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ought to read more, and to

see that there were other points of view as deserving of attention as

her own. Naturally, having last seen him as he left the office in

company with Katharine, she attributed the change to her; it was

likely that Katharine, on leaving the scene which she had so clearly

despised, had pronounced some such criticism, or suggested it by her

own attitude. But she knew that Ralph would never admit that he had

been influenced by anybody.

 

“You don’t read enough, Mary,” he was saying. “You ought to read more

poetry.”

 

It was true that Mary’s reading had been rather limited to such works

as she needed to know for the sake of examinations; and her time for

reading in London was very little. For some reason, no one likes to be

told that they do not read enough poetry, but her resentment was only

visible in the way she changed the position of her hands, and in the

fixed look in her eyes. And then she thought to herself, “I’m behaving

exactly as I said I wouldn’t behave,” whereupon she relaxed all her

muscles and said, in her reasonable way:

 

“Tell me what I ought to read, then.”

 

Ralph had unconsciously been irritated by Mary, and he now delivered

himself of a few names of great poets which were the text for a

discourse upon the imperfection of Mary’s character and way of life.

 

“You live with your inferiors,” he said, warming unreasonably, as he

knew, to his text. “And you get into a groove because, on the whole,

it’s rather a pleasant groove. And you tend to forget what you’re

there for. You’ve the feminine habit of making much of details. You

don’t see when things matter and when they don’t. And that’s what’s

the ruin of all these organizations. That’s why the Suffragists have

never done anything all these years. What’s the point of drawing-room

meetings and bazaars? You want to have ideas, Mary; get hold of

something big; never mind making mistakes, but don’t niggle. Why don’t

you throw it all up for a year, and travel?—see something of the

world. Don’t be content to live with half a dozen people in a

backwater all your life. But you won’t,” he concluded.

 

“I’ve rather come to that way of thinking myself—about myself, I

mean,” said Mary, surprising him by her acquiescence. “I should like

to go somewhere far away.”

 

For a moment they were both silent. Ralph then said:

 

“But look here, Mary, you haven’t been taking this seriously, have

you?” His irritation was spent, and the depression, which she could

not keep out of her voice, made him feel suddenly with remorse that he

had been hurting her.

 

“You won’t go away, will you?” he asked. And as she said nothing, he

added, “Oh no, don’t go away.”

 

“I don’t know exactly what I mean to do,” she replied. She hovered on

the verge of some discussion of her plans, but she received no

encouragement. He fell into one of his queer silences, which seemed to

Mary, in spite of all her precautions, to have reference to what she

also could not prevent herself from thinking about—their feeling for

each other and their relationship. She felt that the two lines of

thought bored their way in long, parallel tunnels which came very

close indeed, but never ran into each other.

 

When he had gone, and he left her without breaking his silence more

than was needed to wish her good night, she sat on for a time,

reviewing what he had said. If love is a devastating fire which melts

the whole being into one mountain torrent, Mary was no more in love

with Denham than she was in love with her poker or her tongs. But

probably these extreme passions are very rare, and the state of mind

thus depicted belongs to the very last stages of love, when the power

to resist has been eaten away, week by week or day by day. Like most

intelligent people, Mary was something of an egoist, to the extent,

that is, of attaching great importance to what she felt, and she was

by nature enough of a moralist to like to make certain, from time to

time, that her feelings were creditable to her. When Ralph left her

she thought over her state of mind, and came to the conclusion that it

would be a good thing to learn a language—say Italian or German. She

then went to a drawer, which she had to unlock, and took from it

certain deeply scored manuscript pages. She read them through, looking

up from her reading every now and then and thinking very intently for

a few seconds about Ralph. She did her best to verify all the

qualities in him which gave rise to emotions in her; and persuaded

herself that she accounted reasonably for them all. Then she looked

back again at her manuscript, and decided that to write grammatical

English prose is the hardest thing in the world. But she thought about

herself a great deal more than she thought about grammatical English

prose or about Ralph Denham, and it may therefore be disputed whether

she was in love, or, if so, to which branch of the family her passion

belonged.

