For she accepted her equals
wherever she found them, and she ignored with blithe indifference her
inferiors, whether they were her brothers and sisters, or whether they
were wealthy guests of the house, or whether they were the common
people or the servants. She was quite single and by herself, deriving
from nobody. It was as if she were cut off from all purpose or
continuity, and existed simply moment by moment.
The father, as by some strange final illusion, felt as if all his fate
depended on his ensuring to Winifred her happiness. She who could never
suffer, because she never formed vital connections, she who could lose
the dearest things of her life and be just the same the next day, the
whole memory dropped out, as if deliberately, she whose will was so
strangely and easily free, anarchistic, almost nihilistic, who like a
soulless bird flits on its own will, without attachment or
responsibility beyond the moment, who in her every motion snapped the
threads of serious relationship with blithe, free hands, really
nihilistic, because never troubled, she must be the object of her
father's final passionate solicitude.
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