There was no
reply.
The enigma pressed upon her days, she lived in the heaviness of it,
waiting. His silence added itself up, brought her a kind of shame for
the exertions she had made. She turned with obstinacy from the further
schemes her ingenuity presented. Out of the sum of her unsuccessful
efforts grew a reproach of Arnold; every one of them increased it. His
behaviour she could forgive, arbitrarily putting against it twenty
potential explanations, but not the futility of what she had done. Her
resentment of that undermined all the fairness of her logic, and even
triumphed over the sword of her suspense. She never quite gave up the
struggle, but in effect she passed the week that intervened pinioned in
her unreason--bands that vanished as she looked at them, only to tie her
thrice in another place.
Life became a permanent interrogation-point. Waiting under it, with a
perpetual upward gaze, perhaps she grew a little dizzy. The sun of March
had been increasing, and the air that Saturday afternoon had begun to
melt and glow and hang in the streets with a kind of inertia, like a
curtain that had to be parted to be penetrated. Hilda came into the
house and faced the stairs with an inclination to leave her body on the
ground floor and mount in spirit only.
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