ity rather than doubters or fanatics.

At the end of a fairly hard day's work it was certainly something of an
effort to clear one's room, to pull the mattress off one's bed, and lay
it on the floor, to fill a pitcher with cold coffee, and to sweep a long
table clear for plates and cups and saucers, with pyramids of little
pink biscuits between them; but when these alterations were effected,
Mary felt a lightness of spirit come to her, as if she had put off the
stout stuff of her working hours and slipped over her entire being some
vesture of thin, bright silk. She knelt before the fire and looked out
into the room. The light fell softly, but with clear radiance, through
shades of yellow and blue paper, and the room, which was set with one
or two sofas resembling grassy mounds in their lack of shape, looked
unusually large and quiet. Mary was led to think of the heights of
a Sussex down, and the swelling green circle of some camp of ancient
warriors. The moonlight would be falling there so peacefully now, and
she could fancy the rough pathway of silver upon the wrinkled skin of
the sea.

"And here we are," she said, half aloud, half satirically, yet with
evident pride, "talking about art."

She pulled a basket containing balls of differently colored wools and a
pair of stockings which needed darning towards her, and began to set her
fingers to work; while her mind, reflecting the lassitude of her body,
went on perversely, conjuring up visions of solitude and quiet, and she
pictured herself laying aside her knitting and walking out on to the
down, and hearing nothing but the sheep cropping the grass close to the
roots, while the shadows of the little trees moved very slightly this
way and that in the moonlight, as the breeze went through them. But
she was perfectly conscious of her present situation, and derived some
pleasure from the reflection that she could rejoice equally in solitude,
and in the presence of the many very different people who were now
making their way, by divers paths, across London to the spot where she
was sitting.

As she ran her needle in and out of the wool, she thought of the
various stages in her own life which made her present position seem the
culmination of successive miracles. She thought of her clerical father
in his country parsonage, and of her mother's death, and of her own
determination to obtain education, and of her college life, which had
merged, not so very long ago, in the won