life its hideousness stood unclothed. Mr. Brumley
could sometimes reassure her by a rhetorical effort upon the score of
her hostels, but most of her more intimate and inner life was not, for
very plain reasons, to be shown to him. He was full of the intention of
generous self-denials, but she had long since come to measure the limits
of his self-denial....

Mr. Brumley was a friend in whom smouldered a love, capable she knew
quite clearly of tormented and tormenting jealousies. It would be
difficult to tell, and she certainly could never have told how far she
knew of this by instinct, how far it came out of rapid intuitions from
things seen and heard. But she understood that she dared not let a
single breath of encouragement, a hint of physical confidence, reach
that banked-up glow. A sentinel discretion in her brain was always on
the watch for that danger, and that restraint, that added deliberate
inexpressiveness, kept them most apart, when most her spirit cried out
for companionship.

The common quality of all these moods of lassitude was a desolating
loneliness. She had at times a need that almost overwhelmed her to be
intimate, to be comforted and taken up out of the bleak harsh
disappointments and stresses of her customary life. At times after Sir
Isaac had either been too unloving or too loving, or when the girls or
the matrons had achieved some new tangle of mutual unreasonableness, or
when her faith failed, she would lie in the darkness of her own room
with her soul crying out for--how can one put it?--the touch of other
soul-stuff. And perhaps it was the constant drift of Mr. Brumley's talk,
the little suggestions that fell drop by drop into her mind from his,
that disposed her to believe that this aching sense of solitude in the
void was to be assuaged by love, by some marvel of close exaltation that
one might reach through a lover. She had told Mr. Brumley long ago that
she would never let herself think of love, she still maintained to him
that attitude of resolute aloofness, but almost without noting what she
did, she was tampering now in her solitude with the seals of that locked
chamber. She became secretly curious about love. Perhaps there was
something in it of which she knew nothing. She found herself drawn
towards poetry, found a new attraction in romance; more and more did she
dally with the idea that there was some unknown beauty in the world,
something to which her eyes might presently open, some