At the same time, the woman was doing what nothing in her youth could well have prepared her for.She must have passed a childhood unlike the ordinary girl's childhood, if her steadiness or her alertness had ever been educated, if she had been rebuked for cowardice, for the egoistic distrust of general rules, or for claims of exceptional chances.Yet here she was, trusting not only herself but a multitude of other people; taking her equal risk; giving a watchful confidence to averages - that last, perhaps, her strangest and greatest success.
No exceptions were hers, no appeals, and no forewarnings.She evidently had not in her mind a single phrase, familiar to women, made to express no confidence except in accidents, and to proclaim a prudent foresight of the less probable event.No woman could ride a bicycle along Oxford Street with any such baggage as that about her.
The woman in grey had a watchful confidence not only in a multitude of men but in a multitude of things.And it is very hard for any untrained human being to practise confidence in things in motion -things full of force, and, what is worse, of forces.Moreover, there is a supreme difficulty for a mind accustomed to search timorously for some little place of insignificant rest on any accessible point of stable equilibrium; and that is the difficulty of holding itself nimbly secure in an equilibrium that is unstable.
Who can deny that women are generally used to look about for the little stationary repose just described? Whether in intellectual or in spiritual things, they do not often live without it.
She, none the less, fled upon unstable equilibrium, escaped upon it, depended upon it, trusted it, was `ware of it, was on guard against it, as she sped amid her crowd her own unstable equilibrium, her machine's, that of the judgment, the temper, the skill, the perception, the strength of men and horses.
She had learnt the difficult peace of suspense.She had learnt also the lowly and self-denying faith in common chances.She had learnt to be content with her share - no more - in common security, and to be pleased with her part in common hope.For all this, it may be repeated, she could have had but small preparation.Yet no anxiety was hers, no uneasy distrust and disbelief of that human thing - an average of life and death.
To this courage the woman in grey had attained with a spring, and she had seated herself suddenly upon a place of detachment between earth and air, freed from the principal detentions, weights, and embarrassments of the usual life of fear.She had made herself, as it were, light, so as not to dwell either in security or danger, but to pass between them.She confessed difficulty and peril by her delicate evasions, and consented to rest in neither.She would not owe safety to the mere motionlessness of a seat on the solid earth, but she used gravitation to balance the slight burdens of her wariness and her confidence.She put aside all the pride and vanity of terror, and leapt into an unsure condition of liberty and content.
She leapt, too, into a life of moments.No pause was possible to her as she went, except the vibrating pause of a perpetual change and of an unflagging flight.A woman, long educated to sit still, does not suddenly learn to live a momentary life without strong momentary resolution.She has no light achievement in limiting not only her foresight, which must become brief, but her memory, which must do more; for it must rather cease than become brief.Idle memory wastes time and other things.The moments of the woman in grey as they dropped by must needs disappear, and be simply forgotten, as a child forgets.Idle memory, by the way, shortens life, or shortens the sense of time, by linking the immediate past clingingly to the present.Here may possibly be found one of the reasons for the length of a child's time, and for the brevity of the time that succeeds.The child lets his moments pass by and quickly become remote through a thousand little successive oblivions.He has not yet the languid habit of recall.
"Thou art my warrior," said Volumnia."I holp to frame thee."Shall a man inherit his mother's trick of speaking, or her habit and attitude, and not suffer something, against his will, from her bequest of weakness, and something, against his heart, from her bequest of folly? From the legacies of an unlessoned mind, a woman's heirs-male are not cut off in the Common Law of the generations of mankind.Brutus knew that the valour of Portia was settled upon his sons.
