her seen or not seen.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something
flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but
He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when
He paints in white. In a sense our age has realised this fact, and
expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that
white was a blank and colourless thing, negative and non-committal, then
white would be used instead of black and grey for the funeral dress of
this pessimistic period. We should see city gentlemen in frock coats of
spotless silver linen, with top hats as white as wonderful arum lilies.
Which is not the case.

Meanwhile, I could not find my chalk.

.....

I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town nearer than
Chichester at which it was even remotely probable that there would be
such a thing as an artist's colourman. And yet, without white, my absurd
little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there
were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for
expedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and
again, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine
a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass.
Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt
water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense
warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely out of white
chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stooped
and broke a piece off the rock I sat on; it did not mark so well as the
shop chalks do; but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a trance
of pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only a grand
peninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is something even more
admirable. It is a piece of chalk.

III. The Secret of a Train

All this talk of a railway mystery has sent my mind back to a loose
memory. I will not merely say that this story is true: because, as you
will soon see, it is all truth and no story. It has no explanation and
no conclusion; it is, like most of the other things we encounter in
life, a fragment of something else which would be intensely exciting if
it were not too large to be seen. For the perplexity of life arises from
there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested
properly in any of them; w