"Ah, how useless is all this bustle and confusion!" she thought irritably. "Surely man could live more simply. But he is dedicated to vanity, he must make a splurge. What was that I said to André this morning? Oh yes--about the energy of being. Man must make a show, if not for his Creator's satisfaction at least for his own. The Creator!" she murmured bitterly, "He knows nothing of us! We pine constantly for a liberty fuller than any we have ever known, and that accounts for all our unwearying expenditure of force. Poor pygmies! Persisting deep in the soul of man, is a vague, undefined sense, 'I am the heritor of the infinite.' And so he works," she continued, "he produces marvels and he thinks his immediate achievement embraces his entire object. But it isn't so. And he opens his heart to passions; but his object is the same. For back of the least labour into which he throws himself, back of the most depraved emotion in which he loses himself, is a vast, mysterious, subconscious searching; and that," she declared, "accounts for everything." She was soaring now above herself, above the terror of her problem. She was viewing the situation as the universal situation and her thoughts were transfigured, rendered impersonal by the clearness of her perception. She saw life no longer with the eyes of an inexperienced and impassioned woman, but with the eyes of one made wise through extremity of anguish. "It accounts for all the good that we do and for all the evil that we do," she resumed. "Each chooses a road of escape, perhaps many roads, and follows them madly. But," she concluded, "we never find that larger freedom. We are tormented by the feeling of its imminence, but it retreats ever beyond us. And finally we come face to face with the eternal, basic fact of existence: _I am a prisoner_. That's what we discover. We learn the truth. I learned it that night after the opera. _I am the bird in the box!_" For an instant she held her head erect, then shrank, a pained and huddled form, against the cushions of the cab. "Yes, I have my dream like the others," she whimpered. "But it isn't a dream. Love _is_ a mode of escape. It is. It is. And it's my road. But do I follow it?" The answer was a forlorn shake of the head. "Emil, my Father, Simon, Emily Short, that girl Betty Holden, even Nora Gage; all--all wiser than I. They follow their instincts, creditable or discreditable, they follow them and they glean at least some satisfaction. While I--" The full tide of her misery, that which she had tried to evade, inundated her. "Fool, why am I like that?" she muttered, "for some scruple, which God, if he knows, probably laughs at me for respecting. As Emil said, wasn't it God made us capable of love?"