But she must. She must! There was no other way. Like a person shut up suddenly in an airless prison, she ran frantically from one locked door to another, beating her hands on them, finding them sullenly strong, not even shaken on their cruel steel hinges as she flung herself against them. If Lester got well, of course he could not stay at home and keep house and take care of the children ... no able-bodied man ever did that. What would people say? It was out of the question. People would laugh at Lester. They would laugh at her. They would not admire her any more. What would people say if she did not go back at once to the children? She who had always been so devoted to them, she whom people pitied now because she was forced to be separated from them. Every one had heard her say how hard it was for a mother to be separated from her.... For one instant, an instant she never forgot, Evangeline knew for the first, the only time in her life, a gust of cold, deadly contempt for herself. It nearly killed her, she who had tried so hard all her life to keep her self-respect, she who had been willing to pay any price so that in her own eyes she might be always in the right. Yes, it nearly killed her. But it did not reconcile her to the inevitable nor bow her spirit in resignation. Never before had she been asked to pay any such price as this. She couldn’t! She couldn’t! She stood stock-still in her prison cell and wrung her hands in revolt. She simply could not. After having known something else, she could not go back to the narrow, sordid round of struggle with intolerable ever-renewed drudgery, to the daily, hourly contact with the children’s forgetfulness, carelessness, foolishness ... to Stephen’s horrible tempers ... with no outlet ... no future ... poverty for them all, always. Poverty! It came down suffocatingly over her head like a smothering blanket thrown and twisted hard by an assailant who had sprung upon her out of the dark. She had thought herself safe from that long, slow starvation. To go back to it, to the raging, helpless narrowness of an income tragically too small, to rise up and lie down with that leaden care, to drag it about all day like a ball and chain ... she could never endure it now that she knew that it was not in the least inevitable, knew how easy it was to avoid it, knew that if Lester were only willing to care a little more, to try a little harder, to put his mind on it really and truly, to _give his heart to it_ as she did.... All her old burning impatience with Lester was there, boiling up in clouds from the cauldron of her heart.