the senses of certain beauties.  Flattery too, things you said, hopes and deceptions for myself.  And all that had rolled up together and taken to itself the wild help of those deep emotions that slumbered in my body; it seemed everything.  But it wasn’t.  How can I describe it?  It was like having a very bright lamp with a thick shade—­everything else in the room was hidden.  But you take the shade off and there they are—­it is the same light—­still there!  Only it lights every one!”

Her voice ceased.  For awhile no one spoke, and Nettie, with a quick movement, swept the petals into the shape of a pyramid.

Figures of speech always distract me, and it ran through my mind like some puzzling refrain, “It is still the same light. . . .”

“No woman believes these things,” she asserted abruptly.

“What things?”

“No woman ever has believed them.”

“You have to choose a man,” said Verrall, apprehending her before I did.

“We’re brought up to that.  We’re told—­it’s in books, in stories, in the way people look, in the way they behave—­one day there will come a man.  He will be everything, no one else will be anything.  Leave everything else; live in him.”

“And a man, too, is taught that of some woman,” said Verrall.

“Only men don’t believe it!  They have more obstinate minds. . . .  Men have never behaved as though they believed it.  One need not be old to know that.  By nature they don’t believe it.  But a woman believes nothing by nature.  She goes into a mold hiding her secret thoughts almost from herself.”

“She used to,” I said.

“You haven’t,” said Verrall, “anyhow.”

“I’ve come out.  It’s this comet.  And Willie.  And because I never really believed in the mold at all—­even if I thought I did.  It’s stupid to send Willie off—­shamed, cast out, never to see him again—­when I like him as much as I do.  It is cruel, it is wicked and ugly, to prance over him as if he was a defeated enemy, and pretend I’m going to be happy just the same.  There’s no sense in a rule of life that prescribes that.  It’s selfish.  It’s brutish.  It’s like something that has no sense.  I------” there was a sob in her voice:  “Willie!  I won’t.”

I sat lowering, I mused with my eyes upon her quick fingers.

“It is brutish,” I said at last, with a careful unemotional deliberation.  “Nevertheless—­it is in the nature of things. . . .  No! . . .  You see, after all, we are still half brutes, Nettie.  And men, as you say, are more obstinate than women.  The comet hasn’t altered that; it’s only made it clearer.  We have come into being through a tumult of blind forces. . . .  I come back to what I said just now; we have found our poor reasonable minds, our wills to live well, ourselves, adrift on a wash of instincts, passions, instinctive prejudices, half animal stupidities. . . .  Here we are like people clinging to something—­like people awakening—­upon a raft.”