miraculous, romantic, and incredible, had the quality of a dream through which she lived in a dazed nonchalance.  Could it be true that she had resided with Mrs. Maldon only for a month?  Could it be true that her courtship had lasted only two days—­or at most, three?  Never, she thought, had a sensible, quiet girl ridden such a whirlwind before in the entire history of the world.  Could Louis be as foolishly fond of her as he seemed?  Was she truly to be married?  “I shan’t have a single wedding-present,” she had said.  Then wedding-presents began to come.  “Are we married?” she had said, when they were married and in the conventional clothes in the conventional vehicle.  After that she soon did realize that the wondrous and the unutterable had happened to her too.  And she swung over to the other extreme:  instead of doubting the reality of her own experiences, she was convinced that her experiences were more real than those of any other created girl, and hence she felt a slight condescension towards all the rest.  “I am a married woman,” she reflected at intervals, with intense momentary pride.  And her fits of confusion in public would end in recurrences of this strange, proud feeling.

Then she had to face the return to Bursley, and, later, the At Home which Louis propounded as a matter of course, and which she knew to be inevitable.  The house was her toy, and Mrs. Tams was her toy.  But the glee of playing with toys had been overshadowed for days by the delicious dread of the At Home.  “It will be the first caller that will kill me,” she had said.  “But will anybody really come?” And the first caller had called.  And, finding herself still alive, she had become radiant, and often during the afternoon had forgotten to be clumsy.  The success of the At Home was prodigious, startling.  Now and then when the room was full, and people without chairs perched on the end of the Chesterfield, she had whispered to her secret heart in a tiny, tiny voice:  “These are my guests.  They all treat me with special deference.  I am the hostess. I am Mrs. Fores.”  The Batchgrew clan was well represented, no doubt by order from authority, Mrs. Yardley came, in surprising stylishness.  Visitors arrived from Knype.  Miss Malkin came and atoned for her historic glance in the shop.  But the dazzlers were sundry male friends of Louis, with Kensingtonian accents, strange phrases, and assurance in the handling of teacups and the choosing of cake....  One by one and two by two they had departed, and at last Rachel, with a mind as it were breathless from rapid flittings to and fro, was seated alone on the sofa.