at Lord Mark's effect on her. If she could guess
this effect what then did she know about it and in
what degree had she felt it herself? Did that repre
sent, as between them, anything particular, and
should she have to count with them as duplicating,
as intensifying by a mutual intelligence, the relation
into which she was sinking? Nothing was so odd
as that she should have to recognise so quickly in
each of these glimpses of an instant the various signs
of a relation; and this anomaly itself, had she had
more time to give to it, might well, might almost ter
ribly have suggested to her that her doom was to live
fast. It was queerly a question of the short run and
the consciousness proportionately crowded.

These were immense excursions for the spirit of
a young person at Mrs. Lowder's mere dinner-party;
but what was so significant and so admonitory as the
fact of their being possible? What could they have
been but just a part, already, of the crowded con
sciousness? And it was just a part, likewise, that
while plates were changed and dishes presented and
periods in the banquet marked; while appear
ances insisted and phenomena multiplied and words
reached her from here and there like plashes of a
slow, thick tide; while Mrs. Lowder grew somehow
more stout and more instituted and Susie, at her
distance and in comparison, more thinly improvised
and more different different, that is, from every
one and everything: it was just a part that while
this process went forward our young lady alighted,

[[177]]

p176 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p177w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p178

v?