ist in you?" herself enquired
with pain. "You might be a business body, or one of the mistresses in
John Square, the crude way you're talking. It's not a fact that ye can
look up in a directory. But it's perfectly true that this woman's queer
and warselled and unhappy. But you're losing your head terribly on your
first encounter with tragedy, and you fancying yourself a cut above the
ordinary because you enjoyed a good read of 'King Lear' and 'Macbeth.'"
"Well, I never said I wanted to take rooms with Lady Macbeth," she
objected.

But Marion was asking her now if she liked this room, or if she found
it, as many people did, more like a lighthouse than a home, and because
she spoke with passionate concern lest the girl should not be at ease in
the place where she was to spend her future life, Ellen immediately
answered with a kind of secondary sincerity that she liked it very much.
Yet the room was convincing her of something she was too young and too
poor ever to have proved before, and that was the possibility of excess.
All her delights had been so sparse and in character so simple that no
cloying of after-taste had ever changed them from being finally and
unquestionably delights; they stood like a knot of poplars on the edge
of a large garden whose close resemblance to golden flame could be
enjoyed quite without dubiety because there was no fear that the lawns
or flowers would be robbed of sunlight by their spear-thin shadows. She
did not know that one could eat too many ices, for she had never been
able to afford more than one at a time; in rainy Edinburgh the stories
of men whose minds became sick at dwelling under immutably blue skies
had seemed one of the belittling lies about fair things that grown-up
people like to tell; and since she had had hardly anybody to talk to
till Richard came, and had never had enough books to read, it had seemed
quite impossible that one could feel or think past the point where
feeling and thinking were happy embarkations of the soul on bracing
seas.

Yet here in this room the inconceivable had happened, and she recognised
that there was present an excess of beauty and an excess of being. For
indeed the room was too like a lighthouse in the way that all who sat
within were forced to look out on the windy firmament and see the earth
spread far below as the pavement of the clouds on which their shadows
trod like gliding feet. The walls it turned to the south and west were
almost entir