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 scornful eyes looking at her with all the bitterness that was in them just now when he insulted her. Suddenly, and not knowing how it happened, she realized that Nelson was a person, a being like herself, full of himself as she was full of herself. He was not just some impressions made upon her senses, not just something for her to use; he was as much a person, in fact, as she was. Moreover, in this revelation she understood that he had suffered; that she had been nearly the cause of his death; and that to die meant as much to him as to die would mean to her.

She stopped short, looking up blankly at the warm noon sky above the brow of the hill. "Oh, my goodness!" she whispered. "He was right!"

She was dazed, stricken with her bewilderment and her unhappiness; what had happened to her appeared to her as nothing short of tragic. On the contrary, she should have been full of a new delight; for the thing that had just befallen her on the hillside was of a prophetic beauty; it was the beginning of her life as a being independent of her mechanical self. Out of her rage and pain and the hot pressure of old, old instincts and urges, intelligence was being born.

For the first time in her life, she had just had a thought.