not;
she sang, she sent her voice through the woods and took the splendid ring
of it for an assurance of her peculiarly unshackled state. She loved this
liberty. Of the men who had 'done her the honour,' not one had moved her
to regret the refusal. She lived in the hope of simply doing good, and
could only give her hand to a man able to direct and help her; one who
would bear to be matched with her brother. Who was he? Not discoverable;
not likely to be.

Therefore she had her freedom, an absolutely unflushed freedom, happier
than poor Grace Barrow's. Rumour spoke of Emma Colesworth having a wing
clipped. How is it that sensible women can be so susceptible? For,
thought Jane, the moment a woman is what is called in love, she can give
her heart no longer to the innocent things about her; she is cut away
from Nature: that pure well-water is tasteless to her. To me it is wine!

The drinking of the pure well-water as wine is among the fatal signs of
fire in the cup, showing Nature at work rather to enchain the victim than
bid her daughter go. Jane of course meant the poet's 'Nature.' She did
not reflect that the strong glow of poetic imagination is wanted to
hallow a passionate devotion to the inanimate for this evokes the
spiritual; and passionateness of any kind in narrower brains should be a
proclamation to us of sanguine freshets not coming from a spiritual
source. But the heart betraying deluded her. She fancied she had not ever
been so wedded to Nature as on that walk through the bursting beechwoods,
that sweet lonely walk, perfect in loneliness, where even a thought of a
presence was thrust away as a desecration and images of souls in thought
were shadowy.

Her lust of freedom gave her the towering holiday. She took the delirium
in her own pure fashion, in a love of the bankside flowers and the downy
edges of the young beech-buds fresh on the sprays. And it was no unreal
love, though too intent and forcible to win the spirit from the object.
She paid for this indulgence of her mood by losing the spirit entirely.
At night she was a spent rocket. What had gone she could not tell: her
very soul she almost feared. Her glorious walk through the wood seemed
burnt out. She struck a light to try her poet on the shelf of the elect
of earth by her bed, and she read, and read flatness. Not his the fault!
She revered him too deeply to lay it on him. Whose was it? She had a
vision of the gulfs of bondage.

Could it be possib