consequent, in her fashion.
She is a creature of the apparent moods and shifts and tempers only
because she is kept in narrow confines, resembling, if you like, a wild
cat caged. Aminta's journey down to Steignton turned the course of other
fortunes besides her own; and she disdained the minor adventure it
was, while dreaming it important; and she determined eagerly on going,
without wanting to go; and it was neither from a sense of duty nor in
a spirit of contrariety that she went. Nevertheless, with her heart in
hand, her movements are traceably as rational as a soldier's before the
enemy or a trader's matching his customer.

The wish to look on Steignton had been spoken or sighed for during
long years between Aminta and her aunt, until finally shame and anger
clinched the subject. To look on Steignton for once was now Aminta's
phrasing of her sudden resolve; it appeared as a holiday relief from
recent worries, and it was an expedition with an aim, though she had but
the coldest curiosity to see the place, and felt alien to it. Yet the
thought, never to have seen Steignton! roused phantoms of dead wishes
to drive the strange engine she was, faster than the living would have
done. Her reason for haste was rationally founded on the suddenness of
her resolve, which, seeing that she could not say she desired to go,
seemed to come of an external admonition; and it counselled quick
movements, lest her inspired obedience to the prompting should as
abruptly breathe itself out. 'And in that case I shall never have seen
Steignton at all,' she said, with perfect calmness, and did not attempt
to sound her meaning.

She did know that she was a magazine of a great storage of powder. It
banked inoffensively dry. She had forgiven her lord, owning the real
nobleman he was in courtesy to women, whom his inherited ideas of them
so quaintly minimized and reduced to pretty insect or tricky reptile.
They, too, had the choice of being ultimately the one or the other in
fact; the latter most likely.

If, however, she had forgiven her lord, the shattering of their union
was the cost of forgiveness. In letting him stand high, as the lofty man
she had originally worshipped, she separated herself from him, to feel
that the humble she was of a different element, as a running water at a
mountain's base. They are one in the landscape; they are far from one in
reality. Aminta's pride of being chafed at the yoke of marriage.

Her aunt was directe