She was tempted to free herself from this fettering life, where all is limitation and division.  Its individualism appeared to her particularly clear when she thought of Owen.  They had clasped and kissed in the hope to become part of the other’s substance.  They had sought to mingle, to become one; now it was in the hope of a union of soul that Owen sought her, his kisses were for this end.  She had read his desire in his eyes.  But the barrier of the flesh, which at first could barely sunder them, now seemed to have acquired a personal life, a separate entity; it seemed like some invisible force thrusting them apart.  The flesh which had brought them together now seemed to have had enough of them; the flesh, once gentle and persuasive, seemed to have become stern, relentless as the commander in “Don Juan.”  She thought of it as the forest in “Macbeth”; of something that had come out of the inanimate, angry and determined—­a terrible thing this angry, frustrated flesh.  Like the commander, it seemed to grasp and hurry her away from Owen, and she seemed to hear it mutter, “This vain noise must cease.”  The idea of the flesh was not their pleasure, but the next generation; the frustrated flesh was now putting them apart.  She hummed the music, and the life she had lived continued to loom up and fall back into darkness like shapes seen in a faded picture.  She had loved Owen, and sung a few operas, that was all.  She remembered that everything was passing; the notes she sang existed only while she sang them, each was a little past.  A moment approaches; it is ours, and no sooner is it ours than it has slipped behind us, even in the space of the indrawing of a breath.  No wonder, then, that men had come to seek reality beyond this life; it was natural to believe that this life must be the shadow of another life lying beyond it, and she leaned forward, pale and nervous, in the pale grace of the Sheraton sofa.

Her depression that morning was itself a mystery.  What did it mean?  Whence did it proceed?  She had not lost her voice.  Owen did not love her less.  Ulick was coming to see her; but within her was an unendurable anxiety.  It proceeded from nothing without; it was her own mind that frightened her.  But just now she had been exalted and happy in the memory of that deeply emotional music.  She tried to remember the exact moment when this strange, penetrating sorrow had fallen upon her.  Whence had it come, and what did it mean?  A few minutes ago it was not with her.  She knew that it would not always be with her, yet it did not seem as if it would ever leave her.  She could not think of herself as ever being happy again.  But Ulick would distract this misery from her brain.  She would send him to the piano, and the exalted sorrow in the music, which she could but faintly remember, would raise her above sorrow, would bear her out of and above the circle of personal despondency.  Ulick might help her; she could not help herself.  She was incapable of going to the piano, though she was fully conscious that her mood would pass away in music.  She walked across the room, her eyes contracted with suffering, and she stretched herself like one who would rid herself of a burden.