Howards End quotes

Margaret was silent. If her aunt could not see why she must go down, she was not going to tell her. She was not going to say, “I love my dear sister; I must be near her at this crisis of her life.”

The affections are more reticent than the passions, and their expression more subtle.

If she herself should ever fall in love with a man, she, like Helen, would proclaim it from the housetops, but as she loved only a sister she used the voiceless language of sympathy.

“Can you break an engagement off slowly?” Her eyes lit up. “

What’s an engagement made of, do you suppose? I think it’s made of some hard stuff that may snap, but can’t break.

It is different to the other ties of life. They stretch or bend. They admit of degree. They’re different.”

Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini.

They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo. Italians realise this, as is natural;

But Helen was a more serious patient. New ideas had burst upon her like a thunderclap, and by them and by their reverberations she had been stunned.

The truth was that she had fallen in love, not with an individual, but with a family.

Before Paul arrived she had, as it were, been tuned up into his key. The energy of the Wilcoxes had fascinated her, had created new images of beauty in her responsive mind.

Temperance, tolerance, and sexual equality were intelligible cries to them; whereas they did not follow our Forward Policy in Tibet with the keen attention that it merits, and would at times dismiss the whole British Empire with a puzzled, if reverent, sigh.

Not out of them are the shows of history erected: the world would be a grey, bloodless place were it composed entirely of Miss Schlegels. But the world being what it is, perhaps they shine out in it like stars.

A word on their origin. They were not “English to the backbone,” as their aunt had piously asserted. But, on the other hand, they were not “Germans of the dreadful sort.”

Money, supremely useful; intellect, rather useful; imagination, of no use at all. No”—for the other had protested—“your Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than is our Imperialism over here.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.

That is not imagination. No, it kills it. When their poets over here try to celebrate bigness they are dead at once, and naturally. Your poets too are dying, your philosophers, your musicians, to whom Europe has listened for two hundred years. Gone.

A hateful little girl, but at thirteen she had grasped a dilemma that most people travel through life without perceiving. Her brain darted up and down; it grew pliant and strong.

Her conclusion was, that any human being lies nearer to the unseen than any organisation, and from this she never varied.

Helen advanced along the same lines, though with a more irresponsible tread. In character she resembled her sister, but she was pretty, and so apt to have a more amusing time.

He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion.

But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.

Helen pushed her way out during the applause. She desired to be alone. The music had summed up to her all that had happened or could happen in her career.

Most ladies would have laughed, but Margaret really minded, for it gave her a glimpse into squalor.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

As soon as Brahms had grunted himself out, she gave him her card and said, “That is where we live;

And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard’s life.

For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are.

Leonard listened to it with reverence.

He felt that he was being done good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queen’s Hall Concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head out of the grey waters and see the universe.

He believed in sudden conversion, a belief which may be right, but which is peculiarly attractive to a half-baked mind.

It is the basis of much popular religion; in the domain of business it dominates the Stock Exchange, and becomes that “bit of luck” by which all successes and failures are explained.

The face—the face does not signify. It was the face of the photograph, but older, and the teeth were not so numerous as the photographer had suggested, and certainly not so white.

Yes, Jacky was past her prime, whatever that prime may have been.

She was descending quicker than most women into the colourless years, and the look in her eyes confessed it.

They had all passed up that narrow, rich staircase at Wickham Place to some ample room, whither he could never follow them, not if he read for ten hours a day. Oh, it was no good, this continual aspiration.

Some are born cultured; the rest had better go in for whatever comes easy.

To see life steadily and to see it whole was not for the likes of him.

Her thought drew being from the obscure borderland. She could not explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

It is necessary to prepare for an examination, or a dinner-party, or a possible fall in the price of stock: those who attempt human relations must adopt another method, or fail.

“Because I’d sooner risk it,” was her lame conclusion.

“

I hope to risk things all my life.

”

“Oh, shame! What a shocking speech!”

“Money pads the edges of things,” said Miss Schlegel. “God help those who have none.”

