woman, had grown into a girl who dreamed the shimmering dreams that were wafted along rainbow paths towards the distant clouds high in the heavens . . . In her maturity, she had developed herself hurriedly, as though afraid of being too late, into a thinking, feeling, loving woman . . . She had been sincere in that new, hurried life; but it had been nothing more than illusion and illusion alone, the illusion of a woman who felt herself growing old without ever, ever having lived . . .
But, though it had all been illusion, was illusion nothing then? . . . Or was illusion indeed something, something of no great account? And, even though she had lived only illusion, illusion under the compelling eyes of the man whom she loved, feeling love for the first and only time, under the brooding, anguished eyes of that thinker and seeker, had she not lived then, had she not lived then?
Yes, she had: she had lived, in the way in which a woman like herself—a woman who had never felt simply and sincerely except as a child in those far-off childish days, a woman whose life had been nothing but artificiality and failure—could live again, only later still, older still, old almost and finished; she had lived in illusions, in a fleeting illusion, which just for one moment she had tried to grasp, that day, now a few months ago . . .
She shook her head, her grey head; she was no
