Night and Day
by Virginia Woolf
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
Return to Part 1 of 2

"Now," she said to herself, rising from her seat, "I'll think of
Ralph."

Where was he to be placed in the new scale of life? Her exalted mood
seemed to make it safe to handle the question. But she was dismayed to
find how quickly her passions leapt forward the moment she sanctioned
this line of thought. Now she was identified with him and rethought
his thoughts with complete self-surrender; now, with a sudden cleavage
of spirit, she turned upon him and denounced him for his cruelty.

"But I refuse--I refuse to hate any one," she said aloud; chose the
moment to cross the road with circumspection, and ten minutes later
lunched in the Strand, cutting her meat firmly into small pieces, but
giving her fellow-diners no further cause to judge her eccentric. Her
soliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emerging
suddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when she had
to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or to
choose a turning. "To know the truth--to accept without bitterness"--
those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no one
could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in front
of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford, save that the name of Ralph
occurred frequently in very strange connections, as if, having spoken
it, she wished, superstitiously, to cancel it by adding some other
word that robbed the sentence with his name in it of any meaning.

Those champions of the cause of women, Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal, did
not perceive anything strange in Mary's behavior, save that she was
almost half an hour later than usual in coming back to the office.
Happily, their own affairs kept them busy, and she was free from their
inspection. If they had surprised her they would have found her lost,
apparently, in admiration of the large hotel across the square, for,
after writing a few words, her pen rested upon the paper, and her mind
pursued its own journey among the sun-blazoned windows and the drifts
of purplish smoke which formed her view. And, indeed, this background
was by no means out of keeping with her thoughts. She saw to the
remote spaces behind the strife of the foreground, enabled now to gaze
there, since she had renounced her own demands, privileged to see the
larger view, to share the vast desires and sufferings of the mass of
mankind. She had been too lately and too roughly mastered by facts to
take an easy pleasure in the relief of renunciation; such satisfaction
as she felt came only from the discovery that, having renounced
everything that made life happy, easy, splendid, individual, there
remained a hard reality, unimpaired by one's personal adventures,
remote as the stars, unquenchable as they are.

While Mary Datchet was undergoing this curious transformation from the
particular to the universal, Mrs. Seal remembered her duties with
regard to the kettle and the gas-fire. She was a little surprised to
find that Mary had drawn her chair to the window, and, having lit the
gas, she raised herself from a stooping posture and looked at her. The
most obvious reason for such an attitude in a secretary was some kind
of indisposition. But Mary, rousing herself with an effort, denied
that she was indisposed.

"I'm frightfully lazy this afternoon," she added, with a glance at her
table. "You must really get another secretary, Sally."

The words were meant to be taken lightly, but something in the tone of
them roused a jealous fear which was always dormant in Mrs. Seal's
breast. She was terribly afraid that one of these days Mary, the young
woman who typified so many rather sentimental and enthusiastic ideas,
who had some sort of visionary existence in white with a sheaf of
lilies in her hand, would announce, in a jaunty way, that she was
about to be married.

"You don't mean that you're going to leave us?" she said.

"I've not made up my mind about anything," said Mary--a remark which
could be taken as a generalization.

Mrs. Seal got the teacups out of the cupboard and set them on the
table.

"You're not going to be married, are you?" she asked, pronouncing the
words with nervous speed.

"Why are you asking such absurd questions this afternoon, Sally?" Mary
asked, not very steadily. "Must we all get married?"

Mrs. Seal emitted a most peculiar chuckle. She seemed for one moment
to acknowledge the terrible side of life which is concerned with the
emotions, the private lives, of the sexes, and then to sheer off from
it with all possible speed into the shades of her own shivering
virginity. She was made so uncomfortable by the turn the conversation
had taken, that she plunged her head into the cupboard, and endeavored
to abstract some very obscure piece of china.

"We have our work," she said, withdrawing her head, displaying cheeks
more than usually crimson, and placing a jam-pot emphatically upon the
table. But, for the moment, she was unable to launch herself upon one
of those enthusiastic, but inconsequent, tirades upon liberty,
democracy, the rights of the people, and the iniquities of the
Government, in which she delighted. Some memory from her own past or
from the past of her sex rose to her mind and kept her abashed. She
glanced furtively at Mary, who still sat by the window with her arm
upon the sill. She noticed how young she was and full of the promise
of womanhood. The sight made her so uneasy that she fidgeted the cups
upon their saucers.

"Yes--enough work to last a lifetime," said Mary, as if concluding
some passage of thought.

Mrs. Seal brightened at once. She lamented her lack of scientific
training, and her deficiency in the processes of logic, but she set
her mind to work at once to make the prospects of the cause appear as
alluring and important as she could. She delivered herself of an
harangue in which she asked a great many rhetorical questions and
answered them with a little bang of one fist upon another.

"To last a lifetime? My dear child, it will last all our lifetimes. As
one falls another steps into the breach. My father, in his generation,
a pioneer--I, coming after him, do my little best. What, alas! can one
do more? And now it's you young women--we look to you--the future
looks to you. Ah, my dear, if I'd a thousand lives, I'd give them all
to our cause. The cause of women, d'you say? I say the cause of
humanity. And there are some"--she glanced fiercely at the window--
"who don't see it! There are some who are satisfied to go on, year
after year, refusing to admit the truth. And we who have the vision--
the kettle boiling over? No, no, let me see to it--we who know the
truth," she continued, gesticulating with the kettle and the teapot.
Owing to these encumbrances, perhaps, she lost the thread of her
discourse, and concluded, rather wistfully, "It's all so SIMPLE." She
referred to a matter that was a perpetual source of bewilderment to
her--the extraordinary incapacity of the human race, in a world where
the good is so unmistakably divided from the bad, of distinguishing
one from the other, and embodying what ought to be done in a few
large, simple Acts of Parliament, which would, in a very short time,
completely change the lot of humanity.

"One would have thought," she said, "that men of University training,
like Mr. Asquith--one would have thought that an appeal to reason
would not be unheard by them. But reason," she reflected, "what is
reason without Reality?"

Doing homage to the phrase, she repeated it once more, and caught the
ear of Mr. Clacton, as he issued from his room; and he repeated it a
third time, giving it, as he was in the habit of doing with Mrs.
Seal's phrases, a dryly humorous intonation. He was well pleased with
the world, however, and he remarked, in a flattering manner, that he
would like to see that phrase in large letters at the head of a
leaflet.

"But, Mrs. Seal, we have to aim at a judicious combination of the
two," he added in his magisterial way to check the unbalanced
enthusiasm of the women. "Reality has to be voiced by reason before it
can make itself felt. The weak point of all these movements, Miss
Datchet," he continued, taking his place at the table and turning to
Mary as usual when about to deliver his more profound cogitations, "is
that they are not based upon sufficiently intellectual grounds. A
mistake, in my opinion. The British public likes a pellet of reason in
its jam of eloquence--a pill of reason in its pudding of sentiment,"
he said, sharpening the phrase to a satisfactory degree of literary
precision.

His eyes rested, with something of the vanity of an author, upon the
yellow leaflet which Mary held in her hand. She rose, took her seat at
the head of the table, poured out tea for her colleagues, and gave her
opinion upon the leaflet. So she had poured out tea, so she had
criticized Mr. Clacton's leaflets a hundred times already; but now it
seemed to her that she was doing it in a different spirit; she had
enlisted in the army, and was a volunteer no longer. She had renounced
something and was now--how could she express it?;--not quite "in the
running" for life. She had always known that Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal
were not in the running, and across the gulf that separated them she
had seen them in the guise of shadow people, flitting in and out of
the ranks of the living--eccentrics, undeveloped human beings, from
whose substance some essential part had been cut away. All this had
never struck her so clearly as it did this afternoon, when she felt
that her lot was cast with them for ever. One view of the world
plunged in darkness, so a more volatile temperament might have argued
after a season of despair, let the world turn again and show another,
more splendid, perhaps. No, Mary thought, with unflinching loyalty to
what appeared to her to be the true view, having lost what is best, I
do not mean to pretend that any other view does instead. Whatever
happens, I mean to have no presences in my life. Her very words had a
sort of distinctness which is sometimes produced by sharp, bodily
pain. To Mrs. Seal's secret jubilation the rule which forbade
discussion of shop at tea-time was overlooked. Mary and Mr. Clacton
argued with a cogency and a ferocity which made the little woman feel
that something very important--she hardly knew what--was taking place.
She became much excited; one crucifix became entangled with another,
and she dug a considerable hole in the table with the point of her
pencil in order to emphasize the most striking heads of the discourse;
and how any combination of Cabinet Ministers could resist such
discourse she really did not know.

She could hardly bring herself to remember her own private instrument
of justice--the typewriter. The telephone-bell rang, and as she
hurried off to answer a voice which always seemed a proof of
importance by itself, she felt that it was at this exact spot on the
surface of the globe that all the subterranean wires of thought and
progress came together. When she returned, with a message from the
printer, she found that Mary was putting on her hat firmly; there was
something imperious and dominating in her attitude altogether.

"Look, Sally," she said, "these letters want copying. These I've not
looked at. The question of the new census will have to be gone into
carefully. But I'm going home now. Good night, Mr. Clacton; good
night, Sally."

"We are very fortunate in our secretary, Mr. Clacton," said Mrs. Seal,
pausing with her hand on the papers, as the door shut behind Mary. Mr.
Clacton himself had been vaguely impressed by something in Mary's
behavior towards him. He envisaged a time even when it would become
necessary to tell her that there could not be two masters in one
office--but she was certainly able, very able, and in touch with a
group of very clever young men. No doubt they had suggested to her
some of her new ideas.

He signified his assent to Mrs. Seal's remark, but observed, with a
glance at the clock, which showed only half an hour past five:

"If she takes the work seriously, Mrs. Seal--but that's just what some
of your clever young ladies don't do." So saying he returned to his
room, and Mrs. Seal, after a moment's hesitation, hurried back to her
labors.

CHAPTER XXI

Mary walked to the nearest station and reached home in an incredibly
short space of time, just so much, indeed, as was needed for the
intelligent understanding of the news of the world as the "Westminster
Gazette" reported it. Within a few minutes of opening her door, she
was in trim for a hard evening's work. She unlocked a drawer and took
out a manuscript, which consisted of a very few pages, entitled, in a
forcible hand, "Some Aspects of the Democratic State." The aspects
dwindled out in a cries-cross of blotted lines in the very middle of a
sentence, and suggested that the author had been interrupted, or
convinced of the futility of proceeding, with her pen in the
air. . . . Oh, yes, Ralph had come in at that point. She scored that
sheet very effectively, and, choosing a fresh one, began at a great
rate with a generalization upon the structure of human society, which
was a good deal bolder than her custom. Ralph had told her once that
she couldn't write English, which accounted for those frequent blots
and insertions; but she put all that behind her, and drove ahead with
such words as came her way, until she had accomplished half a page of
generalization and might legitimately draw breath. Directly her hand
stopped her brain stopped too, and she began to listen. A paper-boy
shouted down the street; an omnibus ceased and lurched on again with
the heave of duty once more shouldered; the dullness of the sounds
suggested that a fog had risen since her return, if, indeed, a fog has
power to deaden sound, of which fact, she could not be sure at the
present moment. It was the sort of fact Ralph Denham knew. At any
rate, it was no concern of hers, and she was about to dip a pen when
her ear was caught by the sound of a step upon the stone staircase.
She followed it past Mr. Chippen's chambers; past Mr. Gibson's; past
Mr. Turner's; after which it became her sound. A postman, a
washerwoman, a circular, a bill--she presented herself with each of
these perfectly natural possibilities; but, to her surprise, her mind
rejected each one of them impatiently, even apprehensively. The step
became slow, as it was apt to do at the end of the steep climb, and
Mary, listening for the regular sound, was filled with an intolerable
nervousness. Leaning against the table, she felt the knock of her
heart push her body perceptibly backwards and forwards--a state of
nerves astonishing and reprehensible in a stable woman. Grotesque
fancies took shape. Alone, at the top of the house, an unknown person
approaching nearer and nearer--how could she escape? There was no way
of escape. She did not even know whether that oblong mark on the
ceiling was a trap-door to the roof or not. And if she got on to the
roof--well, there was a drop of sixty feet or so on to the pavement.
But she sat perfectly still, and when the knock sounded, she got up
directly and opened the door without hesitation. She saw a tall figure
outside, with something ominous to her eyes in the look of it.

"What do you want?" she said, not recognizing the face in the fitful
light of the staircase.

"Mary? I'm Katharine Hilbery!"

Mary's self-possession returned almost excessively, and her welcome
was decidedly cold, as if she must recoup herself for this ridiculous
waste of emotion. She moved her green-shaded lamp to another table,
and covered "Some Aspects of the Democratic State" with a sheet of
blotting-paper.

"Why can't they leave me alone?" she thought bitterly, connecting
Katharine and Ralph in a conspiracy to take from her even this hour of
solitary study, even this poor little defence against the world. And,
as she smoothed down the sheet of blotting-paper over the manuscript,
she braced herself to resist Katharine, whose presence struck her, not
merely by its force, as usual, but as something in the nature of a
menace.

"You're working?" said Katharine, with hesitation, perceiving that she
was not welcome.

"Nothing that matters," Mary replied, drawing forward the best of the
chairs and poking the fire.

"I didn't know you had to work after you had left the office," said
Katharine, in a tone which gave the impression that she was thinking
of something else, as was, indeed, the case.

She had been paying calls with her mother, and in between the calls
Mrs. Hilbery had rushed into shops and bought pillow-cases and
blotting-books on no perceptible method for the furnishing of
Katharine's house. Katharine had a sense of impedimenta accumulating
on all sides of her. She had left her at length, and had come on to
keep an engagement to dine with Rodney at his rooms. But she did not
mean to get to him before seven o'clock, and so had plenty of time to
walk all the way from Bond Street to the Temple if she wished it. The
flow of faces streaming on either side of her had hypnotized her into
a mood of profound despondency, to which her expectation of an evening
alone with Rodney contributed. They were very good friends again,
better friends, they both said, than ever before. So far as she was
concerned this was true. There were many more things in him than she
had guessed until emotion brought them forth--strength, affection,
sympathy. And she thought of them and looked at the faces passing, and
thought how much alike they were, and how distant, nobody feeling
anything as she felt nothing, and distance, she thought, lay
inevitably between the closest, and their intimacy was the worst
presence of all. For, "Oh dear," she thought, looking into a
tobacconist's window, "I don't care for any of them, and I don't care
for William, and people say this is the thing that matters most, and I
can't see what they mean by it."

She looked desperately at the smooth-bowled pipes, and wondered--
should she walk on by the Strand or by the Embankment? It was not a
simple question, for it concerned not different streets so much as
different streams of thought. If she went by the Strand she would
force herself to think out the problem of the future, or some
mathematical problem; if she went by the river she would certainly
begin to think about things that didn't exist--the forest, the ocean
beach, the leafy solitudes, the magnanimous hero. No, no, no! A
thousand times no!--it wouldn't do; there was something repulsive in
such thoughts at present; she must take something else; she was out of
that mood at present. And then she thought of Mary; the thought gave
her confidence, even pleasure of a sad sort, as if the triumph of
Ralph and Mary proved that the fault of her failure lay with herself
and not with life. An indistinct idea that the sight of Mary might be
of help, combined with her natural trust in her, suggested a visit;
for, surely, her liking was of a kind that implied liking upon Mary's
side also. After a moment's hesitation she decided, although she
seldom acted upon impulse, to act upon this one, and turned down a
side street and found Mary's door. But her reception was not
encouraging; clearly Mary didn't want to see her, had no help to
impart, and the half-formed desire to confide in her was quenched
immediately. She was slightly amused at her own delusion, looked
rather absent-minded, and swung her gloves to and fro, as if doling
out the few minutes accurately before she could say good-by.

Those few minutes might very well be spent in asking for information
as to the exact position of the Suffrage Bill, or in expounding her
own very sensible view of the situation. But there was a tone in her
voice, or a shade in her opinions, or a swing of her gloves which
served to irritate Mary Datchet, whose manner became increasingly
direct, abrupt, and even antagonistic. She became conscious of a wish
to make Katharine realize the importance of this work, which she
discussed so coolly, as though she, too, had sacrificed what Mary
herself had sacrificed. The swinging of the gloves ceased, and
Katharine, after ten minutes, began to make movements preliminary to
departure. At the sight of this, Mary was aware--she was abnormally
aware of things to-night--of another very strong desire; Katharine was
not to be allowed to go, to disappear into the free, happy world of
irresponsible individuals. She must be made to realize--to feel.

"I don't quite see," she said, as if Katharine had challenged her
explicitly, "how, things being as they are, any one can help trying,
at least, to do something."

"No. But how ARE things?"

Mary pressed her lips, and smiled ironically; she had Katharine at her
mercy; she could, if she liked, discharge upon her head wagon-loads of
revolting proof of the state of things ignored by the casual, the
amateur, the looker-on, the cynical observer of life at a distance.
And yet she hesitated. As usual, when she found herself in talk with
Katharine, she began to feel rapid alternations of opinion about her,
arrows of sensation striking strangely through the envelope of
personality, which shelters us so conveniently from our fellows. What
an egoist, how aloof she was! And yet, not in her words, perhaps, but
in her voice, in her face, in her attitude, there were signs of a soft
brooding spirit, of a sensibility unblunted and profound, playing over
her thoughts and deeds, and investing her manner with an habitual
gentleness. The arguments and phrases of Mr. Clacton fell flat against
such armor.

"You'll be married, and you'll have other things to think of," she
said inconsequently, and with an accent of condescension. She was not
going to make Katharine understand in a second, as she would, all she
herself had learnt at the cost of such pain. No. Katharine was to be
happy; Katharine was to be ignorant; Mary was to keep this knowledge
of the impersonal life for herself. The thought of her morning's
renunciation stung her conscience, and she tried to expand once more
into that impersonal condition which was so lofty and so painless. She
must check this desire to be an individual again, whose wishes were in
conflict with those of other people. She repented of her bitterness.

Katharine now renewed her signs of leave-taking; she had drawn on one
of her gloves, and looked about her as if in search of some trivial
saying to end with. Wasn't there some picture, or clock, or chest of
drawers which might be singled out for notice? something peaceable and
friendly to end the uncomfortable interview? The green-shaded lamp
burnt in the corner, and illumined books and pens and blotting-paper.
The whole aspect of the place started another train of thought and
struck her as enviably free; in such a room one could work--one could
have a life of one's own.

"I think you're very lucky," she observed. "I envy you, living alone
and having your own things"--and engaged in this exalted way, which
had no recognition or engagement-ring, she added in her own mind.

Mary's lips parted slightly. She could not conceive in what respects
Katharine, who spoke sincerely, could envy her.

"I don't think you've got any reason to envy me," she said.

"Perhaps one always envies other people," Katharine observed vaguely.

"Well, but you've got everything that any one can want."

Katharine remained silent. She gazed into the fire quietly, and
without a trace of self-consciousness. The hostility which she had
divined in Mary's tone had completely disappeared, and she forgot that
she had been upon the point of going.

"Well, I suppose I have," she said at length. "And yet I sometimes
think--" She paused; she did not know how to express what she meant.

"It came over me in the Tube the other day," she resumed, with a
smile; "what is it that makes these people go one way rather than the
other? It's not love; it's not reason; I think it must be some idea.
Perhaps, Mary, our affections are the shadow of an idea. Perhaps there
isn't any such thing as affection in itself. . . ." She spoke
half-mockingly, asking her question, which she scarcely troubled to
frame, not of Mary, or of any one in particular.

But the words seemed to Mary Datchet shallow, supercilious,
cold-blooded, and cynical all in one. All her natural instincts were
roused in revolt against them.

"I'm the opposite way of thinking, you see," she said.

"Yes; I know you are," Katharine replied, looking at her as if now she
were about, perhaps, to explain something very important.

Mary could not help feeling the simplicity and good faith that lay
behind Katharine's words.

"I think affection is the only reality," she said.

"Yes," said Katharine, almost sadly. She understood that Mary was
thinking of Ralph, and she felt it impossible to press her to reveal
more of this exalted condition; she could only respect the fact that,
in some few cases, life arranged itself thus satisfactorily and pass
on. She rose to her feet accordingly. But Mary exclaimed, with
unmistakable earnestness, that she must not go; that they met so
seldom; that she wanted to talk to her so much. . . . Katharine was
surprised at the earnestness with which she spoke. It seemed to her
that there could be no indiscretion in mentioning Ralph by name.

Seating herself "for ten minutes," she said: "By the way, Mr. Denham
told me he was going to give up the Bar and live in the country. Has
he gone? He was beginning to tell me about it, when we were
interrupted."

"He thinks of it," said Mary briefly. The color at once came to her
face.

"It would be a very good plan," said Katharine in her decided way.

"You think so?"

"Yes, because he would do something worth while; he would write a
book. My father always says that he's the most remarkable of the young
men who write for him."

Mary bent low over the fire and stirred the coal between the bars with
a poker. Katharine's mention of Ralph had roused within her an almost
irresistible desire to explain to her the true state of the case
between herself and Ralph. She knew, from the tone of her voice, that
in speaking of Ralph she had no desire to probe Mary's secrets, or to
insinuate any of her own. Moreover, she liked Katharine; she trusted
her; she felt a respect for her. The first step of confidence was
comparatively simple; but a further confidence had revealed itself, as
Katharine spoke, which was not so simple, and yet it impressed itself
upon her as a necessity; she must tell Katharine what it was clear
that she had no conception of--she must tell Katharine that Ralph was
in love with her.

"I don't know what he means to do," she said hurriedly, seeking time
against the pressure of her own conviction. "I've not seen him since
Christmas."

Katharine reflected that this was odd; perhaps, after all, she had
misunderstood the position. She was in the habit of assuming, however,
that she was rather unobservant of the finer shades of feeling, and
she noted her present failure as another proof that she was a
practical, abstract-minded person, better fitted to deal with figures
than with the feelings of men and women. Anyhow, William Rodney would
say so.

"And now--" she said.

"Oh, please stay!" Mary exclaimed, putting out her hand to stop her.
Directly Katharine moved she felt, inarticulately and violently, that
she could not bear to let her go. If Katharine went, her only chance
of speaking was lost; her only chance of saying something tremendously
important was lost. Half a dozen words were sufficient to wake
Katharine's attention, and put flight and further silence beyond her
power. But although the words came to her lips, her throat closed upon
them and drove them back. After all, she considered, why should she
speak? Because it is right, her instinct told her; right to expose
oneself without reservations to other human beings. She flinched from
the thought. It asked too much of one already stripped bare. Something
she must keep of her own. But if she did keep something of her own?
Immediately she figured an immured life, continuing for an immense
period, the same feelings living for ever, neither dwindling nor
changing within the ring of a thick stone wall. The imagination of
this loneliness frightened her, and yet to speak--to lose her
loneliness, for it had already become dear to her, was beyond her
power.

Her hand went down to the hem of Katharine's skirt, and, fingering a
line of fur, she bent her head as if to examine it.

"I like this fur," she said, "I like your clothes. And you mustn't
think that I'm going to marry Ralph," she continued, in the same tone,
"because he doesn't care for me at all. He cares for some one else."
Her head remained bent, and her hand still rested upon the skirt.

"It's a shabby old dress," said Katharine, and the only sign that
Mary's words had reached her was that she spoke with a little jerk.

"You don't mind my telling you that?" said Mary, raising herself.

"No, no," said Katharine; "but you're mistaken, aren't you?" She was,
in truth, horribly uncomfortable, dismayed, indeed, disillusioned. She
disliked the turn things had taken quite intensely. The indecency of
it afflicted her. The suffering implied by the tone appalled her. She
looked at Mary furtively, with eyes that were full of apprehension.
But if she had hoped to find that these words had been spoken without
understanding of their meaning, she was at once disappointed. Mary lay
back in her chair, frowning slightly, and looking, Katharine thought,
as if she had lived fifteen years or so in the space of a few minutes.

"There are some things, don't you think, that one can't be mistaken
about?" Mary said, quietly and almost coldly. "That is what puzzles me
about this question of being in love. I've always prided myself upon
being reasonable," she added. "I didn't think I could have felt
this--I mean if the other person didn't. I was foolish. I let myself
pretend." Here she paused. "For, you see, Katharine," she proceeded,
rousing herself and speaking with greater energy, "I AM in love.
There's no doubt about that. . . . I'm tremendously in love . . . with
Ralph." The little forward shake of her head, which shook a lock of
hair, together with her brighter color, gave her an appearance at once
proud and defiant.

Katharine thought to herself, "That's how it feels then." She
hesitated, with a feeling that it was not for her to speak; and then
said, in a low tone, "You've got that."

"Yes," said Mary; "I've got that. One wouldn't NOT be in love. . . .
But I didn't mean to talk about that; I only wanted you to know.
There's another thing I want to tell you . . ." She paused. "I haven't
any authority from Ralph to say it; but I'm sure of this--he's in love
with you."

Katharine looked at her again, as if her first glance must have been
deluded, for, surely, there must be some outward sign that Mary was
talking in an excited, or bewildered, or fantastic manner. No; she
still frowned, as if she sought her way through the clauses of a
difficult argument, but she still looked more like one who reasons
than one who feels.

"That proves that you're mistaken--utterly mistaken," said Katharine,
speaking reasonably, too. She had no need to verify the mistake by a
glance at her own recollections, when the fact was so clearly stamped
upon her mind that if Ralph had any feeling towards her it was one of
critical hostility. She did not give the matter another thought, and
Mary, now that she had stated the fact, did not seek to prove it, but
tried to explain to herself, rather than to Katharine, her motives in
making the statement.

She had nerved herself to do what some large and imperious instinct
demanded her doing; she had been swept on the breast of a wave beyond
her reckoning.

"I've told you," she said, "because I want you to help me. I don't
want to be jealous of you. And I am--I'm fearfully jealous. The only
way, I thought, was to tell you."

She hesitated, and groped in her endeavor to make her feelings clear
to herself.

"If I tell you, then we can talk; and when I'm jealous, I can tell
you. And if I'm tempted to do something frightfully mean, I can tell
you; you could make me tell you. I find talking so difficult; but
loneliness frightens me. I should shut it up in my mind. Yes, that's
what I'm afraid of. Going about with something in my mind all my life
that never changes. I find it so difficult to change. When I think a
thing's wrong I never stop thinking it wrong, and Ralph was quite
right, I see, when he said that there's no such thing as right and
wrong; no such thing, I mean, as judging people--"

"Ralph Denham said that?" said Katharine, with considerable
indignation. In order to have produced such suffering in Mary, it
seemed to her that he must have behaved with extreme callousness. It
seemed to her that he had discarded the friendship, when it suited his
convenience to do so, with some falsely philosophical theory which
made his conduct all the worse. She was going on to express herself
thus, had not Mary at once interrupted her.

"No, no," she said; "you don't understand. If there's any fault it's
mine entirely; after all, if one chooses to run risks--"

Her voice faltered into silence. It was borne in upon her how
completely in running her risk she had lost her prize, lost it so
entirely that she had no longer the right, in talking of Ralph, to
presume that her knowledge of him supplanted all other knowledge. She
no longer completely possessed her love, since his share in it was
doubtful; and now, to make things yet more bitter, her clear vision of
the way to face life was rendered tremulous and uncertain, because
another was witness of it. Feeling her desire for the old unshared
intimacy too great to be borne without tears, she rose, walked to the
farther end of the room, held the curtains apart, and stood there
mastered for a moment. The grief itself was not ignoble; the sting of
it lay in the fact that she had been led to this act of treachery
against herself. Trapped, cheated, robbed, first by Ralph and then by
Katharine, she seemed all dissolved in humiliation, and bereft of
anything she could call her own. Tears of weakness welled up and
rolled down her cheeks. But tears, at least, she could control, and
would this instant, and then, turning, she would face Katharine, and
retrieve what could be retrieved of the collapse of her courage.

She turned. Katharine had not moved; she was leaning a little forward
in her chair and looking into the fire. Something in the attitude
reminded Mary of Ralph. So he would sit, leaning forward, looking
rather fixedly in front of him, while his mind went far away,
exploring, speculating, until he broke off with his, "Well, Mary?"--
and the silence, that had been so full of romance to her, gave way to
the most delightful talk that she had ever known.

Something unfamiliar in the pose of the silent figure, something
still, solemn, significant about it, made her hold her breath. She
paused. Her thoughts were without bitterness. She was surprised by her
own quiet and confidence. She came back silently, and sat once more by
Katharine's side. Mary had no wish to speak. In the silence she seemed
to have lost her isolation; she was at once the sufferer and the
pitiful spectator of suffering; she was happier than she had ever
been; she was more bereft; she was rejected, and she was immensely
beloved. Attempt to express these sensations was vain, and, moreover,
she could not help believing that, without any words on her side, they
were shared. Thus for some time longer they sat silent, side by side,
while Mary fingered the fur on the skirt of the old dress.

CHAPTER XXII

The fact that she would be late in keeping her engagement with William
was not the only reason which sent Katharine almost at racing speed
along the Strand in the direction of his rooms. Punctuality might have
been achieved by taking a cab, had she not wished the open air to fan
into flame the glow kindled by Mary's words. For among all the
impressions of the evening's talk one was of the nature of a
revelation and subdued the rest to insignificance. Thus one looked;
thus one spoke; such was love.

"She sat up straight and looked at me, and then she said, 'I'm in
love,'" Katharine mused, trying to set the whole scene in motion. It
was a scene to dwell on with so much wonder that not a grain of pity
occurred to her; it was a flame blazing suddenly in the dark; by its
light Katharine perceived far too vividly for her comfort the
mediocrity, indeed the entirely fictitious character of her own
feelings so far as they pretended to correspond with Mary's feelings.
She made up her mind to act instantly upon the knowledge thus gained,
and cast her mind in amazement back to the scene upon the heath, when
she had yielded, heaven knows why, for reasons which seemed now
imperceptible. So in broad daylight one might revisit the place where
one has groped and turned and succumbed to utter bewilderment in a
fog.

"It's all so simple," she said to herself. "There can't be any doubt.
I've only got to speak now. I've only got to speak," she went on
saying, in time to her own footsteps, and completely forgot Mary
Datchet.

William Rodney, having come back earlier from the office than he
expected, sat down to pick out the melodies in "The Magic Flute" upon
the piano. Katharine was late, but that was nothing new, and, as she
had no particular liking for music, and he felt in the mood for it,
perhaps it was as well. This defect in Katharine was the more strange,
William reflected, because, as a rule, the women of her family were
unusually musical. Her cousin, Cassandra Otway, for example, had a
very fine taste in music, and he had charming recollections of her in
a light fantastic attitude, playing the flute in the morning-room at
Stogdon House. He recalled with pleasure the amusing way in which her
nose, long like all the Otway noses, seemed to extend itself into the
flute, as if she were some inimitably graceful species of musical
mole. The little picture suggested very happily her melodious and
whimsical temperament. The enthusiasms of a young girl of
distinguished upbringing appealed to William, and suggested a thousand
ways in which, with his training and accomplishments, he could be of
service to her. She ought to be given the chance of hearing good
music, as it is played by those who have inherited the great
tradition. Moreover, from one or two remarks let fall in the course of
conversation, he thought it possible that she had what Katharine
professed to lack, a passionate, if untaught, appreciation of
literature. He had lent her his play. Meanwhile, as Katharine was
certain to be late, and "The Magic Flute" is nothing without a voice,
he felt inclined to spend the time of waiting in writing a letter to
Cassandra, exhorting her to read Pope in preference to Dostoevsky,
until her feeling for form was more highly developed. He set himself
down to compose this piece of advice in a shape which was light and
playful, and yet did no injury to a cause which he had near at heart,
when he heard Katharine upon the stairs. A moment later it was plain
that he had been mistaken, it was not Katharine; but he could not
settle himself to his letter. His temper had changed from one of
urbane contentment--indeed of delicious expansion--to one of
uneasiness and expectation. The dinner was brought in, and had to be
set by the fire to keep hot. It was now a quarter of an hour beyond
the specified time. He bethought him of a piece of news which had
depressed him in the earlier part of the day. Owing to the illness of
one of his fellow-clerks, it was likely that he would get no holiday
until later in the year, which would mean the postponement of their
marriage. But this possibility, after all, was not so disagreeable as
the probability which forced itself upon him with every tick of the
clock that Katharine had completely forgotten her engagement. Such
things had happened less frequently since Christmas, but what if they
were going to begin to happen again? What if their marriage should
turn out, as she had said, a farce? He acquitted her of any wish to
hurt him wantonly, but there was something in her character which made
it impossible for her to help hurting people. Was she cold? Was she
self-absorbed? He tried to fit her with each of these descriptions,
but he had to own that she puzzled him.

"There are so many things that she doesn't understand," he reflected,
glancing at the letter to Cassandra which he had begun and laid aside.
What prevented him from finishing the letter which he had so much
enjoyed beginning? The reason was that Katharine might, at any moment,
enter the room. The thought, implying his bondage to her, irritated
him acutely. It occurred to him that he would leave the letter lying
open for her to see, and he would take the opportunity of telling her
that he had sent his play to Cassandra for her to criticize. Possibly,
but not by any means certainly, this would annoy her--and as he
reached the doubtful comfort of this conclusion, there was a knock on
the door and Katharine came in. They kissed each other coldly and she
made no apology for being late. Nevertheless, her mere presence moved
him strangely; but he was determined that this should not weaken his
resolution to make some kind of stand against her; to get at the truth
about her. He let her make her own disposition of clothes and busied
himself with the plates.

