Then I am attached forever to the spacious gentle surroundings in which I was born? Always watching and listening and feeling for them to emerge? My social happiness dependent upon the presence of some suggestion of its remembered features, my secret social ambition its perfected form in circumstances beyond my reach?... No. There was something within her that could not tolerate either the people or the thoughts existing within that exclusive world. In the silences that flowed about its manifold unvarying expressions, she would always find herself ranging off into lively consciousness of other ways of living, whose smiling mystery defied its complacent patronage.... It drew only her nature, the ease and beauty loving soul of her physical being, and that only in critical contemplation. She would never desire to bestir herself to achieve stateliness. So that the faraway moment of being driven forth seemed to bear two meanings. It was life's stupid error, a cruel blind destruction of her helpless youth. At this moment if it were possible she would reverse it and return. During all these years she had been standing motionless, fixed tearfully in the attitude of return. The joy she had found in her invisible life amongst the servants was the joy of remaining girt and ready for the flight of return, her original nature stored up and hidden behind the adopted manner of her bondage. Or it was life's wisdom, the swift movement of her lucky star, providence pouncing. And providence, having seized her indolent blissful protesting form and flung it forth with a laugh, had continued to pamper her with a sense of happiness that bubbled unexpectedly out in the midst of her utmost attempts to achieve misery by a process of reason. It is my strange bungling in misery that makes everyone seem far off. A perpetual oblivion not only of my own circumstances, but, at the wrong moments, of those of other people, makes me disappoint and shock them, suddenly disappearing before their eyes in the midst of a sympathy that they had eagerly seemed to find satisfying and rare.... A light frivolous elastic temperament? A helpless going to and fro between two temperaments. A solid charwomanly commonplace kindliness, spread like a doormat at the disposal of everybody, and an intermittent perfect dilettantism that would disgust even the devil?