I'll do exquisite penance, which
you can help me now, I too beautifully feel, to get completely over."

That was what, while she watched herself, she potentially heard him
bring out; and while she carried to an end another day, another sequence
and yet another of their hours together, without his producing it, she
felt herself occupied with him beyond even the intensity of surrender.
She was keeping her head, for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of
this detachment, with the labour of her keeping the pitch of it down,
held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which
artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her greatest
danger, or at least her greatest motive for care, was the obsession of
the thought that, if he actually did suspect, the fruit of his attention
to her couldn't help being a sense of the growth of her importance.
Taking the measure, with him, as she had taken it with her father, of
the prescribed reach of her hypocrisy, she saw how it would have to
stretch even to her seeking to prove that she was NOT, all the same,
important. A single touch from him--oh, she should know it in case of
its coming!--any brush of his hand, of his lips, of his voice, inspired
by recognition of her probable interest as distinct from pity for her
virtual gloom, would hand her over to him bound hand and foot. Therefore
to be free, to be free to act, other than abjectly, for her father,
she must conceal from him the validity that, like a microscopic insect
pushing a grain of sand, she was taking on even for herself. She could
keep it up with a change in sight, but she couldn't keep it up forever;
so that, really, one extraordinary effect of their week of untempered
confrontation, which bristled with new marks, was to make her reach
out, in thought, to their customary companions and calculate the kind
of relief that rejoining them would bring. She was learning, almost from
minute to minute, to be a mistress of shades since, always, when there
were possibilities enough of intimacy, there were also, by that fact, in
intercourse, possibilities of iridescence; but she was working against
an adversary who was a master of shades too, and on whom, if she didn't
look out, she should presently have imposed a consciousness of the
nature of their struggle. To feel him in fact, to think of his feeling
himself, her adversary in things of this fineness--to see him at all,
in short, brave a name that wo