lt up the fine,
closely woven substance of their life at home. They were less splendid
but more natural than her father was. All her rages had been against
them; it was their world with its four meals, its punctuality, and
servants on the stairs at half-past ten, that she examined so closely
and wanted so vehemently to smash to atoms. Following these thoughts she
looked up and said:

"And there's a sort of beauty in it--there they are at Richmond at this
very moment building things up. They're all wrong, perhaps, but there's
a sort of beauty in it," she repeated. "It's so unconscious, so modest.
And yet they feel things. They do mind if people die. Old spinsters are
always doing things. I don't quite know what they do. Only that was what
I felt when I lived with them. It was very real."

She reviewed their little journeys to and fro, to Walworth, to charwomen
with bad legs, to meetings for this and that, their minute acts of
charity and unselfishness which flowered punctually from a definite view
of what they ought to do, their friendships, their tastes and habits;
she saw all these things like grains of sand falling, falling through
innumerable days, making an atmosphere and building up a solid mass, a
background. Hewet observed her as she considered this.

"Were you happy?" he demanded.

Again she had become absorbed in something else, and he called her back
to an unusually vivid consciousness of herself.

"I was both," she replied. "I was happy and I was miserable. You've no
conception what it's like--to be a young woman." She looked straight at
him. "There are terrors and agonies," she said, keeping her eye on him
as if to detect the slightest hint of laughter.

"I can believe it," he said. He returned her look with perfect
sincerity.

"Women one sees in the streets," she said.

"Prostitutes?"

"Men kissing one."

He nodded his head.

"You were never told?"

She shook her head.

"And then," she began and stopped. Here came in the great space of life
into which no one had ever penetrated. All that she had been saying
about her father and her aunts and walks in Richmond Park, and what they
did from hour to hour, was merely on the surface. Hewet was watching
her. Did he demand that she should describe that also? Why did he sit
so near and keep his eye on her? Why did they not have done with this
searching and agony? Why did they not kiss each other simply? She wished
to kiss him. But all the time she