been a surprise, not only to other
people but to Katharine herself, if some magic watch could have taken
count of the moments spent in an entirely different occupation from her
ostensible one. Sitting with faded papers before her, she took part in
a series of scenes such as the taming of wild ponies upon the American
prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a hurricane round a black
promontory of rock, or in others more peaceful, but marked by her
complete emancipation from her present surroundings and, needless to
say, by her surpassing ability in her new vocation. When she was rid of
the pretense of paper and pen, phrase-making and biography, she turned
her attention in a more legitimate direction, though, strangely enough,
she would rather have confessed her wildest dreams of hurricane and
prairie than the fact that, upstairs, alone in her room, she rose early
in the morning or sat up late at night to... work at mathematics. No
force on earth would have made her confess that. Her actions when thus
engaged were furtive and secretive, like those of some nocturnal animal.
Steps had only to sound on the staircase, and she slipped her paper
between the leaves of a great Greek dictionary which she had purloined
from her father's room for this purpose. It was only at night, indeed,
that she felt secure enough from surprise to concentrate her mind to the
utmost.

Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively wish
to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in her
mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would not
have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the
star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and
vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly in
thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feel
wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away
from view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness. Again and again
she was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinking
of her grandfather. Waking from these trances, she would see that her
mother, too, had lapsed into some dream almost as visionary as her own,
for the people who played their parts in it had long been numbered
among the dead. But, seeing her own state mirrored in her mother's face,
Katharine would shake herself awake with a sense of irritation. Her
mother was the last p