Then again--and this, too, was so much more attainable in the country than in London--there was still intellectual achievement possible to her, by which she could speak intimately with others, and perhaps be a living and moving force in the world. For that, and for the long patient concentration of thought that it demanded, London seemed to her an impossible home; she was still too much in love with life not to be continually distracted by the bewildering fury of it there. The spectacle of that to her, as to Peggy, was absorbing; it was impossible to live one’s own life in town; all the hours belonged, as if in small allotments, to others, and there it was impossible to lead that detached life which to her at any rate seemed to be an essential condition of creative work. For she was no quick and nimble worker for whom the briskness of town life seems somehow congenial and natural; it was rather in solitude, in quiet, solitary evenings, in rambles alone over that open and exhilarating down that her thought matured and ripened best. It had been thus, though not here, that “Gambits” had been evolved; it would be here in this green, pleasant home of hers that she would work out and elaborate the new play which was already beginning to take form in her mind. As she had said to Hugh before on that night at Cookham, she marvelled at his not caring to set his mark on the world, to make people listen to him, for this to her was something of a passion which she could not imagine unshared by others, and the fact that she had done it, had tasted the intoxication of brilliant success, made her but more eager to drink of it again. But she had no intention of living a hermit’s existence, and, just as she wished to avoid the riot and rush of the world, so she had no idea of being a recluse. Solitary hours and many of them she wished for, but she filled up much of the day in the quiet, unexciting life of the place, for it was part of her plan to be busy, though not at the break-neck, runaway pace of Peggy. For she still had to keep her head turned in the direction of the future and averted from the past, and when she was not at work it was just in these cheerful little local employments that she could pass the time pleasantly but unemotionally. Then, too, there was the garden, which like some hungry animal swallowed at a gulp all the time she could give to it, though that time was considerable. For here the two main strands of her life as she had planned it were interwoven; Nature, grateful for and eagerly responding to her ministrations, spoke to her from the garden-beds, while some separate compartment of her brain, so it seemed, was brooding and busy, unconsciously for the most part, turning over in the cool darkness of it the scenes, the combinations, the characters of the next play. Sometimes out of that darkness would leap a sudden flash that she was wholly conscious of, and showed her how that subconscious self had been busy sorting, turning over, accepting and rejecting till a definite point, a clenched situation was struck out.