"I've got a piece of news for you, Katharine," he said directly they
sat down to table; "I shan't get my holiday in April. We shall have to
put off our marriage."

He rapped the words out with a certain degree of briskness. Katharine
started a little, as if the announcement disturbed her thoughts.

"That won't make any difference, will it? I mean the lease isn't
signed," she replied. "But why? What has happened?"

He told her, in an off-hand way, how one of his fellow-clerks had
broken down, and might have to be away for months, six months even, in
which case they would have to think over their position. He said it in
a way which struck her, at last, as oddly casual. She looked at him.
There was no outward sign that he was annoyed with her. Was she well
dressed? She thought sufficiently so. Perhaps she was late? She looked
for a clock.

"It's a good thing we didn't take the house then," she repeated
thoughtfully.

"It'll mean, too, I'm afraid, that I shan't be as free for a
considerable time as I have been," he continued. She had time to
reflect that she gained something by all this, though it was too soon
to determine what. But the light which had been burning with such
intensity as she came along was suddenly overclouded, as much by his
manner as by his news. She had been prepared to meet opposition, which
is simple to encounter compared with--she did not know what it was
that she had to encounter. The meal passed in quiet, well-controlled
talk about indifferent things. Music was not a subject about which she
knew anything, but she liked him to tell her things; and could, she
mused, as he talked, fancy the evenings of married life spent thus,
over the fire; spent thus, or with a book, perhaps, for then she would
have time to read her books, and to grasp firmly with every muscle of
her unused mind what she longed to know. The atmosphere was very free.
Suddenly William broke off. She looked up apprehensively, brushing
aside these thoughts with annoyance.

"Where should I address a letter to Cassandra?" he asked her. It was
obvious again that William had some meaning or other to-night, or was
in some mood. "We've struck up a friendship," he added.

"She's at home, I think," Katharine replied.

"They keep her too much at home," said William. "Why don't you ask her
to stay with you, and let her hear a little good music? I'll just
finish what I was saying, if you don't mind, because I'm particularly
anxious that she should hear to-morrow."

Katharine sank back in her chair, and Rodney took the paper on his
knees, and went on with his sentence. "Style, you know, is what we
tend to neglect--"; but he was far more conscious of Katharine's eye
upon him than of what he was saying about style. He knew that she was
looking at him, but whether with irritation or indifference he could
not guess.

In truth, she had fallen sufficiently into his trap to feel
uncomfortably roused and disturbed and unable to proceed on the lines
laid down for herself. This indifferent, if not hostile, attitude on
William's part made it impossible to break off without animosity,
largely and completely. Infinitely preferable was Mary's state, she
thought, where there was a simple thing to do and one did it. In fact,
she could not help supposing that some littleness of nature had a part
in all the refinements, reserves, and subtleties of feeling for which
her friends and family were so distinguished. For example, although
she liked Cassandra well enough, her fantastic method of life struck
her as purely frivolous; now it was socialism, now it was silkworms,
now it was music--which last she supposed was the cause of William's
sudden interest in her. Never before had William wasted the minutes of
her presence in writing his letters. With a curious sense of light
opening where all, hitherto, had been opaque, it dawned upon her that,
after all, possibly, yes, probably, nay, certainly, the devotion which
she had almost wearily taken for granted existed in a much slighter
degree than she had suspected, or existed no longer. She looked at him
attentively as if this discovery of hers must show traces in his face.
Never had she seen so much to respect in his appearance, so much that
attracted her by its sensitiveness and intelligence, although she saw
these qualities as if they were those one responds to, dumbly, in the
face of a stranger. The head bent over the paper, thoughtful as usual,
had now a composure which seemed somehow to place it at a distance,
like a face seen talking to some one else behind glass.

He wrote on, without raising his eyes. She would have spoken, but
could not bring herself to ask him for signs of affection which she
had no right to claim. The conviction that he was thus strange to her
filled her with despondency, and illustrated quite beyond doubt the
infinite loneliness of human beings. She had never felt the truth of
this so strongly before. She looked away into the fire; it seemed to
her that even physically they were now scarcely within speaking
distance; and spiritually there was certainly no human being with whom
she could claim comradeship; no dream that satisfied her as she was
used to be satisfied; nothing remained in whose reality she could
believe, save those abstract ideas--figures, laws, stars, facts, which
she could hardly hold to for lack of knowledge and a kind of shame.

When Rodney owned to himself the folly of this prolonged silence, and
the meanness of such devices, and looked up ready to seek some excuse
for a good laugh, or opening for a confession, he was disconcerted by
what he saw. Katharine seemed equally oblivious of what was bad or of
what was good in him. Her expression suggested concentration upon
something entirely remote from her surroundings. The carelessness of
her attitude seemed to him rather masculine than feminine. His impulse
to break up the constraint was chilled, and once more the exasperating
sense of his own impotency returned to him. He could not help
contrasting Katharine with his vision of the engaging, whimsical
Cassandra; Katharine undemonstrative, inconsiderate, silent, and yet
so notable that he could never do without her good opinion.

She veered round upon him a moment later, as if, when her train of
thought was ended, she became aware of his presence.

"Have you finished your letter?" she asked. He thought he heard faint
amusement in her tone, but not a trace of jealousy.

"No, I'm not going to write any more to-night," he said. "I'm not in
the mood for it for some reason. I can't say what I want to say."

"Cassandra won't know if it's well written or badly written,"
Katharine remarked.

"I'm not so sure about that. I should say she has a good deal of
literary feeling."

"Perhaps," said Katharine indifferently. "You've been neglecting my
education lately, by the way. I wish you'd read something. Let me
choose a book." So speaking, she went across to his bookshelves and
began looking in a desultory way among his books. Anything, she
thought, was better than bickering or the strange silence which drove
home to her the distance between them. As she pulled one book forward
and then another she thought ironically of her own certainty not an
hour ago; how it had vanished in a moment, how she was merely marking
time as best she could, not knowing in the least where they stood,
what they felt, or whether William loved her or not. More and more the
condition of Mary's mind seemed to her wonderful and enviable--if,
indeed, it could be quite as she figured it--if, indeed, simplicity
existed for any one of the daughters of women.

"Swift," she said, at last, taking out a volume at haphazard to settle
this question at least. "Let us have some Swift."

Rodney took the book, held it in front of him, inserted one finger
between the pages, but said nothing. His face wore a queer expression
of deliberation, as if he were weighing one thing with another, and
would not say anything until his mind were made up.

Katharine, taking her chair beside him, noted his silence and looked
at him with sudden apprehension. What she hoped or feared, she could
not have said; a most irrational and indefensible desire for some
assurance of his affection was, perhaps, uppermost in her mind.
Peevishness, complaints, exacting cross-examination she was used to,
but this attitude of composed quiet, which seemed to come from the
consciousness of power within, puzzled her. She did not know what was
going to happen next.

At last William spoke.

"I think it's a little odd, don't you?" he said, in a voice of
detached reflection. "Most people, I mean, would be seriously upset if
their marriage was put off for six months or so. But we aren't; now
how do you account for that?"

She looked at him and observed his judicial attitude as of one holding
far aloof from emotion.

"I attribute it," he went on, without waiting for her to answer, "to
the fact that neither of us is in the least romantic about the other.
That may be partly, no doubt, because we've known each other so long;
but I'm inclined to think there's more in it than that. There's
something temperamental. I think you're a trifle cold, and I suspect
I'm a trifle self-absorbed. If that were so it goes a long way to
explaining our odd lack of illusion about each other. I'm not saying
that the most satisfactory marriages aren't founded upon this sort of
understanding. But certainly it struck me as odd this morning, when
Wilson told me, how little upset I felt. By the way, you're sure we
haven't committed ourselves to that house?"

"I've kept the letters, and I'll go through them to-morrow; but I'm
certain we're on the safe side."

"Thanks. As to the psychological problem," he continued, as if the
question interested him in a detached way, "there's no doubt, I think,
that either of us is capable of feeling what, for reasons of
simplicity, I call romance for a third person--at least, I've little
doubt in my own case."

It was, perhaps, the first time in all her knowledge of him that
Katharine had known William enter thus deliberately and without sign
of emotion upon a statement of his own feelings. He was wont to
discourage such intimate discussions by a little laugh or turn of the
conversation, as much as to say that men, or men of the world, find
such topics a little silly, or in doubtful taste. His obvious wish to
explain something puzzled her, interested her, and neutralized the
wound to her vanity. For some reason, too, she felt more at ease with
him than usual; or her ease was more the ease of equality--she could
not stop to think of that at the moment though. His remarks interested
her too much for the light that they threw upon certain problems of
her own.

"What is this romance?" she mused.

"Ah, that's the question. I've never come across a definition that
satisfied me, though there are some very good ones"--he glanced in the
direction of his books.

"It's not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps--it's
ignorance," she hazarded.

"Some authorities say it's a question of distance--romance in
literature, that is--"

"Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be--"
she hesitated.

"Have you no personal experience of it?" he asked, letting his eyes
rest upon her swiftly for a moment.

"I believe it's influenced me enormously," she said, in the tone of
one absorbed by the possibilities of some view just presented to them;
"but in my life there's so little scope for it," she added. She
reviewed her daily task, the perpetual demands upon her for good
sense, self-control, and accuracy in a house containing a romantic
mother. Ah, but her romance wasn't THAT romance. It was a desire, an
echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in
music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by
desires so incoherent, so incommunicable.

"But isn't it curious," William resumed, "that you should neither feel
it for me, nor I for you?"

Katharine agreed that it was curious--very; but even more curious to
her was the fact that she was discussing the question with William. It
revealed possibilities which opened a prospect of a new relationship
altogether. Somehow it seemed to her that he was helping her to
understand what she had never understood; and in her gratitude she was
conscious of a most sisterly desire to help him, too--sisterly, save
for one pang, not quite to be subdued, that for him she was without
romance.

"I think you might be very happy with some one you loved in that way,"
she said.

"You assume that romance survives a closer knowledge of the person one
loves?"

He asked the question formally, to protect himself from the sort of
personality which he dreaded. The whole situation needed the most
careful management lest it should degenerate into some degrading and
disturbing exhibition such as the scene, which he could never think of
without shame, upon the heath among the dead leaves. And yet each
sentence brought him relief. He was coming to understand something or
other about his own desires hitherto undefined by him, the source of
his difficulty with Katharine. The wish to hurt her, which had urged
him to begin, had completely left him, and he felt that it was only
Katharine now who could help him to be sure. He must take his time.
There were so many things that he could not say without the greatest
difficulty--that name, for example, Cassandra. Nor could he move his
eyes from a certain spot, a fiery glen surrounded by high mountains,
in the heart of the coals. He waited in suspense for Katharine to
continue. She had said that he might be very happy with some one he
loved in that way.

"I don't see why it shouldn't last with you," she resumed. "I can
imagine a certain sort of person--" she paused; she was aware that he
was listening with the greatest intentness, and that his formality was
merely the cover for an extreme anxiety of some sort. There was some
person then--some woman--who could it be? Cassandra? Ah, possibly--

"A person," she added, speaking in the most matter-of-fact tone she
could command, "like Cassandra Otway, for instance. Cassandra is the
most interesting of the Otways--with the exception of Henry. Even so,
I like Cassandra better. She has more than mere cleverness. She is a
character--a person by herself."

"Those dreadful insects!" burst from William, with a nervous laugh,
and a little spasm went through him as Katharine noticed. It WAS
Cassandra then. Automatically and dully she replied, "You could insist
that she confined herself to--to--something else. . . . But she cares
for music; I believe she writes poetry; and there can be no doubt that
she has a peculiar charm--"

She ceased, as if defining to herself this peculiar charm. After a
moment's silence William jerked out:

"I thought her affectionate?"

"Extremely affectionate. She worships Henry. When you think what a
house that is--Uncle Francis always in one mood or another--"

"Dear, dear, dear," William muttered.

"And you have so much in common."

"My dear Katharine!" William exclaimed, flinging himself back in his
chair, and uprooting his eyes from the spot in the fire. "I really
don't know what we're talking about. . . . I assure you. . . ."

He was covered with an extreme confusion.

He withdrew the finger that was still thrust between the pages of
Gulliver, opened the book, and ran his eye down the list of chapters,
as though he were about to select the one most suitable for reading
aloud. As Katharine watched him, she was seized with preliminary
symptoms of his own panic. At the same time she was convinced that,
should he find the right page, take out his spectacles, clear his
throat, and open his lips, a chance that would never come again in all
their lives would be lost to them both.

"We're talking about things that interest us both very much," she
said. "Shan't we go on talking, and leave Swift for another time? I
don't feel in the mood for Swift, and it's a pity to read any one when
that's the case--particularly Swift."

The presence of wise literary speculation, as she calculated, restored
William's confidence in his security, and he replaced the book in the
bookcase, keeping his back turned to her as he did so, and taking
advantage of this circumstance to summon his thoughts together.

But a second of introspection had the alarming result of showing him
that his mind, when looked at from within, was no longer familiar
ground. He felt, that is to say, what he had never consciously felt
before; he was revealed to himself as other than he was wont to think
him; he was afloat upon a sea of unknown and tumultuous possibilities.
He paced once up and down the room, and then flung himself impetuously
into the chair by Katharine's side. He had never felt anything like
this before; he put himself entirely into her hands; he cast off all
responsibility. He very nearly exclaimed aloud:

"You've stirred up all these odious and violent emotions, and now you
must do the best you can with them."

Her near presence, however, had a calming and reassuring effect upon
his agitation, and he was conscious only of an implicit trust that,
somehow, he was safe with her, that she would see him through, find
out what it was that he wanted, and procure it for him.

"I wish to do whatever you tell me to do," he said. "I put myself
entirely in your hands, Katharine."

"You must try to tell me what you feel," she said.

"My dear, I feel a thousand things every second. I don't know, I'm
sure, what I feel. That afternoon on the heath--it was then--then--"
He broke off; he did not tell her what had happened then. "Your
ghastly good sense, as usual, has convinced me--for the moment--but
what the truth is, Heaven only knows!" he exclaimed.

"Isn't it the truth that you are, or might be, in love with
Cassandra?" she said gently.

William bowed his head. After a moment's silence he murmured:

"I believe you're right, Katharine."

She sighed, involuntarily. She had been hoping all this time, with an
intensity that increased second by second against the current of her
words, that it would not in the end come to this. After a moment of
surprising anguish, she summoned her courage to tell him how she
wished only that she might help him, and had framed the first words of
her speech when a knock, terrific and startling to people in their
overwrought condition, sounded upon the door.

"Katharine, I worship you," he urged, half in a whisper.

"Yes," she replied, withdrawing with a little shiver, "but you must
open the door."

CHAPTER XXIII

When Ralph Denham entered the room and saw Katharine seated with her
back to him, he was conscious of a change in the grade of the
atmosphere such as a traveler meets with sometimes upon the roads,
particularly after sunset, when, without warning, he runs from clammy
chill to a hoard of unspent warmth in which the sweetness of hay and
beanfield is cherished, as if the sun still shone although the moon is
up. He hesitated; he shuddered; he walked elaborately to the window
and laid aside his coat. He balanced his stick most carefully against
the folds of the curtain. Thus occupied with his own sensations and
preparations, he had little time to observe what either of the other
two was feeling. Such symptoms of agitation as he might perceive (and
they had left their tokens in brightness of eye and pallor of cheeks)
seemed to him well befitting the actors in so great a drama as that of
Katharine Hilbery's daily life. Beauty and passion were the breath of
her being, he thought.

She scarcely noticed his presence, or only as it forced her to adopt a
manner of composure, which she was certainly far from feeling.
William, however, was even more agitated than she was, and her first
instalment of promised help took the form of some commonplace upon the
age of the building or the architect's name, which gave him an excuse
to fumble in a drawer for certain designs, which he laid upon the
table between the three of them.

Which of the three followed the designs most carefully it would be
difficult to tell, but it is certain that not one of the three found
for the moment anything to say. Years of training in a drawing-room
came at length to Katharine's help, and she said something suitable,
at the same moment withdrawing her hand from the table because she
perceived that it trembled. William agreed effusively; Denham
corroborated him, speaking in rather high-pitched tones; they thrust
aside the plans, and drew nearer to the fireplace.

"I'd rather live here than anywhere in the whole of London," said
Denham.

("And I've got nowhere to live") Katharine thought, as she agreed
aloud.

"You could get rooms here, no doubt, if you wanted to," Rodney
replied.

"But I'm just leaving London for good--I've taken that cottage I was
telling you about." The announcement seemed to convey very little to
either of his hearers.

"Indeed?--that's sad. . . . You must give me your address. But you
won't cut yourself off altogether, surely--"

"You'll be moving, too, I suppose," Denham remarked.

William showed such visible signs of floundering that Katharine
collected herself and asked:

"Where is the cottage you've taken?"

In answering her, Denham turned and looked at her. As their eyes met,
she realized for the first time that she was talking to Ralph Denham,
and she remembered, without recalling any details, that she had been
speaking of him quite lately, and that she had reason to think ill of
him. What Mary had said she could not remember, but she felt that
there was a mass of knowledge in her mind which she had not had time
to examine--knowledge now lying on the far side of a gulf. But her
agitation flashed the queerest lights upon her past. She must get
through the matter in hand, and then think it out in quiet. She bent
her mind to follow what Ralph was saying. He was telling her that he
had taken a cottage in Norfolk, and she was saying that she knew, or
did not know, that particular neighborhood. But after a moment's
attention her mind flew to Rodney, and she had an unusual, indeed
unprecedented, sense that they were in touch and shared each other's
thoughts. If only Ralph were not there, she would at once give way to
her desire to take William's hand, then to bend his head upon her
shoulder, for this was what she wanted to do more than anything at the
moment, unless, indeed, she wished more than anything to be alone--
yes, that was what she wanted. She was sick to death of these
discussions; she shivered at the effort to reveal her feelings. She
had forgotten to answer. William was speaking now.

"But what will you find to do in the country?" she asked at random,
striking into a conversation which she had only half heard, in such a
way as to make both Rodney and Denham look at her with a little
surprise. But directly she took up the conversation, it was William's
turn to fall silent. He at once forgot to listen to what they were
saying, although he interposed nervously at intervals, "Yes, yes,
yes." As the minutes passed, Ralph's presence became more and more
intolerable to him, since there was so much that he must say to
Katharine; the moment he could not talk to her, terrible doubts,
unanswerable questions accumulated, which he must lay before
Katharine, for she alone could help him now. Unless he could see her
alone, it would be impossible for him ever to sleep, or to know what
he had said in a moment of madness, which was not altogether mad, or
was it mad? He nodded his head, and said, nervously, "Yes, yes," and
looked at Katharine, and thought how beautiful she looked; there was
no one in the world that he admired more. There was an emotion in her
face which lent it an expression he had never seen there. Then, as he
was turning over means by which he could speak to her alone, she rose,
and he was taken by surprise, for he had counted on the fact that she
would outstay Denham. His only chance, then, of saying something to
her in private, was to take her downstairs and walk with her to the
street. While he hesitated, however, overcome with the difficulty of
putting one simple thought into words when all his thoughts were
scattered about, and all were too strong for utterance, he was struck
silent by something that was still more unexpected. Denham got up from
his chair, looked at Katharine, and said:

"I'm going, too. Shall we go together?"

And before William could see any way of detaining him--or would it be
better to detain Katharine?--he had taken his hat, stick, and was
holding the door open for Katharine to pass out. The most that William
could do was to stand at the head of the stairs and say good-night. He
could not offer to go with them. He could not insist that she should
stay. He watched her descend, rather slowly, owing to the dusk of the
staircase, and he had a last sight of Denham's head and of Katharine's
head near together, against the panels, when suddenly a pang of acute
jealousy overcame him, and had he not remained conscious of the
slippers upon his feet, he would have run after them or cried out. As
it was he could not move from the spot. At the turn of the staircase
Katharine turned to look back, trusting to this last glance to seal
their compact of good friendship. Instead of returning her silent
greeting, William grinned back at her a cold stare of sarcasm or of
rage.

She stopped dead for a moment, and then descended slowly into the
court. She looked to the right and to the left, and once up into the
sky. She was only conscious of Denham as a block upon her thoughts.
She measured the distance that must be traversed before she would be
alone. But when they came to the Strand no cabs were to be seen, and
Denham broke the silence by saying:

"There seem to be no cabs. Shall we walk on a little?"

"Very well," she agreed, paying no attention to him.

Aware of her preoccupation, or absorbed in his own thoughts, Ralph
said nothing further; and in silence they walked some distance along
the Strand. Ralph was doing his best to put his thoughts into such
order that one came before the rest, and the determination that when
he spoke he should speak worthily, made him put off the moment of
speaking till he had found the exact words and even the place that
best suited him. The Strand was too busy. There was too much risk,
also, of finding an empty cab. Without a word of explanation he turned
to the left, down one of the side streets leading to the river. On no
account must they part until something of the very greatest importance
had happened. He knew perfectly well what he wished to say, and had
arranged not only the substance, but the order in which he was to say
it. Now, however, that he was alone with her, not only did he find the
difficulty of speaking almost insurmountable, but he was aware that he
was angry with her for thus disturbing him, and casting, as it was so
easy for a person of her advantages to do, these phantoms and pitfalls
across his path. He was determined that he would question her as
severely as he would question himself; and make them both, once and
for all, either justify her dominance or renounce it. But the longer
they walked thus alone, the more he was disturbed by the sense of her
actual presence. Her skirt blew; the feathers in her hat waved;
sometimes he saw her a step or two ahead of him, or had to wait for
her to catch him up.

The silence was prolonged, and at length drew her attention to him.
First she was annoyed that there was no cab to free her from his
company; then she recalled vaguely something that Mary had said to
make her think ill of him; she could not remember what, but the
recollection, combined with his masterful ways--why did he walk so
fast down this side street?--made her more and more conscious of a
person of marked, though disagreeable, force by her side. She stopped
and, looking round her for a cab, sighted one in the distance. He was
thus precipitated into speech.

"Should you mind if we walked a little farther?" he asked. "There's
something I want to say to you."

"Very well," she replied, guessing that his request had something to
do with Mary Datchet.

"It's quieter by the river," he said, and instantly he crossed over.
"I want to ask you merely this," he began. But he paused so long that
she could see his head against the sky; the slope of his thin cheek
and his large, strong nose were clearly marked against it. While he
paused, words that were quite different from those he intended to use
presented themselves.

"I've made you my standard ever since I saw you. I've dreamt about
you; I've thought of nothing but you; you represent to me the only
reality in the world."

His words, and the queer strained voice in which he spoke them, made
it appear as if he addressed some person who was not the woman beside
him, but some one far away.

"And now things have come to such a pass that, unless I can speak to
you openly, I believe I shall go mad. I think of you as the most
beautiful, the truest thing in the world," he continued, filled with a
sense of exaltation, and feeling that he had no need now to choose his
words with pedantic accuracy, for what he wanted to say was suddenly
become plain to him.

"I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river; to me you're
everything that exists; the reality of everything. Life, I tell you,
would be impossible without you. And now I want--"

She had heard him so far with a feeling that she had dropped some
material word which made sense of the rest. She could hear no more of
this unintelligible rambling without checking him. She felt that she
was overhearing what was meant for another.

"I don't understand," she said. "You're saying things that you don't
mean."

"I mean every word I say," he replied, emphatically. He turned his
head towards her. She recovered the words she was searching for while
he spoke. "Ralph Denham is in love with you." They came back to her in
Mary Datchet's voice. Her anger blazed up in her.

"I saw Mary Datchet this afternoon," she exclaimed.

He made a movement as if he were surprised or taken aback, but
answered in a moment:

"She told you that I had asked her to marry me, I suppose?"

"No!" Katharine exclaimed, in surprise.

"I did though. It was the day I saw you at Lincoln," he continued. "I
had meant to ask her to marry me, and then I looked out of the window
and saw you. After that I didn't want to ask any one to marry me. But
I did it; and she knew I was lying, and refused me. I thought then,
and still think, that she cares for me. I behaved very badly. I don't
defend myself."

"No," said Katharine, "I should hope not. There's no defence that I
can think of. If any conduct is wrong, that is." She spoke with an
energy that was directed even more against herself than against him.
"It seems to me," she continued, with the same energy, "that people
are bound to be honest. There's no excuse for such behavior." She
could now see plainly before her eyes the expression on Mary Datchet's
face.

After a short pause, he said:

"I am not telling you that I am in love with you. I am not in love
with you."

"I didn't think that," she replied, conscious of some bewilderment.

"I have not spoken a word to you that I do not mean," he added.

"Tell me then what it is that you mean," she said at length.

As if obeying a common instinct, they both stopped and, bending
slightly over the balustrade of the river, looked into the flowing
water.

"You say that we've got to be honest," Ralph began. "Very well. I will
try to tell you the facts; but I warn you, you'll think me mad. It's a
fact, though, that since I first saw you four or five months ago I
have made you, in an utterly absurd way, I expect, my ideal. I'm
almost ashamed to tell you what lengths I've gone to. It's become the
thing that matters most in my life." He checked himself. "Without
knowing you, except that you're beautiful, and all that, I've come to
believe that we're in some sort of agreement; that we're after
something together; that we see something. . . . I've got into the
habit of imagining you; I'm always thinking what you'd say or do; I
walk along the street talking to you; I dream of you. It's merely a
bad habit, a schoolboy habit, day-dreaming; it's a common experience;
half one's friends do the same; well, those are the facts."

Simultaneously, they both walked on very slowly.

"If you were to know me you would feel none of this," she said. "We
don't know each other--we've always been--interrupted. . . . Were you
going to tell me this that day my aunts came?" she asked, recollecting
the whole scene.

He bowed his head.

"The day you told me of your engagement," he said.

She thought, with a start, that she was no longer engaged.

"I deny that I should cease to feel this if I knew you," he went on.
"I should feel it more reasonably--that's all. I shouldn't talk the
kind of nonsense I've talked to-night. . . . But it wasn't nonsense.
It was the truth," he said doggedly. "It's the important thing. You
can force me to talk as if this feeling for you were an hallucination,
but all our feelings are that. The best of them are half illusions.
Still," he added, as if arguing to himself, "if it weren't as real a
feeling as I'm capable of, I shouldn't be changing my life on your
account."

"What do you mean?" she inquired.

"I told you. I'm taking a cottage. I'm giving up my profession."

"On my account?" she asked, in amazement.

"Yes, on your account," he replied. He explained his meaning no
further.

"But I don't know you or your circumstances," she said at last, as he
remained silent.

"You have no opinion about me one way or the other?"

"Yes, I suppose I have an opinion--" she hesitated.

He controlled his wish to ask her to explain herself, and much to his
pleasure she went on, appearing to search her mind.

"I thought that you criticized me--perhaps disliked me. I thought of
you as a person who judges--"

"No; I'm a person who feels," he said, in a low voice.

"Tell me, then, what has made you do this?" she asked, after a break.

He told her in an orderly way, betokening careful preparation, all
that he had meant to say at first; how he stood with regard to his
brothers and sisters; what his mother had said, and his sister Joan
had refrained from saying; exactly how many pounds stood in his name
at the bank; what prospect his brother had of earning a livelihood in
America; how much of their income went on rent, and other details
known to him by heart. She listened to all this, so that she could
have passed an examination in it by the time Waterloo Bridge was in
sight; and yet she was no more listening to it than she was counting
the paving-stones at her feet. She was feeling happier than she had
felt in her life. If Denham could have seen how visibly books of
algebraic symbols, pages all speckled with dots and dashes and twisted
bars, came before her eyes as they trod the Embankment, his secret joy
in her attention might have been dispersed. She went on, saying, "Yes,
I see. . . . But how would that help you? . . . Your brother has
passed his examination?" so sensibly, that he had constantly to keep
his brain in check; and all the time she was in fancy looking up
through a telescope at white shadow-cleft disks which were other
worlds, until she felt herself possessed of two bodies, one walking by
the river with Denham, the other concentrated to a silver globe aloft
in the fine blue space above the scum of vapors that was covering the
visible world. She looked at the sky once, and saw that no star was
keen enough to pierce the flight of watery clouds now coursing rapidly
before the west wind. She looked down hurriedly again. There was no
reason, she assured herself, for this feeling of happiness; she was
not free; she was not alone; she was still bound to earth by a million
fibres; every step took her nearer home. Nevertheless, she exulted as
she had never exulted before. The air was fresher, the lights more
distinct, the cold stone of the balustrade colder and harder, when by
chance or purpose she struck her hand against it. No feeling of
annoyance with Denham remained; he certainly did not hinder any flight
she might choose to make, whether in the direction of the sky or of
her home; but that her condition was due to him, or to anything that
he had said, she had no consciousness at all.

They were now within sight of the stream of cabs and omnibuses
crossing to and from the Surrey side of the river; the sound of the
traffic, the hooting of motor-horns, and the light chime of tram-bells
sounded more and more distinctly, and, with the increase of noise,
they both became silent. With a common instinct they slackened their
pace, as if to lengthen the time of semi-privacy allowed them. To
Ralph, the pleasure of these last yards of the walk with Katharine was
so great that he could not look beyond the present moment to the time
when she should have left him. He had no wish to use the last moments
of their companionship in adding fresh words to what he had already
said. Since they had stopped talking, she had become to him not so
much a real person, as the very woman he dreamt of; but his solitary
dreams had never produced any such keenness of sensation as that which
he felt in her presence. He himself was also strangely transfigured.
He had complete mastery of all his faculties. For the first time he
was in possession of his full powers. The vistas which opened before
him seemed to have no perceptible end. But the mood had none of the
restlessness or feverish desire to add one delight to another which
had hitherto marked, and somewhat spoilt, the most rapturous of his
imaginings. It was a mood that took such clear-eyed account of the
conditions of human life that he was not disturbed in the least by the
gliding presence of a taxicab, and without agitation he perceived that
Katharine was conscious of it also, and turned her head in that
direction. Their halting steps acknowledged the desirability of
engaging the cab; and they stopped simultaneously, and signed to it.

"Then you will let me know your decision as soon as you can?" he
asked, with his hand on the door.

She hesitated for a moment. She could not immediately recall what the
question was that she had to decide.

"I will write," she said vaguely. "No," she added, in a second,
bethinking her of the difficulties of writing anything decided upon a
question to which she had paid no attention, "I don't see how to
manage it."

She stood looking at Denham, considering and hesitating, with her foot
upon the step. He guessed her difficulties; he knew in a second that
she had heard nothing; he knew everything that she felt.

"There's only one place to discuss things satisfactorily that I know
of," he said quickly; "that's Kew."

"Kew?"

"Kew," he repeated, with immense decision. He shut the door and gave
her address to the driver. She instantly was conveyed away from him,
and her cab joined the knotted stream of vehicles, each marked by a
light, and indistinguishable one from the other. He stood watching for
a moment, and then, as if swept by some fierce impulse, from the spot
where they had stood, he turned, crossed the road at a rapid pace, and
disappeared.

He walked on upon the impetus of this last mood of almost supernatural
exaltation until he reached a narrow street, at this hour empty of
traffic and passengers. Here, whether it was the shops with their
shuttered windows, the smooth and silvered curve of the wood pavement,
or a natural ebb of feeling, his exaltation slowly oozed and deserted
him. He was now conscious of the loss that follows any revelation; he
had lost something in speaking to Katharine, for, after all, was the
Katharine whom he loved the same as the real Katharine? She had
transcended her entirely at moments; her skirt had blown, her feather
waved, her voice spoken; yes, but how terrible sometimes the pause
between the voice of one's dreams and the voice that comes from the
object of one's dreams! He felt a mixture of disgust and pity at the
figure cut by human beings when they try to carry out, in practice,
what they have the power to conceive. How small both he and Katharine
had appeared when they issued from the cloud of thought that enveloped
them! He recalled the small, inexpressive, commonplace words in which
they had tried to communicate with each other; he repeated them over
to himself. By repeating Katharine's words, he came in a few moments
to such a sense of her presence that he worshipped her more than ever.
But she was engaged to be married, he remembered with a start. The
strength of his feeling was revealed to him instantly, and he gave
himself up to an irresistible rage and sense of frustration. The image
of Rodney came before him with every circumstance of folly and
indignity. That little pink-cheeked dancing-master to marry Katharine?
that gibbering ass with the face of a monkey on an organ? that posing,
vain, fantastical fop? with his tragedies and his comedies, his
innumerable spites and prides and pettinesses? Lord! marry Rodney! She
must be as great a fool as he was. His bitterness took possession of
him, and as he sat in the corner of the underground carriage, he
looked as stark an image of unapproachable severity as could be
imagined. Directly he reached home he sat down at his table, and began
to write Katharine a long, wild, mad letter, begging her for both
their sakes to break with Rodney, imploring her not to do what would
destroy for ever the one beauty, the one truth, the one hope; not to
be a traitor, not to be a deserter, for if she were--and he wound up
with a quiet and brief assertion that, whatever she did or left
undone, he would believe to be the best, and accept from her with
gratitude. He covered sheet after sheet, and heard the early carts
starting for London before he went to bed.

