She ran her hand with a singular clawing motion upwards over her
forehead. Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was
exactly that of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing
horrors there. And then suddenly she stopped. She was, most
amazingly, just Mrs Ashburnham again. Her face was perfectly
clear, sharp and defined; her hair was glorious in its golden coils.
Her nostrils twitched with a sort of contempt. She appeared to look
with interest at a gypsy caravan that was coming over a little
bridge far below us.

"Don't you know," she said, in her clear hard voice, "don't you
know that I'm an Irish Catholic?"

V THOSE words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had in
my life. They told me, I think, almost more than I have ever
gathered at any one moment--about myself. I don't think that
before that day I had ever wanted anything very much except
Florence. I have, of course, had appetites, impatiences . . . Why,
sometimes at a table d'hôte, when there would be, say, caviare
handed round, I have been absolutely full of impatience for fear
that when the dish came to me there should not be a satisfying
portion left over by the other guests. I have been exceedingly
impatient at missing trains. The Belgian State Railway has a trick
of letting the French trains miss their connections at Brussels.
That has always infuriated me. I have written about it letters to
The Times that The Times never printed; those that I wrote to the
Paris edition of the New York Herald were always printed, but
they never seemed to satisfy me when I saw them. Well, that was
a sort of frenzy with me.