But now the grotesque fancy was to be the reality; the other was to become the shadow of a dream. No yearning or panting could restore it. The impossible was the inevitable. The unthinkable was the commonplace. She had made her choice deliberately, irrevocably. She had lost the whole world to gain her own soul. In the despair of her mood she questioned the worth of the sacrifice. The finality of the choice oppressed her. If at this eleventh hour she could still have the opportunity of the heroic--if still the gates of the world were open to her, she would have had a stimulus to continued nobility. The world and the passionate love for the perfect man--which would she choose? Her exaltation would still have swept her to the greater choice. Of, this she was desperately aware. But the gates were shut. She had already chosen. The heroic moment had gone. The acceptance of conditions was now mere uninspired duty. She gave way to unreason. “O God! Why cannot I have both--my own love and my own life?” The tears she shed calmed her. The next day she felt ill from the strain, paying the highly bred woman's penalty of nervous break-down. Connie Deering noted the circles beneath her eyes and the pinched nostrils. Norma casually mentioned a night's neuralgia. It would pass off during the day. She refused to be doctored. She would pay a visit to Jimmie before lunch. The fresh air would do her good. “The fresh air and Jimmie,” laughed her friend. “You are the most beautifully in love young woman I have ever met.” Norma started on her visit, walking fast. At Baker Street station it began to rain. She took the penitential omnibus; but her thoughts were too anxious to concern themselves with its discomforts. Besides, it was almost empty. The night had brought counsel. She would go to Jimmie and be her true self, frank and unsparing. With a touch of her old scorn she had resolved to confess unreservedly all the meanness and cowardice of which she had of late been guilty. She would bare to him the soon spotted soul and crave his cleansing. He would understand, pardon, and purify. Perhaps, when he knew all, he would be able to devise some new scheme of existence. At any rate, she would no longer receive his kisses with a lie in her heart. She loved him too ardently. He should know what she was, what were her needs, her limitations. The meeting would be a crisis in their lives. Out of it would come reconstruction on some unshakable basis. Up to a certain point she reasoned; beyond it, the pathetic unreason of a woman drifted rudderless. It had stopped raining when she left the omnibus and started on the short walk from the corner to Friary Grove. At the familiar gate her heart already seemed lighter; she opened it, mounted the front steps, and rang. The middle-aged servant, minus cap and with thin untidy hair, in a soiled print dress, her sleeves rolled up to the elbow exposing red coarse arms, was the first shock to Norma when the door opened.