"
"That's the feeling of a captive; and yet somehow I can't think of
you as ever having been anybody's captive."
"You do display some wonderful insight sometimes. My dear, I begin
to suspect that men are rather conceited about their powers. They
think they dominate us. Even exceptional men will think that; men
too great for mere vanity, men like Henry Allegre for instance, who
by his consistent and serene detachment was certainly fit to
dominate all sorts of people. Yet for the most part they can only
do it because women choose more or less consciously to let them do
so. Henry Allegre, if any man, might have been certain of his own
power; and yet, look: I was a chit of a girl, I was sitting with a
book where I had no business to be, in his own garden, when he
suddenly came upon me, an ignorant girl of seventeen, a most
uninviting creature with a tousled head, in an old black frock and
shabby boots. I could have run away. I was perfectly capable of
it. But I stayed looking up at him and--in the end it was HE who
went away and it was I who stayed."
"Consciously?" I murmured.
"Consciously? You may just as well ask my shadow that lay so still
by me on the young grass in that morning sunshine.
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