In her perplexity Jenny fell once more into a kind of dream, an argumentative dream.  She went back over the earlier rows, re-living them, exaggerating unconsciously the noble unselfishness of her own acts and the pointed effectiveness of her speeches, until the scenes were transformed.  They now appeared in other hues, in other fashionings.  This is what volatile minds are able to do with all recent happenings whatsoever, re-casting them in form altogether more exquisite than the crude realities.  The chiaroscuro of their experiences is thus so constantly changing and recomposing that—­whatever the apparent result of the scene in fact—­the dreamer is in retrospect always victor, in the heroic limelight.  With Jenny this was a mood, not a preoccupation; but when she had been moved or excited beyond the ordinary she often did tend to put matters in a fresh aspect, more palatable to her self-love, and more picturesque in detail than the actual happening.  That is one of the advantages of the rapidly-working brain, that its power of improvisation is, in solitude, very constant and reassuring.  It is as though such a grain, upon this more strictly personal side, were a commonwealth of little cell-building microbes.  The chief microbe comes, like the engineer, to estimate the damage to one’s amour propre and to devise means of repair.  He then summons all his necessary workmen, who are tiny self-loves and ancient praises and habitual complacencies and the staircase words of which one thinks too late for use in the scene itself; and with their help he restores that proportion without which the human being cannot maintain his self-respect.  Jenny was like the British type as recorded in legend; being beaten, she never admitted it; but even, five minutes later, through the adroitness of her special engineer and his handymen, would be able quite seriously to demonstrate a victory to herself.

Defeat?  Never!  How Alf and Emmy shrank now before her increasing skill in argument.  How were they shattered!  How inept were their feebleness!  How splendid Jenny had been, in act, in motive, in speech, in performance!

“Er, yes!” Jenny said, beginning to ridicule her own highly coloured picture.  “Well, it was something like that!” She had too much sense of the ridiculous to maintain for long unquestioned the heroic vein as natural to her own actions.  More justly, she resumed her consideration of the scenes, pondering over them in their nakedness and their meanings, trying to see how all these stupid little feelings had burst their way from overcharged hearts, and how each word counted as part of the mosaic of misunderstanding that had been composed.