But she was no longer the calm lady whom the world knew. She would sit down and stand up, and go wandering from room to room, and return from these ramblings, to begin them all over again. She sat by Deirdre’s side and took her hand, peering long and earnestly into the face she loved: dwelling on the set of her eyes, the line of her cheek, the poise of her lips and her chin: watching how her teeth shone and disappeared as she spoke, what her tongue looked like as it became visible for a short red flash: looking now at her ears and now at her hair; or standing well away to take her in as a girl, as a completion, with all details merged and the human unit standing full formed at the eye.
She cogitated what dress Deirdre should wear on the morrow: what ornaments for her neck and hair; and then she thought, in a fever of inspiration, that she would take no thought of these: that the girl should be dressed even more plainly than usual: that there should be no ornaments upon her of any kind: that there should be nothing to look at but the girl herself with her hair for a crown, and her eyes for all other attraction: the light eagerness of her limbs should be their own witness: the colour of her cheek should be sufficient wonder for any eye.
And again she thought that men do not understand these things at a glance; that they are used to looking for that which they have already seen; and that they spend time, not so much in appreciating that which is present, as in trying to account for the absence of that which they had expected to see. And she remembered again that it was Conachúr himself who was coming, with a mind which would ponder exactly what was presented to it, and an eye that would regard no more than could be seen.
She determined, in terror, that she would not prepare Deirdre in any way for the visit, and that until she was called into the presence the child should know nothing even of an impending visitor.
She arranged that this should happen, and at the accustomed hour the torches were quenched and the folk of the household betook themselves to their beds.
CHAPTER XIV
But at the hour she considered suitable Deirdre rose again from her bed.
She could not rest there, although she lay with the endless patience of a cat, staring hour after hour into the gloom and seeing in it more of radiance than the sun could show.
She was living at last.
The sense that all the morrows were provided for, and that all the minutes of all the morrows were calculated and ordained, dropped from her for ever, for she had become at last an identity instead of a puppet to be pulled here and ordered there, and to do only what was willed by other people; for first the imagination awakes, and then the senses, and lastly the will, when the urge of life is focussed.