 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Night and Day by Virginia Woolf To Vanessa Bell, but looking for a phrase I found none to stand beside your name. Night and Day, Chapter One It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other young ladies of her class, Catherine Hilbury was pouring out tea. Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning and this rather subdued moment, and played with the things one does voluntarily and normally in the daylight. But although she was silent, she was evidently mistress of a situation which was familiar enough to her and inclined to let it take its way for the sixth under time perhaps, without bringing into play any of her unoccupied faculties. A single glance was enough to show that Mrs. Hilbury was so rich in the gifts which make tea parties of elderly distinguished people successful that she scarcely needed any help from her daughter, provided that the tiresome business of tea cups and bread and butter was discharged for her. Considering that the little party had been seated round the tea table for less than twenty minutes, the animation observable on their faces and the amount of sound they were producing collectively were very credible to the hostess. It suddenly came to Catherine's mind that if someone opened the door at this moment he would think that they were enjoying themselves. He would think what an extremely nice house to come into, and instinctively she laughed and said something to increase the noise for the credit of the house presumably, since she herself had not been feeling exhilarated. At the very same moment, rather to her amusement, the door was slung open and a young man entered the room. Catherine, as she shook hands with him, asked him in her own mind, Now do you think we're enjoying ourselves enormously? Mr. Denham mother, she said aloud, for she saw that her mother had forgotten his name. That fact was perceptible to Mr. Denham also, and increased the awkwardness which inevitably attends the entrance of a stranger into a roomful of people much at their ease, and all launched upon sentences. At the same time it seemed to Mr. Denham, as if a thousand softly padded doors had closed between him and the street outside, a fine mist, the etherealized essence of the fog, hung visibly in the wide and rather empty space of the drawing room, all silver where the candles were grouped on the tea table, and ready again in the firelight. With the omnibuses and cabs still running in his head, and his body still tingling with his quick walk along the streets and in and out of traffic and foot passengers, this drawing room seemed very remote and still, and the faces of the elderly people were mellowed, had some distance from each other, and had a bloom on them owing to the fact that the air in the drawing room was thickened by blue grains of mist. Mr. Denham had come in as Mr. Fortescue, the eminent novelist, reached the middle of a very long sentence. He kept this suspended while the newcomer sat down, and Mrs. Hilbertig definitely joined the severed parts by leaning towards him and remarking, Now, what would you do if you were married to an engineer and had to live in Manchester, Mr. Denham? Surely she can learn Persian, broken and thin, elderly gentlemen. Is there no retired schoolmaster or man of letters in Manchester with whom she could read Persian? A cousin of ours has married and gone to live in Manchester, Catherine explained. Mr. Denham muttered something, which was indeed all that was required of him, and the novelist went on where he had left off. Privately Mr. Denham cursed himself very sharply for having exchanged the freedom of the street with his sophisticated drawing room, where, among other disagreeables, he certainly would not appear at his best. He glanced around him and saw that, safe for Catherine, they were all over forty, the only consolation being that Mr. Fortescue was a considerable celebrity, so that tomorrow one might be glad to have met him. Have you ever been to Manchester? He asked Catherine. Never, she replied. Why do you object to it then? Catherine stirred her tea and seemed to speculate, so Denham thought, upon the duty of filling somebody else's cup. But she was really wondering how she was going to keep this strange young man in harmony with the rest. She observed that he was compressing his tea-cup so that there was danger lest the thin china might cave inwards. She could see that he was nervous. One would expect a bony young man with his face slightly reddened by the wind and his hair not altogether smooth to be nervous in such a party. Further he probably disliked this kind of thing and had come out of curiosity or because her father had invited him. Anyhow, he would not be easily combined with the rest. I should think there would be no one to talk to in Manchester, she replied at random. Mr. Fortescue had been observing her for a moment or two, as novelists are inclined to observe, and at this remark he smiled and made it the text for a little further speculation. In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Catherine decidedly hits the mark, he said, and lying back in his chair with his opaque contemplative eyes fixed on the ceiling and the tips of his fingers pressed together he depicted first the horrors of the streets of Manchester and then the bare immense moors on the outskirts of the town and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live and then the professors and their miserable young students devoted to the more strenuous works of our young dramatists would visit her and how her appearance would change by degrees and how she would fly to London and how Catherine would have to lead her about as one leads an eager dog on a chain past rows of clamorous butcher shops poor dear creature. Oh, Mr. Fortescue exclaimed Mrs. Hilbury as he finished. I had just written to say how I envied her. I was thinking of the big gardens and the dear old ladies in mittens who read nothing but the spectator and snuffed the candles. Have they all disappeared? I told her she would find the nice things of London without the horrid streets that depress one so. There is the university, said the thin gentleman who had previously insisted upon the existence of people knowing Persian. I know there are moors there because I read about them in a book the other day, said Catherine. I am grieved and amazed at the ignorance of my family, Mr. Hilbury remarked. He was an elderly man with a pair of oval hazel eyes which were rather bright for his time of life and relieved the heaviness of his face. He played constantly with a little green stone attached to his watch chain thus displaying long and very sensitive fingers and had a habit of moving his head hither and thither very quickly without altering the position of his large and rather corpulent body so that he seemed to be providing himself incessantly with food for amusement and reflection with the least possible expenditure of energy. One might suppose that he had passed the time of life when his ambitions were personal or that he had gratified them as far as he was likely to do and now employed his considerable acuteness rather to observe and reflect than to attain any result. Catherine, so denim decided, while Mr. Fortescue built up another rounded structure of words had a likeness to each of her parents, but these elements were rather oddly blended. She had the quick impulsive movements of her mother, the lips parting often to speak and closing again, the dark oval eyes of her father brimming with light upon her basis of sadness or, since she was too young to have acquired a sorrowful point of view, one might say that the basis was not sadness so much as a spirit given to contemplation and self-control. Judging by her hair, her coloring, and the shape of her features, she was striking, if not actually beautiful. Decision and composure stamped her, a combination of qualities that produced a very marked character and one that was not calculated to put a young man who scarcely knew her at his ease. For the rest she was tall, her dress was of some quiet color with old yellow tinted lace for ornament to which the spark of an ancient jewel gave its one red gleam. Denim noticed that, although silent, she kept sufficient control of the situation to answer immediately if her mother appealed to her for help, and yet it was obvious to him that she attended only with the surface skin of her mind. It struck him that her position at the tea table, among all these elderly people, was not without its difficulties, and he checked his inclination to find her, or her attitude, generally anti-pathetic to him. The talk had passed over Manchester after dealing with it generously. Would it be the battle of Trafalgar or the Spanish Armada Catherine, her mother demanded? Trafalgar, mother. Trafalgar, of course. How stupid of me. Another cup of tea with a thin slice of lemon in it, and then, dear Mr. Fortescu, please explain my absurd little puzzle. One can't help believing gentlemen with Roman noses even if one meets them in omnibuses. Mr. Hilberry here interposed so far as Denim was concerned, and talked a great deal of sense about the solicitor's profession and the changes which he had seen in his lifetime. Indeed, Denim properly fell to his lot, following to the fact that an article by Denim upon some legal matter published by Mr. Hilberry in his review had brought them acquainted. But when a moment later Mrs. Sutton Bailey was announced, he turned to her, and Mr. Denim found himself sitting silent, rejecting possible things to say, beside Catherine, who was silent, too. Being much about the same age and both under thirty, they were prohibited from the use of a great many convenient phrases which launched conversation into smooth waters. They were further silenced by Catherine's rather malicious determination not to help this young man, in whose upright and resolute bearing she detected something hostile to her surroundings by any of the usual feminine amenities. They therefore sat silent, Denim controlling his desire to say something abrupt and explosive, which should shock her into life. But Mrs. Hilberry was immediately sensitive to any silence in the drawing-room, as of a dumb note in a sonorous scale, and leaning across the table she observed in the curiously tentative, detached manner which always gave her phrases the likeness of butterflies flaunting from one sunny spot to the other. Do you know, Mr. Denim, you remind me so much of dear Mr. Ruskin. Is it his tie, Catherine, or his hair, or the way he sits in his chair? Do tell me, Mr. Denim, are you an admirer of Ruskin? Someone the other day said to me, Oh, no, we don't read Ruskin, Mrs. Hilberry. What do you read, I wonder, for you can't spend all your time going up at airplanes and burrowing into the bowels of the earth? She looked benevolently at Denim, who said nothing articulate, and then at Catherine, who smiled but said nothing either, upon which Mrs. Hilberry seemed possessed by a brilliant idea, and exclaimed, I'm sure Mr. Denim would like to see our things, Catherine. 