“But this is something quite new!” said Mrs. Munt, who collected new ideas as a squirrel collects nuts, and was especially attracted by those that are portable.

“But this is something quite new!” said

Mrs. Munt, who collected new ideas as a squirrel collects nuts, and was especially attracted by those that are portable.

“New for me; sensible people have acknowledged it for years. You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence.

“New for me; sensible people have acknowledged it for years.

You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands.

It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It’s only when we see someone near us tottering that we realise all that an independent income means.

“Then you ought to!” said Margaret. “

Discussion keeps a house alive. It cannot stand by bricks and mortar alone.

”

“No, we don’t,” said Margaret, with a sudden revulsion. “

We lead the lives of gibbering monkeys.

Mrs. Wilcox—really—We have something quiet and stable at the bottom. We really have. All my friends have. Don’t pretend you enjoyed lunch, for you loathed it, but forgive me by coming again, alone, or by asking me to you.”

But the visible signs of their belief were Regent Street or Drury Lane, a little mud displaced, a little money spent, a little food cooked, eaten, and forgotten. Inadequate. But in public who shall express the unseen adequately?

It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision.

“No, I do like Christmas on the whole,” she announced. “In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But oh, it is clumsier every year.”

“Now, Dolly, I can attend to you. Miss Schlegel? What does she want?”

When people wrote a letter Charles always asked what they wanted. Want was to him the only cause of action.

And the question in this case was correct, for his wife replied, “She wants Howards End.”

Was there to be no compensation for the garage and other improvements that they had made under the assumption that all would be theirs some day? Treacherous! treacherous and absurd!

When we think the dead both treacherous and absurd, we have gone far towards reconciling ourselves to their departure.

That note, scribbled in pencil, sent through the matron, was unbusinesslike as well as cruel, and decreased at once the value of the woman who had written it.

It fostered such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilisation. They form character, too; Margaret could not doubt it; they keep the soul from becoming sloppy.

How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a world?

“Don’t brood too much,” she wrote to Helen, “on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It’s true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.”

“Don’t brood too much,” she wrote to Helen, “on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It’s true, but to brood on it is medieval.

Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.

”

It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks.

Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe.

It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle.

It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

Margaret hoped that for the future she would be less cautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the past.

now it was January and the whole affair lay forgotten. Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realised the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians.

Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere.

With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes.

On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed.

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks.

Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

An air of evasion characterised Mr. Bast. He explained again, but was obviously lying, and Helen didn’t see why he should get off.

She had the cruelty of youth.

Neglecting her sister’s pressure, she said, “I still don’t understand. When did you say you paid this call?”

“Not if you gave them so much. A big windfall would not pauperise a man. It is these little driblets, distributed among too many, that do the harm.

Money’s educational. It’s far more educational than the things it buys.

” There was a protest. “In a sense,” added Margaret, but the protest continued. “Well, isn’t the most civilized thing going, the man who has learnt to wear his income properly?”

“Give them a chance. Give them money. Don’t dole them out poetry-books and railway-tickets like babies. Give them the wherewithal to buy these things. When your Socialism comes it may be different, and we may think in terms of commodities instead of cash.

Till it comes give people cash, for it is the warp of civilisation, whatever the woof may be.

The imagination ought to play upon money and realise it vividly, for it’s the—the second most important thing in the world.

… so slurred over and hushed up, there is so little clear thinking—oh, political economy, of course, but so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means.

Money: give Mr. Bast money, and don’t bother about his ideals. He’ll pick up those for himself.

”

“

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them.

It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.”

Love, say the ascetics, reveals our shameful kinship with the beasts. Be it so: one can bear that; jealousy is the real shame.

It is jealousy, not love, that connects us with the farmyard intolerably, and calls up visions of two angry cocks and a complacent hen.

Margaret crushed complacency down because she was civilised. Mr. Wilcox, uncivilised, continued to feel anger long after he had rebuilt his defences, and was again presenting a bastion to the world.

