By these means Rachel reached that stage in thinking, if thinking it can
be called, when the eyes are intent upon a ball or a knob and the lips
cease to move. Her efforts to come to an understanding had only hurt
her aunt's feelings, and the conclusion must be that it is better not
to try. To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself
and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. It was far better
to play the piano and forget all the rest. The conclusion was very
welcome. Let these odd men and women--her aunts, the Hunts, Ridley,
Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest--be symbols,--featureless but dignified,
symbols of age, of youth, of motherhood, of learning, and beautiful
often as people upon the stage are beautiful. It appeared that nobody
ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but
that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt,
but did not talk about, one could accept a system in which things went
round and round quite satisfactorily to other people, without often
troubling to think about it, except as something superficially strange.
Absorbed by her music she accepted her lot very complacently, blazing
into indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and subsiding as she subsided
now. Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion, her mind seemed to enter
into communion, to be delightfully expanded and combined with the spirit
of the whitish boards on deck, with the spirit of the sea, with the
spirit of Beethoven Op.
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