Chapter II

The land, which from the time they left London had been so ugly as to be almost invisible, suddenly took form and colour. To the south, beyond a creek whose further bank was a raw edge of gleaming mud hummocks tufted with dark spriggy heaths and veined with waterways that shone white under the cold sky, there stretched a great quiet plain. It stretched illimitably, and though there were dotted over it red barns and grey houses and knots of trees growing in fellowship as they do round steadings, and though its colour was a deep wet fertile green, it did not seem as if it could be a human territory. It could be regarded only as a place for the feet of the clouds which, half as tall as the sky, stood on the far horizon. They passed a station, built high above the marsh on piles, and looked down on a ford that crossed the mud bed of the creek to a white road that drove southwards into the plain. A tongue of the creek ran inwards beside it for a hundred yards or so; above its humpy mud banks the road protected itself by white wooden railings, and on its other side a line of telegraph poles ran towards the skyline.

This was the beauty of bleakness, but not as she had known it on the Pentlands. That was like tragedy. Storms broke on the hills, spread snow or filled the freshets as with tears, and then departed, leaving the curlews drilling holes with their cries in the sphere of catharised clear air; and the people there, men resting on their staves, women at their but-and-ben doors, spoke with magnificent calm, as if they had exhausted all their violence on certain specific occasions. But this plain was like a realist mind with an intense consciousness of cause and effect. There would blow a warning wind before the storm. It would be visible afar off in its coming, as a darkness, a flaw on the horizon; and when it had scourged the plain it would be seen for long travelling on towards the mainland. There would be no illusion that anything happens suddenly or that anything disappears. Here the long preparation of earth's events and their endurance would be evident. It would breed people like Marion, in whom a sense of the bearing of the past on the present was so powerful that it was often difficult to know of what she was speaking, and whether the tale she was telling of Richard referred to yesterday or his boyhood; that it was impossible to say whether she smiled because of memory or hope when she leaned forward and said, "This is Kerith Island."

"Mhm," said Ellen, since it was not her own country; "it's verra flat." And then, realising that she was belittling beauty, she exclaimed, "I must have said that for the sake of being disagreeable. I think it's fine, though very different from Scotland. But after all, why should everything be like Scotland? There's no real reason. I don't see where Richard's going to work, though."

"Three miles along the road and two to the right. You can see the works from our windows."

"Of course you could," said Ellen sourly; and explained, "When I couldn't see the works I made up a sort of story for myself, about the works being new ones, and the firm not being able to get them finished in time for Richard to start work, so that we had him hanging about the house all to ourselves. That was silly. Of course. But I am silly about him. I suppose I will soon get over it."

"I will hate you if you do," answered Marion, "for I never have."

The island and its creek fell away to the south. The train ran now across the marshes, flat and green, chequered with dykes, confined to the right by the steep brim of a sea-wall. To the left a line of little hills gained height. They fell back in an amphitheatre, and a farmhouse turned to the sun a garden more austere with the salt air than farmhouse gardens commonly are, and behind it, in the shelter of the curved green escarpment, some tall trees stood among the pastures. The hills rose again to an overhanging steepness and broke down to a gap full of the purples of bare woods, before which stood the cathedralesque ruins of a brick-kiln, with its tall tower and apse-like ovens, on a green platform of levelled ground scored with the red of rusted trolley-lines. The hill grew higher and stood sheer like a turfed cliff, and was surmounted by four tall towers of grey stone. It would have been impressive if the fall of the cliff had not been disfigured by a large shed of pink corrugated iron with "Hallelujah Army" painted on its roof, which was built on a shelf where some hawthorn trees and bramble bushes found a footing.

Then for a time, after an oblique valley had cleft the range, an elm-hedge ran along the crest, till there looked down a grey church with a squinting spire and grey-black yews set about it, and something white like a monument standing up on a mound beside it. Woods appeared and receded, leaving the hilltop bare, and returned; there was a broken hedge of hawthorn; a downward line of trees scored the gentler slope of the escarpment, and from a square red brick house on the skyline there fell an orchard.

