It was as
if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory
solidity and opacity. It was as if he found himself made not of flesh
and blood but of tissue paper.
But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical sensations.
It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were not absolutely his
own skin.
And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an endless
succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could find no
reassurance besieged him.
Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.
She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in familiar and
trusted things. It was not only that the world of his existence which
had seemed to be the whole universe had become diaphanous and betrayed
vast and uncontrollable realities beyond it, but his daughter had as it
were suddenly opened a door in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had
been his abiding refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and
she stood there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step
out.
"Could it be possible that she did not believe?"
He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room, slender
and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so fearless.
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