In her heart, madly beating, two intense feelings fought and struggled.  The dominant thought of years, to end with herself the life that seems a curse and not a blessing, to be always maid, to die in the forlorn hope and to leave none to sorrow through having lived by her, was shaken to its base by a new-born furious desire to yield herself utterly.  It came to her to run after Ned, to go with him, to Queensland, to the bush, to prison, to the gallows if need be.  An insane craving for him raged within her as her memory renewed his kisses on her lips, his crushing arm-clasp, the strength that wooed with delicious bruisings, the strong personality that smote against her own until she longed to stay the smiting.  It flashed through her mind that crowning joy of all joys would be to have his child in her arms, to rear a little agitator to carry on his father’s fight when Ned himself was gone for ever.

Then—­she stamped her foot in self-contempt and walked resolutely to her door.  When she got up to her room she went to the open window and, kneeling down there, watched with tearless eyes the full white moon that began to descend towards the roofs amid the gleaming stars of the cloudless sky.

The hours passed and she still knelt watching, tearless and sleepless, mind and body numbed and enwrapped by dull gnawing pain.

* * * * *

Pain is to fight one’s self and to subdue one’s self.  Nellie fought with herself and conquered.

A paradox this seems but is not, for in truth each individual is more than one, far more.  Every living human is a bundle of faggot faculties, in which bundle every faculty is not an inert faggot but a living, breathing, conscious serpent.  The weakling is he in whose forceless nature one serpent after another writhes its head up, dominant for a moment only, doomed to be thrust down by another fancy as fickle.  The strong man is he whose forceful nature casts itself to subdue its own shifting desires by raising one supreme above the others and holding it there by identifying the dearest aspirations with its supremacy.  And we call that man god-like whose heart yearns towards one little ideal, struggling for existence amid the tumultuous passions that clash in him around it, threatening to stifle it, and whose personality drives him to pick this ideal out and to lift it up and to hold it supreme lifelong.  He himself is its bitterest enemy, its most hateful foe, its would-be murderer.  He himself shrinks from and cowers at and abhors the choking for its sake of faculties that draw titanic strength from the innermost fibres of his own being.  Yet he himself shelters and defends and battles for this intruder on his peace, this source of endless pain and brain-rending sorrow.  A strength arises within him that tramples the other strength underfoot; he celebrates his victory with sighs and tears.  So the New rises and rules until the Old is shattered and broken and fights the New no more; so Brutality goes and so Humanity comes.