Night and Day

NIGHT AND DAY

CHAPTER I

It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other young

ladies of her class, Katharine Hilbery was pouring out tea. Perhaps a

fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt

over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning

and this rather subdued moment, and played with the things one does

voluntarily and normally in the daylight. But although she was silent,

she was evidently mistress of a situation which was familiar enough to

her, and inclined to let it take its way for the six hundredth time,

perhaps, without bringing into play any of her unoccupied faculties. A

single glance was enough to show that Mrs. Hilbery was so rich in the

gifts which make tea-parties of elderly distinguished people

successful, that she scarcely needed any help from her daughter,

provided that the tiresome business of teacups and bread and butter was

discharged for her.

Considering that the little party had been seated round the tea-table

for less than twenty minutes, the animation observable on their faces,

and the amount of sound they were producing collectively, were very

creditable to the hostess. It suddenly came into Katharine’s mind that

if some one opened the door at this moment he would think that they

were enjoying themselves; he would think, “What an extremely nice house

to come into!” and instinctively she laughed, and said something to

increase the noise, for the credit of the house presumably, since she

herself had not been feeling exhilarated. At the very same moment,

rather to her amusement, the door was flung open, and a young man

entered the room. Katharine, as she shook hands with him, asked him, in

her own mind, “Now, do you think we’re enjoying ourselves

enormously?”... “Mr. Denham, mother,” she said aloud, for she saw that

her mother had forgotten his name.

That fact was perceptible to Mr. Denham also, and increased the

awkwardness which inevitably attends the entrance of a stranger into a

room full of people much at their ease, and all launched upon

sentences. At the same time, it seemed to Mr. Denham as if a thousand

softly padded doors had closed between him and the street outside. A

fine mist, the etherealized essence of the fog, hung visibly in the

wide and rather empty space of the drawing-room, all silver where the

candles were grouped on the tea-table, and ruddy again in the

firelight. With the omnibuses and cabs still running in his head, and

his body still tingling with his quick walk along the streets and in

and out of traffic and foot-passengers, this drawing-room seemed very

remote and still; and the faces of the elderly people were mellowed, at

some distance from each other, and had a bloom on them owing to the

fact that the air in the drawing-room was thickened by blue grains of

mist. Mr. Denham had come in as Mr. Fortescue, the eminent novelist,

reached the middle of a very long sentence. He kept this suspended

while the newcomer sat down, and Mrs. Hilbery deftly joined the severed

parts by leaning towards him and remarking:

“Now, what would you do if you were married to an engineer, and had to

live in Manchester, Mr. Denham?”

“Surely she could learn Persian,” broke in a thin, elderly gentleman.

“Is there no retired schoolmaster or man of letters in Manchester with

whom she could read Persian?”

“A cousin of ours has married and gone to live in Manchester,”

Katharine explained. Mr. Denham muttered something, which was indeed

all that was required of him, and the novelist went on where he had

left off. Privately, Mr. Denham cursed himself very sharply for having

exchanged the freedom of the street for this sophisticated

drawing-room, where, among other disagreeables, he certainly would not

appear at his best. He glanced round him, and saw that, save for

Katharine, they were all over forty, the only consolation being that

Mr. Fortescue was a considerable celebrity, so that to-morrow one might

be glad to have met him.

“Have you ever been to Manchester?” he asked Katharine.

“Never,” she replied.

“Why do you object to it, then?”

Katharine stirred her tea, and seemed to speculate, so Denham thought,

upon the duty of filling somebody else’s cup, but she was really

wondering how she was going to keep this strange young man in harmony

with the rest. She observed that he was compressing his teacup, so that

there was danger lest the thin china might cave inwards. She could see

that he was nervous; one would expect a bony young man with his face

slightly reddened by the wind, and his hair not altogether smooth, to

be nervous in such a party. Further, he probably disliked this kind of

thing, and had come out of curiosity, or because her father had invited

him—anyhow, he would not be easily combined with the rest.

“I should think there would be no one to talk to in Manchester,” she

replied at random. Mr. Fortescue had been observing her for a moment or

two, as novelists are inclined to observe, and at this remark he

smiled, and made it the text for a little further speculation.

“In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Katharine decidedly

hits the mark,” he said, and lying back in his chair, with his opaque

contemplative eyes fixed on the ceiling, and the tips of his fingers

pressed together, he depicted, first the horrors of the streets of

Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the

town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live,

and then the professors and the miserable young students devoted to the

more strenuous works of our younger dramatists, who would visit her,

and how her appearance would change by degrees, and how she would fly

to London, and how Katharine would have to lead her about, as one leads

an eager dog on a chain, past rows of clamorous butchers’ shops, poor

dear creature.

“Oh, Mr. Fortescue,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, as he finished, “I had

just written to say how I envied her! I was thinking of the big gardens

and the dear old ladies in mittens, who read nothing but the

“Spectator,” and snuff the candles. Have they _all_ disappeared? I told

her she would find the nice things of London without the horrid streets

that depress one so.”

“There is the University,” said the thin gentleman, who had previously

insisted upon the existence of people knowing Persian.

“I know there are moors there, because I read about them in a book the

other day,” said Katharine.

“I am grieved and amazed at the ignorance of my family,” Mr. Hilbery

remarked. He was an elderly man, with a pair of oval, hazel eyes which

were rather bright for his time of life, and relieved the heaviness of

his face. He played constantly with a little green stone attached to

his watch-chain, thus displaying long and very sensitive fingers, and

had a habit of moving his head hither and thither very quickly without

altering the position of his large and rather corpulent body, so that

he seemed to be providing himself incessantly with food for amusement

and reflection with the least possible expenditure of energy. One might

suppose that he had passed the time of life when his ambitions were

personal, or that he had gratified them as far as he was likely to do,

and now employed his considerable acuteness rather to observe and

reflect than to attain any result.

Katharine, so Denham decided, while Mr. Fortescue built up another

rounded structure of words, had a likeness to each of her parents, but

these elements were rather oddly blended. She had the quick, impulsive

movements of her mother, the lips parting often to speak, and closing

again; and the dark oval eyes of her father brimming with light upon a

basis of sadness, or, since she was too young to have acquired a

sorrowful point of view, one might say that the basis was not sadness

so much as a spirit given to contemplation and self-control. Judging by

her hair, her coloring, and the shape of her features, she was

striking, if not actually beautiful. Decision and composure stamped

her, a combination of qualities that produced a very marked character,

and one that was not calculated to put a young man, who scarcely knew

her, at his ease. For the rest, she was tall; her dress was of some

quiet color, with old yellow-tinted lace for ornament, to which the

spark of an ancient jewel gave its one red gleam. Denham noticed that,

although silent, she kept sufficient control of the situation to answer

immediately her mother appealed to her for help, and yet it was obvious

to him that she attended only with the surface skin of her mind. It

struck him that her position at the tea-table, among all these elderly

people, was not without its difficulties, and he checked his

inclination to find her, or her attitude, generally antipathetic to

him. The talk had passed over Manchester, after dealing with it very

generously.

“Would it be the Battle of Trafalgar or the Spanish Armada, Katharine?”

her mother demanded.

“Trafalgar, mother.”

“Trafalgar, of course! How stupid of me! Another cup of tea, with a

thin slice of lemon in it, and then, dear Mr. Fortescue, please explain

my absurd little puzzle. One can’t help believing gentlemen with Roman

noses, even if one meets them in omnibuses.”

Mr. Hilbery here interposed so far as Denham was concerned, and talked

a great deal of sense about the solicitors’ profession, and the changes

which he had seen in his lifetime. Indeed, Denham properly fell to his

lot, owing to the fact that an article by Denham upon some legal

matter, published by Mr. Hilbery in his Review, had brought them

acquainted. But when a moment later Mrs. Sutton Bailey was announced,

he turned to her, and Mr. Denham found himself sitting silent,

rejecting possible things to say, beside Katharine, who was silent too.

Being much about the same age and both under thirty, they were

prohibited from the use of a great many convenient phrases which launch

conversation into smooth waters. They were further silenced by

Katharine’s rather malicious determination not to help this young man,

in whose upright and resolute bearing she detected something hostile to

her surroundings, by any of the usual feminine amenities. They

therefore sat silent, Denham controlling his desire to say something

abrupt and explosive, which should shock her into life. But Mrs.

Hilbery was immediately sensitive to any silence in the drawing-room,

as of a dumb note in a sonorous scale, and leaning across the table she

observed, in the curiously tentative detached manner which always gave

her phrases the likeness of butterflies flaunting from one sunny spot

to another, “D’you know, Mr. Denham, you remind me so much of dear Mr.

Ruskin.... Is it his tie, Katharine, or his hair, or the way he sits in

his chair? Do tell me, Mr. Denham, are you an admirer of Ruskin? Some

one, the other day, said to me, ‘Oh, no, we don’t read Ruskin, Mrs.

Hilbery.’ What _do_ you read, I wonder?—for you can’t spend all your

time going up in aeroplanes and burrowing into the bowels of the

earth.”

She looked benevolently at Denham, who said nothing articulate, and

then at Katharine, who smiled but said nothing either, upon which Mrs.

Hilbery seemed possessed by a brilliant idea, and exclaimed:

“I’m sure Mr. Denham would like to see our things, Katharine. I’m sure

he’s not like that dreadful young man, Mr. Ponting, who told me that he

considered it our duty to live exclusively in the present. After all,

what IS the present? Half of it’s the past, and the better half, too, I

should say,” she added, turning to Mr. Fortescue.

Denham rose, half meaning to go, and thinking that he had seen all that

there was to see, but Katharine rose at the same moment, and saying,

“Perhaps you would like to see the pictures,” led the way across the

drawing-room to a smaller room opening out of it.

The smaller room was something like a chapel in a cathedral, or a

grotto in a cave, for the booming sound of the traffic in the distance

suggested the soft surge of waters, and the oval mirrors, with their

silver surface, were like deep pools trembling beneath starlight. But

the comparison to a religious temple of some kind was the more apt of

the two, for the little room was crowded with relics.

As Katharine touched different spots, lights sprang here and there, and

revealed a square mass of red-and-gold books, and then a long skirt in

blue-and-white paint lustrous behind glass, and then a mahogany

writing-table, with its orderly equipment, and, finally, a picture

above the table, to which special illumination was accorded. When

Katharine had touched these last lights, she stood back, as much as to

say, “There!” Denham found himself looked down upon by the eyes of the

great poet, Richard Alardyce, and suffered a little shock which would

have led him, had he been wearing a hat, to remove it. The eyes looked

at him out of the mellow pinks and yellows of the paint with divine

friendliness, which embraced him, and passed on to contemplate the

entire world. The paint had so faded that very little but the beautiful

large eyes were left, dark in the surrounding dimness.

Katharine waited as though for him to receive a full impression, and

then she said:

“This is his writing-table. He used this pen,” and she lifted a quill

pen and laid it down again. The writing-table was splashed with old

ink, and the pen disheveled in service. There lay the gigantic

gold-rimmed spectacles, ready to his hand, and beneath the table was a

pair of large, worn slippers, one of which Katharine picked up,

remarking:

“I think my grandfather must have been at least twice as large as any

one is nowadays. This,” she went on, as if she knew what she had to say

by heart, “is the original manuscript of the ‘Ode to Winter.’ The early

poems are far less corrected than the later. Would you like to look at

it?”

While Mr. Denham examined the manuscript, she glanced up at her

grandfather, and, for the thousandth time, fell into a pleasant dreamy

state in which she seemed to be the companion of those giant men, of

their own lineage, at any rate, and the insignificant present moment

was put to shame. That magnificent ghostly head on the canvas, surely,

never beheld all the trivialities of a Sunday afternoon, and it did not

seem to matter what she and this young man said to each other, for they

were only small people.

“This is a copy of the first edition of the poems,” she continued,

without considering the fact that Mr. Denham was still occupied with

the manuscript, “which contains several poems that have not been

reprinted, as well as corrections.” She paused for a minute, and then

went on, as if these spaces had all been calculated.

“That lady in blue is my great-grandmother, by Millington. Here is my

uncle’s walking-stick—he was Sir Richard Warburton, you know, and rode

with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow. And then, let me see—oh, that’s

the original Alardyce, 1697, the founder of the family fortunes, with

his wife. Some one gave us this bowl the other day because it has their

crest and initials. We think it must have been given them to celebrate

their silver wedding-day.”

Here she stopped for a moment, wondering why it was that Mr. Denham

said nothing. Her feeling that he was antagonistic to her, which had

lapsed while she thought of her family possessions, returned so keenly

that she stopped in the middle of her catalog and looked at him. Her

mother, wishing to connect him reputably with the great dead, had

compared him with Mr. Ruskin; and the comparison was in Katharine’s

mind, and led her to be more critical of the young man than was fair,

for a young man paying a call in a tail-coat is in a different element

altogether from a head seized at its climax of expressiveness, gazing

immutably from behind a sheet of glass, which was all that remained to

her of Mr. Ruskin. He had a singular face—a face built for swiftness

and decision rather than for massive contemplation; the forehead broad,

the nose long and formidable, the lips clean-shaven and at once dogged

and sensitive, the cheeks lean, with a deeply running tide of red blood

in them. His eyes, expressive now of the usual masculine impersonality

and authority, might reveal more subtle emotions under favorable

circumstances, for they were large, and of a clear, brown color; they

seemed unexpectedly to hesitate and speculate; but Katharine only

looked at him to wonder whether his face would not have come nearer the

standard of her dead heroes if it had been adorned with side-whiskers.

In his spare build and thin, though healthy, cheeks, she saw tokens of

an angular and acrid soul. His voice, she noticed, had a slight

vibrating or creaking sound in it, as he laid down the manuscript and

said:

“You must be very proud of your family, Miss Hilbery.”

“Yes, I am,” Katharine answered, and she added, “Do you think there’s

anything wrong in that?”

“Wrong? How should it be wrong? It must be a bore, though, showing your

things to visitors,” he added reflectively.

“Not if the visitors like them.”

“Isn’t it difficult to live up to your ancestors?” he proceeded.

“I dare say I shouldn’t try to write poetry,” Katharine replied.

“No. And that’s what I should hate. I couldn’t bear my grandfather to

cut me out. And, after all,” Denham went on, glancing round him

satirically, as Katharine thought, “it’s not your grandfather only.

You’re cut out all the way round. I suppose you come of one of the most

distinguished families in England. There are the Warburtons and the

Mannings—and you’re related to the Otways, aren’t you? I read it all in

some magazine,” he added.

“The Otways are my cousins,” Katharine replied.

“Well,” said Denham, in a final tone of voice, as if his argument were

proved.

“Well,” said Katharine, “I don’t see that you’ve proved anything.”

Denham smiled, in a peculiarly provoking way. He was amused and

gratified to find that he had the power to annoy his oblivious,

supercilious hostess, if he could not impress her; though he would have

preferred to impress her.

He sat silent, holding the precious little book of poems unopened in

his hands, and Katharine watched him, the melancholy or contemplative

expression deepening in her eyes as her annoyance faded. She appeared

to be considering many things. She had forgotten her duties.

“Well,” said Denham again, suddenly opening the little book of poems,

as though he had said all that he meant to say or could, with

propriety, say. He turned over the pages with great decision, as if he

were judging the book in its entirety, the printing and paper and

binding, as well as the poetry, and then, having satisfied himself of

its good or bad quality, he placed it on the writing-table, and

examined the malacca cane with the gold knob which had belonged to the

soldier.

“But aren’t you proud of your family?” Katharine demanded.

“No,” said Denham. “We’ve never done anything to be proud of—unless you

count paying one’s bills a matter for pride.”

“That sounds rather dull,” Katharine remarked.

“You would think us horribly dull,” Denham agreed.

“Yes, I might find you dull, but I don’t think I should find you

ridiculous,” Katharine added, as if Denham had actually brought that

charge against her family.

“No—because we’re not in the least ridiculous. We’re a respectable

middle-class family, living at Highgate.”

“We don’t live at Highgate, but we’re middle class too, I suppose.”

Denham merely smiled, and replacing the malacca cane on the rack, he

drew a sword from its ornamental sheath.

“That belonged to Clive, so we say,” said Katharine, taking up her

duties as hostess again automatically.

“Is it a lie?” Denham inquired.

“It’s a family tradition. I don’t know that we can prove it.”

“You see, we don’t have traditions in our family,” said Denham.

“You sound very dull,” Katharine remarked, for the second time.

“Merely middle class,” Denham replied.

“You pay your bills, and you speak the truth. I don’t see why you

should despise us.”

Mr. Denham carefully sheathed the sword which the Hilberys said

belonged to Clive.

“I shouldn’t like to be you; that’s all I said,” he replied, as if he

were saying what he thought as accurately as he could.

“No, but one never would like to be any one else.”

“I should. I should like to be lots of other people.”

“Then why not us?” Katharine asked.

Denham looked at her as she sat in her grandfather’s arm-chair, drawing

her great-uncle’s malacca cane smoothly through her fingers, while her

background was made up equally of lustrous blue-and-white paint, and

crimson books with gilt lines on them. The vitality and composure of

her attitude, as of a bright-plumed bird poised easily before further

flights, roused him to show her the limitations of her lot. So soon, so

easily, would he be forgotten.

“You’ll never know anything at first hand,” he began, almost savagely.

“It’s all been done for you. You’ll never know the pleasure of buying

things after saving up for them, or reading books for the first time,

or making discoveries.”

“Go on,” Katharine observed, as he paused, suddenly doubtful, when he

heard his voice proclaiming aloud these facts, whether there was any

truth in them.

“Of course, I don’t know how you spend your time,” he continued, a

little stiffly, “but I suppose you have to show people round. You are

writing a life of your grandfather, aren’t you? And this kind of

thing”—he nodded towards the other room, where they could hear bursts

of cultivated laughter—“must take up a lot of time.”

She looked at him expectantly, as if between them they were decorating

a small figure of herself, and she saw him hesitating in the

disposition of some bow or sash.

“You’ve got it very nearly right,” she said, “but I only help my

mother. I don’t write myself.”

“Do you do anything yourself?” he demanded.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “I don’t leave the house at ten and come

back at six.”

“I don’t mean that.”

Mr. Denham had recovered his self-control; he spoke with a quietness

which made Katharine rather anxious that he should explain himself, but

at the same time she wished to annoy him, to waft him away from her on

some light current of ridicule or satire, as she was wont to do with

these intermittent young men of her father’s.

“Nobody ever does do anything worth doing nowadays,” she remarked. “You

see”—she tapped the volume of her grandfather’s poems—“we don’t even

print as well as they did, and as for poets or painters or

novelists—there are none; so, at any rate, I’m not singular.”

“No, we haven’t any great men,” Denham replied. “I’m very glad that we

haven’t. I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth

century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation.”

Katharine opened her lips and drew in her breath, as if to reply with

equal vigor, when the shutting of a door in the next room withdrew her

attention, and they both became conscious that the voices, which had

been rising and falling round the tea-table, had fallen silent; the

light, even, seemed to have sunk lower. A moment later Mrs. Hilbery

appeared in the doorway of the ante-room. She stood looking at them

with a smile of expectancy on her face, as if a scene from the drama of

the younger generation were being played for her benefit. She was a

remarkable-looking woman, well advanced in the sixties, but owing to

the lightness of her frame and the brightness of her eyes she seemed to

have been wafted over the surface of the years without taking much harm

in the passage. Her face was shrunken and aquiline, but any hint of

sharpness was dispelled by the large blue eyes, at once sagacious and

innocent, which seemed to regard the world with an enormous desire that

it should behave itself nobly, and an entire confidence that it could

do so, if it would only take the pains.

Certain lines on the broad forehead and about the lips might be taken

to suggest that she had known moments of some difficulty and perplexity

in the course of her career, but these had not destroyed her

trustfulness, and she was clearly still prepared to give every one any

number of fresh chances and the whole system the benefit of the doubt.

She wore a great resemblance to her father, and suggested, as he did,

the fresh airs and open spaces of a younger world.

“Well,” she said, “how do you like our things, Mr. Denham?”

Mr. Denham rose, put his book down, opened his mouth, but said nothing,

as Katharine observed, with some amusement.

Mrs. Hilbery handled the book he had laid down.

“There are some books that _live_,” she mused. “They are young with us,

and they grow old with us. Are you fond of poetry, Mr. Denham? But what

an absurd question to ask! The truth is, dear Mr. Fortescue has almost

tired me out. He is so eloquent and so witty, so searching and so

profound that, after half an hour or so, I feel inclined to turn out

all the lights. But perhaps he’d be more wonderful than ever in the

dark. What d’you think, Katharine? Shall we give a little party in

complete darkness? There’d have to be bright rooms for the bores....”

Here Mr. Denham held out his hand.

“But we’ve any number of things to show you!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed,

taking no notice of it. “Books, pictures, china, manuscripts, and the

very chair that Mary Queen of Scots sat in when she heard of Darnley’s

murder. I must lie down for a little, and Katharine must change her

dress (though she’s wearing a very pretty one), but if you don’t mind

being left alone, supper will be at eight. I dare say you’ll write a

poem of your own while you’re waiting. Ah, how I love the firelight!

Doesn’t our room look charming?”

She stepped back and bade them contemplate the empty drawing-room, with

its rich, irregular lights, as the flames leapt and wavered.

“Dear things!” she exclaimed. “Dear chairs and tables! How like old

friends they are—faithful, silent friends. Which reminds me, Katharine,

little Mr. Anning is coming to-night, and Tite Street, and Cadogan

Square.... Do remember to get that drawing of your great-uncle glazed.

Aunt Millicent remarked it last time she was here, and I know how it

would hurt me to see _my_ father in a broken glass.”

It was like tearing through a maze of diamond-glittering spiders’ webs

to say good-bye and escape, for at each movement Mrs. Hilbery

remembered something further about the villainies of picture-framers or

the delights of poetry, and at one time it seemed to the young man that

he would be hypnotized into doing what she pretended to want him to do,

for he could not suppose that she attached any value whatever to his

presence. Katharine, however, made an opportunity for him to leave, and

for that he was grateful to her, as one young person is grateful for

the understanding of another.

CHAPTER II

The young man shut the door with a sharper slam than any visitor had

used that afternoon, and walked up the street at a great pace, cutting

the air with his walking-stick. He was glad to find himself outside

that drawing-room, breathing raw fog, and in contact with unpolished

people who only wanted their share of the pavement allowed them. He

thought that if he had had Mr. or Mrs. or Miss Hilbery out here he

would have made them, somehow, feel his superiority, for he was chafed

by the memory of halting awkward sentences which had failed to give

even the young woman with the sad, but inwardly ironical eyes a hint of

his force. He tried to recall the actual words of his little outburst,

and unconsciously supplemented them by so many words of greater

expressiveness that the irritation of his failure was somewhat

assuaged. Sudden stabs of the unmitigated truth assailed him now and

then, for he was not inclined by nature to take a rosy view of his

conduct, but what with the beat of his foot upon the pavement, and the

glimpse which half-drawn curtains offered him of kitchens,

dining-rooms, and drawing-rooms, illustrating with mute power different

scenes from different lives, his own experience lost its sharpness.

His own experience underwent a curious change. His speed slackened, his

head sank a little towards his breast, and the lamplight shone now and

again upon a face grown strangely tranquil. His thought was so

absorbing that when it became necessary to verify the name of a street,

he looked at it for a time before he read it; when he came to a

crossing, he seemed to have to reassure himself by two or three taps,

such as a blind man gives, upon the curb; and, reaching the Underground

station, he blinked in the bright circle of light, glanced at his

watch, decided that he might still indulge himself in darkness, and

walked straight on.

And yet the thought was the thought with which he had started. He was

still thinking about the people in the house which he had left; but

instead of remembering, with whatever accuracy he could, their looks

and sayings, he had consciously taken leave of the literal truth. A

turn of the street, a firelit room, something monumental in the

procession of the lamp-posts, who shall say what accident of light or

shape had suddenly changed the prospect within his mind, and led him to

murmur aloud:

“She’ll do.... Yes, Katharine Hilbery’ll do.... I’ll take Katharine

Hilbery.”

As soon as he had said this, his pace slackened, his head fell, his

eyes became fixed. The desire to justify himself, which had been so

urgent, ceased to torment him, and, as if released from constraint, so

that they worked without friction or bidding, his faculties leapt

forward and fixed, as a matter of course, upon the form of Katharine

Hilbery. It was marvellous how much they found to feed upon,

considering the destructive nature of Denham’s criticism in her

presence. The charm, which he had tried to disown, when under the

effect of it, the beauty, the character, the aloofness, which he had

been determined not to feel, now possessed him wholly; and when, as

happened by the nature of things, he had exhausted his memory, he went

on with his imagination. He was conscious of what he was about, for in

thus dwelling upon Miss Hilbery’s qualities, he showed a kind of

method, as if he required this vision of her for a particular purpose.

He increased her height, he darkened her hair; but physically there was

not much to change in her. His most daring liberty was taken with her

mind, which, for reasons of his own, he desired to be exalted and

infallible, and of such independence that it was only in the case of

Ralph Denham that it swerved from its high, swift flight, but where he

was concerned, though fastidious at first, she finally swooped from her

eminence to crown him with her approval. These delicious details,

however, were to be worked out in all their ramifications at his

leisure; the main point was that Katharine Hilbery would do; she would

do for weeks, perhaps for months. In taking her he had provided himself

with something the lack of which had left a bare place in his mind for

a considerable time. He gave a sigh of satisfaction; his consciousness

of his actual position somewhere in the neighborhood of Knightsbridge

returned to him, and he was soon speeding in the train towards

Highgate.

Although thus supported by the knowledge of his new possession of

considerable value, he was not proof against the familiar thoughts

which the suburban streets and the damp shrubs growing in front gardens

and the absurd names painted in white upon the gates of those gardens

suggested to him. His walk was uphill, and his mind dwelt gloomily upon

the house which he approached, where he would find six or seven

brothers and sisters, a widowed mother, and, probably, some aunt or

uncle sitting down to an unpleasant meal under a very bright light.

Should he put in force the threat which, two weeks ago, some such

gathering had wrung from him—the terrible threat that if visitors came

on Sunday he should dine alone in his room? A glance in the direction

of Miss Hilbery determined him to make his stand this very night, and

accordingly, having let himself in, having verified the presence of

Uncle Joseph by means of a bowler hat and a very large umbrella, he

gave his orders to the maid, and went upstairs to his room.

He went up a great many flights of stairs, and he noticed, as he had

very seldom noticed, how the carpet became steadily shabbier, until it

ceased altogether, how the walls were discolored, sometimes by cascades

of damp, and sometimes by the outlines of picture-frames since removed,

how the paper flapped loose at the corners, and a great flake of

plaster had fallen from the ceiling. The room itself was a cheerless

one to return to at this inauspicious hour. A flattened sofa would,

later in the evening, become a bed; one of the tables concealed a

washing apparatus; his clothes and boots were disagreeably mixed with

books which bore the gilt of college arms; and, for decoration, there

hung upon the wall photographs of bridges and cathedrals and large,

unprepossessing groups of insufficiently clothed young men, sitting in

rows one above another upon stone steps. There was a look of meanness

and shabbiness in the furniture and curtains, and nowhere any sign of

luxury or even of a cultivated taste, unless the cheap classics in the

book-case were a sign of an effort in that direction. The only object

that threw any light upon the character of the room’s owner was a large

perch, placed in the window to catch the air and sun, upon which a tame

and, apparently, decrepit rook hopped dryly from side to side. The

bird, encouraged by a scratch behind the ear, settled upon Denham’s

shoulder. He lit his gas-fire and settled down in gloomy patience to

await his dinner. After sitting thus for some minutes a small girl

popped her head in to say,

“Mother says, aren’t you coming down, Ralph? Uncle Joseph—”

“They’re to bring my dinner up here,” said Ralph, peremptorily;

whereupon she vanished, leaving the door ajar in her haste to be gone.

After Denham had waited some minutes, in the course of which neither he

nor the rook took their eyes off the fire, he muttered a curse, ran

downstairs, intercepted the parlor-maid, and cut himself a slice of

bread and cold meat. As he did so, the dining-room door sprang open, a

voice exclaimed “Ralph!” but Ralph paid no attention to the voice, and

made off upstairs with his plate. He set it down in a chair opposite

him, and ate with a ferocity that was due partly to anger and partly to

hunger. His mother, then, was determined not to respect his wishes; he

was a person of no importance in his own family; he was sent for and

treated as a child. He reflected, with a growing sense of injury, that

almost every one of his actions since opening the door of his room had

been won from the grasp of the family system. By rights, he should have

been sitting downstairs in the drawing-room describing his afternoon’s

adventures, or listening to the afternoon’s adventures of other people;

the room itself, the gas-fire, the arm-chair—all had been fought for;

the wretched bird, with half its feathers out and one leg lamed by a

cat, had been rescued under protest; but what his family most resented,

he reflected, was his wish for privacy. To dine alone, or to sit alone

after dinner, was flat rebellion, to be fought with every weapon of

underhand stealth or of open appeal. Which did he dislike

most—deception or tears? But, at any rate, they could not rob him of

his thoughts; they could not make him say where he had been or whom he

had seen. That was his own affair; that, indeed, was a step entirely in

the right direction, and, lighting his pipe, and cutting up the remains

of his meal for the benefit of the rook, Ralph calmed his rather

excessive irritation and settled down to think over his prospects.

This particular afternoon was a step in the right direction, because it

was part of his plan to get to know people beyond the family circuit,

just as it was part of his plan to learn German this autumn, and to

review legal books for Mr. Hilbery’s “Critical Review.” He had always

made plans since he was a small boy; for poverty, and the fact that he

was the eldest son of a large family, had given him the habit of

thinking of spring and summer, autumn and winter, as so many stages in

a prolonged campaign. Although he was still under thirty, this

forecasting habit had marked two semicircular lines above his eyebrows,

which threatened, at this moment, to crease into their wonted shapes.

But instead of settling down to think, he rose, took a small piece of

cardboard marked in large letters with the word OUT, and hung it upon

the handle of his door. This done, he sharpened a pencil, lit a

reading-lamp and opened his book. But still he hesitated to take his

seat. He scratched the rook, he walked to the window; he parted the

curtains, and looked down upon the city which lay, hazily luminous,

beneath him. He looked across the vapors in the direction of Chelsea;

looked fixedly for a moment, and then returned to his chair. But the

whole thickness of some learned counsel’s treatise upon Torts did not

screen him satisfactorily. Through the pages he saw a drawing-room,

very empty and spacious; he heard low voices, he saw women’s figures,

he could even smell the scent of the cedar log which flamed in the

grate. His mind relaxed its tension, and seemed to be giving out now

what it had taken in unconsciously at the time. He could remember Mr.

Fortescue’s exact words, and the rolling emphasis with which he

delivered them, and he began to repeat what Mr. Fortescue had said, in

Mr. Fortescue’s own manner, about Manchester. His mind then began to

wander about the house, and he wondered whether there were other rooms

like the drawing-room, and he thought, inconsequently, how beautiful

the bathroom must be, and how leisurely it was—the life of these

well-kept people, who were, no doubt, still sitting in the same room,

only they had changed their clothes, and little Mr. Anning was there,

and the aunt who would mind if the glass of her father’s picture was

broken. Miss Hilbery had changed her dress (“although she’s wearing

such a pretty one,” he heard her mother say), and she was talking to

Mr. Anning, who was well over forty, and bald into the bargain, about

books. How peaceful and spacious it was; and the peace possessed him so

completely that his muscles slackened, his book drooped from his hand,

and he forgot that the hour of work was wasting minute by minute.

He was roused by a creak upon the stair. With a guilty start he

composed himself, frowned and looked intently at the fifty-sixth page

of his volume. A step paused outside his door, and he knew that the

person, whoever it might be, was considering the placard, and debating

whether to honor its decree or not. Certainly, policy advised him to

sit still in autocratic silence, for no custom can take root in a

family unless every breach of it is punished severely for the first six

months or so. But Ralph was conscious of a distinct wish to be

interrupted, and his disappointment was perceptible when he heard the

creaking sound rather farther down the stairs, as if his visitor had

decided to withdraw. He rose, opened the door with unnecessary

abruptness, and waited on the landing. The person stopped

simultaneously half a flight downstairs.

“Ralph?” said a voice, inquiringly.

“Joan?”

“I was coming up, but I saw your notice.”

“Well, come along in, then.” He concealed his desire beneath a tone as

grudging as he could make it.

Joan came in, but she was careful to show, by standing upright with one

hand upon the mantelpiece, that she was only there for a definite

purpose, which discharged, she would go.

She was older than Ralph by some three or four years. Her face was

round but worn, and expressed that tolerant but anxious good humor

which is the special attribute of elder sisters in large families. Her

pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph’s, save in expression, for whereas

he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to

be in the habit of considering everything from many different points of

view. This made her appear his elder by more years than existed in fact

between them. Her gaze rested for a moment or two upon the rook. She

then said, without any preface:

“It’s about Charles and Uncle John’s offer.... Mother’s been talking to

me. She says she can’t afford to pay for him after this term. She says

she’ll have to ask for an overdraft as it is.”

“That’s simply not true,” said Ralph.

“No. I thought not. But she won’t believe me when I say it.”

Ralph, as if he could foresee the length of this familiar argument,

drew up a chair for his sister and sat down himself.

“I’m not interrupting?” she inquired.

Ralph shook his head, and for a time they sat silent. The lines curved

themselves in semicircles above their eyes.

“She doesn’t understand that one’s got to take risks,” he observed,

finally.

“I believe mother would take risks if she knew that Charles was the

sort of boy to profit by it.”

“He’s got brains, hasn’t he?” said Ralph. His tone had taken on that

shade of pugnacity which suggested to his sister that some personal

grievance drove him to take the line he did. She wondered what it might

be, but at once recalled her mind, and assented.

“In some ways he’s fearfully backward, though, compared with what you

were at his age. And he’s difficult at home, too. He makes Molly slave

for him.”

Ralph made a sound which belittled this particular argument. It was

plain to Joan that she had struck one of her brother’s perverse moods,

and he was going to oppose whatever his mother said. He called her

“she,” which was a proof of it. She sighed involuntarily, and the sigh

annoyed Ralph, and he exclaimed with irritation:

“It’s pretty hard lines to stick a boy into an office at seventeen!”

“Nobody _wants_ to stick him into an office,” she said.

She, too, was becoming annoyed. She had spent the whole of the

afternoon discussing wearisome details of education and expense with

her mother, and she had come to her brother for help, encouraged,

rather irrationally, to expect help by the fact that he had been out

somewhere, she didn’t know and didn’t mean to ask where, all the

afternoon.

Ralph was fond of his sister, and her irritation made him think how

unfair it was that all these burdens should be laid on her shoulders.

“The truth is,” he observed gloomily, “that I ought to have accepted

Uncle John’s offer. I should have been making six hundred a year by

this time.”

“I don’t think that for a moment,” Joan replied quickly, repenting of

her annoyance. “The question, to my mind, is, whether we couldn’t cut

down our expenses in some way.”

“A smaller house?”

“Fewer servants, perhaps.”

Neither brother nor sister spoke with much conviction, and after

reflecting for a moment what these proposed reforms in a strictly

economical household meant, Ralph announced very decidedly:

“It’s out of the question.”

It was out of the question that she should put any more household work

upon herself. No, the hardship must fall on him, for he was determined

that his family should have as many chances of distinguishing

themselves as other families had—as the Hilberys had, for example. He

believed secretly and rather defiantly, for it was a fact not capable

of proof, that there was something very remarkable about his family.

“If mother won’t run risks—”

“You really can’t expect her to sell out again.”

“She ought to look upon it as an investment; but if she won’t, we must

find some other way, that’s all.”

A threat was contained in this sentence, and Joan knew, without asking,

what the threat was. In the course of his professional life, which now

extended over six or seven years, Ralph had saved, perhaps, three or

four hundred pounds. Considering the sacrifices he had made in order to

put by this sum it always amazed Joan to find that he used it to gamble

with, buying shares and selling them again, increasing it sometimes,

sometimes diminishing it, and always running the risk of losing every

penny of it in a day’s disaster. But although she wondered, she could

not help loving him the better for his odd combination of Spartan

self-control and what appeared to her romantic and childish folly.

Ralph interested her more than any one else in the world, and she often

broke off in the middle of one of these economic discussions, in spite

of their gravity, to consider some fresh aspect of his character.

“I think you’d be foolish to risk your money on poor old Charles,” she

observed. “Fond as I am of him, he doesn’t seem to me exactly

brilliant.... Besides, why should you be sacrificed?”

“My dear Joan,” Ralph exclaimed, stretching himself out with a gesture

of impatience, “don’t you see that we’ve all got to be sacrificed?

What’s the use of denying it? What’s the use of struggling against it?

So it always has been, so it always will be. We’ve got no money and we

never shall have any money. We shall just turn round in the mill every

day of our lives until we drop and die, worn out, as most people do,

when one comes to think of it.”

Joan looked at him, opened her lips as if to speak, and closed them

again. Then she said, very tentatively:

“Aren’t you happy, Ralph?”

“No. Are you? Perhaps I’m as happy as most people, though. God knows

whether I’m happy or not. What is happiness?”

He glanced with half a smile, in spite of his gloomy irritation, at his

sister. She looked, as usual, as if she were weighing one thing with

another, and balancing them together before she made up her mind.

“Happiness,” she remarked at length enigmatically, rather as if she

were sampling the word, and then she paused. She paused for a

considerable space, as if she were considering happiness in all its

bearings. “Hilda was here to-day,” she suddenly resumed, as if they had

never mentioned happiness. “She brought Bobbie—he’s a fine boy now.”

Ralph observed, with an amusement that had a tinge of irony in it, that

she was now going to sidle away quickly from this dangerous approach to

intimacy on to topics of general and family interest. Nevertheless, he

reflected, she was the only one of his family with whom he found it

possible to discuss happiness, although he might very well have

discussed happiness with Miss Hilbery at their first meeting. He looked

critically at Joan, and wished that she did not look so provincial or

suburban in her high green dress with the faded trimming, so patient,

and almost resigned. He began to wish to tell her about the Hilberys in

order to abuse them, for in the miniature battle which so often rages

between two quickly following impressions of life, the life of the

Hilberys was getting the better of the life of the Denhams in his mind,

and he wanted to assure himself that there was some quality in which

Joan infinitely surpassed Miss Hilbery. He should have felt that his

own sister was more original, and had greater vitality than Miss

Hilbery had; but his main impression of Katharine now was of a person

of great vitality and composure; and at the moment he could not

perceive what poor dear Joan had gained from the fact that she was the

granddaughter of a man who kept a shop, and herself earned her own

living. The infinite dreariness and sordidness of their life oppressed

him in spite of his fundamental belief that, as a family, they were

somehow remarkable.

“Shall you talk to mother?” Joan inquired. “Because, you see, the

thing’s got to be settled, one way or another. Charles must write to

Uncle John if he’s going there.”

Ralph sighed impatiently.

“I suppose it doesn’t much matter either way,” he exclaimed. “He’s

doomed to misery in the long run.”

A slight flush came into Joan’s cheek.

“You know you’re talking nonsense,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt any one

to have to earn their own living. I’m very glad I have to earn mine.”

Ralph was pleased that she should feel this, and wished her to

continue, but he went on, perversely enough.

“Isn’t that only because you’ve forgotten how to enjoy yourself? You

never have time for anything decent—”

“As for instance?”

“Well, going for walks, or music, or books, or seeing interesting

people. You never do anything that’s really worth doing any more than I

do.”

“I always think you could make this room much nicer, if you liked,” she

observed.

“What does it matter what sort of room I have when I’m forced to spend

all the best years of my life drawing up deeds in an office?”

“You said two days ago that you found the law so interesting.”

“So it is if one could afford to know anything about it.”

(“That’s Herbert only just going to bed now,” Joan interposed, as a

door on the landing slammed vigorously. “And then he won’t get up in

the morning.”)

Ralph looked at the ceiling, and shut his lips closely together. Why,

he wondered, could Joan never for one moment detach her mind from the

details of domestic life? It seemed to him that she was getting more

and more enmeshed in them, and capable of shorter and less frequent

flights into the outer world, and yet she was only thirty-three.

“D’you ever pay calls now?” he asked abruptly.

“I don’t often have the time. Why do you ask?”

“It might be a good thing, to get to know new people, that’s all.”

“Poor Ralph!” said Joan suddenly, with a smile. “You think your

sister’s getting very old and very dull—that’s it, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind,” he said stoutly, but he flushed.

“But you lead a dog’s life, Joan. When you’re not working in an office,

you’re worrying over the rest of us. And I’m not much good to you, I’m

afraid.”

Joan rose, and stood for a moment warming her hands, and, apparently,

meditating as to whether she should say anything more or not. A feeling

of great intimacy united the brother and sister, and the semicircular

lines above their eyebrows disappeared. No, there was nothing more to

be said on either side. Joan brushed her brother’s head with her hand

as she passed him, murmured good night, and left the room. For some

minutes after she had gone Ralph lay quiescent, resting his head on his

hand, but gradually his eyes filled with thought, and the line

reappeared on his brow, as the pleasant impression of companionship and

ancient sympathy waned, and he was left to think on alone.

After a time he opened his book, and read on steadily, glancing once or

twice at his watch, as if he had set himself a task to be accomplished

in a certain measure of time. Now and then he heard voices in the

house, and the closing of bedroom doors, which showed that the

building, at the top of which he sat, was inhabited in every one of its

cells. When midnight struck, Ralph shut his book, and with a candle in

his hand, descended to the ground floor, to ascertain that all lights

were extinct and all doors locked. It was a threadbare, well-worn house

that he thus examined, as if the inmates had grazed down all luxuriance

and plenty to the verge of decency; and in the night, bereft of life,

bare places and ancient blemishes were unpleasantly visible. Katharine

Hilbery, he thought, would condemn it off-hand.

CHAPTER III

Denham had accused Katharine Hilbery of belonging to one of the most

distinguished families in England, and if any one will take the trouble

to consult Mr. Galton’s “Hereditary Genius,” he will find that this

assertion is not far from the truth. The Alardyces, the Hilberys, the

Millingtons, and the Otways seem to prove that intellect is a

possession which can be tossed from one member of a certain group to

another almost indefinitely, and with apparent certainty that the

brilliant gift will be safely caught and held by nine out of ten of the

privileged race. They had been conspicuous judges and admirals, lawyers

and servants of the State for some years before the richness of the

soil culminated in the rarest flower that any family can boast, a great

writer, a poet eminent among the poets of England, a Richard Alardyce;

and having produced him, they proved once more the amazing virtues of

their race by proceeding unconcernedly again with their usual task of

breeding distinguished men. They had sailed with Sir John Franklin to

the North Pole, and ridden with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow, and

when they were not lighthouses firmly based on rock for the guidance of

their generation, they were steady, serviceable candles, illuminating

the ordinary chambers of daily life. Whatever profession you looked at,

there was a Warburton or an Alardyce, a Millington or a Hilbery

somewhere in authority and prominence.

