A little after midnight when all the house was hushed, she went into the adjoining room, cuddled Jack Junior into her arms, and took him to her own bed.  With his chubby face nestled against her breast, she lay there fighting against that interminable, maddening buzzing in her brain.  She prayed for sleep, her nervous fingers stroking the silky, baby hair.

CHAPTER XVII

IN WHICH THERE IS A FURTHER CLASH

One can only suffer so much.  Poignant feeling brings its own anaesthetic.  When Stella Fyfe fell into a troubled sleep that night, the storm of her emotions had beaten her sorely.  Morning brought its physical reaction.  She could see things clearly and calmly enough to perceive that her love for Monohan was fraught with factors that must be taken into account.  All the world loves a lover, but her world did not love lovers who kicked over the conventional traces.  She had made a niche for herself.  There were ties she could not break lightly, and she was not thinking of herself alone when she considered that, but of her husband and Jack Junior, of Linda Abbey and Charlie Benton, of each and every individual whose life touched more or less directly upon her own.

She had known always what a woman should do in such case, what she had been taught a woman should do:  grin, as Monohan had said, and take her medicine.  For her there was no alternative.  Fyfe had made that clear.  But her heart cried out in rebellion against the necessity.  To her, trying to think logically, the most grievous phase of the doing was the fact that nothing could ever be the same again.  She could go on.  Oh, yes.  She could dam up the wellspring of her impulses, walk steadfast along the accustomed ways.  But those ways would not be the old ones.  There would always be the skeleton at the feast.  She would know it was there, and Jack Fyfe would know, and she dreaded the fruits of that knowledge, the bitterness and smothered resentment it would breed.  But it had to be.  As she saw it, there was no choice.

She came down to breakfast calmly enough.  It was nothing that could be altered by heroics, by tears and wailings.  Not that she was much given to either.  She had not whined when her brother made things so hard for her that any refuge seemed alluring by comparison.  Curiously enough, she did not blame her brother now; neither did she blame Jack Fyfe.

She told herself that in first seeking the line of least resistance she had manifested weakness, that since her present problem was indirectly the outgrowth of that original weakness, she would be weak no more.  So she tried to meet her husband as if nothing had happened, in which she succeeded outwardly very well indeed, since Fyfe himself chose to ignore any change in their mutual attitude.

She busied herself about the house that forenoon, seeking deliberately a multitude of little tasks to occupy her hands and her mind.