"That is our house up there. That is Yaverland's End," said Marion; "and look on the other window, that is Roothing Harbour." But all Ellen could see was a forest of slim straight poles leaning everywhere above the sea-wall. "Those are the masts of the fishing-boats," said Marion indifferently, even grumbling, as was her way when she spoke of the things she loved. "Don't laugh at this place, though it is all mud. I can tell you the Elizabethan adventures drew most of their seamen from here and Tilbury." The sea-wall stopped, and beyond a foreshore of coal-dust and soiled shingle and tarred huts, such as is found always where men go down to the sea in ships, lay a bare harbour basin in which fishing-boats lolled on their sides in silver mud. Further out, smaller boats lay tidily on a bar of coarse grass that ran out from a sea-walled island that lay alongside the marsh the train had just crossed, with a farm and its orchard lying at the end it thrust into the harbour.

Now the train ran slower, and it could be seen that the line had been driven violently through the high street with no decent clearance, for to its left it could be seen that it was overhung by the backs of cottages, and on its right was the cobbled roadway on which walked bearded men in jerseys and top boots and women with that look of brine rather than bloom which is characteristic of fishing-villages. It was a fairly continuous street of huddled houses and drysalters' shops, with their stock of thigh-long boots and lanthorns and sou'-westers heaped behind small dark panes, and here and there came quays, with whitened cottages and trim gardens facing dingy wharf-offices over paved squares set about the edge with capstans, and beyond a Thames barge showing its furled red sail against a vista of shining mud-flats and the vast sky that belonged to this district. This hard, bright, clouded day, which dwelt on the grey in all things, even in the rough grass, made all look brittle and trivial and, however old, still unhistoric. It could be imagined that the people who lived under this immense sky might come to lose the common human sense of their own supreme importance, and to suspect themselves as being of no more account than the fishes which lie at the bottom of the channel; and might look up at the great cloud galleons floating above and wonder if these had not for ship's company beings that would be to them as men are to fishes. It was a place, Ellen saw, that might well have engendered such a curious vigorous lethargy as Marion's. Its breezes were clean enough to nourish strength, but there was something about the proportions of the scene that would breed scepticism concerning the value of all activities.

To see things in terms of Marion was weak, and a distraction from delight. She could neither behold things for their own sake, as she had up till this autumn, nor for Richard's sake, as she had till yesterday evening. But she was forced to wonder about this woman who had been able to be Richard's mother and who was yet so little what one approved of, and who yet again was so picturesque that one had to watch her with pleasant intensity that was not usually associated with dislike. Even when she looked on the astonishing scene that lay before her when they stepped on to the platform at Roothing station she was distracted from her astonishment by a sense that she would afterwards maintain an argument on the subject with Marion. The surroundings were ignobly ugly, as eggshells and scraps of newspaper trodden into waste ground are ugly. She was prepared to tell Marion so, though it was her own town. There had not been sufficient space to build a station with the up and down platforms facing each other, so the up platform was further back, facing the harbour, and this down platform was overshadowed on its landward side by smoke-grimed cottages and tenements which rose on high ground in a peak of squalor. Seawards one looked over a goods-siding, where there stood a few wagons of cockle-shells and a cinderpath esplanade on to a vast plain of mud.

It could not be beautiful. A plain of mud could not be beautiful. Yet the mind could dwell contentedly on this new and curious estate of nature, this substance that was neither earth nor water, this place that was neither land nor sea. It had its own colours: in the shadow of the great couchant cloud whose mane was brassy with sunshine that had lodged in the upper air it was purple; otherwise it was brown; and where the light lay it was as bright as polished steel, yet giving in its brightness some indication of its sucking softness. It had its own strange scenery; it had its undulations and its fissures, and between deep, rounded, shining banks, a course marked here and there by the stripped white ghosts of sapling trees, a winding river flowed out to the far-off channel of the estuary which lay a grey bar under the dark line of the Kentish hills.

