Barbara got up and walked reluctantly to the door. It was preordained, then, that she should dine.... Once you accepted predestination, there was no limit to its application. Her maid wanted her to wear a grey dress, but she preferred something else, anything else; her choice fell on a blue, but she was conscious that she was compelled from outside to choose one rather than the other. She could not be troubled to decide what jewellery she would wear; Destiny must do a little work, must choose for her. She felt that she was scoring a point against Destiny, when she refused to wear any; but Destiny had decided beforehand that she was to have this moment's struggle before deciding not to wear any....
Her maid was almost in tears at such indifference.
"You don't do me credit, my lady, to-night," she complained.
"Don't I? I'm sorry, Merton! But I'm tired, I can't take the trouble."
"Your hair, my lady——"
"I think I shall cut it off! It's only a bother."
"My lady, your beautiful hair?"
"No, I shan't cut it off. It's too much trouble. Everything's too much trouble."
She hardly looked at herself in the glass before going downstairs, though she knew that Sonia O'Rane would have spent hours in preparing herself. But it was preordained whether she looked well ... or wanted to look well.
Throughout dinner her mind struggled under the incubus. Predestination peeped round every conversational corner, explaining and stultifying everything. When O'Rane spoke sympathetically of Jim Loring's death, she answered almost callously that it must have been preordained. Since leaving Mrs. Savage, she had tried vainly to discover some point in which she was superior to an animal that was born at the stockman's bidding, to be killed for lamb or shorn for wool or kept to bear other sheep at the stockman's bidding and ultimately killed for mutton.