CHAPTER XXIV

The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt towards
the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet
flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring
to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly colored and
sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. Lives frozen by
age, so far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which
neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid,
reflecting the shapes and colors of the present, as well as the shapes
and colors of the past. In the case of Mrs. Hilbery, these early
spring days were chiefly upsetting inasmuch as they caused a general
quickening of her emotional powers, which, as far as the past was
concerned, had never suffered much diminution. But in the spring her
desire for expression invariably increased. She was haunted by the
ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the
combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favorite
authors. She made them for herself on scraps of paper, and rolled them
on her tongue when there seemed no occasion for such eloquence. She
was upheld in these excursions by the certainty that no language could
outdo the splendor of her father's memory, and although her efforts
did not notably further the end of his biography, she was under the
impression of living more in his shade at such times than at others.
No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English
birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport
themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of
the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets
exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly
affected against her better judgment by her mother's enthusiasm. Not
that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a
study of Shakespeare's sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter
of her grandfather's biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous
jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way,
among other things, of writing Shakespeare's sonnets; the idea, struck
out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of
privately printed manuals within the next few days for her
instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature;
she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at
least as good as other people's facts, and all her fancy for the time
being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon. She had a plan, she told
Katharine, when, rather later than usual, Katharine came into the room
the morning after her walk by the river, for visiting Shakespeare's
tomb. Any fact about the poet had become, for the moment, of far
greater interest to her than the immediate present, and the certainty
that there was existing in England a spot of ground where Shakespeare
had undoubtedly stood, where his very bones lay directly beneath one's
feet, was so absorbing to her on this particular occasion that she
greeted her daughter with the exclamation:

"D'you think he ever passed this house?"

The question, for the moment, seemed to Katharine to have reference to
Ralph Denham.

"On his way to Blackfriars, I mean," Mrs. Hilbery continued, "for you
know the latest discovery is that he owned a house there."

Katharine still looked about her in perplexity, and Mrs. Hilbery
added:

"Which is a proof that he wasn't as poor as they've sometimes said. I
should like to think that he had enough, though I don't in the least
want him to be rich."

Then, perceiving her daughter's expression of perplexity, Mrs. Hilbery
burst out laughing.

"My dear, I'm not talking about YOUR William, though that's another
reason for liking him. I'm talking, I'm thinking, I'm dreaming of MY
William--William Shakespeare, of course. Isn't it odd," she mused,
standing at the window and tapping gently upon the pane, "that for all
one can see, that dear old thing in the blue bonnet, crossing the road
with her basket on her arm, has never heard that there was such a
person? Yet it all goes on: lawyers hurrying to their work, cabmen
squabbling for their fares, little boys rolling their hoops, little
girls throwing bread to the gulls, as if there weren't a Shakespeare
in the world. I should like to stand at that crossing all day long and
say: 'People, read Shakespeare!'"

Katharine sat down at her table and opened a long dusty envelope. As
Shelley was mentioned in the course of the letter as if he were alive,
it had, of course, considerable value. Her immediate task was to
decide whether the whole letter should be printed, or only the
paragraph which mentioned Shelley's name, and she reached out for a
pen and held it in readiness to do justice upon the sheet. Her pen,
however, remained in the air. Almost surreptitiously she slipped a
clean sheet in front of her, and her hand, descending, began drawing
square boxes halved and quartered by straight lines, and then circles
which underwent the same process of dissection.

"Katharine! I've hit upon a brilliant idea!" Mrs. Hilbery
exclaimed--"to lay out, say, a hundred pounds or so on copies of
Shakespeare, and give them to working men. Some of your clever friends
who get up meetings might help us, Katharine. And that might lead to a
playhouse, where we could all take parts. You'd be Rosalind--but
you've a dash of the old nurse in you. Your father's Hamlet, come to
years of discretion; and I'm--well, I'm a bit of them all; I'm quite a
large bit of the fool, but the fools in Shakespeare say all the clever
things. Now who shall William be? A hero? Hotspur? Henry the Fifth?
No, William's got a touch of Hamlet in him, too. I can fancy that
William talks to himself when he's alone. Ah, Katharine, you must say
very beautiful things when you're together!" she added wistfully, with
a glance at her daughter, who had told her nothing about the dinner
the night before.

"Oh, we talk a lot of nonsense," said Katharine, hiding her slip of
paper as her mother stood by her, and spreading the old letter about
Shelley in front of her.

"It won't seem to you nonsense in ten years' time," said Mrs. Hilbery.
"Believe me, Katharine, you'll look back on these days afterwards;
you'll remember all the silly things you've said; and you'll find that
your life has been built on them. The best of life is built on what we
say when we're in love. It isn't nonsense, Katharine," she urged,
"it's the truth, it's the only truth."

Katharine was on the point of interrupting her mother, and then she
was on the point of confiding in her. They came strangely close
together sometimes. But, while she hesitated and sought for words not
too direct, her mother had recourse to Shakespeare, and turned page
after page, set upon finding some quotation which said all this about
love far, far better than she could. Accordingly, Katharine did
nothing but scrub one of her circles an intense black with her pencil,
in the midst of which process the telephone-bell rang, and she left
the room to answer it.

When she returned, Mrs. Hilbery had found not the passage she wanted,
but another of exquisite beauty as she justly observed, looking up for
a second to ask Katharine who that was?

"Mary Datchet," Katharine replied briefly.

"Ah--I half wish I'd called you Mary, but it wouldn't have gone with
Hilbery, and it wouldn't have gone with Rodney. Now this isn't the
passage I wanted. (I never can find what I want.) But it's spring;
it's the daffodils; it's the green fields; it's the birds."

She was cut short in her quotation by another imperative
telephone-bell. Once more Katharine left the room.

"My dear child, how odious the triumphs of science are!" Mrs. Hilbery
exclaimed on her return. "They'll be linking us with the moon
next--but who was that?"

"William," Katharine replied yet more briefly.

"I'll forgive William anything, for I'm certain that there aren't any
Williams in the moon. I hope he's coming to luncheon?"

"He's coming to tea."

"Well, that's better than nothing, and I promise to leave you alone."

"There's no need for you to do that," said Katharine.

She swept her hand over the faded sheet, and drew herself up squarely
to the table as if she refused to waste time any longer. The gesture
was not lost upon her mother. It hinted at the existence of something
stern and unapproachable in her daughter's character, which struck
chill upon her, as the sight of poverty, or drunkenness, or the logic
with which Mr. Hilbery sometimes thought good to demolish her
certainty of an approaching millennium struck chill upon her. She went
back to her own table, and putting on her spectacles with a curious
expression of quiet humility, addressed herself for the first time
that morning to the task before her. The shock with an unsympathetic
world had a sobering effect on her. For once, her industry surpassed
her daughter's. Katharine could not reduce the world to that
particular perspective in which Harriet Martineau, for instance, was a
figure of solid importance, and possessed of a genuine relationship to
this figure or to that date. Singularly enough, the sharp call of the
telephone-bell still echoed in her ear, and her body and mind were in
a state of tension, as if, at any moment, she might hear another
summons of greater interest to her than the whole of the nineteenth
century. She did not clearly realize what this call was to be; but
when the ears have got into the habit of listening, they go on
listening involuntarily, and thus Katharine spent the greater part of
the morning in listening to a variety of sounds in the back streets of
Chelsea. For the first time in her life, probably, she wished that
Mrs. Hilbery would not keep so closely to her work. A quotation from
Shakespeare would not have come amiss. Now and again she heard a sigh
from her mother's table, but that was the only proof she gave of her
existence, and Katharine did not think of connecting it with the
square aspect of her own position at the table, or, perhaps, she would
have thrown her pen down and told her mother the reason of her
restlessness. The only writing she managed to accomplish in the course
of the morning was one letter, addressed to her cousin, Cassandra
Otway--a rambling letter, long, affectionate, playful and commanding
all at once. She bade Cassandra put her creatures in the charge of a
groom, and come to them for a week or so. They would go and hear some
music together. Cassandra's dislike of rational society, she said, was
an affectation fast hardening into a prejudice, which would, in the
long run, isolate her from all interesting people and pursuits. She
was finishing the sheet when the sound she was anticipating all the
time actually struck upon her ears. She jumped up hastily, and slammed
the door with a sharpness which made Mrs. Hilbery start. Where was
Katharine off to? In her preoccupied state she had not heard the bell.

The alcove on the stairs, in which the telephone was placed, was
screened for privacy by a curtain of purple velvet. It was a pocket
for superfluous possessions, such as exist in most houses which harbor
the wreckage of three generations. Prints of great-uncles, famed for
their prowess in the East, hung above Chinese teapots, whose sides
were riveted by little gold stitches, and the precious teapots, again,
stood upon bookcases containing the complete works of William Cowper
and Sir Walter Scott. The thread of sound, issuing from the telephone,
was always colored by the surroundings which received it, so it seemed
to Katharine. Whose voice was now going to combine with them, or to
strike a discord?

"Whose voice?" she asked herself, hearing a man inquire, with great
determination, for her number. The unfamiliar voice now asked for Miss
Hilbery. Out of all the welter of voices which crowd round the far end
of the telephone, out of the enormous range of possibilities, whose
voice, what possibility, was this? A pause gave her time to ask
herself this question. It was solved next moment.

"I've looked out the train. . . . Early on Saturday afternoon
would suit me best. . . . I'm Ralph Denham. . . . But I'll write
it down. . . ."

With more than the usual sense of being impinged upon the point of a
bayonet, Katharine replied:

"I think I could come. I'll look at my engagements. . . . Hold on."

She dropped the machine, and looked fixedly at the print of the
great-uncle who had not ceased to gaze, with an air of amiable
authority, into a world which, as yet, beheld no symptoms of the
Indian Mutiny. And yet, gently swinging against the wall, within the
black tube, was a voice which recked nothing of Uncle James, of China
teapots, or of red velvet curtains. She watched the oscillation of the
tube, and at the same moment became conscious of the individuality of
the house in which she stood; she heard the soft domestic sounds of
regular existence upon staircases and floors above her head, and
movements through the wall in the house next door. She had no very
clear vision of Denham himself, when she lifted the telephone to her
lips and replied that she thought Saturday would suit her. She hoped
that he would not say good-bye at once, although she felt no
particular anxiety to attend to what he was saying, and began, even
while he spoke, to think of her own upper room, with its books, its
papers pressed between the leaves of dictionaries, and the table that
could be cleared for work. She replaced the instrument, thoughtfully;
her restlessness was assuaged; she finished her letter to Cassandra
without difficulty, addressed the envelope, and fixed the stamp with
her usual quick decision.

A bunch of anemones caught Mrs. Hilbery's eye when they had finished
luncheon. The blue and purple and white of the bowl, standing in a
pool of variegated light on a polished Chippendale table in the
drawing-room window, made her stop dead with an exclamation of
pleasure.

"Who is lying ill in bed, Katharine?" she demanded. "Which of our
friends wants cheering up? Who feels that they've been forgotten and
passed over, and that nobody wants them? Whose water rates are
overdue, and the cook leaving in a temper without waiting for her
wages? There was somebody I know--" she concluded, but for the moment
the name of this desirable acquaintance escaped her. The best
representative of the forlorn company whose day would be brightened by
a bunch of anemones was, in Katharine's opinion, the widow of a
general living in the Cromwell Road. In default of the actually
destitute and starving, whom she would much have preferred, Mrs.
Hilbery was forced to acknowledge her claims, for though in
comfortable circumstances, she was extremely dull, unattractive,
connected in some oblique fashion with literature, and had been
touched to the verge of tears, on one occasion, by an afternoon call.

It happened that Mrs. Hilbery had an engagement elsewhere, so that the
task of taking the flowers to the Cromwell Road fell upon Katharine.
She took her letter to Cassandra with her, meaning to post it in the
first pillar-box she came to. When, however, she was fairly out of
doors, and constantly invited by pillar-boxes and post-offices to slip
her envelope down their scarlet throats, she forbore. She made absurd
excuses, as that she did not wish to cross the road, or that she was
certain to pass another post-office in a more central position a
little farther on. The longer she held the letter in her hand,
however, the more persistently certain questions pressed upon her, as
if from a collection of voices in the air. These invisible people
wished to be informed whether she was engaged to William Rodney, or
was the engagement broken off? Was it right, they asked, to invite
Cassandra for a visit, and was William Rodney in love with her, or
likely to fall in love? Then the questioners paused for a moment, and
resumed as if another side of the problem had just come to their
notice. What did Ralph Denham mean by what he said to you last night?
Do you consider that he is in love with you? Is it right to consent to
a solitary walk with him, and what advice are you going to give him
about his future? Has William Rodney cause to be jealous of your
conduct, and what do you propose to do about Mary Datchet? What are
you going to do? What does honor require you to do? they repeated.

"Good Heavens!" Katharine exclaimed, after listening to all these
remarks, "I suppose I ought to make up my mind."

But the debate was a formal skirmishing, a pastime to gain breathing-
space. Like all people brought up in a tradition, Katharine was able,
within ten minutes or so, to reduce any moral difficulty to its
traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers. The book of
wisdom lay open, if not upon her mother's knee, upon the knees of many
uncles and aunts. She had only to consult them, and they would at once
turn to the right page and read out an answer exactly suited to one in
her position. The rules which should govern the behavior of an
unmarried woman are written in red ink, graved upon marble, if, by
some freak of nature, it should fall out that the unmarried woman has
not the same writing scored upon her heart. She was ready to believe
that some people are fortunate enough to reject, accept, resign, or
lay down their lives at the bidding of traditional authority; she
could envy them; but in her case the questions became phantoms
directly she tried seriously to find an answer, which proved that the
traditional answer would be of no use to her individually. Yet it had
served so many people, she thought, glancing at the rows of houses on
either side of her, where families, whose incomes must be between a
thousand and fifteen-hundred a year lived, and kept, perhaps, three
servants, and draped their windows with curtains which were always
thick and generally dirty, and must, she thought, since you could only
see a looking-glass gleaming above a sideboard on which a dish of
apples was set, keep the room inside very dark. But she turned her
head away, observing that this was not a method of thinking the matter
out.

The only truth which she could discover was the truth of what she
herself felt--a frail beam when compared with the broad illumination
shed by the eyes of all the people who are in agreement to see
together; but having rejected the visionary voices, she had no choice
but to make this her guide through the dark masses which confronted
her. She tried to follow her beam, with an expression upon her face
which would have made any passer-by think her reprehensibly and almost
ridiculously detached from the surrounding scene. One would have felt
alarmed lest this young and striking woman were about to do something
eccentric. But her beauty saved her from the worst fate that can
befall a pedestrian; people looked at her, but they did not laugh. To
seek a true feeling among the chaos of the unfeelings or half-feelings
of life, to recognize it when found, and to accept the consequences of
the discovery, draws lines upon the smoothest brow, while it quickens
the light of the eyes; it is a pursuit which is alternately
bewildering, debasing, and exalting, and, as Katharine speedily found,
her discoveries gave her equal cause for surprise, shame, and intense
anxiety. Much depended, as usual, upon the interpretation of the word
love; which word came up again and again, whether she considered
Rodney, Denham, Mary Datchet, or herself; and in each case it seemed
to stand for something different, and yet for something unmistakable
and something not to be passed by. For the more she looked into the
confusion of lives which, instead of running parallel, had suddenly
intersected each other, the more distinctly she seemed to convince
herself that there was no other light on them than was shed by this
strange illumination, and no other path save the one upon which it
threw its beams. Her blindness in the case of Rodney, her attempt to
match his true feeling with her false feeling, was a failure never to
be sufficiently condemned; indeed, she could only pay it the tribute
of leaving it a black and naked landmark unburied by attempt at
oblivion or excuse.

With this to humiliate there was much to exalt. She thought of three
different scenes; she thought of Mary sitting upright and saying, "I'm
in love--I'm in love"; she thought of Rodney losing his self-
consciousness among the dead leaves, and speaking with the abandonment
of a child; she thought of Denham leaning upon the stone parapet and
talking to the distant sky, so that she thought him mad. Her mind,
passing from Mary to Denham, from William to Cassandra, and from
Denham to herself--if, as she rather doubted, Denham's state of mind
was connected with herself--seemed to be tracing out the lines of some
symmetrical pattern, some arrangement of life, which invested, if not
herself, at least the others, not only with interest, but with a kind
of tragic beauty. She had a fantastic picture of them upholding
splendid palaces upon their bent backs. They were the lantern-bearers,
whose lights, scattered among the crowd, wove a pattern, dissolving,
joining, meeting again in combination. Half forming such conceptions
as these in her rapid walk along the dreary streets of South
Kensington, she determined that, whatever else might be obscure, she
must further the objects of Mary, Denham, William, and Cassandra. The
way was not apparent. No course of action seemed to her indubitably
right. All she achieved by her thinking was the conviction that, in
such a cause, no risk was too great; and that, far from making any
rules for herself or others, she would let difficulties accumulate
unsolved, situations widen their jaws unsatiated, while she maintained
a position of absolute and fearless independence. So she could best
serve the people who loved.

Read in the light of this exaltation, there was a new meaning in the
words which her mother had penciled upon the card attached to the
bunch of anemones. The door of the house in the Cromwell Road opened;
gloomy vistas of passage and staircase were revealed; such light as
there was seemed to be concentrated upon a silver salver of
visiting-cards, whose black borders suggested that the widow's friends
had all suffered the same bereavement. The parlor-maid could hardly be
expected to fathom the meaning of the grave tone in which the young
lady proffered the flowers, with Mrs. Hilbery's love; and the door
shut upon the offering.

The sight of a face, the slam of a door, are both rather destructive
of exaltation in the abstract; and, as she walked back to Chelsea,
Katharine had her doubts whether anything would come of her resolves.
If you cannot make sure of people, however, you can hold fairly fast
to figures, and in some way or other her thought about such problems
as she was wont to consider worked in happily with her mood as to her
friends' lives. She reached home rather late for tea.

On the ancient Dutch chest in the hall she perceived one or two hats,
coats, and walking-sticks, and the sound of voices reached her as she
stood outside the drawing-room door. Her mother gave a little cry as
she came in; a cry which conveyed to Katharine the fact that she was
late, that the teacups and milk-jugs were in a conspiracy of
disobedience, and that she must immediately take her place at the head
of the table and pour out tea for the guests. Augustus Pelham, the
diarist, liked a calm atmosphere in which to tell his stories; he
liked attention; he liked to elicit little facts, little stories,
about the past and the great dead, from such distinguished characters
as Mrs. Hilbery for the nourishment of his diary, for whose sake he
frequented tea-tables and ate yearly an enormous quantity of buttered
toast. He, therefore, welcomed Katharine with relief, and she had
merely to shake hands with Rodney and to greet the American lady who
had come to be shown the relics, before the talk started again on the
broad lines of reminiscence and discussion which were familiar to her.

Yet, even with this thick veil between them, she could not help
looking at Rodney, as if she could detect what had happened to him
since they met. It was in vain. His clothes, even the white slip, the
pearl in his tie, seemed to intercept her quick glance, and to
proclaim the futility of such inquiries of a discreet, urbane
gentleman, who balanced his cup of tea and poised a slice of bread and
butter on the edge of the saucer. He would not meet her eye, but that
could be accounted for by his activity in serving and helping, and the
polite alacrity with which he was answering the questions of the
American visitor.

It was certainly a sight to daunt any one coming in with a head full
of theories about love. The voices of the invisible questioners were
reinforced by the scene round the table, and sounded with a tremendous
self-confidence, as if they had behind them the common sense of twenty
generations, together with the immediate approval of Mr. Augustus
Pelham, Mrs. Vermont Bankes, William Rodney, and, possibly, Mrs.
Hilbery herself. Katharine set her teeth, not entirely in the
metaphorical sense, for her hand, obeying the impulse towards definite
action, laid firmly upon the table beside her an envelope which she
had been grasping all this time in complete forgetfulness. The address
was uppermost, and a moment later she saw William's eye rest upon it
as he rose to fulfil some duty with a plate. His expression instantly
changed. He did what he was on the point of doing, and then looked at
Katharine with a look which revealed enough of his confusion to show
her that he was not entirely represented by his appearance. In a
minute or two he proved himself at a loss with Mrs. Vermont Bankes,
and Mrs. Hilbery, aware of the silence with her usual quickness,
suggested that, perhaps, it was now time that Mrs. Bankes should be
shown "our things."

Katharine accordingly rose, and led the way to the little inner room
with the pictures and the books. Mrs. Bankes and Rodney followed her.

She turned on the lights, and began directly in her low, pleasant
voice: "This table is my grandfather's writing-table. Most of the
later poems were written at it. And this is his pen--the last pen he
ever used." She took it in her hand and paused for the right number of
seconds. "Here," she continued, "is the original manuscript of the
'Ode to Winter.' The early manuscripts are far less corrected than the
later ones, as you will see directly. . . . Oh, do take it yourself,"
she added, as Mrs. Bankes asked, in an awestruck tone of voice, for
that privilege, and began a preliminary unbuttoning of her white kid
gloves.

"You are wonderfully like your grandfather, Miss Hilbery," the
American lady observed, gazing from Katharine to the portrait,
"especially about the eyes. Come, now, I expect she writes poetry
herself, doesn't she?" she asked in a jocular tone, turning to
William. "Quite one's ideal of a poet, is it not, Mr. Rodney? I cannot
tell you what a privilege I feel it to be standing just here with the
poet's granddaughter. You must know we think a great deal of your
grandfather in America, Miss Hilbery. We have societies for reading
him aloud. What! His very own slippers!" Laying aside the manuscript,
she hastily grasped the old shoes, and remained for a moment dumb in
contemplation of them.

While Katharine went on steadily with her duties as show-woman, Rodney
examined intently a row of little drawings which he knew by heart
already. His disordered state of mind made it necessary for him to
take advantage of these little respites, as if he had been out in a
high wind and must straighten his dress in the first shelter he
reached. His calm was only superficial, as he knew too well; it did
not exist much below the surface of tie, waistcoat, and white slip.

On getting out of bed that morning he had fully made up his mind to
ignore what had been said the night before; he had been convinced, by
the sight of Denham, that his love for Katharine was passionate, and
when he addressed her early that morning on the telephone, he had
meant his cheerful but authoritative tones to convey to her the fact
that, after a night of madness, they were as indissolubly engaged as
ever. But when he reached his office his torments began. He found a
letter from Cassandra waiting for him. She had read his play, and had
taken the very first opportunity to write and tell him what she
thought of it. She knew, she wrote, that her praise meant absolutely
nothing; but still, she had sat up all night; she thought this, that,
and the other; she was full of enthusiasm most elaborately scratched
out in places, but enough was written plain to gratify William's
vanity exceedingly. She was quite intelligent enough to say the right
things, or, even more charmingly, to hint at them. In other ways, too,
it was a very charming letter. She told him about her music, and about
a Suffrage meeting to which Henry had taken her, and she asserted,
half seriously, that she had learnt the Greek alphabet, and found it
"fascinating." The word was underlined. Had she laughed when she drew
that line? Was she ever serious? Didn't the letter show the most
engaging compound of enthusiasm and spirit and whimsicality, all
tapering into a flame of girlish freakishness, which flitted, for the
rest of the morning, as a will-o'-the-wisp, across Rodney's landscape.
He could not resist beginning an answer to her there and then. He
found it particularly delightful to shape a style which should express
the bowing and curtsying, advancing and retreating, which are
characteristic of one of the many million partnerships of men and
women. Katharine never trod that particular measure, he could not help
reflecting; Katharine--Cassandra; Cassandra--Katharine--they
alternated in his consciousness all day long. It was all very well to
dress oneself carefully, compose one's face, and start off punctually
at half-past four to a tea-party in Cheyne Walk, but Heaven only knew
what would come of it all, and when Katharine, after sitting silent
with her usual immobility, wantonly drew from her pocket and slapped
down on the table beneath his eyes a letter addressed to Cassandra
herself, his composure deserted him. What did she mean by her
behavior?

He looked up sharply from his row of little pictures. Katharine was
disposing of the American lady in far too arbitrary a fashion. Surely
the victim herself must see how foolish her enthusiasms appeared in
the eyes of the poet's granddaughter. Katharine never made any attempt
to spare people's feelings, he reflected; and, being himself very
sensitive to all shades of comfort and discomfort, he cut short the
auctioneer's catalog, which Katharine was reeling off more and more
absent-mindedly, and took Mrs. Vermont Bankes, with a queer sense of
fellowship in suffering, under his own protection.

But within a few minutes the American lady had completed her
inspection, and inclining her head in a little nod of reverential
farewell to the poet and his shoes, she was escorted downstairs by
Rodney. Katharine stayed by herself in the little room. The ceremony
of ancestor-worship had been more than usually oppressive to her.
Moreover, the room was becoming crowded beyond the bounds of order.
Only that morning a heavily insured proof-sheet had reached them from
a collector in Australia, which recorded a change of the poet's mind
about a very famous phrase, and, therefore, had claims to the honor of
glazing and framing. But was there room for it? Must it be hung on the
staircase, or should some other relic give place to do it honor?
Feeling unable to decide the question, Katharine glanced at the
portrait of her grandfather, as if to ask his opinion. The artist who
had painted it was now out of fashion, and by dint of showing it to
visitors, Katharine had almost ceased to see anything but a glow of
faintly pleasing pink and brown tints, enclosed within a circular
scroll of gilt laurel-leaves. The young man who was her grandfather
looked vaguely over her head. The sensual lips were slightly parted,
and gave the face an expression of beholding something lovely or
miraculous vanishing or just rising upon the rim of the distance. The
expression repeated itself curiously upon Katharine's face as she
gazed up into his. They were the same age, or very nearly so. She
wondered what he was looking for; were there waves beating upon a
shore for him, too, she wondered, and heroes riding through the
leaf-hung forests? For perhaps the first time in her life she thought
of him as a man, young, unhappy, tempestuous, full of desires and
faults; for the first time she realized him for herself, and not from
her mother's memory. He might have been her brother, she thought. It
seemed to her that they were akin, with the mysterious kinship of
blood which makes it seem possible to interpret the sights which the
eyes of the dead behold so intently, or even to believe that they look
with us upon our present joys and sorrows. He would have understood,
she thought, suddenly; and instead of laying her withered flowers upon
his shrine, she brought him her own perplexities--perhaps a gift of
greater value, should the dead be conscious of gifts, than flowers and
incense and adoration. Doubts, questionings, and despondencies she
felt, as she looked up, would be more welcome to him than homage, and
he would hold them but a very small burden if she gave him, also, some
share in what she suffered and achieved. The depth of her own pride
and love were not more apparent to her than the sense that the dead
asked neither flowers nor regrets, but a share in the life which they
had given her, the life which they had lived.

Rodney found her a moment later sitting beneath her grandfather's
portrait. She laid her hand on the seat next her in a friendly way,
and said:

"Come and sit down, William. How glad I was you were here! I felt
myself getting ruder and ruder."

"You are not good at hiding your feelings," he returned dryly.

"Oh, don't scold me--I've had a horrid afternoon." She told him how
she had taken the flowers to Mrs. McCormick, and how South Kensington
impressed her as the preserve of officers' widows. She described how
the door had opened, and what gloomy avenues of busts and palm-trees
and umbrellas had been revealed to her. She spoke lightly, and
succeeded in putting him at his ease. Indeed, he rapidly became too
much at his ease to persist in a condition of cheerful neutrality. He
felt his composure slipping from him. Katharine made it seem so
natural to ask her to help him, or advise him, to say straight out
what he had in his mind. The letter from Cassandra was heavy in his
pocket. There was also the letter to Cassandra lying on the table in
the next room. The atmosphere seemed charged with Cassandra. But,
unless Katharine began the subject of her own accord, he could not
even hint--he must ignore the whole affair; it was the part of a
gentleman to preserve a bearing that was, as far as he could make it,
the bearing of an undoubting lover. At intervals he sighed deeply. He
talked rather more quickly than usual about the possibility that some
of the operas of Mozart would be played in the summer. He had received
a notice, he said, and at once produced a pocket-book stuffed with
papers, and began shuffling them in search. He held a thick envelope
between his finger and thumb, as if the notice from the opera company
had become in some way inseparably attached to it.

"A letter from Cassandra?" said Katharine, in the easiest voice in the
world, looking over his shoulder. "I've just written to ask her to
come here, only I forgot to post it."

He handed her the envelope in silence. She took it, extracted the
sheets, and read the letter through.

The reading seemed to Rodney to take an intolerably long time.

"Yes," she observed at length, "a very charming letter."

Rodney's face was half turned away, as if in bashfulness. Her view of
his profile almost moved her to laughter. She glanced through the
pages once more.

"I see no harm," William blurted out, "in helping her--with Greek, for
example--if she really cares for that sort of thing."

"There's no reason why she shouldn't care," said Katharine, consulting
the pages once more. "In fact--ah, here it is--'The Greek alphabet is
absolutely FASCINATING.' Obviously she does care."

"Well, Greek may be rather a large order. I was thinking chiefly of
English. Her criticisms of my play, though they're too generous,
evidently immature--she can't be more than twenty-two, I suppose?--
they certainly show the sort of thing one wants: real feeling for
poetry, understanding, not formed, of course, but it's at the root of
everything after all. There'd be no harm in lending her books?"

"No. Certainly not."

"But if it--hum--led to a correspondence? I mean, Katharine, I take
it, without going into matters which seem to me a little morbid, I
mean," he floundered, "you, from your point of view, feel that there's
nothing disagreeable to you in the notion? If so, you've only to
speak, and I never think of it again."

She was surprised by the violence of her desire that he never should
think of it again. For an instant it seemed to her impossible to
surrender an intimacy, which might not be the intimacy of love, but
was certainly the intimacy of true friendship, to any woman in the
world. Cassandra would never understand him--she was not good enough
for him. The letter seemed to her a letter of flattery--a letter
addressed to his weakness, which it made her angry to think was known
to another. For he was not weak; he had the rare strength of doing
what he promised--she had only to speak, and he would never think of
Cassandra again.

She paused. Rodney guessed the reason. He was amazed.

"She loves me," he thought. The woman he admired more than any one in
the world, loved him, as he had given up hope that she would ever love
him. And now that for the first time he was sure of her love, he
resented it. He felt it as a fetter, an encumbrance, something which
made them both, but him in particular, ridiculous. He was in her power
completely, but his eyes were open and he was no longer her slave or
her dupe. He would be her master in future. The instant prolonged
itself as Katharine realized the strength of her desire to speak the
words that should keep William for ever, and the baseness of the
temptation which assailed her to make the movement, or speak the word,
which he had often begged her for, which she was now near enough to
feeling. She held the letter in her hand. She sat silent.

At this moment there was a stir in the other room; the voice of Mrs.
Hilbery was heard talking of proof-sheets rescued by miraculous
providence from butcher's ledgers in Australia; the curtain separating
one room from the other was drawn apart, and Mrs. Hilbery and Augustus
Pelham stood in the doorway. Mrs. Hilbery stopped short. She looked at
her daughter, and at the man her daughter was to marry, with her
peculiar smile that always seemed to tremble on the brink of satire.

"The best of all my treasures, Mr. Pelham!" she exclaimed. "Don't
move, Katharine. Sit still, William. Mr. Pelham will come another
day."

Mr. Pelham looked, smiled, bowed, and, as his hostess had moved on,
followed her without a word. The curtain was drawn again either by him
or by Mrs. Hilbery.

But her mother had settled the question somehow. Katharine doubted no
longer.

"As I told you last night," she said, "I think it's your duty, if
there's a chance that you care for Cassandra, to discover what your
feeling is for her now. It's your duty to her, as well as to me. But
we must tell my mother. We can't go on pretending."

"That is entirely in your hands, of course," said Rodney, with an
immediate return to the manner of a formal man of honor.

"Very well," said Katharine.

Directly he left her she would go to her mother, and explain that the
engagement was at an end--or it might be better that they should go
together?

"But, Katharine," Rodney began, nervously attempting to stuff
Cassandra's sheets back into their envelope; "if Cassandra--should
Cassandra--you've asked Cassandra to stay with you."

"Yes; but I've not posted the letter."

He crossed his knees in a discomfited silence. By all his codes it was
impossible to ask a woman with whom he had just broken off his
engagement to help him to become acquainted with another woman with a
view to his falling in love with her. If it was announced that their
engagement was over, a long and complete separation would inevitably
follow; in those circumstances, letters and gifts were returned; after
years of distance the severed couple met, perhaps at an evening party,
and touched hands uncomfortably with an indifferent word or two. He
would be cast off completely; he would have to trust to his own
resources. He could never mention Cassandra to Katharine again; for
months, and doubtless years, he would never see Katharine again;
anything might happen to her in his absence.

Katharine was almost as well aware of his perplexities as he was. She
knew in what direction complete generosity pointed the way; but pride
--for to remain engaged to Rodney and to cover his experiments hurt
what was nobler in her than mere vanity--fought for its life.

"I'm to give up my freedom for an indefinite time," she thought, "in
order that William may see Cassandra here at his ease. He's not the
courage to manage it without my help--he's too much of a coward to
tell me openly what he wants. He hates the notion of a public breach.
He wants to keep us both."

When she reached this point, Rodney pocketed the letter and
elaborately looked at his watch. Although the action meant that he
resigned Cassandra, for he knew his own incompetence and distrusted
himself entirely, and lost Katharine, for whom his feeling was
profound though unsatisfactory, still it appeared to him that there
was nothing else left for him to do. He was forced to go, leaving
Katharine free, as he had said, to tell her mother that the engagement
was at an end. But to do what plain duty required of an honorable man,
cost an effort which only a day or two ago would have been
inconceivable to him. That a relationship such as he had glanced at
with desire could be possible between him and Katharine, he would have
been the first, two days ago, to deny with indignation. But now his
life had changed; his attitude had changed; his feelings were
different; new aims and possibilities had been shown him, and they had
an almost irresistible fascination and force. The training of a life
of thirty-five years had not left him defenceless; he was still master
of his dignity; he rose, with a mind made up to an irrevocable
farewell.

