The first time Walter meets Mr. Fairlie is the first time the reader encounters him as well. This first meeting reveals the character to be an excessively neurotic, pretentious, and self-centered man. As he bids Walter farewell, he uses a simile that exaggerates his sensitive nature:
Would you mind taking great pains not to let the doors bang, and not to drop the portfolio? Thank you. Gently with the curtains, please—the slightest noise from them goes through me like a knife. Yes. Good morning!
Throughout this initial interaction between the two men, Mr. Fairlie constantly interrupts Walter or refrains from engaging in the conversation in a customary way, focusing instead on his unreasonable needs and haughty opinions. Mr. Fairlie's claim that noise from the curtains cuts him like a knife is not meant literally, but the mere suggestion that he could derive pain from such a faint sound nevertheless accentuates his neurotic nature for the reader. The hyperbolic simile is comical and leaves the reader with sympathy for Walter and anyone who has to deal with this difficult man—in particular his valet, Louis.
Walter's months in Cumberland with Laura and Marian go by cheerfully and quickly. He uses a simile to compare this period of time to a smooth stream, but he also indicates that danger looms ahead:
The days passed, the weeks passed; it was approaching the third month of my stay in Cumberland. The delicious monotony of life in our calm seclusion, flowed on with me like a smooth stream with a swimmer who glides down the current. All memory of the past, all thought of the future, all sense of the falseness and hopelessness of my own position, lay hushed within me into deceitful rest. Lulled by the Syren-song that my own heart sung to me, with eyes shut to all sight, and ears closed to all sound of danger, I drifted nearer and nearer to the fatal rocks.
Walter takes immense pleasure in his life at Limmeridge. He gets along very well with Marian and Laura, and he enjoys his work. In relation to this, he compares himself to a swimmer gliding through a stream in the direction of the current. He knows that thinking of the future would interrupt his flow in the stream, and he therefore completely immerses himself in the present for as long as he can.
The simile acquires a menacing undertone within a couple of sentences, however. Walter and Laura are falling in love with one another, which can't end well because their positions in society are too far apart. Alluding to the sirens of Greek mythology, creatures that lure sailors onto rocks and cause shipwrecks, Walter explains that he closed his eyes to a rational view of the situation and willingly sustained the fantasy for as long as he could. Eventually, however, Walter knows he will hit the rocks when he and Laura inevitably come to be separated.
When Marian tells Walter that Laura is engaged and that it would therefore be best for him to leave Limmeridge, Walter uses a simile to compare the news to a bullet. The pain he feels at learning that Laura will soon be married feels like being shot in the heart.
The last word went like a bullet to my heart. My arm lost all sensation of the hand that grasped it. I never moved and never spoke. The sharp autumn breeze that scattered the dead leaves at our feet, came as cold to me, on a sudden, as if my own mad hopes were dead leaves, too, whirled away by the wind like the rest. Hopes! [...]
The pang passed; and nothing but the dull numbing pain of it remained.
The shock immobilizes Walter, similar to how a real shot would. Collins leaves it ambiguous how much time passes between the figurative bullet hits Walter's heart and the figurative pang passes, but the reader is made to feel like time stops just as Walter is shot by Marian's news. Presumably only a few seconds pass. However, the syntax of the sentence, "I never moved and never spoke," makes it seem like this moment lasts for a long time.
The scene's setting, the Summer House, is central to Marian's revelation. The Summer House is the place where Walter and Laura first meet, and it becomes the backdrop of their burgeoning love. Summer is now over, however, just like the innocent joy of their romance. The dark chill of autumn makes its way into the scene by way of a second simile, in which Walter compares his hopes to dead leaves that are whirled away by the wind.
Throughout the novel, Laura is described as a beautiful, innocent, and virtuous young woman. Walter and Marian emphasize her innocence to the point of characterizing her as a child. At a certain point, Walter even uses a simile where he directly compares her to one:
She spoke as a child might have spoken; she showed me her thoughts as a child might have shown them. I waited a few minutes longer—waited to tell her that she was dearer to me now than she had ever been in the past times.
In Walter's initial period of getting to know and falling in love with Laura, he was already describing her using this kind of language. Her passivity and helplessness are some of the features that set her apart from her foil Marian and through which she embodies the ideals of Victorian womanhood. This impression of Laura as a vulnerable child is accentuated in the Third Epoch. The trauma of being separated from Marian, forced into the asylum, and told that she is Anne Catherick heightens Laura's helplessness. After the three of them move in together, Walter and Marian keep her in the dark about their schemes and even let her believe that her meager drawings are contributing to their income.
