"
"It's hard enough without that," she asserted.
"What's hard?" Helen demanded.
"Life," she replied, and then they both became silent.
Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why
an hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid
that the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating to a
spectator. True to her creed, she did not attempt to interfere, although
there were enough of those weak moments of depression to make it
perfectly easy for a less scrupulous person to press through and know
all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did not choose. All these
moods ran themselves into one general effect, which Helen compared to
the sliding of a river, quick, quicker, quicker still, as it races to a
waterfall. Her instinct was to cry out Stop! but even had there been
any use in crying Stop! she would have refrained, thinking it best that
things should take their way, the water racing because the earth was
shaped to make it race.
It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was watched, or
that there was anything in her manner likely to draw attention to her.
What had happened to her she did not know. Her mind was very much in the
condition of the racing water to which Helen compared it. She wanted
to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to see him when he was not
there; it was an agony to miss seeing him; agonies were strewn all about
her day on account of him, but she never asked herself what this force
driving through her life arose from.
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