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. Denim rose, half meaning to go, and thinking that he had seen all that there was to see, but Catherine rose at the same moment and saying, perhaps you'd like to see the pictures, led the way across the dining-room to a smaller room opening out of it. The smaller room was something like a chapel in a cathedral or a grotto in a cave, for the booming sound of the traffic in the distance suggested the soft surge of waters, and the oval mirrors with their silver surface were like deep pools trembling beneath the starlight. But the comparison of a religious temple of some kind was the more apt of the two, and the little room was crowded with relics. As Catherine touched different spots, lights sprang here and there, and revealed a square mass of red and gold books, and then a long skirt in blue and white paint lustrous behind glass, and then a mahogany writing table with its orderly equipment, and finally a picture above the table to which special illumination was accorded. When Catherine had touched these last lights, she stood back, as much as to say, there. Then him found himself looked upon by the eyes of the great poet Richard Allardice, and suffered a little shock which would have led him, had he been wearing a hat, to remove it. The eyes looked at him out of the mellow pinks and yellows of the paint with divine friendliness which embraced him, and passed on to contemplate the entire world. The paint had so faded that very little and beautiful large eyes were left, dark in the surrounding dimness. Catherine waited as though for him to receive a full impression, and then she said, This is his writing table. He used this pen, and she lifted a quill pen and laid it down again. The writing table was splashed with old ink, and the pen disheveled in service. There lay the gigantic gold-room spectacles ready to his hand, and beneath the table was a pair of large worn slippers, one of which Catherine picked up, remarking, 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 O to Winter. The early poems are far less corrected than the later. Would you like to look at it? While Mr. Denim examined the manuscript, she glanced up at her grandfather, and for the thousandth time fell into a pleasant dreamy state, which seemed to be the companion of those giant men, of their own lineage at any rate, and the insignificant present moment was put to shame. That magnificent ghostly head on the canvas surely never beheld all the trivialities of a Sunday afternoon, and it did not seem to matter what she and this young man said to each other, for they were only small people. This is a copy of the first edition of the poems, she continued, without considering the fact that Mr. Denim was still occupied with the manuscript, which contained several poems which have not been reprinted, as well as corrections. She paused for a minute, and then went on, as if these spaces had all been calculated. That Lady in Blue is my great-grandmother, by Millington. Here is my uncle's walking stick. He was Sir Richard Warburton, you know, and rode with Havlock to the relief of Lucknow. Then, then, let me see, oh, that's the original Dice 1697, the founder of the family fortunes, with his wife. Someone gave us this bowl the other day, because it has their crest and initials. We think it must have been given them to celebrate their silver wedding day. Here she stopped for a moment, wondering why it was that Mr. Denim said nothing. Her feeling that he was antagonistic to her, which had lapsed while she thought of her family possessions, returned so keenly that she stopped in the middle of her catalogue and looked at him. Her mother, wishing to connect him reputably with the great dead, had compared him with Mr. Ruskin, and the comparison was in Catherine's mind, and led her to be more critical of the young man than was fair. For a young man paying a call in a tailcoat is in a different element altogether from a head seized at its climax of expressiveness gazing immutably from behind a sheet of glass, which was all that remained to her of Mr. Ruskin. He had a singular face, a face built for swiftness and decision, rather than for massive contemplation, the far head broad, the nose long and formidable, the lips clean shaven, and at once dogged and sensitive, the cheeks lean with a deeply running tide of red blood in them. His eyes, expressive now of the usual masculine impersonality and authority, might reveal more subtle emotions under favorable circumstances, for they were large and of a clear brown color. They seemed unexpectedly to hesitate and speculate. But Catherine only looked at him to wonder whether his face would not have come nearer the standard of her dead heroes if it had been adorned with side whiskers. In his spare-build and thin, though healthy cheeks, she saw tokens of an angular and acrid soul. His voice, she noticed, had a slight vibrating or creaking sound in it, as he laid down the manuscript and said, You must be very proud of your family, Miss Hilbury. Yes, I am, Catherine answered, and she added, Do you think there's anything wrong in that? Wrong? How should it be wrong? It must be a bore, though, showing your things to visitors, he added reflectively. Not if the visitors like them. Isn't it difficult to live up to your ancestors? He proceeded. I daresay I shouldn't try to write poetry, Catherine replied. Oh. And that's what I should hate. I couldn't bear my grandfather to cut me out. And after all, denim went on, glancing round him satirically, as Catherine thought. It's not your grandfather only. You're cutting out all the way round. I suppose you come of one of the most distinguished families in England. There are Warburton's and the Mannings, and you're related to the Ottweys, aren't you? I read it all in some magazine, he added. The Ottweys are my cousins, Catherine replied. Well, said Denim, in a final tone of voice, as if his argument were proved. Well, said Catherine, I don't see that you've proved anything. Denim smiled in a peculiarly provoking way. He was amused and gratified to find that he had the power to annoy his oblivious, supercilious hostess if he could not impress her, though he would have preferred to impress her. He sat silent, holding the precious little book of poems unopened in his hands, and Catherine watched him, the melancholy or contemplative expression deepening in her eyes as her annoyance faded. She appeared to be considering many things. She had forgotten her duties. Well, said Denim again, suddenly opening the little book of poems, as though he had said all that he meant to say, or could, with propriety say. He turned over the pages with great decision, as if he were judging the book in its entirety, the printing and the paper and the binding, as well as the poetry. And then, having satisfied himself of its good or bad quality, he placed it on the writing-table, and examined the Malacca cane with the gold knob which had belonged to the soldier. But aren't you proud of your family, Catherine demanded? No, said Denim, we've never done anything to be proud of, unless you count paying one's bills a matter for pride. That sounds rather dull, Catherine remarked. You would think us horribly dull, Denim agreed. Yes, I might find you dull, but I don't think I should find you ridiculous, Catherine added, as if Denim had actually brought that charge against her family. No, because we're not in the least ridiculous. We're a respectable middle-class family living at Highgate. We don't live at Highgate, but we're middle-class too, I suppose. Denim merely smiled, and replacing the Malacca cane on the rack, he drew a sword from its ornamental sheath. That belonged to Clive, so we say, said Catherine, taking a perduities as hostess again automatically. Is it a lie? Denim inquired. It's a family tradition. I don't know that we can prove it. You see, we don't have traditions in our family, said Denim. You sound very dull, Catherine remarked for the second time. Merely middle-class, Denim replied. You pay your bills, and you speak the truth. I don't see why you should despise us. Mr. Denim carefully sheathed the sword, which the hillberries said belonged to Clive. I shouldn't like to be you, that's all I said, he replied, as if he were saying that he thought as accurately as he could. But no one never would like to be anyone else. I should, I should like to be lots of people. Then why not us, Catherine asked. Denim looked at her as she sat in her grandfather's armchair, drawing her great-uncle's Malacca cane smoothly through her fingers, while her background was made up equally of lustrous blue and white paint and crimson books with gilt lines on them. The vitality and composure of her attitude, as of a bright-plumed bird poised easily before further flights, roused him to show her the limitations of her lot. So soon, so easily, would he be forgotten. 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. Gone, Catherine observed, as he paused, suddenly doubtful when he heard his voice proclaiming aloud these facts, whether there was any truth in them. Of course, I don't know how you spend your time, he continued a little stiffly, but I suppose you have to show people around. You're writing a life of your grandfather, aren't you? And this kind of thing, he nodded towards the other room where they could hear bursts of cultivated laughter, must take up a lot of time. She looked at him expectantly, as if between them they were decorating a small figure of herself, and she saw him hesitating in the disposition of some beau or sash. You've got it very nearly right, she said, but I only help my mother, I don't write myself. Do you do anything yourself? he demanded. What do you mean? she asked. I don't leave the house at ten and come back at six. I don't mean that. Mr. Denim had recovered his self-control. He spoke with a quietness which made Catherine rather anxious that he should explain himself, but at the same time she wished to annoy him to waft him away from her on some light current of ridicule or satire as she was wont to do with these intermittent young men of her fathers. Nobody ever does do anything worth doing nowadays, she remarked. You see, she tapped the volume of her grandfather's poems. We don't even print as well as they did. And as for poets or painters or novelists, there are none. So at any rate, I'm not singular. No, we haven't any great men, Denim replied. I'm very glad that we haven't. I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the 19th century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation. Catherine opened her lips and drew in her breath as if to reply with equal vigor when the shutting of a door in the next room withdrew her attention. And they both became conscious that the voices which had been rising and falling around the tea table had fallen silent. The light even seemed to have sunk lower. A moment later Mrs. Hilberry appeared in the doorway of the ante-room. She stood looking at them with a smile of expectancy on her face as if a scene from the drama of the younger generation were being played for her benefit. She was a remarkable looking woman, well advanced in the sixties, but owing to the lightness of her frame and the brightness of her eyes she seemed to have been wafted over the surface of the years without taking much harm in the passage. Her face was shrunken and aquiline, but any hint of sharpness was dispelled by the large blue eyes at once sagacious and innocent, which seemed to regard the world with an enormous desire that it should behave itself nobly and an entire confidence that it could do so if it would only take the pains. Certain lines on the broad forehead and about the lips might be taken to suggest that she had known moments of some difficulty, perplexity in the course of her career, but these had not destroyed her trustfulness and she was clearly still prepared to give everyone any number of fresh chances and the whole system the benefit of the doubt. She wore a great resemblance to her father and suggested, as he did, the fresh airs and open spaces of a younger world. Well, she said, how do you like our things, Mr. Denham? Mr. Denham rose, put his book down, opened his mouth, but said nothing, as Catherine observed with some amusement. Mrs. Hillberry handled the book that he had laid down. There are some books that live, she mused, they are young with us and they grow old with us. Are you fond of poetry, Mr. Denham? But what an absurd question to ask. The truth is, my dear Mr. Fortescue has almost tired me out. He is so eloquent and so witty, so searching and so profound, that after half an hour or so I feel inclined to turn out all the lights. But perhaps he'd be more wonderful than ever in the dark. What do you think, Catherine? Shall we give a little party in complete darkness? There'd have to be bright rooms for the boars. Here Mr. Denham held out his hand. But we've any number of things to show you, Mrs. Hillberry exclaimed, taking no notice of it. Books, pictures, china, manuscripts, and the very chair that Mary Queen of Scots sat in when she heard of Darnley's murder. I must lie down for a little, and Catherine must change her dress, though she's wearing a very pretty one. But if you don't mind being left alone, supper will be at eight. I dare say you'll write a poem of your own while you're waiting. Ah, how I love the firelight. Doesn't our room look charming? She stepped back and bade them contemplate the empty drawing room with its rich irregular lights