She felt as if she could resign with a little smile the part that she had to play in life.  Not the past, that was no longer hers either to preserve or to blot out; she could not wish herself different from what she had been; but the future—­was that to be the same as the past?  Then, with an apparent contradiction to what she had been thinking a few moments before regarding the worthlessness of life, she began to think that her unhappiness was possibly the result of her eccentric life.  She had lived in defiance of rules, governed by individual caprice.  Apparently it had succeeded, but only apparently.  Underneath the surface of her life she had always been unhappy.  All her talent, all her intelligence had not been able to save her.  And Owen?  All that pride of intelligence had resulted in unhappiness in his case as in hers.  Both had disobeyed the law which we feel to be right when we look into the very recesses of our soul, and that these laws seem foolish and illogical when criticised by the light of reason does not prove their untruth.  There is something beyond reason, and to become concentric, to enter into the conventions, seemed to her in a vague and distant manner to be indispensable.  She was weary of living in the inhospitable regions outside of prejudice and authority....  She felt that it was prejudice and authority that gave a meaning, or a sufficient semblance of a meaning, to life as it was; she was a helpless atom tossed hither and thither by every gust of passion as a leaf in a whirlwind, and she longed to understand herself and her mission in life.

In her present attitude towards life, nothing mattered except the present reality, the satisfaction of the moment; her present conception of life only counselled sacrifice of personal desires for the sake of larger desires.  But these larger satisfactions did not differ in kind from the lesser, and all went the same way, the pleasure we take in a bunch of violets, or that which a love story brings, and both pass, but one leaves neither remorse nor bitterness behind.  A thought told her that she was, while in the midst of these moral reflections, preparing herself to be Ulick’s mistress.  She denied the thought and put it behind her angrily, attributing its intrusion to her nerves, and to separate herself from it she allowed thoughts on the mutability of things to again exclusively occupy her.  If she were to get up from the sofa she would create another division in her life, and to-morrow she would not remember her mood of to-day; it would have vanished as if it had never been.  She asked, What do we live for? and rose nervously from the sofa, and then stood still.  That half-hour was now behind her; again her place in life had been shifted.  Yesterday, too, was gone, and with it the pleasure of her walk with Ulick.  She had walked with him yesterday in the Green Park, in the still crystal evening.  She could almost see the two figures, she could see them at one spot,