ad really talked thus, or whether she had dreamed their talk.
To her dying day she was never sure, for Pa certainly added nothing to
the conversation thereafter. Was it real? Or had her too excited brain
played her a trick? Jenny pinched herself. It was like a fairy tale, in
which cats talk and little birds humanly sing, or the tiniest of fairies
appear from behind clocks or from within flower-pots. She looked at Pa
with fresh awe. There was no knowing where you had him! He had the
interest, for her, of one returned by miracle from other regions,
gifted with preposterous knowledges.... He became at this instant
fabulous, like Rip Van Winkle, or the Sleeping Beauty ... or the White
Cat....

In her perplexity Jenny fell once more into a kind of dream, an
argumentative dream. She went back over the earlier rows, re-living
them, exaggerating unconsciously the noble unselfishness of her own acts
and the pointed effectiveness of her speeches, until the scenes were
transformed. They now appeared in other hues, in other fashionings. This
is what volatile minds are able to do with all recent happenings
whatsoever, re-casting them in form altogether more exquisite than the
crude realities. The chiaroscuro of their experiences is thus so
constantly changing and recomposing that--whatever the apparent result
of the scene in fact--the dreamer is in retrospect always victor, in the
heroic limelight. With Jenny this was a mood, not a preoccupation; but
when she had been moved or excited beyond the ordinary she often did
tend to put matters in a fresh aspect, more palatable to her self-love,
and more picturesque in detail than the actual happening. That is one of
the advantages of the rapidly-working brain, that its power of
improvisation is, in solitude, very constant and reassuring. It is as
though such a grain, upon this more strictly personal side, were a
commonwealth of little cell-building microbes. The chief microbe comes,
like the engineer, to estimate the damage to one's _amour propre_ and to
devise means of repair. He then summons all his necessary workmen, who
are tiny self-loves and ancient praises and habitual complacencies and
the staircase words of which one thinks too late for use in the scene
itself; and with their help he restores that proportion without which
the human being cannot maintain his self-respect. Jenny was like the
British type as recorded in legend; being beaten, she never admitted it;
but even, five min