al of gilding on the back,
which were tokens in her aunt's eyes of harsh wrangling and disputes
about facts which had no such importance as the moderns claimed for
them. But she did not interfere. Rachel read what she chose, reading
with the curious literalness of one to whom written sentences are
unfamiliar, and handling words as though they were made of wood,
separately of great importance, and possessed of shapes like tables or
chairs. In this way she came to conclusions, which had to be remodelled
according to the adventures of the day, and were indeed recast as
liberally as any one could desire, leaving always a small grain of
belief behind them.

Ibsen was succeeded by a novel such as Mrs. Ambrose detested, whose
purpose was to distribute the guilt of a woman's downfall upon the right
shoulders; a purpose which was achieved, if the reader's discomfort
were any proof of it. She threw the book down, looked out of the window,
turned away from the window, and relapsed into an arm-chair.

The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind
contracting and expanding like the main-spring of a clock, and the
small noises of midday, which one can ascribe to no definite cause, in
a regular rhythm. It was all very real, very big, very impersonal, and
after a moment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let
it fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some
consciousness of her own existence. She was next overcome by the
unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an
arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world. Who were the
people moving in the house--moving things from one place to another? And
life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and
vanishing, as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the
room would remain. Her dissolution became so complete that she could
not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and
looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. She
was overcome with awe that things should exist at all. . . . She forgot
that she had any fingers to raise. . . . The things that existed were
so immense and so desolate. . . . She continued to be conscious of these
vast masses of substance for a long stretch of time, the clock still
ticking in the midst of the universal silence.

"Come in," she said mechanically, for a string in her brain seemed to
be pulled by a persisten