living which embraced the filial attitude among others
less explicable. It gave her pleasure to do certain things
in certain ways. She stood and sat and spoke, and even
thought, at times, with a subtle approval and enjoyment
of her manner of doing it. It was not actual artistic
achievement, but it was the sort of thing that entered
her imagination, as such achievement's natural corollary.
Her self-consciousness was a supreme fact of her
personality; it began earlier than any date she could
remember, and it was a channel of the most unfailing and
intense satisfaction to her from many sources. One was
her beauty, for she had developed an elusive beauty that
served her moods. When she was dull she called herself
ugly--unfairly, though her face lost tremendously in
value then--and her general dislike of dullness and
ugliness became particular and acute in connection with
herself. It is not too much to say that she took a keen
enjoying pleasure in the flush upon her own cheek and
the light in her own eyes no less than in the inward
sparkle that provoked it--an honest delight, she would
not have minded confessing it. Her height, her symmetry,
her perfect abounding health were separate joys to her;
she found absorbing and critical interest in the very
figment of her being. It was entirely preposterous that
a young woman should kneel at an attic window in a flood
of spring moonlight, with, her hair about the shoulders
of her nightgown, repeating Rossetti to the wakeful
budding garden, especially as it was for herself she did
it--nobody else saw her. She knelt there partly because
of a vague desire to taste the essence of the spring and