as the flames leapt and wavered. Dear things, she exclaimed, dear chairs and tables, how like old friends they are, faithful, silent friends. Which reminds me, Catherine, little Mr. Edding is coming tonight and tight street and categan square. Don't remember to get that drawing of your great uncle glazed. Aunt Millicent remarked it last time she was here, and I know how it returned me to see my father in a broken glass. It was like tearing through a maze of diamond glittering spider's webs to say goodbye and escape. For each moment Mrs. Hilbury remembered something further about the villainies of picture framers or the delights of poetry, and at one time it seemed to the young man that he would be hypnotized into doing what she pretended to want him to do, or he could not suppose that she attached any value whatever to his presence. Catherine, however, made an opportunity for him to leave and for that he was grateful to her as one young person is grateful for the understanding of another. End of Chapter 1 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Night and Day by Virginia Woolf. Chapter 2 The young man shut the door with a sharper slam than any visitor had used that afternoon and walked up the street at a great pace cutting the air with his walking stick. He was glad to find himself outside that drawing-room, breathing raw fog, and in contact with unpolished people who only wanted their share of the pavement allowed them. He thought that if he had had Mr. or Mrs. or Miss Hilbury out here he would have made them somehow feel his superiority. For he was chafed by the memory of halting awkward sentences which had failed to give even the young woman with the sad but inwardly ironical eyes a hint of his force. He tried to recall the actual words of his little outburst and unconsciously supplemented them by so many words of greater expressiveness that the irritation of his failure was somewhat assuaged. Sudden stabs of the unmitigated truth assailed him now and then, for he was not inclined by nature to take a rosy view of his conduct. But what with the beat of his foot upon the pavement and the glimpse which half-drawn curtains offered him of kitchens, dining-rooms, and drawing-rooms, illustrating with mute power different scenes from different lives, his own experience lost its sharpness. His own experience underwent a curious change, his speed slackened, his head sank a little towards his breast, and the lamp-light shone now and again upon a face grown strangely tranquil. His thought was so absorbing that when it became necessary to verify the name of a street he looked at it for a time before he read it. When he came to a crossing he seemed to have to reassure himself by two or three taps, such as a blind man gives upon the curb, and reaching the underground station he blinked in the bright circle of light, glanced at his watch, decided that he might still indulge himself in darkness and walked straight on. And yet the thought was the thought with which he had started. He was still thinking about the people in the house which he had left. But instead of remembering with whatever accuracy he could their looks and sayings he had consciously taken leave of the literal truth. A turn of the street, a fire-lit room, something monumental in the procession of the lamp-posts. The light of light or shape had suddenly changed the prospect within his mind and led him to murmur aloud. She'll do. Yes, Catherine Hilbury'll do. I'll take Catherine Hilbury. As soon as he had said this his pace slackened. His head fell. His eyes became fixed. The desire to justify himself which had been so urgent ceased to torment him. And as if released from constraint and worked without friction or bidding his faculties leapt forward and fixed, as a matter of course, upon the form of Catherine Hilbury. It was marvellous how much they found to feed upon considering the destructive nature of Denhem's criticism in her presence. The charm which he had tried to disown when under the effect of it the beauty, the character, the aloofness which he had been determined not to feel now possessed him wholly as happened by the nature of things he had exhausted his memory he went on with his imagination. He was conscious of what he was about. For in thus dwelling upon Miss Hilbury's qualities he showed a kind of method as if he required this vision of her for a particular purpose. He increased her height. He darkened her hair. But physically there was not much to change in her. His most daring liberty was taken with her mind and in the absence of his own he desired to be exalted and invaluable. And of such independence that it was only in the case of Ralph Denhem that it swerved from its high, swift flight but where he was concerned, though fastidious at first, she finally swooped from her eminence to crown him with her approval. These delicious details, however, were to be worked out in all their ramifications at his leisure. The main point was that Catherine Hilbury would do. He would do for weeks. Perhaps for months. In taking her he had provided himself with something the lack of which had left a bare place in his mind for a considerable time. He gave a sigh of satisfaction. His consciousness of his actual position somewhere in the neighborhood of Knightsbridge returned to him and he was soon speeding in the train towards Highgate. Although thus supported by the knowledge of his new possession of considerable value in the woods, which the suburban streets and the damp shrubs growing in front gardens and the absurd names painted in white upon the gates of those gardens suggested to him, his walk was uphill and his mind dwelt gloomily upon the house which he approached, where he would find six or seven brothers and sisters, a widowed mother, and probably some aunt or uncle sitting down to an unpleasant meal under a very bright light. Should he put in force the threat that some such gathering had rung from him? The terrible threat that if visitors came on Sunday he should dine alone in his room? A glance in the direction of Miss Hillberry determined him to make his stand this very night and accordingly, having let himself in, having verified the presence of Uncle Joseph by means of a bowler hat and a very large umbrella, he gave his orders to the maid and went upstairs to his room. He went up a great many flights of stairs and had very seldom noticed how the carpet became steadily shabbier until it ceased altogether, how the walls were discolored, sometimes by cascades of damp and sometimes by the outlines of picture frames since removed, how the paper flapped loose at the corners, and a great flake of plaster had fallen from the ceiling. The room itself was a cheerless one to return to at this inauspicious hour. A flattened sofa would later in the evening become a bed. One of the tables concealed a washing apparatus. His clothes and boots were disagreeably mixed with books which bore the guilt of college arms and for decoration there hung upon the wall photographs of bridges and cathedrals and large, unpre-possessing groups of insufficiently clothed young men sitting in rows one above another upon stone steps. There was a look of meanness and shabbiness in the furniture and curtains and no were any sign of luxury or even of a cultivated taste, unless the cheap classics in the bookcase were a sign of an effort in that direction. The only object that threw any light upon the character of the room's owner was a large perch placed in the window to catch the air and sun upon which a tame and apparently decrepit rook hopped dryly from side to side. The bird, encouraged by a scratch behind the ear, settled upon Denham's shoulder. He lit his gas-fire and settled down in gloomy patience to await his dinner. After sitting thus for some minutes a small girl popped her head in to say, Mother says, aren't you coming down, Ralph? Uncle Joseph, there to bring my dinner up here, said Ralph, preemptually. Whereupon she vanished, leaving the door ajar in her haste to be gone. After Denham had waited for some minutes in the course of which neither he nor the rook took their eyes off the fire he muttered a curse, ran downstairs intercepted the polarmade and cut himself a slice of bread and cold meat. As he did so the dining-room door sprang open a voice exclaimed, Ralph! But Ralph paid no attention to the voice and made off, upstairs with his plate. He set it down in a chair opposite him and ate with a ferocity that was due partly to anger and partly to hunger. His mother then was determined not to respect his wishes. He was a person of no importance in his own family. He was sent for and treated as a child. He reflected with a growing sense of injury that almost every one of his actions since opening the door of his room had been one from the grasp of the family system. By right he should have been sitting downstairs in the drawing-room describing his afternoon's adventures, or listening to the afternoon's adventures of other people. The room itself, the gas-fire, the armchair, all had been fought for, the wretched bird with half its feathers out and one leg, lame by a cat, had been rescued under protest. But what his family most resented, he reflected, was his wish for privacy. To dine alone, or to sit alone after dinner, was flat rebellion to be fought with every weapon of underhand stealth or of open appeal. Which did he dislike most? Deception or tears? But at any rate they could not rob him of his thoughts. They could not make him say where he had been or whom he had seen. That was his own affair. That, indeed, was a step entirely in the right direction. And, lighting his pipe and cutting up the remains of his meal for the benefit of the rook, Ralph calmed his rather excessive irritation and settled down to think over his prospects. This particular afternoon was a step in the right direction, because it was part of his plan to get to know people beyond the family circuit, just as he had his plan to learn German this autumn and to review legal books for Mr. Hilberry's critical review. He had always made plans since he was a small boy, for poverty and the fact that he was the eldest son of a large family, had given him the habit of thinking of spring and summer, autumn and winter, as so many stages in a prolonged campaign. Although he was still under thirty, this forecasting habit had marked two semi-circular lines above his eyebrows, which threatened at this moment to crease into their wanted shapes. But instead of settling down to think, he rose, took a small piece of cardboard marked in large letters with the word out, and hung it upon the handle of his door. This done, he sharpened a pencil, lit a reading lamp, and opened his book. But still he hesitated to take his seat. He scratched the rook, he walked to the window. He parted the curtains and looked down upon the city, which was completely luminous beneath him. He looked across the vapours in the direction of Chelsea, looked fixedly for a moment, and then returned to his chair. But the whole thickness of some learned council's treatise upon torts did not screen him satisfactorily. Through the pages he saw a drawing-room, very empty and spacious. He heard low voices. He saw women's figures. He could even smell the scent of the cedar log which flamed in the grate. His mind relaxed its tension and seemed to be giving out now what it had taken in unconsciously at the time. He could remember Mr. Fortescue's exact words and the rolling emphasis with which he delivered them. And he began to repeat what Mr. Fortescue had said in Mr. Fortescue's own manner about Manchester. His mind then began to wonder about the house, and he wondered whether there were other rooms like the drawing-room. And he thought, inconsequently, how beautiful the bathroom must be and how leisurely it was. The life of these well-kept people who were, no doubt, still sitting in the same room, only they had changed their clothes and little Mr. Anning was there and the aunt who had mined if the glass of her father's picture was broken. Miss Hillberry had changed her dress. Although she's wearing such a pretty one, he heard her mother say, and she was talking to Mr. Anning, who was well over 40 and bawled into the bargain about books. It was peaceful and spacious it was, and the peace possessed him so completely