le she had guessed. If before her then had been
flashed the vision of herself as his secret lover, how impossible she
would have thought it. Surely, having come to it, having lived in it now
for so long, she ought to be able to see how and exactly when the step
had been taken which had brought her to it, which had so altered herself
and her views as to make it possible? Yet, looking back, she could see
no such one point between the self to whom it would have been impossible
and the self to whom it was an acknowledged thing of long standing. If
life consisted of sudden steps, how easily could they be avoided, she
thought, as she went again through the bitter waters to which she had
never succeeded in growing indifferent. It was these gradual slopes....
She could not even say, "It was that moment I first knew I loved him."

She lay, her brow pressed against the pillow, and saw again the
Killigrew and the Judy of those early days at Cloom when she had been
staying with Blanche, taken down there almost unwillingly, certainly
against the wishes of her people, who had not shared her enthusiasm for
Miss Grey. She had liked Killigrew at once; his odd, whimsical, slanting
way of looking at life had appealed to the clever young girl whose
intellect had developed in front of her emotional capacities. It was her
brain that had charmed him, more than her uncertain beauty; in those
early days her personality had been so strong and her beauty still so
hidden beneath its eccentricities, which later had added to it. All the
time Ishmael had been so deeply in love with Blanche she and Killigrew
had been getting more intimate, and yet there was "nothing in it" then.

When had it begun? Surely on that long train journey up to town there had
been a new note, a feeling of something there had not been before ...
partly because Blanche had left them at Exeter to make a cross-country
connection, and she and he had had those first few hours of an enclosed
intimacy they had not had before--in the train. What a queer, stuffy
background ... hardly unromantic, though, when you thought of all trains
stood for and had seen! She had examined rather anxiously into her own
feelings that night at home, she remembered, because she knew Killigrew's
views on marriage as the most unsatisfactory and immoral of states, and
she did not wish to suffer. She was not given to self-pity, and it never
struck her that there was some pathos in that careful wish to avoid