"I leave you, then," he said, standing up and holding out his hand
with an effort that left him pale, but lent him dignity, "to tell your
mother that our engagement is ended by your desire."

She took his hand and held it.

"You don't trust me?" she said.

"I do, absolutely," he replied.

"No. You don't trust me to help you. . . . I could help you?"

"I'm hopeless without your help!" he exclaimed passionately, but
withdrew his hand and turned his back. When he faced her, she thought
that she saw him for the first time without disguise.

"It's useless to pretend that I don't understand what you're offering,
Katharine. I admit what you say. Speaking to you perfectly frankly, I
believe at this moment that I do love your cousin; there is a chance
that, with your help, I might--but no," he broke off, "it's
impossible, it's wrong--I'm infinitely to blame for having allowed
this situation to arise."

"Sit beside me. Let's consider sensibly--"

"Your sense has been our undoing--" he groaned.

"I accept the responsibility."

"Ah, but can I allow that?" he exclaimed. "It would mean--for we must
face it, Katharine--that we let our engagement stand for the time
nominally; in fact, of course, your freedom would be absolute."

"And yours too."

"Yes, we should both be free. Let us say that I saw Cassandra once,
twice, perhaps, under these conditions; and then if, as I think
certain, the whole thing proves a dream, we tell your mother
instantly. Why not tell her now, indeed, under pledge of secrecy?"

"Why not? It would be over London in ten minutes, besides, she would
never even remotely understand."

"Your father, then? This secrecy is detestable--it's dishonorable."

"My father would understand even less than my mother."

"Ah, who could be expected to understand?" Rodney groaned; "but it's
from your point of view that we must look at it. It's not only asking
too much, it's putting you into a position--a position in which I
could not endure to see my own sister."

"We're not brothers and sisters," she said impatiently, "and if we
can't decide, who can? I'm not talking nonsense," she proceeded. "I've
done my best to think this out from every point of view, and I've come
to the conclusion that there are risks which have to be taken,--though
I don't deny that they hurt horribly."

"Katharine, you mind? You'll mind too much."

"No I shan't," she said stoutly. "I shall mind a good deal, but I'm
prepared for that; I shall get through it, because you will help me.
You'll both help me. In fact, we'll help each other. That's a
Christian doctrine, isn't it?"

"It sounds more like Paganism to me," Rodney groaned, as he reviewed
the situation into which her Christian doctrine was plunging them.

And yet he could not deny that a divine relief possessed him, and that
the future, instead of wearing a lead-colored mask, now blossomed with
a thousand varied gaieties and excitements. He was actually to see
Cassandra within a week or perhaps less, and he was more anxious to
know the date of her arrival than he could own even to himself. It
seemed base to be so anxious to pluck this fruit of Katharine's
unexampled generosity and of his own contemptible baseness. And yet,
though he used these words automatically, they had now no meaning. He
was not debased in his own eyes by what he had done, and as for
praising Katharine, were they not partners, conspirators, people bent
upon the same quest together, so that to praise the pursuit of a
common end as an act of generosity was meaningless. He took her hand
and pressed it, not in thanks so much as in an ecstasy of comradeship.

"We will help each other," he said, repeating her words, seeking her
eyes in an enthusiasm of friendship.

Her eyes were grave but dark with sadness as they rested on him. "He's
already gone," she thought, "far away--he thinks of me no more." And
the fancy came to her that, as they sat side by side, hand in hand,
she could hear the earth pouring from above to make a barrier between
them, so that, as they sat, they were separated second by second by an
impenetrable wall. The process, which affected her as that of being
sealed away and for ever from all companionship with the person she
cared for most, came to an end at last, and by common consent they
unclasped their fingers, Rodney touching hers with his lips, as the
curtain parted, and Mrs. Hilbery peered through the opening with her
benevolent and sarcastic expression to ask whether Katharine could
remember was it Tuesday or Wednesday, and did she dine in Westminster?

"Dearest William," she said, pausing, as if she could not resist the
pleasure of encroaching for a second upon this wonderful world of love
and confidence and romance. "Dearest children," she added,
disappearing with an impulsive gesture, as if she forced herself to
draw the curtain upon a scene which she refused all temptation to
interrupt.

CHAPTER XXV

At a quarter-past three in the afternoon of the following Saturday
Ralph Denham sat on the bank of the lake in Kew Gardens, dividing the
dial-plate of his watch into sections with his forefinger. The just
and inexorable nature of time itself was reflected in his face. He
might have been composing a hymn to the unhasting and unresting march
of that divinity. He seemed to greet the lapse of minute after minute
with stern acquiescence in the inevitable order. His expression was so
severe, so serene, so immobile, that it seemed obvious that for him at
least there was a grandeur in the departing hour which no petty
irritation on his part was to mar, although the wasting time wasted
also high private hopes of his own.

His face was no bad index to what went on within him. He was in a
condition of mind rather too exalted for the trivialities of daily
life. He could not accept the fact that a lady was fifteen minutes
late in keeping her appointment without seeing in that accident the
frustration of his entire life. Looking at his watch, he seemed to
look deep into the springs of human existence, and by the light of
what he saw there altered his course towards the north and the
midnight. . . . Yes, one's voyage must be made absolutely without
companions through ice and black water--towards what goal? Here he
laid his finger upon the half-hour, and decided that when the
minute-hand reached that point he would go, at the same time answering
the question put by another of the many voices of consciousness with
the reply that there was undoubtedly a goal, but that it would need
the most relentless energy to keep anywhere in its direction. Still,
still, one goes on, the ticking seconds seemed to assure him, with
dignity, with open eyes, with determination not to accept the
second-rate, not to be tempted by the unworthy, not to yield, not to
compromise. Twenty-five minutes past three were now marked upon the
face of the watch. The world, he assured himself, since Katharine
Hilbery was now half an hour behind her time, offers no happiness, no
rest from struggle, no certainty. In a scheme of things utterly bad
from the start the only unpardonable folly is that of hope. Raising
his eyes for a moment from the face of his watch, he rested them upon
the opposite bank, reflectively and not without a certain wistfulness,
as if the sternness of their gaze were still capable of mitigation.
Soon a look of the deepest satisfaction filled them, though, for a
moment, he did not move. He watched a lady who came rapidly, and yet
with a trace of hesitation, down the broad grass-walk towards him. She
did not see him. Distance lent her figure an indescribable height, and
romance seemed to surround her from the floating of a purple veil
which the light air filled and curved from her shoulders.

"Here she comes, like a ship in full sail," he said to himself, half
remembering some line from a play or poem where the heroine bore down
thus with feathers flying and airs saluting her. The greenery and the
high presences of the trees surrounded her as if they stood forth at
her coming. He rose, and she saw him; her little exclamation proved
that she was glad to find him, and then that she blamed herself for
being late.

"Why did you never tell me? I didn't know there was this," she
remarked, alluding to the lake, the broad green space, the vista of
trees, with the ruffled gold of the Thames in the distance and the
Ducal castle standing in its meadows. She paid the rigid tail of the
Ducal lion the tribute of incredulous laughter.

"You've never been to Kew?" Denham remarked.

But it appeared that she had come once as a small child, when the
geography of the place was entirely different, and the fauna included
certainly flamingoes and, possibly, camels. They strolled on,
refashioning these legendary gardens. She was, as he felt, glad merely
to stroll and loiter and let her fancy touch upon anything her eyes
encountered--a bush, a park-keeper, a decorated goose--as if the
relaxation soothed her. The warmth of the afternoon, the first of
spring, tempted them to sit upon a seat in a glade of beech-trees,
with forest drives striking green paths this way and that around them.
She sighed deeply.

"It's so peaceful," she said, as if in explanation of her sigh. Not a
single person was in sight, and the stir of the wind in the branches,
that sound so seldom heard by Londoners, seemed to her as if wafted
from fathomless oceans of sweet air in the distance.

While she breathed and looked, Denham was engaged in uncovering with
the point of his stick a group of green spikes half smothered by the
dead leaves. He did this with the peculiar touch of the botanist. In
naming the little green plant to her he used the Latin name, thus
disguising some flower familiar even to Chelsea, and making her
exclaim, half in amusement, at his knowledge. Her own ignorance was
vast, she confessed. What did one call that tree opposite, for
instance, supposing one condescended to call it by its English name?
Beech or elm or sycamore? It chanced, by the testimony of a dead leaf,
to be oak; and a little attention to a diagram which Denham proceeded
to draw upon an envelope soon put Katharine in possession of some of
the fundamental distinctions between our British trees. She then asked
him to inform her about flowers. To her they were variously shaped and
colored petals, poised, at different seasons of the year, upon very
similar green stalks; but to him they were, in the first instance,
bulbs or seeds, and later, living things endowed with sex, and pores,
and susceptibilities which adapted themselves by all manner of
ingenious devices to live and beget life, and could be fashioned squat
or tapering, flame-colored or pale, pure or spotted, by processes
which might reveal the secrets of human existence. Denham spoke with
increasing ardor of a hobby which had long been his in secret. No
discourse could have worn a more welcome sound in Katharine's ears.
For weeks she had heard nothing that made such pleasant music in her
mind. It wakened echoes in all those remote fastnesses of her being
where loneliness had brooded so long undisturbed.

She wished he would go on for ever talking of plants, and showing her
how science felt not quite blindly for the law that ruled their
endless variations. A law that might be inscrutable but was certainly
omnipotent appealed to her at the moment, because she could find
nothing like it in possession of human lives. Circumstances had long
forced her, as they force most women in the flower of youth, to
consider, painfully and minutely, all that part of life which is
conspicuously without order; she had had to consider moods and wishes,
degrees of liking or disliking, and their effect upon the destiny of
people dear to her; she had been forced to deny herself any
contemplation of that other part of life where thought constructs a
destiny which is independent of human beings. As Denham spoke, she
followed his words and considered their bearing with an easy vigor
which spoke of a capacity long hoarded and unspent. The very trees and
the green merging into the blue distance became symbols of the vast
external world which recks so little of the happiness, of the
marriages or deaths of individuals. In order to give her examples of
what he was saying, Denham led the way, first to the Rock Garden, and
then to the Orchid House.

For him there was safety in the direction which the talk had taken.
His emphasis might come from feelings more personal than those science
roused in him, but it was disguised, and naturally he found it easy to
expound and explain. Nevertheless, when he saw Katharine among the
orchids, her beauty strangely emphasized by the fantastic plants,
which seemed to peer and gape at her from striped hoods and fleshy
throats, his ardor for botany waned, and a more complex feeling
replaced it. She fell silent. The orchids seemed to suggest absorbing
reflections. In defiance of the rules she stretched her ungloved hand
and touched one. The sight of the rubies upon her finger affected him
so disagreeably that he started and turned away. But next moment he
controlled himself; he looked at her taking in one strange shape after
another with the contemplative, considering gaze of a person who sees
not exactly what is before him, but gropes in regions that lie beyond
it. The far-away look entirely lacked self-consciousness. Denham
doubted whether she remembered his presence. He could recall himself,
of course, by a word or a movement--but why? She was happier thus. She
needed nothing that he could give her. And for him, too, perhaps, it
was best to keep aloof, only to know that she existed, to preserve
what he already had--perfect, remote, and unbroken. Further, her still
look, standing among the orchids in that hot atmosphere, strangely
illustrated some scene that he had imagined in his room at home. The
sight, mingling with his recollection, kept him silent when the door
was shut and they were walking on again.

But though she did not speak, Katharine had an uneasy sense that
silence on her part was selfishness. It was selfish of her to
continue, as she wished to do, a discussion of subjects not remotely
connected with any human beings. She roused herself to consider their
exact position upon the turbulent map of the emotions. Oh yes--it was
a question whether Ralph Denham should live in the country and write a
book; it was getting late; they must waste no more time; Cassandra
arrived to-night for dinner; she flinched and roused herself, and
discovered that she ought to be holding something in her hands. But
they were empty. She held them out with an exclamation.

"I've left my bag somewhere--where?" The gardens had no points of the
compass, so far as she was concerned. She had been walking for the
most part on grass--that was all she knew. Even the road to the Orchid
House had now split itself into three. But there was no bag in the
Orchid House. It must, therefore, have been left upon the seat. They
retraced their steps in the preoccupied manner of people who have to
think about something that is lost. What did this bag look like? What
did it contain?

"A purse--a ticket--some letters, papers," Katharine counted, becoming
more agitated as she recalled the list. Denham went on quickly in
advance of her, and she heard him shout that he had found it before
she reached the seat. In order to make sure that all was safe she
spread the contents on her knee. It was a queer collection, Denham
thought, gazing with the deepest interest. Loose gold coins were
tangled in a narrow strip of lace; there were letters which somehow
suggested the extreme of intimacy; there were two or three keys, and
lists of commissions against which crosses were set at intervals. But
she did not seem satisfied until she had made sure of a certain paper
so folded that Denham could not judge what it contained. In her relief
and gratitude she began at once to say that she had been thinking over
what Denham had told her of his plans.

He cut her short. "Don't let's discuss that dreary business."

"But I thought--"

"It's a dreary business. I ought never to have bothered you--"

"Have you decided, then?"

He made an impatient sound. "It's not a thing that matters."

She could only say rather flatly, "Oh!"

"I mean it matters to me, but it matters to no one else. Anyhow," he
continued, more amiably, "I see no reason why you should be bothered
with other people's nuisances."

She supposed that she had let him see too clearly her weariness of
this side of life.

"I'm afraid I've been absent-minded," she began, remembering how often
William had brought this charge against her.

"You have a good deal to make you absent-minded," he replied.

"Yes," she replied, flushing. "No," she contradicted herself. "Nothing
particular, I mean. But I was thinking about plants. I was enjoying
myself. In fact, I've seldom enjoyed an afternoon more. But I want to
hear what you've settled, if you don't mind telling me."

"Oh, it's all settled," he replied. "I'm going to this infernal
cottage to write a worthless book."

"How I envy you," she replied, with the utmost sincerity.

"Well, cottages are to be had for fifteen shillings a week."

"Cottages are to be had--yes," she replied. "The question is--" She
checked herself. "Two rooms are all I should want," she continued,
with a curious sigh; "one for eating, one for sleeping. Oh, but I
should like another, a large one at the top, and a little garden where
one could grow flowers. A path--so--down to a river, or up to a wood,
and the sea not very far off, so that one could hear the waves at
night. Ships just vanishing on the horizon--" She broke off. "Shall
you be near the sea?"

"My notion of perfect happiness," he began, not replying to her
question, "is to live as you've said."

"Well, now you can. You will work, I suppose," she continued; "you'll
work all the morning and again after tea and perhaps at night. You
won't have people always coming about you to interrupt."

"How far can one live alone?" he asked. "Have you tried ever?"

"Once for three weeks," she replied. "My father and mother were in
Italy, and something happened so that I couldn't join them. For three
weeks I lived entirely by myself, and the only person I spoke to was a
stranger in a shop where I lunched--a man with a beard. Then I went
back to my room by myself and--well, I did what I liked. It doesn't
make me out an amiable character, I'm afraid," she added, "but I can't
endure living with other people. An occasional man with a beard is
interesting; he's detached; he lets me go my way, and we know we shall
never meet again. Therefore, we are perfectly sincere--a thing not
possible with one's friends."

"Nonsense," Denham replied abruptly.

"Why 'nonsense'?" she inquired.

"Because you don't mean what you say," he expostulated.

"You're very positive," she said, laughing and looking at him. How
arbitrary, hot-tempered, and imperious he was! He had asked her to
come to Kew to advise him; he then told her that he had settled the
question already; he then proceeded to find fault with her. He was the
very opposite of William Rodney, she thought; he was shabby, his
clothes were badly made, he was ill versed in the amenities of life;
he was tongue-tied and awkward to the verge of obliterating his real
character. He was awkwardly silent; he was awkwardly emphatic. And yet
she liked him.

"I don't mean what I say," she repeated good-humoredly. "Well--?"

"I doubt whether you make absolute sincerity your standard in life,"
he answered significantly.

She flushed. He had penetrated at once to the weak spot--her
engagement, and had reason for what he said. He was not altogether
justified now, at any rate, she was glad to remember; but she could
not enlighten him and must bear his insinuations, though from the lips
of a man who had behaved as he had behaved their force should not have
been sharp. Nevertheless, what he said had its force, she mused;
partly because he seemed unconscious of his own lapse in the case of
Mary Datchet, and thus baffled her insight; partly because he always
spoke with force, for what reason she did not yet feel certain.

"Absolute sincerity is rather difficult, don't you think?" she
inquired, with a touch of irony.

"There are people one credits even with that," he replied a little
vaguely. He was ashamed of his savage wish to hurt her, and yet it was
not for the sake of hurting her, who was beyond his shafts, but in
order to mortify his own incredibly reckless impulse of abandonment to
the spirit which seemed, at moments, about to rush him to the
uttermost ends of the earth. She affected him beyond the scope of his
wildest dreams. He seemed to see that beneath the quiet surface of her
manner, which was almost pathetically at hand and within reach for all
the trivial demands of daily life, there was a spirit which she
reserved or repressed for some reason either of loneliness or--could
it be possible--of love. Was it given to Rodney to see her unmasked,
unrestrained, unconscious of her duties? a creature of uncalculating
passion and instinctive freedom? No; he refused to believe it. It was
in her loneliness that Katharine was unreserved. "I went back to my
room by myself and I did--what I liked." She had said that to him, and
in saying it had given him a glimpse of possibilities, even of
confidences, as if he might be the one to share her loneliness, the
mere hint of which made his heart beat faster and his brain spin. He
checked himself as brutally as he could. He saw her redden, and in the
irony of her reply he heard her resentment.

He began slipping his smooth, silver watch in his pocket, in the hope
that somehow he might help himself back to that calm and fatalistic
mood which had been his when he looked at its face upon the bank of
the lake, for that mood must, at whatever cost, be the mood of his
intercourse with Katharine. He had spoken of gratitude and
acquiescence in the letter which he had never sent, and now all the
force of his character must make good those vows in her presence.

She, thus challenged, tried meanwhile to define her points. She wished
to make Denham understand.

"Don't you see that if you have no relations with people it's easier
to be honest with them?" she inquired. "That is what I meant. One
needn't cajole them; one's under no obligation to them. Surely you
must have found with your own family that it's impossible to discuss
what matters to you most because you're all herded together, because
you're in a conspiracy, because the position is false--" Her reasoning
suspended itself a little inconclusively, for the subject was complex,
and she found herself in ignorance whether Denham had a family or not.
Denham was agreed with her as to the destructiveness of the family
system, but he did not wish to discuss the problem at that moment.

He turned to a problem which was of greater interest to him.

"I'm convinced," he said, "that there are cases in which perfect
sincerity is possible--cases where there's no relationship, though the
people live together, if you like, where each is free, where there's
no obligation upon either side."

"For a time perhaps," she agreed, a little despondently. "But
obligations always grow up. There are feelings to be considered.
People aren't simple, and though they may mean to be reasonable, they
end"--in the condition in which she found herself, she meant, but
added lamely--"in a muddle."

"Because," Denham instantly intervened, "they don't make themselves
understood at the beginning. I could undertake, at this instant," he
continued, with a reasonable intonation which did much credit to his
self-control, "to lay down terms for a friendship which should be
perfectly sincere and perfectly straightforward."

She was curious to hear them, but, besides feeling that the topic
concealed dangers better known to her than to him, she was reminded by
his tone of his curious abstract declaration upon the Embankment.
Anything that hinted at love for the moment alarmed her; it was as
much an infliction to her as the rubbing of a skinless wound.

But he went on, without waiting for her invitation.

"In the first place, such a friendship must be unemotional," he laid
it down emphatically. "At least, on both sides it must be understood
that if either chooses to fall in love, he or she does so entirely at
his own risk. Neither is under any obligation to the other. They must
be at liberty to break or to alter at any moment. They must be able to
say whatever they wish to say. All this must be understood."

"And they gain something worth having?" she asked.

"It's a risk--of course it's a risk," he replied. The word

was one that she had been using frequently in her arguments with
herself of late.

"But it's the only way--if you think friendship worth having," he
concluded.

"Perhaps under those conditions it might be," she said reflectively.

"Well," he said, "those are the terms of the friendship I wish to
offer you." She had known that this was coming, but, none the less,
felt a little shock, half of pleasure, half of reluctance, when she
heard the formal statement.

"I should like it," she began, "but--"

"Would Rodney mind?"

"Oh no," she replied quickly.

"No, no, it isn't that," she went on, and again came to an end. She
had been touched by the unreserved and yet ceremonious way in which he
had made what he called his offer of terms, but if he was generous it
was the more necessary for her to be cautious. They would find
themselves in difficulties, she speculated; but, at this point, which
was not very far, after all, upon the road of caution, her foresight
deserted her. She sought for some definite catastrophe into which they
must inevitably plunge. But she could think of none. It seemed to her
that these catastrophes were fictitious; life went on and on--life was
different altogether from what people said. And not only was she at an
end of her stock of caution, but it seemed suddenly altogether
superfluous. Surely if any one could take care of himself, Ralph
Denham could; he had told her that he did not love her. And, further,
she meditated, walking on beneath the beech-trees and swinging her
umbrella, as in her thought she was accustomed to complete freedom,
why should she perpetually apply so different a standard to her
behavior in practice? Why, she reflected, should there be this
perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the
life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice
on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the
other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night? Was it not
possible to step from one to the other, erect, and without essential
change? Was this not the chance he offered her--the rare and wonderful
chance of friendship? At any rate, she told Denham, with a sigh in
which he heard both impatience and relief, that she agreed; she
thought him right; she would accept his terms of friendship.

"Now," she said, "let's go and have tea."

In fact, these principles having been laid down, a great lightness of
spirit showed itself in both of them. They were both convinced that
something of profound importance had been settled, and could now give
their attention to their tea and the Gardens. They wandered in and out
of glass-houses, saw lilies swimming in tanks, breathed in the scent
of thousands of carnations, and compared their respective tastes in
the matter of trees and lakes. While talking exclusively of what they
saw, so that any one might have overheard them, they felt that the
compact between them was made firmer and deeper by the number of
people who passed them and suspected nothing of the kind. The question
of Ralph's cottage and future was not mentioned again.

CHAPTER XXVI

Although the old coaches, with their gay panels and the guard's horn,
and the humors of the box and the vicissitudes of the road, have long
moldered into dust so far as they were matter, and are preserved in
the printed pages of our novelists so far as they partook of the
spirit, a journey to London by express train can still be a very
pleasant and romantic adventure. Cassandra Otway, at the age of
twenty-two, could imagine few things more pleasant. Satiated with
months of green fields as she was, the first row of artisans' villas
on the outskirts of London seemed to have something serious about it,
which positively increased the importance of every person in the
railway carriage, and even, to her impressionable mind, quickened the
speed of the train and gave a note of stern authority to the shriek of
the engine-whistle. They were bound for London; they must have
precedence of all traffic not similarly destined. A different demeanor
was necessary directly one stepped out upon Liverpool Street platform,
and became one of those preoccupied and hasty citizens for whose needs
innumerable taxi-cabs, motor-omnibuses, and underground railways were
in waiting. She did her best to look dignified and preoccupied too,
but as the cab carried her away, with a determination which alarmed
her a little, she became more and more forgetful of her station as a
citizen of London, and turned her head from one window to another,
picking up eagerly a building on this side or a street scene on that
to feed her intense curiosity. And yet, while the drive lasted no one
was real, nothing was ordinary; the crowds, the Government buildings,
the tide of men and women washing the base of the great glass windows,
were all generalized, and affected her as if she saw them on the
stage.

All these feelings were sustained and partly inspired by the fact that
her journey took her straight to the center of her most romantic
world. A thousand times in the midst of her pastoral landscape her
thoughts took this precise road, were admitted to the house in
Chelsea, and went directly upstairs to Katharine's room, where,
invisible themselves, they had the better chance of feasting upon the
privacy of the room's adorable and mysterious mistress. Cassandra
adored her cousin; the adoration might have been foolish, but was
saved from that excess and lent an engaging charm by the volatile
nature of Cassandra's temperament. She had adored a great many things
and people in the course of twenty-two years; she had been alternately
the pride and the desperation of her teachers. She had worshipped
architecture and music, natural history and humanity, literature and
art, but always at the height of her enthusiasm, which was accompanied
by a brilliant degree of accomplishment, she changed her mind and
bought, surreptitiously, another grammar. The terrible results which
governesses had predicted from such mental dissipation were certainly
apparent now that Cassandra was twenty-two, and had never passed an
examination, and daily showed herself less and less capable of passing
one. The more serious prediction that she could never possibly earn
her living was also verified. But from all these short strands of
different accomplishments Cassandra wove for herself an attitude, a
cast of mind, which, if useless, was found by some people to have the
not despicable virtues of vivacity and freshness. Katharine, for
example, thought her a most charming companion. The cousins seemed to
assemble between them a great range of qualities which are never found
united in one person and seldom in half a dozen people. Where
Katharine was simple, Cassandra was complex; where Katharine was solid
and direct, Cassandra was vague and evasive. In short, they
represented very well the manly and the womanly sides of the feminine
nature, and, for foundation, there was the profound unity of common
blood between them. If Cassandra adored Katharine she was incapable of
adoring any one without refreshing her spirit with frequent draughts
of raillery and criticism, and Katharine enjoyed her laughter at least
as much as her respect.

Respect was certainly uppermost in Cassandra's mind at the present
moment. Katharine's engagement had appealed to her imagination as the
first engagement in a circle of contemporaries is apt to appeal to the
imaginations of the others; it was solemn, beautiful, and mysterious;
it gave both parties the important air of those who have been
initiated into some rite which is still concealed from the rest of the
group. For Katharine's sake Cassandra thought William a most
distinguished and interesting character, and welcomed first his
conversation and then his manuscript as the marks of a friendship
which it flattered and delighted her to inspire.

Katharine was still out when she arrived at Cheyne Walk. After
greeting her uncle and aunt and receiving, as usual, a present of two
sovereigns for "cab fares and dissipation" from Uncle Trevor, whose
favorite niece she was, she changed her dress and wandered into
Katharine's room to await her. What a great looking-glass Katharine
had, she thought, and how mature all the arrangements upon the
dressing-table were compared to what she was used to at home. Glancing
round, she thought that the bills stuck upon a skewer and stood for
ornament upon the mantelpiece were astonishingly like Katharine, There
wasn't a photograph of William anywhere to be seen. The room, with its
combination of luxury and bareness, its silk dressing-gowns and
crimson slippers, its shabby carpet and bare walls, had a powerful air
of Katharine herself; she stood in the middle of the room and enjoyed
the sensation; and then, with a desire to finger what her cousin was
in the habit of fingering, Cassandra began to take down the books
which stood in a row upon the shelf above the bed. In most houses this
shelf is the ledge upon which the last relics of religious belief
lodge themselves as if, late at night, in the heart of privacy,
people, skeptical by day, find solace in sipping one draught of the
old charm for such sorrows or perplexities as may steal from their
hiding-places in the dark. But there was no hymn-book here. By their
battered covers and enigmatical contents, Cassandra judged them to be
old school-books belonging to Uncle Trevor, and piously, though
eccentrically, preserved by his daughter. There was no end, she
thought, to the unexpectedness of Katharine. She had once had a
passion for geometry herself, and, curled upon Katharine's quilt, she
became absorbed in trying to remember how far she had forgotten what
she once knew. Katharine, coming in a little later, found her deep in
this characteristic pursuit.

"My dear," Cassandra exclaimed, shaking the book at her cousin, "my
whole life's changed from this moment! I must write the man's name
down at once, or I shall forget--"

Whose name, what book, which life was changed Katharine proceeded to
ascertain. She began to lay aside her clothes hurriedly, for she was
very late.

"May I sit and watch you?" Cassandra asked, shutting up her book. "I
got ready on purpose."

"Oh, you're ready, are you?" said Katharine, half turning in the midst
of her operations, and looking at Cassandra, who sat, clasping her
knees, on the edge of the bed.

"There are people dining here," she said, taking in the effect of
Cassandra from a new point of view. After an interval, the
distinction, the irregular charm, of the small face with its long
tapering nose and its bright oval eyes were very notable. The hair
rose up off the forehead rather stiffly, and, given a more careful
treatment by hairdressers and dressmakers, the light angular figure
might possess a likeness to a French lady of distinction in the
eighteenth century.

"Who's coming to dinner?" Cassandra asked, anticipating further
possibilities of rapture.

"There's William, and, I believe, Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Aubrey."

"I'm so glad William is coming. Did he tell you that he sent me his
manuscript? I think it's wonderful--I think he's almost good enough
for you, Katharine."

"You shall sit next to him and tell him what you think of him."

"I shan't dare do that," Cassandra asserted.

"Why? You're not afraid of him, are you?"

"A little--because he's connected with you."

Katharine smiled.

"But then, with your well-known fidelity, considering that you're
staying here at least a fortnight, you won't have any illusions left
about me by the time you go. I give you a week, Cassandra. I shall see
my power fading day by day. Now it's at the climax; but to-morrow
it'll have begun to fade. What am I to wear, I wonder? Find me a blue
dress, Cassandra, over there in the long wardrobe."

She spoke disconnectedly, handling brush and comb, and pulling out the
little drawers in her dressing-table and leaving them open. Cassandra,
sitting on the bed behind her, saw the reflection of her cousin's face
in the looking-glass. The face in the looking-glass was serious and
intent, apparently occupied with other things besides the straightness
of the parting which, however, was being driven as straight as a Roman
road through the dark hair. Cassandra was impressed again by
Katharine's maturity; and, as she enveloped herself in the blue dress
which filled almost the whole of the long looking-glass with blue
light and made it the frame of a picture, holding not only the
slightly moving effigy of the beautiful woman, but shapes and colors
of objects reflected from the background, Cassandra thought that no
sight had ever been quite so romantic. It was all in keeping with the
room and the house, and the city round them; for her ears had not yet
ceased to notice the hum of distant wheels.

They went downstairs rather late, in spite of Katharine's extreme
speed in getting ready. To Cassandra's ears the buzz of voices inside
the drawing-room was like the tuning up of the instruments of the
orchestra. It seemed to her that there were numbers of people in the
room, and that they were strangers, and that they were beautiful and
dressed with the greatest distinction, although they proved to be
mostly her relations, and the distinction of their clothing was
confined, in the eyes of an impartial observer, to the white waistcoat
which Rodney wore. But they all rose simultaneously, which was by
itself impressive, and they all exclaimed, and shook hands, and she
was introduced to Mr. Peyton, and the door sprang open, and dinner was
announced, and they filed off, William Rodney offering her his
slightly bent black arm, as she had secretly hoped he would. In short,
had the scene been looked at only through her eyes, it must have been
described as one of magical brilliancy. The pattern of the
soup-plates, the stiff folds of the napkins, which rose by the side of
each plate in the shape of arum lilies, the long sticks of bread tied
with pink ribbon, the silver dishes and the sea-colored champagne
glasses, with the flakes of gold congealed in their stems--all these
details, together with a curiously pervasive smell of kid gloves,
contributed to her exhilaration, which must be repressed, however,
because she was grown up, and the world held no more for her to marvel
at.

The world held no more for her to marvel at, it is true; but it held
other people; and each other person possessed in Cassandra's mind some
fragment of what privately she called "reality." It was a gift that
they would impart if you asked them for it, and thus no dinner-party
could possibly be dull, and little Mr. Peyton on her right and William
Rodney on her left were in equal measure endowed with the quality
which seemed to her so unmistakable and so precious that the way
people neglected to demand it was a constant source of surprise to
her. She scarcely knew, indeed, whether she was talking to Mr. Peyton
or to William Rodney. But to one who, by degrees, assumed the shape of
an elderly man with a mustache, she described how she had arrived in
London that very afternoon, and how she had taken a cab and driven
through the streets. Mr. Peyton, an editor of fifty years, bowed his
bald head repeatedly, with apparent understanding. At least, he
understood that she was very young and pretty, and saw that she was
excited, though he could not gather at once from her words or remember
from his own experience what there was to be excited about. "Were
there any buds on the trees?" he asked. "Which line did she travel
by?"

He was cut short in these amiable inquiries by her desire to know
whether he was one of those who read, or one of those who look out of
the window? Mr. Peyton was by no means sure which he did. He rather
thought he did both. He was told that he had made a most dangerous
confession. She could deduce his entire history from that one fact. He
challenged her to proceed; and she proclaimed him a Liberal Member of
Parliament.

William, nominally engaged in a desultory conversation with Aunt
Eleanor, heard every word, and taking advantage of the fact that
elderly ladies have little continuity of conversation, at least with
those whom they esteem for their youth and their sex, he asserted his
presence by a very nervous laugh.

Cassandra turned to him directly. She was enchanted to find that,
instantly and with such ease, another of these fascinating beings was
offering untold wealth for her extraction.

"There's no doubt what YOU do in a railway carriage, William," she
said, making use in her pleasure of his first name. "You never ONCE
look out of the window; you read ALL the time."

"And what facts do you deduce from that?" Mr. Peyton asked.

"Oh, that he's a poet, of course," said Cassandra. "But I must confess
that I knew that before, so it isn't fair. I've got your manuscript
with me," she went on, disregarding Mr. Peyton in a shameless way.
"I've got all sorts of things I want to ask you about it."

William inclined his head and tried to conceal the pleasure that her
remark gave him. But the pleasure was not unalloyed. However
susceptible to flattery William might be, he would never tolerate it
from people who showed a gross or emotional taste in literature, and
if Cassandra erred even slightly from what he considered essential in
this respect he would express his discomfort by flinging out his hands
and wrinkling his forehead; he would find no pleasure in her flattery
after that.

