isions passed through it, and sudden dull gleams of
memory, of expectation. The past and the future came and went at their
will, but she saw them only in fitful images, which rose and fell by a
logic of their own. It was extraordinary the things she remembered. Now
that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much
concerned her and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt
to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things,
their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their
horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness. She
remembered a thousand trifles; they started to life with the spontaneity
of a shiver. She had thought them trifles at the time; now she saw that
they had been weighted with lead. Yet even now they were trifles after
all, for of what use was it to her to understand them? Nothing seemed of
use to her to-day. All purpose, all intention, was suspended; all
desire too save the single desire to reach her much-embracing refuge.
Gardencourt had been her starting-point, and to those muffled chambers
it was at least a temporary solution to return. She had gone forth in
her strength; she would come back in her weakness, and if the place had
been a rest to her before, it would be a sanctuary now. She envied Ralph
his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect
of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything
more--this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble
tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.

She had moments indeed in her journey from Rome which were almost as
good as being dead. She sat in her corner, so motionless, so passive,
simply with the sense of being carried, so detached from hope and
regret, that she recalled to herself one of those Etruscan figures
couched upon the receptacle of their ashes. There was nothing to regret
now--that was all over. Not only the time of her folly, but the time of
her repentance was far. The only thing to regret was that Madame Merle
had been so--well, so unimaginable. Just here her intelligence dropped,
from literal inability to say what it was that Madame Merle had been.
Whatever it was it was for Madame Merle herself to regret it; and
doubtless she would do so in America, where she had announced she was
going. It concerned Isabel no more; she only had an impression that she
should never again see Madame Merle. This impression ca