It may be said, indeed, that English society being what it is, no very

great merit is required, once you bear a well-known name, to put you

into a position where it is easier on the whole to be eminent than

obscure. And if this is true of the sons, even the daughters, even in

the nineteenth century, are apt to become people of

importance—philanthropists and educationalists if they are spinsters,

and the wives of distinguished men if they marry. It is true that there

were several lamentable exceptions to this rule in the Alardyce group,

which seems to indicate that the cadets of such houses go more rapidly

to the bad than the children of ordinary fathers and mothers, as if it

were somehow a relief to them. But, on the whole, in these first years

of the twentieth century, the Alardyces and their relations were

keeping their heads well above water. One finds them at the tops of

professions, with letters after their names; they sit in luxurious

public offices, with private secretaries attached to them; they write

solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great

universities, and when one of them dies the chances are that another of

them writes his biography.

Now the source of this nobility was, of course, the poet, and his

immediate descendants, therefore, were invested with greater luster

than the collateral branches. Mrs. Hilbery, in virtue of her position

as the only child of the poet, was spiritually the head of the family,

and Katharine, her daughter, had some superior rank among all the

cousins and connections, the more so because she was an only child. The

Alardyces had married and intermarried, and their offspring were

generally profuse, and had a way of meeting regularly in each other’s

houses for meals and family celebrations which had acquired a

semi-sacred character, and were as regularly observed as days of

feasting and fasting in the Church.

In times gone by, Mrs. Hilbery had known all the poets, all the

novelists, all the beautiful women and distinguished men of her time.

These being now either dead or secluded in their infirm glory, she made

her house a meeting-place for her own relations, to whom she would

lament the passing of the great days of the nineteenth century, when

every department of letters and art was represented in England by two

or three illustrious names. Where are their successors? she would ask,

and the absence of any poet or painter or novelist of the true caliber

at the present day was a text upon which she liked to ruminate, in a

sunset mood of benignant reminiscence, which it would have been hard to

disturb had there been need. But she was far from visiting their

inferiority upon the younger generation. She welcomed them very

heartily to her house, told them her stories, gave them sovereigns and

ices and good advice, and weaved round them romances which had

generally no likeness to the truth.

The quality of her birth oozed into Katharine’s consciousness from a

dozen different sources as soon as she was able to perceive anything.

Above her nursery fireplace hung a photograph of her grandfather’s tomb

in Poets’ Corner, and she was told in one of those moments of grown-up

confidence which are so tremendously impressive to the child’s mind,

that he was buried there because he was a “good and great man.” Later,

on an anniversary, she was taken by her mother through the fog in a

hansom cab, and given a large bunch of bright, sweet-scented flowers to

lay upon his tomb. The candles in the church, the singing and the

booming of the organ, were all, she thought, in his honor. Again and

again she was brought down into the drawing-room to receive the

blessing of some awful distinguished old man, who sat, even to her

childish eye, somewhat apart, all gathered together and clutching a

stick, unlike an ordinary visitor in her father’s own arm-chair, and

her father himself was there, unlike himself, too, a little excited and

very polite. These formidable old creatures used to take her in their

arms, look very keenly in her eyes, and then to bless her, and tell her

that she must mind and be a good girl, or detect a look in her face

something like Richard’s as a small boy. That drew down upon her her

mother’s fervent embrace, and she was sent back to the nursery very

proud, and with a mysterious sense of an important and unexplained

state of things, which time, by degrees, unveiled to her.

There were always visitors—uncles and aunts and cousins “from India,”

to be reverenced for their relationship alone, and others of the

solitary and formidable class, whom she was enjoined by her parents to

“remember all your life.” By these means, and from hearing constant

talk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions of the

world included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the names of

Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, for some

reason, much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to other people.

They made a kind of boundary to her vision of life, and played a

considerable part in determining her scale of good and bad in her own

small affairs. Her descent from one of these gods was no surprise to

her, but matter for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, the

privileges of her lot were taken for granted, and certain drawbacks

made themselves very manifest. Perhaps it is a little depressing to

inherit not lands but an example of intellectual and spiritual virtue;

perhaps the conclusiveness of a great ancestor is a little discouraging

to those who run the risk of comparison with him. It seems as if,

having flowered so splendidly, nothing now remained possible but a

steady growth of good, green stalk and leaf. For these reasons, and for

others, Katharine had her moments of despondency. The glorious past, in

which men and women grew to unexampled size, intruded too much upon the

present, and dwarfed it too consistently, to be altogether encouraging

to one forced to make her experiment in living when the great age was

dead.

She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural, in the

first place owing to her mother’s absorption in them, and in the second

because a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the

dead, since she was helping her mother to produce a life of the great

poet. When Katharine was seventeen or eighteen—that is to say, some ten

years ago—her mother had enthusiastically announced that now, with a

daughter to help her, the biography would soon be published. Notices to

this effect found their way into the literary papers, and for some time

Katharine worked with a sense of great pride and achievement.

Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were making no way at

all, and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghost of

a literary temperament could doubt but that they had materials for one

of the greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelves and

boxes bulged with the precious stuff. The most private lives of the

most interesting people lay furled in yellow bundles of close-written

manuscript. In addition to this Mrs. Hilbery had in her own head as

bright a vision of that time as now remained to the living, and could

give those flashes and thrills to the old words which gave them almost

the substance of flesh. She had no difficulty in writing, and covered a

page every morning as instinctively as a thrush sings, but

nevertheless, with all this to urge and inspire, and the most devout

intention to accomplish the work, the book still remained unwritten.

Papers accumulated without much furthering their task, and in dull

moments Katharine had her doubts whether they would ever produce

anything at all fit to lay before the public. Where did the difficulty

lie? Not in their materials, alas! nor in their ambitions, but in

something more profound, in her own inaptitude, and above all, in her

mother’s temperament. Katharine would calculate that she had never

known her write for more than ten minutes at a time. Ideas came to her

chiefly when she was in motion. She liked to perambulate the room with

a duster in her hand, with which she stopped to polish the backs of

already lustrous books, musing and romancing as she did so. Suddenly

the right phrase or the penetrating point of view would suggest itself,

and she would drop her duster and write ecstatically for a few

breathless moments; and then the mood would pass away, and the duster

would be sought for, and the old books polished again. These spells of

inspiration never burnt steadily, but flickered over the gigantic mass

of the subject as capriciously as a will-o’-the-wisp, lighting now on

this point, now on that. It was as much as Katharine could do to keep

the pages of her mother’s manuscript in order, but to sort them so that

the sixteenth year of Richard Alardyce’s life succeeded the fifteenth

was beyond her skill. And yet they were so brilliant, these paragraphs,

so nobly phrased, so lightning-like in their illumination, that the

dead seemed to crowd the very room. Read continuously, they produced a

sort of vertigo, and set her asking herself in despair what on earth

she was to do with them? Her mother refused, also, to face the radical

questions of what to leave in and what to leave out. She could not

decide how far the public was to be told the truth about the poet’s

separation from his wife. She drafted passages to suit either case, and

then liked each so well that she could not decide upon the rejection of

either.

But the book must be written. It was a duty that they owed the world,

and to Katharine, at least, it meant more than that, for if they could

not between them get this one book accomplished they had no right to

their privileged position. Their increment became yearly more and more

unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that her

grandfather was a very great man.

By the time she was twenty-seven, these thoughts had become very

familiar to her. They trod their way through her mind as she sat

opposite her mother of a morning at a table heaped with bundles of old

letters and well supplied with pencils, scissors, bottles of gum,

india-rubber bands, large envelopes, and other appliances for the

manufacture of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham’s visit, Katharine

had resolved to try the effect of strict rules upon her mother’s habits

of literary composition. They were to be seated at their tables every

morning at ten o’clock, with a clean-swept morning of empty, secluded

hours before them. They were to keep their eyes fast upon the paper,

and nothing was to tempt them to speech, save at the stroke of the hour

when ten minutes for relaxation were to be allowed them. If these rules

were observed for a year, she made out on a sheet of paper that the

completion of the book was certain, and she laid her scheme before her

mother with a feeling that much of the task was already accomplished.

Mrs. Hilbery examined the sheet of paper very carefully. Then she

clapped her hands and exclaimed enthusiastically:

“Well done, Katharine! What a wonderful head for business you’ve got!

Now I shall keep this before me, and every day I shall make a little

mark in my pocketbook, and on the last day of all—let me think, what

shall we do to celebrate the last day of all? If it weren’t the winter

we could take a jaunt to Italy. They say Switzerland’s very lovely in

the snow, except for the cold. But, as you say, the great thing is to

finish the book. Now let me see—”

When they inspected her manuscripts, which Katharine had put in order,

they found a state of things well calculated to dash their spirits, if

they had not just resolved on reform. They found, to begin with, a

great variety of very imposing paragraphs with which the biography was

to open; many of these, it is true, were unfinished, and resembled

triumphal arches standing upon one leg, but, as Mrs. Hilbery observed,

they could be patched up in ten minutes, if she gave her mind to it.

Next, there was an account of the ancient home of the Alardyces, or

rather, of spring in Suffolk, which was very beautifully written,

although not essential to the story. However, Katharine had put

together a string of names and dates, so that the poet was capably

brought into the world, and his ninth year was reached without further

mishap. After that, Mrs. Hilbery wished, for sentimental reasons, to

introduce the recollections of a very fluent old lady, who had been

brought up in the same village, but these Katharine decided must go. It

might be advisable to introduce here a sketch of contemporary poetry

contributed by Mr. Hilbery, and thus terse and learned and altogether

out of keeping with the rest, but Mrs. Hilbery was of opinion that it

was too bare, and made one feel altogether like a good little girl in a

lecture-room, which was not at all in keeping with her father. It was

put on one side. Now came the period of his early manhood, when various

affairs of the heart must either be concealed or revealed; here again

Mrs. Hilbery was of two minds, and a thick packet of manuscript was

shelved for further consideration.

Several years were now altogether omitted, because Mrs. Hilbery had

found something distasteful to her in that period, and had preferred to

dwell upon her own recollections as a child. After this, it seemed to

Katharine that the book became a wild dance of will-o’-the-wisps,

without form or continuity, without coherence even, or any attempt to

make a narrative. Here were twenty pages upon her grandfather’s taste

in hats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summer

day’s expedition into the country, when they had missed their train,

together with fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous men and women,

which seemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic. There were,

moreover, thousands of letters, and a mass of faithful recollections

contributed by old friends, which had grown yellow now in their

envelopes, but must be placed somewhere, or their feelings would be

hurt. So many volumes had been written about the poet since his death

that she had also to dispose of a great number of misstatements, which

involved minute researches and much correspondence. Sometimes Katharine

brooded, half crushed, among her papers; sometimes she felt that it was

necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the

past; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present,

which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to

be of an utterly thin and inferior composition.

The worst of it was that she had no aptitude for literature. She did

not like phrases. She had even some natural antipathy to that process

of self-examination, that perpetual effort to understand one’s own

feeling, and express it beautifully, fitly, or energetically in

language, which constituted so great a part of her mother’s existence.

She was, on the contrary, inclined to be silent; she shrank from

expressing herself even in talk, let alone in writing. As this

disposition was highly convenient in a family much given to the

manufacture of phrases, and seemed to argue a corresponding capacity

for action, she was, from her childhood even, put in charge of

household affairs. She had the reputation, which nothing in her manner

contradicted, of being the most practical of people. Ordering meals,

directing servants, paying bills, and so contriving that every clock

ticked more or less accurately in time, and a number of vases were

always full of fresh flowers was supposed to be a natural endowment of

hers, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery often observed that it was poetry the

wrong side out. From a very early age, too, she had to exert herself in

another capacity; she had to counsel and help and generally sustain her

mother. Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to sustain

herself if the world had been what the world is not. She was

beautifully adapted for life in another planet. But the natural genius

she had for conducting affairs there was of no real use to her here.

Her watch, for example, was a constant source of surprise to her, and

at the age of sixty-five she was still amazed at the ascendancy which

rules and reasons exerted over the lives of other people. She had never

learnt her lesson, and had constantly to be punished for her ignorance.

But as that ignorance was combined with a fine natural insight which

saw deep whenever it saw at all, it was not possible to write Mrs.

Hilbery off among the dunces; on the contrary, she had a way of seeming

the wisest person in the room. But, on the whole, she found it very

necessary to seek support in her daughter.

Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as

yet, no title and very little recognition, although the labor of mill

and factory is, perhaps, no more severe and the results of less benefit

to the world. She lived at home. She did it very well, too. Any one

coming to the house in Cheyne Walk felt that here was an orderly place,

shapely, controlled—a place where life had been trained to show to the

best advantage, and, though composed of different elements, made to

appear harmonious and with a character of its own. Perhaps it was the

chief triumph of Katharine’s art that Mrs. Hilbery’s character

predominated. She and Mr. Hilbery appeared to be a rich background for

her mother’s more striking qualities.

Silence being, thus, both natural to her and imposed upon her, the only

other remark that her mother’s friends were in the habit of making

about it was that it was neither a stupid silence nor an indifferent

silence. But to what quality it owed its character, since character of

some sort it had, no one troubled themselves to inquire. It was

understood that she was helping her mother to produce a great book. She

was known to manage the household. She was certainly beautiful. That

accounted for her satisfactorily. But it would have been a surprise,

not only to other people but to Katharine herself, if some magic watch

could have taken count of the moments spent in an entirely different

occupation from her ostensible one. Sitting with faded papers before

her, she took part in a series of scenes such as the taming of wild

ponies upon the American prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a

hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or in others more peaceful,

but marked by her complete emancipation from her present surroundings

and, needless to say, by her surpassing ability in her new vocation.

When she was rid of the pretense of paper and pen, phrase-making and

biography, she turned her attention in a more legitimate direction,

though, strangely enough, she would rather have confessed her wildest

dreams of hurricane and prairie than the fact that, upstairs, alone in

her room, she rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to...

work at mathematics. No force on earth would have made her confess

that. Her actions when thus engaged were furtive and secretive, like

those of some nocturnal animal. Steps had only to sound on the

staircase, and she slipped her paper between the leaves of a great

Greek dictionary which she had purloined from her father’s room for

this purpose. It was only at night, indeed, that she felt secure enough

from surprise to concentrate her mind to the utmost.

Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively wish

to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in her

mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would not

have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the

star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and

vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly in

thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feel

wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away

from view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness. Again and again

she was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinking of

her grandfather. Waking from these trances, she would see that her

mother, too, had lapsed into some dream almost as visionary as her own,

for the people who played their parts in it had long been numbered

among the dead. But, seeing her own state mirrored in her mother’s

face, Katharine would shake herself awake with a sense of irritation.

Her mother was the last person she wished to resemble, much though she

admired her. Her common sense would assert itself almost brutally, and

Mrs. Hilbery, looking at her with her odd sidelong glance, that was

half malicious and half tender, would liken her to “your wicked old

Uncle Judge Peter, who used to be heard delivering sentence of death in

the bathroom. Thank Heaven, Katharine, I’ve not a drop of _him_ in me!”

CHAPTER IV

At about nine o’clock at night, on every alternate Wednesday, Miss Mary

Datchet made the same resolve, that she would never again lend her

rooms for any purposes whatsoever. Being, as they were, rather large

and conveniently situated in a street mostly dedicated to offices off

the Strand, people who wished to meet, either for purposes of

enjoyment, or to discuss art, or to reform the State, had a way of

suggesting that Mary had better be asked to lend them her rooms. She

always met the request with the same frown of well-simulated annoyance,

which presently dissolved in a kind of half-humorous, half-surly shrug,

as of a large dog tormented by children who shakes his ears. She would

lend her room, but only on condition that all the arrangements were

made by her. This fortnightly meeting of a society for the free

discussion of everything entailed a great deal of moving, and pulling,

and ranging of furniture against the wall, and placing of breakable and

precious things in safe places. Miss Datchet was quite capable of

lifting a kitchen table on her back, if need were, for although

well-proportioned and dressed becomingly, she had the appearance of

unusual strength and determination.

She was some twenty-five years of age, but looked older because she

earned, or intended to earn, her own living, and had already lost the

look of the irresponsible spectator, and taken on that of the private

in the army of workers. Her gestures seemed to have a certain purpose,

the muscles round eyes and lips were set rather firmly, as though the

senses had undergone some discipline, and were held ready for a call on

them. She had contracted two faint lines between her eyebrows, not from

anxiety but from thought, and it was quite evident that all the

feminine instincts of pleasing, soothing, and charming were crossed by

others in no way peculiar to her sex. For the rest she was brown-eyed,

a little clumsy in movement, and suggested country birth and a descent

from respectable hard-working ancestors, who had been men of faith and

integrity rather than doubters or fanatics.

At the end of a fairly hard day’s work it was certainly something of an

effort to clear one’s room, to pull the mattress off one’s bed, and lay

it on the floor, to fill a pitcher with cold coffee, and to sweep a

long table clear for plates and cups and saucers, with pyramids of

little pink biscuits between them; but when these alterations were

effected, Mary felt a lightness of spirit come to her, as if she had

put off the stout stuff of her working hours and slipped over her

entire being some vesture of thin, bright silk. She knelt before the

fire and looked out into the room. The light fell softly, but with

clear radiance, through shades of yellow and blue paper, and the room,

which was set with one or two sofas resembling grassy mounds in their

lack of shape, looked unusually large and quiet. Mary was led to think

of the heights of a Sussex down, and the swelling green circle of some

camp of ancient warriors. The moonlight would be falling there so

peacefully now, and she could fancy the rough pathway of silver upon

the wrinkled skin of the sea.

“And here we are,” she said, half aloud, half satirically, yet with

evident pride, “talking about art.”

She pulled a basket containing balls of differently colored wools and a

pair of stockings which needed darning towards her, and began to set

her fingers to work; while her mind, reflecting the lassitude of her

body, went on perversely, conjuring up visions of solitude and quiet,

and she pictured herself laying aside her knitting and walking out on

to the down, and hearing nothing but the sheep cropping the grass close

to the roots, while the shadows of the little trees moved very slightly

this way and that in the moonlight, as the breeze went through them.

But she was perfectly conscious of her present situation, and derived

some pleasure from the reflection that she could rejoice equally in

solitude, and in the presence of the many very different people who

were now making their way, by divers paths, across London to the spot

where she was sitting.

As she ran her needle in and out of the wool, she thought of the

various stages in her own life which made her present position seem the

culmination of successive miracles. She thought of her clerical father

in his country parsonage, and of her mother’s death, and of her own

determination to obtain education, and of her college life, which had

merged, not so very long ago, in the wonderful maze of London, which

still seemed to her, in spite of her constitutional level-headedness,

like a vast electric light, casting radiance upon the myriads of men

and women who crowded round it. And here she was at the very center of

it all, that center which was constantly in the minds of people in

remote Canadian forests and on the plains of India, when their thoughts

turned to England. The nine mellow strokes, by which she was now

apprised of the hour, were a message from the great clock at

Westminster itself. As the last of them died away, there was a firm

knocking on her own door, and she rose and opened it. She returned to

the room, with a look of steady pleasure in her eyes, and she was

talking to Ralph Denham, who followed her.

“Alone?” he said, as if he were pleasantly surprised by that fact.

“I am sometimes alone,” she replied.

“But you expect a great many people,” he added, looking round him.

“It’s like a room on the stage. Who is it to-night?”

“William Rodney, upon the Elizabethan use of metaphor. I expect a good

solid paper, with plenty of quotations from the classics.”

Ralph warmed his hands at the fire, which was flapping bravely in the

grate, while Mary took up her stocking again.

“I suppose you are the only woman in London who darns her own

stockings,” he observed.

“I’m only one of a great many thousands really,” she replied, “though I

must admit that I was thinking myself very remarkable when you came in.

And now that you’re here I don’t think myself remarkable at all. How

horrid of you! But I’m afraid you’re much more remarkable than I am.

You’ve done much more than I’ve done.”

“If that’s your standard, you’ve nothing to be proud of,” said Ralph

grimly.

“Well, I must reflect with Emerson that it’s being and not doing that

matters,” she continued.

“Emerson?” Ralph exclaimed, with derision. “You don’t mean to say you

read Emerson?”

“Perhaps it wasn’t Emerson; but why shouldn’t I read Emerson?” she

asked, with a tinge of anxiety.

“There’s no reason that I know of. It’s the combination that’s

odd—books and stockings. The combination is very odd.” But it seemed to

recommend itself to him. Mary gave a little laugh, expressive of

happiness, and the particular stitches that she was now putting into

her work appeared to her to be done with singular grace and felicity.

She held out the stocking and looked at it approvingly.

“You always say that,” she said. “I assure you it’s a common

‘combination,’ as you call it, in the houses of the clergy. The only

thing that’s odd about me is that I enjoy them both—Emerson and the

stocking.”

A knock was heard, and Ralph exclaimed:

“Damn those people! I wish they weren’t coming!”

“It’s only Mr. Turner, on the floor below,” said Mary, and she felt

grateful to Mr. Turner for having alarmed Ralph, and for having given a

false alarm.

“Will there be a crowd?” Ralph asked, after a pause.

“There’ll be the Morrises and the Crashaws, and Dick Osborne, and

Septimus, and all that set. Katharine Hilbery is coming, by the way, so

William Rodney told me.”

“Katharine Hilbery!” Ralph exclaimed.

“You know her?” Mary asked, with some surprise.

“I went to a tea-party at her house.”

Mary pressed him to tell her all about it, and Ralph was not at all

unwilling to exhibit proofs of the extent of his knowledge. He

described the scene with certain additions and exaggerations which

interested Mary very much.

“But, in spite of what you say, I do admire her,” she said. “I’ve only

seen her once or twice, but she seems to me to be what one calls a

‘personality.’”

“I didn’t mean to abuse her. I only felt that she wasn’t very

sympathetic to me.”

“They say she’s going to marry that queer creature Rodney.”

“Marry Rodney? Then she must be more deluded than I thought her.”

“Now that’s my door, all right,” Mary exclaimed, carefully putting her

wools away, as a succession of knocks reverberated unnecessarily,

accompanied by a sound of people stamping their feet and laughing. A

moment later the room was full of young men and women, who came in with

a peculiar look of expectation, exclaimed “Oh!” when they saw Denham,

and then stood still, gaping rather foolishly.

The room very soon contained between twenty and thirty people, who

found seats for the most part upon the floor, occupying the mattresses,

and hunching themselves together into triangular shapes. They were all

young and some of them seemed to make a protest by their hair and

dress, and something somber and truculent in the expression of their

faces, against the more normal type, who would have passed unnoticed in

an omnibus or an underground railway. It was notable that the talk was

confined to groups, and was, at first, entirely spasmodic in character,

and muttered in undertones as if the speakers were suspicious of their

fellow-guests.

Katharine Hilbery came in rather late, and took up a position on the

floor, with her back against the wall. She looked round quickly,

recognized about half a dozen people, to whom she nodded, but failed to

see Ralph, or, if so, had already forgotten to attach any name to him.

But in a second these heterogeneous elements were all united by the

voice of Mr. Rodney, who suddenly strode up to the table, and began

very rapidly in high-strained tones:

“In undertaking to speak of the Elizabethan use of metaphor in poetry—”

All the different heads swung slightly or steadied themselves into a

position in which they could gaze straight at the speaker’s face, and

the same rather solemn expression was visible on all of them. But, at

the same time, even the faces that were most exposed to view, and

therefore most tautly under control, disclosed a sudden impulsive

tremor which, unless directly checked, would have developed into an

outburst of laughter. The first sight of Mr. Rodney was irresistibly

ludicrous. He was very red in the face, whether from the cool November

night or nervousness, and every movement, from the way he wrung his

hands to the way he jerked his head to right and left, as though a

vision drew him now to the door, now to the window, bespoke his

horrible discomfort under the stare of so many eyes. He was

scrupulously well dressed, and a pearl in the center of his tie seemed

to give him a touch of aristocratic opulence. But the rather prominent

eyes and the impulsive stammering manner, which seemed to indicate a

torrent of ideas intermittently pressing for utterance and always

checked in their course by a clutch of nervousness, drew no pity, as in

the case of a more imposing personage, but a desire to laugh, which

was, however, entirely lacking in malice. Mr. Rodney was evidently so

painfully conscious of the oddity of his appearance, and his very

redness and the starts to which his body was liable gave such proof of

his own discomfort, that there was something endearing in this

ridiculous susceptibility, although most people would probably have

echoed Denham’s private exclamation, “Fancy marrying a creature like

that!”

His paper was carefully written out, but in spite of this precaution

Mr. Rodney managed to turn over two sheets instead of one, to choose

the wrong sentence where two were written together, and to discover his

own handwriting suddenly illegible. When he found himself possessed of

a coherent passage, he shook it at his audience almost aggressively,

and then fumbled for another. After a distressing search a fresh

discovery would be made, and produced in the same way, until, by means

of repeated attacks, he had stirred his audience to a degree of

animation quite remarkable in these gatherings. Whether they were

stirred by his enthusiasm for poetry or by the contortions which a

human being was going through for their benefit, it would be hard to

say. At length Mr. Rodney sat down impulsively in the middle of a

sentence, and, after a pause of bewilderment, the audience expressed

its relief at being able to laugh aloud in a decided outburst of

applause.

Mr. Rodney acknowledged this with a wild glance round him, and, instead

of waiting to answer questions, he jumped up, thrust himself through

the seated bodies into the corner where Katharine was sitting, and

exclaimed, very audibly:

“Well, Katharine, I hope I’ve made a big enough fool of myself even for

you! It was terrible! terrible! terrible!”

“Hush! You must answer their questions,” Katharine whispered, desiring,

at all costs, to keep him quiet. Oddly enough, when the speaker was no

longer in front of them, there seemed to be much that was suggestive in

what he had said. At any rate, a pale-faced young man with sad eyes was

already on his feet, delivering an accurately worded speech with

perfect composure. William Rodney listened with a curious lifting of

his upper lip, although his face was still quivering slightly with

emotion.

“Idiot!” he whispered. “He’s misunderstood every word I said!”

“Well then, answer him,” Katharine whispered back.

“No, I shan’t! They’d only laugh at me. Why did I let you persuade me

that these sort of people care for literature?” he continued.

There was much to be said both for and against Mr. Rodney’s paper. It

had been crammed with assertions that such-and-such passages, taken

liberally from English, French, and Italian, are the supreme pearls of

literature. Further, he was fond of using metaphors which, compounded

in the study, were apt to sound either cramped or out of place as he

delivered them in fragments. Literature was a fresh garland of spring

flowers, he said, in which yew-berries and the purple nightshade

mingled with the various tints of the anemone; and somehow or other

this garland encircled marble brows. He had read very badly some very

beautiful quotations. But through his manner and his confusion of

language there had emerged some passion of feeling which, as he spoke,

formed in the majority of the audience a little picture or an idea

which each now was eager to give expression to. Most of the people

there proposed to spend their lives in the practice either of writing

or painting, and merely by looking at them it could be seen that, as

they listened to Mr. Purvis first, and then to Mr. Greenhalgh, they

were seeing something done by these gentlemen to a possession which

they thought to be their own. One person after another rose, and, as

with an ill-balanced axe, attempted to hew out his conception of art a

little more clearly, and sat down with the feeling that, for some

reason which he could not grasp, his strokes had gone awry. As they sat

down they turned almost invariably to the person sitting next them, and

rectified and continued what they had just said in public. Before long,

therefore, the groups on the mattresses and the groups on the chairs

were all in communication with each other, and Mary Datchet, who had

begun to darn stockings again, stooped down and remarked to Ralph:

“That was what I call a first-rate paper.”

Both of them instinctively turned their eyes in the direction of the

reader of the paper. He was lying back against the wall, with his eyes

apparently shut, and his chin sunk upon his collar. Katharine was

turning over the pages of his manuscript as if she were looking for

some passage that had particularly struck her, and had a difficulty in

finding it.

“Let’s go and tell him how much we liked it,” said Mary, thus

suggesting an action which Ralph was anxious to take, though without

her he would have been too proud to do it, for he suspected that he had

more interest in Katharine than she had in him.

“That was a very interesting paper,” Mary began, without any shyness,

seating herself on the floor opposite to Rodney and Katharine. “Will

you lend me the manuscript to read in peace?”

Rodney, who had opened his eyes on their approach, regarded her for a

moment in suspicious silence.

“Do you say that merely to disguise the fact of my ridiculous failure?”

he asked.

Katharine looked up from her reading with a smile.

“He says he doesn’t mind what we think of him,” she remarked. “He says

we don’t care a rap for art of any kind.”

“I asked her to pity me, and she teases me!” Rodney exclaimed.

“I don’t intend to pity you, Mr. Rodney,” Mary remarked, kindly, but

firmly. “When a paper’s a failure, nobody says anything, whereas now,

just listen to them!”

The sound, which filled the room, with its hurry of short syllables,

its sudden pauses, and its sudden attacks, might be compared to some

animal hubbub, frantic and inarticulate.

“D’you think that’s all about my paper?” Rodney inquired, after a

moment’s attention, with a distinct brightening of expression.

“Of course it is,” said Mary. “It was a very suggestive paper.”

She turned to Denham for confirmation, and he corroborated her.

“It’s the ten minutes after a paper is read that proves whether it’s

been a success or not,” he said. “If I were you, Rodney, I should be

very pleased with myself.”

This commendation seemed to comfort Mr. Rodney completely, and he began

to bethink him of all the passages in his paper which deserved to be

called “suggestive.”

“Did you agree at all, Denham, with what I said about Shakespeare’s

later use of imagery? I’m afraid I didn’t altogether make my meaning

plain.”

Here he gathered himself together, and by means of a series of

frog-like jerks, succeeded in bringing himself close to Denham.

Denham answered him with the brevity which is the result of having

another sentence in the mind to be addressed to another person. He

wished to say to Katharine: “Did you remember to get that picture

glazed before your aunt came to dinner?” but, besides having to answer

Rodney, he was not sure that the remark, with its assertion of

intimacy, would not strike Katharine as impertinent. She was listening

to what some one in another group was saying. Rodney, meanwhile, was

talking about the Elizabethan dramatists.

He was a curious-looking man since, upon first sight, especially if he

chanced to be talking with animation, he appeared, in some way,

ridiculous; but, next moment, in repose, his face, with its large nose,

thin cheeks and lips expressing the utmost sensibility, somehow

recalled a Roman head bound with laurel, cut upon a circle of

semi-transparent reddish stone. It had dignity and character. By

profession a clerk in a Government office, he was one of those martyred

spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of

almost intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it,

they must attempt to practise it themselves, and they are generally

endowed with very little facility in composition. They condemn whatever

they produce. Moreover, the violence of their feelings is such that

they seldom meet with adequate sympathy, and being rendered very

sensitive by their cultivated perceptions, suffer constant slights both

to their own persons and to the thing they worship. But Rodney could

never resist making trial of the sympathies of any one who seemed

favorably disposed, and Denham’s praise had stimulated his very

susceptible vanity.

“You remember the passage just before the death of the Duchess?” he

continued, edging still closer to Denham, and adjusting his elbow and

knee in an incredibly angular combination. Here, Katharine, who had

been cut off by these maneuvers from all communication with the outer

world, rose, and seated herself upon the window-sill, where she was

joined by Mary Datchet. The two young women could thus survey the whole

party. Denham looked after them, and made as if he were tearing

handfuls of grass up by the roots from the carpet. But as it fell in

accurately with his conception of life that all one’s desires were

bound to be frustrated, he concentrated his mind upon literature, and

determined, philosophically, to get what he could out of that.

Katharine was pleasantly excited. A variety of courses was open to her.

She knew several people slightly, and at any moment one of them might

rise from the floor and come and speak to her; on the other hand, she

might select somebody for herself, or she might strike into Rodney’s

discourse, to which she was intermittently attentive. She was conscious

of Mary’s body beside her, but, at the same time, the consciousness of

being both of them women made it unnecessary to speak to her. But Mary,

feeling, as she had said, that Katharine was a “personality,” wished so

much to speak to her that in a few moments she did.

“They’re exactly like a flock of sheep, aren’t they?” she said,

referring to the noise that rose from the scattered bodies beneath her.

Katharine turned and smiled.

“I wonder what they’re making such a noise about?” she said.

“The Elizabethans, I suppose.”

“No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the Elizabethans.

There! Didn’t you hear them say, ‘Insurance Bill’?”

“I wonder why men always talk about politics?” Mary speculated. “I

suppose, if we had votes, we should, too.”

“I dare say we should. And you spend your life in getting us votes,

don’t you?”

“I do,” said Mary, stoutly. “From ten to six every day I’m at it.”

Katharine looked at Ralph Denham, who was now pounding his way through

the metaphysics of metaphor with Rodney, and was reminded of his talk

that Sunday afternoon. She connected him vaguely with Mary.

“I suppose you’re one of the people who think we should all have

professions,” she said, rather distantly, as if feeling her way among

the phantoms of an unknown world.

“Oh dear no,” said Mary at once.

“Well, I think I do,” Katharine continued, with half a sigh. “You will

always be able to say that you’ve done something, whereas, in a crowd

like this, I feel rather melancholy.”

“In a crowd? Why in a crowd?” Mary asked, deepening the two lines

between her eyes, and hoisting herself nearer to Katharine upon the

window-sill.

“Don’t you see how many different things these people care about? And I

want to beat them down—I only mean,” she corrected herself, “that I

want to assert myself, and it’s difficult, if one hasn’t a profession.”

Mary smiled, thinking that to beat people down was a process that

should present no difficulty to Miss Katharine Hilbery. They knew each

other so slightly that the beginning of intimacy, which Katharine

seemed to initiate by talking about herself, had something solemn in

it, and they were silent, as if to decide whether to proceed or not.

They tested the ground.

“Ah, but I want to trample upon their prostrate bodies!” Katharine

announced, a moment later, with a laugh, as if at the train of thought

which had led her to this conclusion.

“One doesn’t necessarily trample upon people’s bodies because one runs

an office,” Mary remarked.

“No. Perhaps not,” Katharine replied. The conversation lapsed, and Mary

saw Katharine looking out into the room rather moodily with closed

lips, the desire to talk about herself or to initiate a friendship

having, apparently, left her. Mary was struck by her capacity for being

thus easily silent, and occupied with her own thoughts. It was a habit

that spoke of loneliness and a mind thinking for itself. When Katharine

remained silent Mary was slightly embarrassed.

“Yes, they’re very like sheep,” she repeated, foolishly.

“And yet they are very clever—at least,” Katharine added, “I suppose

they have all read Webster.”

“Surely you don’t think that a proof of cleverness? I’ve read Webster,

I’ve read Ben Jonson, but I don’t think myself clever—not exactly, at

least.”

“I think you must be very clever,” Katharine observed.

“Why? Because I run an office?”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking how you live alone in this

room, and have parties.”

Mary reflected for a second.

“It means, chiefly, a power of being disagreeable to one’s own family,

I think. I have that, perhaps. I didn’t want to live at home, and I

told my father. He didn’t like it.... But then I have a sister, and you

haven’t, have you?”

“No, I haven’t any sisters.”

“You are writing a life of your grandfather?” Mary pursued.

Katharine seemed instantly to be confronted by some familiar thought

from which she wished to escape. She replied, “Yes, I am helping my

mother,” in such a way that Mary felt herself baffled, and put back

again into the position in which she had been at the beginning of their

talk. It seemed to her that Katharine possessed a curious power of

drawing near and receding, which sent alternate emotions through her

far more quickly than was usual, and kept her in a condition of curious

alertness. Desiring to classify her, Mary bethought her of the

convenient term “egoist.”

“She’s an egoist,” she said to herself, and stored that word up to give

to Ralph one day when, as it would certainly fall out, they were

discussing Miss Hilbery.

“Heavens, what a mess there’ll be to-morrow morning!” Katharine

exclaimed. “I hope you don’t sleep in this room, Miss Datchet?”

Mary laughed.

“What are you laughing at?” Katharine demanded.

“I won’t tell you.”

“Let me guess. You were laughing because you thought I’d changed the

conversation?”

“No.”

“Because you think—” She paused.

“If you want to know, I was laughing at the way you said Miss Datchet.”

“Mary, then. Mary, Mary, Mary.”

So saying, Katharine drew back the curtain in order, perhaps, to

conceal the momentary flush of pleasure which is caused by coming

perceptibly nearer to another person.

“Mary Datchet,” said Mary. “It’s not such an imposing name as Katharine

Hilbery, I’m afraid.”

They both looked out of the window, first up at the hard silver moon,

stationary among a hurry of little grey-blue clouds, and then down upon

the roofs of London, with all their upright chimneys, and then below

them at the empty moonlit pavement of the street, upon which the joint

of each paving-stone was clearly marked out. Mary then saw Katharine

raise her eyes again to the moon, with a contemplative look in them, as

though she were setting that moon against the moon of other nights,

held in memory. Some one in the room behind them made a joke about

star-gazing, which destroyed their pleasure in it, and they looked back

into the room again.

Ralph had been watching for this moment, and he instantly produced his

sentence.

“I wonder, Miss Hilbery, whether you remembered to get that picture

glazed?” His voice showed that the question was one that had been

prepared.

“Oh, you idiot!” Mary exclaimed, very nearly aloud, with a sense that

Ralph had said something very stupid. So, after three lessons in Latin

grammar, one might correct a fellow student, whose knowledge did not

embrace the ablative of “mensa.”

“Picture—what picture?” Katharine asked. “Oh, at home, you mean—that

Sunday afternoon. Was it the day Mr. Fortescue came? Yes, I think I

remembered it.”

The three of them stood for a moment awkwardly silent, and then Mary

left them in order to see that the great pitcher of coffee was properly

handled, for beneath all her education she preserved the anxieties of

one who owns china.

Ralph could think of nothing further to say; but could one have

stripped off his mask of flesh, one would have seen that his will-power

was rigidly set upon a single object—that Miss Hilbery should obey him.

He wished her to stay there until, by some measures not yet apparent to

him, he had conquered her interest. These states of mind transmit

themselves very often without the use of language, and it was evident

to Katharine that this young man had fixed his mind upon her. She

instantly recalled her first impressions of him, and saw herself again

proffering family relics. She reverted to the state of mind in which he

had left her that Sunday afternoon. She supposed that he judged her

very severely. She argued naturally that, if this were the case, the

burden of the conversation should rest with him. But she submitted so

far as to stand perfectly still, her eyes upon the opposite wall, and

her lips very nearly closed, though the desire to laugh stirred them

slightly.

“You know the names of the stars, I suppose?” Denham remarked, and from

the tone of his voice one might have thought that he grudged Katharine

the knowledge he attributed to her.

She kept her voice steady with some difficulty.

“I know how to find the Pole star if I’m lost.”

“I don’t suppose that often happens to you.”

“No. Nothing interesting ever happens to me,” she said.

“I think you make a system of saying disagreeable things, Miss

Hilbery,” he broke out, again going further than he meant to. “I

suppose it’s one of the characteristics of your class. They never talk

seriously to their inferiors.”

Whether it was that they were meeting on neutral ground to-night, or

whether the carelessness of an old grey coat that Denham wore gave an

ease to his bearing that he lacked in conventional dress, Katharine

certainly felt no impulse to consider him outside the particular set in

which she lived.

“In what sense are you my inferior?” she asked, looking at him gravely,

as though honestly searching for his meaning. The look gave him great

pleasure. For the first time he felt himself on perfectly equal terms

with a woman whom he wished to think well of him, although he could not

have explained why her opinion of him mattered one way or another.

Perhaps, after all, he only wanted to have something of her to take

home to think about. But he was not destined to profit by his

advantage.

“I don’t think I understand what you mean,” Katharine repeated, and

then she was obliged to stop and answer some one who wished to know

whether she would buy a ticket for an opera from them, at a reduction.

Indeed, the temper of the meeting was now unfavorable to separate

conversation; it had become rather debauched and hilarious, and people

who scarcely knew each other were making use of Christian names with

apparent cordiality, and had reached that kind of gay tolerance and

general friendliness which human beings in England only attain after

sitting together for three hours or so, and the first cold blast in the

air of the street freezes them into isolation once more. Cloaks were

being flung round the shoulders, hats swiftly pinned to the head; and

Denham had the mortification of seeing Katharine helped to prepare

herself by the ridiculous Rodney. It was not the convention of the

meeting to say good-bye, or necessarily even to nod to the person with

whom one was talking; but, nevertheless, Denham was disappointed by the

completeness with which Katharine parted from him, without any attempt

to finish her sentence. She left with Rodney.

CHAPTER V

Denham had no conscious intention of following Katharine, but, seeing

her depart, he took his hat and ran rather more quickly down the stairs

than he would have done if Katharine had not been in front of him. He

overtook a friend of his, by name Harry Sandys, who was going the same

way, and they walked together a few paces behind Katharine and Rodney.

The night was very still, and on such nights, when the traffic thins

away, the walker becomes conscious of the moon in the street, as if the

curtains of the sky had been drawn apart, and the heaven lay bare, as

it does in the country. The air was softly cool, so that people who had

been sitting talking in a crowd found it pleasant to walk a little

before deciding to stop an omnibus or encounter light again in an

underground railway. Sandys, who was a barrister with a philosophic

tendency, took out his pipe, lit it, murmured “hum” and “ha,” and was

silent. The couple in front of them kept their distance accurately, and

appeared, so far as Denham could judge by the way they turned towards

each other, to be talking very constantly. He observed that when a

pedestrian going the opposite way forced them to part they came

together again directly afterwards. Without intending to watch them he

never quite lost sight of the yellow scarf twisted round Katharine’s

head, or the light overcoat which made Rodney look fashionable among

the crowd. At the Strand he supposed that they would separate, but

instead they crossed the road, and took their way down one of the

narrow passages which lead through ancient courts to the river. Among

the crowd of people in the big thoroughfares Rodney seemed merely to be

lending Katharine his escort, but now, when passengers were rare and

the footsteps of the couple were distinctly heard in the silence,

Denham could not help picturing to himself some change in their

conversation. The effect of the light and shadow, which seemed to

increase their height, was to make them mysterious and significant, so

that Denham had no feeling of irritation with Katharine, but rather a

half-dreamy acquiescence in the course of the world. Yes, she did very

well to dream about—but Sandys had suddenly begun to talk. He was a

solitary man who had made his friends at college and always addressed

them as if they were still undergraduates arguing in his room, though

many months or even years had passed in some cases between the last

sentence and the present one. The method was a little singular, but

very restful, for it seemed to ignore completely all accidents of human

life, and to span very deep abysses with a few simple words.

On this occasion he began, while they waited for a minute on the edge

of the Strand:

“I hear that Bennett has given up his theory of truth.”

Denham returned a suitable answer, and he proceeded to explain how this

decision had been arrived at, and what changes it involved in the

philosophy which they both accepted. Meanwhile Katharine and Rodney

drew further ahead, and Denham kept, if that is the right expression

for an involuntary action, one filament of his mind upon them, while

with the rest of his intelligence he sought to understand what Sandys

was saying.

