to
the drawing-room, lighted also, but empty now, and seeming to speak
the more, in its own voice, of all the possibilities she controlled.
Spacious and splendid, like a stage again awaiting a drama, it was
a scene she might people, by the press of her spring, either with
serenities and dignities and decencies, or with terrors and shames and
ruins, things as ugly as those formless fragments of her golden bowl she
was trying so hard to pick up.

She continued to walk and continued to pause; she stopped afresh for
the look into the smoking-room, and by this time--it was as if the
recognition had of itself arrested her--she saw as in a picture, with
the temptation she had fled from quite extinct, why it was she had been
able to give herself so little, from the first, to the vulgar heat of
her wrong. She might fairly, as she watched them, have missed it as a
lost thing; have yearned for it, for the straight vindictive view, the
rights of resentment, the rages of jealousy, the protests of passion,
as for something she had been cheated of not least: a range of feelings
which for many women would have meant so much, but which for HER
husband's wife, for HER father's daughter, figured nothing nearer to
experience than a wild eastern caravan, looming into view with crude
colours in the sun, fierce pipes in the air, high spears against the
sky, all a thrill, a natural joy to mingle with, but turning off short
before it reached her and plunging into other defiles. She saw at
all events why horror itself had almost failed her; the horror that,
foreshadowed in advance, would, by her thought, have made everything
that was unaccustomed in her cry out with pain; the horror of finding
evil seated, all at its ease, where she had only dreamed of good; the
horror of the thing HIDEOUSLY behind, behind so much trusted, so much
pretended, nobleness, cleverness, tenderness. It was the first sharp
falsity she had known in her life, to touch at all, or be touched by;
it had met her like some bad-faced stranger surprised in one of the
thick-carpeted corridors of a house of quiet on a Sunday afternoon; and
yet, yes, amazingly, she had been able to look at terror and disgust
only to know that she must put away from her the bitter-sweet of their
freshness. The sight, from the window, of the group so constituted, TOLD
her why, told her how, named to her, as with hard lips, named straight
AT her, so that she must take it full in the face, that other p