It was with the flatness of accent which she hated, which was so hard for her, that she made the admission.  It was physical excitement,—­that was what it was.  Physical excitement, that was what Vincent Marsh could give her which Neale no longer could. . . .  That and great ease of life, which Neale never would.  There was a pause in which she shivered, humiliated.  She added lamely to this, a guessed-at possibility for aesthetic sympathy and understanding, perhaps more than Neale could . . . and broke off with a qualm of sickness.  How horrid this was!  How it offended a deep sense of personal dignity and decency!  How infinitely more beautiful and gracious those rolling clouds of vagueness and impulsive illusion!

But at least, when it had extracted the plain, bare statement which it had hunted down through the many-recessed corners of her heart, that stern sense of reality let her alone.  She no longer felt like a beetle impaled on a pin.  She was free now to move as she liked and look unmolested at what she pleased.  Honesty had no more power over her than to make sure she saw what she was pretending to look at.

But at what a diminished pile she had now to look, tarnished and faded like the once-loved bits of bright-colored silk and paper.  She felt robbed and cried out in a pain which seemed to her to come from her very heart, that something living and vital and precious to her had been killed by that rough handling.  But one warning look from the clear eyes of honesty forced her, lamenting, to give up even this.  If it had been living and precious and vital to her, it would have survived anything that honesty could have done to it.

But something had survived, something to be reckoned with, something which no tyrant, overbearing honesty could put out of her life . . . the possibility for being carried away in the deep full current of passion, fed by all the multitudinous streams of ripened personality.  If that was all that was left, was not that enough?  It had been for thousands of other women. . . .

No, not that; honesty woke to menace again.  What thousands of other women had done had no bearing here.  She was not thousands of other women.  She was herself, herself.  Would it be enough for her?

Honesty issued a decree of impartial justice.  Let her look at it with a mature woman’s experienced divination of reality, let her look at it as it would be and see for herself if it would be enough.  She was no girl whose ignorance rendered her incapable of judging until she had literally experienced.  She was no bound-woman, bullied by the tyranny of an outgrown past, forced to revolt in order to attain the freedom without which no human decision can be taken.  Neale’s strong hand had opened the door to freedom and she could see what the bound-women could not . . . that freedom is not the end, but only the beginning.

It was as though something were holding her gripped and upright there, staring before her, motionless, till she had put herself to the last supreme test.  She closed her eyes, and sat so immobile, rapt in the prodigious effort of her imagination and will, that she barely breathed.  How would it be?  Would it be enough?  She plunged the plummet down, past the fury and rage of the storm on the surface, past the teeming life of the senses, down to the depths of consciousness. . . .