accumulations of the unanswered. They were THERE, these
accumulations; they were like a roomful of confused objects, never
as yet "sorted," which for some time now she had been passing and
re-passing, along the corridor of her life. She passed it when she could
without opening the door; then, on occasion, she turned the key to throw
in a fresh contribution. So it was that she had been getting things out
of the way. They rejoined the rest of the confusion; it was as if they
found their place, by some instinct of affinity, in the heap. They knew,
in short, where to go; and when she, at present, by a mental act, once
more pushed the door open, she had practically a sense of method and
experience. What she should never know about Charlotte's thought--she
tossed THAT in. It would find itself in company, and she might at last
have been standing there long enough to see it fall into its corner. The
sight moreover would doubtless have made her stare, had her attention
been more free--the sight of the mass of vain things, congruous,
incongruous, that awaited every addition. It made her in fact, with
a vague gasp, turn away, and what had further determined this was the
final sharp extinction of the inward scene by the outward. The quite
different door had opened and her husband was there.

It had been as strange as she could consent, afterwards, to think it; it
had been, essentially, what had made the abrupt bend in her life: he
had come back, had followed her from the other house, VISIBLY
uncertain--this was written in the face he for the first minute showed
her. It had been written only for those seconds, and it had appeared to
go, quickly, after they began to talk; but while it lasted it had been
written large, and, though she didn't quite know what she had expected
of him, she felt she hadn't expected the least shade of embarrassment.
What had made the embarrassment--she called it embarrassment so as to be
able to assure herself she put it at the very worst--what had made
the particular look was his thus distinguishably wishing to see how he
should find her. Why FIRST--that had, later on, kept coming to her; the
question dangled there as if it were the key to everything. With the
sense of it on the spot, she had felt, overwhelmingly, that she was
significant, that so she must instantly strike him, and that this had
a kind of violence beyond what she had intended. It was in fact even at
the moment not absent from her view that