: she was
intensely of the feminine type, verging neither towards the saint nor the angel.
She was a fair divided excellence, whose fulness of perfection must be in
marriage. And, like all youthful creatures, she felt as if the present
conditions of choice were final. It belonged to the freshness of her heart that,
having had her emotions strongly stirred by real objects, she never speculated
on possible relations yet to come. It seemed to her that she stood at the first
and last parting of the ways. And, in one sense, she was under no illusion. It
is only in that freshness of our time that the choice is possible which gives
unity to life, and makes the memory a temple where all relics and all votive
offerings, all worship and all grateful joy, are an unbroken history sanctified
by one religion.
 

                                   Chapter 45

 We may not make this world a paradise
 By walking it together with clasped hands
 And eyes that meeting feed a double strength.
 We must be only joined by pains divine,
 Of spirits blent in mutual memories.
 
It was a consequence of that interview with her father, that when Esther stepped
early on a grey March morning into the carriage with Mrs Transome, to go to the
Loamford Assizes, she was full of an expectation that held her lips in trembling
silence, and gave her eyes that sightless beauty which tells that the vision is
all within.
    Mrs Transome did not disturb her with unnecessary speech. Of late, Esther's
anxious observation had been drawn to a change in Mrs Transome, shown in many
small ways which only women notice. It was not only that when they sat together
the talk seemed more of an effort to her: that might have come from the gradual
draining away of matter for discourse pertaining to most sorts of companionship,
in which repetition is not felt to be as desirable as novelty. But while Mrs
Transome was dressed just as usual, took her seat as usual, trifled with her
drugs and had her embroidery before her as usual, and still made her morning
greetings with that finished easy politeness and consideration of tone which to
rougher people seems like affection, Esther noticed a strange fitfulness in her
movements. Sometimes the stitches of her embroidery went on with silent unbroken
swiftness for a quarter of an hour as if she had to work out her deliverance
from bondage by finishing a scroll-patterned border; then her hands dropt
suddenly and her gaze fell blankly on the table before her, and she would sit in
that way motionless as a seated statue, apparently unconscious of Esther's
presence, till some thought darting within her