With
suddenly enlarged pupils and a movement as instinctive almost as the
bounding of a startled fawn, she jumped up and found herself in the
middle of the big room, exclaiming at those amazing and familiar
strangers.
"What do you want?"
You will note that she cried: What do you want? Not: What has happened?
She told Mrs. Fyne that she had received suddenly the feeling of being
personally attacked. And that must have been very terrifying. The woman
before her had been the wisdom, the authority, the protection of life,
security embodied and visible and undisputed.
You may imagine then the force of the shock in the intuitive perception
not merely of danger, for she did not know what was alarming her, but in
the sense of the security being gone. And not only security. I don't
know how to explain it clearly. Look! Even a small child lives, plays
and suffers in terms of its conception of its own existence. Imagine, if
you can, a fact coming in suddenly with a force capable of shattering
that very conception itself. It was only because of the girl being still
so much of a child that she escaped mental destruction; that, in other
words she got over it.
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