"No," she murmured, "I am not tired. This is content, at the day's end. It is marvellous,"—she opened her eyes again upon him with a smile of wonder. "I haven't had a moment of fatigue, and I have done so much since yesterday,—more than I have done for years. I wonder what it is gives us women strength or weakness."
"Joy gives strength!"
"Peace gives strength. Sometimes I think that all the weakness in life—women's weakness—is merely wrong adjustment. It is never work that kills—it isn't just living, no matter how hard it is. But it is trying to live when you are dead…. Dearest, if we stayed here, I should be always strong! I know it. All the weariness and the pain and the languor would go; I should be what I was meant to be, what every human being is meant to be,—strong to bear."
"It is a bitter thought."
"I suppose that is why men and women struggle so blindly to set themselves right, why they run away and commit all sorts of follies. They feel within them the capacity for health, for happiness, if they can only get right somehow. And when they find the way—"
She made a little gesture with her hand that swept the troubles from the road.
"If they can be sure, it is almost a duty—to put themselves right, isn't it?"
Here they had come to the temptation which in all their intimate moments they had avoided…. 'Others have remade the pattern of their lives,—why not we?' The woman answered the thought in the man's mind.
"I should never take it, even knowing that it is my one chance for health and all that I desire, not while my father lives, not while my mother-in-law lives; it would add another sorrow to their graves. Nor while my husband has a right to his children. We are all bound in criss-cross in life. Nor would you, dearest, have me; you would hate me,—it would turn our glory to gall!"
It was not her habit to put her hands before her eyes. She was clear with herself, and without the sentimental fog. For the Bishop's creed she cared nothing. For her mother-in-law's prejudices she cared as little. The punishment of Society she would have met with gleeful contempt. People could not take from her what she valued, for she had stripped so much that there was little left in her heart to be deprived of. As for her husband, he did not exist for her; towards him she was spiritually blind. Her children were so much a part of her that she never thought of them as away from her. Where she went, they would be, as a matter of course.