essential part of herself had gone. It had not been so when her father
died; what he had absorbed was given back to her, transferred to her
mother. All her memories of her mother were joined to the memory of this
now irrecoverable self.

She tried to reinstate herself through grief; she sheltered behind her
bereavement, affecting a more profound seclusion, abhorring strangers; she
was more than ever the reserved, fastidious daughter of Hilton Frean. She
had always thought of herself as different from Connie and Sarah, living
with a superior, intellectual life. She turned to the books she had read
with her mother, Dante, Browning, Carlyle, and Ruskin, the biographies of
Great Men, trying to retrace the footsteps of her lost self, to revive the
forgotten thrill. But it was no use. One day she found herself reading the
Dedication of _The Ring and the Book_ over and over again, without
taking in its meaning, without any remembrance of its poignant secret.
"'And all a wonder and a wild desire'--Mamma loved that." She thought she
loved it too; but what she loved was the dark-green book she had seen in
her mother's long, white hands, and the sound of her mother's voice
reading. She had followed her mother's mind with strained attention and
anxiety, smiling when she smiled, but with no delight and no admiration of
her own.

If only she could have remembered. It was only through memory that she
could reinstate herself.

She had a horror of the empty house. Her friends advised her to leave it,
but she had a horror of removal, of change. She loved the rooms that had
held her mother, the chair she had sat on, the white, fluted cup she had
drunk from in her illness. She clung to the image of her mother; and
always beside it, shadowy and pathetic, she discerned the image of her