, something that
happened to you or me, or might have happened, if our circumstances had
been different; only the mood of desolate self-consciousness in which
the soul slowly contemplates the disaster of existence. The melancholy
that the music exhales is no querulous feminine plaint, but an
immemorial melancholy, an exalted resignation. The music goes out like a
fume, dying in remote chords, and Evelyn sat absorbed, viewing the world
from afar, like the Lady of Shallott, seeing in the mirror of memory the
chestnut trees of the Dulwich street, and a little girl running after
her hoop; and then her mother's singing classes, and the expectation she
had lived in of learning to sing, and being brought upon the stage by
her mother. If her mother had lived, she would have been singing "Romeo
and Juliet" and "Lucia." ... Her father would have deemed her voice
wasted; but mother always had had her way with father. Then she saw
herself pining for Owen, sick of love, longing, hungry, weak, weary,
disappointed, hopeless. Her thoughts turned from that past, and her
mother's face looked out of her reverie, grey and grave and watchful,
only half seen in the shadows. She seemed aware of her mother as she
might be of some idea, strangely personal to herself, something near and
remote, beyond this span of life, stretching into infinity. She seemed
to feel herself lifted a little above the verge of life, so that she
might inquire the truth from her mother; but something seemed to hold
her back, and she did not dare to hear the supernatural truth. She was
still too thrall to this life of lies, but she could not but see her
mother's face, and what surprised her was that this grey shadow was more
real to her than the rest of the world. The face did not stir, it
always wore the same expression. Evelyn could not even tell if the
expression of the dim eyes was one of disapproval. But it needs must
be--she could have no doubt on that point. What was certain and sure was
that she seemed in a nearer and more intimate, in a more essential
communication with her mother, than with her father who was alive.
Nothing seemed to divide her from her mother; she had only to let her
soul go, and it could mingle with her mother's spirit, and then all
misunderstandings would be at an end.

She was tempted to free herself from this fettering life, where all is
limitation and division. Its individualism appeared to her particularly
clear when she thought of Owe