,
hardly noticed in the passing of the day--taken as air to the breather;
until some chip of the scene, round which an emotion had curled, was
vivid foreground and gateway to shrouded romance: it might be the
stream's white face browning into willow-droopers, or a wagtail on a
water-lily leaf, or the fore-horse of an up-river barge at strain of
legs, a red-finned perch hung a foot above the pebbles in sun-veined
depths, a kingfisher on the scud under alders, the forest of the bankside
weeds.

CHAPTER XXV

PREPARATIONS FOR A RESOLVE

That day receded like a spent billow, and lapsed among the others
advancing, but it left a print deeper than events would have stamped.
Aminta's pen declined to run to her lord; and the dipping it in ink was
no acceleration of the process. A sentence, bearing likeness to an
artless infant's trot of the half-dozen steps to mother's lap, stumbled
upon the full stop midway. Desperate determination pushed it along, and
there was in consequence a dead stop at the head of the next sentence. A
woman whose nature is insurgent against the majesty of the man to whom
she must, among the singular injunctions binding her, regularly write,
sees no way between hypocrisy and rebellion. For rebellion, she, with the
pen in her hand, is avowedly not yet ripe, hypocrisy is abominable.

If she abstained from writing, he might travel down to learn the cause; a
similar danger, or worse, haunted the writing frigidly. She had to be the
hypocrite or else--leap.

But an honest woman who is a feeling woman, when she consents to play
hypocrite, cannot do it by halves. From writing a short cold letter,
Aminta wrote a short warm one, or very friendly. Length she could avoid,
because she was unable to fill a page. It seemed that she could not
compose a friendly few lines without letting her sex be felt in them.
What she had put away from her, so as not to feel it herself, the
simulation of ever so small a bit of feeling brought prominently back;
and where she had made a cast for flowing independent simplicity, she was
feminine, ultra-feminine to her reading of it.

Better take the leap than be guilty of double-dealing even on paper! The
nature of the leap she did not examine.

Her keen apprehension of the price payable for his benevolent intentions
caught scent of them in the air. Those Ormont jewels shone as emblems of
a detested subjection, the penalty for being the beautiful woman rageing
men proclaimed.