ers the mind. How long the mind shall entertain a
thought before responsibility is incurred I am not ready to say. One's
mood changes. A storm gathers, rages for a while, and disperses; but the
traces of the storm remain after the storm has passed away. I am
thinking now that perhaps, after all, you were sincere when you asked me
to leave Garranard and take my holiday in Rome, and the baseness of
which for a moment I deemed you capable was the creation of my own soul.
I don't mean that my mind, my soul, is always base. At times we are more
or less unworthy. Our tempers are part of ourselves? I have been
pondering this question lately. Which self is the true self--the
peaceful or the choleric? My wretched temper aggravated my
disappointment, and my failure to write the history of the lake and its
castles no doubt contributed to produce the nervous depression from
which I am suffering. But this is not all; it seems to me that I may
point out that your--I hardly know what word to use: "irrelevancy" does
not express my meaning; "inconsequences" is nearer, yet it isn't the
word I want--well, your inconsequences perplex and distract my thoughts.
If you will look through the letter you sent me last you will find that
you have written many things that might annoy a man living in the
conditions in which I live. You follow the current of your mood, but the
transitions you omit, and the reader is left hopelessly
conjecturing....'

She seemed so strange, so inconclusive. There seemed to be at least two,
if not three, different women in the letters she had written to him, and
he sat wondering how a woman with cheeks like hers, and a voice like
hers, and laughter like hers, could take an interest in such arid
studies. Her very name, Nora Glynn, seemed so unlike the woman who would
accompany Mr. Poole into National Libraries, and sit by him surrounded
by learned tomes. Moreover a mistress does not read Hebrew in a
National Library with her paramour. But what did he know about such
women? He had heard of them supping in fashionable restaurants covered
with diamonds, and he thought of them with painted faces and dyed hair,
and he was sure that Nora did not dye her hair or paint her face. No,
she was not Poole's mistress. It was only his ignorance of life that
could have led him to think of anything so absurd.... And then, weary of
thinking and debating with himself, he took down a book that was lent
some months ago, a monograph on a l