1She spoke to no one of what had happened, either on the terrace or in the lane or in the depths of the old attic, and the days came to resume again their old monotonous round, as if the strange, hot, disturbing night had had no more existence than a dream. She did not see O’Hara, yet she heard of him, constantly, from Sybil, from Sabine, even from Jack, who seemed stronger than he had ever been and able for a time to go about the farm with his grandfather in the trap drawn by an old white horse. There were moments when it seemed to Olivia that the boy might one day be really well, and yet there was never any real joy in those moments, because always in the back of her mind stood the truth. She knew it would never be, despite all that fierce struggle which she and the old man kept up perpetually against the thing which was stronger than either of them. Indeed, she even found a new sort of sadness in the sight of the pale thin boy and the rugged old man driving along the lanes in the trap, the eyes of the grandfather bright with a look of deluding hope. It was a look which she found unbearable because it was the first time in years, almost since that first day when Jack, as a tiny baby who did not cry enough, came into the world, that the expression of the old man had changed from one of grave and uncomplaining resignation.

2Sometimes when she watched them together she was filled with a fierce desire to go to John Pentland and tell him that it was not her fault that there were not more children, other heirs to take the place of Jack. She wanted to tell him that she would have had ten children if it were possible, that even now she was still young enough to have more children. She wanted to pour out to him something of that hunger of life which had swept over her on the night in Sabine’s garden beneath the apple-tree, a spot abounding in fertility. But she knew, too, how impossible it was to discuss a matter which old John Pentland, in the depths of his soul believed to be “indelicate.” Such things were all hidden behind a veil which shut out so much of truth from all their lives. There were times when she fancied he understood it all, those times when he took her hand and kissed her affectionately. She fancied that he understood and that the knowledge lay somehow at the root of the old man’s quiet contempt for his own son.

3But she saw well enough the tragedy that lay deep down at the root of the whole matter. She understood that it was not Anson who was to blame. It was that they had all been caught in the toils of something stronger than any of them, a force which with a cruel injustice compelled her to live a dry, monotonous, barren existence when she would have embraced life passionately, which compelled her to watch her own son dying slowly before her eyes.

4Always she came back to the same thought, that the boy must be kept alive until his grandfather was dead; and sometimes, standing on the terrace, looking out across the fields, Olivia saw that old Mrs. Soames, dressed absurdly in pink, with a large picture-hat, was riding in the trap with the old man and his grandson, as if in reality she were the grandmother of Jack instead of the mad old woman abovestairs.

5The days came to resume their round of dull monotony, and yet there was a difference, odd and indefinable, as if in some way the sun were brighter than it had been, as if those days, when even in the bright sunlight the house had seemed a dull gray place, were gone now. She could no longer look across the meadows toward the bright new chimneys of O’Hara’s house without a sudden quickening of breath, a warm pleasant sensation of no longer standing quite alone.

6She was not even annoyed any longer by the tiresome daily visits of Aunt Cassie, nor by the old woman’s passion for pitying her and making wild insinuations against Sabine and O’Hara and complaining of Sybil riding with him in the mornings over the dew-covered fields. She was able now simply to sit there politely as she had once done, listening while the old woman talked on and on; only now she did not even listen with attention. It seemed to her at times that Aunt Cassie was like some insect beating itself frantically against a pane of glass, trying over and over again with an unflagging futility to enter where it was impossible to enter.

7It was Sabine who gave her a sudden glimpse of penetration into this instinct about Aunt Cassie, Sabine who spent all her time finding out about people. It happened one morning that the two clouds of dust, the one made by Aunt Cassie and the other by Sabine, met at the very foot of the long drive leading up to Pentlands, and together the two women—one dressed severely in shabby black, without so much as a fleck of powder on her nose, the other dressed expensively in what some Paris dressmaker chose to call a costume de sport, with her face made up like a Parisian—arrived together to sit on the piazza of Pentlands insulting each other subtly for an hour. When at last Sabine managed to outstay Aunt Cassie (it was always a contest between them, for each knew that the other would attack her as soon as she was out of hearing) she turned to Olivia and said abruptly, “I’ve been thinking about Aunt Cassie, and I’m sure now of one thing. Aunt Cassie is a virgin!”

