existence more distinguished than her own; an existence brilliant and
tender, where dalliance and high endeavour, virtue and the flavour of
sin, eternal appetite and eternal satisfaction, were incredibly united.
Even now, on her fortieth birthday, she still believed in the
possibility of a conscious state of positive and continued happiness,
and regretted that she should have missed it.

The imminence and the arrival of this dire birthday, this day of wrath
on which the proudest woman will kneel to implacable destiny and beg a
reprieve, had induced the reveries natural to it--the self-searching,
the exchange of old fallacies for new, the dismayed glance forward, the
lingering look behind. Absorbed though she was in the control of the
sensitive steed, the field of her mind's eye seemed to be entirely
filled by an image of the woman of forty as imagined by herself at the
age of twenty. And she was that woman now! But she did not feel like
forty; at thirty she had not felt thirty; she could only accept the
almanac and the rules of arithmetic. The interminable years of her
marriage rolled back, and she was eighteen again, ingenuous and
trustful, convinced that her versatile husband was unique among his
sex. The fading of a short-lived and factitious passion, the descent of
the unique male to the ordinary level of males, the births of her three
girls and their rearing and training: all these things seemed as trifles
to her, mere excrescences and depressions in the vast tableland of her
monotonous and placid career. She had had no career. Her strength of
will, of courage, of love, had never been taxed; only her patience. 'And
my life is over!' she told herself, insisting that her life was over
without being able to believe it.

As the dog-cart was crossing the railway bridge at Shawport, at the foot
of the rise to Hillport, Leonora overtook her eldest daughter. She drew