 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Night and Day by Virginia Woolf. CHAPTER V. Denim had no conscious intention of following Catherine, but, seeing her depart, he took his hat and ran rather more quickly down the stairs than he would have done if Catherine had not been in front of him. He overtook a friend of his by name Harry Sandeis who was going the same way, and they walked together a few paces behind Catherine and Rodney. The night was very still, and on such nights, when the traffic thins away, the walker becomes conscious of the moon in the street, as if the curtains of the sky had been drawn apart and the heaven lay bare as it does in the country. The air was softly cool, so that people who had been sitting talking in a crowd found it pleasant to walk a little before deciding to stop an omnibus or encounter light again in an underground railway. Sandeis, who was a barrister with a philosophic tendency, took out his pipe, lit it, murmured, hum, and ha, and was silent. The couple in front of them kept their distance accurately and appeared, so far as Denim could judge by the way they turned towards each other, to be talking very constantly. He observed that when a pedestrian going the opposite way forced them to part, they came together again directly afterwards. Without intending to watch them, he never quite lost sight of the yellow scarf twisted round Catherine's head, or the light overcoat which made Rodney look fashionable among the crowd. At the strand he supposed that they would separate, but instead they crossed the road and took their way down one of the narrow passages which led through ancient courts to the river. Among the crowd of people in the big thoroughfares, Rodney seemed merely to be lending Catherine his escort, but now, when passengers were rare and the footsteps of the couple were distinctly heard in the silence, Denim could not help picturing to himself some change in their conversation. The effect of the light and shadow which seemed to increase their height was to make them mysterious and significant, so that Denim had no feeling of irritation with Catherine, but rather a half-dreamy acquiescence in the course of the world. Yes, she did very well to dream about, but Sandeis had suddenly begun to talk. He was a solitary man who had made his friends at college and always addressed them as if they were still undergraduates arguing in his room, though many months or even years had passed in some cases between the last sentence and the present one. The method was a little singular, but very restful, for it seemed to ignore completely all accidents of human life and to span very deep abysses with a few simple words. On this occasion, he began, while they waited for a minute on the edge of the strand, I hear that Bennett has given up his theory of truth. Denim returned a suitable answer, and he proceeded to explain how this decision had been arrived at and what changes it involved in the philosophy which they both accepted. Meanwhile, Catherine and Rodney drew further ahead, and Denim kept, if that is the right expression for an involuntary action, one filament of his mind upon them. While with the rest of his intelligence, he sought to understand what Sandeis was saying. As they passed through the courts, thus talking, Sandeis laid the tip of his stick upon one of the stones, forming a time-worn arch, and struck it meditatively two or three times in order to illustrate something very obscure about the complex nature of one's apprehension of facts. During the pause which this necessitated, Catherine and Rodney turned the corner and disappeared. For a moment Denim stopped involuntarily in his sentence, and continued it with a sense of having lost something. Unconscious that they were observed, Catherine and Rodney had come out on the embankment. When they had crossed the road, Rodney slapped his hand upon the stone parapet above the river and exclaimed, I promise I won't say another word about it, Catherine, but do stop a minute and look at the moon upon the water. Catherine paused, looked up and down the river and snuffed the air. I'm sure one can smell the sea with the wind blowing this way, she said. They stood silent for a few moments while the river shifted in its bed, and the silver and red lights which were laid upon it were torn by the current and joined together again. Very far off up the river a steamer hooded with its hollow voice of unspeakable melancholy, as if from the heart of lonely, mist- shrouded voyagings. Ah! Rodney cried, striking his hand once more upon the balustrade. Why can't one say how beautiful it all is? Why am I condemned forever, Catherine, to feel what I can't express? And the things I can give, there's no use in my giving. Trust me, Catherine, he added hastily. I won't speak of it again. But in the presence of beauty, look at the iridescence round the moon. One feels—one feels—perhaps have you married me? I'm half a poet, you see, and I can't pretend not to feel what I do feel. If I could write, ah, that would be another matter. I shouldn't bother you to marry me, then, Catherine. He spoke these disconnected sentences rather abruptly, with his eyes alternately upon the moon and upon the stream. But for me, I suppose, you would recommend marriage? said Catherine, with her eyes fixed on the moon. Certainly I should. Not for you only, but for all women. While you're nothing at all without it, you're only half alive, only half your faculties. You must feel that for yourself. That is why, here he stopped himself. And they began to walk slowly along the embankment, the moon fronting them. With how sad steps she climbs the sky! How silently and with how wan a face! Rodney quoted, I've been told a great many unpleasant things about myself to-night, Catherine stated, without attending to him. Mr. Denham seems to think it is his mission to lecture me, though I hardly know him. By the way, William, you know him. Tell me, what is he like? William drew a deep sigh. We may lecture you until we're blue in the face. Yes, but what's he like? And we write sonnets to your eyebrows, you cruel, practical creature. Denham? he added, as Catherine remained silent. A good fellow, I should think. He cares naturally for the right sort of things, I expect. But you mustn't marry him, though. He scolded you, did he? What did he say? What happens with Mr. Denham is this. He comes to tea. I do all I can to put him at his ease. He merely sits and scowls at me. Then I show him our manuscripts. At this he becomes really angry, and tells me I've no business to call myself a middle-class woman. So we part in a huff. And next time we meet, which was to-night, he walks straight up to me and says, go to the devil! That's the sort of behavior my mother complains of. I want to know. What does it mean? She paused, and slackening her steps, looked at the lighted train, drawing itself smoothly over Hungerford Bridge. It means, I should say, that he finds you chilly and unsympathetic. Catherine laughed with round, separate notes of genuine amusement. It's time I jumped into a cab and hid myself in my own house, she exclaimed. Would your mother object to my being seen with you? No one could possibly recognize us, could they? Rodney inquired with some solicitude. Catherine looked at him, and perceiving that his solicitude was genuine, she laughed again, but with an ironical note in her laughter. You may laugh, Catherine, but I can tell you, that if any of your friends saw us together at this time of night, they would talk about it, and I should find that very disagreeable. But why do you laugh? I don't know. Because you're such a clear mixture, I think. You're half-poet and half-old maid. I know, I always seem to you highly ridiculous, but I can't help having inherited certain traditions and trying to put them into practice. Nonsense, William, you may come of the oldest family in Devonshire, but that's no reason why you should mind being seen alone with me on the embankment. I'm ten years older than you are, Catherine, and I know more of the world than you do. Very well, leave me and go home. Rodney looked back over his shoulder and perceived that they were being followed at a short distance by a taxi cab, which evidently awaited his summons. Catherine saw it too and exclaimed, Don't call that cab for me, William. I shall walk. Nonsense, Catherine, you'll do nothing of the kind. It's nearly twelve o'clock, and we've walked too far as it is. Catherine laughed and walked on so quickly that both Rodney and the taxi cab had to increase their pace to keep up with her. Now, William, she said, if people see me racing along the embankment like this, they will talk. You had far better say goodnight if you don't want people to talk. At this, William Beckon was a despotic gesture to the cab with one hand, and with the other he brought Catherine to a standstill. Don't let the man see us struggling for God's sake, he murmured. Catherine stood for a moment, quite still. There's more of the old maid in you than the poet, she observed briefly. William shut the door sharply, gave the address to the driver, and turned away, lifting his hat punctiliously high and farewell to the invisible lady. He looked back after the cab twice, suspiciously, half expecting that she would stop it and dismount. But it bore her swiftly on, and was soon out of sight. William fell in the mood for a short soliloquy of indignation, for Catherine had contrived to exasperate him in more ways than one. Of all the unreasonable, inconsiderate creature I've ever known, she's the worst, he exclaimed to himself, striding back along the embankment. Heaven forbid that I should ever make a fool of myself with her again! Why, I'd soon marry the daughter of my landlady, then Catherine Hilberry. She'd leave me not a moment's peace, and she'd never understand me, never, never, never! Uttered aloud and with vehemence so that the stars of Heaven might hear, where there was no human being at hand, these sentiments sounded satisfactorily irrefutable. Rodney quieted down, and walked on in silence, until he perceived someone approaching him who had something, either in his walk or his dress, which proclaimed that he was one of William's acquaintances before it was possible to tell which of them he was. It was Denim, who, having parted from Sandice at the bottom of his staircase, was now walking to the tube at Sharring Cross, deep in the thoughts which his talk with Sandice had suggested. He had forgotten the meeting at Mary Dashett's rooms, he had forgotten Rodney and metaphors and Elizabethan drama, and could have sworn that he had forgotten Catherine Hilberry too, although that was more disputable. His mind was scaling the highest pinnacles of its alps, where there was only starlight and the untrodden snow. He cast strange eyes upon Rodney as they encountered each other beneath a lamppost. Ha! Rodney exclaimed. If he had been in full possession of his mind, Denim would probably have passed on with a salutation. But the shock of the interruption made him stand still, and before he knew what he was doing, he had turned and was walking with Rodney in obedience to Rodney's invitation to come to his rooms and have something to drink. Denim had no wish to drink with Rodney, but he followed him passively enough. Rodney was gratified by this obedience. He felt inclined to be communicative with this silent man, who possessed so obviously all the good masculine qualities in which Catherine now seemed lamentably deficient. But you do well, Denim. He began impossibly to have nothing to do with young women. I offer you my experience, if one trusts them, one invariably has cause to repent. Not that I have any reason at this moment, he added hastily to complain of them. It's a subject that crops up now and again for no particular reason. Miss Dashett, I dare say, is one of the exceptions. Do you like Miss Dashett? These remarks indicated clearly enough that Rodney's nerves were in a state of irritation, and Denim speedily woken to the situation of the world as it had been one hour ago. He had last seen Rodney walking with Catherine. He could not help regretting the eagerness with which his mind returned to these interests, and fretted him with the old trivial anxieties. He sank in his own esteem. Reason made him break from Rodney, who clearly tended to become confidential, before he had utterly lost touch with the problems of high philosophy. He looked along the road, and marked a lamppost at a distance of some hundred yards, and decided that he would part from Rodney when they reached this point. Yes, I like Mary. I don't see how one could help liking her, even art cautiously, with his eye on the lamppost. Ah Denim, you are so different from me. You never give yourself away. I watched you this evening with Catherine Hilberry. My instinct is to trust the person I'm talking to. That's why I'm always being taken in, I suppose. Denim seemed to be pondering this statement of Rodney's, but as a matter of fact, he was hardly conscious of Rodney and his revelations, and was only concerned to make him mention Catherine again, before they reached the lamppost. Who's taking you in now, yes, Catherine Hilberry? Rodney stopped, and once more began beating a kind of rhythm, as if he were marking a phrase in a symphony upon the smooth stone balustrade of the embankment. Catherine Hilberry, he repeated with a curious little chuckle. No, Denim, I have no illusions about that young woman. I think I made that plain to her tonight. But don't run away with a false impression. He continued eagerly, turning and linking his arm through Denim's, as though to prevent him from escaping. And thus compelled Denim past the monetary lamppost, to which in passing he breathed an excuse. For how could he break away when Rodney's arm was actually linked in his? You must not think that I have any bitterness against her, far from it. It's not altogether her fault, poor girl. She lives, you know, one of those odious, self-centered lives, at least I think them odious for a woman, feeding her wits upon everything, having