d Monica," said Pauline, standing in the doorway, "you're
never to dare to speak about me to Mother as you must have spoken this
afternoon. Because neither of you has any emotion but conceit and
selfishness, you shall not be jealous of Guy and me. Margaret, you can
have no heart. I shall write to Richard and tell him you're heartless.
Don't smile down at your violoncello. You shall not rule me into being
like yourself. Oh, I'll never play music with either of you again!"

Then she left them, and in her white room for an hour she listened
hopelessly to the trolling wind.

NOVEMBER

Guy was very indignant when he heard from Pauline the sequel of her
sisters' vigilance. That they should afterwards have tried to atone with
gentleness for what they had made her suffer did not avail with him.
Monica and Margaret now impressed him with their unworldly beauty in a
strange way, for they became sinister figures like the Lady Geraldine in
Christabel, sly, malignant sylphs set in ambush to haunt the romantic
path of his love. He was intensely aware that he ought not to resent
their interference, but that he ought, in fact, to acknowledge the
justice of it, and by a stoical endeavor prove himself entitled to the
cares of this long engagement. Actually Guy was enduring a violent
jealousy, and illogically he began to declare how the others were
jealous of him and Pauline. The consciousness that he could not carry
her off into immediate marriage galled him, and he suffered all the
pangs of an unmerited servitude. He and Pauline became the prisoners of
tyrants who were urging them to accept the yoke of convention; the more
he suffered the more he knew in his heart that he was culpable, and the
more culpable he recognized himself the more he chafed against the
burden of waiting. All the resolutions that with the announcement of
their betrothal had seemed to sail before a prospering breeze now turned
and beat up against adverse influences, and were every moment in danger
of being irreparably wrecked.

Naturally coincident with all the stress of a situation, that owing to
the temperament of the Greys was never relieved by discussion, was a
complete failure to advance on the private road of his poetical
ambition. All that he had written was seeming vain and bad; all that he
was now trying to write deteriorated with every word painfully inscribed
upon the cheerless empty page. He had conceived a set of eclogues that
were to mark