Her first thought was: "He's going too in a few hours--I
needn't see him again before he leaves..." At that moment
the possibility of having to look in Darrow's face and hear
him speak seemed to her more unendurable than anything else
she could imagine. Then, on the next wave of feeling, came
the desire to confront him at once and wring from him she
knew not what: avowal, denial, justification, anything that
should open some channel of escape to the flood of her pent-
up anguish.

She had told Owen she was tired, and this seemed a
sufficient reason for remaining upstairs when the motor came
to the door and Miss Painter and Sophy Viner were borne off
in it; sufficient also for sending word to Madame de
Chantelle that she would not come down till after luncheon.
Having despatched her maid with this message, she lay down
on her sofa and stared before her into darkness...

She had been unhappy before, and the vision of old miseries
flocked like hungry ghosts about her fresh pain: she
recalled her youthful disappointment, the failure of her
marriage, the wasted years that followed; but those were
negative sorrows, denials and postponements of life. She
seemed in no way related to their shadowy victim, she who
was stretched on this fiery rack of the irreparable. She
had suffered before--yes, but lucidly, reflectively,
elegiacally: now she was suffering as a hurt animal must,
blindly, furiously, with the single fierce animal longing
that the awful pain should stop...