control of everything, getting far too much her own way at home, spoiled in a sense, feeling that everyone is at her feet, and so not realizing how she hurts. That is, how rudely she behaves to people who haven't all her advantages. Still, to do her justice she's no fool. He added, as if to warn Denim not to take any liberties, she has taste, she has sense, she can understand you when you talk to her. But she's a woman and there's an end of it. He added with another little chuckle, and dropped Denim's arm. And did you tell her all this, tonight? Denim asked. Oh, dear me, no, I should never think of telling Catherine the truth about herself. That wouldn't do it all. What has to be in an attitude of adoration in order to get on with Catherine? Now I've learned that she's refused to marry him. Why don't I go home? Denim thought to himself. But he went on walking beside Rodney, and for a time they did not speak, though Rodney hums snatches of a tune out of an opera by Mozart. A feeling of contempt and liking combined very naturally in the mind of one, to whom another has just spoken unpremeditatedly, revealing rather more of his private feelings than he intended to reveal. Denim began to wonder what sort of person Rodney was, and at the same time Rodney began to think about Denim. You're a slave, like me, I suppose, he asked. A solicitor, yes. I sometimes wonder why we don't chuck it. Why don't you emigrate, Denim? I should have thought that would suit you. I have a family. I'm often on the point of going myself, but I know I couldn't live without this. And he waved his hand towards the city of London, which wore, at this moment, the appearance of a town cut out of grey-blue cardboard and pasted flat against the sky, which was of a deeper blue. There are one or two people I'm fond of, and there's a little good music, and a few pictures now and then, just enough to keep one dangling about here. Ah, but I couldn't live with savages. Are you fond of books? Music? Pictures? Do you care at all for first editions? I've got a few nice things up here, things I pick up cheap, for I can't afford to give what they ask. They had reached a small court of high eighteenth-century houses, in one of which Rodney had his rooms. They climbed a very steep staircase, through whose uncurtained windows the moonlight fell, illuminating the banisters with their twisted pillars, and the piles of plates set on the windowsills and jars half full of milk. Rodney's rooms were small, but the sitting-room window looked out into a courtyard, with its flagged pavement and its single tree, and across to the flat red brick fronts of the opposite houses, which would not have surprised Dr. Johnson if he had come out of his grave for a turn in the moonlight. Rodney lit his lamp, pulled his curtains, offered denim a chair, and flinging the manuscript of his paper on the Elizabethan use of metaphor onto the table, exclaimed, Oh, dear me, what a waste of time, but it's over now, and so we may think no more about it. He then busied himself very dexterously in lighting a fire, producing glasses, whiskey, a cake, and cups and saucers. He put on a faded crimson dressing gown, and a pair of red slippers, and advanced to denim with a tumbler in one hand, and a well-burnished book in the other. The Baskerville Congrive, said Rodney, offering it to his guest, I couldn't read him in a cheap addition. When he was seen thus among his books and his valuables, amably anxious to make his visitor comfortable, and moving about with something of the dexterity and grace of a Persian cat, then him relaxed his critical attitude, and felt more at home with Rodney than he would have done with many men better known to him. Rodney's room was the room of a person who cherishes a great many personal tastes, guarding them from the rough blast of the public with scrupulous attention. His papers and his books rose in jagged mounds on table and floor, round which he skirted with nervous care lest his dressing gown might disarrange them ever so slightly. On a chair stood a stack of photographs of statues and pictures, which it was his habit to exhibit one by one for the space of a day or two. The books on his shelves were as orderly as regiments of soldiers, and the backs of them shown like so many bronze beetle wings. Though if you took one from its place, you saw a shabbier volume behind it, since space was limited. An oval Venetian mirror stood above the fireplace, and reflected duskily in its spotted depths the faint yellow and crimson of a jar full of tulips which stood among the letters and pipes and cigarettes upon the mantelpiece. A small piano occupied a corner of the room with the score of Don Giovanni open upon the bracket. Well, Rodney, said Denim as he filled his pipe and looked about him. This is all very nice and comfortable. Rodney turned his head half round and smiled with the pride of a proprietor, and then prevented himself from smiling. Tolerable, he muttered. But I daresay it's just as well that you have to earn your own living. If you mean that I shouldn't do anything good with leisure if I had it, I daresay you're right, but I should be ten times as happy with my whole day to spend it as I liked. I doubt that, Denim replied. They sat silent, and the smoke from their pipes joined amicably in a blue vapor above their heads. I should spend three hours every day reading Shakespeare, Rodney remarked, and there's music and pictures, let alone the society of the people one likes. You'd be bored to death in a year's time. Oh, I grant you, I should be bored if I did nothing, but I should write plays. Hmm. I should write plays, he repeated. I've written three quarters of one already, and I'm only waiting for a holiday to finish it, and it's not bad. No, some of it's really rather nice. The question arose in Denim's mind whether he should ask to see this play, as, no doubt, he was expected to do. He looked rather stealthily at Rodney, who was tapping the coal nervously with a poker, and quivering almost physically, so Denim thought with desire to talk about this play of his, and vanity unrequited and urgent. He seemed very much at Denim's mercy, and Denim could not help liking him, partly on that account. Well, will you let me see the play? Denim asked, and Rodney looked immediately appeased, but nevertheless he sat silent for a moment, holding the poker perfectly upright in the air, regarding it with his rather prominent eyes, and opening his lips and shutting them again. Do you really care for this kind of thing? He asked at length, in a different tone of voice from that in which he had been speaking, and without waiting for an answer he went on rather creurously. Very few people care for poetry. I daresay it bores you. Perhaps, Denim remark. Well, I'll lend it to you, Rodney announced, putting down the poker. As he moved to fetch the play, Denim stretched a hand to the bookcase beside him, and took down the first volume which his fingers touched. It happened to be a small and very lovely addition of Sir Thomas Brown, containing the urn burial, the hydriotaphia, and the Garden of Cyrus, and opening it at a passage which he knew very nearly by heart, Denim began to read, and for some time continued to read. Rodney resumed his seat with his manuscript on his knee, and from time to time he glanced at Denim, and then joined his fingertips and crossed his thin legs over the fender, as if he experienced a good deal of pleasure. At length Denim shut the book and stood with his back to the fireplace, occasionally making an inarticulate humming sound, which seemed to refer to Sir Thomas Brown. He put his hat on his head and stood over Rodney, who still lay stretched back in his chair with his toes within the fender. I shall look in again some time, Denim remarked upon which Rodney held up his hand, containing his manuscript, without saying anything except, if you like. Denim took the manuscript and went. Two days later he was much surprised to find a thin parcel on his breakfast plate, which, on being opened, revealed the very copy of Sir Thomas Brown, which he had studied so intently in Rodney's rooms. From sheer laziness he returned no thanks, but he thought of Rodney from time to time with interest, disconnecting him from Catherine, and meant to go round one evening and smoke a pipe with him. It pleased Rodney thus to give away whatever his friends genuinely admired. His library was constantly being diminished. End of Chapter 5 It may be said that the minutes between 9.25 and 9.30 in the morning had a singular charm for Mary Dashett. She spent them in a very enviable frame of mind. Her contentment was almost unalloyed. High in the air as her flat was, some beams from the morning sun reached her even in November, striking straight at curtain, chair, and carpet, and painting there three bright, true spaces of green, blue, and purple, upon which the eye rested with a pleasure which gave physical warmth to the body. There were few mornings when Mary did not look up as she bent to lace her boots, and as she followed the yellow rod from curtain to breakfast table, she usually breathed some sigh of thankfulness that her life provided her with such moments of pure enjoyment. She was robbing no one of anything, and yet, to get so much pleasure from simple things, such as eating one's breakfast alone in a room which had nice colors in it, clean from the skirting of the boards to the corners of the ceiling, seemed to suit her so thoroughly that she used at first to hunt about for someone to apologize to, or for some flaw in the situation. She had now been six months in London, and she could find no flaw, but that, as she invariably concluded by the time her boots were laced, was solely and entirely due to the fact that she had her work. Every day, as she stood with her dispatch box in her hand at the door of her flat and gave one look back into the room to see that everything was straight before she left, she said to herself that she was very glad that she was going to leave it all, that to have sat there all day long in the enjoyment of leisure would have been intolerable. Out in the street she liked to think herself one of the workers, who at this hour take their way and wrap it single file along all the broad pavements of the city, with their heads slightly lowered as if all their effort were to follow each other as closely as might be, so that Mary used to figure to herself a straight rabbit run worn by their unswerving feet upon the pavement, but she'd like to pretend that she was indistinguishable from the rest, and that when a wet day drove her to the underground or omnibus, she gave and took her share of crowd and wet with clerks and typists and commercial men, and shared with them the serious business of winding up the world to tick for another four and twenty hours. Thus thinking, on the particular morning in question, she made her way across Lincoln's infields and up Kingsway, and so through South Hampton Row until she reached her office in Russell Square. Now and then she would pause and look into the window of some bookseller or flower shop, where at this early hour the goods were being arranged, and empty gaps behind the plate glass revealed a state of undress. Mary felt kindly disposed towards the shopkeepers, and hoped that they would trick the midday public into purchasing. For at this hour of the morning she ranged herself entirely on the side of the shopkeepers and bank clerks, and regarded all who slept late and had money to spend as her enemy and natural prey, and directly she had crossed the road at Hallburn. Her thoughts all came naturally and regularly derused upon her work, and she forgot that she was, properly speaking, an amateur worker, whose services were unpaid, and could hardly be said to wind the world up for its daily task, since the world so far had shown very little desire to take the boons which Mary's society for women's suffrage had offered it. She was thinking all the way up South Hampton Row of note paper and fool's cap, and how an economy in the use of paper might be effected, without, of course, hurting Mrs. Seal's feelings, for she was certain that the great organizers always pounce, to begin with, upon trifles like these, and built up their triumphant reforms upon a basis of absolute solidity. And without acknowledging it for a moment, Mary Dashett was determined to be a great organizer, and had already doomed her society to reconstruction of the most radical kind. Once or twice lately it is true she had started, brought awake, before turning into Russell Square, and denounced herself rather sharply for being already in a groove, capable, that is, of thinking the same thoughts every morning at the same hour, so that the chest that colored brick of the Russell Square houses had some curious connection with her thoughts about office economy, and served also as a sign that she should get into trim for meeting Mr. Clacton, or Mrs. Seal, or whoever might be beforehand with her at the office. Having no religious belief, she was the more conscientious about her life, examining her position from time to time very seriously, and nothing annoyed her more than to find one of these bad habits nibbling away unheeded at the precious substance. What was the good, after all, of being a woman if one didn't keep fresh, and cram one's life with all sorts of views and experiments? Thus she always gave herself a little shake, as she turned the corner, and as often as not, reached her own door, whistling a snatch of a Somerset Shire ballot. The suffrage office was at the top of one of the large Russell Square houses, which had once been lived in by a great city merchant and his family, and was now let out in slices to a number of societies, which displayed assorted initials upon doors of ground glass, and kept, each of them, a typewriter which clicked busily all day long. The old house, with its great stone staircase, echoed hollowly to the sound of typewriters and of errand boys from ten to six. The noise of different typewriters already at work, disseminating their views upon the protection