e very copy of Sir Thomas Browne which he had studied
so intently in Rodney's rooms. From sheer laziness he returned no
thanks, but he thought of Rodney from time to time with interest,
disconnecting him from Katharine, and meant to go round one evening and
smoke a pipe with him. It pleased Rodney thus to give away whatever his
friends genuinely admired. His library was constantly being diminished.

CHAPTER VI

Of all the hours of an ordinary working week-day, which are the
pleasantest to look forward to and to look back upon? If a single
instance is of use in framing a theory, it may be said that the minutes
between nine-twenty-five and nine-thirty in the morning had a singular
charm for Mary Datchet. She spent them in a very enviable frame of mind;
her contentment was almost unalloyed. High in the air as her flat was,
some beams from the morning sun reached her even in November, striking
straight at curtain, chair, and carpet, and painting there three bright,
true spaces of green, blue, and purple, upon which the eye rested with a
pleasure which gave physical warmth to the body.

There were few mornings when Mary did not look up, as she bent to
lace her boots, and as she followed the yellow rod from curtain to
breakfast-table she usually breathed some sigh of thankfulness that her
life provided her with such moments of pure enjoyment. She was robbing
no one of anything, and yet, to get so much pleasure from simple things,
such as eating one's breakfast alone in a room which had nice colors in
it, clean from the skirting of the boards to the corners of the ceiling,
seemed to suit her so thoroughly that she used at first to hunt about
for some one to apologize to, or for some flaw in the situation. She had
now been six months in London, and she could find no flaw, but that, as
she invariably concluded by the time her boots were laced, was solely
and entirely due to the fact that she had her work. Every day, as she
stood with her dispatch-box in her hand at the door of her flat, and
gave one look back into the room to see that everything was straight
before she left, she said to herself that she was very glad that she
was going to leave it all, that to have sat there all day long, in the
enjoyment of leisure, would have been intolerable.

Out in the street she liked to think herself one of the workers who,
at this hour, take their way in rapid single file along all the broad
pavements of the city, with their heads