Inasmuch as no such event had ever occurred, though she must often have pondered its eventuality as she lay alone absorbed in her interminable games of patience (and though it would have plunged her in despair from the first moment of its realisation, from the first of those little unforeseen contingencies, the first word of calamitous news, whose accents can never afterwards be expunged from the memory, everything that bears upon it the imprint of actual, physical death, so terribly different from the logical abstraction of its possibility) she would fall back from time to time, to add an interest to her life, upon imaginary calamities which she would follow up with passion.