There were impulses of various kinds, alternately soft and severe, to
which she was constitutionally accessible and which were determined by
the smallest accidents. She was rigid in general on the article of
making the public itself affix its stamps, and found a special enjoyment
in dealing to that end with some of the ladies who were too grand to
touch them. She had thus a play of refinement and subtlety greater, she
flattered herself, than any of which she could be made the subject; and
though most people were too stupid to be conscious of this it brought her
endless small consolations and revenges. She recognised quite as much
those of her sex whom she would have liked to help, to warn, to rescue,
to see more of; and that alternative as well operated exactly through the
hazard of personal sympathy, her vision for silver threads and moonbeams
and her gift for keeping the clues and finding her way in the tangle. The
moonbeams and silver threads presented at moments all the vision of what
poor _she_ might have made of happiness. Blurred and blank as the whole
thing often inevitably, or mercifully, became, she could still, through
crevices and crannies, be stupefied, especially by what, in spite of all
seasoning, touched the sorest place in her consciousness, the revelation
of the golden shower flying about without a gleam of gold for herself. It
remained prodigious to the end, the money her fine friends were able to
spend to get still more, or even to complain to fine friends of their own
that they were in want. The pleasures they proposed were equalled only
by those they declined, and they made their appointments often so
expensively that she was left wondering at the nature of the delights to
which the mere approaches were so paved with shillings. She quivered on
occasion into the perception of this and that one whom she would on the
chance have just simply liked to _be_. Her conceit, her baffled vanity,
was possibly monstrous; she certainly often threw herself into a defiant
conviction that she would have done the whole thing much better. But her
greatest comfort, mostly, was her comparative vision of the men; by whom