provocation. "What are you screaming for, you little fool?" she said
advancing alone close to the girl who was affected exactly as if she had
seen Medusa's head with serpentine locks set mysteriously on the
shoulders of that familiar person, in that brown dress, under that hat
she knew so well. It made her lose all her hold on reality. She told
Mrs. Fyne: "I didn't know where I was. I didn't even know that I was
frightened. If she had told me it was a joke I would have laughed. If
she had told me to put on my hat and go out with her I would have gone to
put on my hat and gone out with her and never said a single word; I
should have been convinced I had been mad for a minute or so, and I would
have worried myself to death rather than breathe a hint of it to her or
anyone. But the wretch put her face close to mine and I could not move.
Directly I had looked into her eyes I felt grown on to the carpet."

It was years afterwards that she used to talk like this to Mrs. Fyne--and
to Mrs. Fyne alone. Nobody else ever heard the story from her lips. But
it was never forgotten. It was always felt; it remained like a mark on
her soul, a sort of mystic wound, to be contemplated, to be meditated
over. And she said further to Mrs. Fyne, in the course of many
confidences provoked by that contemplation, that, as long as that woman
called her names, it was almost soothing, it was in a manner reassuring.
Her imagination had, like her body, gone off in a wild bound to meet the
unknown; and then to hear after all something which more in its tone than
in its substance was mere venomous abuse, had steadied the inward flutter
of all her being.

"She called me a little fool more times than I can remember. I! A fool!
Why, Mrs. Fyne! I do assure you I had never yet thought at all; never of
anything in the world, till then. I just went on living. And one can't
be a fool without one has at least tried to think. But what had I ever