GRACE
Not in a day and not in a night did Maggie find a key to that strange confusion of fears, superstitions, and self-satisfactions that was known to the world as Grace Trenchard.Perhaps she never found it, and through all the struggle and conflict in which she was now to be involved she was fighting, desperately, in the dark.Fight she did, and it was this same conflict, bitter and tragic enough at the time, that transformed her into the woman that she became...
and through all that conflict it may be truly said of her that she never knew a moment's bitterness--anger, dismay, loneliness, even despair-bitterness never.
It was not strange that Maggie did not understand Grace; Grace never understood herself nor did she make the slightest attempt to do so.
It would be easy enough to cover the ground at once by saying that she had no imagination, that she never went behind the thing that she saw, and that she found the grasping of external things quite as much as she could manage.But that is not enough.Very early indeed, when she had been a stolid-faced little girl with a hot desire for the doll possessed by her neighbour, she had had for nurse a woman who rejoiced in supernatural events.With ghost stories of the most terrifying kind she besieged Grace's young heart and mind.The child had never imagination enough to visualise these stories in the true essence, but she seized upon external detail-the blue lights, the white shimmering garments, the moon and the church clock, the clanking chain and the stain of blood upon the board.
These things were not for her, and indeed did she allow her fancy to dwell, for a moment, upon them she was besieged at once by so horrid a panic that she lost all control and self-possession.She therefore very quickly put those things from her and thenceforth lived in the world as in a castle surrounded by a dark moat filled with horrible and slimy creatures who would raise a head at her did she so much as glance their way.
She decided then never to look, and from a very early age those quarters of life became to her "queer," indecent, and dangerous.All the more she fastened her grip upon the things that she could see and hold, and these things repaid her devotion by never deceiving her or pretending to be what they were not.She believed intensely in forms and repetitions; she liked everything to be where she expected it to be, people to say the things that she expected them to say, clocks to strike at the right time, and trains to be up to the minute.With all this she could never be called an accurate or careful woman.She was radically stupid, stupid in the real sense of the word, so that her mind did not grasp a new thought or fact until it had been repeated to her again and again, so that she had no power of expressing herself, and a deep inaccuracy about everything and every one which she endeavoured to cover by a stream of aimless lies that deceived no one.She would of course have been very indignant had any one told her that she was stupid.She hated what she called "clever people" and never had them near her if she could help it.She was instantly suspicious of any one who liked ideas or wanted anything changed.With all this she was of an extreme obstinacy and a deep, deep jealousy.She clung to what she had with the tenacity of a mollusc.What she had was in the main Paul, and her affection for him was a very real human quality in her.