Night and Day quotes

“I’m sure Mr. Denham would like to see our things, Katharine. I’m sure he’s not like that dreadful young man, Mr. Ponting, who told me that he considered it our duty to live exclusively in the present.

After all, what is the present? Half of it’s the past, and the better half, too, I should say

,” she added, turning to Mr. Fortescue.

“

I think my grandfather must have been at least twice as large as anyone is nowadays.

This,” she went on, as if she knew what she had to say by heart, “is the original manuscript of the ‘Ode to Winter.’ The early poems are far less corrected than the later. Would you like to look at it?”

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

We’re a respectable middle-class family, living at Highgate.

”

“I should.

I should like to be lots of other people.

”

“You’ll never know anything at first hand,” he began, almost savagely. “It’s all been done for you.

You’ll never know the pleasure of buying things after saving up for them, or reading books for the first time, or making discoveries.

”

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

I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation.

”

Her descent from one of these gods was no surprise to her, but matter for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, the privileges of her lot were taken for granted, and certain drawbacks made themselves very manifest.

Perhaps it is a little depressing to inherit not lands but an example of intellectual and spiritual virtue; perhaps the conclusiveness of a great ancestor is a little discouraging to those who run the risk of comparison with him.

It seems as if, having flowered so splendidly, nothing now remained possible but a steady growth of good, green stalk and leaf. For these reasons, and for others, Katharine had her moments of despondency.

Ordering meals, directing servants, paying bills, and so contriving that every clock ticked more or less accurately in time, and a number of vases were always full of fresh flowers was supposed to be a natural endowment of hers, and, indeed,

Mrs. Hilbery often observed that it was poetry the wrong side out.

From a very early age, too, she had to exert herself in another capacity; she had to counsel and help and generally sustain her mother. Mrs.

Hilbery often observed that it was poetry the wrong side out. From a very early age, too, she had to exert herself in another capacity; she had to counsel and help and generally sustain her mother.

Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to sustain herself if the world had been what the world is not.

She was beautifully adapted for life in another planet. But the natural genius she had for conducting affairs there was of no real use to her here.

she had to counsel and help and generally sustain her mother. Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to sustain herself if the world had been what the world is not.

She was beautifully adapted for life in another planet.

But the natural genius she had for conducting affairs there was of no real use to her here.

Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as yet, no title and very little recognition, although the labor of mill and factory is, perhaps, no more severe and the results of less benefit to the world.

She lived at home. She did it very well, too.

Anyone coming to the house in Cheyne Walk felt that here was an orderly place, shapely, controlled—a place where life had been trained to show to the best advantage, and, though composed of different elements, made to appear harmonious and with a character of its …

“

It means, chiefly, a power of being disagreeable to one’s own family, I think.

I have that, perhaps. I didn’t want to live at home, and I told my father. He didn’t like it. … But then I have a sister, and you haven’t, have you?”

“No.

Nothing interesting ever happens to me,

” she said.

“I don’t know. Because you’re such a queer mixture, I think.

You’re half poet and half old maid.

”

“

There’s more of the old maid in you than the poet,

” she observed briefly.

“

Of all the unreasonable, inconsiderate creatures I’ve ever known, she’s the worst!

” he exclaimed to himself, striding back along the Embankment. “Heaven forbid that I should ever make a fool of myself with her again. Why, I’d sooner marry the daughter of my landlady than Katharine Hilbery!

“Of all the unreasonable, inconsiderate creatures I’ve ever known, she’s the worst!” he exclaimed to himself, striding back along the Embankment. “Heaven forbid that I should ever make a fool of myself with her again.

Why, I’d sooner marry the daughter of my landlady than Katharine Hilbery!

She’d leave me not a moment’s peace—and she’d never understand me—never, never, never!”

From sheer laziness he returned no thanks, but he thought of Rodney from time to time with interest, disconnecting him from Katharine, and meant to go round one evening and smoke a pipe with him.

It pleased Rodney thus to give away whatever his friends genuinely admired. His library was constantly being diminished.

Having no religious belief, she was the more conscientious about her life, examining her position from time to time very seriously, and nothing annoyed her more than to find one of these bad habits nibbling away unheeded at the precious substance.

What was the good, after all, of being a woman if one didn’t keep fresh, and cram one’s life with all sorts of views and experiments?

Thus she always gave herself a little shake, as she turned the corner, and, as often as not, reached her own door whistling a snatch of a Somersetshire ballad.

“

But one can’t lunch off trees, Sally,

” said Mary.

But the breeze was blowing in their faces; it lifted her hat for a second, and she drew out a pin and stuck it in again—a little action which seemed, for some reason, to make her rather more fallible.

Ah, if only her hat would blow off, and leave her altogether disheveled, accepting it from his hands!

