But this new condition in her life had by no means constituted the sum of these three days' meditation in the country. With the elasticity inherent in human nature, the moment the new condition had been made, her mental fibres set themselves automatically to adjust themselves to it. Doctors say that any patient adjusts himself to the most fatal sentence in twenty-four hours; the thing becomes a part of life. It was so with her, and now she felt, though not reconciled, at any rate used to the thing. Though highly introspective, she was not, in the ordinary sense of the word, self-conscious, and she no longer believed that the changed glances of the world at her would affect her very seriously. Surely she could manage to take them at their correct and worthless valuation. At first the thought of that had seemed intolerable; but after three days she was beginning to feel she cared very appreciably less.
So far her solitude had been successful, but beyond that it had been a complete failure. For the larger of the two reasons which had induced her to come here remained, and she could not even now conjecture what in the future should be her attitude to Jim. With this problem she had wrestled and struggled in vain, and it seemed to her, in these first days of her consciousness as to her essential relations to him, that all her life-long consistency of thought and habit on such a point were cancelled and worthless. The truth was that she had not known at all before that she was really capable of passion. Her nature, including something far deeper and stronger than mere physical nature, had till quite lately been dormant; she had been ignorant all her life of what the longing for another meant; all her life she had judged men and women by a blind standard which did not really measure that to which it was applied. All her life she had labelled immorality as vulgar, and, as such, she shrugged her shoulders at it and passed by. But now it was beginning to be burned into her that it was not her fastidiousness that labelled things vulgar, but her ignorance. She had thought Blanche Devereux vulgar because she herself had not understood. Now she was afraid she was beginning to understand, and with the gradual comprehension came growing bewilderment. And step by step with the bewilderment marched an inward tumult of ecstasy, of which she had not known herself capable. A sort of horrified wonder at herself was there, and withal a singing in her heart. It had awoke, and, like the roar of the sea which drowns the idle clatter of the Corniche road, it made a huge soft tumult.