8There was something so cold-blooded and sudden in the statement that Olivia laughed.

9“I’m sure of it,” persisted Sabine with quiet seriousness. “Look at her. She’s always talking about the tragedy of her being too frail ever to have had children. She never tried. That’s the answer. She never tried.” Sabine tossed away what remained of the cigarette she had lighted to annoy Aunt Cassie and continued. “You never knew my Uncle Ned Struthers when he was young. You only knew him as an old man with no spirit left. But he wasn’t that way always. It’s what she did to him. She destroyed him. He was a full-blooded kind of man who liked drinking and horses and he must have liked women, too, but she cured him of that. He would have liked children, but instead of a wife he only got a woman who couldn’t bear the thought of not being married and yet couldn’t bear what marriage meant. He got a creature who fainted and wept and lay on a sofa all day, who got the better of him because he was a nice, stupid, chivalrous fellow.”

10Sabine was launched now with all the passion which seized her when she had laid bare a little patch of life and examined it minutely.

11“He didn’t even dare to be unfaithful to her. If he looked at another woman she fainted and became deathly ill and made terrible scenes. I can remember some of them. I remember that once he called on Mrs. Soames when she was young and beautiful, and when he came home Aunt Cassie met him in hysterics and told him that if it ever happened again she would go out, ‘frail and miserable as she was,’ and commit adultery. I remember the story because I overheard my father telling it when I was a child and I was miserable until I found out what ‘committing adultery’ meant. In the end she destroyed him. I’m sure of it.”

12Sabine sat there, with a face like stone, following with her eyes the cloud of dust that moved along the lane as Aunt Cassie progressed on her morning round of visits, a symbol in a way of all the forces that had warped her own existence.

13“It’s possible,” murmured Olivia.

14Sabine turned toward her with a quick, sudden movement. “That’s why she is always so concerned with the lives of other people. She has never had any life of her own, never. She’s always been afraid. It’s why she loves the calamities of other people, because she’s never had any of her own. Not even her husband’s death was a calamity. It left her free, completely free of troubles as she had always wanted to be.”

15And then a strange thing happened to Olivia. It was as if a new Aunt Cassie had been born, as if the old one, so full of tears and easy sympathy who always appeared miraculously when there was a calamity in the neighborhood, the Aunt Cassie who was famous for her good works and her tears and words of religious counsel, had gone down the lane for the last time, never to return again. To-morrow morning a new Aunt Cassie would arrive, one who outwardly would be the same; only to Olivia she would be different, a woman stripped of all those veils of pretense and emotions with which she wrapped herself, an old woman naked in her ugliness who, Olivia understood in a blinding flash of clarity, was like an insect battering itself against a pane of glass in a futile attempt to enter where it was impossible for her ever to enter. And she was no longer afraid of Aunt Cassie now. She did not even dislike her; she only pitied the old woman because she had missed so much, because she would die without ever having lived. And she must have been young and handsome once, and very amusing. There were still moments when the old lady’s charm and humor and sharp tongue were completely disarming.

16Sabine was talking again, in a cold, unrelenting voice. “She lay there all those years on the sofa covered with a shawl, trying to arrange the lives of every one about her. She killed Anson’s independence and ruined my happiness. She terrorized her husband until in the end he died to escape her. He was a good-natured man, horrified of scenes and scandals.” Sabine lighted a cigarette and flung away the match with a sudden savage gesture. “And now she goes about like an angel of pity, a very brisk angel of pity, a harpy in angel’s clothing. She has played her rôle well. Every one believes in her as a frail, good, unhappy woman. Some of the saints must have been very like her. Some of them must have been trying old maids.”

17She rose and, winding the chiffon scarf about her throat, opened her yellow parasol, saying, “I know I’m right. She’s a virgin. At least,” she added, “in the technical sense, she’s a virgin. I know nothing about her mind.”

18And then, changing abruptly, she said, “Will you go up to Boston with me to-morrow? I’m going to do something about my hair. There’s gray beginning to come into it.”

19Olivia did not answer her at once, but when she did speak it was to say, “Yes; I’m going to take up riding again and I want to order clothes. My old ones would look ridiculous now. It’s been years since I was on a horse.”

20Sabine looked at her sharply and, looking away again, said, “I’ll stop for you about ten o’clock.”