Now, she felt, she was probably about to hear the chief thing he had been approaching.

So she waited attentively.
"Behind a door has been shut another thing," he said and he endeavoured to say it with his usual detached rigidity of calm, but did not wholly succeed.

"It is the outcome of the generations and the centuries at present diminishing in value and dignity.

The past having had its will of me and the present and future having gripped me--if I had had a son--" As if in a flash she saw as he lingered on the words that he was speaking of a thing of which he had secretly thought often and much, though he had allowed no human being to suspect it.

She had not suspected it herself.