of native races, or the value of cereals as foodstuffs, quickened merry steps. And she always ran up the last flight of steps which led to her own landing at whatever hour she came, so as to get her typewriter to take its place in competition with the rest. She sat herself down to her letters, and very soon all these speculations were forgotten, and the two lines drew themselves between her eyebrows as the contents of the letters, the office furniture, and the sounds of activity in the next room gradually asserted their sway upon her. By eleven o'clock the atmosphere of concentration was running so strongly in one direction that any thought of a different order could hardly have survived its birth more than a moment or so. The task which lay before her was to organize a series of entertainments, the profits of which were to benefit the society, which drooped for want of funds. It was her first attempt at organization on a large scale, and she meant to achieve something remarkable. She meant to use the cumbersome machine to pick out this, that, and the other, interesting person from the muddle of the world, and to set them for a week in a pattern which must catch the eyes of cabinet ministers, and the eyes once caught, the old arguments were to be delivered with unexampled originality, such with the scheme as a whole, and in contemplation of it she would become quite flushed and excited, and have to remind herself of all the details that intervened between her and success. The door would open and Mr. Clacton would come in to search for a certain leaflet buried beneath a pyramid of leaflets. He was a thin, sandy-haired man of about thirty-five, spoke with a cockney accent, and had about him a frugal look, as if nature had not dealt generously with him in any way, which naturally prevented him from dealing generously with other people. When he had found his leaflet, and offered a few jocular hints upon keeping papers in order, the type writing would stop abruptly, and Mrs. Seal would burst into the room with a letter which needed explanation in her hand. This was a more serious interruption than the other, because she never knew exactly what she wanted, and half a dozen requests would bolt from her, no one of which was clearly stated. Dressed in plum-colored velveteen, with short, gray hair, and a face that seemed permanently flushed with philanthropic enthusiasm, she was always in a hurry, and always in some disorder. She wore two crucifixes, which got themselves entangled in a heavy gold chain upon her breast, and seemed to marry expressive of her mental ambiguity. Only her vast enthusiasm and her worship of Miss Markham, one of the pioneers of the society, kept her in her place, for which she had no sound qualification. So the morning wore on, and the pile of letters grew, and Mary felt, at last, that she was the center ganglion of a very fine network of nerves which fell over England, and one of these days, when she touched the heart of the system, would begin feeling and rushing together, and emitting their splendid blaze of revolutionary fireworks. For some such metaphor represents what she felt about her work, when her brain had been heated by three hours of application. Shortly before one o'clock, Mr. Clackton and Mrs. Seal, desisted from their labors, and the old joke about luncheon, which came out regularly at this hour, was repeated with scarcely any variation of words. Mr. Clackton patronized a vegetarian restaurant. Mrs. Seal brought sandwiches, which she ate beneath the plain trees in Russell Square, while Mary generally went to a gaudy establishment, upholstered in red plush nearby, where, much to the vegetarian's disapproval, you could buy steak, two inches thick, or a roast section of foul, swimming in a pewter dish. The bare branches against the sky do one so much good, Mrs. Seal asserted, looking out into the square. But one can't lunch off trees, Sally, said Mary. I confess, I don't know how you manage it, Miss Dashett, Mr. Clackton remarked. I should sleep all afternoon, I know, if I took a heavy meal in the middle of the day. What's the very latest thing in literature, Mary asked, good-humoredly pointing to the yellow-covered volume beneath Mr. Clackton's arm, for he invariably read some new French author at lunchtime, or squeezed in a visit to a picture gallery. Balancing his social work with an ardent culture of which he was secretly proud, as Mary had very soon defined. So they parted, and Mary walked away, wondering if they guessed that she really wanted to get away from them, and supposing that they had not quite reached that degree of subtlety. She bought herself an evening paper, which she read as she ate, looking over the top of it again and again at the queer people who were buying cakes, or imparting their secrets, until some young woman whom she knew came in, and she called out, Elinor, come and sit by me! And they finished their lunch together, parting on the strip of pavement among the different lines of traffic, with a pleasant feeling that they were stepping once more into their separate places in the great and eternally moving pattern of human life. But, instead of going straight back to the office today, Mary turned into the British Museum, and strolled down the gallery with the shapes of stone until she found an empty seat directly beneath the gaze of the Elgin marbles. She looked at them, and seemed as usual, born up on some wave of exultation and emotion, by which her life at once became solemn and beautiful, an impression which was due as much, perhaps, to the solitude and chill and silence of the gallery as to the actual beauty of the statues. One must suppose, at least, that her emotions were not purely aesthetic, because, after she had gazed at the Ulysses for a minute or two, she began to think about Ralph Denham. So secure did she feel with these silent shapes that she almost yielded to an impulse to say, I am in love with you, allowed. The presence of this immense and enduring beauty made her almost alarmingly conscious of her desire, and at the same time proud of a feeling which did not display anything like the same proportions when she was going about her daily work. She repressed her impulse to speak allowed, and rose and wandered about rather aimlessly among the statues, until she found herself in another gallery devoted to engraved obelisks and winged Assyrian bulls, and her emotion took another turn. She began to picture herself traveling with Ralph in the land where these monsters were couched in the sand. For, she thought to herself, as she gazed fixedly at some information printed behind a piece of glass, the wonderful thing about you is that you're ready for anything. You're not in the least conventional, like most clever men. And she conjured up a scene of herself on a camel's back in the desert, while Ralph commanded a whole tribe of natives. That is what you can do, she went on, moving on to the next statue. You always make people do what you want. A glow spread over her spirit and filled her eyes with brightness. Nevertheless, before she left the museum she was very far from saying, even in the privacy of her own mind, I am in love with you. And that sentence might very well never have framed itself. She was, indeed, rather annoyed with herself for having allowed such an ill-considered breach of her reserve, weakening her powers of resistance, she felt, should this impulse return again. For, as she walked along the street to her office, the force of all her customary objections to being in love with anyone overcame her. She did not want to marry at all. It seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing love into touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship, such as hers was with Ralph, which for two years now had based itself upon common interests in impersonal topics, such as the housing of the poor or the taxation of land values. But the afternoon spirit differed intrinsically from the morning spirit. Mary found herself watching the flight of a bird or making drawings of the branches of the plain trees upon her blotting paper. People came in to see Mr. Clacton on business and a seductive smell of cigarette smoke issued from his room. Mrs. Seal wandered about with newspaper cuttings, which seemed to her either quite splendid or really too bad for words. She used to paste these into books or send them to her friends, having first drawn a broad bar in blue pencil down the margin, a proceeding which signified equally and indistinguishably the depths of her reprobation or the heights of her approval. About four o'clock on that same afternoon Catherine Hilbury was walking up King's Way. The question of tea presented itself. The street lamps were being lit already, and as she stood still for a moment beneath one of them, she tried to think of some neighboring drawing room where there would be firelight and talk congenial to her mood. That mood, owing to the spinning traffic in the evening veil of unreality, was ill adapted to her home surroundings. Perhaps on the whole a shop was the best place in which to preserve this queer sense of heightened existence. At the same time she wished to talk. Remembering Mary Dashett and her repeated invitations, she crossed the road, turned into Russell Square, and peered about, seeking for numbers with a sense of adventure that was out of all proportion to the deed itself. She found herself in a dimly lighted hall, unguarded by a porter, and pushed open the first swing door. But the office boy had never heard of Miss Dashett. Did she belong to the SRFR? Catherine shook her head with a smile of dismay. A voice from within shouted, No, the SGS! Top floor! Catherine mounted past innumerable glass doors with initials on them, and became steadily more and more doubtful of the wisdom of her venture. At the top she paused for a moment to breathe and collect herself. She heard the typewriter and formal professional voices inside, not belonging, she thought, to anyone she had ever spoken to. She touched the bell, and the door was opened almost immediately by Mary herself. Her face had to change its expression entirely when she saw Catherine. You, she exclaimed, we thought you were the printer. Still holding the door open, she called back. No, Mr. Clackton, it's not Pennington's. I should ring them up again. Double three, double eight, central. Well, this is a surprise. Come in, she added. You're just in time for tea. The light of relief shone in Mary's eyes. The boredom of the afternoon was dissipated at once, and she was glad that Catherine had found them in a momentary press of activity, owing to the failure of the printer to send back certain proofs. The unshaded electric light shining upon the table covered with papers dazed Catherine for a moment. After the confusion of her twilight walk and her random thoughts, life in this small room appeared extremely concentrated and bright. She turned instinctively to look out of the window, which was uncurtained, but Mary immediately recalled her. It was very clever of you to find your way, she said, and Catherine wondered as she stood there, feeling for the moment entirely detached and unabsorbed, why she had come. She looked, indeed, to Mary's eyes strangely out of place in the office. Her figure in the long cloak, which took deep folds, and her face, which was composed into a mask of sensitive apprehension, disturbed Mary for a moment with a sense of the presence of someone who was of another world, and therefore subversive of her world. She became immediately anxious that Catherine should be impressed by the importance of her world, and hoped that neither Mrs. Seal nor Mr. Clacton would appear until the impression of importance had been received. But in this she was disappointed. Mrs. Seal burst into the room holding a kettle in her hand, which she set upon the stove, and then with inefficient haste she set light to the gas, which flared up, exploded, and went out. Always the way, always the way, she muttered, Kate Markham is the only person who knows how to deal with the thing. Mary had to go to her help, and together they spread the table, and apologized for the disparity between the cups and the plainness of the food. If we had known Miss Hilbury was coming, we should have bought a cake, said Mary, upon which Mrs. Seal looked at Catherine for the first time, suspiciously, because she was a person who needed cake. Here Mr. Clacton opened the door and came in, holding a typewritten letter in his hand which he was reading aloud. Salford's affiliated, he said. Well done, Salford. Mrs. Seal exclaimed enthusiastically, lumping the teapot which she held upon the table in token of applause. Yes, these provincial centres seemed to be coming into line at last, said Mr. Clacton, and then Mary introduced him to Miss Hilbury, and he asked her in a very formal way if she was interested in our work. And the proofs still not come, said Mrs. Seal, putting both her elbows on the table and propping her chin on her hands, as Mary began to pour out tea. It's too bad, too bad. At this rate we shall miss the country post, which reminds me, Mr. Clacton, don't you think we should circulise the provinces with partridges last speech? What? You've not read it? Oh, it's the best thing they've had in the house this session. Even the Prime Minister, but Mary, cut her short. We don't allow shop a tea, Sally, she said firmly. We find her a penny each time she forgets, and the fines go to buying a plum cake, she explained, seeking to draw Catherine into the community. She had given up all hope of impressing her. