could not quite have told why. He went off down the lane without seeing her back to the cottage, and she stayed awhile, grateful in her turn that meeting him had taken the keen edge off her own problems. She went in to supper and bed feeling very tired, a tiredness that was in her mind and soul, but that had the pleasantness of a healthy physical exhaustion. Georgie showed a disposition to come into her room and ask her her opinion of "falling in love" over mutual hair-brushes, but Judith evaded the tentative suggestion. By then she was feeling that the word was a meaningless string of four letters, and the thing she supposed it stood for as fantastic and far-off as the recurring fragment of a dream, which seems so vivid in the dreaming and is a broken kaleidoscope of ill-fitting colours on awaking. She went to bed and slept soundly, better than she had done for months. She was to wake to the old weight, half-joy, half-pain, but more and more she was to feel the new dread that she was growing out even of that, left in a dryness that belittled the past; but the periods of numbness once begun had to go on in spite of her, and with their bitterness was mingled at least the negative healing of indifference. CHAPTER XII GEORGIE Georgie had been up to the village to post a very important letter--so important that her hand stayed hesitant over the slit in the box for a moment or two while she made up her mind all over again. Then, with a gasp, she pushed the letter through and heard it fall with a faint thud to the bottom of the box. The last chance was still not gone, for the friendly old postmaster would have given it back to her if she had asked for it, but the mere noise it made in falling--one of the most distinctive and irrevocable sounding in the world--caused her to feel a lightening of the heart that meant satisfaction. She turned and went away down the bare village street, past the last row of whitewashed slate-roofed cottages, with the dark clumps of myrtle or tamarisk by their doors, and then she struck off the hard, bleak road, where the wind sang mournfully in the insulators at every telegraph post, and made for the open moor.