She took some time to answer, and during that time she went
over and over the course of her twenty-four years, lighting now on one
point, now on another--on her aunts, her mother, her father, and at last
her mind fixed upon her aunts and her father, and she tried to describe
them as at this distance they appeared to her.
They were very much afraid of her father. He was a great dim force in
the house, by means of which they held on to the great world which is
represented every morning in the _Times_. But the real life of the house
was something quite different from this. It went on independently of
Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself from him. He was good-humoured
towards them, but contemptuous. She had always taken it for granted that
his point of view was just, and founded upon an ideal scale of things
where the life of one person was absolutely more important than the life
of another, and that in that scale they were much less importance than
he was. But did she really believe that? Hewet's words made her think.
She always submitted to her father, just as they did, but it was her
aunts who influenced her really; her aunts who built up the fine,
closely woven substance of their life at home. They were less splendid
but more natural than her father was. All her rages had been against
them; it was their world with its four meals, its punctuality, and
servants on the stairs at half-past ten, that she examined so closely
and wanted so vehemently to smash to atoms.
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