CHAPTER XI

It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering,

the everlasting and perpetual process,” said Katharine, as she passed

under the archway, and so into the wide space of King’s Bench Walk,

“not the discovery itself at all.” She spoke the last words looking up

at Rodney’s windows, which were a semilucent red color, in her honor,

as she knew. He had asked her to tea with him. But she was in a mood

when it is almost physically disagreeable to interrupt the stride of

one’s thought, and she walked up and down two or three times under the

trees before approaching his staircase. She liked getting hold of some

book which neither her father or mother had read, and keeping it to

herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the

meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide

whether the book was a good one or a bad one. This evening she had

twisted the words of Dostoevsky to suit her mood—a fatalistic mood—

to proclaim that the process of discovery was life, and that,

presumably, the nature of one’s goal mattered not at all. She sat down

for a moment upon one of the seats; felt herself carried along in the

swirl of many things; decided, in her sudden way, that it was time to

heave all this thinking overboard, and rose, leaving a fishmonger’s

basket on the seat behind her. Two minutes later her rap sounded with

authority upon Rodney’s door.

 

“Well, William,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m late.”

 

It was true, but he was so glad to see her that he forgot his

annoyance. He had been occupied for over an hour in making things

ready for her, and he now had his reward in seeing her look right and

left, as she slipped her cloak from her shoulders, with evident

satisfaction, although she said nothing. He had seen that the fire

burnt well; jam-pots were on the table, tin covers shone in the

fender, and the shabby comfort of the room was extreme. He was dressed

in his old crimson dressing-gown, which was faded irregularly, and had

bright new patches on it, like the paler grass which one finds on

lifting a stone. He made the tea, and Katharine drew off her gloves,

and crossed her legs with a gesture that was rather masculine in its

ease. Nor did they talk much until they were smoking cigarettes over

the fire, having placed their teacups upon the floor between them.

 

They had not met since they had exchanged letters about their

relationship. Katharine’s answer to his protestation had been short

and sensible. Half a sheet of notepaper contained the whole of it, for

she merely had to say that she was not in love with him, and so could

not marry him, but their friendship would continue, she hoped,

unchanged. She had added a postscript in which she stated, “I like

your sonnet very much.”

 

So far as William was concerned, this appearance of ease was assumed.

Three times that afternoon he had dressed himself in a tail-coat, and

three times he had discarded it for an old dressing-gown; three times

he had placed his pearl tie-pin in position, and three times he had

removed it again, the little looking-glass in his room being the

witness of these changes of mind. The question was, which would

Katharine prefer on this particular afternoon in December? He read her

note once more, and the postscript about the sonnet settled the

matter. Evidently she admired most the poet in him; and as this, on

the whole, agreed with his own opinion, he decided to err, if

anything, on the side of shabbiness. His demeanor was also regulated

with premeditation; he spoke little, and only on impersonal matters;

he wished her to realize that in visiting him for the first time alone

she was doing nothing remarkable, although, in fact, that was a point

about which he was not at all sure.

 

Certainly Katharine seemed quite unmoved by any disturbing thoughts;

and if he had been completely master of himself, he might, indeed,

have complained that she was a trifle absent-minded. The ease, the

familiarity of the situation alone with Rodney, among teacups and

candles, had more effect upon her than was apparent. She asked to look

at his books, and then at his pictures. It was while she held

photograph from the Greek in her hands that she exclaimed,

impulsively, if incongruously:

 

“My oysters! I had a basket,” she explained, “and I’ve left it

somewhere. Uncle Dudley dines with us to-night. What in the world have

I done with them?”

 

She rose and began to wander about the room. William rose also, and

stood in front of the fire, muttering, “Oysters, oysters—your basket

of oysters!” but though he looked vaguely here and there, as if the

oysters might be on the top of the bookshelf, his eyes returned always

to Katharine. She drew the curtain and looked out among the scanty

leaves of the plane-trees.

 

“I had them,” she calculated, “in the Strand; I sat on a seat. Well,

never mind,” she concluded, turning back into the room abruptly, “I

dare say some old creature is enjoying them by this time.”

 

“I should have thought that you never forgot anything,” William

remarked, as they settled down again.

 

“That’s part of the myth about me, I know,” Katharine replied.

 

“And I wonder,” William proceeded, with some caution, “what the truth

about you is? But I know this sort of thing doesn’t interest you,” he

added hastily, with a touch of peevishness.

 

“No; it doesn’t interest me very much,” she replied candidly.

 

“What shall we talk about then?” he asked.

 

She looked rather whimsically round the walls of the room.

 

“However we start, we end by talking about the same thing—about

poetry, I mean. I wonder if you realize, William, that I’ve never read

even Shakespeare? It’s rather wonderful how I’ve kept it up all these

years.”

 

“You’ve kept it up for ten years very beautifully, as far as I’m

concerned,” he said.

 

“Ten years? So long as that?”

 

“And I don’t think it’s always bored you,” he added.

 

She looked into the fire silently. She could not deny that the surface

of her feeling was absolutely unruffled by anything in William’s

character; on the contrary, she felt certain that she could deal with

whatever turned up. He

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