As they passed through the courts thus talking, Sandys laid the tip of

his stick upon one of the stones forming a time-worn arch, and struck

it meditatively two or three times in order to illustrate something

very obscure about the complex nature of one’s apprehension of facts.

During the pause which this necessitated, Katharine and Rodney turned

the corner and disappeared. For a moment Denham stopped involuntarily

in his sentence, and continued it with a sense of having lost

something.

Unconscious that they were observed, Katharine and Rodney had come out

on the Embankment. When they had crossed the road, Rodney slapped his

hand upon the stone parapet above the river and exclaimed:

“I promise I won’t say another word about it, Katharine! But do stop a

minute and look at the moon upon the water.”

Katharine paused, looked up and down the river, and snuffed the air.

“I’m sure one can smell the sea, with the wind blowing this way,” she

said.

They stood silent for a few moments while the river shifted in its bed,

and the silver and red lights which were laid upon it were torn by the

current and joined together again. Very far off up the river a steamer

hooted with its hollow voice of unspeakable melancholy, as if from the

heart of lonely mist-shrouded voyagings.

“Ah!” Rodney cried, striking his hand once more upon the balustrade,

“why can’t one say how beautiful it all is? Why am I condemned for

ever, Katharine, to feel what I can’t express? And the things I can

give there’s no use in my giving. Trust me, Katharine,” he added

hastily, “I won’t speak of it again. But in the presence of beauty—look

at the iridescence round the moon!—one feels—one feels—Perhaps if you

married me—I’m half a poet, you see, and I can’t pretend not to feel

what I do feel. If I could write—ah, that would be another matter. I

shouldn’t bother you to marry me then, Katharine.”

He spoke these disconnected sentences rather abruptly, with his eyes

alternately upon the moon and upon the stream.

“But for me I suppose you would recommend marriage?” said Katharine,

with her eyes fixed on the moon.

“Certainly I should. Not for you only, but for all women. Why, you’re

nothing at all without it; you’re only half alive; using only half your

faculties; you must feel that for yourself. That is why—” Here he

stopped himself, and they began to walk slowly along the Embankment,

the moon fronting them.

“With how sad steps she climbs the sky,

How silently and with how wan a face,”

Rodney quoted.

“I’ve been told a great many unpleasant things about myself to-night,”

Katharine stated, without attending to him. “Mr. Denham seems to think

it his mission to lecture me, though I hardly know him. By the way,

William, you know him; tell me, what is he like?”

William drew a deep sigh.

“We may lecture you till we’re blue in the face—”

“Yes—but what’s he like?”

“And we write sonnets to your eyebrows, you cruel practical creature.

Denham?” he added, as Katharine remained silent. “A good fellow, I

should think. He cares, naturally, for the right sort of things, I

expect. But you mustn’t marry him, though. He scolded you, did he—what

did he say?”

“What happens with Mr. Denham is this: He comes to tea. I do all I can

to put him at his ease. He merely sits and scowls at me. Then I show

him our manuscripts. At this he becomes really angry, and tells me I’ve

no business to call myself a middle-class woman. So we part in a huff;

and next time we meet, which was to-night, he walks straight up to me,

and says, ‘Go to the Devil!’ That’s the sort of behavior my mother

complains of. I want to know, what does it mean?”

She paused and, slackening her steps, looked at the lighted train

drawing itself smoothly over Hungerford Bridge.

“It means, I should say, that he finds you chilly and unsympathetic.”

Katharine laughed with round, separate notes of genuine amusement.

“It’s time I jumped into a cab and hid myself in my own house,” she

exclaimed.

“Would your mother object to my being seen with you? No one could

possibly recognize us, could they?” Rodney inquired, with some

solicitude.

Katharine looked at him, and perceiving that his solicitude was

genuine, she laughed again, but with an ironical note in her laughter.

“You may laugh, Katharine, but I can tell you that if any of your

friends saw us together at this time of night they would talk about it,

and I should find that very disagreeable. But why do you laugh?”

“I don’t know. Because you’re such a queer mixture, I think. You’re

half poet and half old maid.”

“I know I always seem to you highly ridiculous. But I can’t help having

inherited certain traditions and trying to put them into practice.”

“Nonsense, William. You may come of the oldest family in Devonshire,

but that’s no reason why you should mind being seen alone with me on

the Embankment.”

“I’m ten years older than you are, Katharine, and I know more of the

world than you do.”

“Very well. Leave me and go home.”

Rodney looked back over his shoulder and perceived that they were being

followed at a short distance by a taxicab, which evidently awaited his

summons. Katharine saw it, too, and exclaimed:

“Don’t call that cab for me, William. I shall walk.”

“Nonsense, Katharine; you’ll do nothing of the kind. It’s nearly twelve

o’clock, and we’ve walked too far as it is.”

Katharine laughed and walked on so quickly that both Rodney and the

taxicab had to increase their pace to keep up with her.

“Now, William,” she said, “if people see me racing along the Embankment

like this they _will_ talk. You had far better say good-night, if you

don’t want people to talk.”

At this William beckoned, with a despotic gesture, to the cab with one

hand, and with the other he brought Katharine to a standstill.

“Don’t let the man see us struggling, for God’s sake!” he murmured.

Katharine stood for a moment quite still.

“There’s more of the old maid in you than the poet,” she observed

briefly.

William shut the door sharply, gave the address to the driver, and

turned away, lifting his hat punctiliously high in farewell to the

invisible lady.

He looked back after the cab twice, suspiciously, half expecting that

she would stop it and dismount; but it bore her swiftly on, and was

soon out of sight. William felt in the mood for a short soliloquy of

indignation, for Katharine had contrived to exasperate him in more ways

than one.

“Of all the unreasonable, inconsiderate creatures I’ve ever known,

she’s the worst!” he exclaimed to himself, striding back along the

Embankment. “Heaven forbid that I should ever make a fool of myself

with her again. Why, I’d sooner marry the daughter of my landlady than

Katharine Hilbery! She’d leave me not a moment’s peace—and she’d never

understand me—never, never, never!”

Uttered aloud and with vehemence so that the stars of Heaven might

hear, for there was no human being at hand, these sentiments sounded

satisfactorily irrefutable. Rodney quieted down, and walked on in

silence, until he perceived some one approaching him, who had

something, either in his walk or his dress, which proclaimed that he

was one of William’s acquaintances before it was possible to tell which

of them he was. It was Denham who, having parted from Sandys at the

bottom of his staircase, was now walking to the Tube at Charing Cross,

deep in the thoughts which his talk with Sandys had suggested. He had

forgotten the meeting at Mary Datchet’s rooms, he had forgotten Rodney,

and metaphors and Elizabethan drama, and could have sworn that he had

forgotten Katharine Hilbery, too, although that was more disputable.

His mind was scaling the highest pinnacles of its alps, where there was

only starlight and the untrodden snow. He cast strange eyes upon

Rodney, as they encountered each other beneath a lamp-post.

“Ha!” Rodney exclaimed.

If he had been in full possession of his mind, Denham would probably

have passed on with a salutation. But the shock of the interruption

made him stand still, and before he knew what he was doing, he had

turned and was walking with Rodney in obedience to Rodney’s invitation

to come to his rooms and have something to drink. Denham had no wish to

drink with Rodney, but he followed him passively enough. Rodney was

gratified by this obedience. He felt inclined to be communicative with

this silent man, who possessed so obviously all the good masculine

qualities in which Katharine now seemed lamentably deficient.

“You do well, Denham,” he began impulsively, “to have nothing to do

with young women. I offer you my experience—if one trusts them one

invariably has cause to repent. Not that I have any reason at this

moment,” he added hastily, “to complain of them. It’s a subject that

crops up now and again for no particular reason. Miss Datchet, I dare

say, is one of the exceptions. Do you like Miss Datchet?”

These remarks indicated clearly enough that Rodney’s nerves were in a

state of irritation, and Denham speedily woke to the situation of the

world as it had been one hour ago. He had last seen Rodney walking with

Katharine. He could not help regretting the eagerness with which his

mind returned to these interests, and fretted him with the old trivial

anxieties. He sank in his own esteem. Reason bade him break from

Rodney, who clearly tended to become confidential, before he had

utterly lost touch with the problems of high philosophy. He looked

along the road, and marked a lamp-post at a distance of some hundred

yards, and decided that he would part from Rodney when they reached

this point.

“Yes, I like Mary; I don’t see how one could help liking her,” he

remarked cautiously, with his eye on the lamp-post.

“Ah, Denham, you’re so different from me. You never give yourself away.

I watched you this evening with Katharine Hilbery. My instinct is to

trust the person I’m talking to. That’s why I’m always being taken in,

I suppose.”

Denham seemed to be pondering this statement of Rodney’s, but, as a

matter of fact, he was hardly conscious of Rodney and his revelations,

and was only concerned to make him mention Katharine again before they

reached the lamp-post.

“Who’s taken you in now?” he asked. “Katharine Hilbery?”

Rodney stopped and once more began beating a kind of rhythm, as if he

were marking a phrase in a symphony, upon the smooth stone balustrade

of the Embankment.

“Katharine Hilbery,” he repeated, with a curious little chuckle. “No,

Denham, I have no illusions about that young woman. I think I made that

plain to her to-night. But don’t run away with a false impression,” he

continued eagerly, turning and linking his arm through Denham’s, as

though to prevent him from escaping; and, thus compelled, Denham passed

the monitory lamp-post, to which, in passing, he breathed an excuse,

for how could he break away when Rodney’s arm was actually linked in

his? “You must not think that I have any bitterness against her—far

from it. It’s not altogether her fault, poor girl. She lives, you know,

one of those odious, self-centered lives—at least, I think them odious

for a woman—feeding her wits upon everything, having control of

everything, getting far too much her own way at home—spoilt, in a

sense, feeling that every one is at her feet, and so not realizing how

she hurts—that is, how rudely she behaves to people who haven’t all her

advantages. Still, to do her justice, she’s no fool,” he added, as if

to warn Denham not to take any liberties. “She has taste. She has

sense. She can understand you when you talk to her. But she’s a woman,

and there’s an end of it,” he added, with another little chuckle, and

dropped Denham’s arm.

“And did you tell her all this to-night?” Denham asked.

“Oh dear me, no. I should never think of telling Katharine the truth

about herself. That wouldn’t do at all. One has to be in an attitude of

adoration in order to get on with Katharine.”

“Now I’ve learnt that she’s refused to marry him why don’t I go home?”

Denham thought to himself. But he went on walking beside Rodney, and

for a time they did not speak, though Rodney hummed snatches of a tune

out of an opera by Mozart. A feeling of contempt and liking combine

very naturally in the mind of one to whom another has just spoken

unpremeditatedly, revealing rather more of his private feelings than he

intended to reveal. Denham began to wonder what sort of person Rodney

was, and at the same time Rodney began to think about Denham.

“You’re a slave like me, I suppose?” he asked.

“A solicitor, yes.”

“I sometimes wonder why we don’t chuck it. Why don’t you emigrate,

Denham? I should have thought that would suit you.”

“I’ve a family.”

“I’m often on the point of going myself. And then I know I couldn’t

live without this”—and he waved his hand towards the City of London,

which wore, at this moment, the appearance of a town cut out of

gray-blue cardboard, and pasted flat against the sky, which was of a

deeper blue.

“There are one or two people I’m fond of, and there’s a little good

music, and a few pictures, now and then—just enough to keep one

dangling about here. Ah, but I couldn’t live with savages! Are you fond

of books? Music? Pictures? D’you care at all for first editions? I’ve

got a few nice things up here, things I pick up cheap, for I can’t

afford to give what they ask.”

They had reached a small court of high eighteenth-century houses, in

one of which Rodney had his rooms. They climbed a very steep staircase,

through whose uncurtained windows the moonlight fell, illuminating the

banisters with their twisted pillars, and the piles of plates set on

the window-sills, and jars half-full of milk. Rodney’s rooms were

small, but the sitting-room window looked out into a courtyard, with

its flagged pavement, and its single tree, and across to the flat

red-brick fronts of the opposite houses, which would not have surprised

Dr. Johnson, if he had come out of his grave for a turn in the

moonlight. Rodney lit his lamp, pulled his curtains, offered Denham a

chair, and, flinging the manuscript of his paper on the Elizabethan use

of Metaphor on to the table, exclaimed:

“Oh dear me, what a waste of time! But it’s over now, and so we may

think no more about it.”

He then busied himself very dexterously in lighting a fire, producing

glasses, whisky, a cake, and cups and saucers. He put on a faded

crimson dressing-gown, and a pair of red slippers, and advanced to

Denham with a tumbler in one hand and a well-burnished book in the

other.

“The Baskerville Congreve,” said Rodney, offering it to his guest. “I

couldn’t read him in a cheap edition.”

When he was seen thus among his books and his valuables, amiably

anxious to make his visitor comfortable, and moving about with

something of the dexterity and grace of a Persian cat, Denham relaxed

his critical attitude, and felt more at home with Rodney than he would

have done with many men better known to him. Rodney’s room was the room

of a person who cherishes a great many personal tastes, guarding them

from the rough blasts of the public with scrupulous attention. His

papers and his books rose in jagged mounds on table and floor, round

which he skirted with nervous care lest his dressing-gown might

disarrange them ever so slightly. On a chair stood a stack of

photographs of statues and pictures, which it was his habit to exhibit,

one by one, for the space of a day or two. The books on his shelves

were as orderly as regiments of soldiers, and the backs of them shone

like so many bronze beetle-wings; though, if you took one from its

place you saw a shabbier volume behind it, since space was limited. An

oval Venetian mirror stood above the fireplace, and reflected duskily

in its spotted depths the faint yellow and crimson of a jarful of

tulips which stood among the letters and pipes and cigarettes upon the

mantelpiece. A small piano occupied a corner of the room, with the

score of “Don Giovanni” open upon the bracket.

“Well, Rodney,” said Denham, as he filled his pipe and looked about

him, “this is all very nice and comfortable.”

Rodney turned his head half round and smiled, with the pride of a

proprietor, and then prevented himself from smiling.

“Tolerable,” he muttered.

“But I dare say it’s just as well that you have to earn your own

living.”

“If you mean that I shouldn’t do anything good with leisure if I had

it, I dare say you’re right. But I should be ten times as happy with my

whole day to spend as I liked.”

“I doubt that,” Denham replied.

They sat silent, and the smoke from their pipes joined amicably in a

blue vapor above their heads.

“I could spend three hours every day reading Shakespeare,” Rodney

remarked. “And there’s music and pictures, let alone the society of the

people one likes.”

“You’d be bored to death in a year’s time.”

“Oh, I grant you I should be bored if I did nothing. But I should write

plays.”

“H’m!”

“I should write plays,” he repeated. “I’ve written three-quarters of

one already, and I’m only waiting for a holiday to finish it. And it’s

not bad—no, some of it’s really rather nice.”

The question arose in Denham’s mind whether he should ask to see this

play, as, no doubt, he was expected to do. He looked rather stealthily

at Rodney, who was tapping the coal nervously with a poker, and

quivering almost physically, so Denham thought, with desire to talk

about this play of his, and vanity unrequited and urgent. He seemed

very much at Denham’s mercy, and Denham could not help liking him,

partly on that account.

“Well,... will you let me see the play?” Denham asked, and Rodney

looked immediately appeased, but, nevertheless, he sat silent for a

moment, holding the poker perfectly upright in the air, regarding it

with his rather prominent eyes, and opening his lips and shutting them

again.

“Do you really care for this kind of thing?” he asked at length, in a

different tone of voice from that in which he had been speaking. And,

without waiting for an answer, he went on, rather querulously: “Very

few people care for poetry. I dare say it bores you.”

“Perhaps,” Denham remarked.

“Well, I’ll lend it you,” Rodney announced, putting down the poker.

As he moved to fetch the play, Denham stretched a hand to the bookcase

beside him, and took down the first volume which his fingers touched.

It happened to be a small and very lovely edition of Sir Thomas Browne,

containing the “Urn Burial,” the “Hydriotaphia,” and the “Garden of

Cyrus,” and, opening it at a passage which he knew very nearly by

heart, Denham began to read and, for some time, continued to read.

Rodney resumed his seat, with his manuscript on his knee, and from time

to time he glanced at Denham, and then joined his finger-tips and

crossed his thin legs over the fender, as if he experienced a good deal

of pleasure. At length Denham shut the book, and stood, with his back

to the fireplace, occasionally making an inarticulate humming sound

which seemed to refer to Sir Thomas Browne. He put his hat on his head,

and stood over Rodney, who still lay stretched back in his chair, with

his toes within the fender.

“I shall look in again some time,” Denham remarked, upon which Rodney

held up his hand, containing his manuscript, without saying anything

except—“If you like.”

Denham took the manuscript and went. Two days later he was much

surprised to find a thin parcel on his breakfast-plate, which, on being

opened, revealed the very copy of Sir Thomas Browne which he had

studied so intently in Rodney’s rooms. From sheer laziness he returned

no thanks, but he thought of Rodney from time to time with interest,

disconnecting him from Katharine, and meant to go round one evening and

smoke a pipe with him. It pleased Rodney thus to give away whatever his

friends genuinely admired. His library was constantly being diminished.

CHAPTER VI

Of all the hours of an ordinary working week-day, which are the

pleasantest to look forward to and to look back upon? If a single

instance is of use in framing a theory, it may be said that the minutes

between nine-twenty-five and nine-thirty in the morning had a singular

charm for Mary Datchet. She spent them in a very enviable frame of

mind; her contentment was almost unalloyed. High in the air as her flat

was, some beams from the morning sun reached her even in November,

striking straight at curtain, chair, and carpet, and painting there

three bright, true spaces of green, blue, and purple, upon which the

eye rested with a pleasure which gave physical warmth to the body.

There were few mornings when Mary did not look up, as she bent to lace

her boots, and as she followed the yellow rod from curtain to

breakfast-table she usually breathed some sigh of thankfulness that her

life provided her with such moments of pure enjoyment. She was robbing

no one of anything, and yet, to get so much pleasure from simple

things, such as eating one’s breakfast alone in a room which had nice

colors in it, clean from the skirting of the boards to the corners of

the ceiling, seemed to suit her so thoroughly that she used at first to

hunt about for some one to apologize to, or for some flaw in the

situation. She had now been six months in London, and she could find no

flaw, but that, as she invariably concluded by the time her boots were

laced, was solely and entirely due to the fact that she had her work.

Every day, as she stood with her dispatch-box in her hand at the door

of her flat, and gave one look back into the room to see that

everything was straight before she left, she said to herself that she

was very glad that she was going to leave it all, that to have sat

there all day long, in the enjoyment of leisure, would have been

intolerable.

Out in the street she liked to think herself one of the workers who, at

this hour, take their way in rapid single file along all the broad

pavements of the city, with their heads slightly lowered, as if all

their effort were to follow each other as closely as might be; so that

Mary used to figure to herself a straight rabbit-run worn by their

unswerving feet upon the pavement. But she liked to pretend that she

was indistinguishable from the rest, and that when a wet day drove her

to the Underground or omnibus, she gave and took her share of crowd and

wet with clerks and typists and commercial men, and shared with them

the serious business of winding-up the world to tick for another

four-and-twenty hours.

Thus thinking, on the particular morning in question, she made her away

across Lincoln’s Inn Fields and up Kingsway, and so through Southampton

Row until she reached her office in Russell Square. Now and then she

would pause and look into the window of some bookseller or flower shop,

where, at this early hour, the goods were being arranged, and empty

gaps behind the plate glass revealed a state of undress. Mary felt

kindly disposed towards the shopkeepers, and hoped that they would

trick the midday public into purchasing, for at this hour of the

morning she ranged herself entirely on the side of the shopkeepers and

bank clerks, and regarded all who slept late and had money to spend as

her enemy and natural prey. And directly she had crossed the road at

Holborn, her thoughts all came naturally and regularly to roost upon

her work, and she forgot that she was, properly speaking, an amateur

worker, whose services were unpaid, and could hardly be said to wind

the world up for its daily task, since the world, so far, had shown

very little desire to take the boons which Mary’s society for woman’s

suffrage had offered it.

She was thinking all the way up Southampton Row of notepaper and

foolscap, and how an economy in the use of paper might be effected

(without, of course, hurting Mrs. Seal’s feelings), for she was certain

that the great organizers always pounce, to begin with, upon trifles

like these, and build up their triumphant reforms upon a basis of

absolute solidity; and, without acknowledging it for a moment, Mary

Datchet was determined to be a great organizer, and had already doomed

her society to reconstruction of the most radical kind. Once or twice

lately, it is true, she had started, broad awake, before turning into

Russell Square, and denounced herself rather sharply for being already

in a groove, capable, that is, of thinking the same thoughts every

morning at the same hour, so that the chestnut-colored brick of the

Russell Square houses had some curious connection with her thoughts

about office economy, and served also as a sign that she should get

into trim for meeting Mr. Clacton, or Mrs. Seal, or whoever might be

beforehand with her at the office. Having no religious belief, she was

the more conscientious about her life, examining her position from time

to time very seriously, and nothing annoyed her more than to find one

of these bad habits nibbling away unheeded at the precious substance.

What was the good, after all, of being a woman if one didn’t keep

fresh, and cram one’s life with all sorts of views and experiments?

Thus she always gave herself a little shake, as she turned the corner,

and, as often as not, reached her own door whistling a snatch of a

Somersetshire ballad.

The suffrage office was at the top of one of the large Russell Square

houses, which had once been lived in by a great city merchant and his

family, and was now let out in slices to a number of societies which

displayed assorted initials upon doors of ground glass, and kept, each

of them, a typewriter which clicked busily all day long. The old house,

with its great stone staircase, echoed hollowly to the sound of

typewriters and of errand-boys from ten to six. The noise of different

typewriters already at work, disseminating their views upon the

protection of native races, or the value of cereals as foodstuffs,

quickened Mary’s steps, and she always ran up the last flight of steps

which led to her own landing, at whatever hour she came, so as to get

her typewriter to take its place in competition with the rest.

She sat herself down to her letters, and very soon all these

speculations were forgotten, and the two lines drew themselves between

her eyebrows, as the contents of the letters, the office furniture, and

the sounds of activity in the next room gradually asserted their sway

upon her. By eleven o’clock the atmosphere of concentration was running

so strongly in one direction that any thought of a different order

could hardly have survived its birth more than a moment or so. The task

which lay before her was to organize a series of entertainments, the

profits of which were to benefit the society, which drooped for want of

funds. It was her first attempt at organization on a large scale, and

she meant to achieve something remarkable. She meant to use the

cumbrous machine to pick out this, that, and the other interesting

person from the muddle of the world, and to set them for a week in a

pattern which must catch the eyes of Cabinet Ministers, and the eyes

once caught, the old arguments were to be delivered with unexampled

originality. Such was the scheme as a whole; and in contemplation of it

she would become quite flushed and excited, and have to remind herself

of all the details that intervened between her and success.

The door would open, and Mr. Clacton would come in to search for a

certain leaflet buried beneath a pyramid of leaflets. He was a thin,

sandy-haired man of about thirty-five, spoke with a Cockney accent, and

had about him a frugal look, as if nature had not dealt generously with

him in any way, which, naturally, prevented him from dealing generously

with other people. When he had found his leaflet, and offered a few

jocular hints upon keeping papers in order, the typewriting would stop

abruptly, and Mrs. Seal would burst into the room with a letter which

needed explanation in her hand. This was a more serious interruption

than the other, because she never knew exactly what she wanted, and

half a dozen requests would bolt from her, no one of which was clearly

stated. Dressed in plum-colored velveteen, with short, gray hair, and a

face that seemed permanently flushed with philanthropic enthusiasm, she

was always in a hurry, and always in some disorder. She wore two

crucifixes, which got themselves entangled in a heavy gold chain upon

her breast, and seemed to Mary expressive of her mental ambiguity. Only

her vast enthusiasm and her worship of Miss Markham, one of the

pioneers of the society, kept her in her place, for which she had no

sound qualification.

So the morning wore on, and the pile of letters grew, and Mary felt, at

last, that she was the center ganglion of a very fine network of nerves

which fell over England, and one of these days, when she touched the

heart of the system, would begin feeling and rushing together and

emitting their splendid blaze of revolutionary fireworks—for some such

metaphor represents what she felt about her work, when her brain had

been heated by three hours of application.

Shortly before one o’clock Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal desisted from

their labors, and the old joke about luncheon, which came out regularly

at this hour, was repeated with scarcely any variation of words. Mr.

Clacton patronized a vegetarian restaurant; Mrs. Seal brought

sandwiches, which she ate beneath the plane-trees in Russell Square;

while Mary generally went to a gaudy establishment, upholstered in red

plush, near by, where, much to the vegetarian’s disapproval, you could

buy steak, two inches thick, or a roast section of fowl, swimming in a

pewter dish.

“The bare branches against the sky do one so much _good_,” Mrs. Seal

asserted, looking out into the Square.

“But one can’t lunch off trees, Sally,” said Mary.

“I confess I don’t know how you manage it, Miss Datchet,” Mr. Clacton

remarked. “I should sleep all the afternoon, I know, if I took a heavy

meal in the middle of the day.”

“What’s the very latest thing in literature?” Mary asked,

good-humoredly pointing to the yellow-covered volume beneath Mr.

Clacton’s arm, for he invariably read some new French author at

lunch-time, or squeezed in a visit to a picture gallery, balancing his

social work with an ardent culture of which he was secretly proud, as

Mary had very soon divined.

So they parted and Mary walked away, wondering if they guessed that she

really wanted to get away from them, and supposing that they had not

quite reached that degree of subtlety. She bought herself an evening

paper, which she read as she ate, looking over the top of it again and

again at the queer people who were buying cakes or imparting their

secrets, until some young woman whom she knew came in, and she called

out, “Eleanor, come and sit by me,” and they finished their lunch

together, parting on the strip of pavement among the different lines of

traffic with a pleasant feeling that they were stepping once more into

their separate places in the great and eternally moving pattern of

human life.

But, instead of going straight back to the office to-day, Mary turned

into the British Museum, and strolled down the gallery with the shapes

of stone until she found an empty seat directly beneath the gaze of the

Elgin marbles. She looked at them, and seemed, as usual, borne up on

some wave of exaltation and emotion, by which her life at once became

solemn and beautiful—an impression which was due as much, perhaps, to

the solitude and chill and silence of the gallery as to the actual

beauty of the statues. One must suppose, at least, that her emotions

were not purely esthetic, because, after she had gazed at the Ulysses

for a minute or two, she began to think about Ralph Denham. So secure

did she feel with these silent shapes that she almost yielded to an

impulse to say “I am in love with you” aloud. The presence of this

immense and enduring beauty made her almost alarmingly conscious of her

desire, and at the same time proud of a feeling which did not display

anything like the same proportions when she was going about her daily

work.

She repressed her impulse to speak aloud, and rose and wandered about

rather aimlessly among the statues until she found herself in another

gallery devoted to engraved obelisks and winged Assyrian bulls, and her

emotion took another turn. She began to picture herself traveling with

Ralph in a land where these monsters were couchant in the sand. “For,”

she thought to herself, as she gazed fixedly at some information

printed behind a piece of glass, “the wonderful thing about you is that

you’re ready for anything; you’re not in the least conventional, like

most clever men.”

And she conjured up a scene of herself on a camel’s back, in the

desert, while Ralph commanded a whole tribe of natives.

“That is what you can do,” she went on, moving on to the next statue.

“You always make people do what you want.”

A glow spread over her spirit, and filled her eyes with brightness.

Nevertheless, before she left the Museum she was very far from saying,

even in the privacy of her own mind, “I am in love with you,” and that

sentence might very well never have framed itself. She was, indeed,

rather annoyed with herself for having allowed such an ill-considered

breach of her reserve, weakening her powers of resistance, she felt,

should this impulse return again. For, as she walked along the street

to her office, the force of all her customary objections to being in

love with any one overcame her. She did not want to marry at all. It

seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing love into

touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship, such as hers was

with Ralph, which, for two years now, had based itself upon common

interests in impersonal topics, such as the housing of the poor, or the

taxation of land values.

But the afternoon spirit differed intrinsically from the morning

spirit. Mary found herself watching the flight of a bird, or making

drawings of the branches of the plane-trees upon her blotting-paper.

People came in to see Mr. Clacton on business, and a seductive smell of

cigarette smoke issued from his room. Mrs. Seal wandered about with

newspaper cuttings, which seemed to her either “quite splendid” or

“really too bad for words.” She used to paste these into books, or send

them to her friends, having first drawn a broad bar in blue pencil down

the margin, a proceeding which signified equally and indistinguishably

the depths of her reprobation or the heights of her approval.

About four o’clock on that same afternoon Katharine Hilbery was walking

up Kingsway. The question of tea presented itself. The street lamps

were being lit already, and as she stood still for a moment beneath one

of them, she tried to think of some neighboring drawing-room where

there would be firelight and talk congenial to her mood. That mood,

owing to the spinning traffic and the evening veil of unreality, was

ill-adapted to her home surroundings. Perhaps, on the whole, a shop was

the best place in which to preserve this queer sense of heightened

existence. At the same time she wished to talk. Remembering Mary

Datchet and her repeated invitations, she crossed the road, turned into

Russell Square, and peered about, seeking for numbers with a sense of

adventure that was out of all proportion to the deed itself. She found

herself in a dimly lighted hall, unguarded by a porter, and pushed open

the first swing door. But the office-boy had never heard of Miss

Datchet. Did she belong to the S.R.F.R.? Katharine shook her head with

a smile of dismay. A voice from within shouted, “No. The S.G.S.—top

floor.”

Katharine mounted past innumerable glass doors, with initials on them,

and became steadily more and more doubtful of the wisdom of her

venture. At the top she paused for a moment to breathe and collect

herself. She heard the typewriter and formal professional voices

inside, not belonging, she thought, to any one she had ever spoken to.

She touched the bell, and the door was opened almost immediately by

Mary herself. Her face had to change its expression entirely when she

saw Katharine.

“You!” she exclaimed. “We thought you were the printer.” Still holding

the door open, she called back, “No, Mr. Clacton, it’s not Penningtons.

I should ring them up again—double three double eight, Central. Well,

this is a surprise. Come in,” she added. “You’re just in time for tea.”

The light of relief shone in Mary’s eyes. The boredom of the afternoon

was dissipated at once, and she was glad that Katharine had found them

in a momentary press of activity, owing to the failure of the printer

to send back certain proofs.

The unshaded electric light shining upon the table covered with papers

dazed Katharine for a moment. After the confusion of her twilight walk,

and her random thoughts, life in this small room appeared extremely

concentrated and bright. She turned instinctively to look out of the

window, which was uncurtained, but Mary immediately recalled her.

“It was very clever of you to find your way,” she said, and Katharine

wondered, as she stood there, feeling, for the moment, entirely

detached and unabsorbed, why she had come. She looked, indeed, to

Mary’s eyes strangely out of place in the office. Her figure in the

long cloak, which took deep folds, and her face, which was composed

into a mask of sensitive apprehension, disturbed Mary for a moment with

a sense of the presence of some one who was of another world, and,

therefore, subversive of her world. She became immediately anxious that

Katharine should be impressed by the importance of her world, and hoped

that neither Mrs. Seal nor Mr. Clacton would appear until the

impression of importance had been received. But in this she was

disappointed. Mrs. Seal burst into the room holding a kettle in her

hand, which she set upon the stove, and then, with inefficient haste,

she set light to the gas, which flared up, exploded, and went out.

“Always the way, always the way,” she muttered. “Kit Markham is the

only person who knows how to deal with the thing.”

Mary had to go to her help, and together they spread the table, and

apologized for the disparity between the cups and the plainness of the

food.

“If we had known Miss Hilbery was coming, we should have bought a

cake,” said Mary, upon which Mrs. Seal looked at Katharine for the

first time, suspiciously, because she was a person who needed cake.

Here Mr. Clacton opened the door, and came in, holding a typewritten

letter in his hand, which he was reading aloud.

“Salford’s affiliated,” he said.

“Well done, Salford!” Mrs. Seal exclaimed enthusiastically, thumping

the teapot which she held upon the table, in token of applause.

“Yes, these provincial centers seem to be coming into line at last,”

said Mr. Clacton, and then Mary introduced him to Miss Hilbery, and he

asked her, in a very formal manner, if she were interested “in our

work.”

“And the proofs still not come?” said Mrs. Seal, putting both her

elbows on the table, and propping her chin on her hands, as Mary began

to pour out tea. “It’s too bad—too bad. At this rate we shall miss the

country post. Which reminds me, Mr. Clacton, don’t you think we should

circularize the provinces with Partridge’s last speech? What? You’ve

not read it? Oh, it’s the best thing they’ve had in the House this

Session. Even the Prime Minister—”

But Mary cut her short.

“We don’t allow shop at tea, Sally,” she said firmly. “We fine her a

penny each time she forgets, and the fines go to buying a plum cake,”

she explained, seeking to draw Katharine into the community. She had

given up all hope of impressing her.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Seal apologized. “It’s my misfortune to be

an enthusiast,” she said, turning to Katharine. “My father’s daughter

could hardly be anything else. I think I’ve been on as many committees

as most people. Waifs and Strays, Rescue Work, Church Work, C. O.

S.—local branch—besides the usual civic duties which fall to one as a

householder. But I’ve given them all up for our work here, and I don’t

regret it for a second,” she added. “This is the root question, I feel;

until women have votes—”

“It’ll be sixpence, at least, Sally,” said Mary, bringing her fist down

on the table. “And we’re all sick to death of women and their votes.”

Mrs. Seal looked for a moment as though she could hardly believe her

ears, and made a deprecating “tut-tut-tut” in her throat, looking

alternately at Katharine and Mary, and shaking her head as she did so.

Then she remarked, rather confidentially to Katharine, with a little

nod in Mary’s direction:

“She’s doing more for the cause than any of us. She’s giving her

youth—for, alas! when I was young there were domestic circumstances—”

she sighed, and stopped short.

Mr. Clacton hastily reverted to the joke about luncheon, and explained

how Mrs. Seal fed on a bag of biscuits under the trees, whatever the

weather might be, rather, Katharine thought, as though Mrs. Seal were a

pet dog who had convenient tricks.

“Yes, I took my little bag into the square,” said Mrs. Seal, with the

self-conscious guilt of a child owning some fault to its elders. “It

was really very sustaining, and the bare boughs against the sky do one

so much _good_. But I shall have to give up going into the square,” she

proceeded, wrinkling her forehead. “The injustice of it! Why should I

have a beautiful square all to myself, when poor women who need rest

have nowhere at all to sit?” She looked fiercely at Katharine, giving

her short locks a little shake. “It’s dreadful what a tyrant one still

is, in spite of all one’s efforts. One tries to lead a decent life, but

one can’t. Of course, directly one thinks of it, one sees that _all_

squares should be open to _every one_. Is there any society with that

object, Mr. Clacton? If not, there should be, surely.”

“A most excellent object,” said Mr. Clacton in his professional manner.

“At the same time, one must deplore the ramification of organizations,

Mrs. Seal. So much excellent effort thrown away, not to speak of

pounds, shillings, and pence. Now how many organizations of a

philanthropic nature do you suppose there are in the City of London

itself, Miss Hilbery?” he added, screwing his mouth into a queer little

smile, as if to show that the question had its frivolous side.

Katharine smiled, too. Her unlikeness to the rest of them had, by this

time, penetrated to Mr. Clacton, who was not naturally observant, and

he was wondering who she was; this same unlikeness had subtly

stimulated Mrs. Seal to try and make a convert of her. Mary, too,

looked at her almost as if she begged her to make things easy. For

Katharine had shown no disposition to make things easy. She had

scarcely spoken, and her silence, though grave and even thoughtful,

seemed to Mary the silence of one who criticizes.

“Well, there are more in this house than I’d any notion of,” she said.

“On the ground floor you protect natives, on the next you emigrate

women and tell people to eat nuts—”

“Why do you say that ‘we’ do these things?” Mary interposed, rather

sharply. “We’re not responsible for all the cranks who choose to lodge

in the same house with us.”

Mr. Clacton cleared his throat and looked at each of the young ladies

in turn. He was a good deal struck by the appearance and manner of Miss

Hilbery, which seemed to him to place her among those cultivated and

luxurious people of whom he used to dream. Mary, on the other hand, was

more of his own sort, and a little too much inclined to order him

about. He picked up crumbs of dry biscuit and put them into his mouth

with incredible rapidity.

“You don’t belong to our society, then?” said Mrs. Seal.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said Katharine, with such ready candor that

Mrs. Seal was nonplussed, and stared at her with a puzzled expression,

as if she could not classify her among the varieties of human beings

known to her.

“But surely,” she began.

“Mrs. Seal is an enthusiast in these matters,” said Mr. Clacton, almost

apologetically. “We have to remind her sometimes that others have a

right to their views even if they differ from our own.... “Punch” has a

very funny picture this week, about a Suffragist and an agricultural

laborer. Have you seen this week’s “Punch,” Miss Datchet?”

Mary laughed, and said “No.”

Mr. Clacton then told them the substance of the joke, which, however,

depended a good deal for its success upon the expression which the

artist had put into the people’s faces. Mrs. Seal sat all the time

perfectly grave. Directly he had done speaking she burst out:

“But surely, if you care about the welfare of your sex at all, you must

wish them to have the vote?”

“I never said I didn’t wish them to have the vote,” Katharine

protested.

“Then why aren’t you a member of our society?” Mrs. Seal demanded.

Katharine stirred her spoon round and round, stared into the swirl of

the tea, and remained silent. Mr. Clacton, meanwhile, framed a question

which, after a moment’s hesitation, he put to Katharine.

“Are you in any way related, I wonder, to the poet Alardyce? His

daughter, I believe, married a Mr. Hilbery.”

“Yes; I’m the poet’s granddaughter,” said Katharine, with a little

sigh, after a pause; and for a moment they were all silent.

“The poet’s granddaughter!” Mrs. Seal repeated, half to herself, with a

shake of her head, as if that explained what was otherwise

inexplicable.

The light kindled in Mr. Clacton’s eye.

“Ah, indeed. That interests me very much,” he said. “I owe a great debt

to your grandfather, Miss Hilbery. At one time I could have repeated

the greater part of him by heart. But one gets out of the way of

reading poetry, unfortunately. You don’t remember him, I suppose?”

A sharp rap at the door made Katharine’s answer inaudible. Mrs. Seal

looked up with renewed hope in her eyes, and exclaiming:

“The proofs at last!” ran to open the door. “Oh, it’s only Mr. Denham!”

she cried, without any attempt to conceal her disappointment. Ralph,

Katharine supposed, was a frequent visitor, for the only person he

thought it necessary to greet was herself, and Mary at once explained

the strange fact of her being there by saying:

“Katharine has come to see how one runs an office.”

Ralph felt himself stiffen uncomfortably, as he said:

“I hope Mary hasn’t persuaded you that she knows how to run an office?”

“What, doesn’t she?” said Katharine, looking from one to the other.

At these remarks Mrs. Seal began to exhibit signs of discomposure,

which displayed themselves by a tossing movement of her head, and, as

Ralph took a letter from his pocket, and placed his finger upon a

certain sentence, she forestalled him by exclaiming in confusion:

“Now, I know what you’re going to say, Mr. Denham! But it was the day

Kit Markham was here, and she upsets one so—with her wonderful

vitality, always thinking of something new that we ought to be doing

and aren’t—and I was conscious at the time that my dates were mixed. It

had nothing to do with Mary at all, I assure you.”

“My dear Sally, don’t apologize,” said Mary, laughing. “Men are such

pedants—they don’t know what things matter, and what things don’t.”

“Now, Denham, speak up for our sex,” said Mr. Clacton in a jocular

manner, indeed, but like most insignificant men he was very quick to

resent being found fault with by a woman, in argument with whom he was

fond of calling himself “a mere man.” He wished, however, to enter into

a literary conservation with Miss Hilbery, and thus let the matter

drop.

“Doesn’t it seem strange to you, Miss Hilbery,” he said, “that the

French, with all their wealth of illustrious names, have no poet who

can compare with your grandfather? Let me see. There’s Chenier and Hugo

and Alfred de Musset—wonderful men, but, at the same time, there’s a

richness, a freshness about Alardyce—”

Here the telephone bell rang, and he had to absent himself with a smile

and a bow which signified that, although literature is delightful, it

is not work. Mrs. Seal rose at the same time, but remained hovering

over the table, delivering herself of a tirade against party

government. “For if I were to tell you what I know of back-stairs

intrigue, and what can be done by the power of the purse, you wouldn’t

credit me, Mr. Denham, you wouldn’t, indeed. Which is why I feel that

the only work for my father’s daughter—for he was one of the pioneers,

Mr. Denham, and on his tombstone I had that verse from the Psalms put,

about the sowers and the seed.... And what wouldn’t I give that he

should be alive now, seeing what we’re going to see—” but reflecting

that the glories of the future depended in part upon the activity of

her typewriter, she bobbed her head, and hurried back to the seclusion

of her little room, from which immediately issued sounds of

enthusiastic, but obviously erratic, composition.

Mary made it clear at once, by starting a fresh topic of general

interest, that though she saw the humor of her colleague, she did not

intend to have her laughed at.

“The standard of morality seems to me frightfully low,” she observed

reflectively, pouring out a second cup of tea, “especially among women

who aren’t well educated. They don’t see that small things matter, and

that’s where the leakage begins, and then we find ourselves in

difficulties—I very nearly lost my temper yesterday,” she went on,

looking at Ralph with a little smile, as though he knew what happened

when she lost her temper. “It makes me very angry when people tell me

lies—doesn’t it make you angry?” she asked Katharine.

“But considering that every one tells lies,” Katharine remarked,

looking about the room to see where she had put down her umbrella and

her parcel, for there was an intimacy in the way in which Mary and

Ralph addressed each other which made her wish to leave them. Mary, on

the other hand, was anxious, superficially at least, that Katharine

should stay and so fortify her in her determination not to be in love

with Ralph.

Ralph, while lifting his cup from his lips to the table, had made up

his mind that if Miss Hilbery left, he would go with her.

“I don’t think that I tell lies, and I don’t think that Ralph tells

lies, do you, Ralph?” Mary continued.

Katharine laughed, with more gayety, as it seemed to Mary, than she

could properly account for. What was she laughing at? At them,

presumably. Katharine had risen, and was glancing hither and thither,

at the presses and the cupboards, and all the machinery of the office,

as if she included them all in her rather malicious amusement, which

caused Mary to keep her eyes on her straightly and rather fiercely, as

if she were a gay-plumed, mischievous bird, who might light on the

topmost bough and pick off the ruddiest cherry, without any warning.

Two women less like each other could scarcely be imagined, Ralph

thought, looking from one to the other. Next moment, he too, rose, and

nodding to Mary, as Katharine said good-bye, opened the door for her,

and followed her out.

Mary sat still and made no attempt to prevent them from going. For a

second or two after the door had shut on them her eyes rested on the

door with a straightforward fierceness in which, for a moment, a

certain degree of bewilderment seemed to enter; but, after a brief

hesitation, she put down her cup and proceeded to clear away the

tea-things.

