She experienced the same sensation, if it was a sensation, when, a half-hour later, she found herself roaming dreamily rather than restlessly about the house.  She was not anticipating her farewell of it; it had only ceased to be a background, to have a meaning; it was like the scenery, painted and set, after the play is done.  She herself had been removed elsewhere, projected into a sphere where the signs and seasons were so different from anything she had ever known as to afford no indications—­where day did not necessarily induce light, nor night darkness, nor past experience knowledge.  In the confounding of the perceptive powers and the reeling of the judgment which the new circumstances produced, she clung to her capacity to survive and dominate like a staggered man to a stanchion.

In the mean time she was not positively suffering from either shock or sorrow.  From her personal point of view the loss of money was not of itself an overpowering calamity.  It might entail the disruption of lifelong habits, but she was young enough not to be afraid of that.  In spite of a way of living that might be said to have given her the best of everything, she had always known that her father’s income was a small one for his position in the world.  As a family they had been in the habit of associating on both sides of the Atlantic, with people whose revenues were twice and thrice and ten times their own.  The obligation to keep the pace set by their equals had been recognized as a domestic hardship ever since she could remember, though it was a mitigating circumstance that in one way or another the money had always been found.  Guion, Maxwell & Guion was a well which, while often threatening to run dry, had never failed to respond to a sufficiently energetic pumping.  She had known the thought, however—­fugitive, speculatory, not dwelt upon as a real possibility—­that a day might come when it would do so no more.

It was a thought that went as quickly as it came, its only importance being that it never caused her a shudder.  If it sometimes brought matter for reflection, it was in showing her to herself in a light in which, she was tolerably sure, she never appeared to anybody else—­as the true child of the line of frugal forebears, of sea-scouring men and cheese-paring women, who, during nearly two hundred years of thrift, had put penny to penny to save the Guion competence.  Standing in the cheerful “Colonial” hall which their stinting of themselves had made it possible to build, and which was still furnished chiefly with the objects—­a settle, a pair of cupboards, a Copley portrait, a few chairs, some old decorative pottery—­they had lived with, it afforded one more steadying element for her bewilderment to grasp at, to feel herself their daughter.