She smiled at him in the pale light, and he broke out nervously:  “You look as if you would drop.  What have they done to you?” Though she wore the cloak of peacock-blue over her evening gown, the pointed train wound on the floor behind her, and the fan of white ostrich plumes, which she had forgotten to leave in the car, was still in her hand.  Her face was wan and drawn; there were violet circles under her eyes; and she looked as if she had grown ten years older since the evening before.  It was the outward impression of the night, he knew.  In this house one passed back again into the power of time; youth could not be prolonged here for a single night.

“I don’t know what it means,” he said, with a mixture of exasperation and curiosity.  “I wish you would tell me what it means.”

“I feel,” she answered, in an expressionless tone, as if the insensibility of her nerves had passed into her voice, “that I have faced life for the first time.”

“Tell me what it means,” he reiterated impatiently.

Dropping into the chair from which he had risen, she drew her train aside while the doctor passed them hurriedly, with a muttered apology, and went into the house.  Then, leaning forward, with the fan clasped in her hands, and her eyes on the straight deserted street, which ended abruptly on the brow of a hill, she repeated word for word all that the dying woman had said.  The sun had not yet risen, but a faint opalescent glow suffused the sky in the east, and flushed with a delicate colour the round cobblestones in the street and the herring-bone pattern of the pavement, where blades of grass sprouted among the bricks.  Though she did not look up at Stephen’s face, she was aware while she talked of some subtle emanation of thought outside of herself, as if the struggle in his mind had overflowed mechanical processes and physical boundaries, and was escaping into the empty street and the city beyond.  And this silent struggle, so charged with intensity that it produced the effect of a cry, became for her merely a part, a single voice, in that greater struggle for victory over circumstances which went on ceaselessly day and night in the surrounding houses.  Everywhere about her there was the vague groping toward some idea of freedom, toward independence of spirit; everywhere there was this perpetual striving toward a universe that was larger.  The dwellers in this crowded house, with their vision of space and sunlight; the village with its vision of a city; the city with its vision of a country; the country with its vision of a republic of the world—­all these universal struggles were condensed now into the little space of a man’s consciousness.  To Corinna, in whose veins flowed the blood of Malvern Hill and Cold Harbor, it seemed that the greater victory must lie with those who charged from out the cover of philosophy into the mystery of the unknown.  If she had been in Stephen’s place, she knew that she should have taken the risk, that she should have flung herself into the enterprise of life as into a voyage of discovery.  Yet, at the moment, appreciating all that it meant to him, she asked herself if she had been wise to let him see the thought in her mind.  For an instant, after telling him, she hesitated, and in this instant Stephen spoke.