It supported its own life; hundreds of black fishing-boats and some large vessels leaned this way and that, high and dry on the mud, like flies stuck on a window-pane, and up on the river, whose waters were now flowing from the sea to the land, men came in dingeys, not rowing, but bending their bodies indolently and without effort, because they were back-watering with the tide, so that their swift advance looked as if it were made easy by sorcery. They slackened speed before they came to the wharf, which just here by the station jutted out in a grey bastion surmounted by the minatory finger of a derrick, and some of them climbed out and put round baskets full of shining fish upon their heads, and, walking struttingly to brake their heavy boots on the slippery mud, followed a wet track up to the cinderpath. They looked stunted and fantastic like Oriental chessmen. It was strange, but this place had the quality of beauty. It laid a finger on the heart. Moreover, it had a solemn quality of importance. It was as if this was the primeval ooze from which the first life stirred and crawled landwards to begin to make this a memorable star.

Again the place seemed curiously like Marion. It might well have been that to make her a god had modelled a figure in this estuary mud and breathed on it, so much, in her sallow colouring and the heavy impassivity which was the equivalent of the plain's monotony, did she partake of its qualities. Her behaviour, too, was grand like the plain and yet composed of material that, as stuff for grandeur, was almost as uncompromising as mud.

She took the girl to the railings and made her look out to the sea, saying, "It is rather fine in a queer way, isn't it? When I was a girl I could run dryshod to the very end of the channel, and I daresay Richard could still."

Ellen shivered. "Is it not terribly lonely out there, just under the sky?"

"Oh, no, it's pleasant to be on innocent territory, with no human beings living on it. There was a feeling, so far as I can remember it, of extraordinary freedom and lightness." She spoke with a sincere cynicism, an easy grimness that appeared quite dreadful to Ellen. The girl looked appealingly at her, asking her not to give the sanction of her impressive personality to such hopelessness about life, but had the ill luck to catch her in the act of a practical demonstration of her dislike for her fellow-creatures. Now that the train had puffed out of the station the station-master, a silver-haired old man with a red face on which amiability clung like a lather, had come to Marion's side and was saying that he had not seen her for a long time, and asking how Richard was and when he was coming back. Ellen thought this was very kind of him, but Marion evidently found it tiresome, and hardly troubled to conceal the fact, walking rather more quickly along the platform than the old man could manage and giving no more answer to his questions than a vague smiling "Hum." Ellen hoped that the poor old man was not offended.

She found something dubious, too, about the lack of apology with which Marion led her into the squalor outside the station, over the level crossing, with its cobblestones veined with coal-dust, past the fish-shop hung with the horrid bleeding frills of skate, and the barber's shop that also sold journals, which stood with unreluctant posters at the exact point where newspapers and flypapers meet; and up the winding road, which sent a trail of square red villas with broken prams standing in unplanted or unweeded gardens up the hill in the direction of the church and the castle they had passed in the train. But surely she ought to have apologised for bringing a girl reared in Edinburgh to a place like this. On one of the gates they passed was written "Hiemath," and there was something very characteristic of the jerry-built and decaying place in the cheap sentiment that had been too slovenly to spell its own name correctly. Yet to the left, over the housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines, there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with white sailing-ships and steamers, and dark majestic hills. But because of the quality of the place, and perhaps of her guide, she did not want to recognise its beauty.

When they came to a cross-roads that followed westward along the crest of the hill she would hardly admit to herself that this was better, that this was indeed right in a unique way, and that the dignified houses of white marl and oak on one side of the road and the public lawns on the other were quite good for England. She was not softened by Marion's proud mutter: "It's jolly in spring, seeing the blue sea through the gap in the may hedge. And on the other side of the hedge there's one of those old grass roads. They used to say they were Roman, but they're far older. Older than Stonehenge. This used to run all the way to Canfleet--that's where Kerith Island touches the mainland--but it's all gone but this part here...." She disliked the road when it took a disclaiming twist and left the houses out of sight and travelled between low oaks, because it was the road home, and she would never have chosen a home in this strange place, whose lack of meaning for herself could be measured by its plentitude of meaning for this woman who was so unlike her.

