As she did so, moving with great coolness and deliberation, she became conscious that she was thinking some thoughts that were foreign to her.  She began remembering what she could not have remembered, since she was not then born:  the trouble over her mother’s marriage, the bitter opposition, the shutting the door upon her, the ostracizing her from heart and home.  She became aware of a most singular sensation as of bitter resentment herself, and not against the mother and sister who had so treated her own mother, but against her own mother, and then she became aware of a like bitterness extended to her own self.  She felt malignant toward her mother as a young girl whom she remembered, though she could not have remembered, and she felt malignant toward her own self, and her sister Amanda, and Flora.  Evil suggestions surged in her brain—­suggestions which turned her heart to stone and which still fascinated her.  And all the time by a sort of double consciousness she knew that what she thought was strange and not due to her own volition.  She knew that she was thinking the thoughts of some other person, and she knew who.  She felt herself possessed.

But there was tremendous strength in the woman’s nature.  She had inherited strength for good and righteous self-assertion, from the evil strength of her ancestors.  They had turned their own weapons against themselves.  She made an effort which seemed almost mortal, but was conscious that the hideous thing was gone from her.  She thought her own thoughts.  Then she scouted to herself the idea of anything supernatural about the terrific experience.  “I am imagining everything,” she told herself.  She went on with her preparations; she went to the bureau to take down her hair.  She looked in the glass and saw, instead of her softly parted waves of hair, harsh lines of iron-gray under the black borders of an old-fashioned head-dress.  She saw instead of her smooth, broad forehead, a high one wrinkled with the intensest concentration of selfish reflections of a long life; she saw instead of her steady blue eyes, black ones with depths of malignant reserve, behind a broad meaning of ill will; she saw instead of her firm, benevolent mouth one with a hard, thin line, a network of melancholic wrinkles.  She saw instead of her own face, middle-aged and good to see, the expression of a life of honesty and good will to others and patience under trials, the face of a very old woman scowling forever with unceasing hatred and misery at herself and all others, at life, and death, at that which had been and that which was to come.  She saw instead of her own face in the glass, the face of her dead Aunt Harriet, topping her own shoulders in her own well-known dress!

Sophia Gill left the room.  She went into the one which she shared with her sister Amanda.  Amanda looked up and saw her standing there.  She had set the lamp on a table, and she stood holding a handkerchief over her face.  Amanda looked at her with terror.