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Rh of switches, that the room held. Ordinarily, even for purposes of reading, it was sufficient to light the row of concealed lamps that lay out of sight behind the heavy cornice of the ceiling; those she lit now; she lit the single lamps that illuminated the half-dozen pictures on the walls; she lit the lights by the bed, the lights on her dressing-table, the lights on the table where she wrote. Above the washstand another blazed; two more blazed by the chimneypiece; above her sofa there blazed yet another; and on each side of the pier-glass was one. And the sun, the central illumination, was herself, beautiful as she had never been before, triumphant as never before she had been, less content than ever, and for that reason immeasurably happy.

For she loved; she had never known that before, and the splendour of it made the galaxy of stars burn dim. She knew what it was to be loved; well, she knew the symptoms and stress of passion in another, but never until now had she herself burned with that noble fever. For months now she knew that she had been sickening for it; it was that, she felt sure (and she was right), that had made the whole world and her success therein seem stale and without worth; and now, like some swift and prodigious plague, it had fired all her blood. To be loved had meant so little to her; now she understood why, and it was because she, the essential she, had had no part in it. She had but yielded herself, and that no more than physically, to alien transports, but now the memory of them even was kindled within her, since in the light of the dazzling knowledge she could guess what it all meant. She knew now—a thing that had been unintelligible to her before—how her presence, her proximity, affected Edgar; how her word, her smile, her touch, held promise for him of the ineffable. She knew how she had finished for him according to what had seemed to her at the time mere idle babble, the symphony of Schubert; she knew why he looked at her with burning eyes; why, when he proposed to her first on the empty beach at Littlestone, she had been momentarily frightened at what seemed to her a savage thing. Yes, savage it was—she understood that now—savage and incomparable. All else was tame in comparison with it.

For the time—for this hour, at any rate—the consciousness that she loved, and was loved in return, was sufficient. Even though this great illumination lit the past passages of her life for her, so that she knew and saw all she had missed, she did not just now look forward to all that the future might mean. Life at last