It wasn't at once that he could see all that was
in her actual challenge; but when he did he found himself just
checking a low vague sound, a sound which was perhaps the nearest
approach his vocal chords had ever known to a growl. Everything
Mrs. Pocock had failed to give a sign of recognising in Chad as a
particular part of a transformation--everything that had lent
intention to this particular failure--affected him as gathered into
a large loose bundle and thrown, in her words, into his face. The
missile made him to that extent catch his breath; which however he
presently recovered. "Why when a woman's at once so charming and
so beneficent--"
"You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush and
can make them cross the ocean on purpose to feel the more and take
from you the straighter, HOW you do it?"
Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he
tried not to flounder in her grasp. "I don't think there's
anything I've done in any such calculated way as you describe.
Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of
everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having
come before you, and my having come was a result of our general
state of mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on its
side, from our queer ignorance, our queer misconceptions and
confusions--from which, since then, an inexorable tide of light
seems to have floated us into our perhaps still queerer knowledge.
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