Certainly she would never have chosen this home. Very thick, trim hedges gave the long garden the look of a pound; the standard rose-trees which grew in round flower-beds on the lawn, which was of that excessively deep green that grass takes on in gardens with a north aspect, had the air of being detained in custody, and the borders on each side of the broad gravel path showed that extreme neatness which is found in places of detention. The red brick farmhouse at its end was very small, and its windows such mere square peep-holes among a strong growth of ivy that one conceived its inhabitants as being able to see the light only by pressing their faces close against the glass.

"Oh, I know it's ugly!" muttered Marion, holding back the gate for her. "I should have had it pulled down when I built on the new rooms. But it's been here two hundred years, and there are some of the beams of the house that was here before in it, and we have lived here all the time, so it was too great a responsibility to destroy it." She looked sideways at the girl's clouded face, and explained desperately, "I couldn't, you know. When people don't understand why you did things, and say you did them because you had no respect for good old established decencies of life, you become most carefully conservative!"

But confidence could not be maintained for long at this awkward pitch, and she went on to the front door. "You'll like our roses," she said hopefully, as they waited for it to open; "they grow wonderfully on this Essex clay." But although there was evident in that an amiable desire to please, Ellen was again alienated by the cool smile with which Marion greeted the maid who opened the door, the uninterested "Good morning, Mabel." The girl looked so pleased to see them. Marion returned, too, to this curious idea of hers about not being able to destroy ugly things just because they are old, although of course it is one's plain duty to replace ugly things with beautiful whatever the circumstances, when they stepped in, through no intervening hall or passage, to a little dark room furnished, as farm parlours are, with a grandfather clock, an oak settle, a dresser, a gate-leg table with a patchwork cloth over it, and samplers hanging on wallpaper of a trivial rosebud pattern. "I hate this English farmhouse stuff," she said. "Heavy and uninventive. The Yaverlands have been well-to-do for at least four hundred years, and they never took the trouble to have a single thing made with any particular appositeness to themselves. But I have left this room as it was. To have it disturbed would have been like turning my grandmother's ghost out of doors, and I troubled her enough in her lifetime. But look! It's all right in the rooms I've built on." She held back a door, and they looked into a shining room lined with white panels and lit by wide windows that admitted much of the vast sky. "But I'll take you to your room. It's in the old part of the house. But I think you will like it. It's a room I'm fond of...."

They climbed a steep dark staircase, and Marion opened a low thatched door in which the light, obscured by drawn chintz curtains, fell on cream walls and a bed, with its high headpiece made of fine wood painted green, and a great press made of the same. "There's a step down," she said, "and the floor rakes, but I'm fond of the room. I slept here when I was a girl; but all the things are new--I got them down from London; and I had the walls done. So you have a fresh start." She went to the chintz curtains and pulled them back, disclosing a very large window that came down to within two feet of the floor and looked on to a farmyard. "It's a good-sized window, isn't it?" she said. "There's a story about that. They say my great-grandfather, William Yaverland, was as mean as he was jealous, and as jealous as he was mean, and in middle life he was crippled by a kick from a horse and bedridden ever after. He'd a very pretty young wife, and a handsome overseer who was a very capable chap and worth hundreds a year to the farm, and it struck him that in his new state he'd probably not be able to keep the one without losing the other. So he had this window knocked out so that he could lie in his bed and keep his eye on the dairy where his wife worked and see who went in and came out. Well, now it'll let the morning sun in on you."

