So she was shaken and distressed by the fine face, which looked discontented with thinking as another face might look flushed with drinking, and by the powerful yet inert body which lay in the great armchair limply but uneasily, as if she desired to ask a question but was restrained by a belief that nobody could answer, but for lack of that answer was unable to commit herself to any action.  Her expression was not, as Ellen had at first thought, blank.  Nor was it trivial, though she still sometimes raised those hands with the flashing nails and smoothed her eyebrows.  It showed plainly enough that doubt was wandering from chamber to chamber of her being, blowing out such candles of certitude as the hopefulness natural to all human beings had enabled her to light.  The fact of Richard streamed in like sunshine through the windows of her soul, and when she spoke of him she was evidently utterly happy; but there were some parts of her life with which he had nothing to do, as there are north rooms in a house which the sun cannot touch, and these the breath of doubt left to utter darkness.  “You’re imagining all this, Ellen,” she said to herself; “how can you possibly know all this about her?” “It’s true,” herself answered.  “Well, it’s not true in the sense that it’s true that she’s dark and her name’s Mrs. Yaverland, is it?” “Ellen, have you nothing of an artist in you?” herself enquired with pain.  “You might be a business body, or one of the mistresses in John Square, the crude way you’re talking.  It’s not a fact that ye can look up in a directory.  But it’s perfectly true that this woman’s queer and warselled and unhappy.  But you’re losing your head terribly on your first encounter with tragedy, and you fancying yourself a cut above the ordinary because you enjoyed a good read of ‘King Lear’ and ‘Macbeth.’” “Well, I never said I wanted to take rooms with Lady Macbeth,” she objected.

But Marion was asking her now if she liked this room, or if she found it, as many people did, more like a lighthouse than a home, and because she spoke with passionate concern lest the girl should not be at ease in the place where she was to spend her future life, Ellen immediately answered with a kind of secondary sincerity that she liked it very much.  Yet the room was convincing her of something she was too young and too poor ever to have proved before, and that was the possibility of excess.  All her delights had been so sparse and in character so simple that no cloying of after-taste had ever changed them from being finally and unquestionably delights; they stood like a knot of poplars on the edge of a large garden whose close resemblance to golden flame could be enjoyed quite without dubiety because there was no fear that the lawns or flowers would be robbed of sunlight by their spear-thin shadows.  She did not know that one could eat too many ices, for she had never been able to afford more than one at a time; in rainy Edinburgh the stories of men whose minds became sick at dwelling under immutably blue skies had seemed one of the belittling lies about fair things that grown-up people like to tell; and since she had had hardly anybody to talk to till Richard came, and had never had enough books to read, it had seemed quite impossible that one could feel or think past the point where feeling and thinking were happy embarkations of the soul on bracing seas.