She could remain here for the rest of her life if she chose, denying even Eustace hospitality, and she had a sense of freedom, of buoyancy, vastly different from the superficial enjoyments of the past winter in New York. They had been novel and entrancing, but both novelty and charm had worn thin; and they had served their purpose. No woman is complete until she has had her experience of the lighter pleasures of life; barely conscious of the depths underneath until frivolities turn into débris and balance is established. She had long suspected that she knew a good deal more than she admitted to herself, both apart from her personal ego and inextricably entangled with it, and it was time to find out what it was. She was uneasy, frightened, but determined. Well, in a day or two she would take the lid off, but tonight she would play with the idea that she had lived her life at the manor and that no serious problems had ever knocked at her consciousness for solution. A storm raged during the night and showed no sign of abatement next morning. She put on a raincoat and stout boots and went over to the deserted Boardwalk. The chain of shops looked like an abandoned village. But the waves thundered in almost to the high promenade, and she took a fierce pleasure in battling with the wind, clinging only occasionally to the rail. She felt as if she were charging an elemental enemy and chose to take it as a portent, that although she might for a moment be forced to clutch at something stronger than herself, she could neither be blown over nor forced to retreat. That night she slept twelve hours, and when the broad sunlight awakened her, her brain was as clear as the sky and she knew that her respite was over; or would be when the day itself was over. She had decided that the night, when she would be free of interruption from even her docile servants, was the time to “have it out.” Topper had received instructions to admit no one and to bring her no telephone messages. Eustace had promised not to return to the manor before Friday, nor attempt to communicate with her. Her isolation was complete. After breakfast she took a long walk on the hard roads, and spent the afternoon answering an accumulation of letters from her California friends. Ann Melrose had spent the winter in New York and written home reports both astonishing and amusing; the result had been a revival of correspondence with the girl they had “given up as a bad job.” But the hands of the clock, made for the first American Carteret, in Connecticut—a province that would seem to have been so completely occupied during the seventeenth century building historic furniture for twentieth-century collectors the wonder is it found time for the making of Puritanical history—moved relentlessly on, and at nine o’clock the house was as silent as the vault in the churchyard.