"First of all," she proceeded, "I want to know why you chose to write
a play?"

"Ah! You mean it's not dramatic?"

"I mean that I don't see what it would gain by being acted. But then
does Shakespeare gain? Henry and I are always arguing about
Shakespeare. I'm certain he's wrong, but I can't prove it because I've
only seen Shakespeare acted once in Lincoln. But I'm quite positive,"
she insisted, "that Shakespeare wrote for the stage."

"You're perfectly right," Rodney exclaimed. "I was hoping you were on
that side. Henry's wrong--entirely wrong. Of course, I've failed, as
all the moderns fail. Dear, dear, I wish I'd consulted you before."

From this point they proceeded to go over, as far as memory served
them, the different aspects of Rodney's drama. She said nothing that
jarred upon him, and untrained daring had the power to stimulate
experience to such an extent that Rodney was frequently seen to hold
his fork suspended before him, while he debated the first principles
of the art. Mrs. Hilbery thought to herself that she had never seen
him to such advantage; yes, he was somehow different; he reminded her
of some one who was dead, some one who was distinguished--she had
forgotten his name.

Cassandra's voice rose high in its excitement.

"You've not read 'The Idiot'!" she exclaimed.

"I've read 'War and Peace'," William replied, a little testily.

"'WAR AND PEACE'!" she echoed, in a tone of derision.

"I confess I don't understand the Russians."

"Shake hands! Shake hands!" boomed Uncle Aubrey from across the table.
"Neither do I. And I hazard the opinion that they don't themselves."

The old gentleman had ruled a large part of the Indian Empire, but he
was in the habit of saying that he had rather have written the works
of Dickens. The table now took possession of a subject much to its
liking. Aunt Eleanor showed premonitory signs of pronouncing an
opinion. Although she had blunted her taste upon some form of
philanthropy for twenty-five years, she had a fine natural instinct
for an upstart or a pretender, and knew to a hairbreadth what
literature should be and what it should not be. She was born to the
knowledge, and scarcely thought it a matter to be proud of.

"Insanity is not a fit subject for fiction," she announced positively.

"There's the well-known case of Hamlet," Mr. Hilbery interposed, in
his leisurely, half-humorous tones.

"Ah, but poetry's different, Trevor," said Aunt Eleanor, as if she had
special authority from Shakespeare to say so. "Different altogether.
And I've never thought, for my part, that Hamlet was as mad as they
make out. What is your opinion, Mr. Peyton?" For, as there was a
minister of literature present in the person of the editor of an
esteemed review, she deferred to him.

Mr. Peyton leant a little back in his chair, and, putting his head
rather on one side, observed that that was a question that he had
never been able to answer entirely to his satisfaction. There was much
to be said on both sides, but as he considered upon which side he
should say it, Mrs. Hilbery broke in upon his judicious meditations.

"Lovely, lovely Ophelia!" she exclaimed. "What a wonderful power it
is--poetry! I wake up in the morning all bedraggled; there's a yellow
fog outside; little Emily turns on the electric light when she brings
me my tea, and says, 'Oh, ma'am, the water's frozen in the cistern,
and cook's cut her finger to the bone.' And then I open a little green
book, and the birds are singing, the stars shining, the flowers
twinkling--" She looked about her as if these presences had suddenly
manifested themselves round her dining-room table.

"Has the cook cut her finger badly?" Aunt Eleanor demanded, addressing
herself naturally to Katharine.

"Oh, the cook's finger is only my way of putting it," said Mrs.
Hilbery. "But if she had cut her arm off, Katharine would have sewn it
on again," she remarked, with an affectionate glance at her daughter,
who looked, she thought, a little sad. "But what horrid, horrid
thoughts," she wound up, laying down her napkin and pushing her chair
back. "Come, let us find something more cheerful to talk about
upstairs."

Upstairs in the drawing-room Cassandra found fresh sources of
pleasure, first in the distinguished and expectant look of the room,
and then in the chance of exercising her divining-rod upon a new
assortment of human beings. But the low tones of the women, their
meditative silences, the beauty which, to her at least, shone even
from black satin and the knobs of amber which encircled elderly necks,
changed her wish to chatter to a more subdued desire merely to watch
and to whisper. She entered with delight into an atmosphere in which
private matters were being interchanged freely, almost in
monosyllables, by the older women who now accepted her as one of
themselves. Her expression became very gentle and sympathetic, as if
she, too, were full of solicitude for the world which was somehow
being cared for, managed and deprecated by Aunt Maggie and Aunt
Eleanor. After a time she perceived that Katharine was outside the
community in some way, and, suddenly, she threw aside her wisdom and
gentleness and concern and began to laugh.

"What are you laughing at?" Katharine asked.

A joke so foolish and unfilial wasn't worth explaining.

"It was nothing--ridiculous--in the worst of taste, but still, if you
half shut your eyes and looked--" Katharine half shut her eyes and
looked, but she looked in the wrong direction, and Cassandra laughed
more than ever, and was still laughing and doing her best to explain
in a whisper that Aunt Eleanor, through half-shut eyes, was like the
parrot in the cage at Stogdon House, when the gentlemen came in and
Rodney walked straight up to them and wanted to know what they were
laughing at.

"I utterly refuse to tell you!" Cassandra replied, standing up
straight, clasping her hands in front of her, and facing him. Her
mockery was delicious to him. He had not even for a second the fear
that she had been laughing at him. She was laughing because life was
so adorable, so enchanting.

"Ah, but you're cruel to make me feel the barbarity of my sex," he
replied, drawing his feet together and pressing his finger-tips upon
an imaginary opera-hat or malacca cane. "We've been discussing all
sorts of dull things, and now I shall never know what I want to know
more than anything in the world."

"You don't deceive us for a minute!" she cried. "Not for a second. We
both know that you've been enjoying yourself immensely. Hasn't he,
Katharine?"

"No," she replied, "I think he's speaking the truth. He doesn't care
much for politics."

Her words, though spoken simply, produced a curious change in the
light, sparkling atmosphere. William at once lost his look of
animation and said seriously:

"I detest politics."

"I don't think any man has the right to say that," said Cassandra,
almost severely.

"I agree. I mean that I detest politicians," he corrected himself
quickly.

"You see, I believe Cassandra is what they call a Feminist," Katharine
went on. "Or rather, she was a Feminist six months ago, but it's no
good supposing that she is now what she was then. That is one of her
greatest charms in my eyes. One never can tell." She smiled at her as
an elder sister might smile.

"Katharine, you make one feel so horribly small!" Cassandra exclaimed.

"No, no, that's not what she means," Rodney interposed. "I quite agree
that women have an immense advantage over us there. One misses a lot
by attempting to know things thoroughly."

"He knows Greek thoroughly," said Katharine. "But then he also knows a
good deal about painting, and a certain amount about music. He's very
cultivated--perhaps the most cultivated person I know."

"And poetry," Cassandra added.

"Yes, I was forgetting his play," Katharine remarked, and turning her
head as though she saw something that needed her attention in a far
corner of the room, she left them.

For a moment they stood silent, after what seemed a deliberate
introduction to each other, and Cassandra watched her crossing the
room.

"Henry," she said next moment, "would say that a stage ought to be no
bigger than this drawing-room. He wants there to be singing and
dancing as well as acting--only all the opposite of Wagner--you
understand?"

They sat down, and Katharine, turning when she reached the window, saw
William with his hand raised in gesticulation and his mouth open, as
if ready to speak the moment Cassandra ceased.

Katharine's duty, whether it was to pull a curtain or move a chair,
was either forgotten or discharged, but she continued to stand by the
window without doing anything. The elderly people were all grouped
together round the fire. They seemed an independent, middle-aged
community busy with its own concerns. They were telling stories very
well and listening to them very graciously. But for her there was no
obvious employment.

"If anybody says anything, I shall say that I'm looking at the river,"
she thought, for in her slavery to her family traditions, she was
ready to pay for her transgression with some plausible falsehood. She
pushed aside the blind and looked at the river. But it was a dark
night and the water was barely visible. Cabs were passing, and couples
were loitering slowly along the road, keeping as close to the railings
as possible, though the trees had as yet no leaves to cast shadow upon
their embraces. Katharine, thus withdrawn, felt her loneliness. The
evening had been one of pain, offering her, minute after minute,
plainer proof that things would fall out as she had foreseen. She had
faced tones, gestures, glances; she knew, with her back to them, that
William, even now, was plunging deeper and deeper into the delight of
unexpected understanding with Cassandra. He had almost told her that
he was finding it infinitely better than he could have believed. She
looked out of the window, sternly determined to forget private
misfortunes, to forget herself, to forget individual lives. With her
eyes upon the dark sky, voices reached her from the room in which she
was standing. She heard them as if they came from people in another
world, a world antecedent to her world, a world that was the prelude,
the antechamber to reality; it was as if, lately dead, she heard the
living talking. The dream nature of our life had never been more
apparent to her, never had life been more certainly an affair of four
walls, whose objects existed only within the range of lights and
fires, beyond which lay nothing, or nothing more than darkness. She
seemed physically to have stepped beyond the region where the light of
illusion still makes it desirable to possess, to love, to struggle.
And yet her melancholy brought her no serenity. She still heard the
voices within the room. She was still tormented by desires. She wished
to be beyond their range. She wished inconsistently enough that she
could find herself driving rapidly through the streets; she was even
anxious to be with some one who, after a moment's groping, took a
definite shape and solidified into the person of Mary Datchet. She
drew the curtains so that the draperies met in deep folds in the
middle of the window.

"Ah, there she is," said Mr. Hilbery, who was standing swaying affably
from side to side, with his back to the fire. "Come here, Katharine. I
couldn't see where you'd got to--our children," he observed
parenthetically, "have their uses--I want you to go to my study,
Katharine; go to the third shelf on the right-hand side of the door;
take down 'Trelawny's Recollections of Shelley'; bring it to me. Then,
Peyton, you will have to admit to the assembled company that you have
been mistaken."

"'Trelawny's Recollections of Shelley.' The third shelf on the right
of the door," Katharine repeated. After all, one does not check
children in their play, or rouse sleepers from their dreams. She
passed William and Cassandra on her way to the door.

"Stop, Katharine," said William, speaking almost as if he were
conscious of her against his will. "Let me go." He rose, after a
second's hesitation, and she understood that it cost him an effort.
She knelt one knee upon the sofa where Cassandra sat, looking down at
her cousin's face, which still moved with the speed of what she had
been saying.

"Are you--happy?" she asked.

"Oh, my dear!" Cassandra exclaimed, as if no further words were
needed. "Of course, we disagree about every subject under the sun,"
she exclaimed, "but I think he's the cleverest man I've ever met--and
you're the most beautiful woman," she added, looking at Katharine, and
as she looked her face lost its animation and became almost melancholy
in sympathy with Katharine's melancholy, which seemed to Cassandra the
last refinement of her distinction.

"Ah, but it's only ten o'clock," said Katharine darkly.

"As late as that! Well--?" She did not understand.

"At twelve my horses turn into rats and off I go. The illusion fades.
But I accept my fate. I make hay while the sun shines." Cassandra
looked at her with a puzzled expression.

"Here's Katharine talking about rats, and hay, and all sorts of odd
things," she said, as William returned to them. He had been quick.
"Can you make her out?"

Katharine perceived from his little frown and hesitation that he did
not find that particular problem to his taste at present. She stood
upright at once and said in a different tone:

"I really am off, though. I wish you'd explain if they say anything,
William. I shan't be late, but I've got to see some one."

"At this time of night?" Cassandra exclaimed.

"Whom have you got to see?" William demanded.

"A friend," she remarked, half turning her head towards him. She knew
that he wished her to stay, not, indeed, with them, but in their
neighborhood, in case of need.

"Katharine has a great many friends," said William rather lamely,
sitting down once more, as Katharine left the room.

She was soon driving quickly, as she had wished to drive, through the
lamp-lit streets. She liked both light and speed, and the sense of
being out of doors alone, and the knowledge that she would reach Mary
in her high, lonely room at the end of the drive. She climbed the
stone steps quickly, remarking the queer look of her blue silk skirt
and blue shoes upon the stone, dusty with the boots of the day, under
the light of an occasional jet of flickering gas.

The door was opened in a second by Mary herself, whose face showed not
only surprise at the sight of her visitor, but some degree of
embarrassment. She greeted her cordially, and, as there was no time
for explanations, Katharine walked straight into the sitting-room, and
found herself in the presence of a young man who was lying back in a
chair and holding a sheet of paper in his hand, at which he was
looking as if he expected to go on immediately with what he was in the
middle of saying to Mary Datchet. The apparition of an unknown lady in
full evening dress seemed to disturb him. He took his pipe from his
mouth, rose stiffly, and sat down again with a jerk.

"Have you been dining out?" Mary asked.

"Are you working?" Katharine inquired simultaneously.

The young man shook his head, as if he disowned his share in the
question with some irritation.

"Well, not exactly," Mary replied. "Mr. Basnett had brought some
papers to show me. We were going through them, but we'd almost
done. . . . Tell us about your party."

Mary had a ruffled appearance, as if she had been running her fingers
through her hair in the course of her conversation; she was dressed
more or less like a Russian peasant girl. She sat down again in a
chair which looked as if it had been her seat for some hours; the
saucer which stood upon the arm contained the ashes of many
cigarettes. Mr. Basnett, a very young man with a fresh complexion and
a high forehead from which the hair was combed straight back, was one
of that group of "very able young men" suspected by Mr. Clacton,
justly as it turned out, of an influence upon Mary Datchet. He had
come down from one of the Universities not long ago, and was now
charged with the reformation of society. In connection with the rest
of the group of very able young men he had drawn up a scheme for the
education of labor, for the amalgamation of the middle class and the
working class, and for a joint assault of the two bodies, combined in
the Society for the Education of Democracy, upon Capital. The scheme
had already reached the stage in which it was permissible to hire an
office and engage a secretary, and he had been deputed to expound the
scheme to Mary, and make her an offer of the Secretaryship, to which,
as a matter of principle, a small salary was attached. Since seven
o'clock that evening he had been reading out loud the document in
which the faith of the new reformers was expounded, but the reading
was so frequently interrupted by discussion, and it was so often
necessary to inform Mary "in strictest confidence" of the private
characters and evil designs of certain individuals and societies that
they were still only half-way through the manuscript. Neither of them
realized that the talk had already lasted three hours. In their
absorption they had forgotten even to feed the fire, and yet both Mr.
Basnett in his exposition, and Mary in her interrogation, carefully
preserved a kind of formality calculated to check the desire of the
human mind for irrelevant discussion. Her questions frequently began,
"Am I to understand--" and his replies invariably represented the
views of some one called "we."

By this time Mary was almost persuaded that she, too, was included in
the "we," and agreed with Mr. Basnett in believing that "our" views,
"our" society, "our" policy, stood for something quite definitely
segregated from the main body of society in a circle of superior
illumination.

The appearance of Katharine in this atmosphere was extremely
incongruous, and had the effect of making Mary remember all sorts of
things that she had been glad to forget.

"You've been dining out?" she asked again, looking, with a little
smile, at the blue silk and the pearl-sewn shoes.

"No, at home. Are you starting something new?" Katharine hazarded,
rather hesitatingly, looking at the papers.

"We are," Mr. Basnett replied. He said no more.

"I'm thinking of leaving our friends in Russell Square," Mary
explained.

"I see. And then you will do something else."

"Well, I'm afraid I like working," said Mary.

"Afraid," said Mr. Basnett, conveying the impression that, in his
opinion, no sensible person could be afraid of liking to work.

"Yes," said Katharine, as if he had stated this opinion aloud. "I
should like to start something--something off one's own bat--that's
what I should like."

"Yes, that's the fun," said Mr. Basnett, looking at her for the first
time rather keenly, and refilling his pipe.

"But you can't limit work--that's what I mean," said Mary. "I mean
there are other sorts of work. No one works harder than a woman with
little children."

"Quite so," said Mr. Basnett. "It's precisely the women with babies we
want to get hold of." He glanced at his document, rolled it into a
cylinder between his fingers, and gazed into the fire. Katharine felt
that in this company anything that one said would be judged upon its
merits; one had only to say what one thought, rather barely and
tersely, with a curious assumption that the number of things that
could properly be thought about was strictly limited. And Mr. Basnett
was only stiff upon the surface; there was an intelligence in his face
which attracted her intelligence.

"When will the public know?" she asked.

"What d'you mean--about us?" Mr. Basnett asked, with a little smile.

"That depends upon many things," said Mary. The conspirators looked
pleased, as if Katharine's question, with the belief in their
existence which it implied, had a warming effect upon them.

"In starting a society such as we wish to start (we can't say any more
at present)," Mr. Basnett began, with a little jerk of his head,
"there are two things to remember--the Press and the public. Other
societies, which shall be nameless, have gone under because they've
appealed only to cranks. If you don't want a mutual admiration
society, which dies as soon as you've all discovered each other's
faults, you must nobble the Press. You must appeal to the public."

"That's the difficulty," said Mary thoughtfully.

"That's where she comes in," said Mr. Basnett, jerking his head in
Mary's direction. "She's the only one of us who's a capitalist. She
can make a whole-time job of it. I'm tied to an office; I can only
give my spare time. Are you, by any chance, on the look-out for a
job?" he asked Katharine, with a queer mixture of distrust and
deference.

"Marriage is her job at present," Mary replied for her.

"Oh, I see," said Mr. Basnett. He made allowances for that; he and his
friends had faced the question of sex, along with all others, and
assigned it an honorable place in their scheme of life. Katharine felt
this beneath the roughness of his manner; and a world entrusted to the
guardianship of Mary Datchet and Mr. Basnett seemed to her a good
world, although not a romantic or beautiful place or, to put it
figuratively, a place where any line of blue mist softly linked tree
to tree upon the horizon. For a moment she thought she saw in his
face, bent now over the fire, the features of that original man whom
we still recall every now and then, although we know only the clerk,
barrister, Governmental official, or workingman variety of him. Not
that Mr. Basnett, giving his days to commerce and his spare time to
social reform, would long carry about him any trace of his
possibilities of completeness; but, for the moment, in his youth and
ardor, still speculative, still uncramped, one might imagine him the
citizen of a nobler state than ours. Katharine turned over her small
stock of information, and wondered what their society might be going
to attempt. Then she remembered that she was hindering their business,
and rose, still thinking of this society, and thus thinking, she said
to Mr. Basnett:

"Well, you'll ask me to join when the time comes, I hope."

He nodded, and took his pipe from his mouth, but, being unable to
think of anything to say, he put it back again, although he would have
been glad if she had stayed.

Against her wish, Mary insisted upon taking her downstairs, and then,
as there was no cab to be seen, they stood in the street together,
looking about them.

"Go back," Katharine urged her, thinking of Mr. Basnett with his
papers in his hand.

"You can't wander about the streets alone in those clothes," said
Mary, but the desire to find a cab was not her true reason for
standing beside Katharine for a minute or two. Unfortunately for her
composure, Mr. Basnett and his papers seemed to her an incidental
diversion of life's serious purpose compared with some tremendous fact
which manifested itself as she stood alone with Katharine. It may have
been their common womanhood.

"Have you seen Ralph?" she asked suddenly, without preface.

"Yes," said Katharine directly, but she did not remember when or where
she had seen him. It took her a moment or two to remember why Mary
should ask her if she had seen Ralph.

"I believe I'm jealous," said Mary.

"Nonsense, Mary," said Katharine, rather distractedly, taking her arm
and beginning to walk up the street in the direction of the main road.
"Let me see; we went to Kew, and we agreed to be friends. Yes, that's
what happened." Mary was silent, in the hope that Katharine would tell
her more. But Katharine said nothing.

"It's not a question of friendship," Mary exclaimed, her anger rising,
to her own surprise. "You know it's not. How can it be? I've no right
to interfere--" She stopped. "Only I'd rather Ralph wasn't hurt," she
concluded.

"I think he seems able to take care of himself," Katharine observed.
Without either of them wishing it, a feeling of hostility had risen
between them.

"Do you really think it's worth it?" said Mary, after a pause.

"How can one tell?" Katharine asked.

"Have you ever cared for any one?" Mary demanded rashly and foolishly.

"I can't wander about London discussing my feelings--Here's a cab--no,
there's some one in it."

"We don't want to quarrel," said Mary.

"Ought I to have told him that I wouldn't be his friend?" Katharine
asked. "Shall I tell him that? If so, what reason shall I give him?"

"Of course you can't tell him that," said Mary, controlling herself.

"I believe I shall, though," said Katharine suddenly.

"I lost my temper, Katharine; I shouldn't have said what I did."

"The whole thing's foolish," said Katharine, peremptorily. "That's
what I say. It's not worth it." She spoke with unnecessary vehemence,
but it was not directed against Mary Datchet. Their animosity had
completely disappeared, and upon both of them a cloud of difficulty
and darkness rested, obscuring the future, in which they had both to
find a way.

"No, no, it's not worth it," Katharine repeated. "Suppose, as you say,
it's out of the question--this friendship; he falls in love with me. I
don't want that. Still," she added, "I believe you exaggerate; love's
not everything; marriage itself is only one of the things--" They had
reached the main thoroughfare, and stood looking at the omnibuses and
passers-by, who seemed, for the moment, to illustrate what Katharine
had said of the diversity of human interests. For both of them it had
become one of those moments of extreme detachment, when it seems
unnecessary ever again to shoulder the burden of happiness and
self-assertive existence. Their neighbors were welcome to their
possessions.

"I don't lay down any rules,"' said Mary, recovering herself first, as
they turned after a long pause of this description. "All I say is that
you should know what you're about--for certain; but," she added, "I
expect you do."

At the same time she was profoundly perplexed, not only by what she
knew of the arrangements for Katharine's marriage, but by the
impression which she had of her, there on her arm, dark and
inscrutable.

They walked back again and reached the steps which led up to Mary's
flat. Here they stopped and paused for a moment, saying nothing.

"You must go in," said Katharine, rousing herself. "He's waiting all
this time to go on with his reading." She glanced up at the lighted
window near the top of the house, and they both looked at it and
waited for a moment. A flight of semicircular steps ran up to the
hall, and Mary slowly mounted the first two or three, and paused,
looking down upon Katharine.

"I think you underrate the value of that emotion," she said slowly,
and a little awkwardly. She climbed another step and looked down once
more upon the figure that was only partly lit up, standing in the
street with a colorless face turned upwards. As Mary hesitated, a cab
came by and Katharine turned and stopped it, saying as she opened the
door:

"Remember, I want to belong to your society--remember," she added,
having to raise her voice a little, and shutting the door upon the
rest of her words.

Mary mounted the stairs step by step, as if she had to lift her body
up an extremely steep ascent. She had had to wrench herself forcibly
away from Katharine, and every step vanquished her desire. She held on
grimly, encouraging herself as though she were actually making some
great physical effort in climbing a height. She was conscious that Mr.
Basnett, sitting at the top of the stairs with his documents, offered
her solid footing if she were capable of reaching it. The knowledge
gave her a faint sense of exaltation.

Mr. Basnett raised his eyes as she opened the door.

"I'll go on where I left off," he said. "Stop me if you want anything
explained."

He had been re-reading the document, and making pencil notes in the
margin while he waited, and he went on again as if there had been no
interruption. Mary sat down among the flat cushions, lit another
cigarette, and listened with a frown upon her face.

Katharine leant back in the corner of the cab that carried her to
Chelsea, conscious of fatigue, and conscious, too, of the sober and
satisfactory nature of such industry as she had just witnessed. The
thought of it composed and calmed her. When she reached home she let
herself in as quietly as she could, in the hope that the household was
already gone to bed. But her excursion had occupied less time than she
thought, and she heard sounds of unmistakable liveliness upstairs. A
door opened, and she drew herself into a ground-floor room in case the
sound meant that Mr. Peyton were taking his leave. From where she
stood she could see the stairs, though she was herself invisible. Some
one was coming down the stairs, and now she saw that it was William
Rodney. He looked a little strange, as if he were walking in his
sleep; his lips moved as if he were acting some part to himself. He
came down very slowly, step by step, with one hand upon the banisters
to guide himself. She thought he looked as if he were in some mood of
high exaltation, which it made her uncomfortable to witness any longer
unseen. She stepped into the hall. He gave a great start upon seeing
her and stopped.

"Katharine!" he exclaimed. "You've been out?" he asked.

"Yes. . . . Are they still up?"

He did not answer, and walked into the ground-floor room through the
door which stood open.

"It's been more wonderful than I can tell you," he said, "I'm
incredibly happy--"

He was scarcely addressing her, and she said nothing. For a moment
they stood at opposite sides of a table saying nothing. Then he asked
her quickly, "But tell me, how did it seem to you? What did you think,
Katharine? Is there a chance that she likes me? Tell me, Katharine!"

Before she could answer a door opened on the landing above and
disturbed them. It disturbed William excessively. He started back,
walked rapidly into the hall, and said in a loud and ostentatiously
ordinary tone:

"Good night, Katharine. Go to bed now. I shall see you soon. I hope I
shall be able to come to-morrow."

Next moment he was gone. She went upstairs and found Cassandra on the
landing. She held two or three books in her hand, and she was stooping
to look at others in a little bookcase. She said that she could never
tell which book she wanted to read in bed, poetry, biography, or
metaphysics.

"What do you read in bed, Katharine?" she asked, as they walked
upstairs side by side.

"Sometimes one thing--sometimes another," said Katharine vaguely.
Cassandra looked at her.

"D'you know, you're extraordinarily queer," she said. "Every one seems
to me a little queer. Perhaps it's the effect of London."

"Is William queer, too?" Katharine asked.

"Well, I think he is a little," Cassandra replied. "Queer, but very
fascinating. I shall read Milton to-night. It's been one of the
happiest nights of my life, Katharine," she added, looking with shy
devotion at her cousin's beautiful face.

CHAPTER XXVII

London, in the first days of spring, has buds that open and flowers
that suddenly shake their petals--white, purple, or crimson--in
competition with the display in the garden beds, although these city
flowers are merely so many doors flung wide in Bond Street and the
neighborhood, inviting you to look at a picture, or hear a symphony,
or merely crowd and crush yourself among all sorts of vocal,
excitable, brightly colored human beings. But, all the same, it is no
mean rival to the quieter process of vegetable florescence. Whether or
not there is a generous motive at the root, a desire to share and
impart, or whether the animation is purely that of insensate fervor
and friction, the effect, while it lasts, certainly encourages those
who are young, and those who are ignorant, to think the world one
great bazaar, with banners fluttering and divans heaped with spoils
from every quarter of the globe for their delight.

As Cassandra Otway went about London provided with shillings that
opened turnstiles, or more often with large white cards that
disregarded turnstiles, the city seemed to her the most lavish and
hospitable of hosts. After visiting the National Gallery, or Hertford
House, or hearing Brahms or Beethoven at the Bechstein Hall, she would
come back to find a new person awaiting her, in whose soul were
imbedded some grains of the invaluable substance which she still
called reality, and still believed that she could find. The Hilberys,
as the saying is, "knew every one," and that arrogant claim was
certainly upheld by the number of houses which, within a certain area,
lit their lamps at night, opened their doors after 3 p. m., and
admitted the Hilberys to their dining-rooms, say, once a month. An
indefinable freedom and authority of manner, shared by most of the
people who lived in these houses, seemed to indicate that whether it
was a question of art, music, or government, they were well within the
gates, and could smile indulgently at the vast mass of humanity which
is forced to wait and struggle, and pay for entrance with common coin
at the door. The gates opened instantly to admit Cassandra. She was
naturally critical of what went on inside, and inclined to quote what
Henry would have said; but she often succeeded in contradicting Henry,
in his absence, and invariably paid her partner at dinner, or the kind
old lady who remembered her grandmother, the compliment of believing
that there was meaning in what they said. For the sake of the light in
her eager eyes, much crudity of expression and some untidiness of
person were forgiven her. It was generally felt that, given a year or
two of experience, introduced to good dressmakers, and preserved from
bad influences, she would be an acquisition. Those elderly ladies, who
sit on the edge of ballrooms sampling the stuff of humanity between
finger and thumb and breathing so evenly that the necklaces, which
rise and fall upon their breasts, seem to represent some elemental
force, such as the waves upon the ocean of humanity, concluded, a
little smilingly, that she would do. They meant that she would in all
probability marry some young man whose mother they respected.

William Rodney was fertile in suggestions. He knew of little
galleries, and select concerts, and private performances, and somehow
made time to meet Katharine and Cassandra, and to give them tea or
dinner or supper in his rooms afterwards. Each one of her fourteen
days thus promised to bear some bright illumination in its sober text.
But Sunday approached. The day is usually dedicated to Nature. The
weather was almost kindly enough for an expedition. But Cassandra
rejected Hampton Court, Greenwich, Richmond, and Kew in favor of the
Zoological Gardens. She had once trifled with the psychology of
animals, and still knew something about inherited characteristics. On
Sunday afternoon, therefore, Katharine, Cassandra, and William Rodney
drove off to the Zoo. As their cab approached the entrance, Katharine
bent forward and waved her hand to a young man who was walking rapidly
in the same direction.

"There's Ralph Denham!" she exclaimed. "I told him to meet us here,"
she added. She had even come provided with a ticket for him. William's
objection that he would not be admitted was, therefore, silenced
directly. But the way in which the two men greeted each other was
significant of what was going to happen. As soon as they had admired
the little birds in the large cage William and Cassandra lagged
behind, and Ralph and Katharine pressed on rather in advance. It was
an arrangement in which William took his part, and one that suited his
convenience, but he was annoyed all the same. He thought that
Katharine should have told him that she had invited Denham to meet
them.

"One of Katharine's friends," he said rather sharply. It was clear
that he was irritated, and Cassandra felt for his annoyance. They were
standing by the pen of some Oriental hog, and she was prodding the
brute gently with the point of her umbrella, when a thousand little
observations seemed, in some way, to collect in one center. The center
was one of intense and curious emotion. Were they happy? She dismissed
the question as she asked it, scorning herself for applying such
simple measures to the rare and splendid emotions of so unique a
couple. Nevertheless, her manner became immediately different, as if,
for the first time, she felt consciously womanly, and as if William
might conceivably wish later on to confide in her. She forgot all
about the psychology of animals, and the recurrence of blue eyes and
brown, and became instantly engrossed in her feelings as a woman who
could administer consolation, and she hoped that Katharine would keep
ahead with Mr. Denham, as a child who plays at being grown-up hopes
that her mother won't come in just yet, and spoil the game. Or was it
not rather that she had ceased to play at being grown-up, and was
conscious, suddenly, that she was alarmingly mature and in earnest?

There was still unbroken silence between Katharine and Ralph Denham,
but the occupants of the different cages served instead of speech.

"What have you been doing since we met?" Ralph asked at length.

"Doing?" she pondered. "Walking in and out of other people's houses. I
wonder if these animals are happy?" she speculated, stopping before a
gray bear, who was philosophically playing with a tassel which once,
perhaps, formed part of a lady's parasol.

"I'm afraid Rodney didn't like my coming," Ralph remarked.

"No. But he'll soon get over that," she replied. The detachment
expressed by her voice puzzled Ralph, and he would have been glad if
she had explained her meaning further. But he was not going to press
her for explanations. Each moment was to be, as far as he could make
it, complete in itself, owing nothing of its happiness to
explanations, borrowing neither bright nor dark tints from the future.

"The bears seem happy," he remarked. "But we must buy them a bag of
something. There's the place to buy buns. Let's go and get them." They
walked to the counter piled with little paper bags, and each
simultaneously produced a shilling and pressed it upon the young lady,
who did not know whether to oblige the lady or the gentleman, but
decided, from conventional reasons, that it was the part of the
gentleman to pay.

"I wish to pay," said Ralph peremptorily, refusing the coin which
Katharine tendered. "I have a reason for what I do," he added, seeing
her smile at his tone of decision.

"I believe you have a reason for everything," she agreed, breaking the
bun into parts and tossing them down the bears' throats, "but I can't
believe it's a good one this time. What is your reason?"

He refused to tell her. He could not explain to her that he was
offering up consciously all his happiness to her, and wished, absurdly
enough, to pour every possession he had upon the blazing pyre, even
his silver and gold. He wished to keep this distance between them--the
distance which separates the devotee from the image in the shrine.

Circumstances conspired to make this easier than it would have been,
had they been seated in a drawing-room, for example, with a tea-tray
between them. He saw her against a background of pale grottos and
sleek hides; camels slanted their heavy-ridded eyes at her, giraffes
fastidiously observed her from their melancholy eminence, and the
pink-lined trunks of elephants cautiously abstracted buns from her
outstretched hands. Then there were the hothouses. He saw her bending
over pythons coiled upon the sand, or considering the brown rock
breaking the stagnant water of the alligators' pool, or searching some
minute section of tropical forest for the golden eye of a lizard or
the indrawn movement of the green frogs' flanks. In particular, he saw
her outlined against the deep green waters, in which squadrons of
silvery fish wheeled incessantly, or ogled her for a moment, pressing
their distorted mouths against the glass, quivering their tails
straight out behind them. Again, there was the insect house, where she
lifted the blinds of the little cages, and marveled at the purple
circles marked upon the rich tussore wings of some lately emerged and
semi-conscious butterfly, or at caterpillars immobile like the knobbed
twigs of a pale-skinned tree, or at slim green snakes stabbing the
glass wall again and again with their flickering cleft tongues. The
heat of the air, and the bloom of heavy flowers, which swam in water
or rose stiffly from great red jars, together with the display of
curious patterns and fantastic shapes, produced an atmosphere in which
human beings tended to look pale and to fall silent.

