Far from looking bored or absent-minded, her eyes were concentrated almost sternly upon the page, and from her breathing, which was slow but repressed, it could be seen that her whole body was constrained by the working of her mind.  At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

“What I want to know,” she said aloud, “is this:  What is the truth?  What’s the truth of it all?” She was speaking partly as herself, and partly as the heroine of the play she had just read.  The landscape outside, because she had seen nothing but print for the space of two hours, now appeared amazingly solid and clear, but although there were men on the hill washing the trunks of olive trees with a white liquid, for the moment she herself was the most vivid thing in it—­an heroic statue in the middle of the foreground, dominating the view.  Ibsen’s plays always left her in that condition.  She acted them for days at a time, greatly to Helen’s amusement; and then it would be Meredith’s turn and she became Diana of the Crossways.  But Helen was aware that it was not all acting, and that some sort of change was taking place in the human being.  When Rachel became tired of the rigidity of her pose on the back of the chair, she turned round, slid comfortably down into it, and gazed out over the furniture through the window opposite which opened on the garden. (Her mind wandered away from Nora, but she went on thinking of things that the book suggested to her, of women and life.)

During the three months she had been here she had made up considerably, as Helen meant she should, for time spent in interminable walks round sheltered gardens, and the household gossip of her aunts.  But Mrs. Ambrose would have been the first to disclaim any influence, or indeed any belief that to influence was within her power.  She saw her less shy, and less serious, which was all to the good, and the violent leaps and the interminable mazes which had led to that result were usually not even guessed at by her.  Talk was the medicine she trusted to, talk about everything, talk that was free, unguarded, and as candid as a habit of talking with men made natural in her own case.  Nor did she encourage those habits of unselfishness and amiability founded upon insincerity which are put at so high a value in mixed households of men and women.  She desired that Rachel should think, and for this reason offered books and discouraged too entire a dependence upon Bach and Beethoven and Wagner.  But when Mrs. Ambrose would have suggested Defoe, Maupassant, or some spacious chronicle of family life, Rachel chose modern books, books in shiny yellow covers, books with a great deal of gilding on the back, which were tokens in her aunt’s eyes of harsh wrangling and disputes about facts which had no such importance as the moderns claimed for them.  But she did not interfere.  Rachel read what she chose,