particularly at the beginning of the year, when their
income figured before their ever-sanguine eyes, untouched, infinite and
inexhaustible in its possibilities. For they had a little besides
professional earnings; only it happened somehow that they spent always
rather more than they had, superfluities being so essential to their
existence. Lent, of course, came in opportunely, just when the first
riotous flush of the year was subsiding; in Lent one could not live in
luxury and go to theatres, even if one could afford it. The iron hand of
necessity clasped the more pliable fingers of duty, forcing them to an
unrelaxing hold. The Crevequers' confessor would, no doubt, have
approved of youth thus constrained.

But, with all its inconveniences, life was a charmingly entertaining
game. In the faces of the children asleep, there was, besides sheer
weariness, a youthfulness almost ridiculous. They might have been
fourteen and fifteen. They were always young--very young--but when they
slept they were as two twin babes. Their youth, their childhood, seemed
somehow to obscure an aspect of them; there might have been also in it,
to the sentimentalist, a touch of pity, and to the moralist a vague
rising of dubious hope.

Tommy, waking at a quarter-past two, stretched himself, yawned, and
threw an empty cigarette-box into Betty's lap.

'Come to bed,' he said.

CHAPTER II

THE IMPRESSION-SEEKER

Have you reckoned the landscape took substance and form that it might
be painted in a picture?
Or men and women that they might be written of, and songs sung?
Or the attraction of gravity and the great laws and harmonious
combinations and the fluids of the air as subjects for the savants?
Or the brown land and the blue sea for maps and charts?

WALT WHITMAN.

It was probable that Mrs. Venables came to Naples in order to absorb
impressions. This was the business of her life; she made of herself a
sponge, and let the waters of her experiences fill her. Later, she
squeezed them out. It is admitted, of course, that any sponge will a
little colour with its own individualities of hue the water which
passes through it. She had really a fine power of discerning and
appraising significance in matters the most ordinary. When all is said,
to be easily 'struck' (her own word) must be accounted a gift, like any
other of the manifold gifts of receptiveness. Mrs. Venables was
struck--immensely struck--by