Opening the door of a house which rang with the mocking and profoundly
unhappy laughter of monkeys, they discovered William and Cassandra.
William appeared to be tempting some small reluctant animal to descend
from an upper perch to partake of half an apple. Cassandra was reading
out, in her high-pitched tones, an account of this creature's secluded
disposition and nocturnal habits. She saw Katharine and exclaimed:

"Here you are! Do prevent William from torturing this unfortunate
aye-aye."

"We thought we'd lost you," said William. He looked from one to the
other, and seemed to take stock of Denham's unfashionable appearance.
He seemed to wish to find some outlet for malevolence, but, failing
one, he remained silent. The glance, the slight quiver of the upper
lip, were not lost upon Katharine.

"William isn't kind to animals," she remarked. "He doesn't know what
they like and what they don't like."

"I take it you're well versed in these matters, Denham," said Rodney,
withdrawing his hand with the apple.

"It's mainly a question of knowing how to stroke them," Denham
replied.

"Which is the way to the Reptile House?" Cassandra asked him, not from
a genuine desire to visit the reptiles, but in obedience to her
new-born feminine susceptibility, which urged her to charm and
conciliate the other sex. Denham began to give her directions, and
Katharine and William moved on together.

"I hope you've had a pleasant afternoon," William remarked.

"I like Ralph Denham," she replied.

"Ca se voit," William returned, with superficial urbanity.

Many retorts were obvious, but wishing, on the whole, for peace,
Katharine merely inquired:

"Are you coming back to tea?"

"Cassandra and I thought of having tea at a little shop in Portland
Place," he replied. "I don't know whether you and Denham would care to
join us."

"I'll ask him," she replied, turning her head to look for him. But he
and Cassandra were absorbed in the aye-aye once more.

William and Katharine watched them for a moment, and each looked
curiously at the object of the other's preference. But resting his eye
upon Cassandra, to whose elegance the dressmakers had now done
justice, William said sharply:

"If you come, I hope you won't do your best to make me ridiculous."

"If that's what you're afraid of I certainly shan't come," Katharine
replied.

They were professedly looking into the enormous central cage of
monkeys, and being thoroughly annoyed by William, she compared him to
a wretched misanthropical ape, huddled in a scrap of old shawl at the
end of a pole, darting peevish glances of suspicion and distrust at
his companions. Her tolerance was deserting her. The events of the
past week had worn it thin. She was in one of those moods, perhaps not
uncommon with either sex, when the other becomes very clearly
distinguished, and of contemptible baseness, so that the necessity of
association is degrading, and the tie, which at such moments is always
extremely close, drags like a halter round the neck. William's
exacting demands and his jealousy had pulled her down into some
horrible swamp of her nature where the primeval struggle between man
and woman still rages.

"You seem to delight in hurting me," William persisted. "Why did you
say that just now about my behavior to animals?" As he spoke he
rattled his stick against the bars of the cage, which gave his words
an accompaniment peculiarly exasperating to Katharine's nerves.

"Because it's true. You never see what any one feels," she said. "You
think of no one but yourself."

"That is not true," said William. By his determined rattling he had
now collected the animated attention of some half-dozen apes. Either
to propitiate them, or to show his consideration for their feelings,
he proceeded to offer them the apple which he held.

The sight, unfortunately, was so comically apt in its illustration of
the picture in her mind, the ruse was so transparent, that Katharine
was seized with laughter. She laughed uncontrollably. William flushed
red. No display of anger could have hurt his feelings more profoundly.
It was not only that she was laughing at him; the detachment of the
sound was horrible.

"I don't know what you're laughing at," he muttered, and, turning,
found that the other couple had rejoined them. As if the matter had
been privately agreed upon, the couples separated once more, Katharine
and Denham passing out of the house without more than a perfunctory
glance round them. Denham obeyed what seemed to be Katharine's wish in
thus making haste. Some change had come over her. He connected it with
her laughter, and her few words in private with Rodney; he felt that
she had become unfriendly to him. She talked, but her remarks were
indifferent, and when he spoke her attention seemed to wander. This
change of mood was at first extremely disagreeable to him; but soon he
found it salutary. The pale drizzling atmosphere of the day affected
him, also. The charm, the insidious magic in which he had luxuriated,
were suddenly gone; his feeling had become one of friendly respect,
and to his great pleasure he found himself thinking spontaneously of
the relief of finding himself alone in his room that night. In his
surprise at the suddenness of the change, and at the extent of his
freedom, he bethought him of a daring plan, by which the ghost of
Katharine could be more effectually exorcised than by mere abstinence.
He would ask her to come home with him to tea. He would force her
through the mill of family life; he would place her in a light
unsparing and revealing. His family would find nothing to admire in
her, and she, he felt certain, would despise them all, and this, too,
would help him. He felt himself becoming more and more merciless
towards her. By such courageous measures any one, he thought, could
end the absurd passions which were the cause of so much pain and
waste. He could foresee a time when his experiences, his discovery,
and his triumph were made available for younger brothers who found
themselves in the same predicament. He looked at his watch, and
remarked that the gardens would soon be closed.

"Anyhow," he added, "I think we've seen enough for one afternoon.
Where have the others got to?" He looked over his shoulder, and,
seeing no trace of them, remarked at once:

"We'd better be independent of them. The best plan will be for you to
come back to tea with me."

"Why shouldn't you come with me?" she asked.

"Because we're next door to Highgate here," he replied promptly.

She assented, having very little notion whether Highgate was next door
to Regent's Park or not. She was only glad to put off her return to
the family tea-table in Chelsea for an hour or two. They proceeded
with dogged determination through the winding roads of Regent's Park,
and the Sunday-stricken streets of the neighborhood, in the direction
of the Tube station. Ignorant of the way, she resigned herself
entirely to him, and found his silence a convenient cover beneath
which to continue her anger with Rodney.

When they stepped out of the train into the still grayer gloom of
Highgate, she wondered, for the first time, where he was taking her.
Had he a family, or did he live alone in rooms? On the whole she was
inclined to believe that he was the only son of an aged, and possibly
invalid, mother. She sketched lightly, upon the blank vista down which
they walked, the little white house and the tremulous old lady rising
from behind her tea-table to greet her with faltering words about "my
son's friends," and was on the point of asking Ralph to tell her what
she might expect, when he jerked open one of the infinite number of
identical wooden doors, and led her up a tiled path to a porch in the
Alpine style of architecture. As they listened to the shaking of the
bell in the basement, she could summon no vision to replace the one so
rudely destroyed.

"I must warn you to expect a family party," said Ralph. "They're
mostly in on Sundays. We can go to my room afterwards."

"Have you many brothers and sisters?" she asked, without concealing
her dismay.

"Six or seven," he replied grimly, as the door opened.

While Ralph took off his coat, she had time to notice the ferns and
photographs and draperies, and to hear a hum, or rather a babble, of
voices talking each other down, from the sound of them. The rigidity
of extreme shyness came over her. She kept as far behind Denham as she
could, and walked stiffly after him into a room blazing with unshaded
lights, which fell upon a number of people, of different ages, sitting
round a large dining-room table untidily strewn with food, and
unflinchingly lit up by incandescent gas. Ralph walked straight to the
far end of the table.

"Mother, this is Miss Hilbery," he said.

A large elderly lady, bent over an unsatisfactory spirit-lamp, looked
up with a little frown, and observed:

"I beg your pardon. I thought you were one of my own girls. Dorothy,"
she continued on the same breath, to catch the servant before she left
the room, "we shall want some more methylated spirits--unless the lamp
itself is out of order. If one of you could invent a good
spirit-lamp--" she sighed, looking generally down the table, and then
began seeking among the china before her for two clean cups for the
new-comers.

The unsparing light revealed more ugliness than Katharine had seen in
one room for a very long time. It was the ugliness of enormous folds
of brown material, looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which
depended balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen
with black school-texts. Her eye was arrested by crossed scabbards of
fretted wood upon the dull green wall, and whereever there was a high
flat eminence, some fern waved from a pot of crinkled china, or a
bronze horse reared so high that the stump of a tree had to sustain
his forequarters. The waters of family life seemed to rise and close
over her head, and she munched in silence.

At length Mrs. Denham looked up from her teacups and remarked:

"You see, Miss Hilbery, my children all come in at different hours and
want different things. (The tray should go up if you've done,
Johnnie.) My boy Charles is in bed with a cold. What else can you
expect?--standing in the wet playing football. We did try drawing-room
tea, but it didn't do."

A boy of sixteen, who appeared to be Johnnie, grumbled derisively both
at the notion of drawing-room tea and at the necessity of carrying a
tray up to his brother. But he took himself off, being enjoined by his
mother to mind what he was doing, and shut the door after him.

"It's much nicer like this," said Katharine, applying herself with
determination to the dissection of her cake; they had given her too
large a slice. She knew that Mrs. Denham suspected her of critical
comparisons. She knew that she was making poor progress with her cake.
Mrs. Denham had looked at her sufficiently often to make it clear to
Katharine that she was asking who this young woman was, and why Ralph
had brought her to tea with them. There was an obvious reason, which
Mrs. Denham had probably reached by this time. Outwardly, she was
behaving with rather rusty and laborious civility. She was making
conversation about the amenities of Highgate, its development and
situation.

"When I first married," she said, "Highgate was quite separate from
London, Miss Hilbery, and this house, though you wouldn't believe it,
had a view of apple orchards. That was before the Middletons built
their house in front of us."

"It must be a great advantage to live at the top of a hill," said
Katharine. Mrs. Denham agreed effusively, as if her opinion of
Katharine's sense had risen.

"Yes, indeed, we find it very healthy," she said, and she went on, as
people who live in the suburbs so often do, to prove that it was
healthier, more convenient, and less spoilt than any suburb round
London. She spoke with such emphasis that it was quite obvious that
she expressed unpopular views, and that her children disagreed with
her.

"The ceiling's fallen down in the pantry again," said Hester, a girl
of eighteen, abruptly.

"The whole house will be down one of these days," James muttered.

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Denham. "It's only a little bit of plaster--I
don't see how any house could be expected to stand the wear and tear
you give it." Here some family joke exploded, which Katharine could
not follow. Even Mrs. Denham laughed against her will.

"Miss Hilbery's thinking us all so rude," she added reprovingly. Miss
Hilbery smiled and shook her head, and was conscious that a great many
eyes rested upon her, for a moment, as if they would find pleasure in
discussing her when she was gone. Owing, perhaps, to this critical
glance, Katharine decided that Ralph Denham's family was commonplace,
unshapely, lacking in charm, and fitly expressed by the hideous nature
of their furniture and decorations. She glanced along a mantelpiece
ranged with bronze chariots, silver vases, and china ornaments that
were either facetious or eccentric.

She did not apply her judgment consciously to Ralph, but when she
looked at him, a moment later, she rated him lower than at any other
time of their acquaintanceship.

He had made no effort to tide over the discomforts of her
introduction, and now, engaged in argument with his brother,
apparently forgot her presence. She must have counted upon his support
more than she realized, for this indifference, emphasized, as it was,
by the insignificant commonplace of his surroundings, awoke her, not
only to that ugliness, but to her own folly. She thought of one scene
after another in a few seconds, with that shudder which is almost a
blush. She had believed him when he spoke of friendship. She had
believed in a spiritual light burning steadily and steadfastly behind
the erratic disorder and incoherence of life. The light was now gone
out, suddenly, as if a sponge had blotted it. The litter of the table
and the tedious but exacting conversation of Mrs. Denham remained:
they struck, indeed, upon a mind bereft of all defences, and, keenly
conscious of the degradation which is the result of strife whether
victorious or not, she thought gloomily of her loneliness, of life's
futility, of the barren prose of reality, of William Rodney, of her
mother, and the unfinished book.

Her answers to Mrs. Denham were perfunctory to the verge of rudeness,
and to Ralph, who watched her narrowly, she seemed further away than
was compatible with her physical closeness. He glanced at her, and
ground out further steps in his argument, determined that no folly
should remain when this experience was over. Next moment, a silence,
sudden and complete, descended upon them all. The silence of all these
people round the untidy table was enormous and hideous; something
horrible seemed about to burst from it, but they endured it
obstinately. A second later the door opened and there was a stir of
relief; cries of "Hullo, Joan! There's nothing left for you to eat,"
broke up the oppressive concentration of so many eyes upon the
table-cloth, and set the waters of family life dashing in brisk little
waves again. It was obvious that Joan had some mysterious and
beneficent power upon her family. She went up to Katharine as if she
had heard of her, and was very glad to see her at last. She explained
that she had been visiting an uncle who was ill, and that had kept
her. No, she hadn't had any tea, but a slice of bread would do. Some
one handed up a hot cake, which had been keeping warm in the fender;
she sat down by her mother's side, Mrs. Denham's anxieties seemed to
relax, and every one began eating and drinking, as if tea had begun
over again. Hester voluntarily explained to Katharine that she was
reading to pass some examination, because she wanted more than
anything in the whole world to go to Newnham.

"Now, just let me hear you decline 'amo'--I love," Johnnie demanded.

"No, Johnnie, no Greek at meal-times," said Joan, overhearing him
instantly. "She's up at all hours of the night over her books, Miss
Hilbery, and I'm sure that's not the way to pass examinations," she
went on, smiling at Katharine, with the worried humorous smile of the
elder sister whose younger brothers and sisters have become almost
like children of her own.

"Joan, you don't really think that 'amo' is Greek?" Ralph

asked.

"Did I say Greek? Well, never mind. No dead languages at tea-time. My
dear boy, don't trouble to make me any toast--"

"Or if you do, surely there's the toasting-fork somewhere?" said Mrs.
Denham, still cherishing the belief that the bread-knife could be
spoilt. "Do one of you ring and ask for one," she said, without any
conviction that she would be obeyed. "But is Ann coming to be with
Uncle Joseph?" she continued. "If so, surely they had better send Amy
to us--" and in the mysterious delight of learning further details of
these arrangements, and suggesting more sensible plans of her own,
which, from the aggrieved way in which she spoke, she did not seem to
expect any one to adopt, Mrs. Denham completely forgot the presence of
a well-dressed visitor, who had to be informed about the amenities of
Highgate. As soon as Joan had taken her seat, an argument had sprung
up on either side of Katharine, as to whether the Salvation Army has
any right to play hymns at street corners on Sunday mornings, thereby
making it impossible for James to have his sleep out, and tampering
with the rights of individual liberty.

"You see, James likes to lie in bed and sleep like a hog," said
Johnnie, explaining himself to Katharine, whereupon James fired up
and, making her his goal, also exclaimed:

"Because Sundays are my one chance in the week of having my sleep out.
Johnnie messes with stinking chemicals in the pantry--"

They appealed to her, and she forgot her cake and began to laugh and
talk and argue with sudden animation. The large family seemed to her
so warm and various that she forgot to censure them for their taste in
pottery. But the personal question between James and Johnnie merged
into some argument already, apparently, debated, so that the parts had
been distributed among the family, in which Ralph took the lead; and
Katharine found herself opposed to him and the champion of Johnnie's
cause, who, it appeared, always lost his head and got excited in
argument with Ralph.

"Yes, yes, that's what I mean. She's got it right," he exclaimed,
after Katharine had restated his case, and made it more precise. The
debate was left almost solely to Katharine and Ralph. They looked into
each other's eyes fixedly, like wrestlers trying to see what movement
is coming next, and while Ralph spoke, Katharine bit her lower lip,
and was always ready with her next point as soon as he had done. They
were very well matched, and held the opposite views.

But at the most exciting stage of the argument, for no reason that
Katharine could see, all chairs were pushed back, and one after
another the Denham family got up and went out of the door, as if a
bell had summoned them. She was not used to the clockwork regulations
of a large family. She hesitated in what she was saying, and rose.
Mrs. Denham and Joan had drawn together and stood by the fireplace,
slightly raising their skirts above their ankles, and discussing
something which had an air of being very serious and very private.
They appeared to have forgotten her presence among them. Ralph stood
holding the door open for her.

"Won't you come up to my room?" he said. And Katharine, glancing back
at Joan, who smiled at her in a preoccupied way, followed Ralph
upstairs. She was thinking of their argument, and when, after the long
climb, he opened his door, she began at once.

"The question is, then, at what point is it right for the individual
to assert his will against the will of the State."

For some time they continued the argument, and then the intervals
between one statement and the next became longer and longer, and they
spoke more speculatively and less pugnaciously, and at last fell
silent. Katharine went over the argument in her mind, remembering how,
now and then, it had been set conspicuously on the right course by
some remark offered either by James or by Johnnie.

"Your brothers are very clever," she said. "I suppose you're in the
habit of arguing?"

"James and Johnnie will go on like that for hours," Ralph replied. "So
will Hester, if you start her upon Elizabethan dramatists."

"And the little girl with the pigtail?"

"Molly? She's only ten. But they're always arguing among themselves."

He was immensely pleased by Katharine's praise of his brothers and
sisters. He would have liked to go on telling her about them, but he
checked himself.

"I see that it must be difficult to leave them," Katharine continued.
His deep pride in his family was more evident to him, at that moment,
than ever before, and the idea of living alone in a cottage was
ridiculous. All that brotherhood and sisterhood, and a common
childhood in a common past mean, all the stability, the unambitious
comradeship, and tacit understanding of family life at its best, came
to his mind, and he thought of them as a company, of which he was the
leader, bound on a difficult, dreary, but glorious voyage. And it was
Katharine who had opened his eyes to this, he thought.

A little dry chirp from the corner of the room now roused her
attention.

"My tame rook," he explained briefly. "A cat had bitten one of its
legs." She looked at the rook, and her eyes went from one object to
another.

"You sit here and read?" she said, her eyes resting upon his books. He
said that he was in the habit of working there at night.

"The great advantage of Highgate is the view over London. At night the
view from my window is splendid." He was extremely anxious that she
should appreciate his view, and she rose to see what was to be seen.
It was already dark enough for the turbulent haze to be yellow with
the light of street lamps, and she tried to determine the quarters of
the city beneath her. The sight of her gazing from his window gave him
a peculiar satisfaction. When she turned, at length, he was still
sitting motionless in his chair.

"It must be late," she said. "I must be going." She settled upon the
arm of the chair irresolutely, thinking that she had no wish to go
home. William would be there, and he would find some way of making
things unpleasant for her, and the memory of their quarrel came back
to her. She had noticed Ralph's coldness, too. She looked at him, and
from his fixed stare she thought that he must be working out some
theory, some argument. He had thought, perhaps, of some fresh point in
his position, as to the bounds of personal liberty. She waited,
silently, thinking about liberty.

"You've won again," he said at last, without moving.

"I've won?" she repeated, thinking of the argument.

"I wish to God I hadn't asked you here," he burst out.

"What do you mean?"

"When you're here, it's different--I'm happy. You've only to walk to
the window--you've only to talk about liberty. When I saw you down
there among them all--" He stopped short.

"You thought how ordinary I was."

"I tried to think so. But I thought you more wonderful than ever."

An immense relief, and a reluctance to enjoy that relief, conflicted
in her heart.

She slid down into the chair.

"I thought you disliked me," she said.

"God knows I tried," he replied. "I've done my best to see you as you
are, without any of this damned romantic nonsense. That was why I
asked you here, and it's increased my folly. When you're gone I shall
look out of that window and think of you. I shall waste the whole
evening thinking of you. I shall waste my whole life, I believe."

He spoke with such vehemence that her relief disappeared; she frowned;
and her tone changed to one almost of severity.

"This is what I foretold. We shall gain nothing but unhappiness. Look
at me, Ralph." He looked at her. "I assure you that I'm far more
ordinary than I appear. Beauty means nothing whatever. In fact, the
most beautiful women are generally the most stupid. I'm not that, but
I'm a matter-of-fact, prosaic, rather ordinary character; I order the
dinner, I pay the bills, I do the accounts, I wind up the clock, and I
never look at a book."

"You forget--" he began, but she would not let him speak.

"You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me
mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very
inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about
me, and now you can't separate me from the person you've imagined me
to be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact
it's being in delusion. All romantic people are the same," she added.
"My mother spends her life in making stories about the people she's
fond of. But I won't have you do it about me, if I can help it."

"You can't help it," he said.

"I warn you it's the source of all evil."

"And of all good," he added.

"You'll find out that I'm not what you think me."

"Perhaps. But I shall gain more than I lose."

"If such gain's worth having."

They were silent for a space.

"That may be what we have to face," he said. "There may be nothing
else. Nothing but what we imagine."

"The reason of our loneliness," she mused, and they were silent for a
time.

"When are you to be married?" he asked abruptly, with a change of
tone.

"Not till September, I think. It's been put off."

"You won't be lonely then," he said. "According to what people say,
marriage is a very queer business. They say it's different from
anything else. It may be true. I've known one or two cases where it
seems to be true." He hoped that she would go on with the subject. But
she made no reply. He had done his best to master himself, and his
voice was sufficiently indifferent, but her silence tormented him. She
would never speak to him of Rodney of her own accord, and her reserve
left a whole continent of her soul in darkness.

"It may be put off even longer than that," she said, as if by an
afterthought. "Some one in the office is ill, and William has to take
his place. We may put it off for some time in fact."

"That's rather hard on him, isn't it?" Ralph asked.

"He has his work," she replied. "He has lots of things that interest
him. . . . I know I've been to that place," she broke off, pointing to
a photograph. "But I can't remember where it is--oh, of course it's
Oxford. Now, what about your cottage?"

"I'm not going to take it."

"How you change your mind!" she smiled.

"It's not that," he said impatiently. "It's that I want to be where I
can see you."

"Our compact is going to hold in spite of all I've said?" she asked.

"For ever, so far as I'm concerned," he replied.

"You're going to go on dreaming and imagining and making up stories
about me as you walk along the street, and pretending that we're
riding in a forest, or landing on an island--"

"No. I shall think of you ordering dinner, paying bills, doing the
accounts, showing old ladies the relics--"

"That's better," she said. "You can think of me to-morrow morning
looking up dates in the 'Dictionary of National Biography.'"

"And forgetting your purse," Ralph added.

At this she smiled, but in another moment her smile faded, either
because of his words or of the way in which he spoke them. She was
capable of forgetting things. He saw that. But what more did he see?
Was he not looking at something she had never shown to anybody? Was it
not something so profound that the notion of his seeing it almost
shocked her? Her smile faded, and for a moment she seemed upon the
point of speaking, but looking at him in silence, with a look that
seemed to ask what she could not put into words, she turned and bade
him good night.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Like a strain of music, the effect of Katharine's presence slowly died
from the room in which Ralph sat alone. The music had ceased in the
rapture of its melody. He strained to catch the faintest lingering
echoes; for a moment the memory lulled him into peace; but soon it
failed, and he paced the room so hungry for the sound to come again
that he was conscious of no other desire left in life. She had gone
without speaking; abruptly a chasm had been cut in his course, down
which the tide of his being plunged in disorder; fell upon rocks;
flung itself to destruction. The distress had an effect of physical
ruin and disaster. He trembled; he was white; he felt exhausted, as if
by a great physical effort. He sank at last into a chair standing
opposite her empty one, and marked, mechanically, with his eye upon
the clock, how she went farther and farther from him, was home now,
and now, doubtless, again with Rodney. But it was long before he could
realize these facts; the immense desire for her presence churned his
senses into foam, into froth, into a haze of emotion that removed all
facts from his grasp, and gave him a strange sense of distance, even
from the material shapes of wall and window by which he was
surrounded. The prospect of the future, now that the strength of his
passion was revealed to him, appalled him.

The marriage would take place in September, she had said; that allowed
him, then, six full months in which to undergo these terrible extremes
of emotion. Six months of torture, and after that the silence of the
grave, the isolation of the insane, the exile of the damned; at best,
a life from which the chief good was knowingly and for ever excluded.
An impartial judge might have assured him that his chief hope of
recovery lay in this mystic temper, which identified a living woman
with much that no human beings long possess in the eyes of each other;
she would pass, and the desire for her vanish, but his belief in what
she stood for, detached from her, would remain. This line of thought
offered, perhaps, some respite, and possessed of a brain that had its
station considerably above the tumult of the senses, he tried to
reduce the vague and wandering incoherency of his emotions to order.
The sense of self-preservation was strong in him, and Katharine
herself had strangely revived it by convincing him that his family
deserved and needed all his strength. She was right, and for their
sake, if not for his own, this passion, which could bear no fruit,
must be cut off, uprooted, shown to be as visionary and baseless as
she had maintained. The best way of achieving this was not to run away
from her, but to face her, and having steeped himself in her
qualities, to convince his reason that they were, as she assured him,
not those that he imagined. She was a practical woman, a domestic wife
for an inferior poet, endowed with romantic beauty by some freak of
unintelligent Nature. No doubt her beauty itself would not stand
examination. He had the means of settling this point at least. He
possessed a book of photographs from the Greek statues; the head of a
goddess, if the lower part were concealed, had often given him the
ecstasy of being in Katharine's presence. He took it down from the
shelf and found the picture. To this he added a note from her, bidding
him meet her at the Zoo. He had a flower which he had picked at Kew to
teach her botany. Such were his relics. He placed them before him, and
set himself to visualize her so clearly that no deception or delusion
was possible. In a second he could see her, with the sun slanting
across her dress, coming towards him down the green walk at Kew. He
made her sit upon the seat beside him. He heard her voice, so low and
yet so decided in its tone; she spoke reasonably of indifferent
matters. He could see her faults, and analyze her virtues. His pulse
became quieter, and his brain increased in clarity. This time she
could not escape him. The illusion of her presence became more and
more complete. They seemed to pass in and out of each other's minds,
questioning and answering. The utmost fullness of communion seemed to
be theirs. Thus united, he felt himself raised to an eminence,
exalted, and filled with a power of achievement such as he had never
known in singleness. Once more he told over conscientiously her
faults, both of face and character; they were clearly known to him;
but they merged themselves in the flawless union that was born of
their association. They surveyed life to its uttermost limits. How
deep it was when looked at from this height! How sublime! How the
commonest things moved him almost to tears! Thus, he forgot the
inevitable limitations; he forgot her absence, he thought it of no
account whether she married him or another; nothing mattered, save
that she should exist, and that he should love her. Some words of
these reflections were uttered aloud, and it happened that among them
were the words, "I love her." It was the first time that he had used
the word "love" to describe his feeling; madness, romance,
hallucination--he had called it by these names before; but having,
apparently by accident, stumbled upon the word "love," he repeated it
again and again with a sense of revelation.

"But I'm in love with you!" he exclaimed, with something like dismay.
He leant against the window-sill, looking over the city as she had
looked. Everything had become miraculously different and completely
distinct. His feelings were justified and needed no further
explanation. But he must impart them to some one, because his
discovery was so important that it concerned other people too.
Shutting the book of Greek photographs, and hiding his relics, he ran
downstairs, snatched his coat, and passed out of doors.

The lamps were being lit, but the streets were dark enough and empty
enough to let him walk his fastest, and to talk aloud as he walked. He
had no doubt where he was going. He was going to find Mary Datchet.
The desire to share what he felt, with some one who understood it, was
so imperious that he did not question it. He was soon in her street.
He ran up the stairs leading to her flat two steps at a time, and it
never crossed his mind that she might not be at home. As he rang her
bell, he seemed to himself to be announcing the presence of something
wonderful that was separate from himself, and gave him power and
authority over all other people. Mary came to the door after a
moment's pause. He was perfectly silent, and in the dusk his face
looked completely white. He followed her into her room.

"Do you know each other?" she said, to his extreme surprise, for he
had counted on finding her alone. A young man rose, and said that he
knew Ralph by sight.

"We were just going through some papers," said Mary. "Mr. Basnett has
to help me, because I don't know much about my work yet. It's the new
society," she explained. "I'm the secretary. I'm no longer at Russell
Square."

The voice in which she gave this information was so constrained as to
sound almost harsh.

"What are your aims?" said Ralph. He looked neither at Mary nor at Mr.
Basnett. Mr. Basnett thought he had seldom seen a more disagreeable or
formidable man than this friend of Mary's, this sarcastic-looking,
white-faced Mr. Denham, who seemed to demand, as if by right, an
account of their proposals, and to criticize them before he had heard
them. Nevertheless, he explained his projects as clearly as he could,
and knew that he wished Mr. Denham to think well of them.

"I see," said Ralph, when he had done. "D'you know, Mary," he suddenly
remarked, "I believe I'm in for a cold. Have you any quinine?" The
look which he cast at her frightened her; it expressed mutely, perhaps
without his own consciousness, something deep, wild, and passionate.
She left the room at once. Her heart beat fast at the knowledge of
Ralph's presence; but it beat with pain, and with an extraordinary
fear. She stood listening for a moment to the voices in the next room.

"Of course, I agree with you," she heard Ralph say, in this strange
voice, to Mr. Basnett. "But there's more that might be done. Have you
seen Judson, for instance? You should make a point of getting him."

Mary returned with the quinine.

"Judson's address?" Mr. Basnett inquired, pulling out his notebook and
preparing to write. For twenty minutes, perhaps, he wrote down names,
addresses, and other suggestions that Ralph dictated to him. Then,
when Ralph fell silent, Mr. Basnett felt that his presence was not
desired, and thanking Ralph for his help, with a sense that he was
very young and ignorant compared with him, he said good-bye.

"Mary," said Ralph, directly Mr. Basnett had shut the door and they
were alone together. "Mary," he repeated. But the old difficulty of
speaking to Mary without reserve prevented him from continuing. His
desire to proclaim his love for Katharine was still strong in him, but
he had felt, directly he saw Mary, that he could not share it with
her. The feeling increased as he sat talking to Mr. Basnett. And yet
all the time he was thinking of Katharine, and marveling at his love.
The tone in which he spoke Mary's name was harsh.

"What is it, Ralph?" she asked, startled by his tone. She looked at
him anxiously, and her little frown showed that she was trying
painfully to understand him, and was puzzled. He could feel her
groping for his meaning, and he was annoyed with her, and thought how
he had always found her slow, painstaking, and clumsy. He had behaved
badly to her, too, which made his irritation the more acute. Without
waiting for him to answer, she rose as if his answer were indifferent
to her, and began to put in order some papers that Mr. Basnett had
left on the table. She hummed a scrap of a tune under her breath, and
moved about the room as if she were occupied in making things tidy,
and had no other concern.

"You'll stay and dine?" she said casually, returning to her seat.

"No," Ralph replied. She did not press him further. They sat side by
side without speaking, and Mary reached her hand for her work basket,
and took out her sewing and threaded a needle.

"That's a clever young man," Ralph observed, referring to Mr. Basnett.

"I'm glad you thought so. It's tremendously interesting work, and
considering everything, I think we've done very well. But I'm inclined
to agree with you; we ought to try to be more conciliatory. We're
absurdly strict. It's difficult to see that there may be sense in what
one's opponents say, though they are one's opponents. Horace Basnett
is certainly too uncompromising. I mustn't forget to see that he
writes that letter to Judson. You're too busy, I suppose, to come on
to our committee?" She spoke in the most impersonal manner.

"I may be out of town," Ralph replied, with equal distance of manner.

"Our executive meets every week, of course," she observed. "But some
of our members don't come more than once a month. Members of
Parliament are the worst; it was a mistake, I think, to ask them."

She went on sewing in silence.

"You've not taken your quinine," she said, looking up and seeing the
tabloids upon the mantelpiece.

"I don't want it," said Ralph shortly.

"Well, you know best," she replied tranquilly.

"Mary, I'm a brute!" he exclaimed. "Here I come and waste your time,
and do nothing but make myself disagreeable."

"A cold coming on does make one feel wretched," she replied.

"I've not got a cold. That was a lie. There's nothing the matter with
me. I'm mad, I suppose. I ought to have had the decency to keep away.
But I wanted to see you--I wanted to tell you--I'm in love, Mary." He
spoke the word, but, as he spoke it, it seemed robbed of substance.

"In love, are you?" she said quietly. "I'm glad, Ralph."

"I suppose I'm in love. Anyhow, I'm out of my mind. I can't think, I
can't work, I don't care a hang for anything in the world. Good
Heavens, Mary! I'm in torment! One moment I'm happy; next I'm
miserable. I hate her for half an hour; then I'd give my whole life to
be with her for ten minutes; all the time I don't know what I feel, or
why I feel it; it's insanity, and yet it's perfectly reasonable. Can
you make any sense of it? Can you see what's happened? I'm raving, I
know; don't listen, Mary; go on with your work."

He rose and began, as usual, to pace up and down the room. He knew
that what he had just said bore very little resemblance to what he
felt, for Mary's presence acted upon him like a very strong magnet,
drawing from him certain expressions which were not those he made use
of when he spoke to himself, nor did they represent his deepest
feelings. He felt a little contempt for himself at having spoken thus;
but somehow he had been forced into speech.

"Do sit down," said Mary suddenly. "You make me so--" She spoke with
unusual irritability, and Ralph, noticing it with surprise, sat down
at once.

"You haven't told me her name--you'd rather not, I suppose?"

"Her name? Katharine Hilbery."

"But she's engaged--"

"To Rodney. They're to be married in September."