The impulse which had driven Ralph to take this action was the result

of a very swift little piece of reasoning, and thus, perhaps, was not

quite so much of an impulse as it seemed. It passed through his mind

that if he missed this chance of talking to Katharine, he would have to

face an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room again, demanding

an explanation of his cowardly indecision. It was better, on the whole,

to risk present discomfiture than to waste an evening bandying excuses

and constructing impossible scenes with this uncompromising section of

himself. For ever since he had visited the Hilberys he had been much at

the mercy of a phantom Katharine, who came to him when he sat alone,

and answered him as he would have her answer, and was always beside him

to crown those varying triumphs which were transacted almost every

night, in imaginary scenes, as he walked through the lamplit streets

home from the office. To walk with Katharine in the flesh would either

feed that phantom with fresh food, which, as all who nourish dreams are

aware, is a process that becomes necessary from time to time, or refine

it to such a degree of thinness that it was scarcely serviceable any

longer; and that, too, is sometimes a welcome change to a dreamer. And

all the time Ralph was well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not

represented in his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was

bewildered by the fact that she had nothing to do with his dream of

her.

When, on reaching the street, Katharine found that Mr. Denham proceeded

to keep pace by her side, she was surprised and, perhaps, a little

annoyed. She, too, had her margin of imagination, and to-night her

activity in this obscure region of the mind required solitude. If she

had had her way, she would have walked very fast down the Tottenham

Court Road, and then sprung into a cab and raced swiftly home. The view

she had had of the inside of an office was of the nature of a dream to

her. Shut off up there, she compared Mrs. Seal, and Mary Datchet, and

Mr. Clacton to enchanted people in a bewitched tower, with the spiders’

webs looping across the corners of the room, and all the tools of the

necromancer’s craft at hand; for so aloof and unreal and apart from the

normal world did they seem to her, in the house of innumerable

typewriters, murmuring their incantations and concocting their drugs,

and flinging their frail spiders’ webs over the torrent of life which

rushed down the streets outside.

She may have been conscious that there was some exaggeration in this

fancy of hers, for she certainly did not wish to share it with Ralph.

To him, she supposed, Mary Datchet, composing leaflets for Cabinet

Ministers among her typewriters, represented all that was interesting

and genuine; and, accordingly, she shut them both out from all share in

the crowded street, with its pendant necklace of lamps, its lighted

windows, and its throng of men and women, which exhilarated her to such

an extent that she very nearly forgot her companion. She walked very

fast, and the effect of people passing in the opposite direction was to

produce a queer dizziness both in her head and in Ralph’s, which set

their bodies far apart. But she did her duty by her companion almost

unconsciously.

“Mary Datchet does that sort of work very well.... She’s responsible

for it, I suppose?”

“Yes. The others don’t help at all.... Has she made a convert of you?”

“Oh no. That is, I’m a convert already.”

“But she hasn’t persuaded you to work for them?”

“Oh dear no—that wouldn’t do at all.”

So they walked on down the Tottenham Court Road, parting and coming

together again, and Ralph felt much as though he were addressing the

summit of a poplar in a high gale of wind.

“Suppose we get on to that omnibus?” he suggested.

Katharine acquiesced, and they climbed up, and found themselves alone

on top of it.

“But which way are you going?” Katharine asked, waking a little from

the trance into which movement among moving things had thrown her.

“I’m going to the Temple,” Ralph replied, inventing a destination on

the spur of the moment. He felt the change come over her as they sat

down and the omnibus began to move forward. He imagined her

contemplating the avenue in front of them with those honest sad eyes

which seemed to set him at such a distance from them. But the breeze

was blowing in their faces; it lifted her hat for a second, and she

drew out a pin and stuck it in again,—a little action which seemed, for

some reason, to make her rather more fallible. Ah, if only her hat

would blow off, and leave her altogether disheveled, accepting it from

his hands!

“This is like Venice,” she observed, raising her hand. “The motor-cars,

I mean, shooting about so quickly, with their lights.”

“I’ve never seen Venice,” he replied. “I keep that and some other

things for my old age.”

“What are the other things?” she asked.

“There’s Venice and India and, I think, Dante, too.”

She laughed.

“Think of providing for one’s old age! And would you refuse to see

Venice if you had the chance?”

Instead of answering her, he wondered whether he should tell her

something that was quite true about himself; and as he wondered, he

told her.

“I’ve planned out my life in sections ever since I was a child, to make

it last longer. You see, I’m always afraid that I’m missing something—”

“And so am I!” Katharine exclaimed. “But, after all,” she added, “why

should you miss anything?”

“Why? Because I’m poor, for one thing,” Ralph rejoined. “You, I

suppose, can have Venice and India and Dante every day of your life.”

She said nothing for a moment, but rested one hand, which was bare of

glove, upon the rail in front of her, meditating upon a variety of

things, of which one was that this strange young man pronounced Dante

as she was used to hearing it pronounced, and another, that he had,

most unexpectedly, a feeling about life that was familiar to her.

Perhaps, then, he was the sort of person she might take an interest in,

if she came to know him better, and as she had placed him among those

whom she would never want to know better, this was enough to make her

silent. She hastily recalled her first view of him, in the little room

where the relics were kept, and ran a bar through half her impressions,

as one cancels a badly written sentence, having found the right one.

“But to know that one might have things doesn’t alter the fact that one

hasn’t got them,” she said, in some confusion. “How could I go to

India, for example? Besides,” she began impulsively, and stopped

herself. Here the conductor came round, and interrupted them. Ralph

waited for her to resume her sentence, but she said no more.

“I have a message to give your father,” he remarked. “Perhaps you would

give it him, or I could come—”

“Yes, do come,” Katharine replied.

“Still, I don’t see why you shouldn’t go to India,” Ralph began, in

order to keep her from rising, as she threatened to do.

But she got up in spite of him, and said good-bye with her usual air of

decision, and left him with a quickness which Ralph connected now with

all her movements. He looked down and saw her standing on the pavement

edge, an alert, commanding figure, which waited its season to cross,

and then walked boldly and swiftly to the other side. That gesture and

action would be added to the picture he had of her, but at present the

real woman completely routed the phantom one.

CHAPTER VII

“And little Augustus Pelham said to me, ‘It’s the younger generation

knocking at the door,’ and I said to him, ‘Oh, but the younger

generation comes in without knocking, Mr. Pelham.’ Such a feeble little

joke, wasn’t it, but down it went into his notebook all the same.”

“Let us congratulate ourselves that we shall be in the grave before

that work is published,” said Mr. Hilbery.

The elderly couple were waiting for the dinner-bell to ring and for

their daughter to come into the room. Their arm-chairs were drawn up on

either side of the fire, and each sat in the same slightly crouched

position, looking into the coals, with the expressions of people who

have had their share of experiences and wait, rather passively, for

something to happen. Mr. Hilbery now gave all his attention to a piece

of coal which had fallen out of the grate, and to selecting a favorable

position for it among the lumps that were burning already. Mrs. Hilbery

watched him in silence, and the smile changed on her lips as if her

mind still played with the events of the afternoon.

When Mr. Hilbery had accomplished his task, he resumed his crouching

position again, and began to toy with the little green stone attached

to his watch-chain. His deep, oval-shaped eyes were fixed upon the

flames, but behind the superficial glaze seemed to brood an observant

and whimsical spirit, which kept the brown of the eye still unusually

vivid. But a look of indolence, the result of skepticism or of a taste

too fastidious to be satisfied by the prizes and conclusions so easily

within his grasp, lent him an expression almost of melancholy. After

sitting thus for a time, he seemed to reach some point in his thinking

which demonstrated its futility, upon which he sighed and stretched his

hand for a book lying on the table by his side.

Directly the door opened he closed the book, and the eyes of father and

mother both rested on Katharine as she came towards them. The sight

seemed at once to give them a motive which they had not had before. To

them she appeared, as she walked towards them in her light evening

dress, extremely young, and the sight of her refreshed them, were it

only because her youth and ignorance made their knowledge of the world

of some value.

“The only excuse for you, Katharine, is that dinner is still later than

you are,” said Mr. Hilbery, putting down his spectacles.

“I don’t mind her being late when the result is so charming,” said Mrs.

Hilbery, looking with pride at her daughter. “Still, I don’t know that

I _like_ your being out so late, Katharine,” she continued. “You took a

cab, I hope?”

Here dinner was announced, and Mr. Hilbery formally led his wife

downstairs on his arm. They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed,

the prettiness of the dinner-table merited that compliment. There was

no cloth upon the table, and the china made regular circles of deep

blue upon the shining brown wood. In the middle there was a bowl of

tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh

that the narrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball.

From the surrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers

surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them

testified in the great man’s own handwriting that he was yours

sincerely or affectionately or for ever. The father and daughter would

have been quite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence, or

with a few cryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not be

understood by the servants. But silence depressed Mrs. Hilbery, and far

from minding the presence of maids, she would often address herself to

them, and was never altogether unconscious of their approval or

disapproval of her remarks. In the first place she called them to

witness that the room was darker than usual, and had all the lights

turned on.

“That’s more cheerful,” she exclaimed. “D’you know, Katharine, that

ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried to

make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, you

know, that I spilt the tea—and he made an epigram about that!”

“Which ridiculous goose?” Katharine asked her father.

“Only one of my geese, happily, makes epigrams—Augustus Pelham, of

course,” said Mrs. Hilbery.

“I’m not sorry that I was out,” said Katharine.

“Poor Augustus!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “But we’re all too hard on

him. Remember how devoted he is to his tiresome old mother.”

“That’s only because she is his mother. Any one connected with

himself—”

“No, no, Katharine—that’s too bad. That’s—what’s the word I mean,

Trevor, something long and Latin—the sort of word you and Katharine

know—”

Mr. Hilbery suggested “cynical.”

“Well, that’ll do. I don’t believe in sending girls to college, but I

should teach them that sort of thing. It makes one feel so dignified,

bringing out these little allusions, and passing on gracefully to the

next topic. But I don’t know what’s come over me—I actually had to ask

Augustus the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with, as you were out,

Katharine, and Heaven knows what he mayn’t put down about me in his

diary.”

“I wish,” Katharine started, with great impetuosity, and checked

herself. Her mother always stirred her to feel and think quickly, and

then she remembered that her father was there, listening with

attention.

“What is it you wish?” he asked, as she paused.

He often surprised her, thus, into telling him what she had not meant

to tell him; and then they argued, while Mrs. Hilbery went on with her

own thoughts.

“I wish mother wasn’t famous. I was out at tea, and they would talk to

me about poetry.”

“Thinking you must be poetical, I see—and aren’t you?”

“Who’s been talking to you about poetry, Katharine?” Mrs. Hilbery

demanded, and Katharine was committed to giving her parents an account

of her visit to the Suffrage office.

“They have an office at the top of one of the old houses in Russell

Square. I never saw such queer-looking people. And the man discovered I

was related to the poet, and talked to me about poetry. Even Mary

Datchet seems different in that atmosphere.”

“Yes, the office atmosphere is very bad for the soul,” said Mr.

Hilbery.

“I don’t remember any offices in Russell Square in the old days, when

Mamma lived there,” Mrs. Hilbery mused, “and I can’t fancy turning one

of those noble great rooms into a stuffy little Suffrage office. Still,

if the clerks read poetry there must be something nice about them.”

“No, because they don’t read it as we read it,” Katharine insisted.

“But it’s nice to think of them reading your grandfather, and not

filling up those dreadful little forms all day long,” Mrs. Hilbery

persisted, her notion of office life being derived from some chance

view of a scene behind the counter at her bank, as she slipped the

sovereigns into her purse.

“At any rate, they haven’t made a convert of Katharine, which was what

I was afraid of,” Mr. Hilbery remarked.

“Oh no,” said Katharine very decidedly, “I wouldn’t work with them for

anything.”

“It’s curious,” Mr. Hilbery continued, agreeing with his daughter, “how

the sight of one’s fellow-enthusiasts always chokes one off. They show

up the faults of one’s cause so much more plainly than one’s

antagonists. One can be enthusiastic in one’s study, but directly one

comes into touch with the people who agree with one, all the glamor

goes. So I’ve always found,” and he proceeded to tell them, as he

peeled his apple, how he committed himself once, in his youthful days,

to make a speech at a political meeting, and went there ablaze with

enthusiasm for the ideals of his own side; but while his leaders spoke,

he became gradually converted to the other way of thinking, if thinking

it could be called, and had to feign illness in order to avoid making a

fool of himself—an experience which had sickened him of public

meetings.

Katharine listened and felt as she generally did when her father, and

to some extent her mother, described their feelings, that she quite

understood and agreed with them, but, at the same time, saw something

which they did not see, and always felt some disappointment when they

fell short of her vision, as they always did. The plates succeeded each

other swiftly and noiselessly in front of her, and the table was decked

for dessert, and as the talk murmured on in familiar grooves, she sat

there, rather like a judge, listening to her parents, who did, indeed,

feel it very pleasant when they made her laugh.

Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious

little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually,

though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood

over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance.

Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port, which

were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr. Hilbery, and

simultaneously Mrs. Hilbery and Katharine left the room. All the years

they had lived together they had never seen Mr. Hilbery smoke his cigar

or drink his port, and they would have felt it unseemly if, by chance,

they had surprised him as he sat there. These short, but clearly

marked, periods of separation between the sexes were always used for an

intimate postscript to what had been said at dinner, the sense of being

women together coming out most strongly when the male sex was, as if by

some religious rite, secluded from the female. Katharine knew by heart

the sort of mood that possessed her as she walked upstairs to the

drawing-room, her mother’s arm in hers; and she could anticipate the

pleasure with which, when she had turned on the lights, they both

regarded the drawing-room, fresh swept and set in order for the last

section of the day, with the red parrots swinging on the chintz

curtains, and the arm-chairs warming in the blaze. Mrs. Hilbery stood

over the fire, with one foot on the fender, and her skirts slightly

raised.

“Oh, Katharine,” she exclaimed, “how you’ve made me think of Mamma and

the old days in Russell Square! I can see the chandeliers, and the

green silk of the piano, and Mamma sitting in her cashmere shawl by the

window, singing till the little ragamuffin boys outside stopped to

listen. Papa sent me in with a bunch of violets while he waited round

the corner. It must have been a summer evening. That was before things

were hopeless....”

As she spoke an expression of regret, which must have come frequently

to cause the lines which now grew deep round the lips and eyes, settled

on her face. The poet’s marriage had not been a happy one. He had left

his wife, and after some years of a rather reckless existence, she had

died, before her time. This disaster had led to great irregularities of

education, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery might be said to have escaped

education altogether. But she had been her father’s companion at the

season when he wrote the finest of his poems. She had sat on his knee

in taverns and other haunts of drunken poets, and it was for her sake,

so people said, that he had cured himself of his dissipation, and

become the irreproachable literary character that the world knows,

whose inspiration had deserted him. As Mrs. Hilbery grew old she

thought more and more of the past, and this ancient disaster seemed at

times almost to prey upon her mind, as if she could not pass out of

life herself without laying the ghost of her parent’s sorrow to rest.

Katharine wished to comfort her mother, but it was difficult to do this

satisfactorily when the facts themselves were so much of a legend. The

house in Russell Square, for example, with its noble rooms, and the

magnolia-tree in the garden, and the sweet-voiced piano, and the sound

of feet coming down the corridors, and other properties of size and

romance—had they any existence? Yet why should Mrs. Alardyce live all

alone in this gigantic mansion, and, if she did not live alone, with

whom did she live? For its own sake, Katharine rather liked this tragic

story, and would have been glad to hear the details of it, and to have

been able to discuss them frankly. But this it became less and less

possible to do, for though Mrs. Hilbery was constantly reverting to the

story, it was always in this tentative and restless fashion, as though

by a touch here and there she could set things straight which had been

crooked these sixty years. Perhaps, indeed, she no longer knew what the

truth was.

“If they’d lived now,” she concluded, “I feel it wouldn’t have

happened. People aren’t so set upon tragedy as they were then. If my

father had been able to go round the world, or if she’d had a rest

cure, everything would have come right. But what could I do? And then

they had bad friends, both of them, who made mischief. Ah, Katharine,

when you marry, be quite, quite sure that you love your husband!”

The tears stood in Mrs. Hilbery’s eyes.

While comforting her, Katharine thought to herself, “Now this is what

Mary Datchet and Mr. Denham don’t understand. This is the sort of

position I’m always getting into. How simple it must be to live as they

do!” for all the evening she had been comparing her home and her father

and mother with the Suffrage office and the people there.

“But, Katharine,” Mrs. Hilbery continued, with one of her sudden

changes of mood, “though, Heaven knows, I don’t want to see you

married, surely if ever a man loved a woman, William loves you. And

it’s a nice, rich-sounding name too—Katharine Rodney, which,

unfortunately, doesn’t mean that he’s got any money, because he

hasn’t.”

The alteration of her name annoyed Katharine, and she observed, rather

sharply, that she didn’t want to marry any one.

“It’s very dull that you can only marry one husband, certainly,” Mrs.

Hilbery reflected. “I always wish that you could marry everybody who

wants to marry you. Perhaps they’ll come to that in time, but meanwhile

I confess that dear William—” But here Mr. Hilbery came in, and the

more solid part of the evening began. This consisted in the reading

aloud by Katharine from some prose work or other, while her mother

knitted scarves intermittently on a little circular frame, and her

father read the newspaper, not so attentively but that he could comment

humorously now and again upon the fortunes of the hero and the heroine.

The Hilberys subscribed to a library, which delivered books on Tuesdays

and Fridays, and Katharine did her best to interest her parents in the

works of living and highly respectable authors; but Mrs. Hilbery was

perturbed by the very look of the light, gold-wreathed volumes, and

would make little faces as if she tasted something bitter as the

reading went on; while Mr. Hilbery would treat the moderns with a

curious elaborate banter such as one might apply to the antics of a

promising child. So this evening, after five pages or so of one of

these masters, Mrs. Hilbery protested that it was all too clever and

cheap and nasty for words.

“Please, Katharine, read us something _real_.”

Katharine had to go to the bookcase and choose a portly volume in

sleek, yellow calf, which had directly a sedative effect upon both her

parents. But the delivery of the evening post broke in upon the periods

of Henry Fielding, and Katharine found that her letters needed all her

attention.

CHAPTER VIII

She took her letters up to her room with her, having persuaded her

mother to go to bed directly Mr. Hilbery left them, for so long as she

sat in the same room as her mother, Mrs. Hilbery might, at any moment,

ask for a sight of the post. A very hasty glance through many sheets

had shown Katharine that, by some coincidence, her attention had to be

directed to many different anxieties simultaneously. In the first

place, Rodney had written a very full account of his state of mind,

which was illustrated by a sonnet, and he demanded a reconsideration of

their position, which agitated Katharine more than she liked. Then

there were two letters which had to be laid side by side and compared

before she could make out the truth of their story, and even when she

knew the facts she could not decide what to make of them; and finally

she had to reflect upon a great many pages from a cousin who found

himself in financial difficulties, which forced him to the uncongenial

occupation of teaching the young ladies of Bungay to play upon the

violin.

But the two letters which each told the same story differently were the

chief source of her perplexity. She was really rather shocked to find

it definitely established that her own second cousin, Cyril Alardyce,

had lived for the last four years with a woman who was not his wife,

who had borne him two children, and was now about to bear him another.

This state of things had been discovered by Mrs. Milvain, her aunt

Celia, a zealous inquirer into such matters, whose letter was also

under consideration. Cyril, she said, must be made to marry the woman

at once; and Cyril, rightly or wrongly, was indignant with such

interference with his affairs, and would not own that he had any cause

to be ashamed of himself. Had he any cause to be ashamed of himself,

Katharine wondered; and she turned to her aunt again.

“Remember,” she wrote, in her profuse, emphatic statement, “that he

bears your grandfather’s name, and so will the child that is to be

born. The poor boy is not so much to blame as the woman who deluded

him, thinking him a gentleman, which he IS, and having money, which he

has _not_.”

“What would Ralph Denham say to this?” thought Katharine, beginning to

pace up and down her bedroom. She twitched aside the curtains, so that,

on turning, she was faced by darkness, and looking out, could just

distinguish the branches of a plane-tree and the yellow lights of some

one else’s windows.

“What would Mary Datchet and Ralph Denham say?” she reflected, pausing

by the window, which, as the night was warm, she raised, in order to

feel the air upon her face, and to lose herself in the nothingness of

night. But with the air the distant humming sound of far-off crowded

thoroughfares was admitted to the room. The incessant and tumultuous

hum of the distant traffic seemed, as she stood there, to represent the

thick texture of her life, for her life was so hemmed in with the

progress of other lives that the sound of its own advance was

inaudible. People like Ralph and Mary, she thought, had it all their

own way, and an empty space before them, and, as she envied them, she

cast her mind out to imagine an empty land where all this petty

intercourse of men and women, this life made up of the dense crossings

and entanglements of men and women, had no existence whatever. Even

now, alone, at night, looking out into the shapeless mass of London,

she was forced to remember that there was one point and here another

with which she had some connection. William Rodney, at this very

moment, was seated in a minute speck of light somewhere to the east of

her, and his mind was occupied, not with his book, but with her. She

wished that no one in the whole world would think of her. However,

there was no way of escaping from one’s fellow-beings, she concluded,

and shut the window with a sigh, and returned once more to her letters.

She could not doubt but that William’s letter was the most genuine she

had yet received from him. He had come to the conclusion that he could

not live without her, he wrote. He believed that he knew her, and could

give her happiness, and that their marriage would be unlike other

marriages. Nor was the sonnet, in spite of its accomplishment, lacking

in passion, and Katharine, as she read the pages through again, could

see in what direction her feelings ought to flow, supposing they

revealed themselves. She would come to feel a humorous sort of

tenderness for him, a zealous care for his susceptibilities, and, after

all, she considered, thinking of her father and mother, what is love?

Naturally, with her face, position, and background, she had experience

of young men who wished to marry her, and made protestations of love,

but, perhaps because she did not return the feeling, it remained

something of a pageant to her. Not having experience of it herself, her

mind had unconsciously occupied itself for some years in dressing up an

image of love, and the marriage that was the outcome of love, and the

man who inspired love, which naturally dwarfed any examples that came

her way. Easily, and without correction by reason, her imagination made

pictures, superb backgrounds casting a rich though phantom light upon

the facts in the foreground. Splendid as the waters that drop with

resounding thunder from high ledges of rock, and plunge downwards into

the blue depths of night, was the presence of love she dreamt, drawing

into it every drop of the force of life, and dashing them all asunder

in the superb catastrophe in which everything was surrendered, and

nothing might be reclaimed. The man, too, was some magnanimous hero,

riding a great horse by the shore of the sea. They rode through forests

together, they galloped by the rim of the sea. But waking, she was able

to contemplate a perfectly loveless marriage, as the thing one did

actually in real life, for possibly the people who dream thus are those

who do the most prosaic things.

At this moment she was much inclined to sit on into the night, spinning

her light fabric of thoughts until she tired of their futility, and

went to her mathematics; but, as she knew very well, it was necessary

that she should see her father before he went to bed. The case of Cyril

Alardyce must be discussed, her mother’s illusions and the rights of

the family attended to. Being vague herself as to what all this

amounted to, she had to take counsel with her father. She took her

letters in her hand and went downstairs. It was past eleven, and the

clocks had come into their reign, the grandfather’s clock in the hall

ticking in competition with the small clock on the landing. Mr.

Hilbery’s study ran out behind the rest of the house, on the ground

floor, and was a very silent, subterranean place, the sun in daytime

casting a mere abstract of light through a skylight upon his books and

the large table, with its spread of white papers, now illumined by a

green reading-lamp. Here Mr. Hilbery sat editing his review, or placing

together documents by means of which it could be proved that Shelley

had written “of” instead of “and,” or that the inn in which Byron had

slept was called the “Nag’s Head” and not the “Turkish Knight,” or that

the Christian name of Keats’s uncle had been John rather than Richard,

for he knew more minute details about these poets than any man in

England, probably, and was preparing an edition of Shelley which

scrupulously observed the poet’s system of punctuation. He saw the

humor of these researches, but that did not prevent him from carrying

them out with the utmost scrupulosity.

He was lying back comfortably in a deep arm-chair smoking a cigar, and

ruminating the fruitful question as to whether Coleridge had wished to

marry Dorothy Wordsworth, and what, if he had done so, would have been

the consequences to him in particular, and to literature in general.

When Katharine came in he reflected that he knew what she had come for,

and he made a pencil note before he spoke to her. Having done this, he

saw that she was reading, and he watched her for a moment without

saying anything. She was reading “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” and

her mind was full of the Italian hills and the blue daylight, and the

hedges set with little rosettes of red and white roses. Feeling that

her father waited for her, she sighed and said, shutting her book:

“I’ve had a letter from Aunt Celia about Cyril, father.... It seems to

be true—about his marriage. What are we to do?”

“Cyril seems to have been behaving in a very foolish manner,” said Mr.

Hilbery, in his pleasant and deliberate tones.

Katharine found some difficulty in carrying on the conversation, while

her father balanced his finger-tips so judiciously, and seemed to

reserve so many of his thoughts for himself.

“He’s about done for himself, I should say,” he continued. Without

saying anything, he took Katharine’s letters out of her hand, adjusted

his eyeglasses, and read them through.

At length he said “Humph!” and gave the letters back to her.

“Mother knows nothing about it,” Katharine remarked. “Will you tell

her?”

“I shall tell your mother. But I shall tell her that there is nothing

whatever for us to do.”

“But the marriage?” Katharine asked, with some diffidence.

Mr. Hilbery said nothing, and stared into the fire.

“What in the name of conscience did he do it for?” he speculated at

last, rather to himself than to her.

Katharine had begun to read her aunt’s letter over again, and she now

quoted a sentence. “Ibsen and Butler.... He has sent me a letter full

of quotations—nonsense, though clever nonsense.”

“Well, if the younger generation want to carry on its life on those

lines, it’s none of our affair,” he remarked.

“But isn’t it our affair, perhaps, to make them get married?” Katharine

asked rather wearily.

“Why the dickens should they apply to me?” her father demanded with

sudden irritation.

“Only as the head of the family—”

“But I’m not the head of the family. Alfred’s the head of the family.

Let them apply to Alfred,” said Mr. Hilbery, relapsing again into his

arm-chair. Katharine was aware that she had touched a sensitive spot,

however, in mentioning the family.

“I think, perhaps, the best thing would be for me to go and see them,”

she observed.

“I won’t have you going anywhere near them,” Mr. Hilbery replied with

unwonted decision and authority. “Indeed, I don’t understand why

they’ve dragged you into the business at all—I don’t see that it’s got

anything to do with you.”

“I’ve always been friends with Cyril,” Katharine observed.

“But did he ever tell you anything about this?” Mr. Hilbery asked

rather sharply.

Katharine shook her head. She was, indeed, a good deal hurt that Cyril

had not confided in her—did he think, as Ralph Denham or Mary Datchet

might think, that she was, for some reason, unsympathetic—hostile even?

“As to your mother,” said Mr. Hilbery, after a pause, in which he

seemed to be considering the color of the flames, “you had better tell

her the facts. She’d better know the facts before every one begins to

talk about it, though why Aunt Celia thinks it necessary to come, I’m

sure I don’t know. And the less talk there is the better.”

Granting the assumption that gentlemen of sixty who are highly

cultivated, and have had much experience of life, probably think of

many things which they do not say, Katharine could not help feeling

rather puzzled by her father’s attitude, as she went back to her room.

What a distance he was from it all! How superficially he smoothed these

events into a semblance of decency which harmonized with his own view

of life! He never wondered what Cyril had felt, nor did the hidden

aspects of the case tempt him to examine into them. He merely seemed to

realize, rather languidly, that Cyril had behaved in a way which was

foolish, because other people did not behave in that way. He seemed to

be looking through a telescope at little figures hundreds of miles in

the distance.

Her selfish anxiety not to have to tell Mrs. Hilbery what had happened

made her follow her father into the hall after breakfast the next

morning in order to question him.

“Have you told mother?” she asked. Her manner to her father was almost

stern, and she seemed to hold endless depths of reflection in the dark

of her eyes.

Mr. Hilbery sighed.

“My dear child, it went out of my head.” He smoothed his silk hat

energetically, and at once affected an air of hurry. “I’ll send a note

round from the office.... I’m late this morning, and I’ve any amount of

proofs to get through.”

“That wouldn’t do at all,” Katharine said decidedly. “She must be

told—you or I must tell her. We ought to have told her at first.”

Mr. Hilbery had now placed his hat on his head, and his hand was on the

door-knob. An expression which Katharine knew well from her childhood,

when he asked her to shield him in some neglect of duty, came into his

eyes; malice, humor, and irresponsibility were blended in it. He nodded

his head to and fro significantly, opened the door with an adroit

movement, and stepped out with a lightness unexpected at his age. He

waved his hand once to his daughter, and was gone. Left alone,

Katharine could not help laughing to find herself cheated as usual in

domestic bargainings with her father, and left to do the disagreeable

work which belonged, by rights, to him.

CHAPTER IX

Katharine disliked telling her mother about Cyril’s misbehavior quite

as much as her father did, and for much the same reasons. They both

shrank, nervously, as people fear the report of a gun on the stage,

from all that would have to be said on this occasion. Katharine,

moreover, was unable to decide what she thought of Cyril’s misbehavior.

As usual, she saw something which her father and mother did not see,

and the effect of that something was to suspend Cyril’s behavior in her

mind without any qualification at all. They would think whether it was

good or bad; to her it was merely a thing that had happened.

When Katharine reached the study, Mrs. Hilbery had already dipped her

pen in the ink.

“Katharine,” she said, lifting it in the air, “I’ve just made out such

a queer, strange thing about your grandfather. I’m three years and six

months older than he was when he died. I couldn’t very well have been

his mother, but I might have been his elder sister, and that seems to

me such a pleasant fancy. I’m going to start quite fresh this morning,

and get a lot done.”

She began her sentence, at any rate, and Katharine sat down at her own

table, untied the bundle of old letters upon which she was working,

smoothed them out absent-mindedly, and began to decipher the faded

script. In a minute she looked across at her mother, to judge her mood.

Peace and happiness had relaxed every muscle in her face; her lips were

parted very slightly, and her breath came in smooth, controlled

inspirations like those of a child who is surrounding itself with a

building of bricks, and increasing in ecstasy as each brick is placed

in position. So Mrs. Hilbery was raising round her the skies and trees

of the past with every stroke of her pen, and recalling the voices of

the dead. Quiet as the room was, and undisturbed by the sounds of the

present moment, Katharine could fancy that here was a deep pool of past

time, and that she and her mother were bathed in the light of sixty

years ago. What could the present give, she wondered, to compare with

the rich crowd of gifts bestowed by the past? Here was a Thursday

morning in process of manufacture; each second was minted fresh by the

clock upon the mantelpiece. She strained her ears and could just hear,

far off, the hoot of a motor-car and the rush of wheels coming nearer

and dying away again, and the voices of men crying old iron and

vegetables in one of the poorer streets at the back of the house.

Rooms, of course, accumulate their suggestions, and any room in which

one has been used to carry on any particular occupation gives off

memories of moods, of ideas, of postures that have been seen in it; so

that to attempt any different kind of work there is almost impossible.

Katharine was unconsciously affected, each time she entered her

mother’s room, by all these influences, which had had their birth years

ago, when she was a child, and had something sweet and solemn about

them, and connected themselves with early memories of the cavernous

glooms and sonorous echoes of the Abbey where her grandfather lay

buried. All the books and pictures, even the chairs and tables, had

belonged to him, or had reference to him; even the china dogs on the

mantelpiece and the little shepherdesses with their sheep had been

bought by him for a penny a piece from a man who used to stand with a

tray of toys in Kensington High Street, as Katharine had often heard

her mother tell. Often she had sat in this room, with her mind fixed so

firmly on those vanished figures that she could almost see the muscles

round their eyes and lips, and had given to each his own voice, with

its tricks of accent, and his coat and his cravat. Often she had seemed

to herself to be moving among them, an invisible ghost among the

living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends, because

she knew their secrets and possessed a divine foreknowledge of their

destiny. They had been so unhappy, such muddlers, so wrong-headed, it

seemed to her. She could have told them what to do, and what not to do.

It was a melancholy fact that they would pay no heed to her, and were

bound to come to grief in their own antiquated way. Their behavior was

often grotesquely irrational; their conventions monstrously absurd; and

yet, as she brooded upon them, she felt so closely attached to them

that it was useless to try to pass judgment upon them. She very nearly

lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her

own. On a morning of slight depression, such as this, she would try to

find some sort of clue to the muddle which their old letters presented;

some reason which seemed to make it worth while to them; some aim which

they kept steadily in view—but she was interrupted.

Mrs. Hilbery had risen from her table, and was standing looking out of

the window at a string of barges swimming up the river.

Katharine watched her. Suddenly Mrs. Hilbery turned abruptly, and

exclaimed:

“I really believe I’m bewitched! I only want three sentences, you see,

something quite straightforward and commonplace, and I can’t find ‘em.”

She began to pace up and down the room, snatching up her duster; but

she was too much annoyed to find any relief, as yet, in polishing the

backs of books.

“Besides,” she said, giving the sheet she had written to Katharine, “I

don’t believe this’ll do. Did your grandfather ever visit the Hebrides,

Katharine?” She looked in a strangely beseeching way at her daughter.

“My mind got running on the Hebrides, and I couldn’t help writing a

little description of them. Perhaps it would do at the beginning of a

chapter. Chapters often begin quite differently from the way they go

on, you know.” Katharine read what her mother had written. She might

have been a schoolmaster criticizing a child’s essay. Her face gave

Mrs. Hilbery, who watched it anxiously, no ground for hope.

“It’s very beautiful,” she stated, “but, you see, mother, we ought to

go from point to point—”

“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “And that’s just what I can’t do.

Things keep coming into my head. It isn’t that I don’t know everything

and feel everything (who did know him, if I didn’t?), but I can’t put

it down, you see. There’s a kind of blind spot,” she said, touching her

forehead, “there. And when I can’t sleep o’ nights, I fancy I shall die

without having done it.”

From exultation she had passed to the depths of depression which the

imagination of her death aroused. The depression communicated itself to

Katharine. How impotent they were, fiddling about all day long with

papers! And the clock was striking eleven and nothing done! She watched

her mother, now rummaging in a great brass-bound box which stood by her

table, but she did not go to her help. Of course, Katharine reflected,

her mother had now lost some paper, and they would waste the rest of

the morning looking for it. She cast her eyes down in irritation, and

read again her mother’s musical sentences about the silver gulls, and

the roots of little pink flowers washed by pellucid streams, and the

blue mists of hyacinths, until she was struck by her mother’s silence.

She raised her eyes. Mrs. Hilbery had emptied a portfolio containing

old photographs over her table, and was looking from one to another.

“Surely, Katharine,” she said, “the men were far handsomer in those

days than they are now, in spite of their odious whiskers? Look at old

John Graham, in his white waistcoat—look at Uncle Harley. That’s Peter

the manservant, I suppose. Uncle John brought him back from India.”

Katharine looked at her mother, but did not stir or answer. She had

suddenly become very angry, with a rage which their relationship made

silent, and therefore doubly powerful and critical. She felt all the

unfairness of the claim which her mother tacitly made to her time and

sympathy, and what Mrs. Hilbery took, Katharine thought bitterly, she

wasted. Then, in a flash, she remembered that she had still to tell her

about Cyril’s misbehavior. Her anger immediately dissipated itself; it

broke like some wave that has gathered itself high above the rest; the

waters were resumed into the sea again, and Katharine felt once more

full of peace and solicitude, and anxious only that her mother should

be protected from pain. She crossed the room instinctively, and sat on

the arm of her mother’s chair. Mrs. Hilbery leant her head against her

daughter’s body.

“What is nobler,” she mused, turning over the photographs, “than to be

a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty? How have the

young women of your generation improved upon that, Katharine? I can see

them now, sweeping over the lawns at Melbury House, in their flounces

and furbelows, so calm and stately and imperial (and the monkey and the

little black dwarf following behind), as if nothing mattered in the

world but to be beautiful and kind. But they did more than we do, I

sometimes think. They WERE, and that’s better than doing. They seem to

me like ships, like majestic ships, holding on their way, not shoving

or pushing, not fretted by little things, as we are, but taking their

way, like ships with white sails.”

Katharine tried to interrupt this discourse, but the opportunity did

not come, and she could not forbear to turn over the pages of the album

in which the old photographs were stored. The faces of these men and

women shone forth wonderfully after the hubbub of living faces, and

seemed, as her mother had said, to wear a marvelous dignity and calm,

as if they had ruled their kingdoms justly and deserved great love.

Some were of almost incredible beauty, others were ugly enough in a

forcible way, but none were dull or bored or insignificant. The superb

stiff folds of the crinolines suited the women; the cloaks and hats of

the gentlemen seemed full of character. Once more Katharine felt the

serene air all round her, and seemed far off to hear the solemn beating

of the sea upon the shore. But she knew that she must join the present

on to this past.

Mrs. Hilbery was rambling on, from story to story.

“That’s Janie Mannering,” she said, pointing to a superb, white-haired

dame, whose satin robes seemed strung with pearls. “I must have told

you how she found her cook drunk under the kitchen table when the

Empress was coming to dinner, and tucked up her velvet sleeves (she

always dressed like an Empress herself), cooked the whole meal, and

appeared in the drawing-room as if she’d been sleeping on a bank of

roses all day. She could do anything with her hands—they all could—make

a cottage or embroider a petticoat.

“And that’s Queenie Colquhoun,” she went on, turning the pages, “who

took her coffin out with her to Jamaica, packed with lovely shawls and

bonnets, because you couldn’t get coffins in Jamaica, and she had a

horror of dying there (as she did), and being devoured by the white

ants. And there’s Sabine, the loveliest of them all; ah! it was like a

star rising when she came into the room. And that’s Miriam, in her

coachman’s cloak, with all the little capes on, and she wore great

top-boots underneath. You young people may say you’re unconventional,

but you’re nothing compared with her.”

Turning the page, she came upon the picture of a very masculine,

handsome lady, whose head the photographer had adorned with an imperial

crown.

“Ah, you wretch!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed, “what a wicked old despot you

were, in your day! How we all bowed down before you! ‘Maggie,’ she used

to say, ‘if it hadn’t been for me, where would you be now?’ And it was

true; she brought them together, you know. She said to my father,

‘Marry her,’ and he did; and she said to poor little Clara, ‘Fall down

and worship him,’ and she did; but she got up again, of course. What

else could one expect? She was a mere child—eighteen—and half dead with

fright, too. But that old tyrant never repented. She used to say that

she had given them three perfect months, and no one had a right to

more; and I sometimes think, Katharine, that’s true, you know. It’s

more than most of us have, only we have to pretend, which was a thing

neither of them could ever do. I fancy,” Mrs. Hilbery mused, “that

there was a kind of sincerity in those days between men and women

which, with all your outspokenness, you haven’t got.”

Katharine again tried to interrupt. But Mrs. Hilbery had been gathering

impetus from her recollections, and was now in high spirits.

“They must have been good friends at heart,” she resumed, “because she

used to sing his songs. Ah, how did it go?” and Mrs. Hilbery, who had a

very sweet voice, trolled out a famous lyric of her father’s which had

been set to an absurdly and charmingly sentimental air by some early

Victorian composer.

“It’s the vitality of them!” she concluded, striking her fist against

the table. “That’s what we haven’t got! We’re virtuous, we’re earnest,

we go to meetings, we pay the poor their wages, but we don’t live as

they lived. As often as not, my father wasn’t in bed three nights out

of the seven, but always fresh as paint in the morning. I hear him now,

come singing up the stairs to the nursery, and tossing the loaf for

breakfast on his sword-stick, and then off we went for a day’s

pleasuring—Richmond, Hampton Court, the Surrey Hills. Why shouldn’t we

go, Katharine? It’s going to be a fine day.”

At this moment, just as Mrs. Hilbery was examining the weather from the

window, there was a knock at the door. A slight, elderly lady came in,

and was saluted by Katharine, with very evident dismay, as “Aunt

Celia!” She was dismayed because she guessed why Aunt Celia had come.

It was certainly in order to discuss the case of Cyril and the woman

who was not his wife, and owing to her procrastination Mrs. Hilbery was

quite unprepared. Who could be more unprepared? Here she was,

suggesting that all three of them should go on a jaunt to Blackfriars

to inspect the site of Shakespeare’s theater, for the weather was

hardly settled enough for the country.

To this proposal Mrs. Milvain listened with a patient smile, which

indicated that for many years she had accepted such eccentricities in

her sister-in-law with bland philosophy. Katharine took up her position

at some distance, standing with her foot on the fender, as though by so

doing she could get a better view of the matter. But, in spite of her

aunt’s presence, how unreal the whole question of Cyril and his

morality appeared! The difficulty, it now seemed, was not to break the

news gently to Mrs. Hilbery, but to make her understand it. How was one

to lasso her mind, and tether it to this minute, unimportant spot? A

matter-of-fact statement seemed best.

“I think Aunt Celia has come to talk about Cyril, mother,” she said

rather brutally. “Aunt Celia has discovered that Cyril is married. He

has a wife and children.”

“No, he is _not_ married,” Mrs. Milvain interposed, in low tones,

addressing herself to Mrs. Hilbery. “He has two children, and another

on the way.”

Mrs. Hilbery looked from one to the other in bewilderment.

“We thought it better to wait until it was proved before we told you,”

Katharine added.

“But I met Cyril only a fortnight ago at the National Gallery!” Mrs.

Hilbery exclaimed. “I don’t believe a word of it,” and she tossed her

head with a smile on her lips at Mrs. Milvain, as though she could

quite understand her mistake, which was a very natural mistake, in the

case of a childless woman, whose husband was something very dull in the

Board of Trade.

“I didn’t _wish_ to believe it, Maggie,” said Mrs. Milvain. “For a long

time I _couldn’t_ believe it. But now I’ve seen, and I _have_ to

believe it.”

“Katharine,” Mrs. Hilbery demanded, “does your father know of this?”

Katharine nodded.

“Cyril married!” Mrs. Hilbery repeated. “And never telling us a word,

though we’ve had him in our house since he was a child—noble William’s

son! I can’t believe my ears!”

Feeling that the burden of proof was laid upon her, Mrs. Milvain now

proceeded with her story. She was elderly and fragile, but her

childlessness seemed always to impose these painful duties on her, and

to revere the family, and to keep it in repair, had now become the

chief object of her life. She told her story in a low, spasmodic, and

somewhat broken voice.

“I have suspected for some time that he was not happy. There were new

lines on his face. So I went to his rooms, when I knew he was engaged

at the poor men’s college. He lectures there—Roman law, you know, or it

may be Greek. The landlady said Mr. Alardyce only slept there about

once a fortnight now. He looked so ill, she said. She had seen him with

a young person. I suspected something directly. I went to his room, and

there was an envelope on the mantelpiece, and a letter with an address

in Seton Street, off the Kennington Road.”