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Mrs. Seal apologised. It's my misfortune to be an enthusiast, she said, turning to Catherine. My father's daughter could hardly be anything else. I think I've been on as many committees as most people. Waves and strays, rescue work, church work, COS, local branch, besides the usual civic duties, which fall to one as a householder. But I've given them all up for our work here, and I don't regret it for a second, she added. This is the root question I feel, until women have votes. It'll be six pens at least, Sally, said Mary, bringing her fists down on the table, and we're all sick to death of women and their votes. Mrs. Seal looked for a moment as though she could hardly believe her ears, and made a deprecating in her throat, looking alternately at Catherine and Mary and shaking her head as she did so. Then she remarked, rather confidentially, to Catherine, was the little nod in Mary's direction. She's doing more for the cause than any of us. She's giving her youth. For alas, when I was young there were domestic circumstances. She sighed and stopped short. Mr. Clacton hastily reverted to the joke about luncheon, and explained how Mrs. Seal fed on a bag of biscuits under the trees, whatever the weather might be. Rather, Catherine thought, as though Mrs. Seal were a pet dog who had convenient tricks. Yes, I took my little bag into the square, said Mrs. Seal, with the self-conscious guilt of a child owning some fault to its elders. It was really very sustaining, and the bare bowels against the sky do one so much good, but I shall have to give up going into the square. She proceeded wrinkling her forehead. The injustice of it. Why should I have a beautiful square all to myself, when poor women who need rest have nowhere at all to sit? She looked fiercely at Catherine, giving her short locks a little shake. It's dreadful what a tyrant one still is, in spite of all one's efforts. One tries to lead a decent life, but one can't. Of course, directly one thinks of it. One sees that all squares should be open to everyone. Is there any society with that object, Mr. Clacton? If not, there should be, surely. A most excellent object, said Mr. Clacton in his professional manner. At the same time, one must explore the ramification of organizations, Mrs. Seal. So much excellent effort thrown away, not to speak of pounds, shillings, and pence. Now, how many organizations of a philanthropic nature do you suppose there are in the city of London itself, Miss Hillberry? he added, screwing his mouth into a queer little smile, as if to show that the question had its frivolous side. Catherine's smile, too. Her unlikeness to the rest of them had, by this time, penetrated to Mr. Clacton, who was not naturally observant, and he was wondering who she was. The same unlikeness had subtly stimulated Mrs. Seal to try and make a convert of her. Mary, too, looked at her almost as if she begged her to make things easy. For Catherine had shown no disposition to make things easy. She had scarcely spoken. And her silence, though grave and even thoughtful, seemed to marry the silence of one who criticizes. While there are more in this house than I'd any notion of, she said, on the ground floor you protect natives, on the next you emigrate women, and tell people to eat nuts. Why do you say we do these things, Mary interposed rather sharply? We're not responsible for all the cranks who choose to lodge in the same house with us. Mr. Clacton cleared his throat, and looked at each of the young ladies in turn. He was a good deal struck by the appearance and manner of Miss Hillberry, which seemed to him to place her among those cultivated and luxurious people of whom he used to dream. Mary, on the other hand, was more of his own sort, and a little too much inclined to order him about. He picked up crumbs of dry biscuit and put them into his mouth with incredible rapidity. You don't belong to our society, then? said Mrs. Hill. No, I'm afraid I don't, said Catherine, with such ready candor that Mrs. Hill was nonplussed, and stared at her with a puzzled expression, as if she could not classify her among the varieties of human beings known to her. But surely, she began, Mrs. Hill's an enthusiast in these matters, said Mr. Clacton, almost apologetically, we have to remind her sometimes that others have a right to their views, even if they differ from our own. Punch has a very funny picture this week, about a suffragist and an agricultural laborer. Have you seen this week's punch, Miss Dashett? Mary laughed and said no. Mr. Clacton then told them the substance of the joke, which, however, depended a good deal for its success upon the expression which the artist had put into the people's faces. Mrs. Hill sat all the time perfectly grave, directly he had done speaking, she burst out, but surely, if you care about the welfare of your sex at all, you must wish them to have the vote. I never said I didn't wish them to have the vote, Catherine protested. Then why aren't you a member of our society? Mrs. Hill demanded. Catherine stirred her spoon round and round, stared into the swirl of the tea, and remained silent. Mr. Clacton, meanwhile, framed a question which, after a moment's hesitation, he put to Catherine. Are you in any way related, I wonder, to the poet Allardice? His daughter, I believe, married a Mr. Hillberry. Yes, I'm the poet's granddaughter, said Catherine with a little sigh, after a pause, and for a moment they were all silent. The poet's granddaughter, Mrs. Seal repeated, half to herself, with a shake of her head, as if that explained what was otherwise inexplicable. The light kindled in Mr. Clacton's eye. Ah, indeed, that interests me very much, he said. I owe a great debt to your grandfather, Ms. Hillberry. One time I could have repeated the greater part of him by art. But one gets out of the way of reading poetry, unfortunately. You don't remember, am I suppose? A sharp wrap at the door made Catherine's answer inaudible. Mrs. Seal looked up with renewed hope in her eyes, and exclaiming, The proof's at last! Ran to open the door. Oh, it's only Mr. Denhem, she cried, without any attempt to conceal her disappointment. Ralph, Catherine supposed, was a frequent visitor, for the only person he thought it necessary to greet was herself, and Mary at once explained the strange fact of her being there by saying, Catherine has come to see how one runs an office. Ralph felt himself stiffen uncomfortably, as he said. I hope Mary hasn't persuaded you that she knows how to run an office. What, doesn't she? asked Catherine, looking from one to the other. At these remarks Mrs. Seal began to exhibit signs of discomposure, which displayed themselves by a tossing movement of her head, and as Ralph took a letter from his pocket and placed his finger upon a certain sentence, she forestalled him by exclaiming in confusion. Now, I know what you're going to say, Mr. Denhem, but it was the day Kate Markham was here, and she upsets one so, with her wonderful vitality, always thinking of something new that we ought to be doing, and aren't. And I was conscious at the time that my dates were mixed. It had nothing to do with Mary at all, I assure you. My dear Sally, don't apologize, said Mary, laughing. Men are such pedants, they don't know what things matter and what things don't. Now Denhem, speak up for our sex, said Mr. Clacton in a jocular manner indeed. But like most insignificant men, he was very quick to resent being found fault with by a woman, in argument with whom he was fond of calling himself a mere man. He wished, however, to enter into a literary conversation with Miss Hilbury, and thus let the matter drop. Doesn't it seem strange to you, Miss Hilbury? He said that the French was all their wealth of illustrious names, of no poet who can compare with your grandfather. Let me see. There's Charnier, and Hugo, and Alfred de Musette. Wonderful men. But at the same time, there's a richness, a freshness about allardice. Here the telephone bell rang, and he had to absent himself with a smile and a bow, which signified that, although literature is delightful, it is not work. Mrs. Seal rose at the same time, but remained hovering over the table, delivering herself of a tirade against party government. For if I were to tell you what I know of backstair's intrigue, and what can be done by the power of the purse you wouldn't credit me, Mr. Denhem, you wouldn't indeed. Which is why I feel the only work for my father's daughter, for he was one of the pioneers, Mr. Denhem, and on his tombstone I had that verse from the Psalms put, about the sowers and the seed, and what wouldn't I give that he should be alive now seeing what we are going to see? But reflecting that the glories of the future depended in part, upon the activity of her typewriter, she bobbed her head and hurried back to the seclusion of her little room, from which immediately issued sounds of enthusiastic, but obviously erratic, composition. Mary made it clear at once, by starting a fresh topic of general interest, that though she saw the humor of her colleague, she did not intend to have her laugh at. The standard of morality seems to me frightfully low, she observed reflectively, pouring out a second cup of tea, especially among women who aren't well educated. They don't see that small things matter, and that's where the leakage begins. And then we find ourselves in difficulties. I very nearly lost my temper yesterday, she went on, looking at Ralph with a little smile, as though he knew what happened when she lost her temper. It makes me very angry when people tell me lies. Doesn't it make you angry? she asked Catherine. But considering that everyone tells lies, Catherine remarked, looking about the room to see where she had put down her umbrella and her parcel, for there was an intimacy in the way in which Mary and Ralph addressed each other, which made her wish to leave them. Mary, on the other hand, was anxious, superficially at least, that Catherine should stay, and so fortify her in her determination, not to be in love with Ralph. Ralph, while lifting his cup from his lips to the table, had made up his mind that if Miss Hilbury left, he would go with her. I don't think that I tell lies, and I don't think that Ralph tells lies. Do you, Ralph? Mary continued. Catherine laughed with more gaiety, as it seemed to Mary, than she could properly account for. What was she laughing at? At them, presumably. Catherine had risen, and was glancing hither and thither at the presses and the cupboards and all the machinery of the office, as if she included them all in her rather malicious amusement, which caused Mary to keep her eyes on her straightly and rather fiercely, as if she were a gay-pluned, mischievous bird, who might light on the topmost bow and pick off the ruddiest cherry without any warning. Two women less like each other could scarcely be imagined, Ralph thought, looking from one to the other. Next moment he too rose, and nodding to Mary, as Catherine said goodbye, opened the door for her, and followed her out. Mary sat still, and made no attempt to prevent them from going. For a second or two after the door had shut on them, her eyes rested on the door with a straightforward fierceness in which, for a moment, a certain degree of bewilderment seemed to enter, but after a brief hesitation she put down her cup, and proceeded to clear away the tea-things. The impulse which had driven Ralph to take this action was the result of a very swift little piece of reasoning, and thus, perhaps, was not quite so much of an impulse as it seemed. It passed through his mind that if he missed this chance of talking to Catherine, he would have to face an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room again, demanding an explanation of his cowardly indecision. It was better on the whole to risk present discomforture than to waste an evening bandying excuses and constructing impossible scenes with this uncompromising section of himself. For ever since he had visited the Hillberries, he had been much at the mercy of a phantom Catherine, who came to him when he sat alone and answered him as he would have her answer, and was always beside him to crown those varying triumphs, which were transacted almost every night in imaginary scenes as he walked through the lamplit streets home from the office. To walk with Catherine in the flesh would either feed that phantom with fresh food, which, as all who nourish dreams are aware, is a process that becomes necessary from time to time, or refine it to such a degree of thinness that it was scarcely serviceable any longer, and that too is sometimes a welcome change to a dreamer, and all the time Ralph was well aware that the bulk of Catherine was not represented in his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was bewildered by the fact that she had nothing to do with his dream of her. When, on reaching the street, Catherine found that Mr. Denham proceeded to keep pace by her side, she was surprised, and perhaps a little annoyed. She, too, had her margin of imagination, and tonight her activity in this obscure region of the mine required solitude. If she had had her way, she would have walked very fast down the Tottenham Court Road and then sprung into a cab and raced swiftly home. The view she had had of the inside of an office was of the nature of a dream to her. Shut off up there she compared Mrs. Seal and Mary Dashett and Mr. Clacton to enchanted people in a bewitched tower. With the spider's webs looping across the corners of the room, and all the tools of the necromancer's craft at hand, for so aloof and unreal, and apart from the normal world that they seemed to her, in the house of innumerable typewriters murmuring their incantations and concocting their drugs, and flinging their frail spider's webs over the torrent of life which rushed down the streets outside. She may have been conscious that there was some exaggeration in this fancy of hers, for she certainly did not wish to share it with Ralph. To him, she supposed, Mary Dashett, composing leaflets for cabinet ministers among her typewriters, represented all that was interesting and genuine, and accordingly she shut them both out from all share in the crowded street, with its pendant necklace of lamps, its lighted windows, and its strong of men and women, which exhilarated her to such an extent that she very nearly forgot her companion. She walked very fast, and the effect of people passing in the opposite direction was to produce a queer dizziness both in her head and in Ralph's, which