upid little idol; and absolutely now,
while she stuck a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat--she
had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom
she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't
want her--she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding
between them in consequence of which he should cut loose.

Very near indeed it looked, any such possibility! that consciousness,
too, had taken its turn by the time she was ready; all the vibration,
all the emotion of this present passage being, precisely, in the very
sweetness of their lapse back into the conditions of the simpler time,
into a queer resemblance between the aspect and the feeling of the
moment and those of numberless other moments that were sufficiently far
away. She had been quick in her preparation, in spite of the flow of the
tide that sometimes took away her breath; but a pause, once more, was
still left for her to make, a pause, at the top of the stairs, before
she came down to him, in the span of which she asked herself if it
weren't thinkable, from the perfectly practical point of view, that
she should simply sacrifice him. She didn't go into the detail of what
sacrificing him would mean--she didn't need to; so distinct was it, in
one of her restless lights, that there he was awaiting her, that she
should find him walking up and down the drawing-room in the warm,
fragrant air to which the open windows and the abundant flowers
contributed; slowly and vaguely moving there and looking very slight
and young and, superficially, manageable, almost as much like her child,
putting it a little freely, as like her parent; with the appearance
about him, above all, of having perhaps arrived just on purpose to SAY
it to her, himself, in so many words: "Sacrifice me, my own love; do
sacrifice me, do sacrifice me!" Should she want to, should she insist on
it, she might verily hear him bleating it at her, all conscious and all
accommodating, like some precious, spotless, exceptionally intelligent
lamb. The positive effect of the intensity of this figure, however,
was to make her shake it away in her resumed descent; and after she had
rejoined him, after she had picked him up, she was to know the full
pang of the thought that her impossibility was MADE, absolutely, by his
consciousness, by the lucidity of his intention: this she felt while she
smiled there for him, again, all hypocritically; while she drew