s. His habitual shame at the acceptance of events as if they
were his only, helped him even here. As he looked at his mother
silently after her last words, his face regained some of its
penetrative calm; yet it seemed to have a strangely agitating influence
over her: her eyes were fixed on him with a sort of fascination, but
not with any repose of maternal delight.

"Forgive me, if I speak hastily," he said, with diffident gravity. "Why
have you resolved now on disclosing to me what you took care to have me
brought up in ignorance of? Why--since you seem angry that I should be
glad?"

"Oh--the reasons of our actions!" said the Princess, with a ring of
something like sarcastic scorn. "When you are as old as I am, it will
not seem so simple a question--'Why did you do this?' People talk of
their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have
the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster,
but I have not felt exactly what other women feel--or say they feel,
for fear of being thought unlike others. When you reproach me in your
heart for sending you away from me, you mean that I ought to say I felt
about you as other women say they feel about their children. I did
_not_ feel that. I was glad to be freed from you. But I did well for
you, and I gave you your father's fortune. Do I seem now to be revoking
everything?--Well, there are reasons. I feel many things that I cannot
understand. A fatal illness has been growing in me for a year. I shall
very likely not live another year. I will not deny anything I have
done. I will not pretend to love where I have no love. But shadows are
rising round me. Sickness makes them. If I have wronged the dead--I
have but little time to do what I left undone."

The varied transitions of tone with which this speech was delivered
were as perfect as the most accomplished actress could have made them.
The speech was in fact a piece of what may be called sincere acting;
this woman's nature was one in which all feeling--and all the more when
it was tragic as well as real--immediately became matter of conscious
representation: experience immediately passed into drama, and she acted
her own emotions. In a minor degree this is nothing uncommon, but in
the Princess the acting had a rare perfection of physiognomy, voice,
and gesture. It would not be true to say that she felt less because of
this double consciousness: she felt--that is, her mind went
through--all t