But what could she have done for her family-circle, after the scandal of her divorce? She was weak and selfish, she knew it; but she had received a blow under which she had at first expected to succumb. And, when she found herself surviving it, she had mustered such energy as she possessed and said to herself that she could not go on existing in that same narrow circle of her sisters and her girl friends; and she had forced her life into a different path. She had always had the knack of creating an apparently new frock out of an old dress, transforming a last year's hat into one of the latest fashion. Even so she had now done with her distraught and wretched life, all battered and broken as it was: she had gathered together, as in a fit of economy, all that was left, all that was still serviceable; and out of those remnants she had made herself a new existence. But this new life was unable to breathe in the old atmosphere: it felt aimless in it and estranged; and she had managed to force it into a different path, in spite of all the opposition of her family and friends. Perhaps she would not have succeeded so readily if she had not been so completely shattered. Perhaps she would not have felt this energy if she had suffered only a little. She had her strength and she had her weakness; she was very simple and yet she was very various; and it was perhaps just this complexity that had been the saving of her youth.
Besides, she was actually very young, only twenty-three; and in youth one possesses an unconscious vitality, notwithstanding any apparent weakness. And her contradictory qualities gave her equilibrium and saved her from falling over into the abyss....
All this passed vaguely through her mind as clouds pass before the eyes, not with the conciseness of words but with the misty indefiniteness of a dreamy fatigue. As she lay there, she did not look as if she had ever exerted the strength to give a new path to her life: a pale, delicate woman, slender, with drooping movements, lying on a sofa in her not very fresh dressing-gown, with its faded pink and its rumpled lace. And yet there was a certain poetical fragrance about her personality, despite her weary eyes and the limp outlines of her attire, despite the boarding-house room, with its air of quickly improvised comfort, a comfort which was a matter of tact rather than reality and could be packed away in a single trunk. Her frail figure, her pale and delicate rather than beautiful features were surrounded, as by an aura, by that atmosphere of personal poetry which she unconsciously radiated, which she shed from her eyes upon the things which she beheld, from her fingers upon the things which she touched. To those who did not like her, this peculiar atmosphere, this unusualness, this eccentricity, this unlikeness to the typical young woman of the Hague, was the very thing with which they reproached her. To those who liked her, it was partly talent, partly soul; something peculiar to her which seemed almost genius; yet it was perturbing. It invested her with a great charm; it gave pause for thought and it promised much: more, perhaps, than could be realized. And this woman was the child of her time but especially of her environment and therefore so unfinished, revealing disparity against disparity, in an equilibrium of opposing forces, which might be her undoing or her salvation, but were in either case her fate.