Mrs. Hilbery fidgeted rather restlessly, and hummed fragments of her

tune, as if to interrupt.

“I went to Seton Street,” Aunt Celia continued firmly. “A very low

place—lodging-houses, you know, with canaries in the window. Number

seven just like all the others. I rang, I knocked; no one came. I went

down the area. I am certain I saw some one inside—children—a cradle.

But no reply—no reply.” She sighed, and looked straight in front of her

with a glazed expression in her half-veiled blue eyes.

“I stood in the street,” she resumed, “in case I could catch a sight of

one of them. It seemed a very long time. There were rough men singing

in the public-house round the corner. At last the door opened, and some

one—it must have been the woman herself—came right past me. There was

only the pillar-box between us.”

“And what did she look like?” Mrs. Hilbery demanded.

“One could see how the poor boy had been deluded,” was all that Mrs.

Milvain vouchsafed by way of description.

“Poor thing!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed.

“Poor Cyril!” Mrs. Milvain said, laying a slight emphasis upon Cyril.

“But they’ve got nothing to live upon,” Mrs. Hilbery continued. “If

he’d come to us like a man,” she went on, “and said, ‘I’ve been a

fool,’ one would have pitied him; one would have tried to help him.

There’s nothing so disgraceful after all—But he’s been going about all

these years, pretending, letting one take it for granted, that he was

single. And the poor deserted little wife—”

“She is _not_ his wife,” Aunt Celia interrupted.

“I’ve never heard anything so detestable!” Mrs. Hilbery wound up,

striking her fist on the arm of her chair. As she realized the facts

she became thoroughly disgusted, although, perhaps, she was more hurt

by the concealment of the sin than by the sin itself. She looked

splendidly roused and indignant; and Katharine felt an immense relief

and pride in her mother. It was plain that her indignation was very

genuine, and that her mind was as perfectly focused upon the facts as

any one could wish—more so, by a long way, than Aunt Celia’s mind,

which seemed to be timidly circling, with a morbid pleasure, in these

unpleasant shades. She and her mother together would take the situation

in hand, visit Cyril, and see the whole thing through.

“We must realize Cyril’s point of view first,” she said, speaking

directly to her mother, as if to a contemporary, but before the words

were out of her mouth, there was more confusion outside, and Cousin

Caroline, Mrs. Hilbery’s maiden cousin, entered the room. Although she

was by birth an Alardyce, and Aunt Celia a Hilbery, the complexities of

the family relationship were such that each was at once first and

second cousin to the other, and thus aunt and cousin to the culprit

Cyril, so that his misbehavior was almost as much Cousin Caroline’s

affair as Aunt Celia’s. Cousin Caroline was a lady of very imposing

height and circumference, but in spite of her size and her handsome

trappings, there was something exposed and unsheltered in her

expression, as if for many summers her thin red skin and hooked nose

and reduplication of chins, so much resembling the profile of a

cockatoo, had been bared to the weather; she was, indeed, a single

lady; but she had, it was the habit to say, “made a life for herself,”

and was thus entitled to be heard with respect.

“This unhappy business,” she began, out of breath as she was. “If the

train had not gone out of the station just as I arrived, I should have

been with you before. Celia has doubtless told you. You will agree with

me, Maggie. He must be made to marry her at once for the sake of the

children—”

“But does he refuse to marry her?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired, with a return

of her bewilderment.

“He has written an absurd perverted letter, all quotations,” Cousin

Caroline puffed. “He thinks he’s doing a very fine thing, where we only

see the folly of it.... The girl’s every bit as infatuated as he is—for

which I blame him.”

“She entangled him,” Aunt Celia intervened, with a very curious

smoothness of intonation, which seemed to convey a vision of threads

weaving and interweaving a close, white mesh round their victim.

“It’s no use going into the rights and wrongs of the affair now,

Celia,” said Cousin Caroline with some acerbity, for she believed

herself the only practical one of the family, and regretted that, owing

to the slowness of the kitchen clock, Mrs. Milvain had already confused

poor dear Maggie with her own incomplete version of the facts. “The

mischief’s done, and very ugly mischief too. Are we to allow the third

child to be born out of wedlock? (I am sorry to have to say these

things before you, Katharine.) He will bear your name, Maggie—your

father’s name, remember.”

“But let us hope it will be a girl,” said Mrs. Hilbery.

Katharine, who had been looking at her mother constantly, while the

chatter of tongues held sway, perceived that the look of

straightforward indignation had already vanished; her mother was

evidently casting about in her mind for some method of escape, or

bright spot, or sudden illumination which should show to the

satisfaction of everybody that all had happened, miraculously but

incontestably, for the best.

“It’s detestable—quite detestable!” she repeated, but in tones of no

great assurance; and then her face lit up with a smile which, tentative

at first, soon became almost assured. “Nowadays, people don’t think so

badly of these things as they used to do,” she began. “It will be

horribly uncomfortable for them sometimes, but if they are brave,

clever children, as they will be, I dare say it’ll make remarkable

people of them in the end. Robert Browning used to say that every great

man has Jewish blood in him, and we must try to look at it in that

light. And, after all, Cyril has acted on principle. One may disagree

with his principle, but, at least, one can respect it—like the French

Revolution, or Cromwell cutting the King’s head off. Some of the most

terrible things in history have been done on principle,” she concluded.

“I’m afraid I take a very different view of principle,” Cousin Caroline

remarked tartly.

“Principle!” Aunt Celia repeated, with an air of deprecating such a

word in such a connection. “I will go to-morrow and see him,” she

added.

“But why should you take these disagreeable things upon yourself,

Celia?” Mrs. Hilbery interposed, and Cousin Caroline thereupon

protested with some further plan involving sacrifice of herself.

Growing weary of it all, Katharine turned to the window, and stood

among the folds of the curtain, pressing close to the window-pane, and

gazing disconsolately at the river much in the attitude of a child

depressed by the meaningless talk of its elders. She was much

disappointed in her mother—and in herself too. The little tug which she

gave to the blind, letting it fly up to the top with a snap, signified

her annoyance. She was very angry, and yet impotent to give expression

to her anger, or know with whom she was angry. How they talked and

moralized and made up stories to suit their own version of the

becoming, and secretly praised their own devotion and tact! No; they

had their dwelling in a mist, she decided; hundreds of miles away—away

from what? “Perhaps it would be better if I married William,” she

thought suddenly, and the thought appeared to loom through the mist

like solid ground. She stood there, thinking of her own destiny, and

the elder ladies talked on, until they had talked themselves into a

decision to ask the young woman to luncheon, and tell her, very

friendlily, how such behavior appeared to women like themselves, who

knew the world. And then Mrs. Hilbery was struck by a better idea.

CHAPTER X

Messrs. Grateley and Hooper, the solicitors in whose firm Ralph Denham

was clerk, had their office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and there Ralph

Denham appeared every morning very punctually at ten o’clock. His

punctuality, together with other qualities, marked him out among the

clerks for success, and indeed it would have been safe to wager that in

ten years’ time or so one would find him at the head of his profession,

had it not been for a peculiarity which sometimes seemed to make

everything about him uncertain and perilous. His sister Joan had

already been disturbed by his love of gambling with his savings.

Scrutinizing him constantly with the eye of affection, she had become

aware of a curious perversity in his temperament which caused her much

anxiety, and would have caused her still more if she had not recognized

the germs of it in her own nature. She could fancy Ralph suddenly

sacrificing his entire career for some fantastic imagination; some

cause or idea or even (so her fancy ran) for some woman seen from a

railway train, hanging up clothes in a back yard. When he had found

this beauty or this cause, no force, she knew, would avail to restrain

him from pursuit of it. She suspected the East also, and always

fidgeted herself when she saw him with a book of Indian travels in his

hand, as though he were sucking contagion from the page. On the other

hand, no common love affair, had there been such a thing, would have

caused her a moment’s uneasiness where Ralph was concerned. He was

destined in her fancy for something splendid in the way of success or

failure, she knew not which.

And yet nobody could have worked harder or done better in all the

recognized stages of a young man’s life than Ralph had done, and Joan

had to gather materials for her fears from trifles in her brother’s

behavior which would have escaped any other eye. It was natural that

she should be anxious. Life had been so arduous for all of them from

the start that she could not help dreading any sudden relaxation of his

grasp upon what he held, though, as she knew from inspection of her own

life, such sudden impulse to let go and make away from the discipline

and the drudgery was sometimes almost irresistible. But with Ralph, if

he broke away, she knew that it would be only to put himself under

harsher constraint; she figured him toiling through sandy deserts under

a tropical sun to find the source of some river or the haunt of some

fly; she figured him living by the labor of his hands in some city

slum, the victim of one of those terrible theories of right and wrong

which were current at the time; she figured him prisoner for life in

the house of a woman who had seduced him by her misfortunes. Half

proudly, and wholly anxiously, she framed such thoughts, as they sat,

late at night, talking together over the gas-stove in Ralph’s bedroom.

It is likely that Ralph would not have recognized his own dream of a

future in the forecasts which disturbed his sister’s peace of mind.

Certainly, if any one of them had been put before him he would have

rejected it with a laugh, as the sort of life that held no attractions

for him. He could not have said how it was that he had put these absurd

notions into his sister’s head. Indeed, he prided himself upon being

well broken into a life of hard work, about which he had no sort of

illusions. His vision of his own future, unlike many such forecasts,

could have been made public at any moment without a blush; he

attributed to himself a strong brain, and conferred on himself a seat

in the House of Commons at the age of fifty, a moderate fortune, and,

with luck, an unimportant office in a Liberal Government. There was

nothing extravagant in a forecast of that kind, and certainly nothing

dishonorable. Nevertheless, as his sister guessed, it needed all

Ralph’s strength of will, together with the pressure of circumstances,

to keep his feet moving in the path which led that way. It needed, in

particular, a constant repetition of a phrase to the effect that he

shared the common fate, found it best of all, and wished for no other;

and by repeating such phrases he acquired punctuality and habits of

work, and could very plausibly demonstrate that to be a clerk in a

solicitor’s office was the best of all possible lives, and that other

ambitions were vain.

But, like all beliefs not genuinely held, this one depended very much

upon the amount of acceptance it received from other people, and in

private, when the pressure of public opinion was removed, Ralph let

himself swing very rapidly away from his actual circumstances upon

strange voyages which, indeed, he would have been ashamed to describe.

In these dreams, of course, he figured in noble and romantic parts, but

self-glorification was not the only motive of them. They gave outlet to

some spirit which found no work to do in real life, for, with the

pessimism which his lot forced upon him, Ralph had made up his mind

that there was no use for what, contemptuously enough, he called

dreams, in the world which we inhabit. It sometimes seemed to him that

this spirit was the most valuable possession he had; he thought that by

means of it he could set flowering waste tracts of the earth, cure many

ills, or raise up beauty where none now existed; it was, too, a fierce

and potent spirit which would devour the dusty books and parchments on

the office wall with one lick of its tongue, and leave him in a minute

standing in nakedness, if he gave way to it. His endeavor, for many

years, had been to control the spirit, and at the age of twenty-nine he

thought he could pride himself upon a life rigidly divided into the

hours of work and those of dreams; the two lived side by side without

harming each other. As a matter of fact, this effort at discipline had

been helped by the interests of a difficult profession, but the old

conclusion to which Ralph had come when he left college still held sway

in his mind, and tinged his views with the melancholy belief that life

for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the

precious ones, until it forces us to agree that there is little virtue,

as well as little profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of

our inheritance.

Denham was not altogether popular either in his office or among his

family. He was too positive, at this stage of his career, as to what

was right and what wrong, too proud of his self-control, and, as is

natural in the case of persons not altogether happy or well suited in

their conditions, too apt to prove the folly of contentment, if he

found any one who confessed to that weakness. In the office his rather

ostentatious efficiency annoyed those who took their own work more

lightly, and, if they foretold his advancement, it was not altogether

sympathetically. Indeed, he appeared to be rather a hard and

self-sufficient young man, with a queer temper, and manners that were

uncompromisingly abrupt, who was consumed with a desire to get on in

the world, which was natural, these critics thought, in a man of no

means, but not engaging.

The young men in the office had a perfect right to these opinions,

because Denham showed no particular desire for their friendship. He

liked them well enough, but shut them up in that compartment of life

which was devoted to work. Hitherto, indeed, he had found little

difficulty in arranging his life as methodically as he arranged his

expenditure, but about this time he began to encounter experiences

which were not so easy to classify. Mary Datchet had begun this

confusion two years ago by bursting into laughter at some remark of

his, almost the first time they met. She could not explain why it was.

She thought him quite astonishingly odd. When he knew her well enough

to tell her how he spent Monday and Wednesday and Saturday, she was

still more amused; she laughed till he laughed, too, without knowing

why. It seemed to her very odd that he should know as much about

breeding bulldogs as any man in England; that he had a collection of

wild flowers found near London; and his weekly visit to old Miss

Trotter at Ealing, who was an authority upon the science of Heraldry,

never failed to excite her laughter. She wanted to know everything,

even the kind of cake which the old lady supplied on these occasions;

and their summer excursions to churches in the neighborhood of London

for the purpose of taking rubbings of the brasses became most important

festivals, from the interest she took in them. In six months she knew

more about his odd friends and hobbies than his own brothers and

sisters knew, after living with him all his life; and Ralph found this

very pleasant, though disordering, for his own view of himself had

always been profoundly serious.

Certainly it was very pleasant to be with Mary Datchet and to become,

directly the door was shut, quite a different sort of person, eccentric

and lovable, with scarcely any likeness to the self most people knew.

He became less serious, and rather less dictatorial at home, for he was

apt to hear Mary laughing at him, and telling him, as she was fond of

doing, that he knew nothing at all about anything. She made him, also,

take an interest in public questions, for which she had a natural

liking; and was in process of turning him from Tory to Radical, after a

course of public meetings, which began by boring him acutely, and ended

by exciting him even more than they excited her.

But he was reserved; when ideas started up in his mind, he divided them

automatically into those he could discuss with Mary, and those he must

keep for himself. She knew this and it interested her, for she was

accustomed to find young men very ready to talk about themselves, and

had come to listen to them as one listens to children, without any

thought of herself. But with Ralph, she had very little of this

maternal feeling, and, in consequence, a much keener sense of her own

individuality.

Late one afternoon Ralph stepped along the Strand to an interview with

a lawyer upon business. The afternoon light was almost over, and

already streams of greenish and yellowish artificial light were being

poured into an atmosphere which, in country lanes, would now have been

soft with the smoke of wood fires; and on both sides of the road the

shop windows were full of sparkling chains and highly polished leather

cases, which stood upon shelves made of thick plate-glass. None of

these different objects was seen separately by Denham, but from all of

them he drew an impression of stir and cheerfulness. Thus it came about

that he saw Katharine Hilbery coming towards him, and looked straight

at her, as if she were only an illustration of the argument that was

going forward in his mind. In this spirit he noticed the rather set

expression in her eyes, and the slight, half-conscious movement of her

lips, which, together with her height and the distinction of her dress,

made her look as if the scurrying crowd impeded her, and her direction

were different from theirs. He noticed this calmly; but suddenly, as he

passed her, his hands and knees began to tremble, and his heart beat

painfully. She did not see him, and went on repeating to herself some

lines which had stuck to her memory: “It’s life that matters, nothing

but life—the process of discovering—the everlasting and perpetual

process, not the discovery itself at all.” Thus occupied, she did not

see Denham, and he had not the courage to stop her. But immediately the

whole scene in the Strand wore that curious look of order and purpose

which is imparted to the most heterogeneous things when music sounds;

and so pleasant was this impression that he was very glad that he had

not stopped her, after all. It grew slowly fainter, but lasted until he

stood outside the barrister’s chambers.

When his interview with the barrister was over, it was too late to go

back to the office. His sight of Katharine had put him queerly out of

tune for a domestic evening. Where should he go? To walk through the

streets of London until he came to Katharine’s house, to look up at the

windows and fancy her within, seemed to him possible for a moment; and

then he rejected the plan almost with a blush as, with a curious

division of consciousness, one plucks a flower sentimentally and throws

it away, with a blush, when it is actually picked. No, he would go and

see Mary Datchet. By this time she would be back from her work.

To see Ralph appear unexpectedly in her room threw Mary for a second

off her balance. She had been cleaning knives in her little scullery,

and when she had let him in she went back again, and turned on the

cold-water tap to its fullest volume, and then turned it off again.

“Now,” she thought to herself, as she screwed it tight, “I’m not going

to let these silly ideas come into my head.... Don’t you think Mr.

Asquith deserves to be hanged?” she called back into the sitting-room,

and when she joined him, drying her hands, she began to tell him about

the latest evasion on the part of the Government with respect to the

Women’s Suffrage Bill. Ralph did not want to talk about politics, but

he could not help respecting Mary for taking such an interest in public

questions. He looked at her as she leant forward, poking the fire, and

expressing herself very clearly in phrases which bore distantly the

taint of the platform, and he thought, “How absurd Mary would think me

if she knew that I almost made up my mind to walk all the way to

Chelsea in order to look at Katharine’s windows. She wouldn’t

understand it, but I like her very much as she is.”

For some time they discussed what the women had better do; and as Ralph

became genuinely interested in the question, Mary unconsciously let her

attention wander, and a great desire came over her to talk to Ralph

about her own feelings; or, at any rate, about something personal, so

that she might see what he felt for her; but she resisted this wish.

But she could not prevent him from feeling her lack of interest in what

he was saying, and gradually they both became silent. One thought after

another came up in Ralph’s mind, but they were all, in some way,

connected with Katharine, or with vague feelings of romance and

adventure such as she inspired. But he could not talk to Mary about

such thoughts; and he pitied her for knowing nothing of what he was

feeling. “Here,” he thought, “is where we differ from women; they have

no sense of romance.”

“Well, Mary,” he said at length, “why don’t you say something amusing?”

His tone was certainly provoking, but, as a general rule, Mary was not

easily provoked. This evening, however, she replied rather sharply:

“Because I’ve got nothing amusing to say, I suppose.”

Ralph thought for a moment, and then remarked:

“You work too hard. I don’t mean your health,” he added, as she laughed

scornfully, “I mean that you seem to me to be getting wrapped up in

your work.”

“And is that a bad thing?” she asked, shading her eyes with her hand.

“I think it is,” he returned abruptly.

“But only a week ago you were saying the opposite.” Her tone was

defiant, but she became curiously depressed. Ralph did not perceive it,

and took this opportunity of lecturing her, and expressing his latest

views upon the proper conduct of life. She listened, but her main

impression was that he had been meeting some one who had influenced

him. He was telling her that she ought to read more, and to see that

there were other points of view as deserving of attention as her own.

Naturally, having last seen him as he left the office in company with

Katharine, she attributed the change to her; it was likely that

Katharine, on leaving the scene which she had so clearly despised, had

pronounced some such criticism, or suggested it by her own attitude.

But she knew that Ralph would never admit that he had been influenced

by anybody.

“You don’t read enough, Mary,” he was saying. “You ought to read more

poetry.”

It was true that Mary’s reading had been rather limited to such works

as she needed to know for the sake of examinations; and her time for

reading in London was very little. For some reason, no one likes to be

told that they do not read enough poetry, but her resentment was only

visible in the way she changed the position of her hands, and in the

fixed look in her eyes. And then she thought to herself, “I’m behaving

exactly as I said I wouldn’t behave,” whereupon she relaxed all her

muscles and said, in her reasonable way:

“Tell me what I ought to read, then.”

Ralph had unconsciously been irritated by Mary, and he now delivered

himself of a few names of great poets which were the text for a

discourse upon the imperfection of Mary’s character and way of life.

“You live with your inferiors,” he said, warming unreasonably, as he

knew, to his text. “And you get into a groove because, on the whole,

it’s rather a pleasant groove. And you tend to forget what you’re there

for. You’ve the feminine habit of making much of details. You don’t see

when things matter and when they don’t. And that’s what’s the ruin of

all these organizations. That’s why the Suffragists have never done

anything all these years. What’s the point of drawing-room meetings and

bazaars? You want to have ideas, Mary; get hold of something big; never

mind making mistakes, but don’t niggle. Why don’t you throw it all up

for a year, and travel?—see something of the world. Don’t be content to

live with half a dozen people in a backwater all your life. But you

won’t,” he concluded.

“I’ve rather come to that way of thinking myself—about myself, I mean,”

said Mary, surprising him by her acquiescence. “I should like to go

somewhere far away.”

For a moment they were both silent. Ralph then said:

“But look here, Mary, you haven’t been taking this seriously, have

you?” His irritation was spent, and the depression, which she could not

keep out of her voice, made him feel suddenly with remorse that he had

been hurting her.

“You won’t go away, will you?” he asked. And as she said nothing, he

added, “Oh no, don’t go away.”

“I don’t know exactly what I mean to do,” she replied. She hovered on

the verge of some discussion of her plans, but she received no

encouragement. He fell into one of his queer silences, which seemed to

Mary, in spite of all her precautions, to have reference to what she

also could not prevent herself from thinking about—their feeling for

each other and their relationship. She felt that the two lines of

thought bored their way in long, parallel tunnels which came very close

indeed, but never ran into each other.

When he had gone, and he left her without breaking his silence more

than was needed to wish her good night, she sat on for a time,

reviewing what he had said. If love is a devastating fire which melts

the whole being into one mountain torrent, Mary was no more in love

with Denham than she was in love with her poker or her tongs. But

probably these extreme passions are very rare, and the state of mind

thus depicted belongs to the very last stages of love, when the power

to resist has been eaten away, week by week or day by day. Like most

intelligent people, Mary was something of an egoist, to the extent,

that is, of attaching great importance to what she felt, and she was by

nature enough of a moralist to like to make certain, from time to time,

that her feelings were creditable to her. When Ralph left her she

thought over her state of mind, and came to the conclusion that it

would be a good thing to learn a language—say Italian or German. She

then went to a drawer, which she had to unlock, and took from it

certain deeply scored manuscript pages. She read them through, looking

up from her reading every now and then and thinking very intently for a

few seconds about Ralph. She did her best to verify all the qualities

in him which gave rise to emotions in her; and persuaded herself that

she accounted reasonably for them all. Then she looked back again at

her manuscript, and decided that to write grammatical English prose is

the hardest thing in the world. But she thought about herself a great

deal more than she thought about grammatical English prose or about

Ralph Denham, and it may therefore be disputed whether she was in love,

or, if so, to which branch of the family her passion belonged.

CHAPTER XI

“It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering,

the everlasting and perpetual process,” said Katharine, as she passed

under the archway, and so into the wide space of King’s Bench Walk,

“not the discovery itself at all.” She spoke the last words looking up

at Rodney’s windows, which were a semilucent red color, in her honor,

as she knew. He had asked her to tea with him. But she was in a mood

when it is almost physically disagreeable to interrupt the stride of

one’s thought, and she walked up and down two or three times under the

trees before approaching his staircase. She liked getting hold of some

book which neither her father or mother had read, and keeping it to

herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning

without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether

the book was a good one or a bad one. This evening she had twisted the

words of Dostoevsky to suit her mood—a fatalistic mood—to proclaim that

the process of discovery was life, and that, presumably, the nature of

one’s goal mattered not at all. She sat down for a moment upon one of

the seats; felt herself carried along in the swirl of many things;

decided, in her sudden way, that it was time to heave all this thinking

overboard, and rose, leaving a fishmonger’s basket on the seat behind

her. Two minutes later her rap sounded with authority upon Rodney’s

door.

“Well, William,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m late.”

It was true, but he was so glad to see her that he forgot his

annoyance. He had been occupied for over an hour in making things ready

for her, and he now had his reward in seeing her look right and left,

as she slipped her cloak from her shoulders, with evident satisfaction,

although she said nothing. He had seen that the fire burnt well;

jam-pots were on the table, tin covers shone in the fender, and the

shabby comfort of the room was extreme. He was dressed in his old

crimson dressing-gown, which was faded irregularly, and had bright new

patches on it, like the paler grass which one finds on lifting a stone.

He made the tea, and Katharine drew off her gloves, and crossed her

legs with a gesture that was rather masculine in its ease. Nor did they

talk much until they were smoking cigarettes over the fire, having

placed their teacups upon the floor between them.

They had not met since they had exchanged letters about their

relationship. Katharine’s answer to his protestation had been short and

sensible. Half a sheet of notepaper contained the whole of it, for she

merely had to say that she was not in love with him, and so could not

marry him, but their friendship would continue, she hoped, unchanged.

She had added a postscript in which she stated, “I like your sonnet

very much.”

So far as William was concerned, this appearance of ease was assumed.

Three times that afternoon he had dressed himself in a tail-coat, and

three times he had discarded it for an old dressing-gown; three times

he had placed his pearl tie-pin in position, and three times he had

removed it again, the little looking-glass in his room being the

witness of these changes of mind. The question was, which would

Katharine prefer on this particular afternoon in December? He read her

note once more, and the postscript about the sonnet settled the matter.

Evidently she admired most the poet in him; and as this, on the whole,

agreed with his own opinion, he decided to err, if anything, on the

side of shabbiness. His demeanor was also regulated with premeditation;

he spoke little, and only on impersonal matters; he wished her to

realize that in visiting him for the first time alone she was doing

nothing remarkable, although, in fact, that was a point about which he

was not at all sure.

Certainly Katharine seemed quite unmoved by any disturbing thoughts;

and if he had been completely master of himself, he might, indeed, have

complained that she was a trifle absent-minded. The ease, the

familiarity of the situation alone with Rodney, among teacups and

candles, had more effect upon her than was apparent. She asked to look

at his books, and then at his pictures. It was while she held a

photograph from the Greek in her hands that she exclaimed, impulsively,

if incongruously:

“My oysters! I had a basket,” she explained, “and I’ve left it

somewhere. Uncle Dudley dines with us to-night. What in the world have

I done with them?”

She rose and began to wander about the room. William rose also, and

stood in front of the fire, muttering, “Oysters, oysters—your basket of

oysters!” but though he looked vaguely here and there, as if the

oysters might be on the top of the bookshelf, his eyes returned always

to Katharine. She drew the curtain and looked out among the scanty

leaves of the plane-trees.

“I had them,” she calculated, “in the Strand; I sat on a seat. Well,

never mind,” she concluded, turning back into the room abruptly, “I

dare say some old creature is enjoying them by this time.”

“I should have thought that you never forgot anything,” William

remarked, as they settled down again.

“That’s part of the myth about me, I know,” Katharine replied.

“And I wonder,” William proceeded, with some caution, “what the truth

about you is? But I know this sort of thing doesn’t interest you,” he

added hastily, with a touch of peevishness.

“No; it doesn’t interest me very much,” she replied candidly.

“What shall we talk about then?” he asked.

She looked rather whimsically round the walls of the room.

“However we start, we end by talking about the same thing—about poetry,

I mean. I wonder if you realize, William, that I’ve never read even

Shakespeare? It’s rather wonderful how I’ve kept it up all these

years.”

“You’ve kept it up for ten years very beautifully, as far as I’m

concerned,” he said.

“Ten years? So long as that?”

“And I don’t think it’s always bored you,” he added.

She looked into the fire silently. She could not deny that the surface

of her feeling was absolutely unruffled by anything in William’s

character; on the contrary, she felt certain that she could deal with

whatever turned up. He gave her peace, in which she could think of

things that were far removed from what they talked about. Even now,

when he sat within a yard of her, how easily her mind ranged hither and

thither! Suddenly a picture presented itself before her, without any

effort on her part as pictures will, of herself in these very rooms;

she had come in from a lecture, and she held a pile of books in her

hand, scientific books, and books about mathematics and astronomy which

she had mastered. She put them down on the table over there. It was a

picture plucked from her life two or three years hence, when she was

married to William; but here she checked herself abruptly.

She could not entirely forget William’s presence, because, in spite of

his efforts to control himself, his nervousness was apparent. On such

occasions his eyes protruded more than ever, and his face had more than

ever the appearance of being covered with a thin crackling skin,

through which every flush of his volatile blood showed itself

instantly. By this time he had shaped so many sentences and rejected

them, felt so many impulses and subdued them, that he was a uniform

scarlet.

“You may say you don’t read books,” he remarked, “but, all the same,

you know about them. Besides, who wants you to be learned? Leave that

to the poor devils who’ve got nothing better to do. You—you—ahem!—”

“Well, then, why don’t you read me something before I go?” said

Katharine, looking at her watch.

“Katharine, you’ve only just come! Let me see now, what have I got to

show you?” He rose, and stirred about the papers on his table, as if in

doubt; he then picked up a manuscript, and after spreading it smoothly

upon his knee, he looked up at Katharine suspiciously. He caught her

smiling.

“I believe you only ask me to read out of kindness,” he burst out.

“Let’s find something else to talk about. Who have you been seeing?”

“I don’t generally ask things out of kindness,” Katharine observed;

“however, if you don’t want to read, you needn’t.”

William gave a queer snort of exasperation, and opened his manuscript

once more, though he kept his eyes upon her face as he did so. No face

could have been graver or more judicial.

“One can trust you, certainly, to say unpleasant things,” he said,

smoothing out the page, clearing his throat, and reading half a stanza

to himself. “Ahem! The Princess is lost in the wood, and she hears the

sound of a horn. (This would all be very pretty on the stage, but I

can’t get the effect here.) Anyhow, Sylvano enters, accompanied by the

rest of the gentlemen of Gratian’s court. I begin where he

soliloquizes.” He jerked his head and began to read.

Although Katharine had just disclaimed any knowledge of literature, she

listened attentively. At least, she listened to the first twenty-five

lines attentively, and then she frowned. Her attention was only aroused

again when Rodney raised his finger—a sign, she knew, that the meter

was about to change.

His theory was that every mood has its meter. His mastery of meters was

very great; and, if the beauty of a drama depended upon the variety of

measures in which the personages speak, Rodney’s plays must have

challenged the works of Shakespeare. Katharine’s ignorance of

Shakespeare did not prevent her from feeling fairly certain that plays

should not produce a sense of chill stupor in the audience, such as

overcame her as the lines flowed on, sometimes long and sometimes

short, but always delivered with the same lilt of voice, which seemed

to nail each line firmly on to the same spot in the hearer’s brain.

Still, she reflected, these sorts of skill are almost exclusively

masculine; women neither practice them nor know how to value them; and

one’s husband’s proficiency in this direction might legitimately

increase one’s respect for him, since mystification is no bad basis for

respect. No one could doubt that William was a scholar. The reading

ended with the finish of the Act; Katharine had prepared a little

speech.

“That seems to me extremely well written, William; although, of course,

I don’t know enough to criticize in detail.”

“But it’s the skill that strikes you—not the emotion?”

“In a fragment like that, of course, the skill strikes one most.”

“But perhaps—have you time to listen to one more short piece? the scene

between the lovers? There’s some real feeling in that, I think. Denham

agrees that it’s the best thing I’ve done.”

“You’ve read it to Ralph Denham?” Katharine inquired, with surprise.

“He’s a better judge than I am. What did he say?”

“My dear Katharine,” Rodney exclaimed, “I don’t ask you for criticism,

as I should ask a scholar. I dare say there are only five men in

England whose opinion of my work matters a straw to me. But I trust you

where feeling is concerned. I had you in my mind often when I was

writing those scenes. I kept asking myself, ‘Now is this the sort of

thing Katharine would like?’ I always think of you when I’m writing,

Katharine, even when it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t know about.

And I’d rather—yes, I really believe I’d rather—you thought well of my

writing than any one in the world.”

This was so genuine a tribute to his trust in her that Katharine was

touched.

“You think too much of me altogether, William,” she said, forgetting

that she had not meant to speak in this way.

“No, Katharine, I don’t,” he replied, replacing his manuscript in the

drawer. “It does me good to think of you.”

So quiet an answer, followed as it was by no expression of love, but

merely by the statement that if she must go he would take her to the

Strand, and would, if she could wait a moment, change his dressing-gown

for a coat, moved her to the warmest feeling of affection for him that

she had yet experienced. While he changed in the next room, she stood

by the bookcase, taking down books and opening them, but reading

nothing on their pages.

She felt certain that she would marry Rodney. How could one avoid it?

How could one find fault with it? Here she sighed, and, putting the

thought of marriage away, fell into a dream state, in which she became

another person, and the whole world seemed changed. Being a frequent

visitor to that world, she could find her way there unhesitatingly. If

she had tried to analyze her impressions, she would have said that

there dwelt the realities of the appearances which figure in our world;

so direct, powerful, and unimpeded were her sensations there, compared

with those called forth in actual life. There dwelt the things one

might have felt, had there been cause; the perfect happiness of which

here we taste the fragment; the beauty seen here in flying glimpses

only. No doubt much of the furniture of this world was drawn directly

from the past, and even from the England of the Elizabethan age.

However the embellishment of this imaginary world might change, two

qualities were constant in it. It was a place where feelings were

liberated from the constraint which the real world puts upon them; and

the process of awakenment was always marked by resignation and a kind

of stoical acceptance of facts. She met no acquaintance there, as

Denham did, miraculously transfigured; she played no heroic part. But

there certainly she loved some magnanimous hero, and as they swept

together among the leaf-hung trees of an unknown world, they shared the

feelings which came fresh and fast as the waves on the shore. But the

sands of her liberation were running fast; even through the forest

branches came sounds of Rodney moving things on his dressing-table; and

Katharine woke herself from this excursion by shutting the cover of the

book she was holding, and replacing it in the bookshelf.

“William,” she said, speaking rather faintly at first, like one sending

a voice from sleep to reach the living. “William,” she repeated firmly,

“if you still want me to marry you, I will.”

Perhaps it was that no man could expect to have the most momentous

question of his life settled in a voice so level, so toneless, so

devoid of joy or energy. At any rate William made no answer. She waited

stoically. A moment later he stepped briskly from his dressing-room,

and observed that if she wanted to buy more oysters he thought he knew

where they could find a fishmonger’s shop still open. She breathed

deeply a sigh of relief.

Extract from a letter sent a few days later by Mrs. Hilbery to her

sister-in-law, Mrs. Milvain:

“... How stupid of me to forget the name in my telegram. Such a nice,

rich, English name, too, and, in addition, he has all the graces of

intellect; he has read literally _everything_. I tell Katharine, I

shall always put him on my right side at dinner, so as to have him by

me when people begin talking about characters in Shakespeare. They

won’t be rich, but they’ll be very, very happy. I was sitting in my

room late one night, feeling that nothing nice would ever happen to me

again, when I heard Katharine outside in the passage, and I thought to

myself, ‘Shall I call her in?’ and then I thought (in that hopeless,

dreary way one does think, with the fire going out and one’s birthday

just over), ‘Why should I lay my troubles on _her?_’ But my little

self-control had its reward, for next moment she tapped at the door and

came in, and sat on the rug, and though we neither of us said anything,

I felt so happy all of a second that I couldn’t help crying, ‘Oh,

Katharine, when you come to my age, how I hope you’ll have a daughter,

too!’ You know how silent Katharine is. She was so silent, for such a

long time, that in my foolish, nervous state I dreaded something, I

don’t quite know what. And then she told me how, after all, she had

made up her mind. She had written. She expected him to-morrow. At first

I wasn’t glad at all. I didn’t want her to marry any one; but when she

said, ‘It will make no difference. I shall always care for you and

father most,’ then I saw how selfish I was, and I told her she must

give him everything, everything, everything! I told her I should be

thankful to come second. But why, when everything’s turned out just as

one always hoped it would turn out, why then can one do nothing but

cry, nothing but feel a desolate old woman whose life’s been a failure,

and now is nearly over, and age is so cruel? But Katharine said to me,

‘I am happy. I’m very happy.’ And then I thought, though it all seemed

so desperately dismal at the time, Katharine had said she was happy,

and I should have a son, and it would all turn out so much more

wonderfully than I could possibly imagine, for though the sermons don’t

say so, I do believe the world is meant for us to be happy in. She told

me that they would live quite near us, and see us every day; and she

would go on with the Life, and we should finish it as we had meant to.

And, after all, it would be far more horrid if she didn’t marry—or

suppose she married some one we couldn’t endure? Suppose she had fallen

in love with some one who was married already?

“And though one never thinks any one good enough for the people one’s

fond of, he has the kindest, truest instincts, I’m sure, and though he

seems nervous and his manner is not commanding, I only think these

things because it’s Katharine. And now I’ve written this, it comes over

me that, of course, all the time, Katharine has what he hasn’t. She

does command, she isn’t nervous; it comes naturally to her to rule and

control. It’s time that she should give all this to some one who will

need her when we aren’t there, save in our spirits, for whatever people

say, I’m sure I shall come back to this wonderful world where one’s

been so happy and so miserable, where, even now, I seem to see myself

stretching out my hands for another present from the great Fairy Tree

whose boughs are still hung with enchanting toys, though they are rarer

now, perhaps, and between the branches one sees no longer the blue sky,

but the stars and the tops of the mountains.

“One doesn’t know any more, does one? One hasn’t any advice to give

one’s children. One can only hope that they will have the same vision

and the same power to believe, without which life would be so

meaningless. That is what I ask for Katharine and her husband.”

CHAPTER XII

“Is Mr. Hilbery at home, or Mrs. Hilbery?” Denham asked, of the

parlor-maid in Chelsea, a week later.

“No, sir. But Miss Hilbery is at home,” the girl answered.

Ralph had anticipated many answers, but not this one, and now it was

unexpectedly made plain to him that it was the chance of seeing

Katharine that had brought him all the way to Chelsea on pretence of

seeing her father.

He made some show of considering the matter, and was taken upstairs to

the drawing-room. As upon that first occasion, some weeks ago, the door

closed as if it were a thousand doors softly excluding the world; and

once more Ralph received an impression of a room full of deep shadows,

firelight, unwavering silver candle flames, and empty spaces to be

crossed before reaching the round table in the middle of the room, with

its frail burden of silver trays and china teacups. But this time

Katharine was there by herself; the volume in her hand showed that she

expected no visitors.

Ralph said something about hoping to find her father.

“My father is out,” she replied. “But if you can wait, I expect him

soon.”

It might have been due merely to politeness, but Ralph felt that she

received him almost with cordiality. Perhaps she was bored by drinking

tea and reading a book all alone; at any rate, she tossed the book on

to a sofa with a gesture of relief.

“Is that one of the moderns whom you despise?” he asked, smiling at the

carelessness of her gesture.

“Yes,” she replied. “I think even you would despise him.”

“Even I?” he repeated. “Why even I?”

“You said you liked modern things; I said I hated them.”

This was not a very accurate report of their conversation among the

relics, perhaps, but Ralph was flattered to think that she remembered

anything about it.

“Or did I confess that I hated all books?” she went on, seeing him look

up with an air of inquiry. “I forget—”

“Do you hate all books?” he asked.

“It would be absurd to say that I hate all books when I’ve only read

ten, perhaps; but—’ Here she pulled herself up short.

“Well?”

“Yes, I do hate books,” she continued. “Why do you want to be for ever

talking about your feelings? That’s what I can’t make out. And poetry’s

all about feelings—novels are all about feelings.”

She cut a cake vigorously into slices, and providing a tray with bread

and butter for Mrs. Hilbery, who was in her room with a cold, she rose

to go upstairs.

Ralph held the door open for her, and then stood with clasped hands in

the middle of the room. His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely

knew whether they beheld dreams or realities. All down the street and

on the doorstep, and while he mounted the stairs, his dream of

Katharine possessed him; on the threshold of the room he had dismissed

it, in order to prevent too painful a collision between what he dreamt

of her and what she was. And in five minutes she had filled the shell

of the old dream with the flesh of life; looked with fire out of

phantom eyes. He glanced about him with bewilderment at finding himself

among her chairs and tables; they were solid, for he grasped the back

of the chair in which Katharine had sat; and yet they were unreal; the

atmosphere was that of a dream. He summoned all the faculties of his

spirit to seize what the minutes had to give him; and from the depths

of his mind there rose unchecked a joyful recognition of the truth that

human nature surpasses, in its beauty, all that our wildest dreams

bring us hints of.

Katharine came into the room a moment later. He stood watching her come

towards him, and thought her more beautiful and strange than his dream

of her; for the real Katharine could speak the words which seemed to

crowd behind the forehead and in the depths of the eyes, and the

commonest sentence would be flashed on by this immortal light. And she

overflowed the edges of the dream; he remarked that her softness was

like that of some vast snowy owl; she wore a ruby on her finger.

“My mother wants me to tell you,” she said, “that she hopes you have

begun your poem. She says every one ought to write poetry.... All my

relations write poetry,” she went on. “I can’t bear to think of it

sometimes—because, of course, it’s none of it any good. But then one

needn’t read it—”

“You don’t encourage me to write a poem,” said Ralph.

“But you’re not a poet, too, are you?” she inquired, turning upon him

with a laugh.

“Should I tell you if I were?”

“Yes. Because I think you speak the truth,” she said, searching him for

proof of this apparently, with eyes now almost impersonally direct. It

would be easy, Ralph thought, to worship one so far removed, and yet of

so straight a nature; easy to submit recklessly to her, without thought

of future pain.

“Are you a poet?” she demanded. He felt that her question had an

unexplained weight of meaning behind it, as if she sought an answer to

a question that she did not ask.

“No. I haven’t written any poetry for years,” he replied. “But all the

same, I don’t agree with you. I think it’s the only thing worth doing.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, almost with impatience, tapping her

spoon two or three times against the side of her cup.

“Why?” Ralph laid hands on the first words that came to mind. “Because,

I suppose, it keeps an ideal alive which might die otherwise.”

A curious change came over her face, as if the flame of her mind were

subdued; and she looked at him ironically and with the expression which

he had called sad before, for want of a better name for it.

“I don’t know that there’s much sense in having ideals,” she said.

“But you have them,” he replied energetically. “Why do we call them

ideals? It’s a stupid word. Dreams, I mean—”

She followed his words with parted lips, as though to answer eagerly

when he had done; but as he said, “Dreams, I mean,” the door of the

drawing-room swung open, and so remained for a perceptible instant.

They both held themselves silent, her lips still parted.

Far off, they heard the rustle of skirts. Then the owner of the skirts

appeared in the doorway, which she almost filled, nearly concealing the

figure of a very much smaller lady who accompanied her.

“My aunts!” Katharine murmured, under her breath. Her tone had a hint

of tragedy in it, but no less, Ralph thought, than the situation

required. She addressed the larger lady as Aunt Millicent; the smaller

was Aunt Celia, Mrs. Milvain, who had lately undertaken the task of

marrying Cyril to his wife. Both ladies, but Mrs. Cosham (Aunt

Millicent) in particular, had that look of heightened, smoothed,

incarnadined existence which is proper to elderly ladies paying calls

in London about five o’clock in the afternoon. Portraits by Romney,

seen through glass, have something of their pink, mellow look, their

blooming softness, as of apricots hanging upon a red wall in the

afternoon sun. Mrs. Cosham was so appareled with hanging muffs, chains,

and swinging draperies that it was impossible to detect the shape of a

human being in the mass of brown and black which filled the arm-chair.

