room, the distance outside the house, the distance outside the night, the very distant distance of eternity, the eternity whence all the things of the future come: a roar so overwhelming that it seemed to come from a supernatural sea in which the poor, trembling old woman was drowned, drowned with all her vanity and all her unimportant, insignificant sorrow, a sea in which her very small, small soul was drowned, swallowed up like the veriest atom in the roaring, roaring waves; a roar whose voice told her that it was coming, that it was coming, the great sorrow, the thing before which she trembled with fear because she had long foreseen it and because it would be so heavy for her to bear . . . now that she was too old and too weary to bear any more sorrow! And, with an unconscious gesture, she raised her trembling old hands and prayed, mechanically:
"O God, no more, no more! . . ."
Why must fate be like that, so heavy, so ruthless and crushing? Why had it not all come earlier, including the thing which advanced with such a threatening roar and under which she, too weary now, too weak and too old, would succumb when it passed over her, when it reached her at last out of the roaring, threatening, distant, distant eternity, wherein all the things of the future are born. . . .
But the roar of that doom and her knowledge of it lasted no longer than a second. And, when
