Again she would sit passive
in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen's fantastical or gloomy words
were like so many darts goading her to cry out against the hardness of
life. Best of all were the moods when for no reason again this stress of
feeling slackened, and life went on as usual, only with a joy and colour
in its events that was unknown before; they had a significance like that
which she had seen in the tree: the nights were black bars separating
her from the days; she would have liked to run all the days into one
long continuity of sensation. Although these moods were directly or
indirectly caused by the presence of Terence or the thought of him, she
never said to herself that she was in love with him, or considered what
was to happen if she continued to feel such things, so that Helen's
image of the river sliding on to the waterfall had a great likeness to
the facts, and the alarm which Helen sometimes felt was justified.
In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was incapable of
making a plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind. She
abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day,
meeting him the next, receiving his letters always with a start of
surprise. Any woman experienced in the progress of courtship would have
come by certain opinions from all this which would have given her at
least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever been in love with Rachel,
and she had never been in love with any one.
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