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34 self away. But she found nothing which really seemed to her to weigh as heavily as what she wanted, her success, her happiness. She was not cruel, yet if it was necessary that the unhapiness of others was the coin by which she purchased her own, she would pay it. She would not like sacrificing others—she would hate it—but if someone had to suffer to enable her to enjoy, she knew that she would not forgo her chance. If Aunt Catherine or Aunt Elizabeth, for instance, had, by some mysterious bargain, to pay for her pleasures … well, they had had their lives, they had had their chances too, at best there were but a few grey years remaining for them; and they were not every happy, probably, even as it was.… Or if, in the same way, her own gain had to be anybody else's loss, she knew really what her choice would be, even if the loss was to one she really was devoted to—even if it were Maud's loss, for instance? Then she swept those thoughts away; they were but figments of imagination. Yet in spite of that, she knew that morally, potentially, she had chosen. Her thoughts, it may be, had been talking nonsense to her; asking her child-questions—"What would you do if?" and then putting some outrageous contingency before her; but for the moment, at any rate, she had taken these child-questions seriously, and answered them to the best of her ability.

A light wind blew in from the garden, bearing with it the warm scent of night-smelling flowers from some garden that had prospered better than that of Fair View, and she paused by the window looking out on to the darkness. At first her eyes, accustomed to the illumination in her room and its white reflecting walls, could see nothing but the large empty darkness; but soom forms of things defined themselves and took shape and a little colour. Above in the velvet vault the stars burned hot and close in the warm air, below the long railway embankment made a sharpt black line across the sky. On each side stretched parallel brick walls enclosing strips of garden belonging to neighbouring houses, all just alike, all narrow and confined. But of them all the one immediately below seemed to her most intolerably tedious. She knew every inch of it, and it was all dull and unlovely. The flower-bed under the wall was black, the lawn was black, but across it in a curve stretched the white line at the top of the tennis-net, and the post showed black across the grey of the gravel walk. From the house itself there shone a pale glimmer of light from Aunt Elizabeth's window, and even as she looked it was extinguished. Aunt Elizabeth had gone to bed. And in the morning