set their bodies far apart, but she did her duty by her companion almost unconsciously. Mary Dashett does that sort of work very well. She is responsible for it, I suppose. Yes, the others don't help at all. Has she made a convert of you? Oh, no. That is, I'm a convert already. But she hasn't persuaded you to work for them. Oh, dear no. That wouldn't do it all. So they walked on down the Tottenham Court Road, parting and coming together again, and Ralph felt much as though he were addressing the summit of a poplar in a high gale of wind. Suppose we get on to that omnibus, he suggested. Catherine acquiesced, and they climbed up, and found themselves alone on top of it. But which way are you going? Catherine asked, waking a little from the trance into which movement among moving things had thrown her. I'm going to the temple, Ralph replied, inventing a destination on the spur of the moment. He felt the change come over her as they sat down, and the omnibus began to move forward. He imagined her contemplating the avenue in front of them, with those honest, sad eyes, which seemed to set him at such a distance from them. But the breeze was blowing in their faces. It lifted her hat for a second, and she drew out a pin and stuck it in again. A little action, which seemed, for some reason, to make her rather more fallible. Ah, if only her hat would blow off, and leave her altogether disheveled, accepting it from his hands. This is like Venice, she observed raising her hand. The motor-cars, I mean, shooting about so quickly with their lights. I've never seen Venice, he replied. I keep that, and some other things, for my old age. What are the other things? she asked. There's Venice and India, and I think Dante, too. She laughed. Thank you for inviting for one's old age. And would you refuse to see Venice, if you had the chance? Instead of answering her, he wondered whether he should tell her something that was quite true about himself. And as he wondered, he told her. I've planned out my life in sections ever since I was a child, to make it last longer. You see, I'm always afraid that I'm missing something. And so am I, Catherine exclaimed. But after all, she added, why should you miss anything? Why, because I'm poor, for one thing. Ralph rejoined. You, I suppose, can have Venice and India and Dante every day of your life. She said nothing for a moment, but rested one hand, which was bare of glove, upon the rail in front of her, meditating upon a variety of things, of which one was that this strange young man pronounced Dante as she was used to hearing it pronounced, and another that he had, most unexpectedly, a feeling about life that was familiar to her. Perhaps, then, he was the sort of person she might take an interest in, if she came to know him better. And as she had placed him among those whom she would never want to know better, this was enough to make her silent. She hastily recalled her first view of him, in the little room where the relics were kept, and ran a bar through half her impressions, as one cancels a badly written sentence, having found the right one. But to know that one might have things doesn't alter the fact that one hasn't got them, she said in some confusion. How could I go to India, for example? Besides, she began impulsively, and stopped herself. Here the conductor came round and interrupted them. Ralph waited for her to resume her sentence, but she said no more. I have a message to give your father, he remarked. Perhaps you would give it to him, or I could come. Yes, do come, Catherine replied. Still, I don't see why you shouldn't go to India, Ralph began, in order to keep her from rising, as she threatened to do. But she got up in spite of him, and said good-bye with her usual air of decision, and left him with a quickness which Ralph connected now with all her movements. He looked down, and saw her standing on the pavement edge, an alert, commanding figure, which waited its season to cross, and then walked boldly and swiftly to the other side. That gesture and action would be added to the picture he had of her, but at present the real woman completely routed the phantom one. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Night and Day by Virginia Woolf. Chapter 7 And little Augustus Pelham said to me, It's the younger generation knocking at the door. And I, said to him, Oh, but the younger generation comes in without knocking, Mr. Pelham. Such a feeble little joke, wasn't it? But down it went into his notebook all the same. Let us congratulate ourselves that we shall be in the grave before that work is published, said Mr. Hilbury. The elderly couple were waiting for the dinner bell to ring, and for their daughter to come into the room. Their arm-chairs were drawn up on either side of the fire, and each sat in the same slightly crouched position, looking into the coals with the expressions of people who have had their share of experiences and wait, rather passively, for something to happen. Mr. Hilbury now gave all his attention to a piece of coal which had fallen out of the grate, and to selecting a favorable position for it among the lumps that were burning already. Mrs. Hilbury watched him in silence, and the smile changed on her lips as if her mind still played with the events of the afternoon. When Mr. Hilbury had accomplished his task, he resumed his crouching position again, and began to toy with the little green stone attached to his watch chain. His deep oval-shaped eyes were fixed upon the flames, but behind the superficial glaze seemed to brood an observant and whimsical spirit, which kept the brown of the eye still unusually vivid. But a look of indolence, the result of skepticism, or of a taste too fastidious to be satisfied by the prizes and conclusions so easily within his grasp, lent him an expression almost of melancholy. After sitting thus for a time, he seemed to reach some point in his thinking, which demonstrated its futility, upon which he sighed and stretched his hand for a book lying on the table by his side. Directly the door opened, he closed the book, and the eyes of father and mother both rested on Catherine as she came towards them. The sight seemed at once to give them a motive which they had not had before. To them she appeared as she walked towards them in her light evening dress, extremely young, and the sight of her refreshed them, were it only because her youth and ignorance made their knowledge of the world of some value. The only excuse for you, Catherine, is that dinner is still later than you are, said Mr. Hilberry, putting down his spectacles. I don't mind her being late when the result is so charming, said Mrs. Hilberry, looking with pride at her daughter. Still, I don't know that I like your being out so late, Catherine. She continued, you took a cab, I hope. Here dinner was announced, and Mr. Hilberry formally led his wife downstairs on his arm. They were all dressed for dinner, and indeed the prettiness of the dinner table merited that compliment. There was no cloth upon the table, and the china made regular circles of deep blue upon the shining brown wood. In the middle there was a bowl of tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums and one of pure white, so fresh that the narrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball. From the surrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them testified in the great man's own handwriting that he was yours sincerely or affectionately or forever. The father and daughter would have been quite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence, or with a few cryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not be understood by the servants. But silence depressed Mrs. Hilberry, and far from minding the presence of maids, she would often address herself to them, and was never altogether unconscious of their approval or disapproval of her remarks. In the first place she called them to witness that the room was darker than usual, and had all the lights turned on. That's more cheerful, she exclaimed. Do you know, Catherine, that ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried to make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous expecting them, you know, that I spilt the tea, and he made an epigram about that. Which ridiculous goose? Catherine asked her father. Only one of my geese happily makes epigrams. Augustus Pelham, of course, said Mrs. Hilberry. I'm not sorry that I was out, said Catherine. Poor Augustus, Mrs. Hilberry exclaimed, but were all too hard on him. Remember how devoted he is to his tiresome old mother. That's only because she is his mother, anyone connected with himself. No, no, Catherine, that's too bad. That's what's the word I mean. Trevor, something long and Latin, the sort of word you and Catherine know. Mr. Hilberry suggested cynical? Well, that'll do. I don't believe in sending girls to college, but I should teach them that sort of thing. It makes one feel so dignified, bringing out these little illusions and passing ungracefully to the next topic. But I don't know what's come over me. I actually had to ask Augustus the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with, as you were out, Catherine, and heaven knows what he may put down about me in his diary. I wish Catherine started with great impetuosity and checked herself. Her mother always stirred her to feel and think quickly, and then she remembered that her father was there listening with attention. What is it you wish? He asked as she paused. He often surprised her thus into telling him what she had not meant to tell him, and then they argued, while Mrs. Hilberry went on with her own thoughts. I wish mother wasn't famous. I was out at tea, and they would talk to me about poetry. Thinking you must be poetical, I see, and aren't you? Who's been talking to you about poetry, Catherine? Mrs. Hilberry demanded, and Catherine was committed to giving her parents an account of her visit to the suffrage office. They have an office at the top of one of the old houses in Russell Square. I never saw such queer-looking people, and the man discovered I was related to the poet and talked to me about poetry. Even Mary Dashett seems different in that atmosphere. Yes, the office atmosphere is very bad for the soul, said Mr. Hilberry. I don't remember any offices in Russell Square in the old days when mama lived there, Mrs. Hilberry mused, and I can't fancy turning one of those noble great rooms into a stuffy little suffrage office. Still, if the clerks read poetry, there must be something nice about them. No, because they don't read it as we read it, Catherine insisted. But it's nice to see them in the office, and I think it's nice to think of them reading your grandfather and not filling up those dreadful little forms all day long. Mrs. Hilberry persisted, her notion of office life being derived from some chance view of a scene behind the counter at her bank as she slipped the sovereigns into her purse. At any rate, they haven't made a convert of Catherine, which is what I was afraid of, Mr. Hilberry remarked. Oh no, said Catherine very decidedly, I wouldn't work for them for anything. Mr. Hilberry continued, agreeing with his daughter, how the sight of one's fellow enthusiasts always chokes one off. They show up the faults of one's cause so much more plainly than one's antagonists. One can be enthusiastic in one's study, but directly one comes into touch with the people who agree with one while the glamour goes. So, I've always found. And he proceeded to tell them, as he peeled his apple, how he committed himself once in his youthful days to make a speech at a political meeting, and went there ablaze with enthusiasm for the ideals of his own side. But while his leaders spoke, he became gradually converted to the other way of thinking, if thinking it could be called, and had to feign illness in order to avoid making a fool of himself, an experience which had sickened him of public meetings. Catherine listened and felt as she generally did when her father, and to some extent her mother, described their feelings, that she quite understood and agreed with them, but at the same time saw something which they did not see, and always felt some disappointment when they fell short of her vision, as they always did. The plates succeeded each other swiftly and noiselessly in front of her, and the table was decked for dessert, and as the talk murmured on in familiar grooves, she sat there, rather like a judge, listening to her parents, who did indeed feel it very pleasant when they made her laugh. Daily life in a house where they are young and old is full of curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood over them, which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance. Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar in the glass of port, which were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr. Hillbury, and simultaneously Mrs. Hillbury and Catherine left the room. All the years they had lived together they had never seen Mr. Hillbury smoke his cigar or drink his port, and they would have felt it unseemly if, by chance, they had surprised him as he sat there. These short but clearly marked periods of separation between the sexes were always used for an intimate postscript to what had been said at dinner. The sense of being women together coming out most strongly when the male sex was, as if by some religious right, secluded from the female. Catherine knew by heart the sort of mood that possessed her as she walked upstairs to the drawing-room, her mother's arm and hers, and she could anticipate the pleasure with which, when she had turned on the lights, they both regarded the drawing-room. Fresh swept and sat in order for the last section of the day, with the red parrot swinging on the chintz curtains and the arm-chairs warming in the blaze. Mrs. Hillbury stood over the fire, with one foot on the fender, and her skirts slightly raised. Oh, Catherine, she exclaimed, how you've made me think of Mama and the old days in Russell Square. I can see the chandeliers and the green silk of the piano, and Mama sitting in her cashmere shawl by the window, singing till the little ragamuffin boys outside stopped to listen. Papa sent me in with a bunch of violets, while he waited round the corner. It must have been a summer evening that was before things were hopeless. As she spoke, an expression of regret, which must have come frequently to cause the lines which now grew deep round the lips and eyes, settled on her face. The poet's marriage had not been a happy one. He had left his wife, and after some years of a rather reckless existence, she had died before her time. This disaster had led to great irregularities of education, and indeed Mrs. Hillbury might be said to have escaped education altogether. But she had been her father's companion at the season when he wrote the finest of his poems. She had sat on his knee in taverns and other haunts of drunken poets, and it was for her sake, so people said, that he had cured himself of his dissipation, and become the irreproachable literary character that the world knows whose inspiration had deserted him. As Mrs. Hillbury grew old, she thought more and more of the past, and this ancient disaster seemed at times almost to prey upon her mind, as if she could not pass out of life herself without laying the ghost of her parent's sorrow to rest. Catherine wished to comfort her mother, but it was difficult to do this satisfactorily when the facts themselves were so much of a legend. The house in Russell Square, for example, with its noble rooms, and the magnolia tree in the garden, and the sweet-voiced piano, and the sound of feet coming down the corridors, and other properties of size and romance. Had they any existence? Yet why should Mrs. Allardyce live all alone in this gigantic mansion, and if she did not live alone, with whom did she live? For its own sake, Catherine rather liked this tragic story, and would have been glad to hear the details of it, and to have been able to discuss them frankly. But this it became less and less possible to do. For though, Mrs. Hillbury was constantly reverting to the story, it was always in this tentative and restless fashion, as though by a touch here and there, she could set things straight which had been crooked these sixty years. Perhaps indeed she no longer knew what the truth was. If they lived now, she concluded, I feel it wouldn't have happened. People aren't so set upon tragedy as they were then. If my father had been able to go round the world, or if she'd had to rescue her, everything would have come right. But what could I do? And then they had bad friends, both of them, who made mischief. Ah, Catherine, when you marry, be quite, quite sure that you love your husband. The tear stood in Mrs. Hillbury's eyes. While comforting her, Catherine thought to herself, now this is what Mary Dashett and Mr. Denim don't understand. This is the sort of position I'm always getting into. How simple it must be to live as they do. For all the evening she had been comparing her home and her father and mother with the suffrage office and the people there. But Catherine, Mrs. Hillbury continued, with one of her sudden changes of mood, though heaven knows I don't want to see you married. Surely if ever a man loved a woman, William loves you. And it's a nice rich-sounding name too, Catherine Rodney, which unfortunately doesn't mean that he's got any money because he hasn't. The alteration of her name annoyed Catherine, and she observed rather sharply that she didn't want to marry anyone. It's very dull that you can only marry one husband. Certainly, Mrs. Hillbury reflected. I always wish that you could marry everybody who wants to marry you. Perhaps they'll come to that in time, but meanwhile I confess that dear William... But here Mr. Hillbury came in, and the more solid part of the evening began. This consisted in the reading allowed by Catherine from some prose work or other while her mother knitted scarves intermittently on a little circular frame, and her father read the newspaper, not so attentively, but that he could come at humorously now and again upon the fortunes of the hero and the heroine. The Hillbury subscribed to a library, which delivered books on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Catherine did her best to interest her parents in the works of living and highly respectable authors. But Mrs. Hillbury was perturbed by the very look of the light gold wreath volumes, and would make little faces as if she tasted something bitter as the reading went on, while Mr. Hillbury would treat the moderns with a curious elaborate banter, such as one might apply to the antics of her promising child. So this evening, after five pages or so of one of these masters, Mrs. Hillbury protested that it was all too clever and cheap and nasty for words. Please, Catherine, read us something real. Catherine had to go to the bookcase and choose a portly volume in sleek yellow calf, which had directly a sedative effect upon both her parents. But the delivery of the evening post broke in upon the periods of Henry Fielding, and Catherine found that her letters needed all her attention. She took her letters up to her room with her, having persuaded her mother to go to bed directly Mr. Hillbury left them. For so long as she sat in the same room as her mother, Mrs. Hillbury might at any moment ask for a sight of the post. A very hasty glance through many sheets had shown Catherine that, by some coincidence, her attention had to be directed to many different anxieties simultaneously. In the first place, Rodney had written a very full account of his state of mind, which was illustrated by a sonnet, and he demanded a reconsideration of their position, which agitated Catherine more than she liked. Then there were two letters which had to be laid side by side and compared before she could make out the truth of their story, and even when she knew the facts she could not decide what to make of them. And finally she had to reflect upon a great many pages from a cousin who found himself in financial difficulties, which forced him to the uncongenial occupation of teaching the young ladies of Bungay to play upon the violin. But the two letters which each told the same story differently were the chief source of her perplexity. She was really rather shocked to find it definitely established that her own second cousin, Cyril Allardice, had lived for the last four years with a woman who was not his wife, who had born him two children, and was now about to bear him another. This state of things had been discovered by Mrs. Milvane, her Aunt Celia, a zealous inquirer into such matters, whose letter was also under consideration. Cyril, she said, must be made to marry the woman at once, and Cyril, rightly or wrongly, was indignant with such interference with his affairs, and would not own that he had any cause to be ashamed of himself. Had he any cause to be ashamed of himself, Catherine wondered, and she turned to her Aunt again. Remember, she wrote in her profuse emphatic statement, that he bears your grandfather's name, and so will the child that is to be born. The poor boy is not so much to blame as the woman who deluded him, thinking him a gentleman, which he is, and having money which he has not. What would Ralph Denham say to this, thought Catherine, beginning to pace up and down her bedroom? She twitched aside the curtains, so that, on turning, she was faced by darkness, and looking out could just distinguish the branches of a plain tree and the yellow lights of someone else's windows. What would Mary Dashett, and Ralph Denham say? She reflected, pausing by the window which, as the night was warm, she raised, in order to feel the air upon her face, and to lose herself in the nothingness of night. But with the air, the distant humming sound of far-off crowded thoroughfares was admitted to the room. The incessant and tumultuous hum of the distant traffic seemed, as she stood there, to represent the thick texture of her life. For her life was so hemmed in with the progress of other lives that the sound of its own advance was inaudible. People like Ralph and Mary, she thought, had it all their own way, and an empty space before them. And as she envied them, she cast her mind out to imagine an empty land where all this petty intercourse of men and women, this life made up of the dense crossings and entanglements of men and women, had no existence whatever. Even now, alone, at night, looking out into the shapeless mass of London, she was forced to remember that there was one point in here another, with which she had some connection. William Rodney, at this very moment, was seated in a minute speck of light somewhere to the east of her, and his mind was occupied, not with his book, but with her. She wished that no one in the whole world would think of her. However, there was no way of escaping from one's fellow beings, she concluded, and shut the window with a sigh, and returned once more to her letters. She could not doubt, but that William's letter was the most genuine she had yet received from him. He had come to the conclusion that he could not live without her, he wrote. He believed that he knew her and could give her happiness, and that their marriage would be unlike other marriages. Nor was the sonnet, in spite of its accomplishment, lacking in passion, and Catherine, as she read the pages through again, could see in what direction her feelings ought to flow, supposing they revealed themselves. She would come to feel a humorous sort of tenderness for him, as zealous care for his susceptibilities, and, after all, she considered, thinking of her father and mother, what is love. Naturally, with her face, position, and background, she had experience of young men who wished to marry her, and made protestations of love. But, perhaps because she did not return the feeling, it remained something of a pageant to her. Not having experience of it herself, her mind had unconsciously occupied itself for some years in dressing up an image of love, and the marriage that was the outcome of love, and the man who inspired love, which naturally dwarfed any examples that came her way. Easily and without correction by reason, her imagination made pictures, superb backgrounds casting a rich, though phantom light upon the facts in the foreground. Splendid as the waters that dropped was resounding thunder from high ledges of rock, and plunged downwards into the blue depths of night, was the presence of love she dreamt. Drawing into it every drop of the force of life, and dashing them all asunder in the superb catastrophe in which everything was surrendered, and nothing might be reclaimed. The man, too, was some magnanimous hero, riding a great horse by the shore of the sea. They rode through forests together, they galloped by the rim of the sea. But waking, she was able to contemplate a perfectly loveless marriage, as the thing one did actually in real life, for possibly the people who dreamed us are those who do the most prosaic things. At this moment she was much inclined to sit on into the night, spinning her light fabric of thoughts until she tired of their futility, and went to her mathematics. But as she knew very well it was necessary that she should see her father before he went to bed. The case of Cyril Allardyce must be discussed. Her mother's illusions and the rights of the family attended to. Being vague herself as to what all this amounted to, she had to take counsel with her father. She took her letters in her hand and went downstairs. It was past eleven, and the clocks had come into their reign, the grandfather's clock in the hall ticking in competition with the small clock on the landing. Mr. Hilberry's study ran out behind the rest of the house, on the ground floor, and was a very silent, subterranean place. The sun in daytime casting a mere abstract of light through a skylight upon his books and the large table, with its spread of white papers now illumined by a green reading lamp. Here Mr. Hilberry sat editing his review, replacing together documents by means of which it could be proved that Shelley had written of instead of and, or that the in in which Byron had slept was called the Nagshead and not the Turkish Knight, or that the Christian name of Keith's uncle had been John rather than Richard, for he knew more minute details about these poets than any man in England probably, and was preparing an edition of Shelley which scrupulously observed the poet's system of punctuation. He saw the humor of these researches, but that did not prevent him from carrying them out with utmost scrupulosity. He was lying back comfortably in a deep armchair smoking a cigar, and ruminating the fruitful question as to whether Coleridge had wished to marry Dorothy Wordsworth, and what, if he had done so, would have been the consequences to him in particular and to literature in general. When Catherine came in he reflected that he knew what she had come for, and he made a pencil note before he spoke to her. Having done this, he saw that she was reading, and he watched her for a moment without saying anything. She was reading Isabella and the Pot of Basil, and her mind was full of the Italian hills and the blue daylight, and the hedges set with little rosettes of red and white roses, feeling that her father waited for her. She sighed and said, shutting her book, I've had a letter from Ancelia about Cyril, father. It seems to be true about his marriage. What are we to do? Cyril seems to have been behaving in a very foolish manner, said Mr. Hilberry, in his pleasant and deliberate tunes. Catherine found some difficulty in carrying on the conversation, while her father balanced his fingertips so judiciously, and seemed to reserve so many of his thoughts for himself. He's about done for himself, I should say, he continued. Without saying anything, he took Catherine's letters out of her hand, adjusted his eyeglasses, and read them through. At length he said, huff, and gave the letters back to her. Mother knows nothing about it, Catherine remarked. Will you tell her? I shall tell your