ther for her or for themselves; and the amount
of enjoyed, or at least achieved, security represented by so complete a
conquest of appearances was what acted on her nerves, precisely, with
a kind of provocative force. She found herself, for five minutes,
thrilling with the idea of the prodigious effect that, just as she sat
there near them, she had at her command; with the sense that if she were
but different--oh, ever so different!--all this high decorum would hang
by a hair. There reigned for her, absolutely, during these vertiginous
moments, that fascination of the monstrous, that temptation of the
horribly possible, which we so often trace by its breaking out suddenly,
lest it should go further, in unexplained retreats and reactions.

After it had been thus vividly before her for a little that, springing
up under her wrong and making them all start, stare and turn pale, she
might sound out their doom in a single sentence, a sentence easy to
choose among several of the lurid--after she had faced that blinding
light and felt it turn to blackness, she rose from her place, laying
aside her magazine, and moved slowly round the room, passing near the
card-players and pausing an instant behind the chairs in turn. Silent
and discreet, she bent a vague mild face upon them, as if to signify
that, little as she followed their doings, she wished them well; and
she took from each, across the table, in the common solemnity, an upward
recognition which she was to carry away with her on her moving out
to the terrace, a few minutes later. Her father and her husband, Mrs.
Assingham and Charlotte, had done nothing but meet her eyes; yet the
difference in these demonstrations made each a separate passage--which
was all the more wonderful since, with the secret behind every face,
they had alike tried to look at her THROUGH it and in denial of it.

It all left her, as she wandered off, with the strangest of
impressions--the sense, forced upon her as never yet, of an appeal, a
positive confidence, from the four pairs of eyes, that was deeper than
any negation, and that seemed to speak, on the part of each, of some
relation to be contrived by her, a relation with herself, which would
spare the individual the danger, the actual present strain, of the
relation with the others. They thus tacitly put it upon her to be
disposed of, the whole complexity of their peril, and she promptly saw
why because she was there, and there just as she was, to