She sat down on the windowseat, and with a sense of fulfilment watched the girl move delightedly among the new things, touching the little white wreaths on the embroidered bedspread and tracing the delicate grain with her forefinger, and coming to a stop before the mirror and looking at her face with a solemn respectful vanity because it had pleased her beloved. Marion found this very right and fitting, because to her, in spite of the story of this window, this room had always been sacred to the spirit of young love. She turned her head and looked out into the farmyard. When the land had been let out to neighbouring cultivators the byres and outhouses had all been pulled down, and the yard was now only a quadrangle of grey trodden earth, having on its further side a wall-less shed in which there were stacked all the billets that had been cut from the spinneys on the land they retained, bound neatly with the black branches fluting together and a fuzz of purple twigs at each end.

But she could remember another day, more than thirty years before, when it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as it is in the puppy by a genuine fear of life, or in the kitten by a minxish affectation of the same; and Goodtart, the cattleman, had drawn near with a "Wunnerful, ain't they, Miss Marion?--and them not born at four o'clock this morning," when she heard the clear voice that was sweet and yet hard, like silver ringing on steel, calling to the dogs out in the roadway, "Lesbia! Catullus! Come out of it!" The greyhounds had, as usual, got in among the sheep on the glebe land opposite. She ran forward into the darkness of the stye and put down the two piglets among the sucking tide of life that washed the flanks of the great old sow, but she could not stay there for ever. Goodtart, who, being in the sunlight, could not see that she was looking out at him from the shadow, turned an undisguised face towards the doorway, and she perceived that the dung-brown eyes under his forelocks were almost alive and that his long upper lip was twitching from side to side.

She walked stiffly out, hearing the voice still calling "Catullus! Lesbia!" and went in to the house. But Peggy was baking in the kitchen and Grandmother was reading the _Prittlebay Gazette_ in the parlour, and she went upstairs and threw herself on the bed. She thought of nothing. Her heart seemed by its slogging beat to be urging some argument upon her. Presently she realised that he was no longer calling to his dogs, and she turned on her pillow and looked out of the big window into the farmyard. He was there. Cousin Tom Stallybrass, who had been managing the farm ever since Grandfather's death, had come out and was talking to him, and from his gestures was evidently telling him of the recent collapse of the dairy wall, but he was not interested, for he did not point his stick at it, and in him almost every mental movement was immediately followed by some physical sign. There was something else he wanted. When the greyhounds licked up at him he thrust them away with the petulance of a baulked man, and whenever Tom turned his head away to point at the dairy he cast quick glances at the farm door, at the gate into the road, at the other gate into the fields. She could see his face, and it was dark, and the lips drawn down at the corners. What could it be that he wanted?

She rose from her bed and went to the window, and knelt down by it, pressing her face and the white bib of her apron close to the glass. Instantly he saw her, and his face was filled with worship and happiness as with light. At last she knew that she was loved, that the things he said when they met on the marshes were not said as they had been when she was a child, and that there had lately been solemnity throned in his eyes' levity. He made no motion for her to come down, nor when Tom turned his head again did he throw any furtive look at the window. It was enough for him to have seen her; and soon he went away with bent head followed by his forgotten dogs.

Well, now this girl should sleep here, and the place should be revisited by a love as sacred as that, and one which would not commit sacrilege upon itself. She gave a soft laugh, and in a haze of satisfaction that prevented her seeing that Ellen was beginning to tell her how much she liked the furniture she went out and passed to her own room. For a moment she stood at the side windows, looking out on the show of sky and sea and green islands that lay sealed in the embankments from the grey flood which was now running across the silver plain and trying at them treacherously through the creeks that lay loverlike beside them. Then she turned approvingly to the litter which betokened that this was a bedroom visited by insomnia more often than by sleep: the half-dozen boxes of different sorts of cigarettes, the plate of apples and figs, the pile of books, the portfolio of prints. It had been dreadful, that night at the hotel, with nothing to read. She was very glad to come home.

