The possibilities which the place had then represented were
still vividly present to her. The mere phrase "a French
chateau" had called up to her youthful fancy a throng of
romantic associations, poetic, pictorial and emotional; and
the serene face of the old house seated in its park among
the poplar-bordered meadows of middle France, had seemed, on
her first sight of it, to hold out to her a fate as noble
and dignified as its own mien.
Though she could still call up that phase of feeling it had
long since passed, and the house had for a time become to
her the very symbol of narrowness and monotony. Then, with
the passing of years, it had gradually acquired a less
inimical character, had become, not again a castle of
dreams, evoker of fair images and romantic legend, but the
shell of a life slowly adjusted to its dwelling: the place
one came back to, the place where one had one's duties,
one's habits and one's books, the place one would naturally
live in till one died: a dull house, an inconvenient house,
of which one knew all the defects, the shabbinesses, the
discomforts, but to which one was so used that one could
hardly, after so long a time, think one's self away from it
without suffering a certain loss of identity.
Now, as it lay before her in the autumn mildness, its
mistress was surprised at her own insensibility. She had
been trying to see the house through the eyes of an old
friend who, the next morning, would be driving up to it for
the first time; and in so doing she seemed to be opening her
own eyes upon it after a long interval of blindness.
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