The Age of Property holds bitter moments even for a proprietor.

When a move is imminent, furniture becomes ridiculous, and Margaret now lay awake at nights wondering where, where on earth they and all their belongings would be deposited in September next.

It was absurd, if you came to think of it; Helen and Tibby came to think of it; Margaret was too busy with the house-agents.

The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde.

We are reverting to the civilisation of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.

Helen and Tibby came to think of it; Margaret was too busy with the house-agents. The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde.

We are reverting to the civilisation of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.

The Schlegels were certainly the poorer for the loss of Wickham Place. It had helped to balance their lives, and almost to counsel them. Nor is their ground-landlord spiritually the richer.

Margaret laughed. But she was—quite as unpractical. She could not concentrate on details. Parliament, the Thames, the irresponsive chauffeur, would flash into the field of house-hunting, and all demand some comment or response.

It is impossible to see modern life steadily and see it whole, and she had chosen to see it whole.

Mr. Wilcox saw steadily. He never bothered over the mysterious or the private. The Thames might run inland from the sea, the chauffeur might conceal all passion and philosophy beneath his unhealthy skin. They knew their own business, and he knew his.

Had Mrs. Wilcox’s drawing-room at Howards End looked thus? Just as this thought entered Margaret’s brain, Mr. Wilcox did ask her to be his wife, and the knowledge that she had been right so overcame her that she nearly fainted.

But the proposal was not to rank among the world’s great love scenes.

“Miss Schlegel”—his voice was firm—“I have had you up on false pretences. I want to speak about a much more serious matter than a house.”

She would come to no decision yet. “Oh, sir, this is so sudden”—that prudish phrase exactly expressed her when her time came.

Premonitions are not preparation.

She must examine more closely her own nature and his; she must talk it over judicially with Helen. It had been a strange love-scene—the central radiance unacknowledged from first to last.

Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world’s waters, when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in.

Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores.

So does my grocer stigmatise me when I complain of the quality of his sultanas, and he answers in one breath that they are the best sultanas, and how can I expect the best sultanas at that price?

It is a flaw inherent in the business mind, and Margaret may do well to be tender to it, considering all that the business mind has done for England.

“Yes, in summer especially, the mews is a serious nuisance. The smoking-room, too, is an abominable little den. The house opposite has been taken by operatic people. Ducie Street’s going down, it’s my private opinion.”

If he was a fortress she was a mountain peak, whom all might tread, but whom the snows made nightly virginal. Disdaining the heroic outfit, excitable in her methods, garrulous, episodical, shrill, she misled her lover much as she had misled her aunt.

He mistook her fertility for weakness.

He supposed her “as clever as they make them,” but no more, not realising that she was penetrating to the depths of his soul, and approving of what she found there.

Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion.

Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man.

With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings.

It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

“

You grab the dollars. God does the rest.

”

The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. “Yes, I see, dear; it’s about halfway between,” Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years.

No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything.

It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility.

Perhaps Hertfordshire is scarcely intended for motorists. Did not a gentleman once motor so quickly through Westmoreland that he missed it? and if Westmoreland can be missed, it will fare ill with a county whose delicate structure particularly needs the attentive eye.

Hertfordshire is England at its quietest, with little emphasis of river and hill; it is England meditative.

If Drayton were with us again to write a new edition of his incomparable poem, he would sing the nymphs of Hertfordshire as indeterminate of feature, with hair obfuscated by the London smoke.

But it was the heart of the house beating, faintly at first, then loudly, martially. It dominated the rain.

It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.

Margaret flung open the door to the stairs. A noise as of drums seemed to deafen her. A woman, an old woman, was descending, with figure erect, with face impassive, with lips that parted and said dryly:

Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived forever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death—not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money.

Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life.

Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say, ‘I am I.’ ”

While to Helen the paradox became clearer and clearer. “

Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.

” Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better.

Pity was at the bottom of her actions all through this crisis.

Pity, if one may generalise, is at the bottom of woman.