It would not have seemed credible to Ellen that anyone should feel like this about this house. The things in her room were very pretty, but it was spoiled for her by that large window, not because she was afraid that anyone would look in, but because Marion had told her that someone had once looked out. Since that person had been kin to this woman who was dark with unspent energy, she figured him as being not quite extinguishable by death and therefore still a tenant of the apartment. The jealousy of one of his stock would probably have more dynamic power than her most exalted passions, so she would not be able to evict him. She thought these things quite passionately and desperately while at the same time she was placidly brushing her hair and thinking how nice everything was here. Her mind continued to perform this duet of emotions when they went downstairs and had lunch. It was very pretty, this white room with the few etchings set sparsely on the gleaming panels, each with a fair field of space for its black-and-white assertion; the deep, bright blue carpet, soft as sleep, on the mirror-shining parquet; the long low bookcases with their glass doors; the few perfect flowers, with their reflection floating on polished walnut surfaces as if drowned in sherry.

The meal itself pleased as being in some sense classical, though she could not see why that adjective should occur to her. There was no white cloth, and the bright silver and delicate wineglasses, and the little dishes of coloured glass piled with wet green olives, stood among their images on a gleaming table. The food was all either very hot or very cold. She had two helps of everything, but at the same time she was being appalled by the bareness of the room. Her intuition informed that if a violent soul became terrified lest its own violence should provoke disorder it would probably make a violent effort towards order by throwing nearly everything out of the window, and that its habitation would look very much like this. She knitted her brows and said "Imphm" to herself; and her doubts were confirmed by Marion's vehement exclamation, "Oh, when will Richard come! I wish he would come soon." Her perfect, her so rightly old mother would have said, "It'll be nice for you, dear, when Richard comes," and would not have clouded her dreams of his coming with the threat of passionate competition for his notice.

She said stiffly, looking down on her plate, "We're awful reactionary, letting our whole lives revolve round a man."

"Reactionary?" repeated Marion. It had always been Ellen's complaint that grown-up people took what the young say contemptuously, but to have her remarks treated with quite such earnest consideration filled her for some reason with uneasiness. "I don't think so. If I had a daughter who was as wonderful as Richard I would let my life revolve round her. But I don't know. Perhaps I'm reactionary. Because I don't really believe that any woman could be as wonderful as Richard; do you?"

Ellen had always suspected that this woman was not quite sound on the Feminist question. "Maybe not as wonderful as Richard is," she said stoutly, "but as wonderful as any other man."

"Do you really think so?" asked Marion. "Women are such dependent things. They're dependent on their weak frames and their personal relationships. Illness can make a woman's sun go out so easily. And then, since personal relationships are the most imperfect things in the world, she is so liable to be unhappy. These are handicaps most women don't get over. And then, since men don't love us nearly as much as we love them, that leaves them much more spare vitality to be wonderful with."

Ellen sat in a polite silence, not wishing to make this woman who had failed in love feel small by telling her that she herself was loved by Richard just as much as she loved him.

"I don't know. I don't know. It's annoying the way that one comes to the end of life knowing less than one did at the beginning." She stood up petulantly. "Let's go upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way. She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned the meaning of life as one lived it.

So she was shaken and distressed by the fine face, which looked discontented with thinking as another face might look flushed with drinking, and by the powerful yet inert body which lay in the great armchair limply but uneasily, as if she desired to ask a question but was restrained by a belief that nobody could answer, but for lack of that answer was unable to commit herself to any action. Her expression was not, as Ellen had at first thought, blank. Nor was it trivial, though she still sometimes raised those hands with the flashing nails and smoothed her eyebrows. It showed plainly enough that doubt was wandering from chamber to chamber of her being, blowing out such candles of certitude as the hopefulness natural to all human beings had enabled her to light. The fact of Richard streamed in like sunshine through the windows of her soul, and when she spoke of him she was evidently utterly happy; but there were some parts of her life with which he had nothing to do, as there are north rooms in a house which the sun cannot touch, and these the breath of doubt left to utter darkness. "You're imagining all this, Ellen," she said to herself; "how can you possibly know all this about her?" "It's true," herself answered. "Well, it's not true in the sense that it's true that she's dark and her name's Mrs. Yaverland, is it?" "Ellen, have you nothing of an artist in you?" herself enquired with pain. "You might be a business body, or one of the mistresses in John Square, the crude way you're talking. It's not a fact that ye can look up in a directory. But it's perfectly true that this woman's queer and warselled and unhappy. But you're losing your head terribly on your first encounter with tragedy, and you fancying yourself a cut above the ordinary because you enjoyed a good read of 'King Lear' and 'Macbeth.'" "Well, I never said I wanted to take rooms with Lady Macbeth," she objected.