that his muscles slackened, his book drooped from his hand, and he forgot that the hour of work was wasting minute by minute. He was roused by a creek upon the stair. With a guilty start he composed himself, frowned, and looked intently at the 56th page of his volume, a step paused outside his door, and he knew that the person, whoever it might be, was considering and debating whether to honour its decree or not. Certainly, policy advised him to sit still in autocratic silence. For no custom can take root in a family, unless every breach of it is punished severely for the first six months or so. But Ralph was conscious of a distinct wish to be interrupted, and his disappointment was perceptible when he heard the creaking sound rather farther down the stairs as if his visitor had decided to withdraw. He opened the door with unnecessary abruptness and waited on the landing. The person stopped, simultaneously half a flight downstairs. Ralph? said a voice inquiringly. Joan? I was coming up, but I saw your notice. Well, come along in, then. He concealed his desire beneath a tone as grudging as he could make it. Joan came in, but she was careful to show, by standing upright with one hand upon the mantelpiece, that she was only there for a definite purpose, which discharged she would go. She was older than Ralph by some three or four years. Her face was round but worn and expressed that tolerant but anxious good humor, which is the special attribute of elder sisters and large families. Her pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph's save in expression, for whereas he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to be in the habit of considering everything from many different points of view. She told her to appear his elder by more years than existed in fact between them. Her gaze rested for a moment or two upon the rook. Then she said, without any preface, it's about Charles and Uncle John's offer. Mother's been talking to me. She says she can't afford to pay for him after this term. She says she'll have to ask for an overdraft as it is. That's simply not true, said Ralph. No, I thought not, but she won't believe me when I say it. Ralph, as if he could foresee the length of this familiar argument, drew up a chair for his sister and sat down himself. I'm not interrupting, she inquired. Ralph shook his head, and for a time they sat silent. The lines curved themselves in semi-circles above their eyes. She doesn't understand that one's got to take risks, he observed finally. I believe Mother would take risks if she knew that Charles was the sort of boy to profit by it. He said, his tone had taken on that shade of pugnacity that suggested to his sister that some personal grievance drove him to take the line he did. She wondered what it might be, but at once recalled her mind and assented. In some ways he's fearfully backward though, compared with what you were at his age, and he's difficult at home, too. He makes Molly slave for him. Ralph made a sound which belittled this particular argument. It was plain to Joan that she had struck one of her brother's perverse moods, and he was going to oppose whatever his mother said. He called her she, which was a proof of it. She sighed involuntarily, and the sigh annoyed Ralph, and he exclaimed with irritation. It's pretty hard lines to stick a boy into an office at seventeen. Nobody wants to stick him into an office, she said. She, too, was becoming annoyed. She had spent the whole of the afternoon of education and expense with her mother, and she had come to her brother for help, encouraged, rather irrationally, to expect help by the fact that he had been out somewhere she didn't know and didn't mean to ask where all the afternoon. Ralph was fond of his sister and her irritation made him think how unfair it was that all these burdens should be laid upon her shoulders. The truth is, he observed gloomily, that I ought to have accepted Uncle John's offer. I should have been making six hundred a year by this time. I don't think that for a moment, Joan replied quickly, repenting of her annoyance. The question, to my mind, is whether we couldn't cut down our expenses in some way. A smaller house? Fewer servants, perhaps. Neither brother nor sister spoke with much conviction, and after reflecting for a moment what these proposed reforms in a strictly economical household meant, Ralph announced very decidedly. It was out of the question. It was out of the question that she should put any more household work upon herself. No, the hardship was full on him, for he was determined that his family should have as many chances of distinguishing themselves as other families had, as the Hillberries had, for example. He believed secretly and rather defiantly for it was a fact not capable of proof that there was something very remarkable about his family. You really can't expect her to sell out again. She ought to look upon it as an investment, but if she won't, we must find some other way, that's all. A threat was contained in this sentence and Joan knew, without asking what the threat was. In the course of his professional life, which now extended over six or seven years, Ralph had saved perhaps three or four hundred pounds. Considering the sacrifices he had made in order to put by this sum, it always amazed Joan to find that he used it to gamble with, buying shares and selling them again, increasing it sometimes, sometimes diminishing it and always running the risk of losing every penny of it in a day's disaster. But although she wondered, she could not help loving him the better for his odd combination of Spartan self-control and what appeared to her romantic and childish folly. Ralph interested her more than anyone else in the world and she often broke off in the middle of one of these economic discussions in spite of their gravity to consider some fresh aspect of his character. I think you would be foolish to risk your money on poor old Charles, she observed. Fond as I am of him, he doesn't seem to me exactly brilliant. Besides, why should you be sacrificed? My dear Joan, Ralph exclaimed, stretching himself out with a gesture of impatience, don't you see he's sacrificed? What's the use of denying it? What's the use of struggling against it? So it always has been, so it always will be. We've got no money and we shall never have any money. We shall just turn round in the mill every day of our lives till we drop and die, worn out, as most people do when one comes to think of it. Joan looked at him, opened her lips as if to speak and close them again. Then she said, very tentatively, aren't you happy, Ralph? No, are you? Perhaps I'm as happy as most people, though. God knows whether I'm happy or not. What is happiness? He glanced with a half a smile in spite of his gloomy irritation at his sister. She looked, as usual, as if she were weighing one thing with another and balancing them together before she made up her mind. Happiness, she remarked at length enigmatically, rather as if she were sampling the word, and then she paused. She paused for a considerable space considering happiness in all its bearings. Hilda was here today. She suddenly resumed as if they had never mentioned happiness. She brought Bobby. He's a fine boy now. Ralph observed with an amusement that had a tinge of irony in it that she was now going to sidle away quickly from this dangerous approach to intimacy onto topics of general and family interest. Nevertheless, he reflected, she was the only one of his family with whom he found it possible to discuss happiness, although he might very well have discussed happiness with Miss Hillberry at their first meeting. He looked critically at Joan and wished that she did not look so provincial or suburban in her high green dress with the faded trimming, so patient and almost resigned. He began to wish to tell her about the Hillberries in order to abuse them, or in the miniature battle which so often rages between two quickly following impressions of life, of the Hillberries was getting the better of the life of the Denims in his mind, and he wanted to assure himself that there was some quality in which Joan infinitely surpassed Miss Hillberry. He should have felt that his own sister was more original and had greater vitality than Miss Hillberry had, but his main impression of Catherine now was of a person of great vitality and composure, and at the moment he could not perceive that poor dear Joan had gained from the fact that she was the granddaughter of a man who kept a shop and herself earned her own living. The infinite dreariness and sordidness of their life oppressed him in spite of his fundamental belief that as a family they were somehow remarkable. Shall you talk to mother? Joan inquired, because you see, the things got to be settled one way or another. Charles must write to Uncle John if he's going there. Ralph sighed impatiently. I suppose it doesn't matter either way, he's doomed to misery in the long run. A slight flush came into Joan's cheek. You know you're talking nonsense, she said. It doesn't hurt anyone to have to earn their own living. I'm very glad I have to earn mine. Ralph was pleased that she should feel this, and wished her to continue, but he went on perversely enough. Isn't that only because you've forgotten how to enjoy yourself? You never have time for anything decent, as for instance, for music or books, or seeing interesting people, who never do anything that's really worth doing any more than I do. I always think you could make this room much nicer if you liked," she observed. What does it matter what sort of room I have when I'm forced to spend all the best years of my life drawing up deeds in an office? You said two days ago that you found the law so interesting, so it is if one could afford to know anything about it. That's Herbert only just going to bed now, Joan interposed, as a door on the landing slammed vigorously, and then he won't get up in the morning. Ralph looked at the ceiling and shut his lips closely together. Why, he wondered, could Joan never for one moment detach her mind from the details of domestic life? It seemed to him that she was getting more and more enmeshed in them, and capable of shorter and less frequent flights into the outer world, and yet she was only thirty-three. Do you ever pay calls now? He asked abruptly. I don't often have the time. Why do you ask? It might be a good thing to get to know new people, that's all. Poor Ralph, said Joan, suddenly with a smile. You think your sister's getting very old and very dull. That's it, isn't it? I don't think anything of the kind, he said stoutly, but he flushed. But you lead a dog's life, Joan. When you're not working in an office, you're worrying over the rest of us. And I'm not much good to you, I'm afraid. Joan rose and stood for a moment warming her hands, and apparently meditating as to whether she should say anything more or not. A feeling of great intimacy united the brother and sister, and the semicircular lines above their eyebrows disappeared. No, there was nothing more to be said on either side. Joan brushed her brother's head with her hand as she passed him, murmured good night, and left the room. For some moments after she had gone, Ralph lay quiescent resting his head on his hand, but gradually his eyes filled with thought and the line reappeared on his brow as the pleasant impression of companionship and ancient sympathy waned and he was left to think on alone. After a time he opened his book and read it steadily, glancing once or twice at his watch as if he had set himself a task to be accomplished in a certain measure of time. Now and then he heard voices in the house, and the closing of bedroom doors would show the building at the top of which he sat was inhabited in every one of its cells. When midnight struck Ralph shut his book and with a candle in his hand descended to the ground floor to ascertain that all lights were extinct and all doors locked. It was a thread-bear, well-worn house that he thus examined, as if the inmates had grazed down all exurience and plenty to the verge of decency and in the night bereft of life bear places in ancient blemishes were unpleasantly visible. Catherine Hillberry, he thought, would condemn it offhand. End of Chapter 2 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Night