All sorts of awful, impossible situations flapped like horrible bats about her as she waited. She pictured her father insulting her lover; she pictured Frank, stung by some intolerable taunt, striking him; she pictured, with dreadful vividness, a hundred things that could not possibly be. All round her hummed the myriad noises of the summer noon, and the myriad scents of the flower-garden, where still the industrious sweet-peas were prolific, mingled, and were wafted in web of fragrant smell round her. It was a day of high festival in sound and smell and light and colour, a day of a brilliance that had again and again been sufficient to make her half crazy with the pure joy of living and sight of joyous life so abundantly manifested. But this morning she was deaf and blind to the myriad-voiced noon; for in these last twenty-four hours there had come to her a happiness transcending all she had ever felt and a bitterness of sorrow, marching side by side, and inextricably mingled with it, that was as immeasurably more poignant than any she had ever known as her joy transcended all the other joys of her very happy years. Whatever might happen, life could never again be enjoyed by her with the _insouciance_ of girlhood: some finger had touched her as she smiled and dreamed in her twenty years of sleep and had awakened her. And a voice had said, “Wake; you are a woman; you shall love and suffer.” Yet, even now, while she shrank and winced under the pain, some secret fibre of her being welcomed it. She--her essential self--was the richer for it; life at last had touched her sad, bitter, imperfect, but admirable life. Like a plant, she had been moved suddenly out of the warm shelter of a green-house. Hereafter the sun might scorch her, the wind tear her, the frost wither her, the rain lash her, but she was to know what it was to be rooted in the great earth, to grow, with no shelter in between, upward towards the heavens. All this was certainly happening to her, but as yet she guessed but a small part of it. All that her reverie, when she had read Lady Sunningdale’s letter, told her was that she was acutely unhappy because her father would suffer; and in some tremulous, aërial way happy beyond all that she had ever guessed to be possible because she loved and was loved. The two feelings were inextricably intertwined; neither, as she knew them, could have existence without the other. And out of this tangled thicket of rose and thorn there emerged this new self of hers, in no selfish or egoistic mood, but very conscious, very vital, bleeding from the thorns, but breathing the inimitable odour of the roses.