She had learnt the difficult peace of suspense.  She had learnt also the lowly and self-denying faith in common chances.  She had learnt to be content with her share—­no more—­in common security, and to be pleased with her part in common hope.  For all this, it may be repeated, she could have had but small preparation.  Yet no anxiety was hers, no uneasy distrust and disbelief of that human thing—­an average of life and death.

To this courage the woman in grey had attained with a spring, and she had seated herself suddenly upon a place of detachment between earth and air, freed from the principal detentions, weights, and embarrassments of the usual life of fear.  She had made herself, as it were, light, so as not to dwell either in security or danger, but to pass between them.  She confessed difficulty and peril by her delicate evasions, and consented to rest in neither.  She would not owe safety to the mere motionlessness of a seat on the solid earth, but she used gravitation to balance the slight burdens of her wariness and her confidence.  She put aside all the pride and vanity of terror, and leapt into an unsure condition of liberty and content.

She leapt, too, into a life of moments.  No pause was possible to her as she went, except the vibrating pause of a perpetual change and of an unflagging flight.  A woman, long educated to sit still, does not suddenly learn to live a momentary life without strong momentary resolution.  She has no light achievement in limiting not only her foresight, which must become brief, but her memory, which must do more; for it must rather cease than become brief.  Idle memory wastes time and other things.  The moments of the woman in grey as they dropped by must needs disappear, and be simply forgotten, as a child forgets.  Idle memory, by the way, shortens life, or shortens the sense of time, by linking the immediate past clingingly to the present.  Here may possibly be found one of the reasons for the length of a child’s time, and for the brevity of the time that succeeds.  The child lets his moments pass by and quickly become remote through a thousand little successive oblivions.  He has not yet the languid habit of recall.

“Thou art my warrior,” said Volumnia.  “I holp to frame thee.”

Shall a man inherit his mother’s trick of speaking, or her habit and attitude, and not suffer something, against his will, from her bequest of weakness, and something, against his heart, from her bequest of folly?  From the legacies of an unlessoned mind, a woman’s heirs-male are not cut off in the Common Law of the generations of mankind.  Brutus knew that the valour of Portia was settled upon his sons.

SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT