Chapter XIII

SHE had gone out with these last words so in her
ears that when once she was well away back this
time in the great square alone it was as if some
instant application of them had opened out there be
fore her. It was positively, this effect, an excite
ment that carried her on; she went forward into
space under the sense of an impulse received an
impulse simple and direct, easy above all to act upon.
She was borne up for the hour, and now she knew
why she had wanted to come by herself. No one
in the world could have sufficiently entered into her
state; no tie would have been close enough to enable
a companion to walk beside her without some dis
parity. She literally felt, in this first flush, that her
only company must be the human race at large,
present all round her, but inspiringly impersonal,
and that her only field must be, then and there, the
grey immensity of London. Grey immensity had
somehow of a sudden become her element; grey im
mensity was what her distinguished friend had, for
the moment, furnished her world with and what the
question of " living," as he put it to her, living by
option, by volition, inevitably took on for its im
mediate face. She went straight before her, without
weakness, altogether with strength; and still as she

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v?