“This is like Venice,” she observed, raising her hand. “The motorcars, I mean, shooting about so quickly, with their lights.”

“

I’ve planned out my life in sections ever since I was a child, to make it last longer.

You see, I’m always afraid that I’m missing something—”

“

Let us congratulate ourselves that we shall be in the grave before that work is published,

” said Mr. Hilbery.

“

I wish mother wasn’t famous.

I was out at tea, and they would talk to me about poetry.”

“

Yes, the office atmosphere is very bad for the soul,

” said Mr. Hilbery.

“It’s curious,” Mr. Hilbery continued, agreeing with his daughter, “how the sight of one’s fellow-enthusiasts always chokes one off.

They show up the faults of one’s cause so much more plainly than one’s antagonists.

One can be enthusiastic in one’s study, but directly one comes into touch with the people who agree with one, all the glamor goes.

If my father had been able to go round the world, or if she’d had a rest cure, everything would have come right. But what could I do? And then they had bad friends, both of them, who made mischief.

Ah, Katharine, when you marry, be quite, quite sure that you love your husband!

”

“It’s very dull that you can only marry one husband, certainly,” Mrs. Hilbery reflected. “

I always wish that you could marry everybody who wants to marry you.

Perhaps they’ll come to that in time, but meanwhile I confess that dear William—” But here Mr. Hilbery came in, and the more solid part of the evening began.

William Rodney, at this very moment, was seated in a minute speck of light somewhere to the east of her, and his mind was occupied, not with his book, but with her.

She wished that no one in the whole world would think of her.

However, there was no way of escaping from one’s fellow-beings, she concluded, and shut the window with a sigh, and returned once more to her letters.

He merely seemed to realize, rather languidly, that Cyril had behaved in a way which was foolish, because other people did not behave in that way.

He seemed to be looking through a telescope at little figures hundreds of miles in the distance.

Her selfish anxiety not to have to tell Mrs. Hilbery what had happened made her follow her father into the hall after breakfast the next morning in order to question him.

Katharine, moreover, was unable to decide what she thought of Cyril’s misbehavior. As usual, she saw something which her father and mother did not see, and the effect of that something was to suspend Cyril’s behavior in her mind without any qualification at all.

They would think whether it was good or bad; to her it was merely a thing that had happened.

When Katharine reached the study, Mrs. Hilbery had already dipped her pen in the ink.

Did your grandfather ever visit the Hebrides, Katharine?” She looked in a strangely beseeching way at her daughter. “My mind got running on the Hebrides, and I couldn’t help writing a little description of them. Perhaps it would do at the beginning of a chapter.

Chapters often begin quite differently from the way they go on, you know.

” Katharine read what her mother had written. She might have been a schoolmaster criticizing a child’s essay. Her face gave Mrs. Hilbery, who watched it anxiously, no ground for hope.

But they did more than we do, I sometimes think.

They were, and that’s better than doing.

They seem to me like ships, like majestic ships, holding on their way, not shoving or pushing, not fretted by little things, as we are, but taking their way, like ships with white sails.”

She was a mere child—eighteen—and half dead with fright, too. But that old tyrant never repented. She used to say that she had given them three perfect months, and no one had a right to more; and I sometimes think, Katharine, that’s true, you know.

It’s more than most of us have, only we have to pretend, which was a thing neither of them could ever do.

I fancy,” Mrs. Hilbery mused, “that there was a kind of sincerity in those days between men and women which, with all your outspokenness, you haven’t got.”

“

It’s the vitality of them!

” she concluded, striking her fist against the table. “That’s what we haven’t got! We’re virtuous, we’re earnest, we go to meetings, we pay the poor their wages, but we don’t live as they lived.

“

But let us hope it will be a girl,

” said Mrs. Hilbery.

And, after all, Cyril has acted on principle. One may disagree with his principle, but, at least, one can respect it—like the French Revolution, or Cromwell cutting the King’s head off.

Some of the most terrible things in history have been done on principle,

” she concluded.

When he had gone, and he left her without breaking his silence more than was needed to wish her good night, she sat on for a time, reviewing what he had said.

If love is a devastating fire which melts the whole being into one mountain torrent, Mary was no more in love with Denham than she was in love with her poker or her tongs.

But probably these extreme passions are very rare, and the state of mind thus depicted belongs to the very last stages of love, when the power to resist has been eaten away, week by week or day by day.

“Yes,” said Katharine, with a laugh, for she liked the rashness which irritated the rest of the family.

“My mother’s bulls always turn into cows at the critical moment.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Milvain, “I’m glad you have someone to protect you from bulls now.”

Katharine had promised nothing, taken nothing; to her his dreams had meant nothing. This, indeed, was the lowest pitch of his despair.

If the best of one’s feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?

