reflection, a reflection out of the heart of which a
light flashed for her like a great flower grown in a night. As soon as
this light had spread a little it produced in some quarters a surprising
distinctness, made her of a sudden ask herself why there should have
been even for three days the least obscurity. The perfection of her
success, decidedly, was like some strange shore to which she had been
noiselessly ferried and where, with a start, she found herself quaking
at the thought that the boat might have put off again and left her.
The word for it, the word that flashed the light, was that they were
TREATING her, that they were proceeding with her--and, for that matter,
with her father--by a plan that was the exact counterpart of her own.
It was not from her that they took their cue, but--and this was what
in particular made her sit up--from each other; and with a depth of
unanimity, an exact coincidence of inspiration that, when once her
attention had begun to fix it, struck her as staring out at her in
recovered identities of behaviour, expression and tone. They had a view
of her situation, and of the possible forms her own consciousness of it
might take--a view determined by the change of attitude they had had,
ever so subtly, to recognise in her on their return from Matcham. They
had had to read into this small and all-but-suppressed variation a mute
comment--on they didn't quite know what; and it now arched over the
Princess's head like a vault of bold span that important communication
between them on the subject couldn't have failed of being immediate.
This new perception bristled for her, as we have said, with odd
intimations, but questions unanswered played in and out of it as
well--the question, for instance, of why such promptitude of harmony
SHOULD have been important. Ah, when she began to recover, piece by
piece, the process became lively; she might have been picking small
shining diamonds out of the sweepings of her ordered house. She bent,
in this pursuit, over her dust-bin; she challenged to the last grain the
refuse of her innocent economy. Then it was that the dismissed vision of
Amerigo, that evening, in arrest at the door of her salottino while her
eyes, from her placed chair, took him in--then it was that this immense
little memory gave out its full power. Since the question was of doors,
she had afterwards, she now saw, shut it out; she had responsibly shut
in, as we have understood, shut in th