analysing hers. In these moods she found it
impossible to read or play the piano, even to move being beyond her
inclination. The time passed without her noticing it. When it was dark
she was drawn to the window by the lights of the hotel. A light that
went in and out was the light in Terence's window: there he sat, reading
perhaps, or now he was walking up and down pulling out one book after
another; and now he was seated in his chair again, and she tried to
imagine what he was thinking about. The steady lights marked the rooms
where Terence sat with people moving round him. Every one who stayed in
the hotel had a peculiar romance and interest about them. They were not
ordinary people. She would attribute wisdom to Mrs. Elliot, beauty to
Susan Warrington, a splendid vitality to Evelyn M., because Terence
spoke to them. As unreflecting and pervasive were the moods of
depression. Her mind was as the landscape outside when dark beneath
clouds and straitly lashed by wind and hail. Again she would sit passive
in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen's fantastical or gloomy words
were like so many darts goading her to cry out against the hardness of
life. Best of all were the moods when for no reason again this stress of
feeling slackened, and life went on as usual, only with a joy and colour
in its events that was unknown before; they had a significance like that
which she had seen in the tree: the nights were black bars separating
her from the days; she would have liked to run all the days into one
long continuity of sensation. Although these moods were directly or
indirectly caused by the presence of Terence or the thought of him, she
never said to herself that she was in love with him, or considered what
was to happen if she continued to feel such things, so that Helen's
image of the river sliding on to the waterfall had a great likeness to
the facts, and the alarm which Helen sometimes felt was justified.

In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was incapable of
making a plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind. She
abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day,
meeting him the next, receiving his letters always with a start of
surprise. Any woman experienced in the progress of courtship would have
come by certain opinions from all this which would have given her at
least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever been in love with Rachel,
and she had never been in love wi