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Rh her to think that this was all, that love was no more than these stale satisfactions. She had believed him, too; that made his crime, not her credulity, the greater. And what had he done for her in comparison with what she had done for him? She had given him a child; she had given him the position he was powerless to win for himself, as a centre of all that was most intelligent in this stupid life; she had given him the realization of his utmost ideal of love. And to her now that was like the cracking of an empty eggshell, for there was not meat within. And in return for all that she had done for him, he seemed to have done so little. Once he had said that he wished he had been a stone-breaker opposite Fair View, for if that stone-breaker had been he, they would have been man and wife. In the light of the new knowledge, Lucia wished she had married a stone-breaker, provided only that she loved him. At the moment she would have sacrificed all she had won, all she had striven for, to be the wife of the man she loved. She would cook the dinner, she would darn the stockings, provided only that—that she could suckle his child. She had never known what that meant, though she had done it. She had done it in somnambulism, as it were. But Maud knew, and again she hated Maud because Maud had what she had missed.

And the irony of it! What a superb farce, as remote from reasonable reality as was the life she had led at Fair View. For the moment she felt that destiny must be playing some trick with her, making her dance like a marionette on wires of her own imagination. And then she knew that the truth was the direct opposite of what that image conveyed; she knew that all the rest of her life up till now had been the dance of a marionette, of a wooden jointed toy. She had danced to tunes that had no melody and no rhythm. She had listened to a music that had no heart behind it; she had grinned in answer to smiles that she did not understand, had given tender and soulless replies to whispered words that meant nothing to her. But now she was awake and understood. All that had been tuneless and senseless was made melodious and intelligible; instead of masks she saw the faces beneath, and a meaning leaped like a lightning flash into those ardours which had seemed so abortive, and the thought of which now grew suddenly insupportable.

The tingling ecstasy which had possessed her slowly subsided at the thought of this; she wanted the blaze of the electric light no longer, and she moved swiftly across to the door, and put out the whole of the illumination she had made half an hour before, so