So the pursuit of the mystery ended, as it had commenced, in confusion, but of a milder sort and partially transparent at one or two of the gates she had touched.  A mind capable of seeing was twisted by a nature that would not allow of open eyes; yet the laden emotions of her nature brought her round by another channel to the stage neighbouring sight, where facts, dimly recognised for such—­as they may be in truth, are accepted under their disguises, because disguise of them is needed by the bashful spirit which accuses itself of audaciousness in presuming to speculate.  Had she asked herself the reason of her extended speculation, her foot would not have stopped more abruptly on the edge of a torrent than she on that strange road of vapours and flying lights.  She did not; she sang, she sent her voice through the woods and took the splendid ring of it for an assurance of her peculiarly unshackled state.  She loved this liberty.  Of the men who had ‘done her the honour,’ not one had moved her to regret the refusal.  She lived in the hope of simply doing good, and could only give her hand to a man able to direct and help her; one who would bear to be matched with her brother.  Who was he?  Not discoverable; not likely to be.

Therefore she had her freedom, an absolutely unflushed freedom, happier than poor Grace Barrow’s.  Rumour spoke of Emma Colesworth having a wing clipped.  How is it that sensible women can be so susceptible?  For, thought Jane, the moment a woman is what is called in love, she can give her heart no longer to the innocent things about her; she is cut away from Nature:  that pure well-water is tasteless to her.  To me it is wine!

The drinking of the pure well-water as wine is among the fatal signs of fire in the cup, showing Nature at work rather to enchain the victim than bid her daughter go.  Jane of course meant the poet’s ‘Nature.’  She did not reflect that the strong glow of poetic imagination is wanted to hallow a passionate devotion to the inanimate for this evokes the spiritual; and passionateness of any kind in narrower brains should be a proclamation to us of sanguine freshets not coming from a spiritual source.  But the heart betraying deluded her.  She fancied she had not ever been so wedded to Nature as on that walk through the bursting beechwoods, that sweet lonely walk, perfect in loneliness, where even a thought of a presence was thrust away as a desecration and images of souls in thought were shadowy.

Her lust of freedom gave her the towering holiday.  She took the delirium in her own pure fashion, in a love of the bankside flowers and the downy edges of the young beech-buds fresh on the sprays.  And it was no unreal love, though too intent and forcible to win the spirit from the object.  She paid for this indulgence of her mood by losing the spirit entirely.  At night she was a spent rocket.  What had gone she could not tell:  her very soul she almost feared.  Her glorious walk through the wood seemed burnt out.  She struck a light to try her poet on the shelf of the elect of earth by her bed, and she read, and read flatness.  Not his the fault!  She revered him too deeply to lay it on him.  Whose was it?  She had a vision of the gulfs of bondage.