Laura's characterization is relatively weak throughout the novel—at times she seems more like a part of the setting than a character with her own thoughts, feelings, or actions. It does not help that most of the other central characters serve as narrators at some point during the novel while she does not. This simile appears at a time where Laura behaves as and is treated like the naive but beloved daughter of Marian and Walter. It is therefore significant that Walter explicitly confirms that he sees her as a child.
When Walter pays Mrs. Catherick a visit, he suggests that they should work together to crush Sir Percival. She responds that Walter should crush Sir Percival himself and come back when he has done so. As she speaks this line, Walter notices a deep-seated hatred in her voice and on her face, which he compares to a lurking reptile by way of a simile:
She spoke those words, as she had not spoken yet—quickly, fiercely, vindictively. I had stirred in its lair the serpent-hatred of years—but only for a moment. Like a lurking reptile, it leapt up at me—as she eagerly bent forward towards the place in which I was sitting. Like a lurking reptile, it dropped out of sight again—as she instantly resumed her former position in the chair.
Although the reader has learned a lot about Mrs. Catherick from other characters in earlier chapters, this is the first time she actually appears in the novel. She has overwhelmingly been characterized as a vicious person up until this chapter, and Walter's encounter with her certainly confirms this impression.
As they discuss Sir Percival, Walter manages to trigger a hatred that she has carried within her for decades, which he animates by comparing it to a lurking reptile. Her already menacing presence becomes all the more frightening when she leans towards Walter and flashes her serpent-hatred at him. The lurking reptile disappears again when she sits back down, but her ominous characterization goes nowhere.
After Walter deduces that Anne Catherick's father was Mr. Philip Fairlie—Laura's father—he contemplates the destructive effect that the two women's parentage has had on their lives. Now that the mystery surrounding the character has been dismantled, he bids Anne farewell from the narrative and employs a simile in which he compares her to a shadow:
So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable Gloom. Like a Shadow she first came to me, in the loneliness of the night. Like a Shadow she passes away, in the loneliness of the dead.
Anne Catherick has long been dead, but now that he has figured out the puzzle of her backstory, Walter seems to lay her to rest in his thoughts. The simile in which he compares her to a shadow is somewhat oxymoronic because she has constantly been associated with white, from the title down through all of the scenes in which she appears. She always dressed in white clothes because of Mrs. Fairlie's preference that young girls dress in white. Nevertheless, despite the color of her clothes, it feels appropriate to refer to this lonely and tragic figure as a ghostlike shadow. In the portions of the novel in which she is alive, she is always escaping, hiding, or yearning for eternal rest next to one of the few people who showed her kindness.
This passage also highlights that Walter is aware of the narrative he is constructing. By saying that Laura not only haunted him but also haunted "these pages," he reveals an awareness of the compilation of the book that the reader is reading. By extension, then, he has an awareness of the reader.
As Laura grows healthier and increasingly returns to her old self, Walter decides to take them on a trip to the seaside. Speaking in private with Marian, Walter expresses his desire to marry Laura. As he waits for Laura's answer, he compares the sound of the waves outside to thunder in a simile:
I sat down alone at the window, to wait through the crisis of my life. My mind, in that breathless interval, felt like a total blank. I was conscious of nothing but a painful intensity of all familiar perceptions. The sun grew blinding bright; the white sea birds chasing each other far beyond me, seemed to be flitting before my face; the mellow murmur of the waves on the beach was like thunder in my ears.
Walter waits with great anxiety to know whether Laura accepts his proposal. As he sits in the room, his mind goes blank and he experiences sensory overload. The sun is so bright that it blinds him, he feels like the distant birds are flapping their wings in his face, and the "mellow murmur of the waves" sounds like thunder.
Since meeting Laura, Walter's life has been steered by his impossible love for her. He goes to Honduras to make Laura forget him when she marries Sir Percival. Now that Sir Percival is dead and Laura has largely recovered her strength, their love is finally a possibility. Their love is also possible because they are now social equals, given that Laura's fortune and rank have presumably been lost. The thunder of the waves emphasizes the momentousness of this moment for Walter and the novel's plot more broadly.
