She had learnt the difficult peace of suspense. She had learnt also the
lowly and self-denying faith in common chances. She had learnt to be
content with her share--no more--in common security, and to be pleased
with her part in common hope. For all this, it may be repeated, she
could have had but small preparation. Yet no anxiety was hers, no uneasy
distrust and disbelief of that human thing--an average of life and death.

To this courage the woman in grey had attained with a spring, and she had
seated herself suddenly upon a place of detachment between earth and air,
freed from the principal detentions, weights, and embarrassments of the
usual life of fear. She had made herself, as it were, light, so as not
to dwell either in security or danger, but to pass between them. She
confessed difficulty and peril by her delicate evasions, and consented to
rest in neither. She would not owe safety to the mere motionlessness of
a seat on the solid earth, but she used gravitation to balance the slight
burdens of her wariness and her confidence. She put aside all the pride
and vanity of terror, and leapt into an unsure condition of liberty and
content.

She leapt, too, into a life of moments. No pause was possible to her as
she went, except the vibrating pause of a perpetual change and of an
unflagging flight. A woman, long educated to sit still, does not
suddenly learn to live a momentary life without strong momentary
resolution. She has no light achievement in limiting not only her
foresight, which must become brief, but her memory, which must do more;
for it must rather cease than become brief. Idle memory wastes time and
other things. The moments of the woman in grey as they dropped by must
needs disappear, and be simply forgotten, as a child forgets. Idle
memory, by the way, shortens life, or shortens the sense of time, by
linking the immediate past clingingly to the present. Here may possibly