a quoi bon?_ Why can't one learn to
harden one's poor silly heart, and just move round, stone-like, with
the great movement of things accepting fate and ceasing to struggle or
to care?"

"Just because, I think," he answered, "the converse of that same saying
is equally true. If, in material things, a thousand years are as one
day, in the things of the spirit one day is as a thousand years.
Remember the Christ crying upon the cross--'My God, My God, why hast
Thou forsaken Me?' and suffering during that brief utterance the sum of
all the agony of sensible insignificance and sensible homelessness
human nature ever has borne or will bear."

"Ah, the Christ! the Christ!" Lady Calmady exclaimed, half wistfully as
it seemed to Julius March, and half impatiently. She turned and paced
the pale pavement again.

"You are too courteous, my dear friend, and cite an example august out
of all proportion to my little lament." She looked round at him as she
spoke, smiling; and in the uncertain light her smile showed tremulous,
suggestive of a nearness to tears. "Instinctively you scale
Olympus,--Calvary?--yes, but I am afraid both those heights take on an
equally and tragically mythological character to me--and would bring me
consolation from the dwelling-places of the gods. And my feet, all the
while, are very much upon the floor, alas! That is happening to me
which never yet happened to the gods, according to the orthodox
authorities. Just this--a commonplace--dear Julius, I am growing old."

Katherine drew her cloak more severely about her and moved on hastily,
her head a little bent.

"No, no, don't protest," she added, as he attempted to speak. "We can
be honest and dispense with conventional phrases, here, alone, under
the stars. I am growing old, Julius--and being, I suppose, but a vain,
doting woman, I have only discovered what that really means to-day! But
there is this excuse for me. My youth was so blessed, so--so glorious,
that it was natural I should strive to delude myself regarding its
passing away. I perceive that for years I have continued to call that a
bride-bed which was, in truth, a bier. I have struggled to keep my
youth in fancy, as I have kept the red drawing-room in fact, unaltered.
Is not all this pitifully vain and self-indulgent? I have solaced
myself with the phantom of youth. And I am old--old."

"But you are yourself, Katherine, yourself. Nothing that has been, has
ceased to be," Julius broke in, u