She had not, at first, perhaps, known exactly when
things began to change for her--when the clarity of her mind began to be
disturbed. She had thought in the beginning--as people have a habit
of doing--that an instance--a problem--a situation had attracted her
attention because it was absorbing enough to think over. Her view of the
matter had been that as the same thing would have interested her father,
it had interested herself. But from the morning when she had been
conscious of the sudden fury roused in her by Nigel Anstruthers' ugly
sneer at Mount Dunstan, she had better understood the thing which had
come upon her. Day by day it had increased and gathered power, and she
realised with a certain sense of impatience that she had not in any
degree understood it when she had seen and wondered at its effect on
other women. Each day had been like a wave encroaching farther upon the
shore she stood upon. At the outset a certain ignoble pride--she knew it
ignoble--filled her with rebellion. She had seen so much of this kind
of situation, and had heard so much of the general comment. People had
learned how to sneer because experience had taught them. If she gave
them cause, why should they not sneer at her as at things? She recalled
what she had herself thought of such things--the folly of them, the
obviousness--the almost deserved disaster.
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