Mrs. Milvain was a much slighter figure; but the same doubt as to the

precise lines of her contour filled Ralph, as he regarded them, with

dismal foreboding. What remark of his would ever reach these fabulous

and fantastic characters?—for there was something fantastically unreal

in the curious swayings and noddings of Mrs. Cosham, as if her

equipment included a large wire spring. Her voice had a high-pitched,

cooing note, which prolonged words and cut them short until the English

language seemed no longer fit for common purposes. In a moment of

nervousness, so Ralph thought, Katharine had turned on innumerable

electric lights. But Mrs. Cosham had gained impetus (perhaps her

swaying movements had that end in view) for sustained speech; and she

now addressed Ralph deliberately and elaborately.

“I come from Woking, Mr. Popham. You may well ask me, why Woking? and

to that I answer, for perhaps the hundredth time, because of the

sunsets. We went there for the sunsets, but that was five-and-twenty

years ago. Where are the sunsets now? Alas! There is no sunset now

nearer than the South Coast.” Her rich and romantic notes were

accompanied by a wave of a long white hand, which, when waved, gave off

a flash of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Ralph wondered whether she

more resembled an elephant, with a jeweled head-dress, or a superb

cockatoo, balanced insecurely upon its perch, and pecking capriciously

at a lump of sugar.

“Where are the sunsets now?” she repeated. “Do you find sunsets now,

Mr. Popham?”

“I live at Highgate,” he replied.

“At Highgate? Yes, Highgate has its charms; your Uncle John lived at

Highgate,” she jerked in the direction of Katharine. She sank her head

upon her breast, as if for a moment’s meditation, which past, she

looked up and observed: “I dare say there are very pretty lanes in

Highgate. I can recollect walking with your mother, Katharine, through

lanes blossoming with wild hawthorn. But where is the hawthorn now? You

remember that exquisite description in De Quincey, Mr. Popham?—but I

forget, you, in your generation, with all your activity and

enlightenment, at which I can only marvel”—here she displayed both her

beautiful white hands—“do not read De Quincey. You have your Belloc,

your Chesterton, your Bernard Shaw—why should you read De Quincey?”

“But I do read De Quincey,” Ralph protested, “more than Belloc and

Chesterton, anyhow.”

“Indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Cosham, with a gesture of surprise and relief

mingled. “You are, then, a ‘rara avis’ in your generation. I am

delighted to meet anyone who reads De Quincey.”

Here she hollowed her hand into a screen, and, leaning towards

Katharine, inquired, in a very audible whisper, “Does your friend

_write?_”

“Mr. Denham,” said Katharine, with more than her usual clearness and

firmness, “writes for the Review. He is a lawyer.”

“The clean-shaven lips, showing the expression of the mouth! I

recognize them at once. I always feel at home with lawyers, Mr.

Denham—”

“They used to come about so much in the old days,” Mrs. Milvain

interposed, the frail, silvery notes of her voice falling with the

sweet tone of an old bell.

“You say you live at Highgate,” she continued. “I wonder whether you

happen to know if there is an old house called Tempest Lodge still in

existence—an old white house in a garden?”

Ralph shook his head, and she sighed.

“Ah, no; it must have been pulled down by this time, with all the other

old houses. There were such pretty lanes in those days. That was how

your uncle met your Aunt Emily, you know,” she addressed Katharine.

“They walked home through the lanes.”

“A sprig of May in her bonnet,” Mrs. Cosham ejaculated, reminiscently.

“And next Sunday he had violets in his buttonhole. And that was how we

guessed.”

Katharine laughed. She looked at Ralph. His eyes were meditative, and

she wondered what he found in this old gossip to make him ponder so

contentedly. She felt, she hardly knew why, a curious pity for him.

“Uncle John—yes, ‘poor John,’ you always called him. Why was that?” she

asked, to make them go on talking, which, indeed, they needed little

invitation to do.

“That was what his father, old Sir Richard, always called him. Poor

John, or the fool of the family,” Mrs. Milvain hastened to inform them.

“The other boys were so brilliant, and he could never pass his

examinations, so they sent him to India—a long voyage in those days,

poor fellow. You had your own room, you know, and you did it up. But he

will get his knighthood and a pension, I believe,” she said, turning to

Ralph, “only it is not England.”

“No,” Mrs. Cosham confirmed her, “it is not England. In those days we

thought an Indian Judgeship about equal to a county-court judgeship at

home. His Honor—a pretty title, but still, not at the top of the tree.

However,” she sighed, “if you have a wife and seven children, and

people nowadays very quickly forget your father’s name—well, you have

to take what you can get,” she concluded.

“And I fancy,” Mrs. Milvain resumed, lowering her voice rather

confidentially, “that John would have done more if it hadn’t been for

his wife, your Aunt Emily. She was a very good woman, devoted to him,

of course, but she was not ambitious for him, and if a wife isn’t

ambitious for her husband, especially in a profession like the law,

clients soon get to know of it. In our young days, Mr. Denham, we used

to say that we knew which of our friends would become judges, by

looking at the girls they married. And so it was, and so, I fancy, it

always will be. I don’t think,” she added, summing up these scattered

remarks, “that any man is really happy unless he succeeds in his

profession.”

Mrs. Cosham approved of this sentiment with more ponderous sagacity

from her side of the tea-table, in the first place by swaying her head,

and in the second by remarking:

“No, men are not the same as women. I fancy Alfred Tennyson spoke the

truth about that as about many other things. How I wish he’d lived to

write ‘The Prince’—a sequel to ‘The Princess’! I confess I’m almost

tired of Princesses. We want some one to show us what a good man can

be. We have Laura and Beatrice, Antigone and Cordelia, but we have no

heroic man. How do you, as a poet, account for that, Mr. Denham?”

“I’m not a poet,” said Ralph good-humoredly. “I’m only a solicitor.”

“But you write, too?” Mrs. Cosham demanded, afraid lest she should be

balked of her priceless discovery, a young man truly devoted to

literature.

“In my spare time,” Denham reassured her.

“In your spare time!” Mrs. Cosham echoed. “That is a proof of devotion,

indeed.” She half closed her eyes, and indulged herself in a

fascinating picture of a briefless barrister lodged in a garret,

writing immortal novels by the light of a farthing dip. But the romance

which fell upon the figures of great writers and illumined their pages

was no false radiance in her case. She carried her pocket Shakespeare

about with her, and met life fortified by the words of the poets. How

far she saw Denham, and how far she confused him with some hero of

fiction, it would be hard to say. Literature had taken possession even

of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain

characters in the old novels, for she came out, after a pause, with:

“Um—um—Pendennis—Warrington—I could never forgive Laura,” she

pronounced energetically, “for not marrying George, in spite of

everything. George Eliot did the very same thing; and Lewes was a

little frog-faced man, with the manner of a dancing master. But

Warrington, now, had everything in his favor; intellect, passion,

romance, distinction, and the connection was a mere piece of

undergraduate folly. Arthur, I confess, has always seemed to me a bit

of a fop; I can’t imagine how Laura married him. But you say you’re a

solicitor, Mr. Denham. Now there are one or two things I should like to

ask you—about Shakespeare—” She drew out her small, worn volume with

some difficulty, opened it, and shook it in the air. “They say,

nowadays, that Shakespeare was a lawyer. They say, that accounts for

his knowledge of human nature. There’s a fine example for you, Mr.

Denham. Study your clients, young man, and the world will be the richer

one of these days, I have no doubt. Tell me, how do we come out of it,

now; better or worse than you expected?”

Thus called upon to sum up the worth of human nature in a few words,

Ralph answered unhesitatingly:

“Worse, Mrs. Cosham, a good deal worse. I’m afraid the ordinary man is

a bit of a rascal—”

“And the ordinary woman?”

“No, I don’t like the ordinary woman either—”

“Ah, dear me, I’ve no doubt that’s very true, very true.” Mrs. Cosham

sighed. “Swift would have agreed with you, anyhow—” She looked at him,

and thought that there were signs of distinct power in his brow. He

would do well, she thought, to devote himself to satire.

“Charles Lavington, you remember, was a solicitor,” Mrs. Milvain

interposed, rather resenting the waste of time involved in talking

about fictitious people when you might be talking about real people.

“But you wouldn’t remember him, Katharine.”

“Mr. Lavington? Oh, yes, I do,” said Katharine, waking from other

thoughts with her little start. “The summer we had a house near Tenby.

I remember the field and the pond with the tadpoles, and making

haystacks with Mr. Lavington.”

“She is right. There _was_ a pond with tadpoles,” Mrs. Cosham

corroborated. “Millais made studies of it for ‘Ophelia.’ Some say that

is the best picture he ever painted—”

“And I remember the dog chained up in the yard, and the dead snakes

hanging in the toolhouse.”

“It was at Tenby that you were chased by the bull,” Mrs. Milvain

continued. “But that you couldn’t remember, though it’s true you were a

wonderful child. Such eyes she had, Mr. Denham! I used to say to her

father, ‘She’s watching us, and summing us all up in her little mind.’

And they had a nurse in those days,” she went on, telling her story

with charming solemnity to Ralph, “who was a good woman, but engaged to

a sailor. When she ought to have been attending to the baby, her eyes

were on the sea. And Mrs. Hilbery allowed this girl—Susan her name

was—to have him to stay in the village. They abused her goodness, I’m

sorry to say, and while they walked in the lanes, they stood the

perambulator alone in a field where there was a bull. The animal became

enraged by the red blanket in the perambulator, and Heaven knows what

might have happened if a gentleman had not been walking by in the nick

of time, and rescued Katharine in his arms!”

“I think the bull was only a cow, Aunt Celia,” said Katharine.

“My darling, it was a great red Devonshire bull, and not long after it

gored a man to death and had to be destroyed. And your mother forgave

Susan—a thing I could never have done.”

“Maggie’s sympathies were entirely with Susan and the sailor, I am

sure,” said Mrs. Cosham, rather tartly. “My sister-in-law,” she

continued, “has laid her burdens upon Providence at every crisis in her

life, and Providence, I must confess, has responded nobly, so far—”

“Yes,” said Katharine, with a laugh, for she liked the rashness which

irritated the rest of the family. “My mother’s bulls always turn into

cows at the critical moment.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Milvain, “I’m glad you have some one to protect you

from bulls now.”

“I can’t imagine William protecting any one from bulls,” said

Katharine.

It happened that Mrs. Cosham had once more produced her pocket volume

of Shakespeare, and was consulting Ralph upon an obscure passage in

“Measure for Measure.” He did not at once seize the meaning of what

Katharine and her aunt were saying; William, he supposed, referred to

some small cousin, for he now saw Katharine as a child in a pinafore;

but, nevertheless, he was so much distracted that his eye could hardly

follow the words on the paper. A moment later he heard them speak

distinctly of an engagement ring.

“I like rubies,” he heard Katharine say.

“To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendant world....”

Mrs. Cosham intoned; at the same instant “Rodney” fitted itself to

“William” in Ralph’s mind. He felt convinced that Katharine was engaged

to Rodney. His first sensation was one of violent rage with her for

having deceived him throughout the visit, fed him with pleasant old

wives’ tales, let him see her as a child playing in a meadow, shared

her youth with him, while all the time she was a stranger entirely, and

engaged to marry Rodney.

But was it possible? Surely it was not possible. For in his eyes she

was still a child. He paused so long over the book that Mrs. Cosham had

time to look over his shoulder and ask her niece:

“And have you settled upon a house yet, Katharine?”

This convinced him of the truth of the monstrous idea. He looked up at

once and said:

“Yes, it’s a difficult passage.”

His voice had changed so much, he spoke with such curtness and even

with such contempt, that Mrs. Cosham looked at him fairly puzzled.

Happily she belonged to a generation which expected uncouthness in its

men, and she merely felt convinced that this Mr. Denham was very, very

clever. She took back her Shakespeare, as Denham seemed to have no more

to say, and secreted it once more about her person with the infinitely

pathetic resignation of the old.

“Katharine’s engaged to William Rodney,” she said, by way of filling in

the pause; “a very old friend of ours. He has a wonderful knowledge of

literature, too—wonderful.” She nodded her head rather vaguely. “You

should meet each other.”

Denham’s one wish was to leave the house as soon as he could; but the

elderly ladies had risen, and were proposing to visit Mrs. Hilbery in

her bedroom, so that any move on his part was impossible. At the same

time, he wished to say something, but he knew not what, to Katharine

alone. She took her aunts upstairs, and returned, coming towards him

once more with an air of innocence and friendliness that amazed him.

“My father will be back,” she said. “Won’t you sit down?” and she

laughed, as if now they might share a perfectly friendly laugh at the

tea-party.

But Ralph made no attempt to seat himself.

“I must congratulate you,” he said. “It was news to me.” He saw her

face change, but only to become graver than before.

“My engagement?” she asked. “Yes, I am going to marry William Rodney.”

Ralph remained standing with his hand on the back of a chair in

absolute silence. Abysses seemed to plunge into darkness between them.

He looked at her, but her face showed that she was not thinking of him.

No regret or consciousness of wrong disturbed her.

“Well, I must go,” he said at length.

She seemed about to say something, then changed her mind and said

merely:

“You will come again, I hope. We always seem”—she hesitated—“to be

interrupted.”

He bowed and left the room.

Ralph strode with extreme swiftness along the Embankment. Every muscle

was taut and braced as if to resist some sudden attack from outside.

For the moment it seemed as if the attack were about to be directed

against his body, and his brain thus was on the alert, but without

understanding. Finding himself, after a few minutes, no longer under

observation, and no attack delivered, he slackened his pace, the pain

spread all through him, took possession of every governing seat, and

met with scarcely any resistance from powers exhausted by their first

effort at defence. He took his way languidly along the river

embankment, away from home rather than towards it. The world had him at

its mercy. He made no pattern out of the sights he saw. He felt himself

now, as he had often fancied other people, adrift on the stream, and

far removed from control of it, a man with no grasp upon circumstances

any longer. Old battered men loafing at the doors of public-houses now

seemed to be his fellows, and he felt, as he supposed them to feel, a

mingling of envy and hatred towards those who passed quickly and

certainly to a goal of their own. They, too, saw things very thin and

shadowy, and were wafted about by the lightest breath of wind. For the

substantial world, with its prospect of avenues leading on and on to

the invisible distance, had slipped from him, since Katharine was

engaged. Now all his life was visible, and the straight, meager path

had its ending soon enough. Katharine was engaged, and she had deceived

him, too. He felt for corners of his being untouched by his disaster;

but there was no limit to the flood of damage; not one of his

possessions was safe now. Katharine had deceived him; she had mixed

herself with every thought of his, and reft of her they seemed false

thoughts which he would blush to think again. His life seemed

immeasurably impoverished.

He sat himself down, in spite of the chilly fog which obscured the

farther bank and left its lights suspended upon a blank surface, upon

one of the riverside seats, and let the tide of disillusionment sweep

through him. For the time being all bright points in his life were

blotted out; all prominences leveled. At first he made himself believe

that Katharine had treated him badly, and drew comfort from the thought

that, left alone, she would recollect this, and think of him and tender

him, in silence, at any rate, an apology. But this grain of comfort

failed him after a second or two, for, upon reflection, he had to admit

that Katharine owed him nothing. Katharine had promised nothing, taken

nothing; to her his dreams had meant nothing. This, indeed, was the

lowest pitch of his despair. If the best of one’s feelings means

nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is

left us? The old romance which had warmed his days for him, the

thoughts of Katharine which had painted every hour, were now made to

appear foolish and enfeebled. He rose, and looked into the river, whose

swift race of dun-colored waters seemed the very spirit of futility and

oblivion.

“In what can one trust, then?” he thought, as he leant there. So feeble

and insubstantial did he feel himself that he repeated the word aloud.

“In what can one trust? Not in men and women. Not in one’s dreams about

them. There’s nothing—nothing, nothing left at all.”

Now Denham had reason to know that he could bring to birth and keep

alive a fine anger when he chose. Rodney provided a good target for

that emotion. And yet at the moment, Rodney and Katharine herself

seemed disembodied ghosts. He could scarcely remember the look of them.

His mind plunged lower and lower. Their marriage seemed of no

importance to him. All things had turned to ghosts; the whole mass of

the world was insubstantial vapor, surrounding the solitary spark in

his mind, whose burning point he could remember, for it burnt no more.

He had once cherished a belief, and Katharine had embodied this belief,

and she did so no longer. He did not blame her; he blamed nothing,

nobody; he saw the truth. He saw the dun-colored race of waters and the

blank shore. But life is vigorous; the body lives, and the body, no

doubt, dictated the reflection, which now urged him to movement, that

one may cast away the forms of human beings, and yet retain the passion

which seemed inseparable from their existence in the flesh. Now this

passion burnt on his horizon, as the winter sun makes a greenish pane

in the west through thinning clouds. His eyes were set on something

infinitely far and remote; by that light he felt he could walk, and

would, in future, have to find his way. But that was all there was left

to him of a populous and teeming world.

CHAPTER XIII

The lunch hour in the office was only partly spent by Denham in the

consumption of food. Whether fine or wet, he passed most of it pacing

the gravel paths in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The children got to know his

figure, and the sparrows expected their daily scattering of

bread-crumbs. No doubt, since he often gave a copper and almost always

a handful of bread, he was not as blind to his surroundings as he

thought himself.

He thought that these winter days were spent in long hours before white

papers radiant in electric light; and in short passages through

fog-dimmed streets. When he came back to his work after lunch he

carried in his head a picture of the Strand, scattered with omnibuses,

and of the purple shapes of leaves pressed flat upon the gravel, as if

his eyes had always been bent upon the ground. His brain worked

incessantly, but his thought was attended with so little joy that he

did not willingly recall it; but drove ahead, now in this direction,

now in that; and came home laden with dark books borrowed from a

library.

Mary Datchet, coming from the Strand at lunch-time, saw him one day

taking his turn, closely buttoned in an overcoat, and so lost in

thought that he might have been sitting in his own room.

She was overcome by something very like awe by the sight of him; then

she felt much inclined to laugh, although her pulse beat faster. She

passed him, and he never saw her. She came back and touched him on the

shoulder.

“Gracious, Mary!” he exclaimed. “How you startled me!”

“Yes. You looked as if you were walking in your sleep,” she said. “Are

you arranging some terrible love affair? Have you got to reconcile a

desperate couple?”

“I wasn’t thinking about my work,” Ralph replied, rather hastily. “And,

besides, that sort of thing’s not in my line,” he added, rather grimly.

The morning was fine, and they had still some minutes of leisure to

spend. They had not met for two or three weeks, and Mary had much to

say to Ralph; but she was not certain how far he wished for her

company. However, after a turn or two, in which a few facts were

communicated, he suggested sitting down, and she took the seat beside

him. The sparrows came fluttering about them, and Ralph produced from

his pocket the half of a roll saved from his luncheon. He threw a few

crumbs among them.

“I’ve never seen sparrows so tame,” Mary observed, by way of saying

something.

“No,” said Ralph. “The sparrows in Hyde Park aren’t as tame as this. If

we keep perfectly still, I’ll get one to settle on my arm.”

Mary felt that she could have forgone this display of animal good

temper, but seeing that Ralph, for some curious reason, took a pride in

the sparrows, she bet him sixpence that he would not succeed.

“Done!” he said; and his eye, which had been gloomy, showed a spark of

light. His conversation was now addressed entirely to a bald

cock-sparrow, who seemed bolder than the rest; and Mary took the

opportunity of looking at him. She was not satisfied; his face was

worn, and his expression stern. A child came bowling its hoop through

the concourse of birds, and Ralph threw his last crumbs of bread into

the bushes with a snort of impatience.

“That’s what always happens—just as I’ve almost got him,” he said.

“Here’s your sixpence, Mary. But you’ve only got it thanks to that

brute of a boy. They oughtn’t to be allowed to bowl hoops here—”

“Oughtn’t to be allowed to bowl hoops! My dear Ralph, what nonsense!”

“You always say that,” he complained; “and it isn’t nonsense. What’s

the point of having a garden if one can’t watch birds in it? The street

does all right for hoops. And if children can’t be trusted in the

streets, their mothers should keep them at home.”

Mary made no answer to this remark, but frowned.

She leant back on the seat and looked about her at the great houses

breaking the soft gray-blue sky with their chimneys.

“Ah, well,” she said, “London’s a fine place to live in. I believe I

could sit and watch people all day long. I like my

fellow-creatures....”

Ralph sighed impatiently.

“Yes, I think so, when you come to know them,” she added, as if his

disagreement had been spoken.

“That’s just when I don’t like them,” he replied. “Still, I don’t see

why you shouldn’t cherish that illusion, if it pleases you.” He spoke

without much vehemence of agreement or disagreement. He seemed chilled.

“Wake up, Ralph! You’re half asleep!” Mary cried, turning and pinching

his sleeve. “What have you been doing with yourself? Moping? Working?

Despising the world, as usual?”

As he merely shook his head, and filled his pipe, she went on:

“It’s a bit of a pose, isn’t it?”

“Not more than most things,” he said.

“Well,” Mary remarked, “I’ve a great deal to say to you, but I must go

on—we have a committee.” She rose, but hesitated, looking down upon him

rather gravely. “You don’t look happy, Ralph,” she said. “Is it

anything, or is it nothing?”

He did not immediately answer her, but rose, too, and walked with her

towards the gate. As usual, he did not speak to her without considering

whether what he was about to say was the sort of thing that he could

say to her.

“I’ve been bothered,” he said at length. “Partly by work, and partly by

family troubles. Charles has been behaving like a fool. He wants to go

out to Canada as a farmer—”

“Well, there’s something to be said for that,” said Mary; and they

passed the gate, and walked slowly round the Fields again, discussing

difficulties which, as a matter of fact, were more or less chronic in

the Denham family, and only now brought forward to appease Mary’s

sympathy, which, however, soothed Ralph more than he was aware of. She

made him at least dwell upon problems which were real in the sense that

they were capable of solution; and the true cause of his melancholy,

which was not susceptible to such treatment, sank rather more deeply

into the shades of his mind.

Mary was attentive; she was helpful. Ralph could not help feeling

grateful to her, the more so, perhaps, because he had not told her the

truth about his state; and when they reached the gate again he wished

to make some affectionate objection to her leaving him. But his

affection took the rather uncouth form of expostulating with her about

her work.

“What d’you want to sit on a committee for?” he asked. “It’s waste of

your time, Mary.”

“I agree with you that a country walk would benefit the world more,”

she said. “Look here,” she added suddenly, “why don’t you come to us at

Christmas? It’s almost the best time of year.”

“Come to you at Disham?” Ralph repeated.

“Yes. We won’t interfere with you. But you can tell me later,” she

said, rather hastily, and then started off in the direction of Russell

Square. She had invited him on the impulse of the moment, as a vision

of the country came before her; and now she was annoyed with herself

for having done so, and then she was annoyed at being annoyed.

“If I can’t face a walk in a field alone with Ralph,” she reasoned,

“I’d better buy a cat and live in a lodging at Ealing, like Sally

Seal—and he won’t come. Or did he mean that he _would_ come?”

She shook her head. She really did not know what he had meant. She

never felt quite certain; but now she was more than usually baffled.

Was he concealing something from her? His manner had been odd; his deep

absorption had impressed her; there was something in him that she had

not fathomed, and the mystery of his nature laid more of a spell upon

her than she liked. Moreover, she could not prevent herself from doing

now what she had often blamed others of her sex for doing—from endowing

her friend with a kind of heavenly fire, and passing her life before it

for his sanction.

Under this process, the committee rather dwindled in importance; the

Suffrage shrank; she vowed she would work harder at the Italian

language; she thought she would take up the study of birds. But this

program for a perfect life threatened to become so absurd that she very

soon caught herself out in the evil habit, and was rehearsing her

speech to the committee by the time the chestnut-colored bricks of

Russell Square came in sight. Indeed, she never noticed them. She ran

upstairs as usual, and was completely awakened to reality by the sight

of Mrs. Seal, on the landing outside the office, inducing a very large

dog to drink water out of a tumbler.

“Miss Markham has already arrived,” Mrs. Seal remarked, with due

solemnity, “and this is her dog.”

“A very fine dog, too,” said Mary, patting him on the head.

“Yes. A magnificent fellow,” Mrs. Seal agreed. “A kind of St. Bernard,

she tells me—so like Kit to have a St. Bernard. And you guard your

mistress well, don’t you, Sailor? You see that wicked men don’t break

into her larder when she’s out at _her_ work—helping poor souls who

have lost their way.... But we’re late—we must begin!” and scattering

the rest of the water indiscriminately over the floor, she hurried Mary

into the committee-room.

CHAPTER XIV

Mr. Clacton was in his glory. The machinery which he had perfected and

controlled was now about to turn out its bi-monthly product, a

committee meeting; and his pride in the perfect structure of these

assemblies was great. He loved the jargon of committee-rooms; he loved

the way in which the door kept opening as the clock struck the hour, in

obedience to a few strokes of his pen on a piece of paper; and when it

had opened sufficiently often, he loved to issue from his inner chamber

with documents in his hands, visibly important, with a preoccupied

expression on his face that might have suited a Prime Minister

advancing to meet his Cabinet. By his orders the table had been

decorated beforehand with six sheets of blotting-paper, with six pens,

six ink-pots, a tumbler and a jug of water, a bell, and, in deference

to the taste of the lady members, a vase of hardy chrysanthemums. He

had already surreptitiously straightened the sheets of blotting-paper

in relation to the ink-pots, and now stood in front of the fire engaged

in conversation with Miss Markham. But his eye was on the door, and

when Mary and Mrs. Seal entered, he gave a little laugh and observed to

the assembly which was scattered about the room:

“I fancy, ladies and gentlemen, that we are ready to commence.”

So speaking, he took his seat at the head of the table, and arranging

one bundle of papers upon his right and another upon his left, called

upon Miss Datchet to read the minutes of the previous meeting. Mary

obeyed. A keen observer might have wondered why it was necessary for

the secretary to knit her brows so closely over the tolerably

matter-of-fact statement before her. Could there be any doubt in her

mind that it had been resolved to circularize the provinces with

Leaflet No. 3, or to issue a statistical diagram showing the proportion

of married women to spinsters in New Zealand; or that the net profits

of Mrs. Hipsley’s Bazaar had reached a total of five pounds eight

shillings and twopence half-penny?

Could any doubt as to the perfect sense and propriety of these

statements be disturbing her? No one could have guessed, from the look

of her, that she was disturbed at all. A pleasanter and saner woman

than Mary Datchet was never seen within a committee-room. She seemed a

compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine; less poetically

speaking, she showed both gentleness and strength, an indefinable

promise of soft maternity blending with her evident fitness for honest

labor. Nevertheless, she had great difficulty in reducing her mind to

obedience; and her reading lacked conviction, as if, as was indeed the

case, she had lost the power of visualizing what she read. And directly

the list was completed, her mind floated to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and

the fluttering wings of innumerable sparrows. Was Ralph still enticing

the bald-headed cock-sparrow to sit upon his hand? Had he succeeded?

Would he ever succeed? She had meant to ask him why it is that the

sparrows in Lincoln’s Inn Fields are tamer than the sparrows in Hyde

Park—perhaps it is that the passers-by are rarer, and they come to

recognize their benefactors. For the first half-hour of the committee

meeting, Mary had thus to do battle with the skeptical presence of

Ralph Denham, who threatened to have it all his own way. Mary tried

half a dozen methods of ousting him. She raised her voice, she

articulated distinctly, she looked firmly at Mr. Clacton’s bald head,

she began to write a note. To her annoyance, her pencil drew a little

round figure on the blotting-paper, which, she could not deny, was

really a bald-headed cock-sparrow. She looked again at Mr. Clacton;

yes, he was bald, and so are cock-sparrows. Never was a secretary

tormented by so many unsuitable suggestions, and they all came, alas!

with something ludicrously grotesque about them, which might, at any

moment, provoke her to such flippancy as would shock her colleagues for

ever. The thought of what she might say made her bite her lips, as if

her lips would protect her.

But all these suggestions were but flotsam and jetsam cast to the

surface by a more profound disturbance, which, as she could not

consider it at present, manifested its existence by these grotesque

nods and beckonings. Consider it, she must, when the committee was

over. Meanwhile, she was behaving scandalously; she was looking out of

the window, and thinking of the color of the sky, and of the

decorations on the Imperial Hotel, when she ought to have been

shepherding her colleagues, and pinning them down to the matter in

hand. She could not bring herself to attach more weight to one project

than to another. Ralph had said—she could not stop to consider what he

had said, but he had somehow divested the proceedings of all reality.

And then, without conscious effort, by some trick of the brain, she

found herself becoming interested in some scheme for organizing a

newspaper campaign. Certain articles were to be written; certain

editors approached. What line was it advisable to take? She found

herself strongly disapproving of what Mr. Clacton was saying. She

committed herself to the opinion that now was the time to strike hard.

Directly she had said this, she felt that she had turned upon Ralph’s

ghost; and she became more and more in earnest, and anxious to bring

the others round to her point of view. Once more, she knew exactly and

indisputably what is right and what is wrong. As if emerging from a

mist, the old foes of the public good loomed ahead of her—capitalists,

newspaper proprietors, anti-suffragists, and, in some ways most

pernicious of all, the masses who take no interest one way or

another—among whom, for the time being, she certainly discerned the

features of Ralph Denham. Indeed, when Miss Markham asked her to

suggest the names of a few friends of hers, she expressed herself with

unusual bitterness:

“My friends think all this kind of thing useless.” She felt that she

was really saying that to Ralph himself.

“Oh, they’re that sort, are they?” said Miss Markham, with a little

laugh; and with renewed vigor their legions charged the foe.

Mary’s spirits had been low when she entered the committee-room; but

now they were considerably improved. She knew the ways of this world;

it was a shapely, orderly place; she felt convinced of its right and

its wrong; and the feeling that she was fit to deal a heavy blow

against her enemies warmed her heart and kindled her eye. In one of

those flights of fancy, not characteristic of her but tiresomely

frequent this afternoon, she envisaged herself battered with rotten

eggs upon a platform, from which Ralph vainly begged her to descend.

But—

“What do I matter compared with the cause?” she said, and so on. Much

to her credit, however teased by foolish fancies, she kept the surface

of her brain moderate and vigilant, and subdued Mrs. Seal very

tactfully more than once when she demanded, “Action!—everywhere!—at

once!” as became her father’s daughter.

The other members of the committee, who were all rather elderly people,

were a good deal impressed by Mary, and inclined to side with her and

against each other, partly, perhaps, because of her youth. The feeling

that she controlled them all filled Mary with a sense of power; and she

felt that no work can equal in importance, or be so exciting as, the

work of making other people do what you want them to do. Indeed, when

she had won her point she felt a slight degree of contempt for the

people who had yielded to her.

The committee now rose, gathered together their papers, shook them

straight, placed them in their attache-cases, snapped the locks firmly

together, and hurried away, having, for the most part, to catch trains,

in order to keep other appointments with other committees, for they

were all busy people. Mary, Mrs. Seal, and Mr. Clacton were left alone;

the room was hot and untidy, the pieces of pink blotting-paper were

lying at different angles upon the table, and the tumbler was half full

of water, which some one had poured out and forgotten to drink.

Mrs. Seal began preparing the tea, while Mr. Clacton retired to his

room to file the fresh accumulation of documents. Mary was too much

excited even to help Mrs. Seal with the cups and saucers. She flung up

the window and stood by it, looking out. The street lamps were already

lit; and through the mist in the square one could see little figures

hurrying across the road and along the pavement, on the farther side.

In her absurd mood of lustful arrogance, Mary looked at the little

figures and thought, “If I liked I could make you go in there or stop

short; I could make you walk in single file or in double file; I could

do what I liked with you.” Then Mrs. Seal came and stood by her.

“Oughtn’t you to put something round your shoulders, Sally?” Mary

asked, in rather a condescending tone of voice, feeling a sort of pity

for the enthusiastic ineffective little woman. But Mrs. Seal paid no

attention to the suggestion.

“Well, did you enjoy yourself?” Mary asked, with a little laugh.

Mrs. Seal drew a deep breath, restrained herself, and then burst out,

looking out, too, upon Russell Square and Southampton Row, and at the

passers-by, “Ah, if only one could get every one of those people into

this room, and make them understand for five minutes! But they _must_

see the truth some day.... If only one could _make_ them see it....”

Mary knew herself to be very much wiser than Mrs. Seal, and when Mrs.

Seal said anything, even if it was what Mary herself was feeling, she

automatically thought of all that there was to be said against it. On

this occasion her arrogant feeling that she could direct everybody

dwindled away.

“Let’s have our tea,” she said, turning back from the window and

pulling down the blind. “It was a good meeting—didn’t you think so,

Sally?” she let fall, casually, as she sat down at the table. Surely

Mrs. Seal must realize that Mary had been extraordinarily efficient?

“But we go at such a snail’s pace,” said Sally, shaking her head

impatiently.

At this Mary burst out laughing, and all her arrogance was dissipated.

“You can afford to laugh,” said Sally, with another shake of her head,

“but I can’t. I’m fifty-five, and I dare say I shall be in my grave by

the time we get it—if we ever do.”

“Oh, no, you won’t be in your grave,” said Mary, kindly.

“It’ll be such a great day,” said Mrs. Seal, with a toss of her locks.

“A great day, not only for us, but for civilization. That’s what I

feel, you know, about these meetings. Each one of them is a step

onwards in the great march—humanity, you know. We do want the people

after us to have a better time of it—and so many don’t see it. I wonder

how it is that they don’t see it?”

She was carrying plates and cups from the cupboard as she spoke, so

that her sentences were more than usually broken apart. Mary could not

help looking at the odd little priestess of humanity with something

like admiration. While she had been thinking about herself, Mrs. Seal

had thought of nothing but her vision.

“You mustn’t wear yourself out, Sally, if you want to see the great

day,” she said, rising and trying to take a plate of biscuits from Mrs.

Seal’s hands.

“My dear child, what else is my old body good for?” she exclaimed,

clinging more tightly than before to her plate of biscuits. “Shouldn’t

I be proud to give everything I have to the cause?—for I’m not an

intelligence like you. There were domestic circumstances—I’d like to

tell you one of these days—so I say foolish things. I lose my head, you

know. You don’t. Mr. Clacton doesn’t. It’s a great mistake, to lose

one’s head. But my heart’s in the right place. And I’m so glad Kit has

a big dog, for I didn’t think her looking well.”

They had their tea, and went over many of the points that had been

raised in the committee rather more intimately than had been possible

then; and they all felt an agreeable sense of being in some way behind

the scenes; of having their hands upon strings which, when pulled,

would completely change the pageant exhibited daily to those who read

the newspapers. Although their views were very different, this sense

united them and made them almost cordial in their manners to each

other.

Mary, however, left the tea-party rather early, desiring both to be

alone, and then to hear some music at the Queen’s Hall. She fully

intended to use her loneliness to think out her position with regard to

Ralph; but although she walked back to the Strand with this end in

view, she found her mind uncomfortably full of different trains of

thought. She started one and then another. They seemed even to take

their color from the street she happened to be in. Thus the vision of

humanity appeared to be in some way connected with Bloomsbury, and

faded distinctly by the time she crossed the main road; then a belated

organ-grinder in Holborn set her thoughts dancing incongruously; and by

the time she was crossing the great misty square of Lincoln’s Inn

Fields, she was cold and depressed again, and horribly clear-sighted.

The dark removed the stimulus of human companionship, and a tear

actually slid down her cheek, accompanying a sudden conviction within

her that she loved Ralph, and that he didn’t love her. All dark and

empty now was the path where they had walked that morning, and the

sparrows silent in the bare trees. But the lights in her own building

soon cheered her; all these different states of mind were submerged in

the deep flood of desires, thoughts, perceptions, antagonisms, which

washed perpetually at the base of her being, to rise into prominence in

turn when the conditions of the upper world were favorable. She put off

the hour of clear thought until Christmas, saying to herself, as she

lit her fire, that it is impossible to think anything out in London;

and, no doubt, Ralph wouldn’t come at Christmas, and she would take

long walks into the heart of the country, and decide this question and

all the others that puzzled her. Meanwhile, she thought, drawing her

feet up on to the fender, life was full of complexity; life was a thing

one must love to the last fiber of it.

She had sat there for five minutes or so, and her thoughts had had time

to grow dim, when there came a ring at her bell. Her eye brightened;

she felt immediately convinced that Ralph had come to visit her.

Accordingly, she waited a moment before opening the door; she wanted to

feel her hands secure upon the reins of all the troublesome emotions

which the sight of Ralph would certainly arouse. She composed herself

unnecessarily, however, for she had to admit, not Ralph, but Katharine

and William Rodney. Her first impression was that they were both

extremely well dressed. She felt herself shabby and slovenly beside

them, and did not know how she should entertain them, nor could she

guess why they had come. She had heard nothing of their engagement. But

after the first disappointment, she was pleased, for she felt instantly

that Katharine was a personality, and, moreover, she need not now

exercise her self-control.

“We were passing and saw a light in your window, so we came up,”

Katharine explained, standing and looking very tall and distinguished

and rather absent-minded.

“We have been to see some pictures,” said William. “Oh, dear,” he

exclaimed, looking about him, “this room reminds me of one of the worst

hours in my existence—when I read a paper, and you all sat round and

jeered at me. Katharine was the worst. I could feel her gloating over

every mistake I made. Miss Datchet was kind. Miss Datchet just made it

possible for me to get through, I remember.”

Sitting down, he drew off his light yellow gloves, and began slapping

his knees with them. His vitality was pleasant, Mary thought, although

he made her laugh. The very look of him was inclined to make her laugh.

His rather prominent eyes passed from one young woman to the other, and

his lips perpetually formed words which remained unspoken.

“We have been seeing old masters at the Grafton Gallery,” said

Katharine, apparently paying no attention to William, and accepting a

cigarette which Mary offered her. She leant back in her chair, and the

smoke which hung about her face seemed to withdraw her still further

from the others.

“Would you believe it, Miss Datchet,” William continued, “Katharine

doesn’t like Titian. She doesn’t like apricots, she doesn’t like

peaches, she doesn’t like green peas. She likes the Elgin marbles, and

gray days without any sun. She’s a typical example of the cold northern

nature. I come from Devonshire—”

Had they been quarreling, Mary wondered, and had they, for that reason,

sought refuge in her room, or were they engaged, or had Katharine just

refused him? She was completely baffled.

Katharine now reappeared from her veil of smoke, knocked the ash from

her cigarette into the fireplace, and looked, with an odd expression of

solicitude, at the irritable man.

“Perhaps, Mary,” she said tentatively, “you wouldn’t mind giving us

some tea? We did try to get some, but the shop was so crowded, and in

the next one there was a band playing; and most of the pictures, at any

rate, were very dull, whatever you may say, William.” She spoke with a

kind of guarded gentleness.

Mary, accordingly, retired to make preparations in the pantry.

“What in the world are they after?” she asked of her own reflection in

the little looking-glass which hung there. She was not left to doubt

much longer, for, on coming back into the sitting-room with the

tea-things, Katharine informed her, apparently having been instructed

so to do by William, of their engagement.

“William,” she said, “thinks that perhaps you don’t know. We are going

to be married.”

Mary found herself shaking William’s hand, and addressing her

congratulations to him, as if Katharine were inaccessible; she had,

indeed, taken hold of the tea-kettle.

“Let me see,” Katharine said, “one puts hot water into the cups first,

doesn’t one? You have some dodge of your own, haven’t you, William,

about making tea?”

Mary was half inclined to suspect that this was said in order to

conceal nervousness, but if so, the concealment was unusually perfect.

Talk of marriage was dismissed. Katharine might have been seated in her

own drawing-room, controlling a situation which presented no sort of

difficulty to her trained mind. Rather to her surprise, Mary found

herself making conversation with William about old Italian pictures,

while Katharine poured out tea, cut cake, kept William’s plate

supplied, without joining more than was necessary in the conversation.

She seemed to have taken possession of Mary’s room, and to handle the

cups as if they belonged to her. But it was done so naturally that it

bred no resentment in Mary; on the contrary, she found herself putting

her hand on Katharine’s knee, affectionately, for an instant. Was there

something maternal in this assumption of control? And thinking of

Katharine as one who would soon be married, these maternal airs filled

Mary’s mind with a new tenderness, and even with awe. Katharine seemed

very much older and more experienced than she was.

Meanwhile Rodney talked. If his appearance was superficially against

him, it had the advantage of making his solid merits something of a

surprise. He had kept notebooks; he knew a great deal about pictures.

He could compare different examples in different galleries, and his

authoritative answers to intelligent questions gained not a little,

Mary felt, from the smart taps which he dealt, as he delivered them,

upon the lumps of coal. She was impressed.

“Your tea, William,” said Katharine gently.

He paused, gulped it down, obediently, and continued.

And then it struck Mary that Katharine, in the shade of her

broad-brimmed hat, and in the midst of the smoke, and in the obscurity

of her character, was, perhaps, smiling to herself, not altogether in

the maternal spirit. What she said was very simple, but her words, even

“Your tea, William,” were set down as gently and cautiously and exactly

as the feet of a Persian cat stepping among China ornaments. For the

second time that day Mary felt herself baffled by something inscrutable

in the character of a person to whom she felt herself much attracted.

She thought that if she were engaged to Katharine, she, too, would find

herself very soon using those fretful questions with which William

evidently teased his bride. And yet Katharine’s voice was humble.

“I wonder how you find the time to know all about pictures as well as

books?” she asked.

“How do I find the time?” William answered, delighted, Mary guessed, at

this little compliment. “Why, I always travel with a notebook. And I

ask my way to the picture gallery the very first thing in the morning.

And then I meet men, and talk to them. There’s a man in my office who

knows all about the Flemish school. I was telling Miss Datchet about

the Flemish school. I picked up a lot of it from him—it’s a way men

have—Gibbons, his name is. You must meet him. We’ll ask him to lunch.

And this not caring about art,” he explained, turning to Mary, “it’s

one of Katharine’s poses, Miss Datchet. Did you know she posed? She

pretends that she’s never read Shakespeare. And why should she read

Shakespeare, since she IS Shakespeare—Rosalind, you know,” and he gave

his queer little chuckle. Somehow this compliment appeared very

old-fashioned and almost in bad taste. Mary actually felt herself

blush, as if he had said “the sex” or “the ladies.” Constrained,

perhaps, by nervousness, Rodney continued in the same vein.

“She knows enough—enough for all decent purposes. What do you women

want with learning, when you have so much else—everything, I should

say—everything. Leave us something, eh, Katharine?”

“Leave you something?” said Katharine, apparently waking from a brown

study. “I was thinking we must be going—”

“Is it to-night that Lady Ferrilby dines with us? No, we mustn’t be

late,” said Rodney, rising. “D’you know the Ferrilbys, Miss Datchet?

They own Trantem Abbey,” he added, for her information, as she looked

doubtful. “And if Katharine makes herself very charming to-night,

perhaps’ll lend it to us for the honeymoon.”

