Page:Later Life (1919).djvu/235

Rh friend of the family, was very strong in him; and he felt himself to be the child of both his parents, felt within himself their double heritage of jealousy. The image of his father appeared constantly before him, appeared between the images of Brauws and of his mother. But he let her see nothing of it.

She gathered fresh life in those walks. When Addie was at school, she walked alone, no longer fearing the loneliness out of doors, she who had come to love her indoor loneliness and the still deeper loneliness of her soul. It was as though, after dreaming and educating herself—quickly, nervously, superficially and with youthful simplicity—in what great men had thought and written, she felt herself breathe again in the midst of nature. No longer from her arm-chair, through the windows, along the bend of the curtains did she see the great clouds, but she now saw them out of doors and overhead, blue, white, immense, irradiated by the sun in the vault of the boundless spring skies all vocal with birds, saw them as she stood on the dunes, with the wind all round her head, all round her hair and blowing through her skirts. . ..

"I love him, I love him," a voice inside her sang softly and yet insistently, while the wind's strong passion seemed to lift her up and waft her along.

But in the movement of her hands there was something as though she were resisting the wind, with a smile of gentle irony, of tender mockery.