"I see," said Mary. But in truth the calm of his manner, now that he
was sitting down once more, wrapt her in the presence of something
which she felt to be so strong, so mysterious, so incalculable, that
she scarcely dared to attempt to intercept it by any word or question
that she was able to frame. She looked at Ralph blankly, with a kind
of awe in her face, her lips slightly parted, and her brows raised. He
was apparently quite unconscious of her gaze. Then, as if she could
look no longer, she leant back in her chair, and half closed her eyes.
The distance between them hurt her terribly; one thing after another
came into her mind, tempting her to assail Ralph with questions, to
force him to confide in her, and to enjoy once more his intimacy. But
she rejected every impulse, for she could not speak without doing
violence to some reserve which had grown between them, putting them a
little far from each other, so that he seemed to her dignified and
remote, like a person she no longer knew well.

"Is there anything that I could do for you?" she asked gently, and
even with courtesy, at length.

"You could see her--no, that's not what I want; you mustn't bother
about me, Mary." He, too, spoke very gently.

"I'm afraid no third person can do anything to help," she added.

"No," he shook his head. "Katharine was saying to-day how lonely we
are." She saw the effort with which he spoke Katharine's name, and
believed that he forced himself to make amends now for his concealment
in the past. At any rate, she was conscious of no anger against him;
but rather of a deep pity for one condemned to suffer as she had
suffered. But in the case of Katharine it was different; she was
indignant with Katharine.

"There's always work," she said, a little aggressively.

Ralph moved directly.

"Do you want to be working now?" he asked.

"No, no. It's Sunday," she replied. "I was thinking of Katharine. She
doesn't understand about work. She's never had to. She doesn't know
what work is. I've only found out myself quite lately. But it's the
thing that saves one--I'm sure of that."

"There are other things, aren't there?" he hesitated.

"Nothing that one can count upon," she returned. "After all, other
people--" she stopped, but forced herself to go on. "Where should I be
now if I hadn't got to go to my office every day? Thousands of people
would tell you the same thing--thousands of women. I tell you, work is
the only thing that saved me, Ralph." He set his mouth, as if her
words rained blows on him; he looked as if he had made up his mind to
bear anything she might say, in silence. He had deserved it, and there
would be relief in having to bear it. But she broke off, and rose as
if to fetch something from the next room. Before she reached the door
she turned back, and stood facing him, self-possessed, and yet defiant
and formidable in her composure.

"It's all turned out splendidly for me," she said. "It will for you,
too. I'm sure of that. Because, after all, Katharine is worth it."

"Mary--!" he exclaimed. But her head was turned away, and he could not
say what he wished to say. "Mary, you're splendid," he concluded. She
faced him as he spoke, and gave him her hand. She had suffered and
relinquished, she had seen her future turned from one of infinite
promise to one of barrenness, and yet, somehow, over what she scarcely
knew, and with what results she could hardly foretell, she had
conquered. With Ralph's eyes upon her, smiling straight back at him
serenely and proudly, she knew, for the first time, that she had
conquered. She let him kiss her hand.

The streets were empty enough on Sunday night, and if the Sabbath, and
the domestic amusements proper to the Sabbath, had not kept people
indoors, a high strong wind might very probably have done so. Ralph
Denham was aware of a tumult in the street much in accordance with his
own sensations. The gusts, sweeping along the Strand, seemed at the
same time to blow a clear space across the sky in which stars
appeared, and for a short time the quicks-peeding silver moon riding
through clouds, as if they were waves of water surging round her and
over her. They swamped her, but she emerged; they broke over her and
covered her again; she issued forth indomitable. In the country fields
all the wreckage of winter was being dispersed; the dead leaves, the
withered bracken, the dry and discolored grass, but no bud would be
broken, nor would the new stalks that showed above the earth take any
harm, and perhaps to-morrow a line of blue or yellow would show
through a slit in their green. But the whirl of the atmosphere alone
was in Denham's mood, and what of star or blossom appeared was only as
a light gleaming for a second upon heaped waves fast following each
other. He had not been able to speak to Mary, though for a moment he
had come near enough to be tantalized by a wonderful possibility of
understanding. But the desire to communicate something of the very
greatest importance possessed him completely; he still wished to
bestow this gift upon some other human being; he sought their company.
More by instinct than by conscious choice, he took the direction which
led to Rodney's rooms. He knocked loudly upon his door; but no one
answered. He rang the bell. It took him some time to accept the fact
that Rodney was out. When he could no longer pretend that the sound of
the wind in the old building was the sound of some one rising from his
chair, he ran downstairs again, as if his goal had been altered and
only just revealed to him. He walked in the direction of Chelsea.

But physical fatigue, for he had not dined and had tramped both far
and fast, made him sit for a moment upon a seat on the Embankment. One
of the regular occupants of those seats, an elderly man who had drunk
himself, probably, out of work and lodging, drifted up, begged a
match, and sat down beside him. It was a windy night, he said; times
were hard; some long story of bad luck and injustice followed, told so
often that the man seemed to be talking to himself, or, perhaps, the
neglect of his audience had long made any attempt to catch their
attention seem scarcely worth while. When he began to speak Ralph had
a wild desire to talk to him; to question him; to make him understand.
He did, in fact, interrupt him at one point; but it was useless. The
ancient story of failure, ill-luck, undeserved disaster, went down the
wind, disconnected syllables flying past Ralph's ears with a queer
alternation of loudness and faintness as if, at certain moments, the
man's memory of his wrongs revived and then flagged, dying down at
last into a grumble of resignation, which seemed to represent a final
lapse into the accustomed despair. The unhappy voice afflicted Ralph,
but it also angered him. And when the elderly man refused to listen
and mumbled on, an odd image came to his mind of a lighthouse besieged
by the flying bodies of lost birds, who were dashed senseless, by the
gale, against the glass. He had a strange sensation that he was both
lighthouse and bird; he was steadfast and brilliant; and at the same
time he was whirled, with all other things, senseless against the
glass. He got up, left his tribute of silver, and pressed on, with the
wind against him. The image of the lighthouse and the storm full of
birds persisted, taking the place of more definite thoughts, as he
walked past the Houses of Parliament and down Grosvenor Road, by the
side of the river. In his state of physical fatigue, details merged
themselves in the vaster prospect, of which the flying gloom and the
intermittent lights of lamp-posts and private houses were the outward
token, but he never lost his sense of walking in the direction of
Katharine's house. He took it for granted that something would then
happen, and, as he walked on, his mind became more and more full of
pleasure and expectancy. Within a certain radius of her house the
streets came under the influence of her presence. Each house had an
individuality known to Ralph, because of the tremendous individuality
of the house in which she lived. For some yards before reaching the
Hilberys' door he walked in a trance of pleasure, but when he reached
it, and pushed the gate of the little garden open, he hesitated. He
did not know what to do next. There was no hurry, however, for the
outside of the house held pleasure enough to last him some time
longer. He crossed the road, and leant against the balustrade of the
Embankment, fixing his eyes upon the house.

Lights burnt in the three long windows of the drawing-room. The space
of the room behind became, in Ralph's vision, the center of the dark,
flying wilderness of the world; the justification for the welter of
confusion surrounding it; the steady light which cast its beams, like
those of a lighthouse, with searching composure over the trackless
waste. In this little sanctuary were gathered together several
different people, but their identity was dissolved in a general glory
of something that might, perhaps, be called civilization; at any rate,
all dryness, all safety, all that stood up above the surge and
preserved a consciousness of its own, was centered in the drawing-room
of the Hilberys. Its purpose was beneficent; and yet so far above his
level as to have something austere about it, a light that cast itself
out and yet kept itself aloof. Then he began, in his mind, to
distinguish different individuals within, consciously refusing as yet
to attack the figure of Katharine. His thoughts lingered over Mrs.
Hilbery and Cassandra; and then he turned to Rodney and Mr. Hilbery.
Physically, he saw them bathed in that steady flow of yellow light
which filled the long oblongs of the windows; in their movements they
were beautiful; and in their speech he figured a reserve of meaning,
unspoken, but understood. At length, after all this half-conscious
selection and arrangement, he allowed himself to approach the figure
of Katharine herself; and instantly the scene was flooded with
excitement. He did not see her in the body; he seemed curiously to see
her as a shape of light, the light itself; he seemed, simplified and
exhausted as he was, to be like one of those lost birds fascinated by
the lighthouse and held to the glass by the splendor of the blaze.

These thoughts drove him to tramp a beat up and down the pavement
before the Hilberys' gate. He did not trouble himself to make any
plans for the future. Something of an unknown kind would decide both
the coming year and the coming hour. Now and again, in his vigil, he
sought the light in the long windows, or glanced at the ray which
gilded a few leaves and a few blades of grass in the little garden.
For a long time the light burnt without changing. He had just reached
the limit of his beat and was turning, when the front door opened, and
the aspect of the house was entirely changed. A black figure came down
the little pathway and paused at the gate. Denham understood instantly
that it was Rodney. Without hesitation, and conscious only of a great
friendliness for any one coming from that lighted room, he walked
straight up to him and stopped him. In the flurry of the wind Rodney
was taken aback, and for the moment tried to press on, muttering
something, as if he suspected a demand upon his charity.

"Goodness, Denham, what are you doing here?" he exclaimed, recognizing
him.

Ralph mumbled something about being on his way home. They walked on
together, though Rodney walked quick enough to make it plain that he
had no wish for company.

He was very unhappy. That afternoon Cassandra had repulsed him; he had
tried to explain to her the difficulties of the situation, and to
suggest the nature of his feelings for her without saying anything
definite or anything offensive to her. But he had lost his head; under
the goad of Katharine's ridicule he had said too much, and Cassandra,
superb in her dignity and severity, had refused to hear another word,
and threatened an immediate return to her home. His agitation, after
an evening spent between the two women, was extreme. Moreover, he
could not help suspecting that Ralph was wandering near the Hilberys'
house, at this hour, for reasons connected with Katharine. There was
probably some understanding between them--not that anything of the
kind mattered to him now. He was convinced that he had never cared for
any one save Cassandra, and Katharine's future was no concern of his.
Aloud, he said, shortly, that he was very tired and wished to find a
cab. But on Sunday night, on the Embankment, cabs were hard to come
by, and Rodney found himself constrained to walk some distance, at any
rate, in Denham's company. Denham maintained his silence. Rodney's
irritation lapsed. He found the silence oddly suggestive of the good
masculine qualities which he much respected, and had at this moment
great reason to need. After the mystery, difficulty, and uncertainty
of dealing with the other sex, intercourse with one's own is apt to
have a composing and even ennobling influence, since plain speaking is
possible and subterfuges of no avail. Rodney, too, was much in need of
a confidant; Katharine, despite her promises of help, had failed him
at the critical moment; she had gone off with Denham; she was,
perhaps, tormenting Denham as she had tormented him. How grave and
stable he seemed, speaking little, and walking firmly, compared with
what Rodney knew of his own torments and indecisions! He began to cast
about for some way of telling the story of his relations with
Katharine and Cassandra that would not lower him in Denham's eyes. It
then occurred to him that, perhaps, Katharine herself had confided in
Denham; they had something in common; it was likely that they had
discussed him that very afternoon. The desire to discover what they
had said of him now came uppermost in his mind. He recalled
Katharine's laugh; he remembered that she had gone, laughing, to walk
with Denham.

"Did you stay long after we'd left?" he asked abruptly.

"No. We went back to my house."

This seemed to confirm Rodney's belief that he had been discussed. He
turned over the unpalatable idea for a while, in silence.

"Women are incomprehensible creatures, Denham!" he then exclaimed.

"Um," said Denham, who seemed to himself possessed of complete
understanding, not merely of women, but of the entire universe. He
could read Rodney, too, like a book. He knew that he was unhappy, and
he pitied him, and wished to help him.

"You say something and they--fly into a passion. Or for no reason at
all, they laugh. I take it that no amount of education will--" The
remainder of the sentence was lost in the high wind, against which
they had to struggle; but Denham understood that he referred to
Katharine's laughter, and that the memory of it was still hurting him.
In comparison with Rodney, Denham felt himself very secure; he saw
Rodney as one of the lost birds dashed senseless against the glass;
one of the flying bodies of which the air was full. But he and
Katharine were alone together, aloft, splendid, and luminous with a
twofold radiance. He pitied the unstable creature beside him; he felt
a desire to protect him, exposed without the knowledge which made his
own way so direct. They were united as the adventurous are united,
though one reaches the goal and the other perishes by the way.

"You couldn't laugh at some one you cared for."

This sentence, apparently addressed to no other human being, reached
Denham's ears. The wind seemed to muffle it and fly away with it
directly. Had Rodney spoken those words?

"You love her." Was that his own voice, which seemed to sound in the
air several yards in front of him?

"I've suffered tortures, Denham, tortures!"

"Yes, yes, I know that."

"She's laughed at me."

"Never--to me."

The wind blew a space between the words--blew them so far away that
they seemed unspoken.

"How I've loved her!"

This was certainly spoken by the man at Denham's side. The voice had
all the marks of Rodney's character, and recalled, with; strange
vividness, his personal appearance. Denham could see him against the
blank buildings and towers of the horizon. He saw him dignified,
exalted, and tragic, as he might have appeared thinking of Katharine
alone in his rooms at night.

"I am in love with Katharine myself. That is why I am here to-night."

Ralph spoke distinctly and deliberately, as if Rodney's confession had
made this statement necessary.

Rodney exclaimed something inarticulate.

"Ah, I've always known it," he cried, "I've known it from the first.
You'll marry her!"

The cry had a note of despair in it. Again the wind intercepted their
words. They said no more. At length they drew up beneath a lamp-post,
simultaneously.

"My God, Denham, what fools we both are!" Rodney exclaimed. They
looked at each other, queerly, in the light of the lamp. Fools! They
seemed to confess to each other the extreme depths of their folly. For
the moment, under the lamp-post, they seemed to be aware of some
common knowledge which did away with the possibility of rivalry, and
made them feel more sympathy for each other than for any one else in
the world. Giving simultaneously a little nod, as if in confirmation
of this understanding, they parted without speaking again.

CHAPTER XXIX

Between twelve and one that Sunday night Katharine lay in bed, not
asleep, but in that twilight region where a detached and humorous view
of our own lot is possible; or if we must be serious, our seriousness
is tempered by the swift oncome of slumber and oblivion. She saw the
forms of Ralph, William, Cassandra, and herself, as if they were all
equally unsubstantial, and, in putting off reality, had gained a kind
of dignity which rested upon each impartially. Thus rid of any
uncomfortable warmth of partisanship or load of obligation, she was
dropping off to sleep when a light tap sounded upon her door. A moment
later Cassandra stood beside her, holding a candle and speaking in the
low tones proper to the time of night.

"Are you awake, Katharine?"

"Yes, I'm awake. What is it?"

She roused herself, sat up, and asked what in Heaven's name Cassandra
was doing?

"I couldn't sleep, and I thought I'd come and speak to you--only for a
moment, though. I'm going home to-morrow."

"Home? Why, what has happened?"

"Something happened to-day which makes it impossible for me to stay
here."

Cassandra spoke formally, almost solemnly; the announcement was
clearly prepared and marked a crisis of the utmost gravity. She
continued what seemed to be part of a set speech.

"I have decided to tell you the whole truth, Katharine. William
allowed himself to behave in a way which made me extremely
uncomfortable to-day."

Katharine seemed to waken completely, and at once to be in control of
herself.

"At the Zoo?" she asked.

"No, on the way home. When we had tea."

As if foreseeing that the interview might be long, and the night
chilly, Katharine advised Cassandra to wrap herself in a quilt.
Cassandra did so with unbroken solemnity.

"There's a train at eleven," she said. "I shall tell Aunt Maggie that
I have to go suddenly. . . . I shall make Violet's visit an excuse.
But, after thinking it over, I don't see how I can go without telling
you the truth."

She was careful to abstain from looking in Katharine's direction.
There was a slight pause.

"But I don't see the least reason why you should go," said Katharine
eventually. Her voice sounded so astonishingly equable that Cassandra
glanced at her. It was impossible to suppose that she was either
indignant or surprised; she seemed, on the contrary, sitting up in
bed, with her arms clasped round her knees and a little frown on her
brow, to be thinking closely upon a matter of indifference to her.

"Because I can't allow any man to behave to me in that way," Cassandra
replied, and she added, "particularly when I know that he is engaged
to some one else."

"But you like him, don't you?" Katharine inquired.

"That's got nothing to do with it," Cassandra exclaimed indignantly.
"I consider his conduct, under the circumstances, most disgraceful."

This was the last of the sentences of her premeditated speech; and
having spoken it she was left unprovided with any more to say in that
particular style. When Katharine remarked:

"I should say it had everything to do with it," Cassandra's
self-possession deserted her.

"I don't understand you in the least, Katharine. How can you behave as
you behave? Ever since I came here I've been amazed by you!"

"You've enjoyed yourself, haven't you?" Katharine asked.

"Yes, I have," Cassandra admitted.

"Anyhow, my behavior hasn't spoiled your visit."

"No," Cassandra allowed once more. She was completely at a loss. In
her forecast of the interview she had taken it for granted that
Katharine, after an outburst of incredulity, would agree that
Cassandra must return home as soon as possible. But Katharine, on the
contrary, accepted her statement at once, seemed neither shocked nor
surprised, and merely looked rather more thoughtful than usual. From
being a mature woman charged with an important mission, Cassandra
shrunk to the stature of an inexperienced child.

"Do you think I've been very foolish about it?" she asked.

Katharine made no answer, but still sat deliberating silently, and a
certain feeling of alarm took possession of Cassandra. Perhaps her
words had struck far deeper than she had thought, into depths beyond
her reach, as so much of Katharine was beyond her reach. She thought
suddenly that she had been playing with very dangerous tools.

Looking at her at length, Katharine asked slowly, as if she found the
question very difficult to ask.

"But do you care for William?"

She marked the agitation and bewilderment of the girl's expression,
and how she looked away from her.

"Do you mean, am I in love with him?" Cassandra asked, breathing
quickly, and nervously moving her hands.

"Yes, in love with him," Katharine repeated.

"How can I love the man you're engaged to marry?" Cassandra burst out.

"He may be in love with you."

"I don't think you've any right to say such things, Katharine,"
Cassandra exclaimed. "Why do you say them? Don't you mind in the least
how William behaves to other women? If I were engaged, I couldn't bear
it!"

"We're not engaged," said Katharine, after a pause.

"Katharine!" Cassandra cried.

"No, we're not engaged," Katharine repeated. "But no one knows it but
ourselves."

"But why--I don't understand--you're not engaged!" Cassandra said
again. "Oh, that explains it! You're not in love with him! You don't
want to marry him!"

"We aren't in love with each other any longer," said Katharine, as if
disposing of something for ever and ever.

"How queer, how strange, how unlike other people you are, Katharine,"
Cassandra said, her whole body and voice seeming to fall and collapse
together, and no trace of anger or excitement remaining, but only a
dreamy quietude.

"You're not in love with him?"

"But I love him," said Katharine.

Cassandra remained bowed, as if by the weight of the revelation, for
some little while longer. Nor did Katharine speak. Her attitude was
that of some one who wishes to be concealed as much as possible from
observation. She sighed profoundly; she was absolutely silent, and
apparently overcome by her thoughts.

"D'you know what time it is?" she said at length, and shook her
pillow, as if making ready for sleep.

Cassandra rose obediently, and once more took up her candle. Perhaps
the white dressing-gown, and the loosened hair, and something unseeing
in the expression of the eyes gave her a likeness to a woman walking
in her sleep. Katharine, at least, thought so.

"There's no reason why I should go home, then?" Cassandra said,
pausing. "Unless you want me to go, Katharine? What DO you want me to
do?"

For the first time their eyes met.

"You wanted us to fall in love," Cassandra exclaimed, as if she read
the certainty there. But as she looked she saw a sight that surprised
her. The tears rose slowly in Katharine's eyes and stood there,
brimming but contained--the tears of some profound emotion, happiness,
grief, renunciation; an emotion so complex in its nature that to
express it was impossible, and Cassandra, bending her head and
receiving the tears upon her cheek, accepted them in silence as the
consecration of her love.

"Please, miss," said the maid, about eleven o'clock on the following
morning, "Mrs. Milvain is in the kitchen."

A long wicker basket of flowers and branches had arrived from the
country, and Katharine, kneeling upon the floor of the drawing-room,
was sorting them while Cassandra watched her from an arm-chair, and
absent-mindedly made spasmodic offers of help which were not accepted.
The maid's message had a curious effect upon Katharine.

She rose, walked to the window, and, the maid being gone, said
emphatically and even tragically:

"You know what that means."

Cassandra had understood nothing.

"Aunt Celia is in the kitchen," Katharine repeated.

"Why in the kitchen?" Cassandra asked, not unnaturally.

"Probably because she's discovered something," Katharine replied.
Cassandra's thoughts flew to the subject of her preoccupation.

"About us?" she inquired.

"Heaven knows," Katharine replied. "I shan't let her stay in the
kitchen, though. I shall bring her up here."

The sternness with which this was said suggested that to bring Aunt
Celia upstairs was, for some reason, a disciplinary measure.

"For goodness' sake, Katharine," Cassandra exclaimed, jumping from her
chair and showing signs of agitation, "don't be rash. Don't let her
suspect. Remember, nothing's certain--"

Katharine assured her by nodding her head several times, but the
manner in which she left the room was not calculated to inspire
complete confidence in her diplomacy.

Mrs. Milvain was sitting, or rather perching, upon the edge of a chair
in the servants' room. Whether there was any sound reason for her
choice of a subterranean chamber, or whether it corresponded with the
spirit of her quest, Mrs. Milvain invariably came in by the back door
and sat in the servants' room when she was engaged in confidential
family transactions. The ostensible reason she gave was that neither
Mr. nor Mrs. Hilbery should be disturbed. But, in truth, Mrs. Milvain
depended even more than most elderly women of her generation upon the
delicious emotions of intimacy, agony, and secrecy, and the additional
thrill provided by the basement was one not lightly to be forfeited.
She protested almost plaintively when Katharine proposed to go
upstairs.

"I've something that I want to say to you in PRIVATE," she said,
hesitating reluctantly upon the threshold of her ambush.

"The drawing-room is empty--"

"But we might meet your mother upon the stairs. We might disturb your
father," Mrs. Milvain objected, taking the precaution to speak in a
whisper already.

But as Katharine's presence was absolutely necessary to the success of
the interview, and as Katharine obstinately receded up the kitchen
stairs, Mrs. Milvain had no course but to follow her. She glanced
furtively about her as she proceeded upstairs, drew her skirts
together, and stepped with circumspection past all doors, whether they
were open or shut.

"Nobody will overhear us?" she murmured, when the comparative
sanctuary of the drawing-room had been reached. "I see that I have
interrupted you," she added, glancing at the flowers strewn upon the
floor. A moment later she inquired, "Was some one sitting with you?"
noticing a handkerchief that Cassandra had dropped in her flight.

"Cassandra was helping me to put the flowers in water," said
Katharine, and she spoke so firmly and clearly that Mrs. Milvain
glanced nervously at the main door and then at the curtain which
divided the little room with the relics from the drawing-room.

"Ah, Cassandra is still with you," she remarked. "And did William send
you those lovely flowers?"

Katharine sat down opposite her aunt and said neither yes nor no. She
looked past her, and it might have been thought that she was
considering very critically the pattern of the curtains. Another
advantage of the basement, from Mrs. Milvain's point of view, was that
it made it necessary to sit very close together, and the light was dim
compared with that which now poured through three windows upon
Katharine and the basket of flowers, and gave even the slight angular
figure of Mrs. Milvain herself a halo of gold.

"They're from Stogdon House," said Katharine abruptly, with a little
jerk of her head.

Mrs. Milvain felt that it would be easier to tell her niece what she
wished to say if they were actually in physical contact, for the
spiritual distance between them was formidable. Katharine, however,
made no overtures, and Mrs. Milvain, who was possessed of rash but
heroic courage, plunged without preface:

"People are talking about you, Katharine. That is why I have come this
morning. You forgive me for saying what I'd much rather not say? What
I say is only for your own sake, my child."

"There's nothing to forgive yet, Aunt Celia," said Katharine, with
apparent good humor.

"People are saying that William goes everywhere with you and
Cassandra, and that he is always paying her attentions. At the
Markhams' dance he sat out five dances with her. At the Zoo they were
seen alone together. They left together. They never came back here
till seven in the evening. But that is not all. They say his manner is
very marked--he is quite different when she is there."

Mrs. Milvain, whose words had run themselves together, and whose voice
had raised its tone almost to one of protest, here ceased, and looked
intently at Katharine, as if to judge the effect of her communication.
A slight rigidity had passed over Katharine's face. Her lips were
pressed together; her eyes were contracted, and they were still fixed
upon the curtain. These superficial changes covered an extreme inner
loathing such as might follow the display of some hideous or indecent
spectacle. The indecent spectacle was her own action beheld for the
first time from the outside; her aunt's words made her realize how
infinitely repulsive the body of life is without its soul.

"Well?" she said at length.

Mrs. Milvain made a gesture as if to bring her closer, but it was not
returned.

"We all know how good you are--how unselfish--how you sacrifice
yourself to others. But you've been too unselfish, Katharine. You have
made Cassandra happy, and she has taken advantage of your goodness."

"I don't understand, Aunt Celia," said Katharine. "What has Cassandra
done?"

"Cassandra has behaved in a way that I could not have thought
possible," said Mrs. Milvain warmly. "She has been utterly
selfish--utterly heartless. I must speak to her before I go."

"I don't understand," Katharine persisted.

Mrs. Milvain looked at her. Was it possible that Katharine really
doubted? That there was something that Mrs. Milvain herself did not
understand? She braced herself, and pronounced the tremendous words:

"Cassandra has stolen William's love."

Still the words seemed to have curiously little effect.

"Do you mean," said Katharine, "that he has fallen in love with her?"

"There are ways of MAKING men fall in love with one, Katharine."

Katharine remained silent. The silence alarmed Mrs. Milvain, and she
began hurriedly:

"Nothing would have made me say these things but your own good. I have
not wished to interfere; I have not wished to give you pain. I am a
useless old woman. I have no children of my own. I only want to see
you happy, Katharine."

Again she stretched forth her arms, but they remained empty.

"You are not going to say these things to Cassandra," said Katharine
suddenly. "You've said them to me; that's enough."

Katharine spoke so low and with such restraint that Mrs. Milvain had
to strain to catch her words, and when she heard them she was dazed by
them.

"I've made you angry! I knew I should!" she exclaimed. She quivered,
and a kind of sob shook her; but even to have made Katharine angry was
some relief, and allowed her to feel some of the agreeable sensations
of martyrdom.

"Yes," said Katharine, standing up, "I'm so angry that I don't want to
say anything more. I think you'd better go, Aunt Celia. We don't
understand each other."

At these words Mrs. Milvain looked for a moment terribly apprehensive;
she glanced at her niece's face, but read no pity there, whereupon she
folded her hands upon a black velvet bag which she carried in an
attitude that was almost one of prayer. Whatever divinity she prayed
to, if pray she did, at any rate she recovered her dignity in a
singular way and faced her niece.

"Married love," she said slowly and with emphasis upon every word, "is
the most sacred of all loves. The love of husband and wife is the most
holy we know. That is the lesson Mamma's children learnt from her;
that is what they can never forget. I have tried to speak as she would
have wished her daughter to speak. You are her grandchild."

Katharine seemed to judge this defence upon its merits, and then to
convict it of falsity.

"I don't see that there is any excuse for your behavior," she said.

At these words Mrs. Milvain rose and stood for a moment beside her
niece. She had never met with such treatment before, and she did not
know with what weapons to break down the terrible wall of resistance
offered her by one who, by virtue of youth and beauty and sex, should
have been all tears and supplications. But Mrs. Milvain herself was
obstinate; upon a matter of this kind she could not admit that she was
either beaten or mistaken. She beheld herself the champion of married
love in its purity and supremacy; what her niece stood for she was
quite unable to say, but she was filled with the gravest suspicions.
The old woman and the young woman stood side by side in unbroken
silence. Mrs. Milvain could not make up her mind to withdraw while her
principles trembled in the balance and her curiosity remained
unappeased. She ransacked her mind for some question that should force
Katharine to enlighten her, but the supply was limited, the choice
difficult, and while she hesitated the door opened and William Rodney
came in. He carried in his hand an enormous and splendid bunch of
white and purple flowers, and, either not seeing Mrs. Milvain, or
disregarding her, he advanced straight to Katharine, and presented the
flowers with the words:

"These are for you, Katharine."

Katharine took them with a glance that Mrs. Milvain did not fail to
intercept. But with all her experience, she did not know what to make
of it. She watched anxiously for further illumination. William greeted
her without obvious sign of guilt, and, explaining that he had a
holiday, both he and Katharine seemed to take it for granted that his
holiday should be celebrated with flowers and spent in Cheyne Walk. A
pause followed; that, too, was natural; and Mrs. Milvain began to feel
that she laid herself open to a charge of selfishness if she stayed.
The mere presence of a young man had altered her disposition
curiously, and filled her with a desire for a scene which should end
in an emotional forgiveness. She would have given much to clasp both
nephew and niece in her arms. But she could not flatter herself that
any hope of the customary exaltation remained.

"I must go," she said, and she was conscious of an extreme flatness of
spirit.

Neither of them said anything to stop her. William politely escorted
her downstairs, and somehow, amongst her protests and embarrassments,
Mrs. Milvain forgot to say good-bye to Katharine. She departed,
murmuring words about masses of flowers and a drawing-room always
beautiful even in the depths of winter.

William came back to Katharine; he found her standing where he had
left her.

"I've come to be forgiven," he said. "Our quarrel was perfectly
hateful to me. I've not slept all night. You're not angry with me, are
you, Katharine?"

She could not bring herself to answer him until she had rid her mind
of the impression that her aunt had made on her. It seemed to her that
the very flowers were contaminated, and Cassandra's pocket-
handkerchief, for Mrs. Milvain had used them for evidence in her
investigations.

"She's been spying upon us," she said, "following us about London,
overhearing what people are saying--"

"Mrs. Milvain?" Rodney exclaimed. "What has she told you?"

His air of open confidence entirely vanished.

"Oh, people are saying that you're in love with Cassandra, and that
you don't care for me."

"They have seen us?" he asked.

"Everything we've done for a fortnight has been seen."

"I told you that would happen!" he exclaimed.

He walked to the window in evident perturbation. Katharine was too
indignant to attend to him. She was swept away by the force of her own
anger. Clasping Rodney's flowers, she stood upright and motionless.

Rodney turned away from the window.

"It's all been a mistake," he said. "I blame myself for it. I should
have known better. I let you persuade me in a moment of madness. I beg
you to forget my insanity, Katharine."

"She wished even to persecute Cassandra!" Katharine burst out, not
listening to him. "She threatened to speak to her. She's capable of
it--she's capable of anything!"

"Mrs. Milvain is not tactful, I know, but you exaggerate, Katharine.
People are talking about us. She was right to tell us. It only
confirms my own feeling--the position is monstrous."

At length Katharine realized some part of what he meant.

"You don't mean that this influences you, William?" she asked in
amazement.

"It does," he said, flushing. "It's intensely disagreeable to me. I
can't endure that people should gossip about us. And then there's your
cousin--Cassandra--" He paused in embarrassment.

"I came here this morning, Katharine," he resumed, with a change of
voice, "to ask you to forget my folly, my bad temper, my inconceivable
behavior. I came, Katharine, to ask whether we can't return to the
position we were in before this--this season of lunacy. Will you take
me back, Katharine, once more and for ever?"

No doubt her beauty, intensified by emotion and enhanced by the
flowers of bright color and strange shape which she carried wrought
upon Rodney, and had its share in bestowing upon her the old romance.
But a less noble passion worked in him, too; he was inflamed by
jealousy. His tentative offer of affection had been rudely and, as he
thought, completely repulsed by Cassandra on the preceding day.
Denham's confession was in his mind. And ultimately, Katharine's
dominion over him was of the sort that the fevers of the night cannot
exorcise.

"I was as much to blame as you were yesterday," she said gently,
disregarding his question. "I confess, William, the sight of you and
Cassandra together made me jealous, and I couldn't control myself. I
laughed at you, I know."

"You jealous!" William exclaimed. "l assure you, Katharine, you've not
the slightest reason to be jealous. Cassandra dislikes me, so far as
she feels about me at all. I was foolish enough to try to explain the
nature of our relationship. I couldn't resist telling her what I
supposed myself to feel for her. She refused to listen, very rightly.
But she left me in no doubt of her scorn."

Katharine hesitated. She was confused, agitated, physically tired, and
had already to reckon with the violent feeling of dislike aroused by
her aunt which still vibrated through all the rest of her feelings.
She sank into a chair and dropped her flowers upon her lap.

"She charmed me," Rodney continued. "I thought I loved her. But that's
a thing of the past. It's all over, Katharine. It was a dream--an
hallucination. We were both equally to blame, but no harm's done if
you believe how truly I care for you. Say you believe me!"

He stood over her, as if in readiness to seize the first sign of her
assent. Precisely at that moment, owing, perhaps, to her vicissitudes
of feeling, all sense of love left her, as in a moment a mist lifts
from the earth. And when the mist departed a skeleton world and
blankness alone remained--a terrible prospect for the eyes of the
living to behold. He saw the look of terror in her face, and without
understanding its origin, took her hand in his. With the sense of
companionship returned a desire, like that of a child for shelter, to
accept what he had to offer her--and at that moment it seemed that he
offered her the only thing that could make it tolerable to live. She
let him press his lips to her cheek, and leant her head upon his arm.
It was the moment of his triumph. It was the only moment in which she
belonged to him and was dependent upon his protection.

"Yes, yes, yes," he murmured, "you accept me, Katharine. You love me."

For a moment she remained silent. He then heard her murmur:

"Cassandra loves you more than I do."

