with details enough of delightful still life to furnish her day-dreams;
and no one who has not, like Esther, a strong natural prompting and
susceptibility towards such things, and has at the same time suffered from the
presence of opposite conditions, can understand how powerfully those minor
accidents of rank which please the fastidious sense can preoccupy the
imagination.
    It seemed that almost everything in her day-dreams - cavaliers apart - must
be found at Transome Court. But now that fancy was becoming real, and the
impossible appeared possible, Esther found the balance of her attention
reversed: now that her ladyhood was not simply in Utopia, she found herself
arrested and painfully grasped by the means through which the ladyhood was to be
obtained. To her inexperience this strange story of an alienated inheritance, of
such a last representative of pure-blooded lineage as old Thomas Transome the
bill-sticker, above all of the dispossession hanging over those who actually
held, and had expected always to hold, the wealth and position which were
suddenly announced to be rightfully hers - all these things made a picture, not
for her own tastes and fancies to float in with Elysian indulgence, but in which
she was compelled to gaze on the degrading hard experience of other human
beings, and on a humiliating loss which was the obverse of her own proud gain.
Even in her times of most untroubled egoism Esther shrank from anything
ungenerous; and the fact that she had a very lively image of Harold Transome and
his gipsy-eyed boy in her mind, gave additional distinctness to the thought that
if she entered they must depart. Of the elder Transomes she had a dimmer vision,
and they were necessarily in the background to her sympathy.
    She and her father sat with their hands locked, as they might have done if
they had been listening to a solemn oracle in the days of old revealing unknown
kinship and rightful heirdom. It was not that Esther had any thought of
renouncing her fortune; she was incapable, in these moments, of condensing her
vague ideas and feelings into any distinct plan of action, nor indeed did it
seem that she was called upon to act with any promptitude. It was only that she
was conscious of being strangely awed by something that was called good fortune;
and the awe shut out any scheme of rejection as much as any triumphant joy in
acceptance. Her first father, she learned, had died disappointed and in wrongful
imprisonment, and an undefined sense of Nemesis seemed half to sanctify her
inheritance, and counteract its apparent arbitrariness.
    Felix Holt was present in her mind throughout: what he would say was