found herself picturing the disgust of the departed spider over this
innovation on flies. "It is like my life," she thought, "blown husks for
bread," and the tears welling in her eyes made the seeds seem to swell
and the web run together in a silvery blur. The moment of idle thought
had taken the keen edge from her ideas, and, like many another, she
tried to compromise.

"I'm afraid you must reconstruct your ideas of me, Ishmael," she said,
with an air of candour that struck him as worthy of her even through his
pain. "You think of me as something ethereal and angelic, and I'm not.
I'm only a woman, Ishmael, and the little things of life--friendship,
beauty, one's own kin--mean so much to me."

He had a confused idea she must mean the big things, but he waited
silently.

"Ishmael!" she said desperately; "it's no good, I'm not the sort of
woman who can throw up the whole of life for one thing. You will think
me mercenary, worldly, but I'm not; the old ties are too strong for me,
and I can't break them. It's my heart that breaks.... Oh, Ishmael,
Ishmael, I loved you so!"

Through all the inconsistencies of her words two salient facts stood out
to Ishmael--she was unhappy, and through him. His own pain lay numb, a
thing to be realised when he roamed the fields alone, and still more
intimately known when he had it for bed-and-hearth fellow in his dreary
house. Nature has provided that a great blow shall always stun for a
time; sensation stays quiescent as long as there still remains something
to be done; it is in the lonely hours after all action is over that pain
makes itself felt. Ishmael, if asked then, would have said his heart was