and Day by Virginia Woolf Chapter 3 Denim had accused Catherine Hillberry of belonging to one of the most distinguished families in England. And if anyone will take the trouble to consult Mr. Gaulton's hereditary genius he will find that this assertion is not far from the truth. The Allardices, the Hillberries, the Millingtons, and the Otways seem to prove that intellect is a possession which can be tossed from one member of a certain group to another almost indefinitely and with apparent certainty that the brilliant gift will be safely caught and held by nine out of ten of the privileged race. They had been conspicuous judges and admirals, lawyers and servants of the state for some years before the richness of the soil culminated in the rarest flower that any family can boast, a great writer, a poet eminent among the poets of England, a Richard Allardice. Having produced him they produced once more the amazing virtues of their race by proceeding unconcernedly again with their unusual task of breeding distinguished men. They had sailed with Sir John Franklin to the North Pole and ridden with Havlock to the relief of Lucknow. And when they were not lighthouses firmly based on the rock for the guidance of their generation they were steady, serviceable candles illuminating the ordinary chambers of daily life. Whatever profession you looked at there was a warburton or an Allardice, a Millington or a Hillberry somewhere in authority in prominence. It is said indeed that English society being what it is no very great merit is required once you bear a well known name to put you into a position where it is easier on the whole to be eminent than obscure. And if this is true of the sons even the daughters even in the 19th century are apt to become people of importance, philanthropists and educationalists if they are spinsters and the wives of distinguished men if they marry. It is true that there were several lamentable exceptions to this rule in the Allardice group which seems to indicate that the cadets of such houses go more rapidly to the bad than the children of ordinary fathers and mothers as if it were somehow a relief to them. But on the whole in these first years of the 20th century the Allardices and their relations were keeping their heads well above water. One finds them at the tops of professions with letters after their names. They sit in luxurious public offices with private secretaries attached to them. They write solid books in dark covers issued by the presses of the two great universities and when one of them dies the chances are that another of them writes his biography. Now the source of this nobility was of course the poet and his immediate descendants therefore were invested with greater lustre than the collateral branches. Mrs. Hillberry in virtue of her position as the only child of the poet was spiritually the head of the family and Catherine, her daughter had some superior rank among all the cousins and connections the more so because she was an only child. The Allardices had married and intermarried and their offspring were generally profuse and had a way of meeting regularly in each other's houses for meals and family celebrations which had acquired a semi-sacred character and were as regularly observed as days of feasting and fasting in the church. In times gone by, Mrs. Hillberry had known all the poets, all the novelists, all the beautiful women and distinguished men of her time. These being now either dead or secluded in their infirm glory she made her house a meeting place for her own relations to whom she would lament the passing of the great days of the 19th century when every department of letters and art was represented in England by two or three illustrious names. Where are their successors? she would ask and the absence of any poet or painter or novelist of the true caliber at the present day was a text upon which she liked to ruminate in a sunset mood of benignant reminiscence which it would have been hard to disturb had there been need. But she was far from visiting their inferiority upon the younger generation. She welcomed them very hardly to her house told them her stories gave them sovereigns and ices and good advice and we've browned them romances which had generally no likeness to the truth. The quality of her birth oozed into Catherine's consciousness from a dozen different sources as soon as she was able to perceive anything. Above her nursery fireplace hung a photograph of her grandfather's tomb in Poet's corner and she was told in one of those moments of grown-up confidence obviously impressive to the child's mind that he was buried there because he was a good and great man. Later on an anniversary she was taken by her mother through the fog in a handsome cab and given a large bunch of bright sweet scented flowers to lay upon his tomb. The candles in the church the singing and the booming of the organ were all she thought in his honor. Again and again she was brought down into the drawing-room to receive the blessing of an old distinguished old man who sat even to her childish eye somewhat apart all gathered together and clutching a stick unlike an ordinary visitor in her father's own arm chair and her father himself was there unlike himself too a little excited and very polite. These formidable old creatures used to take her in their arms look very keenly in her eyes and then to bless her and tell her that she must mind and be a good girl and take the look in her face something like Richard's as a small boy. That drew down upon her her mother's fervent embrace and she was sent back to the nursery very proud and with a mysterious sense of an important and unexplained state of things which time by degrees unveiled to her. There were always visitors uncles and aunts and cousins from India to be reverenced for their relationship alone and others of the solitary and formidable class and she was enjoined by her parents to remember all your life by these means and from hearing constant talk of great men in their works her earliest conceptions of the world included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the names of Shakespeare Milton, Wordsworth, Shelly and so on who were, for some reason much more nearly akin to the hillberries than to other people they made a kind of boundary of life and played a considerable part in determining her scale of good and bad in her own small affairs. Her descent from one of these gods was no surprise to her but matter for satisfaction until, as the years were 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 Catherine had her moments of despondency the glorious past in which men and women grew to unexampled size intruded too much upon the present and dwarfed it too consistently to be altogether encouraging to one force to make her experiment in living when the great age was dead she was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural in the first place owing to her mother's absorption in them and in the second because a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the dead since she was helping her mother to produce a life of the great poet. When Catherine was 17 or 18 that is to say some 10 years ago her mother had enthusiastically announced that now with a daughter to help her the biography would soon be published. Notices to this effect found their way into the literary papers and for some time Catherine worked with a sense of great pride and achievement. Lately however it had seemed to her that they were making no way at all and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghost of the contemporary temperament could doubt but that they had materials for one of the greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelves and boxes bulged with the precious stuff the most private lives of the most interesting people they furled in yellow bundles of close written manuscript. In addition to this Mrs. Hilbury had in her own head as bright a vision of that time as now remained to the living and could give those flashes and thrills to the old words which gave them a substance of flesh. She had no difficulty in writing and covered a page every morning as instinctively as a thrush sings but nevertheless with all this to urge and inspire and the most devout intention to accomplish the work the book still remained unwritten. Papers accumulated without much furthering their task and in dull moments Catherine had her doubts whether they would ever produce anything at all fit to lay before the public. Where did the difficulty lie? Not in their materials, alas nor in their ambitions but in something more profound in her own inaptitude and above all in her mother's temperament. Catherine would calculate that she had never known her to write for more than ten minutes at a time. Ideas came to her chiefly when she was in motion. She liked to perambulate the room with a duster in her hand with which she stopped to polish the backs of already lustrous books using and romancing as she did so. Suddenly the right phrase or the penetrating point of view would suggest itself and she would drop her duster and write ecstatically for a few breathless moments and then the mood would pass away and the duster would be sought for and the old books polished again. These spells of inspiration never burnt steadily but flickered over the gigantic mass of the subject as capriciously as the will of the wisp point now on that. It was as much as Catherine could do to keep the pages of her mother's manuscript in order but to sort them so that the sixteenth year of Richard Allardyce's life succeeded the fifteenth was beyond her skill and yet they were so brilliant these paragraphs. So nobly phrased, so lightning-like in their illumination that the dead seemed to crowd the very room. Read continuously they produced a sort of vertigo asking herself in despair what on earth was she to do with them. Her mother refused also to face the radical questions of what to leave in and what to leave out. She could not decide how far the public was to be told the truth about the poet's separation from his wife. She drafted passages to suit either case and then liked each so well that she could not decide upon the rejection of either. But the book must be written. It was a duty that they owed the world and to Catherine, at least, it meant more than that. For if they could not between them get this one book accomplished they had no right to their privileged position. Their increment became yearly more and more unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that her grandfather was a very great man. By the time she was twenty-seven these thoughts had become very familiar to her. They trod their way through her mind as she sat opposite her mother in the morning at a table heaped with bundles of old letters and well supplied with pencils, scissors, bottles of gum, indie rubber bands, large envelopes and other appliances for the manufacture of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham's visit Catherine had resolved to try the effect of strict rules upon her mother's habits of literary composition. They were to be seated at their tables every morning at ten o'clock with a clean swept morning of empty hours before them. They were to keep their eyes fast upon the paper and nothing was to tempt them to speech, safe at the stroke of the hour when ten minutes for relaxation were to be allowed them. If these rules were observed for a year she made out on a sheet of paper that the completion of the book was certain and she laid her scheme before her mother with a feeling that much of the task was already accomplished. Mrs. Hilberry examined the sheet of paper very carefully then she clapped her hands and exclaimed enthusiastically well done Catherine what a wonderful head for business you've got now I shall keep this before me and every day I shall make a little mark in my pocketbook and on the last day of all let me think what shall we do to celebrate the last day of all if it weren't the winter we could take a jaunt to Italy they say Switzerland's very lovely in the snow except for the cold today the great thing is to finish the book now let me see when they inspected her manuscripts which Catherine had put in order they found a state of things well calculated to dash their spirits if they had not just resolved on