She felt a great thirst to know more of the vital questions of the day. She awoke to the fact that the time was in the throes of parturition. Something huge, cyclopean, was being born. Change already stared iron-eyed from the cradle of the twentieth century and hammered with fists of brass. Now was nascent its twin Disorder. She read until her brain reeled and her heart ached. Giddy and downcast, she bared her mind to the bludgeonings of tremendous questions which she could not adequately comprehend. Then common sense—kind old nurse—whispered soothingly: "'Seek not out things that are too hard for thee.' There is a glory of the stars of Political Economy, and another of the moon of Poetic Faculty. Thou shalt comprehend by intuition what will never be given thee by ratiocination. For 'if a man's mind is sometimes wont to tell him more than seven watchmen that sit above in an high tower,' a woman's heart can divine the very stars above the tower and draw down influences as sweet as those of Pleiades for the sustainment of her spirit."
So Sophy left off trying to understand clearly all the "ologies" and fly-wheel within fly-wheel movements of the day, and contented herself with a general apprehension of the zeitgeist. She decided that these gigantic sociological and political questions were for her what the higher mathematics are to the humble arithmetician. She could comprehend that a fourth dimension might exist, but not in what it might consist. It consoled her to remember that in the higher mathematics of existence as of numbers there was an "incalculable quantity." The bigger brains, then, paused at a point higher up, just as hers paused at one lower down.
Then again woke in her the desire to create in her own world of poetry.
All these struggles and hopes, and glees and failures—all this turbulence of her new-straining self, she poured out in her letters to Amaldi, and he answered them in kind. Almost every day they wrote to each other. It seemed incredible to her that her life had once been empty of those letters to which she now looked forward every day as to the simple necessity of food and drink. Never once did he fail to respond to the mood or need from which she wrote—and with so fine, so just a discernment that sometimes he seemed to answer thoughts that she had not written down, but that had been in her mind when she was writing. So exquisitely true was this communication of their minds and natures at a distance that sometimes she almost dreaded meeting him in actuality again. Would not the charm vanish with nearness? She felt that she could far better miss his bodily presence from her life than those wonderful, satisfying letters.
The spring came and with it a new shock for Sophy. She was writing in her old study one March morning when Harold Grey entered with the day's paper in his hand. What he had come to show her was the notice of the death of Lord Wychcote.
Sophy took the paper from him, feeling quite dazed. She grew pale as she read. The notice stated that Viscount Wychcote had died in his sleep at his country seat, Dynehurst, on the night of the second of March. The news had been wired to the Times as being of interest in connection with the divorce of Mrs. Morris Loring, whose son, by her first marriage with Lord Wychcote's younger brother, the Hon. Cecil Chesney, would now succeed to the title—etc., etc.
The shock was a double one to Sophy, for in addition to her sincere affection for Gerald, there was the question of the allowance which he had renewed immediately after her divorce. Now this allowance would most probably be stopped. She had no idea whether Gerald had been in a position to leave her anything, or whether, in case the property were all entailed, she would be still given an allowance, as Bobby's mother and guardian. In case she had to depend entirely on her own slender income, she did not see how she could manage to live in England. She supposed that a sum would be apportioned for Bobby's education, but even that was only a surmise.
Within a few days, however, came a full letter from Mr. Surtees. He explained to her that the bulk of the Wychcote property was entailed, but that certain property which had been left to the late Lord Wychcote in fee simple by a maternal aunt, had been willed to her (Mrs. Chesney) by his lordship. This property consisted of the town house in Regent's Park in which Mrs. Chesney had formerly resided, and a small estate in Warwickshire, called Breene Manor. The Manor house was in good condition, though not of great size. It was a Tudor building and stood in grounds thickly wooded. The situation was salubrious and the view fine, but there was no income from the estate, as Miss Bollinghame, the relative from whom the late Earl inherited the property, had sold all but a hundred acres of the original lands. He wished to explain to Mrs. Chesney, however, that the trustees of the Wychcote property were empowered to advance sums of money for the education and maintenance of her son, and that the money for maintenance would be paid to her as his guardian, in order that she might keep up a position suitable for the young peer. Mr. Surtees ended by venturing to express to Mrs. Chesney his opinion, as the legal adviser of the family, that it would be well for her to come to England with her son as soon as possible.
From the receipt of this letter until two months later, when she was settled at Breene, Sophy moved again in a world of unreality. The quiet of the lovely old house and its surrounding woods and gardens helped to restore her to her normal state once more; for she found Breene a place after her own heart, strangely familiar, as though she had visited it before in dreams. As Mr. Surtees had said, the house was Tudor, but it had been added to and altered during so many other epochs, that it had ended by having a flavour and architecture all its own. For some years it had been leased, and the great walls of yew that enclosed the lawns were smooth and massy from constant clipping. It stood in a crescent of beech woods. Scotch firs towered behind it. To the south lay rose-gardens sloping to an oval pond.