The clean blank windows, however, merely gave her the impression of so many showy picture-frames awaiting their subjects; even those of them open to the charming Newport day seemed to tell her at the most that nothing had happened since the evening before and that the situation was still untouched by the change she dreamt of. A person essentially unobservant of forms, which her amplitude somehow never found of the right measure, so that she felt the misfit in many cases ridiculous, she now passed round the house instead of applying at the rather grandly gaping portal--which might in all conscience have accommodated her--and, crossing a stretch of lawn to the quarter of the place turned to the sea, rested here again some minutes. She sought indeed after a moment the support of an elaborately rustic bench that ministered to ease and contemplation, whence she would rake much of the rest of the small sloping domain; the fair prospect, the great sea spaces, the line of low receding coast that bristled, either way she looked, with still more costly "places," and in particular the proprietor's wide and bedimmed verandah, this at present commonly occupied by her "prowling" father, as she now always thought of him, though if charged she would doubtless have admitted with the candour she was never able to fail of that she herself prowled during these days of tension quite as much as he. He would already have come over, she was well aware--come over on grounds of his own, which were quite different from hers; yet she was scarce the less struck, off at her point of vantage, with the way he now sat unconscious of her, at the outer edge and where the light pointed his presence, in a low basket-chair which covered him in save for little more than his small sharp shrunken profile, detached against the bright further distance, and his small protrusive foot, crossed over a knee and agitated by incessant nervous motion whenever he was thus locked in thought. Seldom had he more produced for her the appearance from which she had during the last three years never known him to vary and which would have told his story, all his story, every inch of it and with the last intensity, she felt, to a spectator capable of being struck with him as one might after all happen to be struck. What she herself recognised at any rate, and really at this particular moment as she had never done, was how his having retired from active business, as they said, given up everything and entered upon the first leisure of his life, had in the oddest way the effect but of emphasising his absorption, denying his detachment and presenting him as steeped up to the chin. Most of all on such occasions did what his life had meant come home to her, and then most, frankly, did that meaning seem small; it was exactly as the contracted size of his little huddled figure in the basket-chair.