"Incredible ass that I am," she thought. "What is Michael to me and what am I to Michael? Not so easily is time's slow ruin repaired. If we meet, we shall meet for perhaps a dinner together; that will be all. What romances must this war have woven and what romances must it not have shattered as swiftly! Romances! Yet, how dare I use such a word about myself? Nine years, nine remorseless deadening years, lie on top of what was never more than a stillborn fancy, and I am expecting to see it burst forth to bloom in Nish. It's the effect of isolation. Time goes by more slowly when one only looks at oneself, and one forgets the countless influences in other people's lives. But I should like to see him again. Oh yes, quite ordinarily and unemotionally I should like to shake hands with him and perhaps talk for a little while. There is nothing extravagantly sentimental in thinking so much." Sylvia had often enough been conscious of her isolation from the world and often enough she had tried to assuage this sense of loneliness by indulging it to the utmost--to such an extent indeed that she had reached the point of hating not merely anything that interfered with her own isolation, but even anything that interfered with the isolation of other people. She had turned the armor of self-defense into a means of aggression, although by doing so she had destroyed the strength of her position. Her loneliness that during these last months seemed to have acquired the more positive qualities of independence was now only too miserably evident as loneliness; and unless she could apply the vital suffering she had undergone recently, so that the years of her prime might bear manifest fruit, she knew that the sense of futility in another nine years would be irreparable indeed. At present the treasure of eighteen months of continuous and deliberate effort to avoid futility was still rich with potentiality; but the human heart was a deceptive treasure-house never very strong against the corruption of time, which, when unlocked, might at any moment display nothing except coffers filled with dust.