Mortimer
made no protest. His brain was fagged at night. It was a relief not to
be expected to talk when they dined alone; those long silences had been
oppresive even to him; he rather welcomed the books.
CHAPTER IV
I
This complete new freedom, and personal privacy, entailed in time a result
which Alexina would have been the last to anticipate even if she had
disposed of her husband by death or divorce.
Owing to the thoroughness of her mental methods she was psychologically
free, the legal tie mattered as little as if Mortimer had been transposed
by some beneficent law to the status of a brother. The will when it is
strong enough can control acts, and, when favored by bias, thought; but it
has no command whatever over the sub-consciousness, and in that mysterious
region are the subtle inheritances of mind and character, the springs and
the direction, of all functional life; a fate with a thousand threads on
her wheel, filaments from the souls and the bodies, the minds and the
acts, of every ancestor straight back to that vast impersonal ocean where,
unthinkable millions of years ago proemial life awaited the call of the
worlds.
This aged untiring fate at the wheel battles unceasingly with the conscious
mind above, for age is prone to live by law and rote. These fates, the
oldest daughters of the Earth-Mother, Nature, know nothing of morals or
manners, assume that men and women are as naive in their normality as the
denizens of forest and field.
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