ANOTHER DAY OR TWO PASSED. OFTEN HER IMAGINATION worked the other way, not for her but against her; not in self-deception but demoralized and uncontrollable. There came a midday when, standing and resting at the kitchen-window, she could think of nothing but the ugliest matters of fact in the painful present tense. Her mind could not, or would not, take refuge in any remembrance of the past, and it had no capacity for the future. What had she, outworn and ailing, to do with the time to come? The only time she minded was the day or two, or the week or two, she still had to wait for her Helianos to come home. What had she ever understood of the past, ancient history, Hellas? Nothing, nothing except a pretended interest for his sake. The past was his hobby, and his weakness, she thought, half spitefully, with nervousness increasing and increasing; and apart from his poor dear sentimentality and pretensions to scholarship, what did it amount to? Tumbledown temples, dead religion, obscure dramaturgy, foolishness and cruelty of myths.
