had been between them an intimacy of
relation as great as it can possibly be without the final closeness of
affection. The delightful Charley walked in, with his eyes fixed on the
back of her governess whose raised veil hid her forehead like a brown
band above the black line of the eyebrows. The girl was astounded and
alarmed by the altogether unknown expression in the woman's face. The
stress of passion often discloses an aspect of the personality completely
ignored till then by its closest intimates. There was something like an
emanation of evil from her eyes and from the face of the other, who,
exactly behind her and overtopping her by half a head, kept his eyelids
lowered in a sinister fashion--which in the poor girl, reached, stirred,
set free that faculty of unreasoning explosive terror lying locked up at
the bottom of all human hearts and of the hearts of animals as well. With
suddenly enlarged pupils and a movement as instinctive almost as the
bounding of a startled fawn, she jumped up and found herself in the
middle of the big room, exclaiming at those amazing and familiar
strangers.

"What do you want?"

You will note that she cried: What do you want? Not: What has happened?
She told Mrs. Fyne that she had received suddenly the feeling of being
personally attacked. And that must have been very terrifying. The woman
before her had been the wisdom, the authority, the protection of life,
security embodied and visible and undisputed.

You may imagine then the force of the shock in the intuitive perception
not merely of danger, for she did not know what was alarming her, but in
the sense of the security being gone. And not only security. I don't
know how to explain it clearly. Look! Even a small child lives, plays
and suffers in terms of its conception of its own existence. Imagine, if
you can, a fact coming in suddenly with a force capable of shattering
that very conception itself. It was only because of the girl being still
so much of a child that she escaped mental destruction; that, in other
words she got over it. Could one conceive of her more mature, while
still as ignorant as she was, one must conclude that she would have
become an idiot on the spot--long before the end of that experience.
Luckily, people, whether mature or not mature (and who really is ever
mature?) are for the most part quite incapable of understanding what is
happening to them: a merciful provision of nature to preserve