mother, but I shall tell her that there is nothing whatever for us to do. But the marriage, Catherine asked with some diffidence, Mr. Hilberry said nothing, and stared into the fire. What in the name of conscience did he do it for, he speculated at last, rather to himself than to her. Catherine had begun to read her aunt's letter over again. And now she quoted a sentence. Ipsen and Butler, he has sent me a letter full of quotations, nonsense, though clever nonsense. Well, if the younger generation want to carry on its life on those lines, it's none of our affair, he remarked. But isn't it our affair, perhaps, to make them get married? Catherine asked, rather wearily. Why the dickens should they apply to me? Her father demanded with sudden irritation. Only as the head of the family. But I'm not the head of the family. Alfred's the head of the family. Let them apply to Alfred, said Mr. Hilberry, relapsing again into his arm-chair. Catherine was aware that she had touched a sensitive spot, however, in mentioning the family. I think, perhaps, the best thing would be for me to go and see them, she observed. I won't have you going anywhere near them, Mr. Hilberry replied with unwanted decision and authority. Indeed, I don't understand why they've dragged you into this business at all. I don't see that it's got anything to do with you. I've always been friends with Cyril, Catherine observed. But did he ever tell you anything about this? Mr. Hilberry asked, rather sharply. Catherine shook her head. She was indeed a good deal hurt that Cyril had not confided in her. Did he think, as Ralph Denham or Mary Datchett might think, that she was, for some reason, unsympathetic? Hostel, even? As to your mother, said Mr. Hilberry after a pause, in which he seemed to be considering the color of the flames, you had better tell her the facts. She'd better know the facts before everyone begins to talk about it. Though why, and so you think is necessary to come, I'm sure I don't know. And the less talk, there is the better. Granting the assumption that gentlemen of sixty who are highly cultivated and have had much experience of life probably think of many things which they do not say, Catherine could not help feeling rather puzzled by her father's attitude as she went back to her room. What a distance he was from it all. How superficially he smoothed these events into a semblance of decency which harmonized with his own view of life. He never wondered what Cyril had felt, nor did the hidden aspects of the case tempt him to examine into them. He merely seemed to realize rather languidly that Cyril had behaved in a way which was foolish because other people did not behave in that way. He seemed to be looking through a telescope at little figures hundreds of miles in the distance. Her selfish anxiety not to have to tell Mrs. Hilbury what had happened made her follow her father into the hall after breakfast the next morning in order to question him. Have you told mother? She asked. Her manner to her father was almost stern and she seemed to hold endless steps of reflection in the dark of her eyes. Mr. Hilbury sighed. My dear child, it went out of my head. He smoothed his silk hat energetically and it once affected an air of hurry. I'll send a note round from the office. I'm late this morning and I have any amount of proofs to get through. That wouldn't do at all, Catherine said decidedly. She must be told. You or I must tell her. We ought to have told her at first. Mr. Hilbury had now placed his hat on his head and his hand was on the doorknob. An expression which Catherine knew well from her childhood when he asked her to shield him in some neglect of duty came into his eyes. Malice, humor, and irresponsibility were blended in it. He nodded his head too and froze significantly, opened the door with an adroit movement and stepped out with a lightness unexpected at his age. He waved his hand once to his daughter and was gone. Left alone, Catherine could not help laughing to find herself cheated as usual in domestic bargaining with her father and left to do the disagreeable work which belonged by rights to him. End of Chapter 8 This is a LibriVox recording while LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information please visit LibriVox.org Night and Day by Virginia Woolf Chapter 9 Catherine disliked telling her mother about Cyril's misbehavior quite as much as her father did and for much the same reasons. They both shrank nervously as people fear the report of a gun on the stage from all that would have to be said on this occasion. Catherine, moreover, was unable to decide what she thought of Cyril's misbehavior. As usual, she saw something which her father and mother did not see and the effect of that something was to suspend Cyril's behavior in her mind without any qualification at all. They would think whether it was good or bad. To her it was merely a thing that had happened. When Catherine reached the study, Mrs. Hillberry had already dipped her pen in the ink. Catherine, she said, lifting it in the air, I've just made out such a queer, strange thing about your grandfather. I'm three years and six months older than he was when he died. I couldn't very well have been his mother but I might have been his elder sister and that seems to me such a pleasant fancy. I'm going to start quite fresh this morning and get a lot done. She began her sentence at any rate and Catherine sat down at her own table, untied the bundle of old letters upon which she was working, smoothed them out absentmindedly and began to decipher the faded script. In a minute she looked across at her mother to judge her mood. Peace and happiness had relaxed every muscle in her face. Her lips were parted very slightly and her breath came in smooth controlled inspirations like those of a child who is surrounding itself with a building of bricks and increasing in ecstasy as each brick is placed in position. So Mrs. Hillberry was raising round her the skies and trees of the past with every stroke of her pen and recalling the voices of the dead. Quiet as the room was and undisturbed by the sounds of the present moment Catherine could fancy that here was a deep pool of past time and that she and her mother were bathed in the light of sixty years ago. What could the present give she wondered to compare with the rich crowd of gifts bestowed by the past? Here was a Thursday morning in process of manufacture. Each second was minted fresh by the clock upon the mantelpiece. She strained her ears and could just hear far off the hoot of a motor car and the rush of wheels coming nearer and dying away again and the voices of men crying old iron and vegetables in one of the poorer streets at the back of the house. Rooms of course accumulate their suggestions and any room in which one has been used to carry on any particular occupation gives off memories of moods of ideas of postures that have been seen in it so that to attempt any different kind of work there is almost impossible. Catherine was unconsciously affected each time she entered her mother's room by all these influences which had had their birth years ago when she was a child and had something sweet and solemn about them and connected themselves with early memories of the cavernous glooms and sonorous echoes of the abbey where her grandfather lay buried. All the books and pictures even the chairs and tables had belonged to him or had referenced to him even the china dogs on the mantelpiece and the little shepherdesses with their sheep had been bought by him for a penny apiece from a man who used to stand with a tray of toys in Kensington High Street as Catherine had often heard her mother tell. Often she had sat in this room with her mind fixed so firmly on those vanished figures that she could almost see the muscles round their eyes and lips and had given to each his own voice with its tricks of accent and his coat and his cravat. Often she seemed to herself to be moving among them an invisible ghost among the living better acquainted with them than with her own friends because she knew their secrets and possessed a divine foreknowledge of their destiny. They had been so unhappy such muddlers so wrongheaded it seemed to her. She could have told them what to do and what not to do. It was a melancholy fact that they would pay no heed to her and were bound to come to grief in their own antiquated way. Their behavior was often grotesquely irrational. Their conventions monstrously absurd and yet as she brooded upon them she felt so closely attached to them that it was useless to try to pass judgment upon them. She very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being with a future of her own. On a morning of slight depression such as this she would try to find some sort of clue to the muddle which their old letters presented some reason which seemed to make it worthwhile to them some aim which they kept steadily in view but she was interrupted. Mrs. Hilbury had risen from her table and was standing looking out of the window at a string of barges swimming up the river. Catherine watched her. Suddenly Mrs. Hilbury turned abruptly and exclaimed I really believe I'm bewitched I only want three sentences you see something quite straightforward and commonplace and I can't find them. She began to pace up and down the room snatching up her duster but she was too much annoyed to find any relief as yet in polishing the backs of books. Besides she said giving the sheet she had written to Catherine I don't believe this will do. Did your grandfather ever visit the Hebrides Catherine? She looked in a strangely beseeching way at her daughter. My mind got running on the Hebrides and I couldn't help writing a little description of them. Perhaps it would do at the beginning of a chapter. Chapters often begin quite differently from the way they go on, you know. Catherine read what her mother had written. She might have been a schoolmaster criticizing a child's essay. Her face gave Mrs. Hilbury who watched it anxiously. No ground for hope. It's very beautiful, she stated but you see mother we ought to go from point to point. Oh, I know, Mrs. Hilbury exclaimed and that's just what I can't do. Things keep coming into my head. It isn't that I don't know everything and feel everything who did know him if I didn't but I can't put it down, you see. There's a kind of blind spot, she said, touching her forehead. There and when I can't sleep a night I fancy I shall die without having done it. From exultation she had passed to the depths of depression which the imagination of her death aroused. The depression communicated itself to Catherine. How impotent they were fiddling about all day long with papers. And the clock was striking eleven and nothing done. She watched her mother now rummaging in a great brass-bound box which stood by her table but she did not go to her help. Of course Catherine reflected. Her mother had now lost some paper and they would waste the rest of the morning looking for it. She cast her eyes down in irritation and read again her mother's musical sentences about the silver gulls and the roots of little pink flowers washed by polluted streams and the blue mists of hyacinths until she was struck by her mother's silence. She raised her eyes. Mrs. Hilbury had emptied a portfolio containing old photographs over her table and was looking from one to another. Surely Catherine, she said, the men were far handsomer in those days than they are now in spite of their odious whiskers. Look at old John Graham in his white waistcoat. Look at Uncle Harley. That's Peter the man-servant, I suppose. Uncle John brought him back from India. Catherine looked at her mother but did not stir or answer. She had suddenly become very angry with a rage which their relationship made silent and therefore doubly powerful and critical. She felt all the unfairness of the claim which her mother tacitly made to her time and sympathy and what Mrs. Hilbury took, Catherine thought bitterly, she wasted. Then in a flash she remembered that she had still to tell her about Cyril's misbehavior. Her anger immediately dissipated itself. It broke like some wave that has gathered itself high above the rest. The waters were resumed into the sea again and Catherine felt once more full of peace and solicitude and anxious only that her mother should be protected from pain. She crossed the room instinctively and sat on the arm of her mother's chair. Mrs. Hilbury lent her head against her daughter's body. What is nobler, she mused, turning over the photographs than to be a woman to whom everyone turns in sorrow or difficulty? How have the young women of your generation improved upon that, Catherine? I can see them now, sweeping over the lawns at Melbury House in their flounces and furbellows, so calm and stately and imperial, and the monkey and the little black dwarf following behind, as if nothing mattered in the world but to be beautiful and kind. But they did more than we do, I sometimes think. They were, and that's better than doing. They seemed to me like ships, like majestic ships, holding on their way, not shoving or pushing, nor fretted by little things as we are, but taking their way like ships with white sails. Catherine tried to interrupt this discourse, but the opportunity did not come, and she could not forbear to turn over the pages of the album in which the old photographs were stored. The faces of these men and women shone forth wonderfully after the hubbub of living faces, and seemed, as her mother had said, to wear a marvellous dignity and calm, as if they had ruled their kingdoms justly and deserved great love. Some were of almost incredible beauty, others were ugly enough in a forcible way, but none were dull or bored or insignificant. The superb, stiff folds of the crinolines suited the women. The cloaks and hats of the gentlemen seemed full of character. Once more Catherine felt the serene air all round her, and seemed far off to hear the solemn beating of the sea upon the shore. But she knew that she must join the present on to this past. Mrs. Hilbury was rambling on from story