She now knew where she was. Reluctantly willing, she tried to adapt to these surroundings and remember the teachings from which she had perhaps allowed herself to be diverted too early. But her heart reared up at this compliance like a horse that is not amenable to any coaxing, and began to run wild with terror, as happens when there are feelings that want to warn the understanding but find no words. Nevertheless, after a while she tried it once again; and to support the effort, she thought of her father, who had been a liberal man and in his self-presentation had always exhibited a somewhat shallow Enlightenment style, but had nonetheless mustered a decision to consign his daughter to a convent school for her education. She felt inclined to regard this as a kind of atoning sacrifice and as an attempt, compelled by a secret insecurity, for once to do the opposite of what one takes to be one’s firm conviction: and because she felt a kinship with every inconsistency, the position she had put herself into appeared to her for a moment like a mysteriously unconscious daughterly act of repetition. But this second, voluntarily indulged shudder of piety did not last either; apparently, during the time when her soul was placed under the all-too-solicitous care of the clergy, she had lost the ability once and for all to anchor her lively intuitions in a creed. For all she had to do was inspect her immediate surroundings again, and with the cruel instinct of youth for the distance that separates the infinity of a teaching from the finiteness of the teacher, which of course easily leads one to deduce the master from the servant, the sight of this home in which she sat like a figure in a framed picture, this prison in which she had willingly and, full of expectation, ensconced herself, suddenly and irresistibly provoked her to laughter.