the path of the rejected was the true path and how many had walked the path! The trees along the way were marked. Signs had been hung up by those who wanted to show others the way. “The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.”
Lillian had said, “men are no good,” and it was clear Lillian had also killed the thing within herself, had let it be killed. She had let some Jerome Hadley kill it, and then she had grown slowly and steadily more and more angry at life, had come to hate life, had thrown it away. And the thing had happened to her mother, too. That was the reason for her life of silence—death walking about. “The dead rise up to strike the dead.”
The story May had told to Maud Welliver was not a lie—it was the living truth. He had tried to kill and had come near succeeding. May had walked in the valley of the shadow of death. She knew that now. Her own sister, Lillian, had come to her when she walked with Death and wanted Life. “If you are going to go on the turf I’ll get you in with men who have money,” Lillian had said. She had got no closer to understanding than that.
May decided that after all she would not try to be Maud Welliver’s friend. She would see her and talk to her but, for the present, she would keep herself to herself. The living thing within her had been wounded and needed time to recover. Of all the feelings, the strong emotion, that swept through her on that evening, cleansing her internally, as she had been trying by splashing in the tub in the woodshed to cleanse herself externally, one impulse got itself definitely expressed. “I’ll go it alone, that’s what I’ll do,” she murmured between sobs as she sat by the window with her head in her hands, and heard the sweet song of the insects, singing of life in the darkness of the fields.
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