Ah when she began to recover piece by piece the process became lively; she might have been picking small shining diamonds out of the sweepings of her ordered house. She bent, in this pursuit, over her dust-bin; she challenged to the last grain the refuse of her innocent economy. Then it was that the dismissed vision of Amerigo that evening in arrest at the door of her while her eyes, from her placed chair, took him in--then it was that this immense little memory gave out its full power. Since the question was of doors she had afterwards, she now saw, shut it out; she had responsibly shut in, as we have understood, shut in there with her sentient self, only the fact of his reappearance and the plenitude of his presence. These things had been testimony after all to supersede any other, for on the spot, even while she looked, (43) the warmly-washing wave had travelled far up the strand. She had subsequently lived for hours she could n't count under the dizzying smothering welter--positively in submarine depths where everything came to her through walls of emerald and mother-of-pearl; though indeed she had got her head above them, for breath, when face to face with Charlotte again on the morrow in Eaton Square. Meanwhile, none the less, as was so apparent, the prior, the prime impression had remained, in the manner of a spying servant, on the other side of the barred threshold; a witness availing himself in time of the lightest pretext to re-enter.
It was as if he had found this pretext in her observed necessity of comparing--comparing the obvious common elements in her husband's and her stepmother's ways of now "taking" her. With or without her witness, at any rate, she was led by comparison to a sense of the quantity of earnest intention operating, and operating so harmoniously, between her companions; and it was in the mitigated midnight of these approximations that she had discerned the promise of her dawn.
It was a worked-out scheme for their not wounding her, for their behaving to her quite nobly; to which each had in some winning way induced the other to contribute, and which therefore, so far as that went, proved she had become with them a subject of intimate study. Quickly, quickly, on a certain alarm taken, eagerly and anxiously, before they SHOULD, without knowing it, wound her, they had signalled from house to house their clever idea, the idea by which for all these days her own idea had been profiting. They (44) had built her in with their purpose--which was why, above her, a vault seemed more heavily to arch; so that she sat there in the solid chamber of her helplessness as in a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her, over the brim of which she could but just manage to see by stretching her neck. Baths of benevolence were very well, but at least, unless one were a patient of some sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child, one usually was n't so immersed save by one's request. It was n't in the least what SHE had requested. She had flapped her little wings as a symbol of desired flight, not merely as a plea for a more gilded cage and an extra allowance of lumps of sugar. Above all she had n't complained, not by the quaver of a syllable--so what wound in particular had she shown her fear of receiving?
What wound HAD she received--as to which she had exchanged the least word with them? If she had ever whined or moped they might have had some reason; but she would be hanged--she conversed with herself in strong language--if she had been from beginning to end anything but pliable and mild. It all came back in consequence to some required process of their own, a process operating quite positively as a precaution and a policy. They had got her into the bath and, for consistency with themselves--which was with each other--must keep her there. In that condition she would n't interfere with the policy, which was established, which was arranged. Her thought over this arrived at a great intensity--had indeed its pauses and timidities, but always to take afterwards a further and lighter spring. The ground was well-nigh (45) covered by the time she had made out her husband and his colleague as directly interested in preventing her freedom of movement.
Policy or no policy, it was they themselves who were arranged. She must be kept in a position so as not to DISarrange them. It fitted immensely together, the whole thing, as soon as she could give them a motive; for, strangely as it had by this time begun to appear to herself, she had n't hitherto imagined them sustained by an ideal distinguishably different from her own. Of course they were arranged--all four arranged; but what had the basis of their life been precisely but that they were arranged together? Ah! Amerigo and Charlotte were arranged together, but she--to confine the matter only to herself--was arranged apart. It rushed over her, the full sense of all this, with quite another rush from that of the breaking wave of ten days before; and as her father himself seemed not to meet the vaguely-clutching hand with which, during the first shock of complete perception, she tried to steady herself, so she felt very much alone.
