What has been thought by others can never be obliterated until....

With a start my reverie broke and fled, scattered by a violent sound that I recognized for the first time in my life as wholly desirable.  The returning motor meant that my hostess was back.

Yet, so urgent had been my temporary obsession, that my first presentation of her was—­well, not as I knew her now.  Floating along with a face of anguished torture I saw Mabel, a mere effigy captured by others’ thinking, pass down into those depths of fire and blood that only just had closed beneath my feet.  She dipped away.  She vanished, her fading eyes turned to the last towards some savior who had failed her.  And that strange intolerable hope was in her face.

The mystery of the place was pretty thick about me just then.  It was the fall of dusk, and the ghost of slanting sunshine was as unreal as though badly painted.  The garden stood at attention all about me.  I cannot explain it, but I can tell it, I think, exactly as it happened, for it remains vivid in me forever—­that, for the first time, something almost happened, myself apparently the combining link through which it pressed towards delivery: 

I had already turned towards the house.  In my mind were pictures—­not actual thoughts—­of the motor, tea on the verandah, my sister, Mabel—­ when there came behind me this tumultuous, awful rush—­as I left the garden.  The ugliness, the pain, the striving to escape, the whole negative and suppressed agony that was the Place, focused that second into a concentrated effort to produce a result.  It was a blinding tempest of long-frustrate desire that heaved at me, surging appallingly behind me like an anguished mob.  I was in the act of crossing the frontier into my normal self again, when it came, catching fearfully at my skirts.  I might use an entire dictionary of descriptive adjectives yet come no nearer to it than this—­the conception of a huge assemblage determined to escape with me, or to snatch me back among themselves.  My legs trembled for an instant, and I caught my breath—­then turned and ran as fast as possible up the ugly terraces.

At the same instant, as though the clanging of an iron gate cut short the unfinished phrase, I thought the beginning of an awful thing: 

“The Damned ...”

Like this it rushed after me from that goblin garden that had sought to keep me: 

“The Damned!”

For there was sound in it.  I know full well it was subjective, not actually heard at all; yet somehow sound was in it—­a great volume, roaring and booming thunderously, far away, and below me.  The sentence dipped back into the depths that gave it birth, unfinished.  Its completion was prevented.  As usual, nothing happened.  But it drove behind me like a hurricane as I ran towards the house, and the sound of it I can only liken to those terrible undertones you may hear standing beside Niagara.  They lie behind the mere crash of the falling flood, within it somehow, not audible to all—­felt rather than definitely heard.