f his past; that was merely a necessity for his own sake and Sally's,
while this related to the painfulness of standing face to face with
an incredible conjunction of surroundings. She, if alone, could take
refuge in wonder-struck silence. If her knowledge were shared with
another, how could examination and analysis be avoided? And these would
involve the resurrection of what she could keep underground as long
as she was by herself; backed by a thought, if needed, of the merry
eyebrows and pearly teeth, and sweet, soft youth, of its unconscious
result. But to be obliged to review and speculate over what she desired
to forget, and was helped to forget by gratitude for its consequences,
would have been a needless addition to the burden she had already
to bear.

The only person she could get any consolation from talking with was
the Major, who already knew, or nearly knew, the particulars of the
nightmare of twenty years ago. But, then--we feel that we are repeating
this _ad nauseam_--he was quite in the dark about Fenwick's identity,
and was to be kept there. Rosalind had decided it so, and she may have
been right.

Would she have done better by forcing on her husband the knowledge of
his own identity, and risking the shock to her daughter of hearing the
story of her outsider father's sin against her mother? Her decision
against this course was always emphasized by--may even have been
unconsciously due to--her prevision of the difficulty of the
communication to Sally. How should she set about it? She pictured
various forms of the attempt to herself, and found none she did not
shudder at.

The knowledge that such things could be would spoil the whole world for
the girl. She had to confess to herself that the customary paltering
with the meaning of words that enables modern novels to be written
about the damnedest things in the universe would either leave her mind
uninformed, or call for a commentary--a rubric in the reddest of red
letters. Even a resort to the brutal force of Oriental speech done into
Jacobean English would be of little avail. For hypocrisy is at work all
through juvenile reception of Holy Writ, and brings out as a result
the idea that that writ is holy because it uses coarse language about
things that hardly call for it. It Bowdlerises Potiphar's wife, and
favours the impression that in Sodom and Gomorrah the inhabitants were
dissipated and sat up late. This sort of thing wouldn't work with
Sally. If