humiliating to remember how she and Neale had felt there, the wild, high
things they had said to each other, that astounding flood of feeling
which had swept them away at the last. What had become of all that?
Where now was that high tide?

* * * * *

Of course she loved Neale, and he loved her; there was nobody like
Neale, yes, all that; but oh! the living flood had been ebbing, ebbing
out of their hearts. They were not _alive_ as they had been alive when
they had clung to each other, there on that age-old rock, and felt the
tide of all the ages lift them high.

It must have been ebbing for a long time before she realized it because,
hurried, absorbed, surrounded incessantly by small cares as she was,
hustled and jostled in her rôle of mother and mistress-of-the-house in
servantless America, with the primitive American need to do so much with
her own hands, she had not even had the time to know the stupid, tragic
thing that was happening to her . . . that she was turning into a slow,
vegetating plant instead of a human being. And now she understood the
meaning of the strange dejection she had felt the day when little Mark
went off to school with the others. How curiously jaded and apprehensive
she had felt that morning, and when she had gone downstairs to see the
callers who arrived that day. That was the first time she had _felt_
that the tide was ebbing.

All this went through her mind with the cruel swiftness of a
sword-flash. And the first reaction to it, involuntary and reflex, was
to crush it instantly down, lest the man walking at her side should be
aware of it. It had come to her with such loud precision that it seemed