of Crooked Lane, and at the same
time they formed the indictment against her which was, perhaps, best
calculated to weigh upon her conscience. She saw it, holding them at
arm's length, in enormous characters that ever stamped and blotted out
the careful, taught-looking writing, and the invariable "God bless you,
yours truly," at the end. They were all there, aridly complete, the
limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind himself
without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through which tiniest
hope could creep, to emerge smiling upon the other side. When she saw
him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten years hence attached to the
body of this petrification, she was almost disposed to abandon the pair,
to let them take their wretched chance. But this was a climax which
did not occur often; she returned, in most of her waking moments, to
devising schemes by which Laura might be delivered into the hands she
was so likely to encumber. The new French poet, the American novelist
of the year, and a work by Mr. John Morley lay upon Alicia's table
many days together for this reason. She sometimes remembered what she
expected of these volumes, what plein air sensations or what profound
plunges, and did not quite like her indifference as to whether her
expectations were fulfilled. She discovered herself intellectually
jaded--there had been tiring excursions--and took to daily rides which
carried her far out among the rice-fields, and gave her sound nights
to sustain the burden of her dreaming days. She had ideas about her
situation; she believed she lived outside of it. At all events she took
a line; the new Arab was typical, and there were other measures which
she arranged deliberately with the idea that she was making a physical
fight. Life might weigh one down with a dragging ball and chain, but one
could always measure the strength of one's pinions against these things.
She made it her sorry and remorseless task to separate from her impulses
those that she found lacking in philosophy, hinting of the foolish
woman, and to turn a cruel heel upon them. She stripped her meditations
of all colour and atmosphere; she would not accept from her grief the
luxury of a rag to wrap herself in. If this gave hers a skeleton to
live with, she had what gratification there was in observing that it was
anatomically as it should be. The result that one saw from the outside
was chiefly a look of delicate hardness, of