Wait now!  Was this only habit, routine, dulled lack of divining imagination of what another life could be?  That was the challenge Vincent would throw down.  She gazed steadily at the wall before her, and called up, detail by detail, the life which Vincent Marsh thought the only one that meant richness and abundance for the human spirit.  It hung there, a shimmering mass of lovely colors and exquisite textures and fineness and delicacy and beauty.  And as she looked at it, it took on the shape of a glorious, uprooted plant, cut off from the very source of life, its glossy surfaces already beginning to wither and dull in the sure approach of corruption and decay.  But what beauties were there to pluck, lovely fading beauties, poignant and exquisite sensations, which she was capable of savoring, which she sadly knew she would live and die without having known, a heritage into which she would never enter; because she had known the unforgettable taste of the other heritage, alive and rooted deep!

This faded out and left her staring at the blank wall again, feeling old and stern.

Nothing more came for a moment, and restless, feeling no bodily fatigue at all, she got out of her bed, took up the candle, and stepped aimlessly out into the hall.  The old clock at the end struck a muffled stroke, as if to greet her.  She held up her candle to look at it.  Half-past two in the morning.  A long time till dawn would come.

She hesitated a moment and turned towards the door of a garret room which stood open.  She had not been in there for so long,—­years perhaps; but as a child she had often played there among the old things, come down from the dead, who were kept in such friendly recollection in this house.  Near the door there had been an old, flat-topped, hair-covered trunk . . . yes, here it was, just as it had been.  Nothing ever changed here.  She sat down on it, the candle on the floor beside her, and saw herself as a little girl playing among the old things.

A little girl!  And now she was the mother of a little girl.  So short a time had passed!  She understood so very little more than when she had been the little girl herself.  Yet now there was Elly who came and stood by her, and looked at her, and asked with all her eyes and lips and being, “Mother, what is the meaning of life?”

What answer had she to give?  Was she at all more fit than anyone else to try to give Elly the unknowable answer to that dark question?  Was there any deep spiritual reality which counted at all, which one human being could give to another?  Did we really live on desert islands, cut off so wholly from each other by the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea?  And if we did, why break one’s heart in the vain effort to do the impossible, to get from human beings what they could not give?

Her heart ached in an old bitterness at the doubt.  Did her children . . . could they . . . give her the love she wanted from them, in answer to her gift of her life to them?  They were already beginning to go away from her, to be estranged from her, to shut her out of their lives, to live their lives with no place for her in them.