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

that I hate all books when I’ve only read ten, perhaps; but⁠—’ Here she pulled herself up short.

“Well?”

“Yes, I do hate books,” she continued. “Why do you want to be forever talking about your feelings? That’s what I can’t make out. And poetry’s all about feelings⁠—novels are all about feelings.”

She cut a cake vigorously into slices, and providing a tray with bread and butter for Mrs. Hilbery, who was in her room with a cold, she rose to go upstairs.

Ralph held the door open for her, and then stood with clasped hands in the middle of the room. His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they beheld dreams or realities. All down the street and on the doorstep, and while he mounted the stairs, his dream of Katharine possessed him; on the threshold of the room he had dismissed it, in order to prevent too painful a collision between what he dreamt of her and what she was. And in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life; looked with fire out of phantom eyes. He glanced about him with bewilderment at finding himself among her chairs and tables; they were solid, for he grasped the back of the chair in which Katharine had sat; and yet they were unreal; the atmosphere was that of a dream. He summoned all the faculties of his spirit to seize what the minutes had to give him; and from the depths of his mind there rose unchecked a joyful recognition of the truth that human nature surpasses, in its beauty, all that our wildest dreams bring us hints of.

Katharine came into the room a moment later. He stood watching her come towards him, and thought her more beautiful and strange than his dream of her; for the real Katharine could speak the words which seemed to crowd behind the forehead and in the depths of the eyes, and the commonest sentence would be flashed on by this immortal light. And she overflowed the edges of the dream; he remarked that her softness was like that of some vast snowy owl; she wore a ruby on her finger.

“My mother wants me to tell you,” she said, “that she hopes you have begun your poem. She says everyone ought to write poetry.⁠ ⁠… All my relations write poetry,” she went on. “I can’t bear to think of it sometimes⁠—because, of course, it’s none of it any good. But then one needn’t read it⁠—”

“You don’t encourage me to write a poem,” said Ralph.

“But you’re not a poet, too, are you?” she inquired, turning upon him with a laugh.

“Should I tell you if I were?”

“Yes. Because I think you speak the truth,” she said, searching him for proof of this apparently, with eyes now almost impersonally direct. It would be easy, Ralph thought, to worship one so far removed, and yet of so straight a nature; easy to submit recklessly to her, without thought of future pain.

“Are you a poet?” she demanded. He felt that her question had an unexplained weight of meaning behind it, as if she sought an answer to a question that she did not ask.

“No. I haven’t written any poetry for years,” he replied. “But all the same, I don’t agree with you. I think it’s the only thing worth doing.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, almost with impatience, tapping her spoon two or three times against the side of her cup.

“Why?” Ralph laid hands on the first words that came to mind. “Because, I suppose, it keeps an ideal alive which might die otherwise.”

A curious change came over her face, as if the flame of her mind were subdued; and she looked at him ironically and with the expression which he had called sad before, for want of a better name for it.

“I don’t know that there’s much sense in having ideals,” she said.

“But you have them,” he replied energetically. “Why do we call them ideals? It’s a stupid word. Dreams, I mean⁠—”

She followed his words with parted lips, as though to answer eagerly when he had done; but as he said, “Dreams, I mean,” the door of the drawing-room swung open, and so remained for a perceptible instant. They both held themselves silent, her lips still parted.

Far off, they heard the rustle of skirts. Then the owner of the skirts appeared in the doorway, which she almost filled, nearly concealing the figure of a very much smaller lady who accompanied her.

“My aunts!” Katharine murmured, under her breath. Her tone had a hint of tragedy in it, but no less, Ralph thought, than the situation required. She addressed the larger lady as Aunt Millicent; the smaller was Aunt Celia, Mrs. Milvain, who had lately undertaken the task of marrying Cyril to his wife. Both ladies, but Mrs. Cosham (Aunt Millicent) in particular, had that look of heightened, smoothed, incarnadined existence which is proper to elderly ladies paying calls in London about five o’clock in the afternoon. Portraits by Romney, seen through glass, have something of their pink, mellow look, their blooming softness, as of apricots hanging upon a red wall in the afternoon sun. Mrs. Cosham was so appareled with hanging muffs, chains, and swinging draperies that it was impossible to detect the shape of a human being in the mass of brown and black which filled the armchair. Mrs. Milvain was a much slighter figure; but the same doubt as to the precise lines of her contour filled Ralph, as he regarded them, with dismal foreboding. What remark of his would ever reach these fabulous and fantastic characters?⁠—for there was something fantastically unreal in the curious swayings and noddings of Mrs. Cosham, as if her equipment included a large wire spring. Her voice had a high-pitched, cooing note, which prolonged words and cut them short until the English language seemed no longer fit for common purposes. In a moment of nervousness, so Ralph thought, Katharine had turned on innumerable electric lights. But Mrs. Cosham had gained impetus