Often she had sat in this room, with her mind fixed so firmly on those vanished figures that she could almost see the muscles round their eyes and lips, and had given to each his own voice, with its tricks of accent, and his coat and his cravat.

Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among them, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends, because she knew their secrets and possessed a divine foreknowledge of their destiny.

They had been so unhappy, such muddlers, so wrong-headed, it seemed to her.

She could have told them what to do, and what not to do.

It was a melancholy fact that they would pay no heed to her, and were bound to come to grief in their own antiquated way.