reform they found, to begin with a great variety of very imposing paragraphs with which the biography was to open many of these it is true were unfinished and resembled triumphal arches standing upon one leg but as Mrs. Hilbury observed they could be patched up in ten minutes if she gave her mind to it next there was an account of the ancient home of the Allardises or rather of spring and Suffolk which was very beautifully written although not essential to the story however Catherine had put together a string of names and dates so that the poet was capably brought into the world and his ninth year was reached without further mishap after that Mrs. Hilbury wished for sentimental reasons to introduce the recollections of a very fluent old lady who had been brought up in the same village but these Catherine decided must go it might be advisable to introduce here a sketch of contemporary poetry contributed by Mr. Hilbury and thus terse and learned and altogether out of keeping with the rest but Mrs. Hilbury was of the opinion that it was too bare and made one feel altogether like a good little girl in a lecture room which was not at all in keeping with her father it was put on one side now came a period of his early manhood when various affairs of the heart must either be concealed or revealed here again Mrs. Hilbury was of two minds and a thick packet of manuscript was shelved for further consideration several years were now altogether omitted because Mrs. Hilbury had found something distasteful to her in that period as well upon her own recollections as a child after this it seemed to Catherine that the book became a wild dance of willow the wisps without form or continuity without coherence even or any attempt to make a narrative here were twenty pages upon her grandfather's taste in hats an essay upon contemporary china a long account of a summer days expedition into the country when they had missed their train together with fragmentary visions of the famous men and women which seemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic there were, moreover thousands of letters and a mass of faithful recollections contributed by old friends which had grown yellow now in their envelopes but must be placed somewhere or their feelings would be hurt so many volumes had been written about the poet since his death that she had also to dispose of a great number of misstatements which involved words and much correspondence sometimes Catherine brooded half crushed among her papers sometimes she felt that it was necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the past at others that the past had completely displaced the present which when one resumed life after a morning among the dead proved to be of an utterly thin and inferior composition the worst of it was that she had no aptitude for literature and did not like phrases she had even some natural antipathy to that process of self-examination that perpetual effort to understand one's own feeling and express it beautifully, fitly or energetically in language which constituted so great a part of her mother's existence she was on the contrary inclined to be silent she shrank from expressing herself even in talk let alone in writing as this disposition was highly convenient in a family much given to the manufacture of phrases and seemed to argue a corresponding capacity for action she was from her childhood even put in charge of household affairs she had the reputation which nothing in her manner contradicted of being the most practical of people 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. Hilbury 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. Hilbury 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 her watch for example was a constant source of surprise to her and at the age of 65 she was still amazed at the ascendancy which rules and reasons exerted over the lives of other people she had never learned her lesson and had constantly to be punished for her ignorance but as that ignorance was combined with a fine natural insight which saw deep whenever it at all it was not possible to write Mrs. Hilbury off among the dunces on the contrary she had a way of seeming the wisest person in the room but on the whole she found it very necessary to seek support in her daughter Catherine 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 and Cheyenne 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 own perhaps it was the chief triumph of Catherine's art that Mrs. Hilbury's character predominated she and Mr. Hilbury appeared to be a rich background for her mother's more striking qualities silence being thus both natural to her and imposed upon her the only other remark that her mother's friends were in the habit of making about it was that it was neither a stupid silence nor an indifferent silence but to what quality it owed its character since character of some sort it had no one troubled themselves to inquire it was understood that she was helping her mother to produce a great book she was known to manage the household she was certainly beautiful that accounted for her satisfactorily but it would have been a surprise not only to other people but to Catherine herself if some magic watch could have taken count of the moment spent in an entirely different occupation from her a sensible one sitting with faded papers before her she took part in a series of scenes such as the taming of wild ponies upon the American prairies or the conduct of a vast ship in a hurricane around a black promontory of rock or in others more peaceful but marked by her complete emancipation from her present surroundings and needless to say by her surpassing ability in her new vocation when she was rid of the pretence of paper and pen phrase making and biography she turned her attention in a more legitimate direction though strangely enough she would rather have confessed her wildest dreams of hurricane and prairie than the fact that upstairs alone in her room she rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to work at mathematics no force on earth would have made her confess that her actions when thus engaged were furtive and secretive like those of some nocturnal animal steps had only to sound on the staircase and she slipped her paper between the leaves of a great Greek dictionary which she had perloined from her father's room for this purpose it was only at night indeed that she felt secure enough from surprise to concentrate her mind to the utmost perhaps the unwombly nature of the science made her instinctively wish to conceal her love of it but the more profound reason was that in her mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature she would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude and star-like impersonality of figures to the confusion, agitation and vagueness of the finest prose there was something a little unseemly in thus opposing the tradition of her family something that made her feel wrong-headed and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away from view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness again and again she was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinking of her grandfather waking from these trances she would see that her mother too had lapsed into some dream almost as visionary as her own for the people who played their parts in it had long been numbered among the dead but seeing her own state mirrored in her mother's face Catherine would shake herself awake with a sense of irritation her mother was the last person she wished to resemble much though she admired her her common sense would assert itself almost brutally and Mrs. Hilberry looking at her with her odd side-long glance that was half malicious and half tender would liken her to your wicked old uncle Judge Peter who used to be her delivering sentence of death in the bathroom thank heaven Catherine I've not a drop of him in me End of Chapter 3 This is a LibriVox recording while LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information please visit LibriVox.org Night and Day Chapter 4 At about nine o'clock at night on every alternate Wednesday Miss Mary Datchett made the same resolve that she would never again lend her rooms for any purposes whatsoever being as they were rather large and conveniently situated in a street mostly dedicated to offices off the strand people who wished to meet either for purposes of enjoyment or to discuss art or to reform the state had a way of suggesting that Mary had better be asked to lend them her rooms She always met the request with the same frown of well simulated annoyance which presently dissolved into a kind of half humorous, half surly shrug as of a large dog tormented by children who shakes his ears She would lend her room but only unconditioned that all the arrangements were made by her This fortnightly meeting of a society for the free discussion of everything entailed a great deal of moving and pulling and ranging of furniture against the wall and placing of breakable and precious things in safe places Miss Datchett was quite capable of lifting a kitchen table on her back if need were for although well proportioned and dressed becomingly she had the appearance of unusual strength and determination She was some 25 years of age but looked older because she earned or intended to earn her own living and had already lost the look of the irresponsible spectator and taken on that of the private in the army of workers Her gestures seemed to have a certain purpose the muscles round eyes and lips were set rather firmly as though the senses had undergone some discipline and were held ready for a call on them She had contracted two faint lines between her eyebrows not from anxiety but from thought and it was quite evident that all the feminine instincts of pleasing and charming were crossed by others in no way peculiar to her sex For the rest she was brown-eyed, a little clumsy in movement and suggested country births and a descent from respectable hard-working ancestors who had been men of faith and integrity rather than doubters or fanatics At the end of a fairly hard day's work it was certainly something of an effort to clear one's room to pull the mattress off one's bed and lay it on the floor to fill a picture with cold coffee and to sweep a long table clear for plates and cups and saucers with pyramids of little pink biscuits between them But when these alterations were effected, Mary felt a lightness of spirit come to her as if she had put off the stout stuff of her working hours and slipped over her entire being some vesture of thin bright silk She knelt before the fire and looked out into the room The light fell softly but with clear radiance the shades of yellow and blue paper and the room which was set with one or two sofas resembling grassy bounds in their lack of shape looked unusually large and quiet Mary was led to think of the heights of a Sussex Down and the swelling green circle of some camp of ancient warriors The moonlight would be falling there so peacefully now and she could fancy the rough pathway of silver upon the wrinkled skin of the sea And here we are, she said half loud, half satirically yet with evident pride talking about art She pulled a basket containing balls of differently colored wools and a pair of stockings which needed darning towards her and began to set her fingers to work while her mind reflecting the lassitude of her body went on perversely conjuring up visions of solitude and quiet and she pictured herself laying aside her knitting and walking out onto the down clearing nothing but the sheep cropping the grass close to the roots while the shadows of the little trees move very slightly this way and that in the moonlight as the breeze went through them but she was perfectly conscious of her present situation and derived some pleasure from the reflection that she could rejoice equally in solitude and in the presence of the many very different people who were now making their way by diverse paths across London As she ran her needle in and out of the wool she thought of the various stages in her own life which made her present position seem the culmination of successive miracles She thought of her clerical father in his country parsonage and of her mother's death and of her own determination to obtain education