ntine locks set mysteriously on the
shoulders of that familiar person, in that brown dress, under that hat
she knew so well. It made her lose all her hold on reality. She told
Mrs Fyne: `I didn't know where I was. I didn't even know that I was
frightened. If she had told me it was a joke I would have laughed. If
she had told me to put on my hat and go out with her I would have gone
to put on my hat and gone out with her and never said a single word; I
should have been convinced I had been mad for a minute or so, and I
would have worried myself to death rather than breathe a hint of it to
her or anyone. But the wretch put her face close to mine and I could
not move. Directly I had looked into her eyes I felt grown on to the
carpet.'"

It was years afterwards that she used to talk like this to Mrs Fyne--
and to Mrs Fyne alone. Nobody else ever heard the story from her lips.
But it was never forgotten. It was always felt; it remained like a
mark on her soul, a sort of mystic wound, to be contemplated, to be
meditated over. And she said further to Mrs Fyne, in the course of
many confidences provoked by that contemplation, that, as long as that
woman called her names, it was almost soothing, it was in a manner
reassuring. Her imagination had, like her body, gone off in a wild
bound to meet the unknown; and then to hear after all something which
more in its tone than in its substance was mere venomous abuse, had
steadied the inward flutter of all her being.

"She called me a little fool more times than I can remember. I! A
fool! Why, Mrs Fyne! I do assure you I had never yet thought at all;
never of anything in the world, till then. I just went on living. And
one can't be a fool without one has at least tried to think. But what
had I ever to think about?"

"And no doubt," commented Marlow, "her life had been a mere life of
sensations--the response to which can neither be foolish nor wise. It
can only be temperamental; and I believe that she was of a generally
happy disposition, a child of the average kind. Even when she was asked
violently whether she imagined that there was anything in her, apart
from her money, to induce any intelligent person to take any sort of
interest in her existence, she only caught her breath in one dry sob and
said nothing, made no other sound, made no movement. When she was
viciously assured that she was in heart, mind, manner and appearance, an
utterly common and insipid cr