en afternoon light. Scarcely three months had elapsed since he
had parted from her on the threshold of the Brys' conservatory; but a
subtle change had passed over the quality of her beauty. Then it had had
a transparency through which the fluctuations of the spirit were
sometimes tragically visible; now its impenetrable surface suggested a
process of crystallization which had fused her whole being into one hard
brilliant substance. The change had struck Mrs. Fisher as a rejuvenation:
to Selden it seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm
fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape.

He felt it in the way she smiled on him, and in the readiness and
competence with which, flung unexpectedly into his presence, she took up
the thread of their intercourse as though that thread had not been
snapped with a violence from which he still reeled. Such facility
sickened him--but he told himself that it was with the pang which
precedes recovery. Now he would really get well--would eject the last
drop of poison from his blood. Already he felt himself calmer in her
presence than he had learned to be in the thought of her. Her assumptions
and elisions, her short-cuts and long DETOURS, the skill with which she
contrived to meet him at a point from which no inconvenient glimpses of
the past were visible, suggested what opportunities she had had for
practising such arts since their last meeting. He felt that she had at
last arrived at an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her
rebellious impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government,
under which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced
into the service of the state.

And he saw other things too in her manner: saw how it had adjusted itself
to the hidden intricacies of a situation in which, even after Mrs.
Fisher's elucidating flashes, he still felt himself agrope. Surely Mrs.
Fisher could no longer charge Miss Bart with neglecting her
opportunities! To Selden's exasperated observation she was only too
completely alive to them. She was "perfect" to every one: subservient to
Bertha's anxious predominance, good-naturedly watchful of Dorset's moods,
brightly companionable to Silverton and Dacey, the latter of whom met her
on an evident footing of old admiration, while young Silverton,
portentously self-absorbed, seemed conscious of her only as of something
vaguely obstructive. And suddenly, as Selden noted the fine shades of
ma