and of her college life which had merged not so very long ago in the wonderful maze of London which still seemed to her in spite of her constitutional level of preparedness like a vast electric light casting radiance upon the myriads of men and women who crowded round it and here she was at the very centre of it all that centre which was constantly in the minds of people in remote Canadian forests and on the plains of India when their thoughts turned to England the nine mellow strokes by which she was now apprised of the hour were a message from the great clock at Westminster itself As the last of them died away there was a firm knocking on her own door and she rose and opened it she returned to the room with a look of steady pleasure in her eyes and she was talking to Ralph Denham who followed her Alone he asked as if he were pleasantly surprised by that fact I am sometimes alone she replied but you expect a great many people he added looking round him it's like a room on the stage who is it tonight? he said Ralph formed his hands at the fire which was flapping bravely in the grate while Mary took up her stocking again I suppose you are the only woman in London who darned her own stockings he observed I'm only one of a great many thousands really she replied though I must admit that I was thinking myself very remarkable when you came in and now that you're here I don't think myself remarkable at all how hard of you but I'm afraid you're much more remarkable than I am you've done much more than I've done if that's your standard you've nothing to be proud of said Ralph grimly well I must reflect with Emerson that it's being and not doing that matters she continued Emerson Ralph exclaimed with derision you don't mean to say you read Emerson perhaps it wasn't Emerson she asked with a tinge of anxiety there's no reason that I know of it's the combination that's odd books and stockings the combination is very odd but it seemed to recommend itself to him Mary gave a little laugh expressive of happiness and the particular stitches that she was now putting into her work appeared to her to be done with singular grace and felicity she held out the stocking and looked at it approvingly you always say that she said I assure you it's a common combination as you call it in the houses of the clergy the only thing that's odd about me is that I enjoy them both Emerson and the stocking a knock was heard and Ralph exclaimed damn those people I wish they weren't coming it's only Mr. Turner on the floor below said Mary and she felt grateful to Mr. Turner for having alarmed Ralph and for having given a false alarm will there be a crowd after a pause there'll be the Marces and the Crashaws and Dick Osborn and Septimus and all that set Catherine Hilbury is coming by the way so William Rodney told me Catherine Hilbury Ralph exclaimed you know her Mary asked with some surprise I went to a tea party at her house Mary pressed him to tell her all about it and Ralph was not at all unwilling to exhibit proofs of the extent of his knowledge he described the scene with certain additions and exaggerations which interested Mary very much but in spite of what you say I do admire her she said I've only seen her once or twice but she seems to me to be what one calls a personality I didn't mean to abuse her I only felt that she wasn't very sympathetic to me they say she's going to marry that queer creature Rodney Mary Rodney then she must be more deluded than I thought her now that's my door all right Mary exclaimed carefully putting her walls away as a succession of knocks reverberated unnecessarily accompanied by a sound of people stamping their feet and laughing a moment later the room was full of young men and women who came in with a peculiar look of expectation exclaimed oh when they saw it dead him and then stood still gaping rather foolishly the room very soon contained between 20 and 30 people they were all young and some of them seemed to make a protest by their hair and dress and something somber and truculent in the expression of their faces against the more normal type who would have passed unnoticed in an omnibus or an underground railway it was notable that the talk was confined to groups and was at first entirely spasmodic in character and muttered in undertones as if the speakers were suspicious of their appearance Catherine Hilbury came in rather late and took up a position on the floor with her back against the wall she looked round quickly recognized about a half a dozen people to whom she nodded but failed to see Ralph or, if so had already forgotten to attach any name to him but in a second these heterogeneous elements were all united by the voice of Mr. Rodney who suddenly strode up to the table and began very rapidly in high-strain tones in undertaking to speak of the Elizabethan use of metaphor in poetry all the different heads swung slightly or studied themselves into a position in which they could gaze straight at the speakers face and the same rather solemn expression was visible on all of them but at the same time even the faces that were most exposed to view and therefore most thoughtly under control disclosed a sudden impulsive tremor which, unless directly checked would have developed into an outburst of laughter the first sight of Mr. Rodney was irresistibly ludicrous he was very red in the face whether from the cool November night or nervousness and every movement from the way he wrung his hands to the way he jerked his head right and left as though a vision drew him now to the door, now to the window bespoke his horrible discomfort in the hair of so many eyes he was scrupulously well dressed and a pearl in the center of his tie seemed to give him a touch of aristocratic opulence but the rather prominent eyes and the impulsive stammering manner which seemed to indicate a torrent of ideas intermittently pressing for utterance and always checked in their course by a clutch of nervousness drew no pity as in the case of a more imposing personage but a desire to laugh however entirely lacking in malice Mr. Rodney was evidently so painfully conscious of the oddity of his appearance and his very redness and the starch to which his body was liable gave such proof of his own discomfort that there was something endearing in this ridiculous susceptibility although most people would probably have echoed Denham's private exclamation fancy marrying a creature like that his paper was carefully written out but in spite of this precaution Mr. Rodney managed to turn over two sheets instead of one to choose the wrong sentence where two were written together and to discover his own handwriting suddenly illegible when he found himself possessed of a coherent passage he shook it at his audience almost aggressively and then fumbled for another after a distressing search a fresh discovery would be made and produced in the same way until by means of repeated attacks he stirred his audience to a degree of animation quite remarkable in these gatherings whether they were stirred by his enthusiasm for poetry or by the contortions which a human being was going through for their benefit it would be hard to say at length Mr. Rodney sat down impulsively in the middle of a sentence and after a pause of bewilderment the audience expressed its relief at being able to laugh aloud in a decided outburst of applause Mr. Rodney acknowledged this with a wild glance round him and instead of waiting to answer questions he jumped up, thrust himself through the seated bodies into the corner where Catherine was sitting and exclaimed very audibly well Catherine I hope I've made a big enough fool of myself even for you it was terrible, terrible, terrible hush you must answer their questions Catherine whispered, desiring at all costs to keep him quiet oddly enough when the speaker was no longer in front of them it seemed to be much that was suggestive in what he had said at any rate a pale-faced young man with sad eyes was already on his feet delivering an accurately worded speech with perfect composure William Rodney listened with a curious lifting of his upper lip although his face was still quivering slightly with emotion he whispered he's misunderstood every word I said well then answer him Catherine whispered back it only laughed at me why did I let you persuade me that these sort of people care for literature he continued there was much to be said both for and against Mr Rodney's paper it had been crammed with assertions that such and such passages taken liberally from English, French and Italian are the supreme pearls of literature further he was fond of using metaphors which compounded in the study were apt to sound either cramped or out of place as he delivered them in fragments literature was a fresh garland of spring flowers he said in which you berries and the purple nightshade mingled with the various tints of the anemone and somehow or other this garland encircled marble brows he had read very badly some very beautiful quotations but through his manner and his confusion of language there had emerged some passion of feeling which as he spoke formed in the majority of the audience a little picture or an idea which each was now eager to give expression to most of the people there proposed to spend their lives in the practice either of writing or painting and merely by looking at them it could be seen that as they listened to Mr Purvis first and then to Mr Greenhog they were seeing something done by these gentlemen to a possession which they thought to be their own one person after another rose and as with an ill balanced acts attempted to hue out his conception of art a little more clearly and sat down with the feeling that for some reason which he could not grasp his strokes had gone awry as they sat down they turned almost invariably to the person sitting next to them and rectified and continued what they had just said in public before long therefore the groups on the mattresses and the groups on the chairs were all in communication with each other and Mary Dashett who had begun to darn stockings again stooped down and remarked to Ralph that was what I call a first rate paper both of them instinctively turned their eyes in the direction of the reader of the paper he was lying back against the wall with his eyes apparently shut and his chin sunk upon his collar Catherine was turning over the pages of his manuscript as if she were looking for some passage that had particularly struck her and had a difficulty in finding it let's go and tell him how much we liked it said Mary thus suggesting an action which Ralph was anxious to take though without her he would have been too proud to do it for he suspected that he had more interest in Catherine than she had in him that was a very interesting paper Mary began without any shyness seating herself on the floor opposite to Rodney and Catherine will you lend me the manuscript to read in peace Rodney who had opened his eyes on their approach regarded her for a moment in suspicious silence do you say that merely to disguise the fact of my ridiculous failure he asked Catherine looked up from her reading with a smile he says he doesn't mind what we think of him she remarked he says we don't care a wrap for art of any kind I asked her to pity me and she teases me Rodney exclaimed I don't intend to pity you Mr. Rodney Mary remarked kindly but firmly when a paper's a failure nobody says anything whereas now just listen to them the sound which filled the room with its hurry of short syllables its sudden pauses and its sudden attacks might be compared to some animal hubbub frantic and inarticulate do you think that's all about my paper Rodney inquired after a moment's attention with a distinct brightening of expression of course it is said Mary it was a very suggestive paper she turned to denim for confirmation and corroborated her it's the ten minutes after a paper is read that proves whether it's been a success or not he said if I were you Rodney I should be very pleased with myself this commendation seemed to comfort Mr. Rodney completely and he began to rethink him of all the passages in his paper which deserved to be called suggestive did you agree at all denim with what I said about Shakespeare's later use of imagery I'm afraid I didn't altogether make my meaning plain here he gathered