It was not that she felt in him any ascendancy
of character--there were moments already when she knew she was the
stronger--but that all the rest of life had become a mere cloudy rim
about the central glory of their passion. Whenever she stopped thinking
about that for a moment she felt as she sometimes did after lying on the
grass and staring up too long at the sky; her eyes were so full of light
that everything about her was a blur.
Each time that Miss Hatchard, in the course of her periodical incursions
into the work-room, dropped an allusion to her young cousin, the
architect, the effect was the same on Charity. The hemlock garland she
was wearing fell to her knees and she sat in a kind of trance. It was
so manifestly absurd that Miss Hatchard should talk of Harney in
that familiar possessive way, as if she had any claim on him, or knew
anything about him. She, Charity Royall, was the only being on earth
who really knew him, knew him from the soles of his feet to the rumpled
crest of his hair, knew the shifting lights in his eyes, and the
inflexions of his voice, and the things he liked and disliked,
and everything there was to know about him, as minutely and yet
unconsciously as a child knows the walls of the room it wakes up in
every morning.
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