She felt a mounting wave of horror and nausea, and knowing well from experience what was on its way, fought desperately to ward it off, reading hurriedly a real-estate item in the newspaper, an account of a flood in the West, trying in vain to fix her mind on what she read.  But she could not stop the advance of what was coming.  She let the newspaper fall with a shudder as the thought arrived, hissing, gliding with venomous swiftness along the familiar path it had so often taken to her heart . . . “suppose this reactionary outburst of hate and greed and intolerance and imperialistic ambitions all around, means that the ‘peace’ is an armed truce only, and that in fifteen years the whole nightmare will start over.”

She looked down at the little boy, applying himself seriously to his buttons.  “In fifteen years’ time my baby will be a man of twenty-one.”

Wild cries broke out in her heart.  “No, oh no!  I couldn’t live through another.  To see them all go, husband and sons!  Not another war!  Let me live quickly, anyhow, somehow, to get it over with . . . and die before it comes.”

The little boy had been twisting himself despairingly, and now said in a small voice, “Mother, I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I can’t do that back button.”

His mother heard his voice and looked down at him uncomprehendingly for a moment.  He said, less resigned, impatience pricking through his tone, “Mother, I told you I never could reach that button behind.”

She bent from her chair, mechanically secured the little garment, and then, leaning back, looked down moodily at her feet.  The little boy began silently to put on and lace up his shoes.

Marise was aware of a dimming of the light in the inner room of her consciousness, as though one window after another were being darkened.  A hushed, mournful twilight fell in her heart.  Melancholy came and sat down with her, black-robed.  What could one feel except Melancholy at the sight of the world of humanity, poor world, war-ridden, broken in health, ruined in hope, the very nerves of action cut by the betrayal of its desperate efforts to be something more than base.

* * * * *

Was that really Melancholy?  Something else slid into her mind, something watchful.  She sat perfectly still so that no chance movement should disturb that mood till it could be examined and challenged.  There was certainly something else in her heart beside sorrow over the miseries of the after-war world.

She persisted in her probing search, felt a cold ray of daylight strike into that gloom and recognized with amazement and chagrin what else it was!  Disgusting!  There in the very bottom of her mind, lay still that discomfort at beginning to look like Cousin Hetty!  And so that wound to her vanity had slowly risen again into her consciousness and clothed itself in the ampler, nobler garments of impersonal Melancholy. . . . “Oh,” she cried aloud, impatiently, contemptuous of herself, “what picayune creatures human beings are!  I’m ashamed to be one!”