Lane, and at the same time they formed the indictment against her which was, perhaps, best calculated to weigh upon her conscience.  She saw it, holding them at arm’s length, in enormous characters that ever stamped and blotted out the careful, taught-looking writing, and the invariable “God bless you, yours truly,” at the end.  They were all there, aridly complete, the limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind himself without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through which tiniest hope could creep, to emerge smiling upon the other side.  When she saw him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten years hence attached to the body of this petrification, she was almost disposed to abandon the pair, to let them take their wretched chance.  But this was a climax which did not occur often; she returned, in most of her waking moments, to devising schemes by which Laura might be delivered into the hands she was so likely to encumber.  The new French poet, the American novelist of the year, and a work by Mr. John Morley lay upon Alicia’s table many days together for this reason.  She sometimes remembered what she expected of these volumes, what plein air sensations or what profound plunges, and did not quite like her indifference as to whether her expectations were fulfilled.  She discovered herself intellectually jaded—­there had been tiring excursions—­and took to daily rides which carried her far out among the rice-fields, and gave her sound nights to sustain the burden of her dreaming days.  She had ideas about her situation; she believed she lived outside of it.  At all events she took a line; the new Arab was typical, and there were other measures which she arranged deliberately with the idea that she was making a physical fight.  Life might weigh one down with a dragging ball and chain, but one could always measure the strength of one’s pinions against these things.  She made it her sorry and remorseless task to separate from her impulses those that she found lacking in philosophy, hinting of the foolish woman, and to turn a cruel heel upon them.  She stripped her meditations of all colour and atmosphere; she would not accept from her grief the luxury of a rag to wrap herself in.  If this gave hers a skeleton to live with, she had what gratification there was in observing that it was anatomically as it should be.  The result that one saw from the outside was chiefly a look of delicate hardness, of tissue a little frayed, but showing a quality in the process.  We may hope that some unconfessed satisfaction was derivable from her continued reception of Duff’s confidences—­ it has long been evident that he found her persuadable—­her unflinching readiness to consult with him; granting the analytic turn we may almost suppose it.  Starvation is so monotonous a misery that a gift of personal diagnosis might easily lend attraction to poisoned food as an alternative, if one may be permitted a melodramatic simile in a case which Alicia kept conventional enough.  She did not even abate the usual number of Duff’s invitations to dinner when there was certainly nothing to repay her for regarding him across a gulf of flowers and silver, and a tide of conversation about the season’s paper-chasing, except the impoverished complexion which people acquire who sit much in Bentinck Street, desirous and unsatisfied.