Night and Day, Virginia Woolf [electronic book reader .txt] 📗

“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 someone.”

“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 lamplit 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 halfway 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 someone 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