“I agree that may be a reason. Otherwise she’s a dull woman,” said

Katharine. “At least,” she added, as if to qualify her abruptness, “I

find it difficult to talk to her.”

“Because you expect every one else to take all the trouble. I’ve seen

her sit silent a whole evening,” he said, turning to Mary, as he had

frequently done already. “Don’t you find that, too? Sometimes when

we’re alone, I’ve counted the time on my watch”—here he took out a

large gold watch, and tapped the glass—“the time between one remark and

the next. And once I counted ten minutes and twenty seconds, and then,

if you’ll believe me, she only said ‘Um!’”

“I’m sure I’m sorry,” Katharine apologized. “I know it’s a bad habit,

but then, you see, at home—”

The rest of her excuse was cut short, so far as Mary was concerned, by

the closing of the door. She fancied she could hear William finding

fresh fault on the stairs. A moment later, the door-bell rang again,

and Katharine reappeared, having left her purse on a chair. She soon

found it, and said, pausing for a moment at the door, and speaking

differently as they were alone:

“I think being engaged is very bad for the character.” She shook her

purse in her hand until the coins jingled, as if she alluded merely to

this example of her forgetfulness. But the remark puzzled Mary; it

seemed to refer to something else; and her manner had changed so

strangely, now that William was out of hearing, that she could not help

looking at her for an explanation. She looked almost stern, so that

Mary, trying to smile at her, only succeeded in producing a silent

stare of interrogation.

As the door shut for the second time, she sank on to the floor in front

of the fire, trying, now that their bodies were not there to distract

her, to piece together her impressions of them as a whole. And, though

priding herself, with all other men and women, upon an infallible eye

for character, she could not feel at all certain that she knew what

motives inspired Katharine Hilbery in life. There was something that

carried her on smoothly, out of reach—something, yes, but

what?—something that reminded Mary of Ralph. Oddly enough, he gave her

the same feeling, too, and with him, too, she felt baffled. Oddly

enough, for no two people, she hastily concluded, were more unlike. And

yet both had this hidden impulse, this incalculable force—this thing

they cared for and didn’t talk about—oh, what was it?

CHAPTER XV

The village of Disham lies somewhere on the rolling piece of cultivated

ground in the neighborhood of Lincoln, not so far inland but that a

sound, bringing rumors of the sea, can be heard on summer nights or

when the winter storms fling the waves upon the long beach. So large is

the church, and in particular the church tower, in comparison with the

little street of cottages which compose the village, that the traveler

is apt to cast his mind back to the Middle Ages, as the only time when

so much piety could have been kept alive. So great a trust in the

Church can surely not belong to our day, and he goes on to conjecture

that every one of the villagers has reached the extreme limit of human

life. Such are the reflections of the superficial stranger, and his

sight of the population, as it is represented by two or three men

hoeing in a turnip-field, a small child carrying a jug, and a young

woman shaking a piece of carpet outside her cottage door, will not lead

him to see anything very much out of keeping with the Middle Ages in

the village of Disham as it is to-day. These people, though they seem

young enough, look so angular and so crude that they remind him of the

little pictures painted by monks in the capital letters of their

manuscripts. He only half understands what they say, and speaks very

loud and clearly, as though, indeed, his voice had to carry through a

hundred years or more before it reached them. He would have a far

better chance of understanding some dweller in Paris or Rome, Berlin or

Madrid, than these countrymen of his who have lived for the last two

thousand years not two hundred miles from the City of London.

The Rectory stands about half a mile beyond the village. It is a large

house, and has been growing steadily for some centuries round the great

kitchen, with its narrow red tiles, as the Rector would point out to

his guests on the first night of their arrival, taking his brass

candlestick, and bidding them mind the steps up and the steps down, and

notice the immense thickness of the walls, the old beams across the

ceiling, the staircases as steep as ladders, and the attics, with their

deep, tent-like roofs, in which swallows bred, and once a white owl.

But nothing very interesting or very beautiful had resulted from the

different additions made by the different rectors.

The house, however, was surrounded by a garden, in which the Rector

took considerable pride. The lawn, which fronted the drawing-room

windows, was a rich and uniform green, unspotted by a single daisy, and

on the other side of it two straight paths led past beds of tall,

standing flowers to a charming grassy walk, where the Rev. Wyndham

Datchet would pace up and down at the same hour every morning, with a

sundial to measure the time for him. As often as not, he carried a book

in his hand, into which he would glance, then shut it up, and repeat

the rest of the ode from memory. He had most of Horace by heart, and

had got into the habit of connecting this particular walk with certain

odes which he repeated duly, at the same time noting the condition of

his flowers, and stooping now and again to pick any that were withered

or overblown. On wet days, such was the power of habit over him, he

rose from his chair at the same hour, and paced his study for the same

length of time, pausing now and then to straighten some book in the

bookcase, or alter the position of the two brass crucifixes standing

upon cairns of serpentine stone upon the mantelpiece. His children had

a great respect for him, credited him with far more learning than he

actually possessed, and saw that his habits were not interfered with,

if possible. Like most people who do things methodically, the Rector

himself had more strength of purpose and power of self-sacrifice than

of intellect or of originality. On cold and windy nights he rode off to

visit sick people, who might need him, without a murmur; and by virtue

of doing dull duties punctually, he was much employed upon committees

and local Boards and Councils; and at this period of his life (he was

sixty-eight) he was beginning to be commiserated by tender old ladies

for the extreme leanness of his person, which, they said, was worn out

upon the roads when it should have been resting before a comfortable

fire. His elder daughter, Elizabeth, lived with him and managed the

house, and already much resembled him in dry sincerity and methodical

habit of mind; of the two sons one, Richard, was an estate agent, the

other, Christopher, was reading for the Bar. At Christmas, naturally,

they met together; and for a month past the arrangement of the

Christmas week had been much in the mind of mistress and maid, who

prided themselves every year more confidently upon the excellence of

their equipment. The late Mrs. Datchet had left an excellent cupboard

of linen, to which Elizabeth had succeeded at the age of nineteen, when

her mother died, and the charge of the family rested upon the shoulders

of the eldest daughter. She kept a fine flock of yellow chickens,

sketched a little, certain rose-trees in the garden were committed

specially to her care; and what with the care of the house, the care of

the chickens, and the care of the poor, she scarcely knew what it was

to have an idle minute. An extreme rectitude of mind, rather than any

gift, gave her weight in the family. When Mary wrote to say that she

had asked Ralph Denham to stay with them, she added, out of deference

to Elizabeth’s character, that he was very nice, though rather queer,

and had been overworking himself in London. No doubt Elizabeth would

conclude that Ralph was in love with her, but there could be no doubt

either that not a word of this would be spoken by either of them,

unless, indeed, some catastrophe made mention of it unavoidable.

Mary went down to Disham without knowing whether Ralph intended to

come; but two or three days before Christmas she received a telegram

from Ralph, asking her to take a room for him in the village. This was

followed by a letter explaining that he hoped he might have his meals

with them; but quiet, essential for his work, made it necessary to

sleep out.

Mary was walking in the garden with Elizabeth, and inspecting the

roses, when the letter arrived.

“But that’s absurd,” said Elizabeth decidedly, when the plan was

explained to her. “There are five spare rooms, even when the boys are

here. Besides, he wouldn’t get a room in the village. And he oughtn’t

to work if he’s overworked.”

“But perhaps he doesn’t want to see so much of us,” Mary thought to

herself, although outwardly she assented, and felt grateful to

Elizabeth for supporting her in what was, of course, her desire. They

were cutting roses at the time, and laying them, head by head, in a

shallow basket.

“If Ralph were here, he’d find this very dull,” Mary thought, with a

little shiver of irritation, which led her to place her rose the wrong

way in the basket. Meanwhile, they had come to the end of the path, and

while Elizabeth straightened some flowers, and made them stand upright

within their fence of string, Mary looked at her father, who was pacing

up and down, with his hand behind his back and his head bowed in

meditation. Obeying an impulse which sprang from some desire to

interrupt this methodical marching, Mary stepped on to the grass walk

and put her hand on his arm.

“A flower for your buttonhole, father,” she said, presenting a rose.

“Eh, dear?” said Mr. Datchet, taking the flower, and holding it at an

angle which suited his bad eyesight, without pausing in his walk.

“Where does this fellow come from? One of Elizabeth’s roses—I hope you

asked her leave. Elizabeth doesn’t like having her roses picked without

her leave, and quite right, too.”

He had a habit, Mary remarked, and she had never noticed it so clearly

before, of letting his sentences tail away in a continuous murmur,

whereupon he passed into a state of abstraction, presumed by his

children to indicate some train of thought too profound for utterance.

“What?” said Mary, interrupting, for the first time in her life,

perhaps, when the murmur ceased. He made no reply. She knew very well

that he wished to be left alone, but she stuck to his side much as she

might have stuck to some sleep-walker, whom she thought it right

gradually to awaken. She could think of nothing to rouse him with

except:

“The garden’s looking very nice, father.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mr. Datchet, running his words together in the

same abstracted manner, and sinking his head yet lower upon his breast.

And suddenly, as they turned their steps to retrace their way, he

jerked out:

“The traffic’s very much increased, you know. More rolling-stock needed

already. Forty trucks went down yesterday by the 12.15—counted them

myself. They’ve taken off the 9.3, and given us an 8.30 instead—suits

the business men, you know. You came by the old 3.10 yesterday, I

suppose?”

She said “Yes,” as he seemed to wish for a reply, and then he looked at

his watch, and made off down the path towards the house, holding the

rose at the same angle in front of him. Elizabeth had gone round to the

side of the house, where the chickens lived, so that Mary found herself

alone, holding Ralph’s letter in her hand. She was uneasy. She had put

off the season for thinking things out very successfully, and now that

Ralph was actually coming, the next day, she could only wonder how her

family would impress him. She thought it likely that her father would

discuss the train service with him; Elizabeth would be bright and

sensible, and always leaving the room to give messages to the servants.

Her brothers had already said that they would give him a day’s

shooting. She was content to leave the problem of Ralph’s relations to

the young men obscure, trusting that they would find some common ground

of masculine agreement. But what would he think of _her?_ Would he see

that she was different from the rest of the family? She devised a plan

for taking him to her sitting-room, and artfully leading the talk

towards the English poets, who now occupied prominent places in her

little bookcase. Moreover, she might give him to understand, privately,

that she, too, thought her family a queer one—queer, yes, but not dull.

That was the rock past which she was bent on steering him. And she

thought how she would draw his attention to Edward’s passion for

Jorrocks, and the enthusiasm which led Christopher to collect moths and

butterflies though he was now twenty-two. Perhaps Elizabeth’s

sketching, if the fruits were invisible, might lend color to the

general effect which she wished to produce of a family, eccentric and

limited, perhaps, but not dull. Edward, she perceived, was rolling the

lawn, for the sake of exercise; and the sight of him, with pink cheeks,

bright little brown eyes, and a general resemblance to a clumsy young

cart-horse in its winter coat of dusty brown hair, made Mary violently

ashamed of her ambitious scheming. She loved him precisely as he was;

she loved them all; and as she walked by his side, up and down, and

down and up, her strong moral sense administered a sound drubbing to

the vain and romantic element aroused in her by the mere thought of

Ralph. She felt quite certain that, for good or for bad, she was very

like the rest of her family.

Sitting in the corner of a third-class railway carriage, on the

afternoon of the following day, Ralph made several inquiries of a

commercial traveler in the opposite corner. They centered round a

village called Lampsher, not three miles, he understood, from Lincoln;

was there a big house in Lampsher, he asked, inhabited by a gentleman

of the name of Otway?

The traveler knew nothing, but rolled the name of Otway on his tongue,

reflectively, and the sound of it gratified Ralph amazingly. It gave

him an excuse to take a letter from his pocket in order to verify the

address.

“Stogdon House, Lampsher, Lincoln,” he read out.

“You’ll find somebody to direct you at Lincoln,” said the man; and

Ralph had to confess that he was not bound there this very evening.

“I’ve got to walk over from Disham,” he said, and in the heart of him

could not help marveling at the pleasure which he derived from making a

bagman in a train believe what he himself did not believe. For the

letter, though signed by Katharine’s father, contained no invitation or

warrant for thinking that Katharine herself was there; the only fact it

disclosed was that for a fortnight this address would be Mr. Hilbery’s

address. But when he looked out of the window, it was of her he

thought; she, too, had seen these gray fields, and, perhaps, she was

there where the trees ran up a slope, and one yellow light shone now,

and then went out again, at the foot of the hill. The light shone in

the windows of an old gray house, he thought. He lay back in his corner

and forgot the commercial traveler altogether. The process of

visualizing Katharine stopped short at the old gray manor-house;

instinct warned him that if he went much further with this process

reality would soon force itself in; he could not altogether neglect the

figure of William Rodney. Since the day when he had heard from

Katharine’s lips of her engagement, he had refrained from investing his

dream of her with the details of real life. But the light of the late

afternoon glowed green behind the straight trees, and became a symbol

of her. The light seemed to expand his heart. She brooded over the gray

fields, and was with him now in the railway carriage, thoughtful,

silent, and infinitely tender; but the vision pressed too close, and

must be dismissed, for the train was slackening. Its abrupt jerks shook

him wide awake, and he saw Mary Datchet, a sturdy russet figure, with a

dash of scarlet about it, as the carriage slid down the platform. A

tall youth who accompanied her shook him by the hand, took his bag, and

led the way without uttering one articulate word.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk

almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a

note of intimacy seldom heard by day. Such an edge was there in Mary’s

voice when she greeted him. About her seemed to hang the mist of the

winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves. He felt himself

at once stepping on to the firm ground of an entirely different world,

but he did not allow himself to yield to the pleasure of it directly.

They gave him his choice of driving with Edward or of walking home

across the fields with Mary—not a shorter way, they explained, but Mary

thought it a nicer way. He decided to walk with her, being conscious,

indeed, that he got comfort from her presence. What could be the cause

of her cheerfulness, he wondered, half ironically, and half enviously,

as the pony-cart started briskly away, and the dusk swam between their

eyes and the tall form of Edward, standing up to drive, with the reins

in one hand and the whip in the other. People from the village, who had

been to the market town, were climbing into their gigs, or setting off

home down the road together in little parties. Many salutations were

addressed to Mary, who shouted back, with the addition of the speaker’s

name. But soon she led the way over a stile, and along a path worn

slightly darker than the dim green surrounding it. In front of them the

sky now showed itself of a reddish-yellow, like a slice of some

semilucent stone behind which a lamp burnt, while a fringe of black

trees with distinct branches stood against the light, which was

obscured in one direction by a hump of earth, in all other directions

the land lying flat to the very verge of the sky. One of the swift and

noiseless birds of the winter’s night seemed to follow them across the

field, circling a few feet in front of them, disappearing and returning

again and again.

Mary had gone this walk many hundred times in the course of her life,

generally alone, and at different stages the ghosts of past moods would

flood her mind with a whole scene or train of thought merely at the

sight of three trees from a particular angle, or at the sound of the

pheasant clucking in the ditch. But to-night the circumstances were

strong enough to oust all other scenes; and she looked at the field and

the trees with an involuntary intensity as if they had no such

associations for her.

“Well, Ralph,” she said, “this is better than Lincoln’s Inn Fields,

isn’t it? Look, there’s a bird for you! Oh, you’ve brought glasses,

have you? Edward and Christopher mean to make you shoot. Can you shoot?

I shouldn’t think so—”

“Look here, you must explain,” said Ralph. “Who are these young men?

Where am I staying?”

“You are staying with us, of course,” she said boldly. “Of course,

you’re staying with us—you don’t mind coming, do you?”

“If I had, I shouldn’t have come,” he said sturdily. They walked on in

silence; Mary took care not to break it for a time. She wished Ralph to

feel, as she thought he would, all the fresh delights of the earth and

air. She was right. In a moment he expressed his pleasure, much to her

comfort.

“This is the sort of country I thought you’d live in, Mary,” he said,

pushing his hat back on his head, and looking about him. “Real country.

No gentlemen’s seats.”

He snuffed the air, and felt more keenly than he had done for many

weeks the pleasure of owning a body.

“Now we have to find our way through a hedge,” said Mary. In the gap of

the hedge Ralph tore up a poacher’s wire, set across a hole to trap a

rabbit.

“It’s quite right that they should poach,” said Mary, watching him

tugging at the wire. “I wonder whether it was Alfred Duggins or Sid

Rankin? How can one expect them not to, when they only make fifteen

shillings a week? Fifteen shillings a week,” she repeated, coming out

on the other side of the hedge, and running her fingers through her

hair to rid herself of a bramble which had attached itself to her. “I

could live on fifteen shillings a week—easily.”

“Could you?” said Ralph. “I don’t believe you could,” he added.

“Oh yes. They have a cottage thrown in, and a garden where one can grow

vegetables. It wouldn’t be half bad,” said Mary, with a soberness which

impressed Ralph very much.

“But you’d get tired of it,” he urged.

“I sometimes think it’s the only thing one would never get tired of,”

she replied.

The idea of a cottage where one grew one’s own vegetables and lived on

fifteen shillings a week, filled Ralph with an extraordinary sense of

rest and satisfaction.

“But wouldn’t it be on the main road, or next door to a woman with six

squalling children, who’d always be hanging her washing out to dry

across your garden?”

“The cottage I’m thinking of stands by itself in a little orchard.”

“And what about the Suffrage?” he asked, attempting sarcasm.

“Oh, there are other things in the world besides the Suffrage,” she

replied, in an off-hand manner which was slightly mysterious.

Ralph fell silent. It annoyed him that she should have plans of which

he knew nothing; but he felt that he had no right to press her further.

His mind settled upon the idea of life in a country cottage.

Conceivably, for he could not examine into it now, here lay a

tremendous possibility; a solution of many problems. He struck his

stick upon the earth, and stared through the dusk at the shape of the

country.

“D’you know the points of the compass?” he asked.

“Well, of course,” said Mary. “What d’you take me for?—a Cockney like

you?” She then told him exactly where the north lay, and where the

south.

“It’s my native land, this,” she said. “I could smell my way about it

blindfold.”

As if to prove this boast, she walked a little quicker, so that Ralph

found it difficult to keep pace with her. At the same time, he felt

drawn to her as he had never been before; partly, no doubt, because she

was more independent of him than in London, and seemed to be attached

firmly to a world where he had no place at all. Now the dusk had fallen

to such an extent that he had to follow her implicitly, and even lean

his hand on her shoulder when they jumped a bank into a very narrow

lane. And he felt curiously shy of her when she began to shout through

her hands at a spot of light which swung upon the mist in a neighboring

field. He shouted, too, and the light stood still.

“That’s Christopher, come in already, and gone to feed his chickens,”

she said.

She introduced him to Ralph, who could see only a tall figure in

gaiters, rising from a fluttering circle of soft feathery bodies, upon

whom the light fell in wavering discs, calling out now a bright spot of

yellow, now one of greenish-black and scarlet. Mary dipped her hand in

the bucket he carried, and was at once the center of a circle also; and

as she cast her grain she talked alternately to the birds and to her

brother, in the same clucking, half-inarticulate voice, as it sounded

to Ralph, standing on the outskirts of the fluttering feathers in his

black overcoat.

He had removed his overcoat by the time they sat round the

dinner-table, but nevertheless he looked very strange among the others.

A country life and breeding had preserved in them all a look which Mary

hesitated to call either innocent or youthful, as she compared them,

now sitting round in an oval, softly illuminated by candlelight; and

yet it was something of the kind, yes, even in the case of the Rector

himself. Though superficially marked with lines, his face was a clear

pink, and his blue eyes had the long-sighted, peaceful expression of

eyes seeking the turn of the road, or a distant light through rain, or

the darkness of winter. She looked at Ralph. He had never appeared to

her more concentrated and full of purpose; as if behind his forehead

were massed so much experience that he could choose for himself which

part of it he would display and which part he would keep to himself.

Compared with that dark and stern countenance, her brothers’ faces,

bending low over their soup-plates, were mere circles of pink, unmolded

flesh.

“You came by the 3.10, Mr. Denham?” said the Reverend Wyndham Datchet,

tucking his napkin into his collar, so that almost the whole of his

body was concealed by a large white diamond. “They treat us very well,

on the whole. Considering the increase of traffic, they treat us very

well indeed. I have the curiosity sometimes to count the trucks on the

goods’ trains, and they’re well over fifty—well over fifty, at this

season of the year.”

The old gentleman had been roused agreeably by the presence of this

attentive and well-informed young man, as was evident by the care with

which he finished the last words in his sentences, and his slight

exaggeration in the number of trucks on the trains. Indeed, the chief

burden of the talk fell upon him, and he sustained it to-night in a

manner which caused his sons to look at him admiringly now and then;

for they felt shy of Denham, and were glad not to have to talk

themselves. The store of information about the present and past of this

particular corner of Lincolnshire which old Mr. Datchet produced really

surprised his children, for though they knew of its existence, they had

forgotten its extent, as they might have forgotten the amount of family

plate stored in the plate-chest, until some rare celebration brought it

forth.

After dinner, parish business took the Rector to his study, and Mary

proposed that they should sit in the kitchen.

“It’s not the kitchen really,” Elizabeth hastened to explain to her

guest, “but we call it so—”

“It’s the nicest room in the house,” said Edward.

“It’s got the old rests by the side of the fireplace, where the men

hung their guns,” said Elizabeth, leading the way, with a tall brass

candlestick in her hand, down a passage. “Show Mr. Denham the steps,

Christopher.... When the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were here two

years ago they said this was the most interesting part of the house.

These narrow bricks prove that it is five hundred years old—five

hundred years, I think—they may have said six.” She, too, felt an

impulse to exaggerate the age of the bricks, as her father had

exaggerated the number of trucks. A big lamp hung down from the center

of the ceiling and, together with a fine log fire, illuminated a large

and lofty room, with rafters running from wall to wall, a floor of red

tiles, and a substantial fireplace built up of those narrow red bricks

which were said to be five hundred years old. A few rugs and a

sprinkling of arm-chairs had made this ancient kitchen into a

sitting-room. Elizabeth, after pointing out the gun-racks, and the

hooks for smoking hams, and other evidence of incontestable age, and

explaining that Mary had had the idea of turning the room into a

sitting-room—otherwise it was used for hanging out the wash and for the

men to change in after shooting—considered that she had done her duty

as hostess, and sat down in an upright chair directly beneath the lamp,

beside a very long and narrow oak table. She placed a pair of horn

spectacles upon her nose, and drew towards her a basketful of threads

and wools. In a few minutes a smile came to her face, and remained

there for the rest of the evening.

“Will you come out shooting with us to-morrow?” said Christopher, who

had, on the whole, formed a favorable impression of his sister’s

friend.

“I won’t shoot, but I’ll come with you,” said Ralph.

“Don’t you care about shooting?” asked Edward, whose suspicions were

not yet laid to rest.

“I’ve never shot in my life,” said Ralph, turning and looking him in

the face, because he was not sure how this confession would be

received.

“You wouldn’t have much chance in London, I suppose,” said Christopher.

“But won’t you find it rather dull—just watching us?”

“I shall watch birds,” Ralph replied, with a smile.

“I can show you the place for watching birds,” said Edward, “if that’s

what you like doing. I know a fellow who comes down from London about

this time every year to watch them. It’s a great place for the wild

geese and the ducks. I’ve heard this man say that it’s one of the best

places for birds in the country.”

“It’s about the best place in England,” Ralph replied. They were all

gratified by this praise of their native county; and Mary now had the

pleasure of hearing these short questions and answers lose their

undertone of suspicious inspection, so far as her brothers were

concerned, and develop into a genuine conversation about the habits of

birds which afterwards turned to a discussion as to the habits of

solicitors, in which it was scarcely necessary for her to take part.

She was pleased to see that her brothers liked Ralph, to the extent,

that is, of wishing to secure his good opinion. Whether or not he liked

them it was impossible to tell from his kind but experienced manner.

Now and then she fed the fire with a fresh log, and as the room filled

with the fine, dry heat of burning wood, they all, with the exception

of Elizabeth, who was outside the range of the fire, felt less and less

anxious about the effect they were making, and more and more inclined

for sleep. At this moment a vehement scratching was heard on the door.

“Piper!—oh, damn!—I shall have to get up,” murmured Christopher.

“It’s not Piper, it’s Pitch,” Edward grunted.

“All the same, I shall have to get up,” Christopher grumbled. He let in

the dog, and stood for a moment by the door, which opened into the

garden, to revive himself with a draught of the black, starlit air.

“Do come in and shut the door!” Mary cried, half turning in her chair.

“We shall have a fine day to-morrow,” said Christopher with

complacency, and he sat himself on the floor at her feet, and leant his

back against her knees, and stretched out his long stockinged legs to

the fire—all signs that he felt no longer any restraint at the presence

of the stranger. He was the youngest of the family, and Mary’s

favorite, partly because his character resembled hers, as Edward’s

character resembled Elizabeth’s. She made her knees a comfortable rest

for his head, and ran her fingers through his hair.

“I should like Mary to stroke my head like that,” Ralph thought to

himself suddenly, and he looked at Christopher, almost affectionately,

for calling forth his sister’s caresses. Instantly he thought of

Katharine, the thought of her being surrounded by the spaces of night

and the open air; and Mary, watching him, saw the lines upon his

forehead suddenly deepen. He stretched out an arm and placed a log upon

the fire, constraining himself to fit it carefully into the frail red

scaffolding, and also to limit his thoughts to this one room.

Mary had ceased to stroke her brother’s head; he moved it impatiently

between her knees, and, much as though he were a child, she began once

more to part the thick, reddish-colored locks this way and that. But a

far stronger passion had taken possession of her soul than any her

brother could inspire in her, and, seeing Ralph’s change of expression,

her hand almost automatically continued its movements, while her mind

plunged desperately for some hold upon slippery banks.

CHAPTER XVI

Into that same black night, almost, indeed, into the very same layer of

starlit air, Katharine Hilbery was now gazing, although not with a view

to the prospects of a fine day for duck shooting on the morrow. She was

walking up and down a gravel path in the garden of Stogdon House, her

sight of the heavens being partially intercepted by the light leafless

hoops of a pergola. Thus a spray of clematis would completely obscure

Cassiopeia, or blot out with its black pattern myriads of miles of the

Milky Way. At the end of the pergola, however, there was a stone seat,

from which the sky could be seen completely swept clear of any earthly

interruption, save to the right, indeed, where a line of elm-trees was

beautifully sprinkled with stars, and a low stable building had a full

drop of quivering silver just issuing from the mouth of the chimney. It

was a moonless night, but the light of the stars was sufficient to show

the outline of the young woman’s form, and the shape of her face gazing

gravely, indeed almost sternly, into the sky. She had come out into the

winter’s night, which was mild enough, not so much to look with

scientific eyes upon the stars, as to shake herself free from certain

purely terrestrial discontents. Much as a literary person in like

circumstances would begin, absent-mindedly, pulling out volume after

volume, so she stepped into the garden in order to have the stars at

hand, even though she did not look at them. Not to be happy, when she

was supposed to be happier than she would ever be again—that, as far as

she could see, was the origin of a discontent which had begun almost as

soon as she arrived, two days before, and seemed now so intolerable

that she had left the family party, and come out here to consider it by

herself. It was not she who thought herself unhappy, but her cousins,

who thought it for her. The house was full of cousins, much of her age,

or even younger, and among them they had some terribly bright eyes.

They seemed always on the search for something between her and Rodney,

which they expected to find, and yet did not find; and when they

searched, Katharine became aware of wanting what she had not been

conscious of wanting in London, alone with William and her parents. Or,

if she did not want it, she missed it. And this state of mind depressed

her, because she had been accustomed always to give complete

satisfaction, and her self-love was now a little ruffled. She would

have liked to break through the reserve habitual to her in order to

justify her engagement to some one whose opinion she valued. No one had

spoken a word of criticism, but they left her alone with William; not

that that would have mattered, if they had not left her alone so

politely; and, perhaps, that would not have mattered if they had not

seemed so queerly silent, almost respectful, in her presence, which

gave way to criticism, she felt, out of it.

Looking now and then at the sky, she went through the list of her

cousins’ names: Eleanor, Humphrey, Marmaduke, Silvia, Henry, Cassandra,

Gilbert, and Mostyn—Henry, the cousin who taught the young ladies of

Bungay to play upon the violin, was the only one in whom she could

confide, and as she walked up and down beneath the hoops of the

pergola, she did begin a little speech to him, which ran something like

this:

“To begin with, I’m very fond of William. You can’t deny that. I know

him better than any one, almost. But why I’m marrying him is, partly, I

admit—I’m being quite honest with you, and you mustn’t tell any

one—partly because I want to get married. I want to have a house of my

own. It isn’t possible at home. It’s all very well for you, Henry; you

can go your own way. I have to be there always. Besides, you know what

our house is. You wouldn’t be happy either, if you didn’t do something.

It isn’t that I haven’t the time at home—it’s the atmosphere.” Here,

presumably, she imagined that her cousin, who had listened with his

usual intelligent sympathy, raised his eyebrows a little, and

interposed:

“Well, but what do you want to do?”

Even in this purely imaginary dialogue, Katharine found it difficult to

confide her ambition to an imaginary companion.

“I should like,” she began, and hesitated quite a long time before she

forced herself to add, with a change of voice, “to study mathematics—to

know about the stars.”

Henry was clearly amazed, but too kind to express all his doubts; he

only said something about the difficulties of mathematics, and remarked

that very little was known about the stars.

Katharine thereupon went on with the statement of her case.

“I don’t care much whether I ever get to know anything—but I want to

work out something in figures—something that hasn’t got to do with

human beings. I don’t want people particularly. In some ways, Henry,

I’m a humbug—I mean, I’m not what you all take me for. I’m not

domestic, or very practical or sensible, really. And if I could

calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures,

and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy,

and I believe I should give William all he wants.”

Having reached this point, instinct told her that she had passed beyond

the region in which Henry’s advice could be of any good; and, having

rid her mind of its superficial annoyance, she sat herself upon the

stone seat, raised her eyes unconsciously and thought about the deeper

questions which she had to decide, she knew, for herself. Would she,

indeed, give William all he wanted? In order to decide the question,

she ran her mind rapidly over her little collection of significant

sayings, looks, compliments, gestures, which had marked their

intercourse during the last day or two. He had been annoyed because a

box, containing some clothes specially chosen by him for her to wear,

had been taken to the wrong station, owing to her neglect in the matter

of labels. The box had arrived in the nick of time, and he had

remarked, as she came downstairs on the first night, that he had never

seen her look more beautiful. She outshone all her cousins. He had

discovered that she never made an ugly movement; he also said that the

shape of her head made it possible for her, unlike most women, to wear

her hair low. He had twice reproved her for being silent at dinner; and

once for never attending to what he said. He had been surprised at the

excellence of her French accent, but he thought it was selfish of her

not to go with her mother to call upon the Middletons, because they

were old family friends and very nice people. On the whole, the balance

was nearly even; and, writing down a kind of conclusion in her mind

which finished the sum for the present, at least, she changed the focus

of her eyes, and saw nothing but the stars.

To-night they seemed fixed with unusual firmness in the blue, and

flashed back such a ripple of light into her eyes that she found

herself thinking that to-night the stars were happy. Without knowing or

caring more for Church practices than most people of her age, Katharine

could not look into the sky at Christmas time without feeling that, at

this one season, the Heavens bend over the earth with sympathy, and

signal with immortal radiance that they, too, take part in her

festival. Somehow, it seemed to her that they were even now beholding

the procession of kings and wise men upon some road on a distant part

of the earth. And yet, after gazing for another second, the stars did

their usual work upon the mind, froze to cinders the whole of our short

human history, and reduced the human body to an ape-like, furry form,

crouching amid the brushwood of a barbarous clod of mud. This stage was

soon succeeded by another, in which there was nothing in the universe

save stars and the light of stars; as she looked up the pupils of her

eyes so dilated with starlight that the whole of her seemed dissolved

in silver and spilt over the ledges of the stars for ever and ever

indefinitely through space. Somehow simultaneously, though

incongruously, she was riding with the magnanimous hero upon the shore

or under forest trees, and so might have continued were it not for the

rebuke forcibly administered by the body, which, content with the

normal conditions of life, in no way furthers any attempt on the part

of the mind to alter them. She grew cold, shook herself, rose, and

walked towards the house.

By the light of the stars, Stogdon House looked pale and romantic, and

about twice its natural size. Built by a retired admiral in the early

years of the nineteenth century, the curving bow windows of the front,

now filled with reddish-yellow light, suggested a portly three-decker,

sailing seas where those dolphins and narwhals who disport themselves

upon the edges of old maps were scattered with an impartial hand. A

semicircular flight of shallow steps led to a very large door, which

Katharine had left ajar. She hesitated, cast her eyes over the front of

the house, marked that a light burnt in one small window upon an upper

floor, and pushed the door open. For a moment she stood in the square

hall, among many horned skulls, sallow globes, cracked oil-paintings,

and stuffed owls, hesitating, it seemed, whether she should open the

door on her right, through which the stir of life reached her ears.

Listening for a moment, she heard a sound which decided her,

apparently, not to enter; her uncle, Sir Francis, was playing his

nightly game of whist; it appeared probable that he was losing.

She went up the curving stairway, which represented the one attempt at

ceremony in the otherwise rather dilapidated mansion, and down a narrow

passage until she came to the room whose light she had seen from the

garden. Knocking, she was told to come in. A young man, Henry Otway,

was reading, with his feet on the fender. He had a fine head, the brow

arched in the Elizabethan manner, but the gentle, honest eyes were

rather skeptical than glowing with the Elizabethan vigor. He gave the

impression that he had not yet found the cause which suited his

temperament.

He turned, put down his book, and looked at her. He noticed her rather

pale, dew-drenched look, as of one whose mind is not altogether settled

in the body. He had often laid his difficulties before her, and

guessed, in some ways hoped, that perhaps she now had need of him. At

the same time, she carried on her life with such independence that he

scarcely expected any confidence to be expressed in words.

“You have fled, too, then?” he said, looking at her cloak. Katharine

had forgotten to remove this token of her star-gazing.

“Fled?” she asked. “From whom d’you mean? Oh, the family party. Yes, it

was hot down there, so I went into the garden.”

“And aren’t you very cold?” Henry inquired, placing coal on the fire,

drawing a chair up to the grate, and laying aside her cloak. Her

indifference to such details often forced Henry to act the part

generally taken by women in such dealings. It was one of the ties

between them.

“Thank you, Henry,” she said. “I’m not disturbing you?”

“I’m not here. I’m at Bungay,” he replied. “I’m giving a music lesson

to Harold and Julia. That was why I had to leave the table with the

ladies—I’m spending the night there, and I shan’t be back till late on

Christmas Eve.”

“How I wish—” Katharine began, and stopped short. “I think these

parties are a great mistake,” she added briefly, and sighed.

“Oh, horrible!” he agreed; and they both fell silent.

Her sigh made him look at her. Should he venture to ask her why she

sighed? Was her reticence about her own affairs as inviolable as it had

often been convenient for rather an egoistical young man to think it?

But since her engagement to Rodney, Henry’s feeling towards her had

become rather complex; equally divided between an impulse to hurt her

and an impulse to be tender to her; and all the time he suffered a

curious irritation from the sense that she was drifting away from him

for ever upon unknown seas. On her side, directly Katharine got into

his presence, and the sense of the stars dropped from her, she knew

that any intercourse between people is extremely partial; from the

whole mass of her feelings, only one or two could be selected for

Henry’s inspection, and therefore she sighed. Then she looked at him,

and their eyes meeting, much more seemed to be in common between them

than had appeared possible. At any rate they had a grandfather in

common; at any rate there was a kind of loyalty between them sometimes

found between relations who have no other cause to like each other, as

these two had.

“Well, what’s the date of the wedding?” said Henry, the malicious mood

now predominating.

“I think some time in March,” she replied.

“And afterwards?” he asked.

“We take a house, I suppose, somewhere in Chelsea.”

“It’s very interesting,” he observed, stealing another look at her.

She lay back in her arm-chair, her feet high upon the side of the

grate, and in front of her, presumably to screen her eyes, she held a

newspaper from which she picked up a sentence or two now and again.

Observing this, Henry remarked:

“Perhaps marriage will make you more human.”

At this she lowered the newspaper an inch or two, but said nothing.

Indeed, she sat quite silent for over a minute.

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to

matter very much, do they?” she said suddenly.

“I don’t think I ever do consider things like the stars,” Henry

replied. “I’m not sure that that’s not the explanation, though,” he

added, now observing her steadily.

“I doubt whether there is an explanation,” she replied rather

hurriedly, not clearly understanding what he meant.

“What? No explanation of anything?” he inquired, with a smile.

“Oh, things happen. That’s about all,” she let drop in her casual,

decided way.

“That certainly seems to explain some of your actions,” Henry thought

to himself.

“One thing’s about as good as another, and one’s got to do something,”

he said aloud, expressing what he supposed to be her attitude, much in

her accent. Perhaps she detected the imitation, for looking gently at

him, she said, with ironical composure:

“Well, if you believe that your life must be simple, Henry.”

“But I don’t believe it,” he said shortly.

“No more do I,” she replied.

“What about the stars?” he asked a moment later. “I understand that you

rule your life by the stars?”

She let this pass, either because she did not attend to it, or because

the tone was not to her liking.

Once more she paused, and then she inquired:

“But do you always understand why you do everything? Ought one to

understand? People like my mother understand,” she reflected. “Now I

must go down to them, I suppose, and see what’s happening.”

“What could be happening?” Henry protested.

“Oh, they may want to settle something,” she replied vaguely, putting

her feet on the ground, resting her chin on her hands, and looking out

of her large dark eyes contemplatively at the fire.

“And then there’s William,” she added, as if by an afterthought.

Henry very nearly laughed, but restrained himself.

“Do they know what coals are made of, Henry?” she asked, a moment

later.

“Mares’ tails, I believe,” he hazarded.

“Have you ever been down a coal-mine?” she went on.

“Don’t let’s talk about coal-mines, Katharine,” he protested. “We shall

probably never see each other again. When you’re married—”

Tremendously to his surprise, he saw the tears stand in her eyes.

“Why do you all tease me?” she said. “It isn’t kind.”

Henry could not pretend that he was altogether ignorant of her meaning,

though, certainly, he had never guessed that she minded the teasing.

But before he knew what to say, her eyes were clear again, and the

sudden crack in the surface was almost filled up.

“Things aren’t easy, anyhow,” she stated.

Obeying an impulse of genuine affection, Henry spoke.

“Promise me, Katharine, that if I can ever help you, you will let me.”

She seemed to consider, looking once more into the red of the fire, and

decided to refrain from any explanation.

“Yes, I promise that,” she said at length, and Henry felt himself

gratified by her complete sincerity, and began to tell her now about

the coal-mine, in obedience to her love of facts.

They were, indeed, descending the shaft in a small cage, and could hear

the picks of the miners, something like the gnawing of rats, in the

earth beneath them, when the door was burst open, without any knocking.

“Well, here you are!” Rodney exclaimed. Both Katharine and Henry turned

round very quickly and rather guiltily. Rodney was in evening dress. It

was clear that his temper was ruffled.

“That’s where you’ve been all the time,” he repeated, looking at

Katharine.

“I’ve only been here about ten minutes,” she replied.

“My dear Katharine, you left the drawing-room over an hour ago.”

She said nothing.

“Does it very much matter?” Henry asked.

Rodney found it hard to be unreasonable in the presence of another man,

and did not answer him.

“They don’t like it,” he said. “It isn’t kind to old people to leave

them alone—although I’ve no doubt it’s much more amusing to sit up here

and talk to Henry.”

“We were discussing coal-mines,” said Henry urbanely.

“Yes. But we were talking about much more interesting things before

that,” said Katharine.

From the apparent determination to hurt him with which she spoke, Henry

thought that some sort of explosion on Rodney’s part was about to take

place.

“I can quite understand that,” said Rodney, with his little chuckle,

leaning over the back of his chair and tapping the woodwork lightly

with his fingers. They were all silent, and the silence was acutely

uncomfortable to Henry, at least.

“Was it very dull, William?” Katharine suddenly asked, with a complete

change of tone and a little gesture of her hand.

“Of course it was dull,” William said sulkily.

“Well, you stay and talk to Henry, and I’ll go down,” she replied.

She rose as she spoke, and as she turned to leave the room, she laid

her hand, with a curiously caressing gesture, upon Rodney’s shoulder.

Instantly Rodney clasped her hand in his, with such an impulse of

emotion that Henry was annoyed, and rather ostentatiously opened a

book.

“I shall come down with you,” said William, as she drew back her hand,

and made as if to pass him.

“Oh no,” she said hastily. “You stay here and talk to Henry.”

“Yes, do,” said Henry, shutting up his book again. His invitation was

polite, without being precisely cordial. Rodney evidently hesitated as

to the course he should pursue, but seeing Katharine at the door, he

exclaimed:

“No. I want to come with you.”

She looked back, and said in a very commanding tone, and with an

expression of authority upon her face:

“It’s useless for you to come. I shall go to bed in ten minutes. Good

night.”

She nodded to them both, but Henry could not help noticing that her

last nod was in his direction. Rodney sat down rather heavily.

His mortification was so obvious that Henry scarcely liked to open the

conversation with some remark of a literary character. On the other

hand, unless he checked him, Rodney might begin to talk about his

feelings, and irreticence is apt to be extremely painful, at any rate

in prospect. He therefore adopted a middle course; that is to say, he

wrote a note upon the fly-leaf of his book, which ran, “The situation

is becoming most uncomfortable.” This he decorated with those

flourishes and decorative borders which grow of themselves upon these

occasions; and as he did so, he thought to himself that whatever

Katharine’s difficulties might be, they did not justify her behavior.

She had spoken with a kind of brutality which suggested that, whether

it is natural or assumed, women have a peculiar blindness to the

feelings of men.

The penciling of this note gave Rodney time to recover himself.

Perhaps, for he was a very vain man, he was more hurt that Henry had

seen him rebuffed than by the rebuff itself. He was in love with

Katharine, and vanity is not decreased but increased by love;

especially, one may hazard, in the presence of one’s own sex. But

Rodney enjoyed the courage which springs from that laughable and

lovable defect, and when he had mastered his first impulse, in some way

to make a fool of himself, he drew inspiration from the perfect fit of

his evening dress. He chose a cigarette, tapped it on the back of his

hand, displayed his exquisite pumps on the edge of the fender, and

summoned his self-respect.

“You’ve several big estates round here, Otway,” he began. “Any good

hunting? Let me see, what pack would it be? Who’s your great man?”

“Sir William Budge, the sugar king, has the biggest estate. He bought

out poor Stanham, who went bankrupt.”

“Which Stanham would that be? Verney or Alfred?”

“Alfred.... I don’t hunt myself. You’re a great huntsman, aren’t you?

You have a great reputation as a horseman, anyhow,” he added, desiring

to help Rodney in his effort to recover his complacency.

“Oh, I love riding,” Rodney replied. “Could I get a horse down here?

