And it had happened to her as it did to the child, because someone stronger than she had protected her while she was growing . . . not protected from effort, as though one should try to protect the child from learning his lessons. . . .  Back there, such ages ago in Italy, in her ignorant . . . how ignorant! . . . and frightened girlhood, she had begged Neale, without knowing what she did, to help her grow up, to help her save what was worth saving in her, to help her untangle from the many-colored confusion of her nature what was best worth keeping.  And Neale had done it, had clung steadily to his divination of what was strong in her, in spite of her clamor to him to let it go.

But Vincent had not grown up, was back there still in confusion, holding desperately with all that terrific strength of his to what could not be held, to what was impermanent and passing in its nature.  Why should he do that?  Neale knew better than that.  Then she saw why:  it was because Vincent conceived of nothing but emptiness if he let it go, and horribly feared that imaginary emptiness.  Out of the incalculable richness of her kingdom she wondered again at his blindness. . . .  And made a pitying guess at the reason for it . . . perhaps for him it was not imaginary.  Perhaps one of the terms of the bargain he had made with life was that there should be nothing later but emptiness for him.  Yes, she saw that.  She would have made that bargain, too, if it had not been for Neale.  She would have been holding terrified to what was not to be held; with nothing but that between her and the abyss.  Who was she to blame Vincent for his blindness?

That, perhaps, had been the meaning of that singular last moment of their talk together, which had frightened her so, with its sudden plunge below the surface, into the real depths, when, changed wholly into someone else, he had run back to her, his hands outstretched, his eyes frightened, his lips trembling . . . perhaps he had felt the abyss there just before him.  For an instant there, he had made her think of Paul, made her remember that Vincent himself had, so short a time ago, been a little boy too.  She had been so shocked and racked by pity and remorse, that she would have been capable of any folly to comfort him.  Perhaps she had seen there for an instant the man Vincent might have been, and had seen that she could have loved that man.

But how instantly it had passed!  He had not suffered that instant of true feeling to have space to live, but had burned it up with the return of his pride, his resentment that anyone save himself should try to stand upright, with the return of the devouring desire-for-possession of the man who had always possessed everything he had coveted.  There was something sad in being able to see the littleness of life which underlay the power and might of personality in a man like Vincent.  He could have been something else.