as it
possible that she had never really understood?

Close upon Kitty's words there came back to her the tilings that
Edith had said of him, that Horace had hinted; things that he had
confessed to her himself. Was it possible that he was still that sort
of man, the sort that she had vowed she would never marry? He was not
bad; she could not think of him as bad; but was he good? Was he like
her cousin Horace? No; certainly there was not the smallest
resemblance between him and Horace. With Horace she had always
felt--in one way--absolutely secure. If she had ever been uncertain it
had not been with this obscure inexplicable dread.

How was it that she had never felt it before? Never felt it in the
first weeks of their acquaintance, when day after day and evening
after evening she had sat working with him, here, alone? When he had
appeared to her in the first flush of his exuberant youth, transparent
as glass, incapable of reservation or disguise? It was in those days
(he had told her) that he had not been--good. And yet her own vision
of him had never been purer, her divination subtler than then. Even in
that last week, after her terrible enlightenment at Cannes, when she
was ready to suspect every man, even Horace, she had never suspected
him. And in the second period of their friendship, when his character
was ripened and full-grown, when she had lived under the same roof
with him, she had never had a misgiving or a doubt. And now there was
no end to her doubt. She could not tell which was the instinct she
should trust, or whether she were better able to judge him then or
now. What had become of her calm and lucid insight? Of the sympathy in
which they had once stood each transparent to the other.

For that was the worst of it; that he no longer understood her; and
that she had given him cause for misunderstanding (this thought was
beginning to keep her awake at night). She had made it impossible for
him to respect her any more. He had his ideas of what a woman should
and should not do, and he had been horrified at finding her so like,
and oh, so unlike other women (here Lucia's mood rose from misery to
anger). She had thought him finer, subtler than that; but he had
judged her as he judged such women. And she had brought that judgement
on herself.

In an ecstasy of shame she recalled the various episodes of their
acquaintance, from the time when she had first engaged him to work for
her (against his will), to th