And the new faces were to be scanned and understood, the new voices listened to intently, the new ideas analysed, the new motives detected and dissected.
In drawing-rooms, in ballrooms, in boudoirs, new scenes constantly presented themselves; one house was never like the next, one hostess never resembled another; wealth itself was presented to her under
innumerable aspects ranging all the way from that false modesty and smugness known as meekness, to fevered pretence, arrogance, and noisy aggressiveness.
Wonderful school for a girl to learn in!—the gilded halls of which were eternally vexed and swept by the winds and whirlwinds of every human passion.
For here, under her still, clear scrutiny, was huddled humanity itself, unconsciously bent on self-revelation. And Athalie's very presence amid assemblies ever shifting, ever renewed, was educating her eyes and ears and intellect to an insight and a comprehension she had never dreamed of.
In some the supreme necessity for self-ventilation interested her; in others, secretiveness hermetically sealed fascinated her. Motives interested or disinterested, sordid or noble; desires, aspirations, hopes, perplexities,—whatever a glance, a word, an attitude, a silence, suggested to her, fixed her attention, excited her intelligence to curiosity, and focussed her interest to a mental concentration.
Out of which emerged deductions—curious fruits of logic, experience, instinct, intuitiveness, and of some extraneous perception, outside of and independent of her own conscious and objective personality.
But in one radical particular Athalie differed from any individual of either sex ever recorded in the history of hypnotic therapeutics or of psychic phenomena.
For those two worlds in which we all dwell, the supraliminal or waking world, the transliminal, or sleeping world, were merged in this young girl.