She could keep it up with a change in sight, but she couldn't keep it up forever; so that, really, one extraordinary effect of their week of untempered confrontation, which bristled with new marks, was to make her reach out, in thought, to their customary companions and calculate the kind of relief that rejoining them would bring.

She was learning, almost from minute to minute, to be a mistress of shades since, always, when there were possibilities enough of intimacy, there were also, by that fact, in intercourse, possibilities of iridescence; but she was working against an adversary who was a master of shades too, and on whom, if she didn't look out, she should presently have imposed a consciousness of the nature of their struggle.

To feel him in fact, to think of his feeling himself, her adversary in things of this fineness--to see him at all, in short, brave a name that would represent him as in opposition-- was already to be nearly reduced to a visible smothering of her cry of alarm.

Should he guess they were having, in their so occult manner, a HIGH fight, and that it was she, all the while, in her supposed stupidity, who had made it high and was keeping it high--in the event of his doing this before they could leave town she should verily be lost.
The possible respite for her at Fawns would come from the fact that observation, in him, there, would inevitably find some of its directness diverted.

This would be the case if only because the remarkable strain of her father's placidity might be thought of as likely to claim some larger part of his attention.