When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil.

Gravely she considered this claim. Had he? Had he suffered tortures of remorse, or had it been, “There! that’s over. Now for respectable life again”? The latter, if she read him rightly.

A man who has been through hell does not boast of his virility.

He is humble and hides it, if, indeed, it still exists. Only in legend does the sinner come forth penitent, but terrible, to conquer pure woman by his resistless power. Henry was anxious to be terrible, but had not got it in him.

He is humble and hides it, if, indeed, it still exists. Only in legend does the sinner come forth penitent, but terrible, to conquer pure woman by his resistless power. Henry was anxious to be terrible, but had not got it in him.

He was a good average Englishman, who had slipped.

The really culpable point—his faithlessness to Mrs. Wilcox—never seemed to strike him. She longed to mention Mrs. Wilcox.

Wilcox to the minds of some men—a concentrated light upon a tiny spot, a little Ten Minutes moving self-contained through its appointed years. No Pagan he, who lives for the Now, and may be wiser than all philosophers.

He lived for the five minutes that have past, and the five to come; he had the business mind.

How did he stand now, as his motor slipped out of Oniton and breasted the great round hills? Margaret had heard a certain rumour, but was all right. She had forgiven him, God bless her, and he felt the manlier for it.

But the Wilcoxes have no part in the place, nor in any place. It is not their names that recur in the parish register. It is not their ghosts that sigh among the alders at evening.

They have swept into the valley and swept out of it, leaving a little dust and a little money behind.

What I give will bring in a hundred and fifty between two. It isn’t enough.” He could not recover. He was not angry or even shocked, and he saw that Helen would still have plenty to live on.

But it amazed him to think what haycocks people can make of their lives.

His delicate intonations would not work, and he could only blurt out that the five thousand pounds would mean a great deal of bother for him personally.

Shortly before the move, our hero and heroine were married. They have weathered the storm, and may reasonably expect peace.

To have no illusions and yet to love⁠—what stronger surety can a woman find?

She had seen her husband’s past as well as his heart. She knew her own heart with a thoroughness that commonplace people believe impossible. The heart of Mrs. Wilcox was alone hidden, and perhaps it is superstitious to speculate on the feelings of the dead.

Then they would argue so jollily, and once or twice she had him in quite a tight corner, but as soon as he grew really serious, she gave in.

Man is for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior, but he does not dislike it if she makes a show of fight.

She cannot win in a real battle, having no muscles, only nerves. Nerves make her jump out of a moving motorcar, or refuse to be married fashionably. The warrior may well allow her to triumph on such occasions;

Margaret was silent. Marriage had not saved her from the sense of flux. London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilisation which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before.

Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth.

Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!

“But she’s only a farm woman,” said Dolly, and her explanation proved correct.

Henry only censured the lower classes when it suited him.

He bore with Miss Avery as with Crane—because he could get good value out of them. “I have patience with a man who knows his job,” he would say, really having patience with the job, and not the man.

Up the avenue Margaret strolled slowly, stopping to watch the sky that gleamed through the upper branches of the chestnuts, or to finger the little horseshoes on the lower branches.

Why has not England a great mythology?

Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our countryside have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here.

My husband says to me sometimes, ‘Where’s auntie?’ I say, ‘Need you ask? She’s at Howards End.’ Yes, Mrs. Wilcox. Mrs. Wilcox, could I prevail upon you to accept a piece of cake? Not if I cut it for you?”

Margaret refused the cake, but unfortunately this gave her gentility in the eyes of Miss Avery’s niece.

“I cannot let you go on alone. Now don’t. You really mustn’t. I will direct you myself if it comes to that. I must get my hat. Now”—roguishly—“Mrs. Wilcox, don’t you move while I’m gone.”

The sun was shining without. The thrush sang his two syllables on the budding guelder-rose. Some children were playing uproariously in heaps of golden straw. It was the presence of sadness at all that surprised Margaret, and ended by giving her a feeling of completeness.