Stupid of me! I forgot to bring any clothes. I can’t imagine, though,

who told you I was anything of a rider?”

To tell the truth, Henry labored under the same difficulty; he did not

wish to introduce Katharine’s name, and, therefore, he replied vaguely

that he had always heard that Rodney was a great rider. In truth, he

had heard very little about him, one way or another, accepting him as a

figure often to be found in the background at his aunt’s house, and

inevitably, though inexplicably, engaged to his cousin.

“I don’t care much for shooting,” Rodney continued; “but one has to do

it, unless one wants to be altogether out of things. I dare say there’s

some very pretty country round here. I stayed once at Bolham Hall.

Young Cranthorpe was up with you, wasn’t he? He married old Lord

Bolham’s daughter. Very nice people—in their way.”

“I don’t mix in that society,” Henry remarked, rather shortly. But

Rodney, now started on an agreeable current of reflection, could not

resist the temptation of pursuing it a little further. He appeared to

himself as a man who moved easily in very good society, and knew enough

about the true values of life to be himself above it.

“Oh, but you should,” he went on. “It’s well worth staying there,

anyhow, once a year. They make one very comfortable, and the women are

ravishing.”

“The women?” Henry thought to himself, with disgust. “What could any

woman see in you?” His tolerance was rapidly becoming exhausted, but he

could not help liking Rodney nevertheless, and this appeared to him

strange, for he was fastidious, and such words in another mouth would

have condemned the speaker irreparably. He began, in short, to wonder

what kind of creature this man who was to marry his cousin might be.

Could any one, except a rather singular character, afford to be so

ridiculously vain?

“I don’t think I should get on in that society,” he replied. “I don’t

think I should know what to say to Lady Rose if I met her.”

“I don’t find any difficulty,” Rodney chuckled. “You talk to them about

their children, if they have any, or their accomplishments—painting,

gardening, poetry—they’re so delightfully sympathetic. Seriously, you

know I think a woman’s opinion of one’s poetry is always worth having.

Don’t ask them for their reasons. Just ask them for their feelings.

Katharine, for example—”

“Katharine,” said Henry, with an emphasis upon the name, almost as if

he resented Rodney’s use of it, “Katharine is very unlike most women.”

“Quite,” Rodney agreed. “She is—” He seemed about to describe her, and

he hesitated for a long time. “She’s looking very well,” he stated, or

rather almost inquired, in a different tone from that in which he had

been speaking. Henry bent his head.

“But, as a family, you’re given to moods, eh?”

“Not Katharine,” said Henry, with decision.

“Not Katharine,” Rodney repeated, as if he weighed the meaning of the

words. “No, perhaps you’re right. But her engagement has changed her.

Naturally,” he added, “one would expect that to be so.” He waited for

Henry to confirm this statement, but Henry remained silent.

“Katharine has had a difficult life, in some ways,” he continued. “I

expect that marriage will be good for her. She has great powers.”

“Great,” said Henry, with decision.

“Yes—but now what direction d’you think they take?”

Rodney had completely dropped his pose as a man of the world, and

seemed to be asking Henry to help him in a difficulty.

“I don’t know,” Henry hesitated cautiously.

“D’you think children—a household—that sort of thing—d’you think

that’ll satisfy her? Mind, I’m out all day.”

“She would certainly be very competent,” Henry stated.

“Oh, she’s wonderfully competent,” said Rodney. “But—I get absorbed in

my poetry. Well, Katharine hasn’t got that. She admires my poetry, you

know, but that wouldn’t be enough for her?”

“No,” said Henry. He paused. “I think you’re right,” he added, as if he

were summing up his thoughts. “Katharine hasn’t found herself yet. Life

isn’t altogether real to her yet—I sometimes think—”

“Yes?” Rodney inquired, as if he were eager for Henry to continue.

“That is what I—” he was going on, as Henry remained silent, but the

sentence was not finished, for the door opened, and they were

interrupted by Henry’s younger brother Gilbert, much to Henry’s relief,

for he had already said more than he liked.

CHAPTER XVII

When the sun shone, as it did with unusual brightness that Christmas

week, it revealed much that was faded and not altogether well-kept-up

in Stogdon House and its grounds. In truth, Sir Francis had retired

from service under the Government of India with a pension that was not

adequate, in his opinion, to his services, as it certainly was not

adequate to his ambitions. His career had not come up to his

expectations, and although he was a very fine, white-whiskered,

mahogany-colored old man to look at, and had laid down a very choice

cellar of good reading and good stories, you could not long remain

ignorant of the fact that some thunder-storm had soured them; he had a

grievance. This grievance dated back to the middle years of the last

century, when, owing to some official intrigue, his merits had been

passed over in a disgraceful manner in favor of another, his junior.

The rights and wrongs of the story, presuming that they had some

existence in fact, were no longer clearly known to his wife and

children; but this disappointment had played a very large part in their

lives, and had poisoned the life of Sir Francis much as a

disappointment in love is said to poison the whole life of a woman.

Long brooding on his failure, continual arrangement and rearrangement

of his deserts and rebuffs, had made Sir Francis much of an egoist, and

in his retirement his temper became increasingly difficult and

exacting.

His wife now offered so little resistance to his moods that she was

practically useless to him. He made his daughter Eleanor into his chief

confidante, and the prime of her life was being rapidly consumed by her

father. To her he dictated the memoirs which were to avenge his memory,

and she had to assure him constantly that his treatment had been a

disgrace. Already, at the age of thirty-five, her cheeks were whitening

as her mother’s had whitened, but for her there would be no memories of

Indian suns and Indian rivers, and clamor of children in a nursery; she

would have very little of substance to think about when she sat, as

Lady Otway now sat, knitting white wool, with her eyes fixed almost

perpetually upon the same embroidered bird upon the same fire-screen.

But then Lady Otway was one of the people for whom the great

make-believe game of English social life has been invented; she spent

most of her time in pretending to herself and her neighbors that she

was a dignified, important, much-occupied person, of considerable

social standing and sufficient wealth. In view of the actual state of

things this game needed a great deal of skill; and, perhaps, at the age

she had reached—she was over sixty—she played far more to deceive

herself than to deceive any one else. Moreover, the armor was wearing

thin; she forgot to keep up appearances more and more.

The worn patches in the carpets, and the pallor of the drawing-room,

where no chair or cover had been renewed for some years, were due not

only to the miserable pension, but to the wear and tear of twelve

children, eight of whom were sons. As often happens in these large

families, a distinct dividing-line could be traced, about half-way in

the succession, where the money for educational purposes had run short,

and the six younger children had grown up far more economically than

the elder. If the boys were clever, they won scholarships, and went to

school; if they were not clever, they took what the family connection

had to offer them. The girls accepted situations occasionally, but

there were always one or two at home, nursing sick animals, tending

silkworms, or playing the flute in their bedrooms. The distinction

between the elder children and the younger corresponded almost to the

distinction between a higher class and a lower one, for with only a

haphazard education and insufficient allowances, the younger children

had picked up accomplishments, friends, and points of view which were

not to be found within the walls of a public school or of a Government

office. Between the two divisions there was considerable hostility, the

elder trying to patronize the younger, the younger refusing to respect

the elder; but one feeling united them and instantly closed any risk of

a breach—their common belief in the superiority of their own family to

all others. Henry was the eldest of the younger group, and their

leader; he bought strange books and joined odd societies; he went

without a tie for a whole year, and had six shirts made of black

flannel. He had long refused to take a seat either in a shipping office

or in a tea-merchant’s warehouse; and persisted, in spite of the

disapproval of uncles and aunts, in practicing both violin and piano,

with the result that he could not perform professionally upon either.

Indeed, for thirty-two years of life he had nothing more substantial to

show than a manuscript book containing the score of half an opera. In

this protest of his, Katharine had always given him her support, and as

she was generally held to be an extremely sensible person, who dressed

too well to be eccentric, he had found her support of some use. Indeed,

when she came down at Christmas she usually spent a great part of her

time in private conferences with Henry and with Cassandra, the youngest

girl, to whom the silkworms belonged. With the younger section she had

a great reputation for common sense, and for something that they

despised but inwardly respected and called knowledge of the world—that

is to say, of the way in which respectable elderly people, going to

their clubs and dining out with ministers, think and behave. She had

more than once played the part of ambassador between Lady Otway and her

children. That poor lady, for instance, consulted her for advice when,

one day, she opened Cassandra’s bedroom door on a mission of discovery,

and found the ceiling hung with mulberry-leaves, the windows blocked

with cages, and the tables stacked with home-made machines for the

manufacture of silk dresses.

“I wish you could help her to take an interest in something that other

people are interested in, Katharine,” she observed, rather plaintively,

detailing her grievances. “It’s all Henry’s doing, you know, giving up

her parties and taking to these nasty insects. It doesn’t follow that

if a man can do a thing a woman may too.”

The morning was sufficiently bright to make the chairs and sofas in

Lady Otway’s private sitting-room appear more than usually shabby, and

the gallant gentlemen, her brothers and cousins, who had defended the

Empire and left their bones on many frontiers, looked at the world

through a film of yellow which the morning light seemed to have drawn

across their photographs. Lady Otway sighed, it may be at the faded

relics, and turned, with resignation, to her balls of wool, which,

curiously and characteristically, were not an ivory-white, but rather a

tarnished yellow-white. She had called her niece in for a little chat.

She had always trusted her, and now more than ever, since her

engagement to Rodney, which seemed to Lady Otway extremely suitable,

and just what one would wish for one’s own daughter. Katharine

unwittingly increased her reputation for wisdom by asking to be given

knitting-needles too.

“It’s so very pleasant,” said Lady Otway, “to knit while one’s talking.

And now, my dear Katharine, tell me about your plans.”

The emotions of the night before, which she had suppressed in such a

way as to keep her awake till dawn, had left Katharine a little jaded,

and thus more matter-of-fact than usual. She was quite ready to discuss

her plans—houses and rents, servants and economy—without feeling that

they concerned her very much. As she spoke, knitting methodically

meanwhile, Lady Otway noted, with approval, the upright, responsible

bearing of her niece, to whom the prospect of marriage had brought some

gravity most becoming in a bride, and yet, in these days, most rare.

Yes, Katharine’s engagement had changed her a little.

“What a perfect daughter, or daughter-in-law!” she thought to herself,

and could not help contrasting her with Cassandra, surrounded by

innumerable silkworms in her bedroom.

“Yes,” she continued, glancing at Katharine, with the round, greenish

eyes which were as inexpressive as moist marbles, “Katharine is like

the girls of my youth. We took the serious things of life seriously.”

But just as she was deriving satisfaction from this thought, and was

producing some of the hoarded wisdom which none of her own daughters,

alas! seemed now to need, the door opened, and Mrs. Hilbery came in, or

rather, did not come in, but stood in the doorway and smiled, having

evidently mistaken the room.

“I never _shall_ know my way about this house!” she exclaimed. “I’m on

my way to the library, and I don’t want to interrupt. You and Katharine

were having a little chat?”

The presence of her sister-in-law made Lady Otway slightly uneasy. How

could she go on with what she was saying in Maggie’s presence? for she

was saying something that she had never said, all these years, to

Maggie herself.

“I was telling Katharine a few little commonplaces about marriage,” she

said, with a little laugh. “Are none of my children looking after you,

Maggie?”

“Marriage,” said Mrs. Hilbery, coming into the room, and nodding her

head once or twice, “I always say marriage is a school. And you don’t

get the prizes unless you go to school. Charlotte has won all the

prizes,” she added, giving her sister-in-law a little pat, which made

Lady Otway more uncomfortable still. She half laughed, muttered

something, and ended on a sigh.

“Aunt Charlotte was saying that it’s no good being married unless you

submit to your husband,” said Katharine, framing her aunt’s words into

a far more definite shape than they had really worn; and when she spoke

thus she did not appear at all old-fashioned. Lady Otway looked at her

and paused for a moment.

“Well, I really don’t advise a woman who wants to have things her own

way to get married,” she said, beginning a fresh row rather

elaborately.

Mrs. Hilbery knew something of the circumstances which, as she thought,

had inspired this remark. In a moment her face was clouded with

sympathy which she did not quite know how to express.

“What a shame it was!” she exclaimed, forgetting that her train of

thought might not be obvious to her listeners. “But, Charlotte, it

would have been much worse if Frank had disgraced himself in any way.

And it isn’t what our husbands GET, but what they _are_. I used to

dream of white horses and palanquins, too; but still, I like the

ink-pots best. And who knows?” she concluded, looking at Katharine,

“your father may be made a baronet to-morrow.”

Lady Otway, who was Mr. Hilbery’s sister, knew quite well that, in

private, the Hilberys called Sir Francis “that old Turk,” and though

she did not follow the drift of Mrs. Hilbery’s remarks, she knew what

prompted them.

“But if you can give way to your husband,” she said, speaking to

Katharine, as if there were a separate understanding between them, “a

happy marriage is the happiest thing in the world.”

“Yes,” said Katharine, “but—” She did not mean to finish her sentence,

she merely wished to induce her mother and her aunt to go on talking

about marriage, for she was in the mood to feel that other people could

help her if they would. She went on knitting, but her fingers worked

with a decision that was oddly unlike the smooth and contemplative

sweep of Lady Otway’s plump hand. Now and then she looked swiftly at

her mother, then at her aunt. Mrs. Hilbery held a book in her hand, and

was on her way, as Katharine guessed, to the library, where another

paragraph was to be added to that varied assortment of paragraphs, the

Life of Richard Alardyce. Normally, Katharine would have hurried her

mother downstairs, and seen that no excuse for distraction came her

way. Her attitude towards the poet’s life, however, had changed with

other changes; and she was content to forget all about her scheme of

hours. Mrs. Hilbery was secretly delighted. Her relief at finding

herself excused manifested itself in a series of sidelong glances of

sly humor in her daughter’s direction, and the indulgence put her in

the best of spirits. Was she to be allowed merely to sit and talk? It

was so much pleasanter to sit in a nice room filled with all sorts of

interesting odds and ends which she hadn’t looked at for a year, at

least, than to seek out one date which contradicted another in a

dictionary.

“We’ve all had perfect husbands,” she concluded, generously forgiving

Sir Francis all his faults in a lump. “Not that I think a bad temper is

really a fault in a man. I don’t mean a bad temper,” she corrected

herself, with a glance obviously in the direction of Sir Francis. “I

should say a quick, impatient temper. Most, in fact _all_ great men

have had bad tempers—except your grandfather, Katharine,” and here she

sighed, and suggested that, perhaps, she ought to go down to the

library.

“But in the ordinary marriage, is it necessary to give way to one’s

husband?” said Katharine, taking no notice of her mother’s suggestion,

blind even to the depression which had now taken possession of her at

the thought of her own inevitable death.

“I should say yes, certainly,” said Lady Otway, with a decision most

unusual for her.

“Then one ought to make up one’s mind to that before one is married,”

Katharine mused, seeming to address herself.

Mrs. Hilbery was not much interested in these remarks, which seemed to

have a melancholy tendency, and to revive her spirits she had recourse

to an infallible remedy—she looked out of the window.

“Do look at that lovely little blue bird!” she exclaimed, and her eye

looked with extreme pleasure at the soft sky. at the trees, at the

green fields visible behind those trees, and at the leafless branches

which surrounded the body of the small blue tit. Her sympathy with

nature was exquisite.

“Most women know by instinct whether they can give it or not,” Lady

Otway slipped in quickly, in rather a low voice, as if she wanted to

get this said while her sister-in-law’s attention was diverted. “And if

not—well then, my advice would be—don’t marry.”

“Oh, but marriage is the happiest life for a woman,” said Mrs. Hilbery,

catching the word marriage, as she brought her eyes back to the room

again. Then she turned her mind to what she had said.

“It’s the most _interesting_ life,” she corrected herself. She looked

at her daughter with a look of vague alarm. It was the kind of maternal

scrutiny which suggests that, in looking at her daughter a mother is

really looking at herself. She was not altogether satisfied; but she

purposely made no attempt to break down the reserve which, as a matter

of fact, was a quality she particularly admired and depended upon in

her daughter. But when her mother said that marriage was the most

interesting life, Katharine felt, as she was apt to do suddenly, for no

definite reason, that they understood each other, in spite of differing

in every possible way. Yet the wisdom of the old seems to apply more to

feelings which we have in common with the rest of the human race than

to our feelings as individuals, and Katharine knew that only some one

of her own age could follow her meaning. Both these elderly women

seemed to her to have been content with so little happiness, and at the

moment she had not sufficient force to feel certain that their version

of marriage was the wrong one. In London, certainly, this temperate

attitude toward her own marriage had seemed to her just. Why had she

now changed? Why did it now depress her? It never occurred to her that

her own conduct could be anything of a puzzle to her mother, or that

elder people are as much affected by the young as the young are by

them. And yet it was true that love—passion—whatever one chose to call

it, had played far less part in Mrs. Hilbery’s life than might have

seemed likely, judging from her enthusiastic and imaginative

temperament. She had always been more interested by other things. Lady

Otway, strange though it seemed, guessed more accurately at Katharine’s

state of mind than her mother did.

“Why don’t we all live in the country?” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, once

more looking out of the window. “I’m sure one would think such

beautiful things if one lived in the country. No horrid slum houses to

depress one, no trams or motor-cars; and the people all looking so

plump and cheerful. Isn’t there some little cottage near you,

Charlotte, which would do for us, with a spare room, perhaps, in case

we asked a friend down? And we should save so much money that we should

be able to travel—”

“Yes. You would find it very nice for a week or two, no doubt,” said

Lady Otway. “But what hour would you like the carriage this morning?”

she continued, touching the bell.

“Katharine shall decide,” said Mrs. Hilbery, feeling herself unable to

prefer one hour to another. “And I was just going to tell you,

Katharine, how, when I woke this morning, everything seemed so clear in

my head that if I’d had a pencil I believe I could have written quite a

long chapter. When we’re out on our drive I shall find us a house. A

few trees round it, and a little garden, a pond with a Chinese duck, a

study for your father, a study for me, and a sitting room for

Katharine, because then she’ll be a married lady.”

At this Katharine shivered a little, drew up to the fire, and warmed

her hands by spreading them over the topmost peak of the coal. She

wished to bring the talk back to marriage again, in order to hear Aunt

Charlotte’s views, but she did not know how to do this.

“Let me look at your engagement-ring, Aunt Charlotte,” she said,

noticing her own.

She took the cluster of green stones and turned it round and round, but

she did not know what to say next.

“That poor old ring was a sad disappointment to me when I first had

it,” Lady Otway mused. “I’d set my heart on a diamond ring, but I never

liked to tell Frank, naturally. He bought it at Simla.”

Katharine turned the ring round once more, and gave it back to her aunt

without speaking. And while she turned it round her lips set themselves

firmly together, and it seemed to her that she could satisfy William as

these women had satisfied their husbands; she could pretend to like

emeralds when she preferred diamonds. Having replaced her ring, Lady

Otway remarked that it was chilly, though not more so than one must

expect at this time of year. Indeed, one ought to be thankful to see

the sun at all, and she advised them both to dress warmly for their

drive. Her aunt’s stock of commonplaces, Katharine sometimes suspected,

had been laid in on purpose to fill silences with, and had little to do

with her private thoughts. But at this moment they seemed terribly in

keeping with her own conclusions, so that she took up her knitting

again and listened, chiefly with a view to confirming herself in the

belief that to be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in

love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is

only a traveller’s story brought from the heart of deep forests and

told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true.

She did her best to listen to her mother asking for news of John, and

to her aunt replying with the authentic history of Hilda’s engagement

to an officer in the Indian Army, but she cast her mind alternately

towards forest paths and starry blossoms, and towards pages of neatly

written mathematical signs. When her mind took this turn her marriage

seemed no more than an archway through which it was necessary to pass

in order to have her desire. At such times the current of her nature

ran in its deep narrow channel with great force and with an alarming

lack of consideration for the feelings of others. Just as the two elder

ladies had finished their survey of the family prospects, and Lady

Otway was nervously anticipating some general statement as to life and

death from her sister-in-law, Cassandra burst into the room with the

news that the carriage was at the door.

“Why didn’t Andrews tell me himself?” said Lady Otway, peevishly,

blaming her servants for not living up to her ideals.

When Mrs. Hilbery and Katharine arrived in the hall, ready dressed for

their drive, they found that the usual discussion was going forward as

to the plans of the rest of the family. In token of this, a great many

doors were opening and shutting, two or three people stood irresolutely

on the stairs, now going a few steps up, and now a few steps down, and

Sir Francis himself had come out from his study, with the “Times” under

his arm, and a complaint about noise and draughts from the open door

which, at least, had the effect of bundling the people who did not want

to go into the carriage, and sending those who did not want to stay

back to their rooms. It was decided that Mrs. Hilbery, Katharine,

Rodney, and Henry should drive to Lincoln, and any one else who wished

to go should follow on bicycles or in the pony-cart. Every one who

stayed at Stogdon House had to make this expedition to Lincoln in

obedience to Lady Otway’s conception of the right way to entertain her

guests, which she had imbibed from reading in fashionable papers of the

behavior of Christmas parties in ducal houses. The carriage horses were

both fat and aged, still they matched; the carriage was shaky and

uncomfortable, but the Otway arms were visible on the panels. Lady

Otway stood on the topmost step, wrapped in a white shawl, and waved

her hand almost mechanically until they had turned the corner under the

laurel-bushes, when she retired indoors with a sense that she had

played her part, and a sigh at the thought that none of her children

felt it necessary to play theirs.

The carriage bowled along smoothly over the gently curving road. Mrs.

Hilbery dropped into a pleasant, inattentive state of mind, in which

she was conscious of the running green lines of the hedges, of the

swelling ploughland, and of the mild blue sky, which served her, after

the first five minutes, for a pastoral background to the drama of human

life; and then she thought of a cottage garden, with the flash of

yellow daffodils against blue water; and what with the arrangement of

these different prospects, and the shaping of two or three lovely

phrases, she did not notice that the young people in the carriage were

almost silent. Henry, indeed, had been included against his wish, and

revenged himself by observing Katharine and Rodney with disillusioned

eyes; while Katharine was in a state of gloomy self-suppression which

resulted in complete apathy. When Rodney spoke to her she either said

“Hum!” or assented so listlessly that he addressed his next remark to

her mother. His deference was agreeable to her, his manners were

exemplary; and when the church towers and factory chimneys of the town

came into sight, she roused herself, and recalled memories of the fair

summer of 1853, which fitted in harmoniously with what she was dreaming

of the future.

CHAPTER XVIII

But other passengers were approaching Lincoln meanwhile by other roads

on foot. A county town draws the inhabitants of all vicarages, farms,

country houses, and wayside cottages, within a radius of ten miles at

least, once or twice a week to its streets; and among them, on this

occasion, were Ralph Denham and Mary Datchet. They despised the roads,

and took their way across the fields; and yet, from their appearance,

it did not seem as if they cared much where they walked so long as the

way did not actually trip them up. When they left the Vicarage, they

had begun an argument which swung their feet along so rhythmically in

time with it that they covered the ground at over four miles an hour,

and saw nothing of the hedgerows, the swelling plowland, or the mild

blue sky. What they saw were the Houses of Parliament and the

Government Offices in Whitehall. They both belonged to the class which

is conscious of having lost its birthright in these great structures

and is seeking to build another kind of lodging for its own notion of

law and government. Purposely, perhaps, Mary did not agree with Ralph;

she loved to feel her mind in conflict with his, and to be certain that

he spared her female judgment no ounce of his male muscularity. He

seemed to argue as fiercely with her as if she were his brother. They

were alike, however, in believing that it behooved them to take in hand

the repair and reconstruction of the fabric of England. They agreed in

thinking that nature has not been generous in the endowment of our

councilors. They agreed, unconsciously, in a mute love for the muddy

field through which they tramped, with eyes narrowed close by the

concentration of their minds. At length they drew breath, let the

argument fly away into the limbo of other good arguments, and, leaning

over a gate, opened their eyes for the first time and looked about

them. Their feet tingled with warm blood and their breath rose in steam

around them. The bodily exercise made them both feel more direct and

less self-conscious than usual, and Mary, indeed, was overcome by a

sort of light-headedness which made it seem to her that it mattered

very little what happened next. It mattered so little, indeed, that she

felt herself on the point of saying to Ralph:

“I love you; I shall never love anybody else. Marry me or leave me;

think what you like of me—I don’t care a straw.” At the moment,

however, speech or silence seemed immaterial, and she merely clapped

her hands together, and looked at the distant woods with the rust-like

bloom on their brown, and the green and blue landscape through the

steam of her own breath. It seemed a mere toss-up whether she said, “I

love you,” or whether she said, “I love the beech-trees,” or only “I

love—I love.”

“Do you know, Mary,” Ralph suddenly interrupted her, “I’ve made up my

mind.”

Her indifference must have been superficial, for it disappeared at

once. Indeed, she lost sight of the trees, and saw her own hand upon

the topmost bar of the gate with extreme distinctness, while he went

on:

“I’ve made up my mind to chuck my work and live down here. I want you

to tell me about that cottage you spoke of. However, I suppose there’ll

be no difficulty about getting a cottage, will there?” He spoke with an

assumption of carelessness as if expecting her to dissuade him.

She still waited, as if for him to continue; she was convinced that in

some roundabout way he approached the subject of their marriage.

“I can’t stand the office any longer,” he proceeded. “I don’t know what

my family will say; but I’m sure I’m right. Don’t you think so?”

“Live down here by yourself?” she asked.

“Some old woman would do for me, I suppose,” he replied. “I’m sick of

the whole thing,” he went on, and opened the gate with a jerk. They

began to cross the next field walking side by side.

“I tell you, Mary, it’s utter destruction, working away, day after day,

at stuff that doesn’t matter a damn to any one. I’ve stood eight years

of it, and I’m not going to stand it any longer. I suppose this all

seems to you mad, though?”

By this time Mary had recovered her self-control.

“No. I thought you weren’t happy,” she said.

“Why did you think that?” he asked, with some surprise.

“Don’t you remember that morning in Lincoln’s Inn Fields?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Ralph, slackening his pace and remembering Katharine and

her engagement, the purple leaves stamped into the path, the white

paper radiant under the electric light, and the hopelessness which

seemed to surround all these things.

“You’re right, Mary,” he said, with something of an effort, “though I

don’t know how you guessed it.”

She was silent, hoping that he might tell her the reason of his

unhappiness, for his excuses had not deceived her.

“I was unhappy—very unhappy,” he repeated. Some six weeks separated him

from that afternoon when he had sat upon the Embankment watching his

visions dissolve in mist as the waters swam past and the sense of his

desolation still made him shiver. He had not recovered in the least

from that depression. Here was an opportunity for making himself face

it, as he felt that he ought to; for, by this time, no doubt, it was

only a sentimental ghost, better exorcised by ruthless exposure to such

an eye as Mary’s, than allowed to underlie all his actions and thoughts

as had been the case ever since he first saw Katharine Hilbery pouring

out tea. He must begin, however, by mentioning her name, and this he

found it impossible to do. He persuaded himself that he could make an

honest statement without speaking her name; he persuaded himself that

his feeling had very little to do with her.

“Unhappiness is a state of mind,” he said, “by which I mean that it is

not necessarily the result of any particular cause.”

This rather stilted beginning did not please him, and it became more

and more obvious to him that, whatever he might say, his unhappiness

had been directly caused by Katharine.

“I began to find my life unsatisfactory,” he started afresh. “It seemed

to me meaningless.” He paused again, but felt that this, at any rate,

was true, and that on these lines he could go on.

“All this money-making and working ten hours a day in an office, what’s

it FOR? When one’s a boy, you see, one’s head is so full of dreams that

it doesn’t seem to matter what one does. And if you’re ambitious,

you’re all right; you’ve got a reason for going on. Now my reasons

ceased to satisfy me. Perhaps I never had any. That’s very likely now I

come to think of it. (What reason is there for anything, though?)

Still, it’s impossible, after a certain age, to take oneself in

satisfactorily. And I know what carried me on”—for a good reason now

occurred to him—“I wanted to be the savior of my family and all that

kind of thing. I wanted them to get on in the world. That was a lie, of

course—a kind of self-glorification, too. Like most people, I suppose,

I’ve lived almost entirely among delusions, and now I’m at the awkward

stage of finding it out. I want another delusion to go on with. That’s

what my unhappiness amounts to, Mary.”

There were two reasons that kept Mary very silent during this speech,

and drew curiously straight lines upon her face. In the first place,

Ralph made no mention of marriage; in the second, he was not speaking

the truth.

“I don’t think it will be difficult to find a cottage,” she said, with

cheerful hardness, ignoring the whole of this statement. “You’ve got a

little money, haven’t you? Yes,” she concluded, “I don’t see why it

shouldn’t be a very good plan.”

They crossed the field in complete silence. Ralph was surprised by her

remark and a little hurt, and yet, on the whole, rather pleased. He had

convinced himself that it was impossible to lay his case truthfully

before Mary, and, secretly, he was relieved to find that he had not

parted with his dream to her. She was, as he had always found her, the

sensible, loyal friend, the woman he trusted; whose sympathy he could

count upon, provided he kept within certain limits. He was not

displeased to find that those limits were very clearly marked. When

they had crossed the next hedge she said to him:

“Yes, Ralph, it’s time you made a break. I’ve come to the same

conclusion myself. Only it won’t be a country cottage in my case; it’ll

be America. America!” she cried. “That’s the place for me! They’ll

teach me something about organizing a movement there, and I’ll come

back and show you how to do it.”

If she meant consciously or unconsciously to belittle the seclusion and

security of a country cottage, she did not succeed; for Ralph’s

determination was genuine. But she made him visualize her in her own

character, so that he looked quickly at her, as she walked a little in

front of him across the plowed field; for the first time that morning

he saw her independently of him or of his preoccupation with Katharine.

He seemed to see her marching ahead, a rather clumsy but powerful and

independent figure, for whose courage he felt the greatest respect.

“Don’t go away, Mary!” he exclaimed, and stopped.

“That’s what you said before, Ralph,” she returned, without looking at

him. “You want to go away yourself and you don’t want me to go away.

That’s not very sensible, is it?”

“Mary,” he cried, stung by the remembrance of his exacting and

dictatorial ways with her, “what a brute I’ve been to you!”

It took all her strength to keep the tears from springing, and to

thrust back her assurance that she would forgive him till Doomsday if

he chose. She was preserved from doing so only by a stubborn kind of

respect for herself which lay at the root of her nature and forbade

surrender, even in moments of almost overwhelming passion. Now, when

all was tempest and high-running waves, she knew of a land where the

sun shone clear upon Italian grammars and files of docketed papers.

Nevertheless, from the skeleton pallor of that land and the rocks that

broke its surface, she knew that her life there would be harsh and

lonely almost beyond endurance. She walked steadily a little in front

of him across the plowed field. Their way took them round the verge of

a wood of thin trees standing at the edge of a steep fold in the land.

Looking between the tree-trunks, Ralph saw laid out on the perfectly

flat and richly green meadow at the bottom of the hill a small gray

manor-house, with ponds, terraces, and clipped hedges in front of it, a

farm building or so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising

behind, all perfectly sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house

the hill rose again, and the trees on the farther summit stood upright

against the sky, which appeared of a more intense blue between their

trunks. His mind at once was filled with a sense of the actual presence

of Katharine; the gray house and the intense blue sky gave him the

feeling of her presence close by. He leant against a tree, forming her

name beneath his breath:

“Katharine, Katharine,” he said aloud, and then, looking round, saw

Mary walking slowly away from him, tearing a long spray of ivy from the

trees as she passed them. She seemed so definitely opposed to the

vision he held in his mind that he returned to it with a gesture of

impatience.

“Katharine, Katharine,” he repeated, and seemed to himself to be with

her. He lost his sense of all that surrounded him; all substantial

things—the hour of the day, what we have done and are about to do, the

presence of other people and the support we derive from seeing their

belief in a common reality—all this slipped from him. So he might have

felt if the earth had dropped from his feet, and the empty blue had

hung all round him, and the air had been steeped in the presence of one

woman. The chirp of a robin on the bough above his head awakened him,

and his awakenment was accompanied by a sigh. Here was the world in

which he had lived; here the plowed field, the high road yonder, and

Mary, stripping ivy from the trees. When he came up with her he linked

his arm through hers and said:

“Now, Mary, what’s all this about America?”

There was a brotherly kindness in his voice which seemed to her

magnanimous, when she reflected that she had cut short his explanations

and shown little interest in his change of plan. She gave him her

reasons for thinking that she might profit by such a journey, omitting

the one reason which had set all the rest in motion. He listened

attentively, and made no attempt to dissuade her. In truth, he found

himself curiously eager to make certain of her good sense, and accepted

each fresh proof of it with satisfaction, as though it helped him to

make up his mind about something. She forgot the pain he had caused

her, and in place of it she became conscious of a steady tide of

well-being which harmonized very aptly with the tramp of their feet

upon the dry road and the support of his arm. The comfort was the more

glowing in that it seemed to be the reward of her determination to

behave to him simply and without attempting to be other than she was.

Instead of making out an interest in the poets, she avoided them

instinctively, and dwelt rather insistently upon the practical nature

of her gifts.

In a practical way she asked for particulars of his cottage, which

hardly existed in his mind, and corrected his vagueness.

“You must see that there’s water,” she insisted, with an exaggeration

of interest. She avoided asking him what he meant to do in this

cottage, and, at last, when all the practical details had been thrashed

out as much as possible, he rewarded her by a more intimate statement.

“One of the rooms,” he said, “must be my study, for, you see, Mary, I’m

going to write a book.” Here he withdrew his arm from hers, lit his

pipe, and they tramped on in a sagacious kind of comradeship, the most

complete they had attained in all their friendship.

“And what’s your book to be about?” she said, as boldly as if she had

never come to grief with Ralph in talking about books. He told her

unhesitatingly that he meant to write the history of the English

village from Saxon days to the present time. Some such plan had lain as

a seed in his mind for many years; and now that he had decided, in a

flash, to give up his profession, the seed grew in the space of twenty

minutes both tall and lusty. He was surprised himself at the positive

way in which he spoke. It was the same with the question of his

cottage. That had come into existence, too, in an unromantic shape—a

square white house standing just off the high road, no doubt, with a

neighbor who kept a pig and a dozen squalling children; for these plans

were shorn of all romance in his mind, and the pleasure he derived from

thinking of them was checked directly it passed a very sober limit. So

a sensible man who has lost his chance of some beautiful inheritance

might tread out the narrow bounds of his actual dwelling-place, and

assure himself that life is supportable within its demesne, only one

must grow turnips and cabbages, not melons and pomegranates. Certainly

Ralph took some pride in the resources of his mind, and was insensibly

helped to right himself by Mary’s trust in him. She wound her ivy spray

round her ash-plant, and for the first time for many days, when alone

with Ralph, set no spies upon her motives, sayings, and feelings, but

surrendered herself to complete happiness.

Thus talking, with easy silences and some pauses to look at the view

over the hedge and to decide upon the species of a little gray-brown

bird slipping among the twigs, they walked into Lincoln, and after

strolling up and down the main street, decided upon an inn where the

rounded window suggested substantial fare, nor were they mistaken. For

over a hundred and fifty years hot joints, potatoes, greens, and apple

puddings had been served to generations of country gentlemen, and now,

sitting at a table in the hollow of the bow window, Ralph and Mary took

their share of this perennial feast. Looking across the joint, half-way

through the meal, Mary wondered whether Ralph would ever come to look

quite like the other people in the room. Would he be absorbed among the

round pink faces, pricked with little white bristles, the calves fitted

in shiny brown leather, the black-and-white check suits, which were

sprinkled about in the same room with them? She half hoped so; she

thought that it was only in his mind that he was different. She did not

wish him to be too different from other people. The walk had given him

a ruddy color, too, and his eyes were lit up by a steady, honest light,

which could not make the simplest farmer feel ill at ease, or suggest

to the most devout of clergymen a disposition to sneer at his faith.

She loved the steep cliff of his forehead, and compared it to the brow

of a young Greek horseman, who reins his horse back so sharply that it

half falls on its haunches. He always seemed to her like a rider on a

spirited horse. And there was an exaltation to her in being with him,

because there was a risk that he would not be able to keep to the right

pace among other people. Sitting opposite him at the little table in

the window, she came back to that state of careless exaltation which

had overcome her when they halted by the gate, but now it was

accompanied by a sense of sanity and security, for she felt that they

had a feeling in common which scarcely needed embodiment in words. How

silent he was! leaning his forehead on his hand, now and then, and

again looking steadily and gravely at the backs of the two men at the

next table, with so little self-consciousness that she could almost

watch his mind placing one thought solidly upon the top of another; she

thought that she could feel him thinking, through the shade of her

fingers, and she could anticipate the exact moment when he would put an

end to his thought and turn a little in his chair and say:

“Well, Mary—?” inviting her to take up the thread of thought where he

had dropped it.

And at that very moment he turned just so, and said:

“Well, Mary?” with the curious touch of diffidence which she loved in

him.

She laughed, and she explained her laugh on the spur of the moment by

the look of the people in the street below. There was a motor-car with

an old lady swathed in blue veils, and a lady’s maid on the seat

opposite, holding a King Charles’s spaniel; there was a country-woman

wheeling a perambulator full of sticks down the middle of the road;

there was a bailiff in gaiters discussing the state of the cattle

market with a dissenting minister—so she defined them.

She ran over this list without any fear that her companion would think

her trivial. Indeed, whether it was due to the warmth of the room or to

the good roast beef, or whether Ralph had achieved the process which is

called making up one’s mind, certainly he had given up testing the good

sense, the independent character, the intelligence shown in her

remarks. He had been building one of those piles of thought, as

ramshackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from words let fall

by gentlemen in gaiters, half from the litter in his own mind, about

duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln

and the relations of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all

this disconnected rambling, there suddenly formed itself in his mind

the idea that he would ask Mary to marry him. The idea was so

spontaneous that it seemed to shape itself of its own accord before his

eyes. It was then that he turned round and made use of his old,

instinctive phrase:

“Well, Mary—?”

As it presented itself to him at first, the idea was so new and

interesting that he was half inclined to address it, without more ado,

to Mary herself. His natural instinct to divide his thoughts carefully

into two different classes before he expressed them to her prevailed.

But as he watched her looking out of the window and describing the old

lady, the woman with the perambulator, the bailiff and the dissenting

minister, his eyes filled involuntarily with tears. He would have liked

to lay his head on her shoulder and sob, while she parted his hair with

her fingers and soothed him and said:

“There, there. Don’t cry! Tell me why you’re crying—“; and they would

clasp each other tight, and her arms would hold him like his mother’s.

He felt that he was very lonely, and that he was afraid of the other

people in the room.

“How damnable this all is!” he exclaimed abruptly.

“What are you talking about?” she replied, rather vaguely, still

looking out of the window.

He resented this divided attention more than, perhaps, he knew, and he

thought how Mary would soon be on her way to America.

“Mary,” he said, “I want to talk to you. Haven’t we nearly done? Why

don’t they take away these plates?”

Mary felt his agitation without looking at him; she felt convinced that

she knew what it was that he wished to say to her.

“They’ll come all in good time,” she said; and felt it necessary to

display her extreme calmness by lifting a salt-cellar and sweeping up a

little heap of bread-crumbs.

“I want to apologize,” Ralph continued, not quite knowing what he was

about to say, but feeling some curious instinct which urged him to

commit himself irrevocably, and to prevent the moment of intimacy from

passing.

“I think I’ve treated you very badly. That is, I’ve told you lies. Did

you guess that I was lying to you? Once in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and

again to-day on our walk. I am a liar, Mary. Did you know that? Do you

think you do know me?”

“I think I do,” she said.

At this point the waiter changed their plates.

“It’s true I don’t want you to go to America,” he said, looking fixedly

at the table-cloth. “In fact, my feelings towards you seem to be

utterly and damnably bad,” he said energetically, although forced to

keep his voice low.

“If I weren’t a selfish beast I should tell you to have nothing more to

do with me. And yet, Mary, in spite of the fact that I believe what I’m

saying, I also believe that it’s good we should know each other—the

world being what it is, you see—” and by a nod of his head he indicated

the other occupants of the room, “for, of course, in an ideal state of

things, in a decent community even, there’s no doubt you shouldn’t have

anything to do with me—seriously, that is.”

“You forget that I’m not an ideal character, either,” said Mary, in the

same low and very earnest tones, which, in spite of being almost

inaudible, surrounded their table with an atmosphere of concentration

which was quite perceptible to the other diners, who glanced at them

now and then with a queer mixture of kindness, amusement, and

curiosity.

“I’m much more selfish than I let on, and I’m worldly a little—more

than you think, anyhow. I like bossing things—perhaps that’s my

greatest fault. I’ve none of your passion for—” here she hesitated, and

glanced at him, as if to ascertain what his passion was for—“for the

truth,” she added, as if she had found what she sought indisputably.

“I’ve told you I’m a liar,” Ralph repeated obstinately.

“Oh, in little things, I dare say,” she said impatiently. “But not in

real ones, and that’s what matters. I dare say I’m more truthful than

you are in small ways. But I could never care”—she was surprised to

find herself speaking the word, and had to force herself to speak it

out—“for any one who was a liar in that way. I love the truth a certain

amount—a considerable amount—but not in the way you love it.” Her voice

sank, became inaudible, and wavered as if she could scarcely keep

herself from tears.

“Good heavens!” Ralph exclaimed to himself. “She loves me! Why did I

never see it before? She’s going to cry; no, but she can’t speak.”

The certainty overwhelmed him so that he scarcely knew what he was

doing; the blood rushed to his cheeks, and although he had quite made

up his mind to ask her to marry him, the certainty that she loved him

seemed to change the situation so completely that he could not do it.

He did not dare to look at her. If she cried, he did not know what he

should do. It seemed to him that something of a terrible and

devastating nature had happened. The waiter changed their plates once

more.

In his agitation Ralph rose, turned his back upon Mary, and looked out

of the window. The people in the street seemed to him only a dissolving

and combining pattern of black particles; which, for the moment,

represented very well the involuntary procession of feelings and

thoughts which formed and dissolved in rapid succession in his own

mind. At one moment he exulted in the thought that Mary loved him; at

the next, it seemed that he was without feeling for her; her love was

repulsive to him. Now he felt urged to marry her at once; now to

disappear and never see her again. In order to control this disorderly

race of thought he forced himself to read the name on the chemist’s

shop directly opposite him; then to examine the objects in the shop

windows, and then to focus his eyes exactly upon a little group of

women looking in at the great windows of a large draper’s shop. This

discipline having given him at least a superficial control of himself,

he was about to turn and ask the waiter to bring the bill, when his eye

was caught by a tall figure walking quickly along the opposite

pavement—a tall figure, upright, dark, and commanding, much detached

from her surroundings. She held her gloves in her left hand, and the

left hand was bare. All this Ralph noticed and enumerated and

recognized before he put a name to the whole—Katharine Hilbery. She

seemed to be looking for somebody. Her eyes, in fact, scanned both