A year ago I’d have laughed at the idea that I could love any man but Arthur—­that of all men I could love Ben O’Hara; and to-day I know that he is the future for me—­that he is the beginning again of my youth.  A year ago I thought only how I might change him, how I might make him over, and now I realize that I shall never change him, that I shall never make him over, and that it doesn’t really matter.  It isn’t the vital thing.  The vital thing is character, and I wouldn’t change that if I could.  For the rest, I shall probably always wish him different in some ways, just as I wish myself different.  I’d like to have him more like Arthur on the surface, just as I’d like to have myself more like Fanny.  I’d like to give him Arthur’s manner just as I’d like to give myself Fanny’s complexion.  But it isn’t possible.  He will always be what he is now, and, after all, it is what he is—­it is not something else that I want—­”

With a glimmer of the clairvoyant insight which had come to her on the country road, she understood that O’Hara was for her an embodied symbol of life—­that she must either take him or leave him completely and without reserve or evasion.  He was not an ideal.  In the love she felt for him there was none of the sentimental glamour of her passion for George.  She saw his imperfections, but she saw that the man was bigger than any attributes, that his faults were as nothing compared to the abundance of his virtues, and that, perfect or imperfect, the tremendous fact remained that she loved him.

In the opposite chair, the severe spinster had taken a strip of knitted silk out of her bag, and was working industriously on a man’s necktie of blue and gray.  From her intent and preoccupied look, from the nervous twitching of her thin lips, the close peering of her near-sighted eyes, through rimless glasses which she wore attached by a gold chain to her hair, she might have found in the act of knitting a supreme consolation for the inexorable denials of destiny.  “I wonder if it satisfies her, just knitting?” thought Gabriella.  “Has she submitted like Arthur to chance, to the way things happen when one no longer resists?  Is she really contented merely to knit, or is she knitting as a condemned prisoner might knit while he is waiting for the scaffold?” And while she watched the patient fingers, she added:  “One must either conquer or be conquered, and I will never be conquered.”

It was eight o’clock when she reached New York, and as she drove the short distance to West Twenty-third Street she began to wonder when she should see O’Hara, and what she should say to him.  In the end she decided that she would wait for a chance meeting, that she would let it happen when it would without moving a step or lifting a hand.  Before many days they would be obliged to meet in the yard or the hall, and some obscure, consecrated tradition of sex, some secret strain of her mother’s ineradicable feminine instinct, opposed the direct and sensible way.  “As soon as I meet him—­and in the end I shall surely meet him—­everything will be right,” she thought, with her eyes on the streets where the spring multitude of children were swarming.  And from this multitude of children, of young, ardent, and adventurous life, there seemed to emanate a colossal and irresistible will—­the will to be, to live, to love, to create, and to conquer.