to story. That's Janey Manoring, she said, pointing to a superb white-haired dame whose satin robes seem strung with pearls. I must have told you how she found her cook drunk under the kitchen table when the Empress was coming to dinner and tucked up her velvet sleeves. She always dressed like an Empress herself, cooked the whole meal, and appeared in the drawing-room as if she'd been sleeping on a bank of roses all day. She could do anything with her hands. They all could. Make a cottage or embroider a petticoat. And that's Queenie Calcune. She went on, turning the pages, who took her coffin out with her to Jamaica, packed with lovely shawls and bonnets, because you couldn't get coffins in Jamaica, and she had a horror of dying there as she did, and being devoured by the white ants. And there's Sabine, the loveliest of them all. Ah! It was like a star rising when she came into the room, and that's Miriam in her coachman's cloak with all the little capes on, and she wore great top boots underneath. You young people may say you're unconventional, but you're nothing compared with her. Turning the page, she came upon the picture of a very masculine, handsome lady whose head the photographer had adorned with an imperial crown. Ah! You wretch! Mrs. Hilbury exclaimed, What a wicked old despot you were in your day! How we all bowed down before you! Maggie, she used to say, If it hadn't been for me, where would you be now? And it was true. She brought them together, you know. She said to my father, Marry her. And he did. And she said to poor little Clara, Fall down and worship him. And she did. But she got up again, of course. What else could one expect? She was a mere child, 18 and half-dead with fright, too. But that old tyrant never repented. She used to say that she had given them three perfect months. And no one had a right to more. And I sometimes think, Catherine, That's true, you know. It's more than most of us have. Only we have to pretend, which was a thing neither of them could ever do. I fancy, Mrs. Hilbury mused, That there was a kind of sincerity in those days between men and women, which with all your outspokenness, you haven't got. Catherine again tried to interrupt, but Mrs. Hilbury had been gathering impetus from her recollections and was now in high spirits. They must have been good friends at heart, she resumed, because she used to sing his songs. Ah, how did it go? And Mrs. Hilbury, who had a very sweet voice, trolled out a famous lyric of her fathers, which had been set to an absurdly and charmingly sentimental air by some early Victorian composer. It's the vitality of them, she concluded, striking her fist against the table. That's what we haven't got. We're virtuous, we're earnest, we go to meetings, we pay the poor their wages, but we don't live as they lived. As often as not, my father wasn't in bed three nights out of the seven, but always fresh as paint in the morning. I hear him now, come singing up the stairs to the nursery, and tossing the loaf for breakfast on his sword-stick, and then off we went for a day's pleasuring. Richmond, Hapton Court, the Surrey Hills. Why shouldn't we go, Catherine? It's going to be a fine day. At this moment, just as Mrs. Hilbury was examining the weather from the window, there was a knock at the door. A slight elderly lady came in and was saluted by Catherine, with very evident dismay, as Ancelia. She was dismayed because she guessed why Ancelia had come. It was certainly, in order to discuss the case of Cyril, and the woman who was not his wife, and owing to her procrastination, Mrs. Hilbury was quite unprepared. Who could be more unprepared? Here she was, suggesting that all three of them should go on a jaunt to Blackfriars to inspect the site of Shakespeare's Theatre, for the weather was hardly settled enough for the country. To this proposal, Mrs. Milvane listened with a patient's smile, which indicated that for many years she had accepted such eccentricities in her sister-in-law with Bland philosophy. Catherine took up her position at some distance, standing with her foot on the fender, as though by doing so she could get a better view of the matter. But in spite of her aunt's presence, how unreal the whole question of Cyril and his morality appeared. The difficulty, it now seemed, was not to break the news gently to Mrs. Hilbury, but to make her understand it. How was one to lasso her mind and tether it to this minute unimportant spot? A matter of fact statement seemed best. I think Aunt Sylia has come to talk about Cyril, mother, she said, rather brutally. Aunt Sylia has discovered that Cyril is married. He has a wife and children. No, he is not married, Mrs. Milvane interposed in low tones, addressing herself to Mrs. Hilbury. He has two children and another on the way. Mrs. Hilbury looked from one to the other in bewilderment. We thought it better to wait until it was proved before we told you, Catherine added. But I met Cyril only a fortnight ago at the National Gallery, Mrs. Hilbury exclaimed. I don't believe a word of it, and she tossed her head with a smile on her lips at Mrs. Milvane, as though she could quite understand her mistake, which was a very natural mistake in the case of a childless woman whose husband was something very dull in the board of trade. I didn't wish to believe it, Maggie, said Mrs. Milvane. For a long time I couldn't believe it, but now I've seen and I have to believe it. Catherine, Mrs. Hilbury demanded, does your father know of this? Catherine nodded. Cyril married, Mrs. Hilbury repeated, and never telling us a word, though we've had him in our house since he was a child, noble William's son. I can't believe my ears. Feeling that the burden of proof was laid upon her, Mrs. Milvane now proceeded with her story. She was elderly and frail, but her childlessness seemed always to impose these painful duties on her, and to revere the family, and to keep it in repair, had now become the chief object of her life. She told her story in a low, spasmodic and somewhat broken voice. I have suspected for some time that he was not happy. There were new lines on his face, so I went to his rooms where I knew he was engaged at the poor man's college. He lectures there, Roman law, you know, or maybe Greek. The landlady said Mr. Allardyce only slept there about once a fortnight now. He looked so ill, she said. She had seen him with a young person. I suspected something directly. I went to his room, and there was an envelope on the mantelpiece, and a letter with an address in Seton Street, off the Kennington Road. Mrs. Hilbury fidgeted rather restlessly, and hum fragments of her tune as if to interrupt. I went to Seton Street, Aunt Cecilia continued firmly, a very low place, lodging-houses, you know, with canaries in the window, number seven just like all the others. I rang, I knocked, no one came. I went down the area, I am certain I saw someone inside, children, a cradle. But no reply, no reply. She sighed, and looked straight in front of her with a glazed expression in her half-failed blue eyes. I stood in the street, she resumed, in case I could catch a sight of one of them. It seemed a very long time. There were rough men singing in the public-house round the corner. At last the door opened, and someone, it must have been the woman herself, came right past me. There was only the pillar-box between us. And what did she look like? Mrs. Hilbury demanded. One could see how the poor boy had been deluded, was all that Mrs. Milvane vouchsafed by way of description. Poor thing, Mrs. Hilbury exclaimed. For Cyril, Mrs. Milvane said, laying a slight emphasis upon Cyril. But they've got nothing to live upon, Mrs. Hilbury continued, if he'd come to us like a man, she went on, and said, I've been a fool, one would have pitied him, one would have tried to help him. There's nothing so disgraceful, after all. But he's been going on about all these years pretending, letting one take it for granted that he was single, and the poor deserted little wife. She is not his wife, Aunt Cecilia interrupting. I've never heard anything so detestable. Mrs. Hilbury wound up, striking her fist on the arm of her chair, as she realized the fact she became thoroughly disgusted, although perhaps she was more hurt by the concealment of the sin than by the sin itself. She looks splendidly roused and indignant, and Catherine felt an immense relief and pride in her mother. It was plain that her indignation was very genuine, and that her mind was as perfectly focused upon the facts as anyone could wish. More so, by a long way, than Aunt Cecilia's mind, which seemed to be timidly circling with a morbid pleasure in these unpleasant shades. She and her mother together would take the situation in hand, visit Cyril, and see the whole thing through. We must realize Cyril's point of view first, she said, speaking directly to her mother, as if to a contemporary. But before the words were out of her mouth there was more confusion outside, and cousin Caroline, Mrs. Hilbury's maiden cousin, entered the room. Although she was by birth an allardice, and Aunt Cecilia, Hilbury, the complexities of the family relationship were such that each was at once first and second cousin to the other, and thus aunt and cousin to the culprit Cyril, so that his misbehavior was almost as much cousin Caroline's affair as Aunt Cecilia's. Cousin Caroline was a lady of very imposing height in circumference, but in spite of her size and her handsome trappings, it was something exposed and unsheltered in her expression, as if for many summers her thin red skin and hooked nose and reduplication of chins, so much resembling the profile of a cockatoo, had been bared to the weather. She was indeed a single lady, but she had, it was the habit to say, made a life for herself, and was thus entitled to be heard with respect. This unhappy business, she began out of breath as she was, if the train had not got out of the station just as I arrived, I should have been with you before. Cecilia has doubtless told you. You will agree with me, Maggie. He must be made to marry her at once for the sake of the children. But does he refuse to marry her? Mrs. Hilbury inquired with a return of Herbie Wildermit. He has written an absurd, perverted letter, all quotations. Cousin Caroline puffed. He thinks he's doing a very fine thing, where we only see the folly of it, the girl's every bit as infatuated as he is, for which I blame him. She entangled him, Aunt Cecilia intervened, with a very curious smoothness of intonation, which seemed to convey a vision of threads weaving and interweaving a close, white mesh round their victim. It's no use going into the rights and wrongs of the affair now, Cecilia, said Cousin Caroline, with some acerbity, for she believed herself the only practical one of the family, and regretted that, owing to the slowness of the kitchen clock, Mrs. Milvane had already confused poor dear Maggie with her own incomplete version of the facts. The mischief's done, and very ugly mischief, too. Are we to allow the third child to be born out of wedlock? I am sorry to have to say these things before you, Catherine. He will bear your name, Maggie, your father's name, remember. But let us hope it will be a girl, said Mrs. Hilbury. Catherine, who had been looking at her mother constantly, while the chatter of tongues held sway, perceived that the look of straightforward indignation had already vanished. Her mother was evidently casting about in her mind for some method of escape, or bright spot, or sudden illumination which should show to the satisfaction of everybody that all had happened, miraculously but incontestably, for the best. It's detestable, quite detestable, she repeated, but in tones of no great assurance, and then her face lit up with a smile which, tentative at first, soon became most assured. Nowadays, people don't think so badly of these things as they used to do, she began. It will be horribly uncomfortable for them sometimes, but if they are brave, clever children, as they will be, I dare say, it'll make remarkable people of them in the end. Robert Browning used to say that every great man has Jewish blood in him, and we must try to look at it in that light. And after all, Cyril has acted on principle. One may disagree with his principle, but at least one can respect it, like the French Revolution, or Cromwell cutting the king's head off. Some of the most terrible things in history have been done on principle, she concluded. I'm afraid I take a very different view of principle, Cousin Caroline remarked tartly. Principle, Aunt Celia repeated, with an air of deprecating such a word and such a connection. I will go to-morrow and see him, she added. But why should you take these disagreeable things upon yourself, Celia? Mrs. Hilbury interposed, and Cousin Caroline thereupon protested with some further plan involving sacrifice of herself. Growing weary of it all, Catherine turned to the window, and stood among the folds of the curtain, pressing close to the window pane, and gazing disconsolently at the river, much in the attitude of a child depressed by the meaningless talk of its elders. She was much disappointed in her mother, and in herself, too, the little tug which she gave to the blind, letting it fly up to the top with a snap signified her annoyance. She was very angry, and yet impotent to give expression to her anger, or know with whom she was angry, how they talked and moralized and made up stories to suit their own version of the becoming, and secretly praised their own devotion and tact. No, they had their dwelling in a mist, she decided, hundreds of miles away. Away from what? Perhaps it would be better if I married William, she thought suddenly, and the thought appeared to loom through the mist like solid ground. She stood there, thinking of her own destiny, and the elder ladies talked on, until they had talked themselves into a decision to ask the young woman to luncheon, and tell her, very friendly, how such behavior appeared to women like themselves, who knew the world, and then Mrs. Hilbury was struck by a better idea.