And yet.... Tough, leathery heart--indestructible spinner
she knew herself to be--no sooner should the dew fall from this
enchanting fabric, the web itself be torn, than she would set to work
upon the flimsiest of materials to weave another. And with such weaving
comes forgetfulness. She thought of this.
Not four feet away, another mind, inscrutable to hers, was violently
employed upon its own problem. In this wild darkness the wall of
Chantilly had bid him go on alone; it left him first without guide,
second without shelter. He drove into the path of a rough and bitter
storm which was attacking everything in the short plain between the
forest and the town. It leapt upon him in an outbreak of hisses; cut him
with hailstones, swept up false banks of snow before him till the
illusion of a road led him astray. He turned too much to the right, hung
on the lip of a buried ditch, turned back again and saved himself. He
turned too much to the left, tilted, hung, was in danger--yet found the
centre of the road again. Here, on this wild plain, the exposed night
was whiter--blanched enough, foreign enough, fitful enough to puzzle the
most resolved and native traveller.
He arrived at a cross-roads. Yet was it a cross-roads? When roads are
filled in level with the plain around them, the plain itself
wind-churned like a ploughed field, when banks are rompishly erected, or
melt unstably before the blows of the storm, it is hard to choose the
true road from the false.
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