This quiet shelter of Beechcote could not be hers
much longer. If she was not to go to Oliver, impossible that she could
live on in this rose-scented stillness of the old house and garden,
surrounded by comfort, tranquillity, beauty, while the agony of the
world rang in her ears--wild voices!--speaking universal, terrible,
representative things, yet in tones piteously dear and familiar, close,
close to her heart. No; like Marion Vincent, she must take her life in
her hands, offering it day by day to this hungry human need, not
stopping to think, accepting the first task to her hand, doing it as she
best could. Only so could she still her own misery; tame, silence her
own grief; grief first and above all for Oliver, grief for her own
youth, grief for her parents. She must turn to the poor in that mood she
had in the first instance refused to allow the growth of in herself--the
mood of one seeking an opiate, an anaesthetic. The scrubbing of hospital
floors; the pacing of dreary streets on mechanical errands; the humblest
obedience and routine; things that must be done, and in the doing of
them deaden thought--these were what she turned to as the only means by
which life could be lived.
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