Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/393

Rh conception of the world and the human soul—surged over her like a cold muddy sea. Was this, then, what one must live in? And to what end? To pass the endless struggle on to someone else?

For the first time, it seemed to her, in the long hours of that night, she saw the world as it really was. She saw it as a long combat, and she saw that no relation could escape this law of struggle and change, certainly not hers and Basil's. Between them, too, it must be a combat, a struggle to keep what they had conquered, a fight against those things in one another, in themselves, that tended to destroy, a long fight against decay and the death of what was precious.

She saw in a flash how she had injured a certain ideal of herself in Basil's mind; she saw all the power of that ideal to bind, to anchor him. She saw how he had set her apart, because of it, from all feminine lightness and weakness, too well known. And the violence of his reaction against the having to change his idea of her showed her how much it had meant to him. It was perhaps unreasonable, his ideal, his idea of her, but she acknowledged that he was right to want her to realise it. Now, perhaps, it would never be real to him again. She had broken one of the cords that bound him to her. She saw before her a battle to regain what she had lost, or to replace it by something else. She took up her courage in both hands and vowed herself to that