She was disturbed.  She was insecure.  She foresaw inquiries being made concerning her.  She foresaw an immense family fuss, endless tomfoolery, the upsetting of her existence, the destruction of her calm.  And she sank away from that prospect.  She could not face it.  She did not want to face it.  “No,” she cried passionately in her soul, “I’ve lived alone, and I’ll stay as I am.  I can’t change at my time of life.”  And her attitude towards a possible invasion of her solitude became one of resentment.  “I won’t have it!  I won’t have it!  I will be left alone.  Constance!  What can Constance be to me, or I to her, now?” The vision of any change in her existence was in the highest degree painful to her.  And not only painful!  It frightened her.  It made her shrink.  But she could not dismiss it. ...  She could not argue herself out of it.  The apparition of Matthew Peel-Swynnerton had somehow altered the very stuff of her fibres.

And surging on the outskirts of the central storm of her brain were ten thousand apprehensions about the management of the Pension.  All was black, hopeless.  The Pension might have been the most complete business failure that gross carelessness and incapacity had ever provoked.  Was it not the fact that she had to supervise everything herself, that she could depend on no one?  Were she to be absent even for a single day the entire structure would inevitably fall.  Instead of working less she worked harder.  And who could guarantee that her investments were safe?

When dawn announced itself, slowly discovering each object in the chamber, she was ill.  Fever seemed to rage in her head.  And in and round her mouth she had strange sensations.  Fossette stirred in the basket near the large desk on which multifarious files and papers were ranged with minute particularity.

“Fossette!” she tried to call out; but no sound issued from her lips.  She could not move her tongue.  She tried to protrude it, and could not.  For hours she had been conscious of a headache.  Her heart sank.  She was sick with fear.  Her memory flashed to her father and his seizure.  She was his daughter!  Paralysis!  “Ca serait le comble!” she thought in French, horrified.  Her fear became abject!  “Can I move at all?” she thought, and madly jerked her head.  Yes, she could move her head slightly on the pillow, and she could stretch her right arm, both arms.  Absurd cowardice!  Of course it was not a seizure!  She reassured herself.  Still, she could not put her tongue out.  Suddenly she began to hiccough, and she had no control over the hiccough.  She put her hand to the bell, whose ringing would summon the man who slept in a pantry off the hall, and suddenly the hiccough ceased.  Her hand dropped.  She was better.  Besides, what use in ringing for a man if she could not speak to him through the door?  She must wait for Jacqueline.  At six o’clock every morning, summer and winter, Jacqueline entered her mistress’s bedroom to release the dog for a moment’s airing under her own supervision.  The clock on the mantelpiece showed five minutes past three.  She had three hours to wait.  Fossette pattered across the room, and sprang on to the bed and nestled down.  Sophia ignored her, but Fossette, being herself unwell and torpid, did not seem to care.