In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect⁠—connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.

But her thoughts were interrupted by the return of Miss Avery’s niece, and were so tranquillising that she suffered the interruption gladly.

“

You are living here, and have been for the last ten minutes, if you ask me.

”

On a perfect day, when the sky seemed blue porcelain, and the waves of the discreet little bay beat gentlest of tattoos upon the sand, Margaret hurried up through the rhododendrons, confronted again by the senselessness of Death.

One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another; the groping inquiry must begin anew.

Preachers or scientists may generalise, but we know that no generality is possible about those whom we love; not one heaven awaits them, not even one oblivion.

One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another; the groping inquiry must begin anew. Preachers or scientists may generalise, but we know that no generality is possible about those whom we love; not one heaven awaits them, not even one oblivion.

Aunt Juley, incapable of tragedy, slipped out of life with odd little laughs and apologies for having stopped in it so long.

She was very weak; she could not rise to the occasion, or realise the great mystery which all agree must await her; it only seemed to her that she was quite done up—more done up than ever before;

the explosion of grief up on the Downs—all connected with Paul, an insignificant boy whose lips had kissed hers for a fraction of time. Margaret and Mrs. Wilcox had feared that they might kiss again. Foolishly—the real danger was reaction.

Reaction against the Wilcoxes had eaten into her life until she was scarcely sane.

At twenty-five she had an idée fixe. What hope was there for her as an old woman?

In one of her moods Helen had confessed that she still “enjoyed” it in a certain sense. Paul had faded, but the magic of his caress endured. And where there is enjoyment of the past there may also be reaction—propagation at both ends.

Well, it is odd and sad that our minds should be such seedbeds, and we without power to choose the seed.

But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology.

But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology.

He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine.

He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul. Margaret and Helen have been more patient, and it is suggested that Margaret has succeeded—so far as success is yet possible. She does understand herself, she has some rudimentary control over her own growth.

He cannot be bored about psychology. He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine.

He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul.

Margaret and Helen have been more patient, and it is suggested that Margaret has succeeded—so far as success is yet possible. She does understand herself, she has some rudimentary control over her own growth. Whether Helen has succeeded one cannot say.

“Oh—that!” said Margaret. “Quite impossible.” But the suggestion had been uttered, and in a few minutes she took it up herself. Nothing else explained. And London agreed with Tibby.

The mask fell off the city, and she saw it for what it really is⁠—a caricature of infinity.

The familiar barriers, the streets along which she moved, the houses between which she had made her little journeys for so many years, became negligible suddenly. Helen seemed one with grimy trees and the traffic and the slowly-flowing slabs of mud.

Henry began to grow serious. Ill-health was to him something perfectly definite. Generally well himself, he could not realise that we sink to it by slow gradations.

The sick had no rights; they were outside the pale; one could lie to them remorselessly.

When his first wife was seized, he had promised to take her down into Hertfordshire, but meanwhile arranged with a nursing-home instead. Helen, too, was ill.

And scruples are all very well. I am as scrupulous as any man alive, I hope; but when it is a case like this, when there is a question of madness—”

“It’s madness when I say it, but not when you say it.”

Henry shrugged his shoulders. “Margaret! Margaret!” he groaned. “No education can teach a woman logic. Now, my dear, my time is valuable. Do you want me to help you or not?”

“It all turns on affection now,” said Margaret. “Affection. Don’t you see?” Resuming her usual methods, she wrote the word on the house with her finger. “Surely you see. I like Helen very much, you not so much. Mr. Mansbridge doesn’t know her. That’s all.

And affection, when reciprocated, gives rights.

Put that down in your notebook, Mr. Mansbridge. It’s a useful formula.”

“Nice little boy,” whispered Helen. “I say, what’s your name? Mine’s Helen.”

That was Helen all over. The Wilcoxes, too, would ask a child its name, but they never told their names in return.

“Tom, this one here is Margaret. And at home we’ve another called Tibby.”

