r is not made after all," said Mrs. Davilow, not
without a sly intention.

"Then that will be because I refuse it beforehand," said Gwendolen. "It
comes to the same thing."

There was a proud little toss of the head as she said this; and when
she walked down-stairs in her long black robes, there was just that
firm poise of head and elasticity of form which had lately been
missing, as in a parched plant. Her mother thought, "She is quite
herself again. It must be pleasure in his coming. Can her mind be
really made up against him?"

Gwendolen would have been rather angry if that thought had been
uttered; perhaps all the more because through the last twenty hours,
with a brief interruption of sleep, she had been so occupied with
perpetually alternating images and arguments for and against the
possibility of her marrying Grandcourt, that the conclusion which she
had determined on beforehand ceased to have any hold on her
consciousness: the alternate dip of counterbalancing thoughts begotten
of counterbalancing desires had brought her into a state in which no
conclusion could look fixed to her. She would have expressed her
resolve as before; but it was a form out of which the blood had been
sucked--no more a part of quivering life than the "God's will be done"
of one who is eagerly watching chances. She did not mean to accept
Grandcourt; from the first moment of receiving his letter she had meant
to refuse him; still, that could not but prompt her to look the
unwelcome reasons full in the face until she had a little less awe of
them, could not hinder her imagination from filling out her knowledge
in various ways, some of which seemed to change the aspect of what she
knew. By dint of looking at a dubious object with a constructive
imagination, who can give it twenty different shapes. Her indistinct
grounds of hesitation before the interview at the Whispering Stones, at
present counted for nothing; they were all merged in the final
repulsion. If it had not been for that day in Cardell Chase, she said
to herself now, there would have been no obstacle to her marrying
Grandcourt. On that day and after it, she had not reasoned and
balanced; she had acted with a force of impulse against which all
questioning was no more than a voice against a torrent. The impulse had
come--not only from her maidenly pride and jealousy, not only from the
shock of another woman's calamity thrust close on her vision, but--from
her dread of wrong-d