The Long Way by Mary Imlay Taylor

Rachel Leven stopped on the landing and laid both hands on the banister. She was experiencing a new and curious sensation of unreality, and her impulse to touch something solid was rather to assure herself that her own personality had survived unchanged, than from any physical need of support.

The contact of her sensitive fingers with the polished wood was almost a relief; it convinced her that her sensations, so vague that they were like a nebulous mist before her spiritual vision, were not actualities at all, but only a fleeting deflection from a commonplace mood, that the uneasiness she had felt all the evening was a mere figment of her imagination, a shadowy specter which had no place in this charming _mise-en-scène_. For she was poignantly aware of the heavy perfume of flowers, of the vivid gleam of electric lights that hung, like huge, quivering dewdrops, in the midst of the tall fern fronds and giant palms of the conservatory; while through the vista of greenery, festooned with scarlet blooms of a climbing passion flower, she caught a glimpse of the flashing wings of Johnstone Astry's parrots.