The full understanding of it was an abyss between them, across
which they joined hands, looking elsewhere. Even in the surprise of
Hilda's announcement Alicia had the instinct to glance away, lest her
eyes should betray too many facts that bore upon the situation. It had
never been discussed, but it had to be accepted and occasionally
referred to; and the terms of acceptance and reference made no
implication of Stephen Arnold. In her inmost privacy Alicia gazed
breathless at the conception as a whole; she leaped at it, and caught
it, and held it to look, with a feverish comparison of possibilities. It
was not strange, perhaps, that she took a vivid personal interest in the
essentials that enabled one to execute a flank movement like Hilda's nor
that she should conceive the first of them to be that one must come out
of a cab. She dismissed that impression with indignation as ungenerously
cynical, but it always came back for redismissal. It did not interfere
in the least, however, with her deliberate invitations to Stephen to
come to 10, Middleton street on afternoons or evenings when Hilda was
there. She was like one standing denied in the Street of Abundance; she
had an avidity of the eye for even love's reflection.
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