thoughts fixed immovably on unreality, the gleam gone, she knew not why, and yet avenged by her awful unconscious production of the kind of social life to which men were tied, compelled to simulate life in her obstinate, smiling fool’s … hell. The rest of the people in the carriage were aware, in the thick of conscious deceits; playing parts. The women, strained and defaced, all masked watchfulness, cut off from themselves, weaving romances in their efforts to get back, the men betraying their delight in their hidden opportunities of escape by the animation behind the voice and manners they assumed for the fixed calculable periods of forced association; ready to distract attention from themselves and their hidden treasures by public argument, if accident should bring it about, over anything and everything.
At least she saw. But what was the use of not being deceived? How in the vast spread of humanity expose the sham? How escape, without surrendering life itself, treacherous countenancing of the fiendish spectacle? What good would death do? What did “ Eine fur Viele ” do? Brought home the truth to one man, who probably after the first shock, soon came to the conclusion that she had been mad.
She talked through lunch to the Brooms with such an intensity of animation that when at last the confrontation was at an end and the afternoon begun in the shelter of the dim little drawing-room, she found Grace and Florrie grouped closely about her, wrapped and eager for more. She turned, at bay, explaining in shaken unmeditated words that the afternoon must be spent by her in thinking out a frightful problem, and relapsed, averted swiftly from their sensitive faces, suddenly pale about eyes that reflected her distress, towards the open door of the little greenhouse leading miserably into the stricken garden. They remained motionless in the chairs they had drawn close to the little settee where she sat enthroned, clearly prepared so to sit in silent sympathy while she gazed at her problem in the garden. She sat tense, but with their eyes upon her she could not summon directly the items of her theme. They