her--Lucy, Hannah, Hannah, Lucy--was intolerably keen. He went to her,
bending with a riven hand on the arm of her chair.

"Do you want Wilmer?" he demanded. "Do you love him truly? Is he
enough?"

"I don't know." Slow tears wet her cheeks. "I can't say. I ought to;
he's good and faithful, and with some of me that's enough. But there's
another part; I can't explain it except to say it's a kind of
excitement for the life Mr. Eckles told us about, all those lights and
restaurants and theaters. Sometimes I think I'll die, I want it so
much; then it comes over me how ungrateful I am to you and Aunt Ettie,
and I hate myself for the way I treat Wilmer." "Do you love him?" he
insisted.

"Perhaps not like you mean."

All that had been so long obscured in his mind and heart slowly cleared
to understanding--Lucy Braley, Richmond's wife; Phebe; Hannah; and
again Lucy, Lucy Vibard had this common hunger for life, for
brightness; they were as helpless in its grasp as he had been to hold
Hannah. Phebe's return, Martin Eckles--were only incidents in a great
inner need. In itself it wasn't wicked; circumstance had made it seem
wrong; Phebe's greenish hair, the mark of so much spoiled, Hannah's
unhappy death--were the result of aspirations; they fretted and
bruised, even killed themselves, like gay young animals, innocent
animals, in a dark lonely enclosure.

They were really finer than the satisfied women who faded to ugliness
in the solitary homes of the Greenstream mountains; not better, for