re gilded cage and an extra
allowance of lumps of sugar. Above all she hadn't complained, not by the
quaver of a syllable--so what wound in particular had she shown her fear
of receiving? What wound HAD she received--as to which she had exchanged
the least word with them? If she had ever whined or moped they might
have had some reason; but she would be hanged--she conversed with
herself in strong language--if she had been, from beginning to end,
anything but pliable and mild. It all came back, in consequence, to some
required process of their own, a process operating, quite positively,
as a precaution and a policy. They had got her into the bath and, for
consistency with themselves--which was with each other--must keep her
there. In that condition she wouldn't interfere with the policy, which
was established, which was arranged. Her thought, over this, arrived at
a great intensity--had indeed its pauses and timidities, but always to
take afterwards a further and lighter spring. The ground was well-nigh
covered by the time she had made out her husband and his colleague as
directly interested in preventing her freedom of movement. Policy or no
policy, it was they themselves who were arranged. She must be kept in
position so as not to DISarrange them. It fitted immensely together, the
whole thing, as soon as she could give them a motive; for, strangely
as it had by this time begun to appear to herself, she had hitherto not
imagined them sustained by an ideal distinguishably different from her
own. Of course they were arranged--all four arranged; but what had
the basis of their life been, precisely, but that they were arranged
together? Amerigo and Charlotte were arranged together, but she--to
confine the matter only to herself--was arranged apart. It rushed over
her, the full sense of all this, with quite another rush from that of
the breaking wave of ten days before; and as her father himself seemed
not to meet the vaguely-clutching hand with which, during the first
shock of complete perception, she tried to steady herself, she felt very
much alone.

XXVII

There had been, from far back--that is from the Christmas time on--a
plan that the parent and the child should "do something lovely"
together, and they had recurred to it on occasion, nursed it and brought
it up theoretically, though without as yet quite allowing it to put its
feet to the ground. The most it had done was to try a few ste