n the
world, she is so liable to be unhappy. These are handicaps most women
don't get over. And then, since men don't love us nearly as much as we
love them, that leaves them much more spare vitality to be wonderful
with."

Ellen sat in a polite silence, not wishing to make this woman who had
failed in love feel small by telling her that she herself was loved by
Richard just as much as she loved him.

"I don't know. I don't know. It's annoying the way that one comes to the
end of life knowing less than one did at the beginning." She stood up
petulantly. "Let's go upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big
sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would
not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak
about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for
a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as
all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way.
She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned
the meaning of life as one lived it.

So she was shaken and distressed by the fine face, which looked
discontented with thinking as another face might look flushed with
drinking, and by the powerful yet inert body which lay in the great
armchair limply but uneasily, as if she desired to ask a question but
was restrained by a belief that nobody could answer, but for lack of
that answer was unable to commit herself to any action. Her expression
was not, as Ellen had at first thought, blank. Nor was it trivial,
though she still sometimes raised those hands with the flashing nails
and smoothed her eyebrows. It showed plainly enough that doubt was
wandering from chamber to chamber of her being, blowing out such candles
of certitude as the hopefulness natural to all human beings had enabled
her to light. The fact of Richard streamed in like sunshine through the
windows of her soul, and when she spoke of him she was evidently utterly
happy; but there were some parts of her life with which he had nothing
to do, as there are north rooms in a house which the sun cannot touch,
and these the breath of doubt left to utter darkness. "You're imagining
all this, Ellen," she said to herself; "how can you possibly know all
this about her?" "It's true," herself answered. "Well, it's not true in
the sense that it's true that she's dark and her name's Mrs. Yaverland,
is it?" "Ellen, have you nothing of an art