At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and
drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the
transition from the imaginary world to the real world.
"What I want to know," she said aloud, "is this: What is the truth?
What's the truth of it all?" She was speaking partly as herself, and
partly as the heroine of the play she had just read. The landscape
outside, because she had seen nothing but print for the space of two
hours, now appeared amazingly solid and clear, but although there were
men on the hill washing the trunks of olive trees with a white liquid,
for the moment she herself was the most vivid thing in it--an heroic
statue in the middle of the foreground, dominating the view. Ibsen's
plays always left her in that condition. She acted them for days at a
time, greatly to Helen's amusement; and then it would be Meredith's turn
and she became Diana of the Crossways. But Helen was aware that it was
not all acting, and that some sort of change was taking place in the
human being. When Rachel became tired of the rigidity of her pose on the
back of the chair, she turned round, slid comfortably down into it, and
gazed out over the furniture through the window opposite which opened on
the garden. (Her mind wandered away from Nora, but she went on thinking
of things that the book suggested to her, of women and life.
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