And what she brought up from those depths was a warning distaste, a something offending to her, to all of her, now she was aware of it.

She was amazed.  Why should she taste an acrid muddy flavor of dregs in that offered cup of heavy aromatic wine, she who had all her life thanked Heaven for her freedom from the ignominy of feeling it debasing to be a woman who loved?  It was glorious to be a woman who loved.  There had been no dregs left from those sweet, light, heady draughts she and Neale had drunk together in their youth, nor in the quieter satisfying draughts they knew now.  What was the meaning of that odor of decay about what seemed so living, so hotly more living than what she had?  Why should she have this unmistakable prescience of something stale and tainting which she had never felt?  Was she too old for passion?  But she was in the height of her physical flowering, and physically she cried out for it.  Could it be that, having spent the heritage of youth, she could not have it again?  Could it be that one could not go back, there, any more than . . .

Oh, what did that bring to mind?  What was that fleeting cobweb of thought that seemed a recurrence of a sensation only recently passed?  When she had tried to tell herself that full-fruited passion was worth all else in life, was the one great and real thing worth all the many small shams . . . what was it she had felt?

She groped among the loose-hanging filaments of impression and brought it out to see.  It seemed to be . . . could it have been, the same startled recoil as at the notion of getting back the peace of childhood by giving up her home for the toy-house; her living children for the dolls?

* * * * *

Now, for the great trial of strength.  Back!  Push back all those thick-clustering, intruding, distracting traditional ideas of other people on both sides; the revolt on one hand, the feeble resignation on the other; what other women did; what people had said. . . .  Let her wipe all that off from the too-receptive tablets of her mind.  Out of sight with all that.  This was her life, her question, hers alone.  Let her stand alone with her own self and her own life, and, with honesty as witness, ask herself the question . . . would she, if she could, give up what she was now, with her myriads of roots, deep-set in the soil of human life, in order to bear the one red rose, splendid though it might be?

That was the question.

With no conscious volition of hers, the answer was there, plain and irrefutable as a fact in the physical world.  No, she would not choose to do that.  She had gone on, gone on beyond that.  She was almost bewildered by the peremptory certainty with which that answer came, as though it had lain inherent in the very question.

* * * * *