But Marion was asking her now if she liked this room, or if she found it, as many people did, more like a lighthouse than a home, and because she spoke with passionate concern lest the girl should not be at ease in the place where she was to spend her future life, Ellen immediately answered with a kind of secondary sincerity that she liked it very much. Yet the room was convincing her of something she was too young and too poor ever to have proved before, and that was the possibility of excess. All her delights had been so sparse and in character so simple that no cloying of after-taste had ever changed them from being finally and unquestionably delights; they stood like a knot of poplars on the edge of a large garden whose close resemblance to golden flame could be enjoyed quite without dubiety because there was no fear that the lawns or flowers would be robbed of sunlight by their spear-thin shadows. She did not know that one could eat too many ices, for she had never been able to afford more than one at a time; in rainy Edinburgh the stories of men whose minds became sick at dwelling under immutably blue skies had seemed one of the belittling lies about fair things that grown-up people like to tell; and since she had had hardly anybody to talk to till Richard came, and had never had enough books to read, it had seemed quite impossible that one could feel or think past the point where feeling and thinking were happy embarkations of the soul on bracing seas.

Yet here in this room the inconceivable had happened, and she recognised that there was present an excess of beauty and an excess of being. For indeed the room was too like a lighthouse in the way that all who sat within were forced to look out on the windy firmament and see the earth spread far below as the pavement of the clouds on which their shadows trod like gliding feet. The walls it turned to the south and west were almost entirely composed of windows of extravagant dimensions, beginning below the cornice and stopping only a couple of feet above the floor, so that as the two women sat by the wood fire they looked over their shoulders at the leaning ships in the harbour and the tide that hurried to it over the silver plain, and the little house with its orchard at the island's end, not a stone's throw from the boats and nets, so marine in its situation that one could conceive it farmed by a merman and see him working his scaly tail up the straight path that drove through the garden to the door, a sheep-fish wriggling at his heels. They saw too the pastures of the rest of the island, of a rougher brine-qualified green, and the one black tree that stood against them like the ace of clubs; and past them lay the channel where the white sail of a frigate curtseyed to the rust-red rag of a barge, and the round dark hills beyond mothering a storm. And if they looked towards the window in the right-hand wall they saw a line of elms going down the escarpment to the marshes like women going down to a well; and between their slim purple statures, the green floor of Kerith Island stretched illimitably to the west. And everywhere there were colours, clear though unsunned, as if the lens of the air had been washed very clean by the sea winds.

She had never before been in a room so freely ventilated by beauty, and yet she knew that she would find living on the ledge of this view quite intolerable. All that existed within the room was dwarfed by the immensity that the glass let in upon it, like the private life of a man dominated by some great general idea. Because the clouds were grey with a load of rain and were running swiftly before an east wind the flesh became inattentive to the heat of the fire and participated in the chill of the open air, and though it is well to walk abroad on cold days, one wants to be warm when one sits by the hearth. Behind the glass doors of the bookcases were many books, with bindings that showed they were the inaccessible sort, modern and right, that one cannot get out of the public library. But one would never be able to sit and read with concentration here, where if the eye strayed ever so little over the margin it saw the river and the plain changing aspects at each change of the wind like passionate people hearing news; yet there are discoveries made by humanity that are as fair as the passage of a cloud-riving spot of sunlight from sea to marsh and from marsh to creek, and more necessary for the human being to observe. But when Ellen tried to rescue her mind from mersion into this excess of beauty and to fix it on the small, warmly-coloured pattern of the domestic life within the room it was lost as completely and disastrously, so far as following its own ends went, in the not less excessive view of the spiritual world presented by this woman's face.