The old romance which had warmed his days for him, the thoughts of Katharine which had painted every hour, were now made to appear foolish and enfeebled.

Could any doubt as to the perfect sense and propriety of these statements be disturbing her? No one could have guessed, from the look of her, that she was disturbed at all.

A pleasanter and saner woman than Mary Datchet was never seen within a committee-room.

She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine; less poetically speaking, she showed both gentleness and strength, an indefinable promise of soft maternity blending with her evident fitness for honest labor.

But they must see the truth some day. … If only one could make them see it. …”

Mary knew herself to be very much wiser than Mrs. Seal, and when Mrs. Seal said anything, even if it was what Mary herself was feeling, she automatically thought of all that there was to be said against it.

On this occasion her arrogant feeling that she could direct everybody dwindled away.

“You mustn’t wear yourself out, Sally, if you want to see the great day,” she said, rising and trying to take a plate of biscuits from Mrs. Seal’s hands.

“My dear child, what else is my old body good for?”

she exclaimed, clinging more tightly than before to her plate of biscuits. “Shouldn’t I be proud to give everything I have to the cause?—for I’m not an intelligence like you.

A moment later, the doorbell rang again, and Katharine reappeared, having left her purse on a chair. She soon found it, and said, pausing for a moment at the door, and speaking differently as they were alone:

“I think being engaged is very bad for the character.”

She shook her purse in her hand until the coins jingled, as if she alluded merely to this example of her forgetfulness. But the remark puzzled Mary; it seemed to refer to something else;

A tall youth who accompanied her shook him by the hand, took his bag, and led the way without uttering one articulate word.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.

Such an edge was there in Mary’s voice when she greeted him. About her seemed to hang the mist of the winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves.

“Marriage,” said Mrs. Hilbery, coming into the room, and nodding her head once or twice, “

I always say marriage is a school. And you don’t get the prizes unless you go to school.

Charlotte has won all the prizes,” she added, giving her sister-in-law a little pat, which made Lady Otway more uncomfortable still. She half laughed, muttered something, and ended on a sigh.

she exclaimed, and her eye looked with extreme pleasure at the soft sky, at the trees, at the green fields visible behind those trees, and at the leafless branches which surrounded the body of the small blue tit.

Her sympathy with nature was exquisite.

“Most women know by instinct whether they can give it or not,” Lady Otway slipped in quickly, in rather a low voice, as if she wanted to get this said while her sister-in-law’s attention was diverted. “And if not—well then, my advice would be—don’t marry.”

… as the two elder ladies had finished their survey of the family prospects, and Lady Otway was nervously anticipating some general statement as to life and death from her sister-in-law, Cassandra burst into the room with the news that the carriage was at the door.

“Why didn’t Andrews tell me himself?” said Lady Otway, peevishly, blaming her servants for not living up to her ideals.

When Mrs. Hilbery and Katharine arrived in the hall, ready dressed for their drive, they found that the usual discussion was going forward as to the plans of the rest of the family.

I wanted them to get on in the world. That was a lie, of course—a kind of self-glorification, too.

Like most people, I suppose, I’ve lived almost entirely among delusions, and now I’m at the awkward stage of finding it out. I want another delusion to go on with.

That’s what my unhappiness amounts to, Mary.”

What were his faults in comparison with the fact that he cared for her? What were her virtues in comparison with the fact that she did not care for him?

In a flash the conviction that not to care is the uttermost sin of all stamped itself upon her inmost thought; and she felt herself branded forever.

He had taken her arm, and held her hand firmly in his, nor had she the force to resist what now seemed to her his enormously superior strength. Very well; she would submit, as her mother and her aunt and most women, perhaps, had submitted;

“

Such damned liars as we all are, how can we? But we can try.

If you don’t want to marry me, don’t; but the position you take up about love, and not seeing each other—isn’t that mere sentimentality? You think I’ve behaved very badly,” he continued, as she did not speak. “Of course I behave badly;

At one o’clock she was surprised to find how efficiently she had dealt with the morning. As she put her hat on she determined to lunch at a shop in the Strand, so as to set that other piece of mechanism, her body, into action.

With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being.

She considered her case as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. She put to herself a series of questions. Would she mind, for example, if the wheels of that motor-omnibus passed over her and crushed her to death? No, not in the least;

Books she shrank from, for they were connected too closely with Ralph. She kept on her way resolutely through the crowd of people, among whom she was so much of an alien, feeling them cleave and give way before her.

Strange thoughts are bred in passing through crowded streets should the passenger, by chance, have no exact destination in front of him, much as the mind shapes all kinds of forms, solutions, images when listening inattentively to music.

From an acute consciousness of herself as an individual, Mary passed to a conception of the scheme of things in which, as a human being, she must have her share. She half held a vision; the vision shaped and dwindled.

“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 anyone in particular.

