But Alice North lifted her pretty brows and shrugged her histrionic shoulders with an air of fine distaste. "Really, Charlotte," she drawled, "I hadn't suspected you of being so primitive."
Walking homeward through the sweet summer dusk, Sheila was far from the listless, extinguished creature whom Alice North had described, however. Never in her life had such a tempest of emotion swept through her being. For she was face to face, at last, with life.
The first night of Ted's courtship returned to her now; she smelt the fragrance of climbing roses; she felt his head again upon her breast—the indescribable first touch of love that is unlike all others!—she heard a voice deep within her exulting: "This is life!" Ah, how ignorant she had been—how pitifully innocent! To have thought that life!
For life was a thing that laid brutal, compelling hands upon you; that destroyed you and created you again; that rent you with unspeakable pangs, with unimaginable terrors, with frantic and powerless rebellions. It was not joy; it was not peace; it was not fulfillment. It was a force. Merciless, implacable, irresistible, it seized upon you and used you. For that you were put into the world; for that you dreamed and hoped and struggled—for that moment out of an eternity, that moment of use!
As she hurried onward, stumbling now and then with a clumsiness alien to her, the sense of lying helpless in the grasp of this force almost drove her to cry out. More than once she lifted her hands to her mouth, and even then little shuddering murmurs broke from her.
Helpless? Oh, yes! yes! For that had come to her from which there was no escape. She was trapped. She, too, was to be put to use. Her own work must make way for Nature's. She saw that now.
Her own work must make way. For Alice North herself had said that one could not serve art and Nature, too—and Nature had exacted service of her. She had been strong enough to defy Ted's tyranny; but, after all, she could not defeat Nature's. Her work must make way.
She let herself noiselessly into the house. From the kitchen floated the sounds of the cook's evening activities, but otherwise the place was silent, and Ted's hat was not on its accustomed hook in the little hall. She could be alone a while.
She stole up the stairs to her bedroom, meaning to lie down in the quiet darkness, but once there, a panic assailed her, a senseless fear of the dim corners, the distorted shadows. Besides, she wanted to see herself; she wanted to see if Ted, promising her beautiful things from motherhood the night before, if Mrs. North, warning her against it to-day, had known that she—that she was going to have a child.
She turned on the lights and stood in their full glare before her mirror. Searchingly she inspected herself—the slender figure that was as yet only delicately rounded, the cheek that showed just a softer curve and bloom, the eyes——