She said to herself, "Supposing this is true, or
that more than this is true, supposing his heart is unsound, what does it
mean to me?" What it excluded was easier to realise than what it meant.
Unless Quisante were to have not existence only, but also health, such
health at least as enables a man to do work although not, may be, to
glory in the doing of it, unless there were to the engine wheels sound
enough to answer to the spur of the steam that his brain's furnace made,
nothing could come about of what Lady Castlefort's Mightiness prophesied,
nothing of what friends and enemies had begun to look for, nothing of
what May herself had grown to regard as his future and hers, as the
basis, the condition, the circumstances, of her life and of his. An old
thought of her own came to her, back from the dim region of ante-marriage
days, the idea to which the Henstead doctor had given a terse, if
metaphorical, expression. Quisante was their race-horse, their money was
on him, they wanted a win for the stable. If this or more than this were
true, then there would be no win for the stable; the horse was a grand
horse, but he wouldn't stand training.
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