spin like humming-tops: moderate liberals. That they all tolerated her again, in the little circle, was that not all part of their moderate liberal attitude? Oh, to live, to live really, to live as he had lived, to live . . . to live with him!
She was now startled at herself. She was in a room full of people and she sat in silence next to her mother. Dear Mamma! . . . And she was weary of her own thinking, for swift as lightning it all flashed through her, that revelation of her thoughts, without sentences, without images, without words. It just flashed; and that was all. But that flashing made her feel weary, enervated, almost breathless in the room, which she found close . . . And the very last of her thoughts, which had just for a moment appeared before her—sentence, image and word—had startled her. She had to confess it to herself: she loved, she loved him. But she inwardly pronounced that love—perhaps with the little cynical laugh which she had observed in her own people—she pronounced that love to be absurd, because so many silent, dead years lay heaped up there, because she was old, quite old. To wish to live at this time of day was absurd. To wish to dream at this stage was absurd. No, after so many years had been wasted on that meaningless existence, then she, an old woman now, must not hope to live again when it dawned too late, that life of thinking and feeling, that life from which might have sprung
