without motion, presence
without mass. Slender and simple, frequently soundless, she was somehow
always in the line of the eye--she counted singularly for its pleasure.
More "dressed," often, with fewer accessories, than other women, or
less dressed, should occasion require, with more, she probably could
not have given the key to these felicities. They were mysteries of
which her friends were conscious--those friends whose general
explanation was to say that she was clever, whether or no it were taken
by the world as the cause or as the effect of her charm. If she saw
more things than her fine face in the dull glass of her father's
lodgings, she might have seen that, after all, she was not herself a
fact in the collapse. She didn't judge herself cheap, she didn't make
for misery. Personally, at least, she was not chalk-marked for the
auction. She hadn't given up yet, and the broken sentence, if she was
the last word, would end with a sort of meaning. There was a minute
during which, though her eyes were fixed, she quite visibly lost
herself in the thought of the way she might still pull things round had
she only been a man. It was the name, above all, she would take in
hand--the precious name she so liked and that, in spite of the harm her
wretched father had done it, was not yet past praying for. She loved it
in fact the more tenderly for that bleeding wound. But what could a
penniless girl do with it but let it go?

When her father at last appeared she became, as usual, instantly aware
of the futility of any effort to hold him to anything. He had written
her that he was ill, too ill to leave his room, and that he must see
her without delay; and if this had been, as was probable, the sketch of
a design, he was indifferent even to the moderate finish required for
deception. He had clearly wanted, for perversities that he called
reasons, to see her, just as she herself had sharpened for a talk; but
she now again felt, in the inevitability of the freedom he used with
her, all the old ache, her poor mother's very own, that he couldn't
touch you ever so lightly without setting up. No relation with him
could be so short or so superficial as not to be somehow to your hurt;
and this, in the strangest way in the world, not because he desired it
to be--feeling often, as he surely must, the profit for him of its not
being--but because there was never a mistake for you that he could
leave unmade or a conviction of his impossibilit