[Hardy-l] sentence sense

[John Farrell]

I've always been puzzled by a sentence in PBE and would like to see  
what others make of it.

Elfride has just rigged Knight's climb back to terra firma.  She's  
soaked.  He offers his coat.  She declines. The text continues:


Elfride had absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her
exterior robe or 'costume.' <The door had been made upon a woman's
wit, and it had found its way out.>  Behind the bank, whilst Knight
reclined upon the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off
her whole clothing, and replaced only her outer bodice and skirt.
Every thread of the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a
woollen and cotton rope.

The sentence in brackets means, I guess, that the rescue has been  
accomplished by Elfride's quick, cunning idea, and that this idea-- 
this ingenious reach of wit--had been enacted (<found its way out.).

  I don't really understand the image here: the rescue is an exit (a  
door?); and the wit to conceive of the exit emerges, as through a  
maze, into action?

If the meaning I am trying to state is actually the meaning of the  
sentence, I'd be inclined to think that Hardy as narrator is doing,  
as is his custom, a sort of dance in the space between the literal  
and the imagistic and constructing the space by deliberately roughing  
up his language .  But if that's what is going on, I'm even more  
flummoxed since the sentence seems a kind of wet noodle to me.  All I  
can see is that the sentence sort of tosses a little syntactical dust  
in our eyes so as to decorously blur what is coming next.   Maybe  
there's just a simpler meaning and some kind soul can point it out to  
me.

with thanks,
Jack Farrell,
UT_Austin