As for happiness--I sometimes question whether those of us who catch a glimpse of a happiness perfect and transcendent ever experience the reality. I doubt, in fact, if any reality could stand, unimpaired, by that vision. It may be that we have to choose between the vision--beheld for an instant and forever remembered--and an earthy, faulty, commonplace little happiness. We may have to choose between a fairy tale that can never be anything but a wonderful fairy tale, and a grubby reality that will spoil fairy tales for us evermore. If that be true, Peter is not to be pitied. He is manifestly one of the chosen; he's had his matchless vision; he still believes in the fairy tale. I told you, once, that I might marry him--in spite of him, as it were! Now I know that I will never marry him. But you must not be sorry for me, my dear. I, too, have had my vision. I'll always believe in the fairy tale. Sheila laid the letter down--beside the stillborn child of her gift. And fleetingly she saw again the pure gold of her idea--saw it gleaming through the misshapen thing she had actually fashioned. After all, though she could never create masterpieces, she had had her vision of them; that, at least, had been vouchsafed to her. And she had had her vision of the perfect love; not even unspeakable sorrow and humiliation had dimmed it. She, also, was one of the chosen; she would always believe in the fairy tale. CHAPTER XVIII It is, perhaps, only after we have put many dreams and hopes behind us that we stumble upon life's real gift to us. And thus it happened for Sheila. It was as if, seeing that she held out her hands for gifts no longer, life capriciously resolved to thrust one upon her. But beneath the apparent caprice was a fine justice--for life was at last kind to Sheila through her son. As Eric grew older, there sprang up between them such a comradeship as, even in her gladdest moments of motherhood, Sheila had never foreseen. He was a manly boy, fond of other boys and of boyish sports, but for all that his companionship with his mother persisted, and as he matured somewhat, deepened into an intimate, understanding relation such as Sheila had not thought to know again. Their kinship was not of the flesh only; that was the thing that Sheila began presently to see. It was then that she began to dream once more; to visualize a future beyond her own unrealized future. But she didn't so much as stretch out a shaping hand; she didn't say an illuminating, a determining word. She remembered instances--many of them--of children's lives having been moulded by their parents, and with pitiful mischance. She had known men and women who, with entirely unconscious tyranny, had thrust ready-made destinies on their sons and daughters, saying in extenuation: