For a while she tried to reconstruct the motives that fourteen years ago had induced her toward that step. If she had really begun her life all over again, it should be easy to do this. But the more she pondered herself at the age of seventeen the more impossibly remote that Sylvia seemed. Certain results, however, could even at this distance of time be ascribed to that unfortunate marriage: among others the three months after she left Philip. When Sylvia came to survey all her life since, she saw how those three months had lurked at the back of everything, how really they had spoiled everything. "Have I fallen a prey to remorse?" she asked herself. "Must I forever be haunted by the memory of what was, after all, a necessary incident to my assumption of assishness? Did I not pay for them that day at Mulberry Cottage when I could not be myself to Michael, but could only bray at him the unrealities of my outward shape?" Lying here in the cool hospital, Sylvia began to conjure against her will the incidents of those three fatal months, and so weak was she still from the typhus that she could not shake off their obsession. Her mind clutched at other memories; but no sooner did she think that she was safely wrapped up in their protecting fragrance than like Furies those three months drove her mind forth from its sanctuary and scourged it with cruel images. "This is the sort of madness that makes a woman kill her seducer," said Sylvia, "this insurgent rage at feeling that the men who crossed my path during those three months still live without remorse for what they did." Gradually, however, her rage died down before the pleadings of reasonableness; she recalled that somewhere she had read how the human body changes entirely every seven years: this reflection consoled her, and though she admitted that it was a trivial and superficial consolation, since remorse was conceived with the spirit rather than with the body, nevertheless the thought that not one corpuscle of her present blood existed fourteen years ago restored her sense of proportion and enabled her to shake off the obsession of those three months, at any rate so far as to allow her to proceed with her contemplation of the new Sylvia lying here in this hospital.