himself together and by means of a series of frog-like jerks succeeded in bringing himself close to denim denim answered him with a brevity which is the result of having another sentence in the mind to be addressed to another person he wished to say to Catherine did you remember to get that picture glazed before your aunt came to dinner but besides having to answer Rodney he was not sure that the remark with its assertion of intimacy would not strike Catherine as impertinent she was listening to what someone in another group was saying Rodney meanwhile was talking about the Elizabethan dramatis he was a curious looking man since upon first sight especially if he chanced to be talking with animation he appeared in some way ridiculous but next moment in repose his face with its large nose thin cheeks and lips expressing the utmost sensibility somehow recalled a Roman head bound with laurel cut upon a circle of semi-transparent reddish stone it had dignity and character by profession a clerk in a government office he was one of those marred spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation not content to rest in their love of it they must attempt to practice it themselves and they are generally endowed with very little facility in composition they condemn whatever they produce moreover the violence of their feelings is such that they seldom meet with adequate sympathy and being rendered very sensitive by their cultivated perceptions suffer constant slights both to their own persons and to the thing they worship but Rodney could never resist making trial of the sympathies of anyone who seemed favorably disposed and Denim's praise had stimulated his very susceptible vanity you remember the passage just before the death of the Duchess he continued edging still closer to Denim and adjusting his elbow and knee in an incredibly angular combination here Catherine who had been cut off by these maneuvers from all communication with the outer world rose and ceded herself upon the windowsill where she was joined by Mary Datchett the two young women could thus survey the whole party Denim looked after them and made as if he were tearing handfuls of grass up by the roots from the carpet but as it fell in accurately with his conception of life that all one's desires were bound to be frustrated he concentrated his mind upon literature and determined philosophically to get what he could out of that Catherine was pleasantly excited a variety of courses was open to her she knew several people slightly and at any moment one of them might rise from the floor and come and speak to her on the other hand she might select somebody for herself or she might strike into Rodney's discourse to which she was intermittently attentive she was conscious of Mary's body beside her but at the same time the consciousness of being both of them women made it unnecessary to speak to her but Mary feeling as she had said that Catherine was a personality wished so much to speak to her that in a few moments she did they're exactly like a flock of sheep aren't they she said referring to the noise that rose from the scattered bodies beneath her Catherine turned and smiled I wonder what they're making such a noise about she said the Elizabethans I suppose no I don't think it's got anything to do with the Elizabethans there didn't you hear them say insurance bill I wonder why men always talk about politics Mary speculated I suppose if we had votes we should too I dare say we should and you spend your life in getting us votes don't you I do said Mary from ten to six every day I'm at it Catherine looked at Ralph Denham who was now pounding his way through the metaphysics of metaphor with Rodney and was reminded of his talk that Sunday afternoon she connected him vaguely with Mary I suppose you're one of the people who think we should all have professions she said rather distantly as if feeling her way among the phantoms of an unknown world oh dear no said Mary at once well I think I do Catherine continued with half a sigh you will always be able to say that you've done something whereas in a crowd like this I feel rather melancholy in a crowd why in a crowd Mary asked deepening the two lines between her eyes and hoisting herself nearer to Catherine upon the windowsill don't you see how many different things these people care about and I want to beat them down I only mean, she corrected herself that I want to assert myself and it's difficult if one hasn't a profession Mary smiled thinking that to beat people down was a process that should present no difficulty to Miss Catherine Hillberry they knew each other so slightly that the beginning of intimacy which Catherine seemed to initiate by talking about herself had something solemn in it and they were silent as if to decide whether to proceed or not but I want to trample upon their prostrate bodies Catherine announced a moment later with a laugh as if at the train of thought which had led her to this conclusion one doesn't necessarily trample upon people's bodies because one runs an office Mary remarked no perhaps not Catherine replied the conversation lapsed and Mary saw Catherine looking out into the room rather moodily with closed lips the desire to talk about herself or to initiate a friendship having apparently left her Mary was struck by her capacity for being thus easily silent and occupied with her own thoughts it was a habit that spoke of loneliness and a mind thinking for itself when Catherine remained silent Mary was slightly embarrassed yes, they're very like sheep she replied foolishly and yet they are very clever at least Catherine added I suppose they have all read Webster surely you don't think that a proof of cleverness I've read Webster I've read Ben Johnson but I don't think myself clever not exactly at least I think you must be very clever Catherine observed why, because I run an office I wasn't thinking of that I was thinking how you live alone in this room and have parties Mary reflected for a second 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, I haven't any sisters you are writing a life of your grandfather Mary pursued Catherine seemed instantly to be confronted by some familiar thought from which she wished to escape she replied, yes I'm helping my mother in such a way that Mary felt herself baffled into the position in which she had been at the beginning of their talk it seemed to her that Catherine possessed a curious power of drawing near and receding, which sent alternate emotions through her far more quickly than was usual and kept her in a condition of curious alertness desiring to classify her Mary bethought her of the convenient term egoist she's an egoist, she said to herself and stored that word up to give to Ralph one day when as it would certainly fall out they were discussing Miss Hilbury Heavens, what a mess there'll be tomorrow morning Catherine exclaimed I hope you don't sleep in this room Miss Dashit Mary laughed what are you laughing at Catherine demanded I won't tell you let me guess, you were laughing because you thought I changed the conversation no because you think she paused if you want to know I was laughing at the way you said Miss Dashit Mary then, Mary, Mary, Mary so saying Catherine drew back the curtain in order perhaps to conceal the momentary flush of pleasure which is caused by coming perceptibly nearer to another person Mary Dashit said Mary it's not such an imposing name as Catherine Hilbury, I'm afraid they both looked out of the window first up at the hard silver moon stationary among a hurry of little gray blue clouds and then down upon the roofs of London with all their upright chimneys and then below them at the empty moonlit pavement of the street upon which the joint of each paving-stone was clearly marked out Mary then saw Catherine raise her eyes again to the moon with a contemplative look in them as though she were setting that moon against the moon of other nights held in memory someone in the room behind them made a joke about stargazing which destroyed their pleasure in it and they looked back into the room again Ralph had been watching for this moment and he instantly produced his sentence I wonder Miss Hilbury whether you remembered to get that picture glazed his voice showed that the question was one that had been prepared oh you idiot Mary exclaimed very nearly allowed with a sense that Ralph had said something very stupid so after three lessons in Latin grammar one might correct a fellow student whose knowledge did not embrace the ablative of Mensa picture what picture Catherine asked oh at home you mean that Sunday afternoon was it the day Mr. Fortescue came yes I think I remembered it the three of them stood for a moment awkwardly silent and then Mary left them in order to see that the great picture of coffee was properly handled for beneath all her education she preserved the anxieties of one who owns China Ralph could think of nothing further to say but could one have stripped off his mask of flesh one would have seen that his willpower was rigidly set upon a single object that Miss Hilbury should obey him he wished her to stay there until by some measures not yet apparent to him he had conquered her interest these states of mind transmit themselves very often without the use of language and it was evident to Catherine that this young man had fixed his mind upon her she instantly recalled her first impressions of him and saw herself again proffering family relics she reverted to the state of mind in which he had left her that Sunday afternoon she supposed that he judged her very severely she argued naturally that if this were the case the burden of the conversation should rest with him but she submitted so far as to stand perfectly still her eyes upon the opposite wall and her lips very nearly closed though the desire to laugh stirred them slightly you know the names of the stars I suppose and from the tone of his voice one might have thought that he grudged Catherine the knowledge he attributed to her she kept her voice steady with some difficulty I know how to find the pole star if I'm lost I don't suppose that often happens to you no nothing interesting ever happens to me she said I think you make a system of saying disagreeable things Miss Hilbury he broke out again going further than he meant to I suppose it's one of the characteristics of your class they never talk seriously to their inferiors whether it was that they were meeting on neutral ground tonight or whether the carelessness of an old grey coat that denim wore gave an ease to his bearing that he lacked in conventional dress Catherine certainly felt no impulse to consider him outside the particular set in which she lived in what sense are you my inferior she asked looking at him gravely as though honestly searching for his meaning the look gave him great pleasure for the first time he felt himself on perfectly equal terms with a woman whom he wished to think well of him although he could not have explained why her opinion of him mattered one way or another perhaps after all he only wanted to have something of her to take home to think about but he was not destined to profit by his advantage I don't think I understand what you mean Catherine repeated and then she was obliged to stop and answer someone who wished to know whether she would buy a ticket for an opera from them at a reduction indeed the temper of the meeting was now unfavorable to separate conversation it had become rather debauched and hilarious and people who scarcely knew each other were making use of Christian names with apparent cordiality and had reached that kind of gay intolerance and general friendliness which human beings in England only attain after sitting together for three hours or so and the first cold blast in the air of the street freezes them into isolation once more cloaks were being flung round the shoulders hats swiftly pinned to the head and then him had the mortification of seeing Catherine help to prepare herself by the ridiculous Rodney it was not the convention of the meeting to say goodbye or necessarily even to nod to the person with whom one was talking but nevertheless then him was disappointed by the completeness with which Catherine parted from him without any attempt to finish her sentence she left with Rodney End of Chapter 4