At the thought, the master-words came to her mind again; and all fell quiet and in a great hush waited on her advance. Neale had said, "What is deepest and most living in _you_." Well, what _was_ deepest and most living in her? That was what she was trying to find out. That was what those voices were trying to cry her down from finding. For the first time in all her life, she drew an inspiration from Neale's resistance to opposition, knew something of the joy of battle. What right had those people to cry her down? She would not submit to it. She would go back to the place where she had been set upon by other people's voices, other people's thoughts, and she would go on steadily, thinking her own. She had been thinking that there _was_ the same displeasure and distaste as when she had thought of returning to her literal childhood, when she set herself fully to conceive what it would be to cramp herself and simplify her complex interests and affections back to the narrow limits of passion, which like her play with dolls had been only a foreshadowing of something greater to come. She spoke it out boldly now, and was amazed that not one of the clamorous voices dared resist the authenticity of her statement. But after all, how would they dare? This was what she had found in her own heart, what they had not been able, for all their clamor, to prevent her from seeing. She had been strong enough to beat them, to stand out against them, to say that she saw what she really did see, and felt what she really did feel. She did not feel what traditionally she should feel, that is what a primitive Italian woman might feel, all of whose emotional life had found no other outlet than sex. . . . Well, if it was so, it was so. For better or for worse, that was the kind of woman she had become, with the simple, forthright physical life subordinate, humble; like a pleasant, lovable child playing among the strong, full-grown, thought-freighted interests and richly varied sympathies and half-impersonal joys and sorrows which had taken possession of her days. And she could not think that the child could ever again be master of her destiny, any more than (save in a moment of false sentimentality) she could think that she would like to have her horizon again limited by a doll-house. To be herself was to go on, not to go back, now that she knew what she had become. It seemed to her that never before had she stood straight up. And in plain fact she found that somehow she had risen to her feet and was now standing, her head up, almost touching the rafters of the slant ceiling. She could have laughed out, to find herself so free. She knew now why she had never known the joy of battle. It was because she had been afraid. And she had been afraid because she had never dared to enter the battle, had always sent others in to do her fighting for her. Now she had been forced into it and had won. And there was nothing to be afraid of, there!