having
traveled far, of looking back on the old familiar things from a long way
off. The richly wrought silver, the cheerful Minton, the splendidly
toned mahogany, the Goya etchings on the walls, things of no great
value, but long ago acquired, treasured, loved, had suddenly become
useless and irrelevant. She had not lost Tory Hill so much as passed
beyond it--out into a condition where nothing that preceded it could
count, and in which, so far as she was concerned, existence would have
to be a new creation, called afresh out of that which was without form
and void.

She experienced the same sensation, if it _was_ a sensation, when, a
half-hour later, she found herself roaming dreamily rather than
restlessly about the house. She was not anticipating her farewell of it;
it had only ceased to be a background, to have a meaning; it was like
the scenery, painted and set, after the play is done. She herself had
been removed elsewhere, projected into a sphere where the signs and
seasons were so different from anything she had ever known as to afford
no indications--where day did not necessarily induce light, nor night
darkness, nor past experience knowledge. In the confounding of the
perceptive powers and the reeling of the judgment which the new
circumstances produced, she clung to her capacity to survive and
dominate like a staggered man to a stanchion.

In the mean time she was not positively suffering from either shock or
sorrow. From her personal point of view the loss of money was not of
itself an overpowering calamity. It might entail the disruption of
lifelong habits, but she was young enough not to be afraid of that. In
spite of a way of living that might be said to have given her the best
of everything, she had always known that her father's income was a small
one for his position in the world. As a family they had been in the
habit of associating on both sides of the Atlantic, with people whose
revenues were twice and thrice and ten times their own. The obligation
to keep the pace set by their equals had been recognized as a domestic
hardship ever since she could remember, though it was a mitigating
circumstance that in one way or another the money had always been found.
Guion, Maxwell & Guion was a well which, while often threatening to run
dry, had never failed to respond to a sufficiently energetic pumping.
She had known the thought, however--fugitive, speculatory, not dwelt
upon as a real possibility--that a