“

It kills what is dreadful and makes what is beautiful live.

”

“Then because my life is great and theirs are little,” said Helen, taking fire. “I know of things they can’t know of, and so do you.

We know that there’s poetry. We know that there’s death. They can only take them on hearsay.

We know this is our house, because it feels ours. Oh, they may take the title-deeds and the door-keys, but for this one night we are at home.”

A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible.

These men are you. You can’t recognise them, because you cannot connect.

I’ve had enough of your unneeded kindness. I’ve spoilt you long enough. All your life you have been spoiled. Mrs. Wilcox spoiled you. No one has ever told what you are—muddled, criminally muddled. Men like you use repentance as a blind, so don’t repent.

These men are you. You can’t recognise them, because you cannot connect. I’ve had enough of your unneeded kindness. I’ve spoilt you long enough. All your life you have been spoiled. Mrs. Wilcox spoiled you.

No one has ever told what you are⁠—muddled, criminally muddled.

Men like you use repentance as a blind, so don’t repent. Only say to yourself, ‘What Helen has done, I’ve done.’ ”

a little cold culture may be raised on it, but no art. His sisters had seen the family danger, and had never forgotten to discount the gold islets that raised them from the sea.

Tibby gave all the praise to himself, and so despised the struggling and the submerged.

Hence the absurdity of the interview; the gulf between them was economic as well as spiritual. But several facts passed; Charles pressed for them with an impertinence that the undergraduate could not withstand. On what date had Helen gone abroad? To whom?

Not even to herself dare she blame Helen. She could not assess her trespass by any moral code; it was everything or nothing.

Morality can tell us that murder is worse than stealing, and group most sins in an order all must approve, but it cannot group Helen.

The surer its pronouncements on this point, the surer may we be that morality is not speaking. Christ was evasive when they questioned Him. It is those that cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone.

The surer its pronouncements on this point, the surer may we be that morality is not speaking. Christ was evasive when they questioned Him.

It is those that cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone.

This was Helen’s evening—won at what cost, and not to be marred by the sorrows of others. Of her own tragedy Margaret never uttered a word.

The peace of the country was entering into her. It has no commerce with memory, and little with hope. Least of all is it concerned with the hopes of the next five minutes.

It is the peace of the present, which passes understanding.

Its murmur came “now,” and “now” once more as they trod the gravel, and “now,” as the moonlight fell upon their father’s sword. They passed upstairs, kissed, and amidst the endless iterations fell asleep.

He would sit at the edge of his bed, holding his heart and moaning, “Oh what shall I do, whatever shall I do?” Nothing brought ease. He could put distance between him and the trespass, but it grew in his soul.

Remorse is not among the eternal verities.

The Greeks were right to dethrone her. Her action is too capricious, as though the Erinyes selected for punishment only certain men and certain sins. And of all means to regeneration Remorse is surely the most wasteful. It cuts away healthy tissues with the poisoned.

Leonard realised that they need never starve, because it would be too painful for his relatives.

Society is based on the family, and the clever wastrel can exploit this indefinitely.

Without a generous thought on either side, pounds and pounds passed. The donors disliked Leonard, and he grew to hate them intensely. When Laura censured his immoral marriage, he thought bitterly, “She minds that! What would she say if she knew the truth?”

It breeds as quickly as the yeoman, and as soundly; strong is the temptation to acclaim it as a super-yeoman, who carries his country’s virtue overseas. But the Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems.

He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism, and though his ambitions may be fulfilled, the earth that he inherits will be grey.

To Leonard, intent on his private sin, there came the conviction of innate goodness elsewhere. It was not the optimism which he had been taught at school.

It was not the optimism which he had been taught at school. Again and again must the drums tap, and the goblins stalk over the universe before joy can be purged of the superficial. It was rather paradoxical, and arose from his sorrow.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him⁠—that is the best account of it that has yet been given.

Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us, and strengthen the wings of love. They can beckon; it is not certain that they will, for they are not love’s servants.