She felt the quiet strength come into her like a tide. And presently, as naturally as a child wakes in the morning, refreshed, and feels the impulse to rise to active effort again, she sat up in bed, folded her arms around her knees, and began to think. Really to think this time, not merely to be the helpless battle-field over which hurtling projectiles of fierce emotions passed back and forth! She set her life fairly there before her, and began to try to understand it. As she took this first step and saw the long journey stretching out before her, she knew on what staff she leaned. It was Neale's belief that she was strong and not weak, that she could find out, if she tried, what was deepest and most living in her heart. With this in her hand, with that great protecting hush about her, she set forth. She was afraid of what she might find, but she set forth. She must begin at the beginning this time, and go steadily forward from one step to the next, not her usual involuntary plunge, not the usual closing over her head of those yelling waters of too vivid impression. The beginning had been . . . yes, the first conscious beginning had been the going away of little Mark, out of his babyhood into his own child-life. He had gone out and left an empty place behind him, which till then had been filled with the insistent ever-present need for care for the physical weakness of babyhood. And she had known that never again would Mark fill that place. Emptiness, silence, solitude in the place of constant activity; it had frightened her, had set before her a vision that her life had reached its peak, and henceforth would go down the decline. Into that empty place had come a ringing, peremptory call back to personal and physical youth and excitement and burning sensations. And with that blinding rebirth of physical youth had come a doubt of all that had seemed the recompense for the loss of it, had come the conception that she might be letting herself be fooled and tricked out of the only real things. There had been many parts to this: her revolt from the mere physical drudgery of her life, from giving so much of her strength to the dull, unsavory, material things. This summer, a thousand times in a thousand ways, there had been brought home to her by Vincent, by Eugenia, the fact that there were lives so arranged that other people did all the drudgery, and left one free to perceive nothing but the beauty and delicacy of existence. Now, straight at it! With all the knowledge of herself and of life which she had gathered,--straight at it, to see what this meant! Did their entire freedom from drudgery give them a keener sense of the beauty and delicacy of existence? Were they more deeply alive because of the ease of their lives?