Marion should not have lived in a room so full of light. The tragic point of her was pressed home too well. The spectator must forget his own fate in looking on this fine ravaged landscape and wondering what extremities of weather had made it what it was, and how such a noble atmosphere should hang over conformations not of the simple kind associated with nobility but subtle as villainy. Ellen knew that she would never have a life of her own here. She would all the time be trying to think out what had happened to Marion. She would never be able to look at events for what they were in themselves and in relation to the destiny she was going to make with Richard; but would wonder, if they were delights, whether their delightfulness would not seem heartless as laughter in a house of mourning to this woman whose delight lay in a grave, and if they were sorrows, whether coming to a woman who had wept so much they would not extort some last secretion more agonising than a common tear.

"But she is old! She will die!" she thought, aghast at this tragic tyranny. "Mother died!" she assured herself hopefully. Instantly she was appalled at her thoughts. She was ashamed at having had such an ill wish about this middle-aged woman who was sitting there rather lumpishly in an armchair and evidently, from her vague wandering glance and the twist of her eyebrows and her mouth, trying to think of something nice to say and regretting that she failed. And as she looked at her and her repentance changed into a marvel that this stunned and stubborn woman should be the wonderful Marion of whom Richard spoke, she realised that her death was the event that she had to fear above all others possible in life. For she did not know what would happen to Richard if his mother died. He cared for her inordinately. When he spoke of her, black fire would burn in his eyes, and after a few sentences he would fall silent and look away from Ellen and, she was sure, forget her, for he would then stretch out for her hand and give it an insincere and mechanical patting which, though at any other time his touch refreshed her veins, she found irritating. If his mother died his grief would of course be as inordinate. He would turn on her a face hostile with preoccupation and would go out to wander on some stupendous mountain system of vast and complicated sorrows. Not even death would stop this woman's habit of excessive living.

Ellen shivered, and rose and looked at the bookcases. The violent order characteristic of the household had polished the glass doors so brightly that between her and the books there floated those intrusive clouds, the aggressive marshes. She went and stood by the fire.

"You look tired," said Marion timidly.

"Yes, I'm tired. Do you know, I'm feeling quite fanciful.... It's just tiredness."

"You'd better go and lie down."

"Oh no, I would just lie and think. I feel awful restless."

"Then let's go for a walk." She shot a furtive, comprehending look at the girl. "This really isn't such a bad place," she told her wistfully.

They separated to dress, smiling at each other kindly and uneasily. Ellen went into her room, and stood about, thinking how romantic it all was, but wondering what was the termination of a romance where curtains do not fall at the act's end, until her eyes fell upon her reflection in the mirror. She was standing with her head bowed and her cheek resting on her clasped hands, and she wished somebody would snapshot her like that, for though of course it would be affected to take such a pose in front of a camera, she would like Richard to have a photograph of her looking like that. Suddenly she remembered how Richard delighted in her, and what pretty things he found to say about her without putting himself out, and how he was always sorry to leave her and sometimes came back for another kiss, and she felt enormously proud of being the dispenser of such satisfactions, and began to put on her hat and coat with peacocking gestures and recklessly light-minded glances in the mirror. The reflection of a crumpled face-towel thrown into a wisp over the rail of the washstand reminded her in some way of the white-faced wee thing Mr. Philip had been during the last few days when she had gone back to the office, and this added to her exhilaration, though she did not see why. She was suddenly relieved from her fear of being dispossessed of her own life.