Her gift was dead--or, at the least, it was forever ineffectual. There would be no more mad, glad flights; no more songs high in the sunlit heavens. The flights and songs and ecstasies were over for all time. Not for an instant did she cheat herself with sophistries of an eventual recovery. She knew that if it lived at all--this gift of hers which had once been more alive than she herself--it would but live within her as the pain of a thing balked and futile, restless still perhaps, but not restless with any power. Always--always now--the too exquisite note of a violin, the sight of blossoming trees at dawn, of silver, inscrutable stars at night would waken in her the hunger, the grief, of the unsatisfied. There would never be a time when she could look on poignant beauty with the peace of one who is herself a part of all beauty--having created something beautiful. For the ultimate calamity had befallen her; her gift had been killed, or hopelessly maimed. Under the tremendous impact of this blow she was curiously unresentful. She wondered a little how it had happened. She wondered if she had suffered too much, suffered to the point of numbness--a thing fatal to one whose work had been fine largely through her capacity for emotion; or if the habit, the superstition, of her vow, persisting within her after the vow itself had been cast aside, had thus finally broken the wings of her talent. She wondered if her marriage alone, or her motherhood, or her shamed and hopeless love for Peter had been most disastrous to her. She had been conscious of them all as she had sat there trying to write. Eric's face and Peter's had drifted between her and her pages. Ted's cold declaration that talent was a bad thing for a married woman, and her own impassioned promise to God to renounce her work for Eric's life had both drowned for her the voice of her gift. It was as if all these factors in her destiny had had too much of her; it was as if they had claimed her too entirely and tenaciously ever to release her. Even in silence and solitude and a belated sense of liberty and rights, she could not be free of them. She could not decide whether one or all of them had been responsible for this final frustration. She wondered--and then she ceased to wonder at all. She knew that the frustration had been accomplished--and that she was suddenly too weary even to cry out. It was at the moment when she realized all this fully, when she sat staring at the deformed and lifeless thing which she had brought forth, that a letter from Charlotte was handed to her. It came from New York--where was Peter. Sheila opened it with shaking fingers--and found what she desired: I have seen Peter [wrote Charlotte] and he seems to have fitted himself, very happily, into the right place. I say happily, but I do not use the word literally, for Peter is scarcely happy. But he is appreciated here, and he likes his work. I'm sure you'll be glad of that.