uh!” she shook her head quickly and shortly. “I’d be afraid to let you try it—well, we’ll see,” she said, turning it off easily in an evasive and conciliatory tone. “We’ll see about it. I’d like to study about it a little first.”
After that there was nothing to do except to curse and beat their fists into the wall. And after that there was nothing to do at all. She had beaten them all, and they knew it. Their curses, prayers, oaths, persuasions and strangled cries availed them nothing. She had beaten them all, and finally they spoke no more to her or to themselves about her motor car: the gigantic folly of that mad wastefulness evoked for them all memories so painful, desolate and tragic—a memory of the fatality of blood and nature which could not be altered, of the done which could be undone never, and of the web of fate in which their lives were meshed—that they knew there was no guilt, no innocence, no victory, and no change. They were what they were, and they had no more to say.
So was it now as she stood planted there before her house. As she had grown older, her body had grown clumsier with the shapeless heaviness of age: as she stood there with her hands clasped in this attitude of ruminant relish, she seemed to be planted solidly on the pavement and somehow to own, inhabit, and possess the very bricks she walked on. She owned the street, the pavement, and finally her terrific ownership of the house was as apparent as if the house were living and could speak to her. For the rest of them that old bleak house had now so many memories of grief and death and intolerable, incurable regret that in their hearts they hated it; but although she had seen a son strangle to death in one of its bleak rooms, she loved the house as if it were a part of her own life—as it was—and her love for it was greater than her love for anyone or anything else on earth.
And yet, for her, even if that house, the whole world, fell in ruins around her, there could be no ruin—her spirit was as everlasting as the earth on which she walked, and could not be touched—no matter what catastrophes of grief, death, tragic loss, and unfulfilment might break the lives of other men—she was triumphant over the ravages of time and accident, and would be triumphant to her death. For there was only the inevitable fulfilment of her own destiny—and ruin, loss, and death availed not—she would be fulfilled. She had lived ten lives, and now she was embarked upon another one, and so it had been ordered in the beginning: this was all that mattered in the end.