"Cassandra?" he whispered.

"She loves you," Katharine repeated. She raised herself and repeated
the sentence yet a third time. "She loves you."

William slowly raised himself. He believed instinctively what
Katharine said, but what it meant to him he was unable to understand.
Could Cassandra love him? Could she have told Katharine that she loved
him? The desire to know the truth of this was urgent, unknown though
the consequences might be. The thrill of excitement associated with
the thought of Cassandra once more took possession of him. No longer
was it the excitement of anticipation and ignorance; it was the
excitement of something greater than a possibility, for now he knew
her and had measure of the sympathy between them. But who could give
him certainty? Could Katharine, Katharine who had lately lain in his
arms, Katharine herself the most admired of women? He looked at her,
with doubt, and with anxiety, but said nothing.

"Yes, yes," she said, interpreting his wish for assurance, "it's true.
I know what she feels for you."

"She loves me?"

Katharine nodded.

"Ah, but who knows what I feel? How can I be sure of my feeling
myself? Ten minutes ago I asked you to marry me. I still wish it--I
don't know what I wish--"

He clenched his hands and turned away. He suddenly faced her and
demanded: "Tell me what you feel for Denham."

"For Ralph Denham?" she asked. "Yes!" she exclaimed, as if she had
found the answer to some momentarily perplexing question. "You're
jealous of me, William; but you're not in love with me. I'm jealous of
you. Therefore, for both our sakes, I say, speak to Cassandra at
once."

He tried to compose himself. He walked up and down the room; he paused
at the window and surveyed the flowers strewn upon the floor.
Meanwhile his desire to have Katharine's assurance confirmed became so
insistent that he could no longer deny the overmastering strength of
his feeling for Cassandra.

"You're right," he exclaimed, coming to a standstill and rapping his
knuckles sharply upon a small table carrying one slender vase. "I love
Cassandra."

As he said this, the curtains hanging at the door of the little room
parted, and Cassandra herself stepped forth.

"I have overheard every word!" she exclaimed.

A pause succeeded this announcement. Rodney made a step forward and
said:

"Then you know what I wish to ask you. Give me your answer--"

She put her hands before her face; she turned away and seemed to
shrink from both of them.

"What Katharine said," she murmured. "But," she added, raising her
head with a look of fear from the kiss with which he greeted her
admission, "how frightfully difficult it all is! Our feelings, I mean
--yours and mine and Katharine's. Katharine, tell me, are we doing
right?"

"Right--of course we're doing right," William answered her, "if, after
what you've heard, you can marry a man of such incomprehensible
confusion, such deplorable--"

"Don't, William," Katharine interposed; "Cassandra has heard us; she
can judge what we are; she knows better than we could tell her."

But, still holding William's hand, questions and desires welled up in
Cassandra's heart. Had she done wrong in listening? Why did Aunt Celia
blame her? Did Katharine think her right? Above all, did William
really love her, for ever and ever, better than any one?

"I must be first with him, Katharine!" she exclaimed. "I can't share
him even with you."

"I shall never ask that," said Katharine. She moved a little away from
where they sat and began half-consciously sorting her flowers.

"But you've shared with me," Cassandra said. "Why can't I share with
you? Why am I so mean? I know why it is," she added. "We understand
each other, William and I. You've never understood each other. You're
too different."

"I've never admired anybody more," William interposed.

"It's not that"--Cassandra tried to enlighten him--"it's
understanding."

"Have I never understood you, Katharine? Have I been very selfish?"

"Yes," Cassandra interposed. "You've asked her for sympathy, and she's
not sympathetic; you've wanted her to be practical, and she's not
practical. You've been selfish; you've been exacting--and so has
Katharine--but it wasn't anybody's fault."

Katharine had listened to this attempt at analysis with keen
attention. Cassandra's words seemed to rub the old blurred image of
life and freshen it so marvelously that it looked new again. She
turned to William.

"It's quite true," she said. "It was nobody's fault."

"There are many things that he'll always come to you for," Cassandra
continued, still reading from her invisible book. "I accept that,
Katharine. I shall never dispute it. I want to be generous as you've
been generous. But being in love makes it more difficult for me."

They were silent. At length William broke the silence.

"One thing I beg of you both, he said, and the old nervousness of
manner returned as he glanced at Katharine. "We will never discuss
these matters again. It's not that I'm timid and conventional, as you
think, Katharine. It's that it spoils things to discuss them; it
unsettles people's minds; and now we're all so happy--"

Cassandra ratified this conclusion so far as she was concerned, and
William, after receiving the exquisite pleasure of her glance, with
its absolute affection and trust, looked anxiously at Katharine.

"Yes, I'm happy," she assured him. "And I agree. We will never talk
about it again."

"Oh, Katharine, Katharine!" Cassandra cried, holding out her arms
while the tears ran down her cheeks.

CHAPTER XXX

The day was so different from other days to three people in the house
that the common routine of household life--the maid waiting at table,
Mrs. Hilbery writing a letter, the clock striking, and the door
opening, and all the other signs of long-established civilization
appeared suddenly to have no meaning save as they lulled Mr. and Mrs.
Hilbery into the belief that nothing unusual had taken place. It
chanced that Mrs. Hilbery was depressed without visible cause, unless
a certain crudeness verging upon coarseness in the temper of her
favorite Elizabethans could be held responsible for the mood. At any
rate, she had shut up "The Duchess of Malfi" with a sigh, and wished
to know, so she told Rodney at dinner, whether there wasn't some young
writer with a touch of the great spirit--somebody who made you believe
that life was BEAUTIFUL? She got little help from Rodney, and after
singing her plaintive requiem for the death of poetry by herself, she
charmed herself into good spirits again by remembering the existence
of Mozart. She begged Cassandra to play to her, and when they went
upstairs Cassandra opened the piano directly, and did her best to
create an atmosphere of unmixed beauty. At the sound of the first
notes Katharine and Rodney both felt an enormous sense of relief at
the license which the music gave them to loosen their hold upon the
mechanism of behavior. They lapsed into the depths of thought. Mrs.
Hilbery was soon spirited away into a perfectly congenial mood, that
was half reverie and half slumber, half delicious melancholy and half
pure bliss. Mr. Hilbery alone attended. He was extremely musical, and
made Cassandra aware that he listened to every note. She played her
best, and won his approval. Leaning slightly forward in his chair, and
turning his little green stone, he weighed the intention of her
phrases approvingly, but stopped her suddenly to complain of a noise
behind him. The window was unhasped. He signed to Rodney, who crossed
the room immediately to put the matter right. He stayed a moment
longer by the window than was, perhaps, necessary, and having done
what was needed, drew his chair a little closer than before to
Katharine's side. The music went on. Under cover of some exquisite run
of melody, he leant towards her and whispered something. She glanced
at her father and mother, and a moment later left the room, almost
unobserved, with Rodney.

"What is it?" she asked, as soon as the door was shut.

Rodney made no answer, but led her downstairs into the dining-room on
the ground floor. Even when he had shut the door he said nothing, but
went straight to the window and parted the curtains. He beckoned to
Katharine.

"There he is again," he said. "Look, there--under the lamp-post."

Katharine looked. She had no idea what Rodney was talking about. A
vague feeling of alarm and mystery possessed her. She saw a man
standing on the opposite side of the road facing the house beneath a
lamp-post. As they looked the figure turned, walked a few steps, and
came back again to his old position. It seemed to her that he was
looking fixedly at her, and was conscious of her gaze on him. She
knew, in a flash, who the man was who was watching them. She drew the
curtain abruptly.

"Denham," said Rodney. "He was there last night too." He spoke
sternly. His whole manner had become full of authority. Katharine felt
almost as if he accused her of some crime. She was pale and
uncomfortably agitated, as much by the strangeness of Rodney's
behavior as by the sight of Ralph Denham.

"If he chooses to come--" she said defiantly.

"You can't let him wait out there. I shall tell him to come in."
Rodney spoke with such decision that when he raised his arm Katharine
expected him to draw the curtain instantly. She caught his hand with a
little exclamation.

"Wait!" she cried. "I don't allow you."

"You can't wait," he replied. "You've gone too far." His hand remained
upon the curtain. "Why don't you admit, Katharine," he broke out,
looking at her with an expression of contempt as well as of anger,
"that you love him? Are you going to treat him as you treated me?"

She looked at him, wondering, in spite of all her perplexity, at the
spirit that possessed him.

"I forbid you to draw the curtain," she said.

He reflected, and then took his hand away.

"I've no right to interfere," he concluded. "I'll leave you. Or, if
you like, we'll go back to the drawing-room."

"No. I can't go back," she said, shaking her head. She bent her head
in thought.

"You love him, Katharine," Rodney said suddenly. His tone had lost
something of its sternness, and might have been used to urge a child
to confess its fault. She raised her eyes and fixed them upon him.

"I love him?" she repeated. He nodded. She searched his face, as if
for further confirmation of his words, and, as he remained silent and
expectant, turned away once more and continued her thoughts. He
observed her closely, but without stirring, as if he gave her time to
make up her mind to fulfil her obvious duty. The strains of Mozart
reached them from the room above.

"Now," she said suddenly, with a sort of desperation, rising from her
chair and seeming to command Rodney to fulfil his part. He drew the
curtain instantly, and she made no attempt to stop him. Their eyes at
once sought the same spot beneath the lamp-post.

"He's not there!" she exclaimed.

No one was there. William threw the window up and looked out. The wind
rushed into the room, together with the sound of distant wheels,
footsteps hurrying along the pavement, and the cries of sirens hooting
down the river.

"Denham!" William cried.

"Ralph!" said Katharine, but she spoke scarcely louder than she might
have spoken to some one in the same room. With their eyes fixed upon
the opposite side of the road, they did not notice a figure close to
the railing which divided the garden from the street. But Denham had
crossed the road and was standing there. They were startled by his
voice close at hand.

"Rodney!"

"There you are! Come in, Denham." Rodney went to the front door and
opened it. "Here he is," he said, bringing Ralph with him into the
dining-room where Katharine stood, with her back to the open window.
Their eyes met for a second. Denham looked half dazed by the strong
light, and, buttoned in his overcoat, with his hair ruffled across his
forehead by the wind, he seemed like somebody rescued from an open
boat out at sea. William promptly shut the window and drew the
curtains. He acted with a cheerful decision as if he were master of
the situation, and knew exactly what he meant to do.

"You're the first to hear the news, Denham," he said. "Katharine isn't
going to marry me, after all."

"Where shall I put--" Ralph began vaguely, holding out his hat and
glancing about him; he balanced it carefully against a silver bowl
that stood upon the sideboard. He then sat himself down rather heavily
at the head of the oval dinner-table. Rodney stood on one side of him
and Katharine on the other. He appeared to be presiding over some
meeting from which most of the members were absent. Meanwhile, he
waited, and his eyes rested upon the glow of the beautifully polished
mahogany table.

"William is engaged to Cassandra," said Katharine briefly.

At that Denham looked up quickly at Rodney. Rodney's expression
changed. He lost his self-possession. He smiled a little nervously,
and then his attention seemed to be caught by a fragment of melody
from the floor above. He seemed for a moment to forget the presence of
the others. He glanced towards the door.

"I congratulate you," said Denham.

"Yes, yes. We're all mad--quite out of our minds, Denham," he said.
"It's partly Katharine's doing--partly mine." He looked oddly round
the room as if he wished to make sure that the scene in which he
played a part had some real existence. "Quite mad," he repeated. "Even
Katharine--" His gaze rested upon her finally, as if she, too, had
changed from his old view of her. He smiled at her as if to encourage
her. "Katharine shall explain," he said, and giving a little nod to
Denham, he left the room.

Katharine sat down at once, and leant her chin upon her hands. So long
as Rodney was in the room the proceedings of the evening had seemed to
be in his charge, and had been marked by a certain unreality. Now that
she was alone with Ralph she felt at once that a constraint had been
taken from them both. She felt that they were alone at the bottom of
the house, which rose, story upon story, upon the top of them.

"Why were you waiting out there?" she asked.

"For the chance of seeing you," he replied.

"You would have waited all night if it hadn't been for William. It's
windy too. You must have been cold. What could you see? Nothing but
our windows."

"It was worth it. I heard you call me."

"I called you?" She had called unconsciously.

"They were engaged this morning," she told him, after a pause.

"You're glad?" he asked.

She bent her head. "Yes, yes," she sighed. "But you don't know how
good he is--what he's done for me--" Ralph made a sound of
understanding. "You waited there last night too?" she asked.

"Yes. I can wait," Denham replied.

The words seemed to fill the room with an emotion which Katharine
connected with the sound of distant wheels, the footsteps hurrying
along the pavement, the cries of sirens hooting down the river, the
darkness and the wind. She saw the upright figure standing beneath the
lamp-post.

"Waiting in the dark," she said, glancing at the window, as if he saw
what she was seeing. "Ah, but it's different--" She broke off. "I'm
not the person you think me. Until you realize that it's impossible--"

Placing her elbows on the table, she slid her ruby ring up and down
her finger abstractedly. She frowned at the rows of leather-bound
books opposite her. Ralph looked keenly at her. Very pale, but sternly
concentrated upon her meaning, beautiful but so little aware of
herself as to seem remote from him also, there was something distant
and abstract about her which exalted him and chilled him at the same
time.

"No, you're right," he said. "I don't know you. I've never known you."

"Yet perhaps you know me better than any one else," she mused.

Some detached instinct made her aware that she was gazing at a book
which belonged by rights to some other part of the house. She walked
over to the shelf, took it down, and returned to her seat, placing the
book on the table between them. Ralph opened it and looked at the
portrait of a man with a voluminous white shirt-collar, which formed
the frontispiece.

"I say I do know you, Katharine," he affirmed, shutting the book.
"It's only for moments that I go mad."

"Do you call two whole nights a moment?"

"I swear to you that now, at this instant, I see you precisely as you
are. No one has ever known you as I know you. . . . Could you have
taken down that book just now if I hadn't known you?"

"That's true," she replied, "but you can't think how I'm divided--how
I'm at my ease with you, and how I'm bewildered. The unreality--the
dark--the waiting outside in the wind--yes, when you look at me, not
seeing me, and I don't see you either. . . . But I do see," she went
on quickly, changing her position and frowning again, "heaps of
things, only not you."

"Tell me what you see," he urged.

But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single
shape colored upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an
atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind
scouring the flanks of northern hills and flashing light upon
cornfields and pools.

"Impossible," she sighed, laughing at the ridiculous notion of putting
any part of this into words.

"Try, Katharine," Ralph urged her.

"But I can't--I'm talking a sort of nonsense--the sort of nonsense one
talks to oneself." She was dismayed by the expression of longing and
despair upon his face. "I was thinking about a mountain in the North
of England," she attempted. "It's too silly--I won't go on."

"We were there together?" he pressed her.

"No. I was alone." She seemed to be disappointing the desire of a
child. His face fell.

"You're always alone there?"

"I can't explain." She could not explain that she was essentially
alone there. "It's not a mountain in the North of England. It's an
imagination--a story one tells oneself. You have yours too?"

"You're with me in mine. You're the thing I make up, you see."

"Oh, I see," she sighed. "That's why it's so impossible." She turned
upon him almost fiercely. "You must try to stop it," she said.

"I won't," he replied roughly, "because I--" He stopped. He realized
that the moment had come to impart that news of the utmost importance
which he had tried to impart to Mary Datchet, to Rodney upon the
Embankment, to the drunken tramp upon the seat. How should he offer it
to Katharine? He looked quickly at her. He saw that she was only half
attentive to him; only a section of her was exposed to him. The sight
roused in him such desperation that he had much ado to control his
impulse to rise and leave the house. Her hand lay loosely curled upon
the table. He seized it and grasped it firmly as if to make sure of
her existence and of his own. "Because I love you, Katharine," he
said.

Some roundness or warmth essential to that statement was absent from
his voice, and she had merely to shake her head very slightly for him
to drop her hand and turn away in shame at his own impotence. He
thought that she had detected his wish to leave her. She had discerned
the break in his resolution, the blankness in the heart of his vision.
It was true that he had been happier out in the street, thinking of
her, than now that he was in the same room with her. He looked at her
with a guilty expression on his face. But her look expressed neither
disappointment nor reproach. Her pose was easy, and she seemed to give
effect to a mood of quiet speculation by the spinning of her ruby ring
upon the polished table. Denham forgot his despair in wondering what
thoughts now occupied her.

"You don't believe me?" he said. His tone was humble, and made her
smile at him.

"As far as I understand you--but what should you advise me to do with
this ring?" she asked, holding it out.

"I should advise you to let me keep it for you," he replied, in the
same tone of half-humorous gravity.

"After what you've said, I can hardly trust you--unless you'll unsay
what you've said?"

"Very well. I'm not in love with you."

"But I think you ARE in love with me. . . . As I am with you," she
added casually enough. "At least," she said slipping her ring back to
its old position, "what other word describes the state we're in?"

She looked at him gravely and inquiringly, as if in search of help.

"It's when I'm with you that I doubt it, not when I'm alone," he
stated.

"So I thought," she replied.

In order to explain to her his state of mind, Ralph recounted his
experience with the photograph, the letter, and the flower picked at
Kew. She listened very seriously.

"And then you went raving about the streets," she mused. "Well, it's
bad enough. But my state is worse than yours, because it hasn't
anything to do with facts. It's an hallucination, pure and simple--an
intoxication. . . . One can be in love with pure reason?" she
hazarded. "Because if you're in love with a vision, I believe that
that's what I'm in love with."

This conclusion seemed fantastic and profoundly unsatisfactory to
Ralph, but after the astonishing variations of his own sentiments
during the past half-hour he could not accuse her of fanciful
exaggeration.

"Rodney seems to know his own mind well enough," he said almost
bitterly. The music, which had ceased, had now begun again, and the
melody of Mozart seemed to express the easy and exquisite love of the
two upstairs.

"Cassandra never doubted for a moment. But we--" she glanced at him as
if to ascertain his position, "we see each other only now and then--"

"Like lights in a storm--"

"In the midst of a hurricane," she concluded, as the window shook
beneath the pressure of the wind. They listened to the sound in
silence.

Here the door opened with considerable hesitation, and Mrs. Hilbery's
head appeared, at first with an air of caution, but having made sure
that she had admitted herself to the dining-room and not to some more
unusual region, she came completely inside and seemed in no way taken
aback by the sight she saw. She seemed, as usual, bound on some quest
of her own which was interrupted pleasantly but strangely by running
into one of those queer, unnecessary ceremonies that other people
thought fit to indulge in.

"Please don't let me interrupt you, Mr.--" she was at a loss, as
usual, for the name, and Katharine thought that she did not recognize
him. "I hope you've found something nice to read," she added, pointing
to the book upon the table. "Byron--ah, Byron. I've known people who
knew Lord Byron," she said.

Katharine, who had risen in some confusion, could not help smiling at
the thought that her mother found it perfectly natural and desirable
that her daughter should be reading Byron in the dining-room late at
night alone with a strange young man. She blessed a disposition that
was so convenient, and felt tenderly towards her mother and her
mother's eccentricities. But Ralph observed that although Mrs. Hilbery
held the book so close to her eyes she was not reading a word.

"My dear mother, why aren't you in bed?" Katharine exclaimed, changing
astonishingly in the space of a minute to her usual condition of
authoritative good sense. "Why are you wandering about?"

"I'm sure I should like your poetry better than I like Lord Byron's,"
said Mrs. Hilbery, addressing Ralph Denham.

"Mr. Denham doesn't write poetry; he has written articles for father,
for the Review," Katharine said, as if prompting her memory.

"Oh dear! How dull!" Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed, with a sudden laugh that
rather puzzled her daughter.

Ralph found that she had turned upon him a gaze that was at once very
vague and very penetrating.

"But I'm sure you read poetry at night. I always judge by the
expression of the eyes," Mrs. Hilbery continued. ("The windows of the
soul," she added parenthetically.) "I don't know much about the law,"
she went on, "though many of my relations were lawyers. Some of them
looked very handsome, too, in their wigs. But I think I do know a
little about poetry," she added. "And all the things that aren't
written down, but--but--" She waved her hand, as if to indicate the
wealth of unwritten poetry all about them. "The night and the stars,
the dawn coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting. . . .
Ah dear," she sighed, "well, the sunset is very lovely too. I
sometimes think that poetry isn't so much what we write as what we
feel, Mr. Denham."

During this speech of her mother's Katharine had turned away, and
Ralph felt that Mrs. Hilbery was talking to him apart, with a desire
to ascertain something about him which she veiled purposely by the
vagueness of her words. He felt curiously encouraged and heartened by
the beam in her eye rather than by her actual words. From the distance
of her age and sex she seemed to be waving to him, hailing him as a
ship sinking beneath the horizon might wave its flag of greeting to
another setting out upon the same voyage. He bent his head, saying
nothing, but with a curious certainty that she had read an answer to
her inquiry that satisfied her. At any rate, she rambled off into a
description of the Law Courts which turned to a denunciation of
English justice, which, according to her, imprisoned poor men who
couldn't pay their debts. "Tell me, shall we ever do without it all?"
she asked, but at this point Katharine gently insisted that her mother
should go to bed. Looking back from half-way up the staircase,
Katharine seemed to see Denham's eyes watching her steadily and
intently with an expression that she had guessed in them when he stood
looking at the windows across the road.

CHAPTER XXXI

The tray which brought Katharine's cup of tea the next morning
brought, also, a note from her mother, announcing that it was her
intention to catch an early train to Stratford-on-Avon that very day.

"Please find out the best way of getting there," the note ran, "and
wire to dear Sir John Burdett to expect me, with my love. I've been
dreaming all night of you and Shakespeare, dearest Katharine."

This was no momentary impulse. Mrs. Hilbery had been dreaming of
Shakespeare any time these six months, toying with the idea of an
excursion to what she considered the heart of the civilized world. To
stand six feet above Shakespeare's bones, to see the very stones worn
by his feet, to reflect that the oldest man's oldest mother had very
likely seen Shakespeare's daughter--such thoughts roused an emotion in
her, which she expressed at unsuitable moments, and with a passion
that would not have been unseemly in a pilgrim to a sacred shrine. The
only strange thing was that she wished to go by herself. But,
naturally enough, she was well provided with friends who lived in the
neighborhood of Shakespeare's tomb, and were delighted to welcome her;
and she left later to catch her train in the best of spirits. There
was a man selling violets in the street. It was a fine day. She would
remember to send Mr. Hilbery the first daffodil she saw. And, as she
ran back into the hall to tell Katharine, she felt, she had always
felt, that Shakespeare's command to leave his bones undisturbed
applied only to odious curiosity-mongers--not to dear Sir John and
herself. Leaving her daughter to cogitate the theory of Anne
Hathaway's sonnets, and the buried manuscripts here referred to, with
the implied menace to the safety of the heart of civilization itself,
she briskly shut the door of her taxi-cab, and was whirled off upon
the first stage of her pilgrimage.

The house was oddly different without her. Katharine found the maids
already in possession of her room, which they meant to clean
thoroughly during her absence. To Katharine it seemed as if they had
brushed away sixty years or so with the first flick of their damp
dusters. It seemed to her that the work she had tried to do in that
room was being swept into a very insignificant heap of dust. The china
shepherdesses were already shining from a bath of hot water. The
writing-table might have belonged to a professional man of methodical
habits.

Gathering together a few papers upon which she was at work, Katharine
proceeded to her own room with the intention of looking through them,
perhaps, in the course of the morning. But she was met on the stairs
by Cassandra, who followed her up, but with such intervals between
each step that Katharine began to feel her purpose dwindling before
they had reached the door. Cassandra leant over the banisters, and
looked down upon the Persian rug that lay on the floor of the hall.

"Doesn't everything look odd this morning?" she inquired. "Are you
really going to spend the morning with those dull old letters, because
if so--"

The dull old letters, which would have turned the heads of the most
sober of collectors, were laid upon a table, and, after a moment's
pause, Cassandra, looking grave all of a sudden, asked Katharine where
she should find the "History of England" by Lord Macaulay. It was
downstairs in Mr. Hilbery's study. The cousins descended together in
search of it. They diverged into the drawing-room for the good reason
that the door was open. The portrait of Richard Alardyce attracted
their attention.

"I wonder what he was like?" It was a question that Katharine had
often asked herself lately.

"Oh, a fraud like the rest of them--at least Henry says so," Cassandra
replied. "Though I don't believe everything Henry says," she added a
little defensively.

Down they went into Mr. Hilbery's study, where they began to look
among his books. So desultory was this examination that some fifteen
minutes failed to discover the work they were in search of.

"Must you read Macaulay's History, Cassandra?" Katharine asked, with a
stretch of her arms.

"I must," Cassandra replied briefly.

"Well, I'm going to leave you to look for it by yourself."

"Oh, no, Katharine. Please stay and help me. You see--you see--I told
William I'd read a little every day. And I want to tell him that I've
begun when he comes."

"When does William come?" Katharine asked, turning to the shelves
again.

"To tea, if that suits you?"

"If it suits me to be out, I suppose you mean."

"Oh, you're horrid. . . . Why shouldn't you--?"

"Yes ?"

"Why shouldn't you be happy too?"

"I am quite happy," Katharine replied.

"I mean as I am. Katharine," she said impulsively, "do let's be
married on the same day."

"To the same man?"

"Oh, no, no. But why shouldn't you marry--some one else?"

"Here's your Macaulay," said Katharine, turning round with the book in
her hand. "I should say you'd better begin to read at once if you mean
to be educated by tea-time."

"Damn Lord Macaulay!" cried Cassandra, slapping the book upon the
table. "Would you rather not talk?"

"We've talked enough already," Katharine replied evasively.

"I know I shan't be able to settle to Macaulay," said Cassandra,
looking ruefully at the dull red cover of the prescribed volume,
which, however, possessed a talismanic property, since William admired
it. He had advised a little serious reading for the morning hours.

"Have YOU read Macaulay?" she asked.

"No. William never tried to educate me." As she spoke she saw the
light fade from Cassandra's face, as if she had implied some other,
more mysterious, relationship. She was stung with compunction. She
marveled at her own rashness in having influenced the life of another,
as she had influenced Cassandra's life.

"We weren't serious," she said quickly.

"But I'm fearfully serious," said Cassandra, with a little shudder,
and her look showed that she spoke the truth. She turned and glanced
at Katharine as she had never glanced at her before. There was fear in
her glance, which darted on her and then dropped guiltily. Oh,
Katharine had everything--beauty, mind, character. She could never
compete with Katharine; she could never be safe so long as Katharine
brooded over her, dominating her, disposing of her. She called her
cold, unseeing, unscrupulous, but the only sign she gave outwardly was
a curious one--she reached out her hand and grasped the volume of
history. At that moment the bell of the telephone rang and Katharine
went to answer it. Cassandra, released from observation, dropped her
book and clenched her hands. She suffered more fiery torture in those
few minutes than she had suffered in the whole of her life; she learnt
more of her capacities for feeling. But when Katharine reappeared she
was calm, and had gained a look of dignity that was new to her.

"Was that him?" she asked.

"It was Ralph Denham," Katharine replied.

"I meant Ralph Denham."

"Why did you mean Ralph Denham? What has William told you about Ralph
Denham?" The accusation that Katharine was calm, callous, and
indifferent was not possible in face of her present air of animation.
She gave Cassandra no time to frame an answer. "Now, when are you and
William going to be married?" she asked.

Cassandra made no reply for some moments. It was, indeed, a very
difficult question to answer. In conversation the night before,
William had indicated to Cassandra that, in his belief, Katharine was
becoming engaged to Ralph Denham in the dining-room. Cassandra, in the
rosy light of her own circumstances, had been disposed to think that
the matter must be settled already. But a letter which she had
received that morning from William, while ardent in its expression of
affection, had conveyed to her obliquely that he would prefer the
announcement of their engagement to coincide with that of Katharine's.
This document Cassandra now produced, and read aloud, with
considerable excisions and much hesitation.

". . . a thousand pities--ahem--I fear we shall cause a great deal of
natural annoyance. If, on the other hand, what I have reason to think
will happen, should happen--within reasonable time, and the present
position is not in any way offensive to you, delay would, in my
opinion, serve all our interests better than a premature explanation,
which is bound to cause more surprise than is desirable--"

"Very like William," Katharine exclaimed, having gathered the drift of
these remarks with a speed that, by itself, disconcerted Cassandra.

"I quite understand his feelings," Cassandra replied. "I quite agree
with them. I think it would be much better, if you intend to marry Mr.
Denham, that we should wait as William says."

"But, then, if I don't marry him for months--or, perhaps, not at all?"

Cassandra was silent. The prospect appalled her. Katharine had been
telephoning to Ralph Denham; she looked queer, too; she must be, or
about to become, engaged to him. But if Cassandra could have overheard
the conversation upon the telephone, she would not have felt so
certain that it tended in that direction. It was to this effect:

"I'm Ralph Denham speaking. I'm in my right senses now."

"How long did you wait outside the house?"

"I went home and wrote you a letter. I tore it up."

"I shall tear up everything too."

"I shall come."

"Yes. Come to-day."

"I must explain to you--"

"Yes. We must explain--"

A long pause followed. Ralph began a sentence, which he canceled with
the word, "Nothing." Suddenly, together, at the same moment, they said
good-bye. And yet, if the telephone had been miraculously connected
with some higher atmosphere pungent with the scent of thyme and the
savor of salt, Katharine could hardly have breathed in a keener sense
of exhilaration. She ran downstairs on the crest of it. She was amazed
to find herself already committed by William and Cassandra to marry
the owner of the halting voice she had just heard on the telephone.
The tendency of her spirit seemed to be in an altogether different
direction; and of a different nature. She had only to look at
Cassandra to see what the love that results in an engagement and
marriage means. She considered for a moment, and then said: "If you
don't want to tell people yourselves, I'll do it for you. I know
William has feelings about these matters that make it very difficult
for him to do anything."

"Because he's fearfully sensitive about other people's feelings," said
Cassandra. "The idea that he could upset Aunt Maggie or Uncle Trevor
would make him ill for weeks."

This interpretation of what she was used to call William's
conventionality was new to Katharine. And yet she felt it now to be
the true one.

"Yes, you're right," she said.

"And then he worships beauty. He wants life to be beautiful in every
part of it. Have you ever noticed how exquisitely he finishes
everything? Look at the address on that envelope. Every letter is
perfect."

Whether this applied also to the sentiments expressed in the letter,
Katharine was not so sure; but when William's solicitude was spent
upon Cassandra it not only failed to irritate her, as it had done when
she was the object of it, but appeared, as Cassandra said, the fruit
of his love of beauty.

"Yes," she said, "he loves beauty."

"I hope we shall have a great many children," said Cassandra. "He
loves children."

This remark made Katharine realize the depths of their intimacy better
than any other words could have done; she was jealous for one moment;
but the next she was humiliated. She had known William for years, and
she had never once guessed that he loved children. She looked at the
queer glow of exaltation in Cassandra's eyes, through which she was
beholding the true spirit of a human being, and wished that she would
go on talking about William for ever. Cassandra was not unwilling to
gratify her. She talked on. The morning slipped away. Katharine
scarcely changed her position on the edge of her father's
writing-table, and Cassandra never opened the "History of England."

And yet it must be confessed that there were vast lapses in the
attention which Katharine bestowed upon her cousin. The atmosphere was
wonderfully congenial for thoughts of her own. She lost herself
sometimes in such deep reverie that Cassandra, pausing, could look at
her for moments unperceived. What could Katharine be thinking about,
unless it were Ralph Denham? She was satisfied, by certain random
replies, that Katharine had wandered a little from the subject of
William's perfections. But Katharine made no sign. She always ended
these pauses by saying something so natural that Cassandra was deluded
into giving fresh examples of her absorbing theme. Then they lunched,
and the only sign that Katharine gave of abstraction was to forget to
help the pudding. She looked so like her mother, as she sat there
oblivious of the tapioca, that Cassandra was startled into exclaiming:

"How like Aunt Maggie you look!"

"Nonsense," said Katharine, with more irritation than the remark
seemed to call for.

In truth, now that her mother was away, Katharine did feel less
sensible than usual, but as she argued it to herself, there was much
less need for sense. Secretly, she was a little shaken by the evidence
which the morning had supplied of her immense capacity for--what could
one call it?--rambling over an infinite variety of thoughts that were
too foolish to be named. She was, for example, walking down a road in
Northumberland in the August sunset; at the inn she left her
companion, who was Ralph Denham, and was transported, not so much by
her own feet as by some invisible means, to the top of a high hill.
Here the scents, the sounds among the dry heather-roots, the
grass-blades pressed upon the palm of her hand, were all so
perceptible that she could experience each one separately. After this
her mind made excursions into the dark of the air, or settled upon the
surface of the sea, which could be discovered over there, or with
equal unreason it returned to its couch of bracken beneath the stars
of midnight, and visited the snow valleys of the moon. These fancies
would have been in no way strange, since the walls of every mind are
decorated with some such tracery, but she found herself suddenly
pursuing such thoughts with an extreme ardor, which became a desire to
change her actual condition for something matching the conditions of
her dream. Then she started; then she awoke to the fact that Cassandra
was looking at her in amazement.

Cassandra would have liked to feel certain that, when Katharine made
no reply at all or one wide of the mark, she was making up her mind to
get married at once, but it was difficult, if this were so, to account
for some remarks that Katharine let fall about the future. She
recurred several times to the summer, as if she meant to spend that
season in solitary wandering. She seemed to have a plan in her mind
which required Bradshaws and the names of inns.

Cassandra was driven finally, by her own unrest, to