"I had had time to get terrified.

She had pushed her face so near mine and her teeth looked as though she wanted to bite me.

Her eyes seemed to have become quite dry, hard and small in a lot of horrible wrinkles.

I was too afraid of her to shudder, too afraid of her to put my fingers to my ears.

I didn't know what I expected her to call me next, but when she told me I was no better than a beggar--that there would be no more masters, no more servants, no more horses for me--I said to myself: Is that all?
I should have laughed if I hadn't been too afraid of her to make the least little sound." It seemed that poor Flora had to know all the possible phases of that sort of anguish, beginning with instinctive panic, through the bewildered stage, the frozen stage and the stage of blanched apprehension, down to the instinctive prudence of extreme terror--the stillness of the mouse.
But when she heard herself called the child of a cheat and a swindler, the very monstrous unexpectedness of this caused in her a revulsion towards letting herself go.