Nellie fought with herself kneeling there at her window, watching the declining moon, staring at it with set eyes, grimly willing herself not to think because to think was to surrender.  Into heart and ear and brain the serpents hissed words of love and thoughts of unspeakable joy.  Upon her lips they pressed again Ned’s hot kisses.  Around her waist they threw again the clasping of his straining arms.  “Why not?  Why not?” they asked her.  “Why not?  Why not?” they cried and shouted.  “Why not?  Oh, why not?” they moaned to her.  And she stared at the radiant moon and clenched her fingers on the window sill and would not answer.  Only to her lips rose a prayer for death that she disowned unuttered.  Had she fallen so low as to seek refuge in superstition, she thought, and from that moment she bore her agony in her own way.

It did pass through her mind that the ideal she had installed in her passionate heart did not aid her, that it had shrunk back out of sight and left her alone to fight for it against herself, left her alone to keep her life for it free from the dominance of these mad passions that had lifted their heads within her and that every nerve in her fought and bled for.  She crushed this back also.  She would not think.  Only she would be loyal to her conception of Right even though the agony of her loyalty drove her mad.

She knew what Pain meant, now.  She drank to the very dregs the cup of human misery.  To have one’s desires within one’s reach, to have one’s whole being driving one to stretch out one’s hand and satisfy the eternal instincts within, and to force one’s self to an abnegation that one’s heart revolts from, that indeed was Pain to her.  She learnt the weakness of all the philosophies as in a flash of lightning one sees clearly.  She could have laughed at the sophism that one chooses always that which pleases one most.  She knew that there are unfathomed depths in being which open beneath us in great crises and swallow up the foundations on which we builded and thought sure.  She paralysed her passion intuitively, waiting, as one holds breath in the water when a broken wave surges over.

Gradually she forgot, an aching pain in her body lulling the aching pain of her mind.  Gradually the white disc of the moon expanded before her and blotted out all active consciousness.  Slowly the fierce serpents withdrew their hissing heads again.  Slowly the ideal she had fought for lifted itself again within her.  She began to feel more like her old self, only strangely exhausted and sorrowful.  She was old, so old; weary, so weary.  Hours went by.  She passed into abstraction.

The falling of the moon behind the roofs roused her.  She gazed at its disappearing rim in bewilderment, for the moment not realising.  Then the sense of bodily pain dawned on her and assured her of the Reality.