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.

“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.

”

“I should feel it more reasonably—that’s all. I shouldn’t talk the kind of nonsense I’ve talked tonight. … 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.”

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!”

“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.”

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;

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.

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.

“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 fingertips upon an imaginary opera-hat or malacca cane.

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.

“

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.

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.”

… 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.

“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.”

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.”

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;

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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 someone you cared for.”

“

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.

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.

“

Cassandra has stolen William’s love.

”

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.

“You’re with me in mine.

You’re the thing I make up, you see.

”

“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.

”

Mary found herself unable to go on writing. She turned her eyes away, but only to be aware of the presence of what Katharine looked at.

There were ghosts in the room, and one, strangely and sadly, was the ghost of herself.

The minutes went by.

“No,” said Katharine. “

Except that when one’s desperate one has a sort of right. I am desperate.

How do I know what’s happening to him now? He may do anything. He may wander about the streets all night. Anything may happen to him.”

“

There are different ways of loving,

” she murmured, half to herself, at length.

She herself was not attentive. She was glad of the movement along lamplit streets in the open air. She was fingering, painfully and with fear, yet with strange hope, too, the discovery which she had stumbled upon unexpectedly that night.

She was free once more at the cost of a gift, the best, perhaps, that she could offer, but she was, thank Heaven, in love no longer.

She was tempted to spend the first instalment of her freedom in some dissipation; in the pit of the Coliseum, for example, since they were now passing the door. Why not go in and celebrate her independence of the tyranny of love?

She was tempted to spend the first instalment of her freedom in some dissipation; in the pit of the Coliseum, for example, since they were now passing the door.

Why not go in and celebrate her independence of the tyranny of love?

Or, perhaps, the top of an omnibus bound for some remote place such as Camberwell, or Sidcup, or the Welsh Harp would suit her better. She noticed these names painted on little boards for the first time for weeks.

Katharine instructed her in the peculiar delights of an entertainment where polar bears follow directly upon ladies in full evening dress, and the stage is alternately a garden of mystery, a milliner’s bandbox, and a fried-fish shop in the Mile End Road.

Whatever the exact nature of the program that night, it fulfilled the highest purposes of dramatic art, so far, at least, as four of the audience were concerned.

No doubt the actors and the authors would have been surprised to learn in what shape their efforts reached those particular eyes and ears; but they could not have denied that the effect as a whole was tremendous.

She left the choice entirely to Ralph and William, who, taking counsel fraternally over an evening paper, found themselves in agreement as to the merits of a music-hall. This being arranged, everything else followed easily and enthusiastically. Cassandra had never been to a music-hall.

Katharine instructed her in the peculiar delights of an entertainment where polar bears follow directly upon ladies in full evening dress, and the stage is alternately a garden of mystery, a milliner’s bandbox, and a fried-fish shop in the Mile End Road.

Whatever the exact nature of the program that night, it fulfilled the highest purposes of dramatic art, so far, at least, as four of the audience were concerned.

“She has condoned Cassandra’s conduct and entangled herself with Ralph Denham,” she repeated.

She stood very erect with the dauntless air of one testifying to the truth regardless of consequences.

She knew from past discussions that the only way to counter her brother’s indolence and indifference was to shoot her statements at him in a compressed form once finally upon leaving the room.

“You’ve had some difference of opinion, eh? Take my word for it, most people go through this sort of thing when they’re engaged.

I’ve seen more trouble come from long engagements than from any other form of human folly.

Take my advice and put the whole matter out of your minds—both of you. I prescribe a complete abstinence from emotion. Visit some cheerful seaside resort, Rodney.”

I’ve seen more trouble come from long engagements than from any other form of human folly. Take my advice and put the whole matter out of your minds—both of you.

I prescribe a complete abstinence from emotion. Visit some cheerful seaside resort, Rodney.

”

“For God’s sake, Katharine, control yourself!” he cried.

She looked for a moment like a wild animal caged in a civilized dwelling-place.

She glanced over the walls covered with books, as if for a second she had forgotten the position of the door. Then she made as if to go, but her father laid his hand upon her shoulder. He compelled her to sit down.

“I’m not in love with Ralph Denham,” she said.

“Don’t marry unless you’re in love!” said Mrs. Hilbery very quickly.

“But,” she added, glancing momentarily at her daughter, “aren’t there different ways, Katharine—different—?”

… or what we shall find—who knows anything, except that love is our faith—love—” she crooned, and the soft sound beating through the dim words was heard by her daughter as the breaking of waves solemnly in order upon the vast shore that she gazed upon.

She would have been content for her mother to repeat that word almost indefinitely⁠—a soothing word when uttered by another, a riveting together of the shattered fragments of the world.

But Mrs. Hilbery, instead of repeating the word love, said pleadingly: