y deeds and
achievements, but one could at least enjoy life, be a pleased
participator in its spoils and pleasures, an enchanted spectator of its
never-ending flux and pageant, its richly glowing moving pictures. One
could watch the play out, even if one hadn't much of a part oneself.
Music, art, drama, the company of eminent, pleasant and entertaining
persons, all the various forms of beauty, the carefully cultivated
richness, graces and elegances which go to build up the world of the
fortunate, the cultivated, the prosperous and the well-bred--Neville
walked among these like the soul in the lordly pleasure house built for
her by the poet Tennyson, or like Robert Browning glutting his sense upon
the world--"Miser, there waits the gold for thee!"--or Francis Thompson
swinging the earth a trinket at his wrist. In truth, she was at times
self-consciously afraid that she resembled all these three, whom (in the
moods they thus expressed) she disliked beyond reason, finding them
morbid and hard to please.

She too knew herself morbid and hard to please. If she had not been
so, to be Rodney's wife would surely have been enough; it would have
satisfied all her nature. Why didn't it? Was it perhaps really because,
though she loved him, it was not with the uncritical devotion of the
early days? She had for so many years now seen clearly, through and
behind his charm, his weakness, his vanities, his scorching ambitions
and jealousies, his petulant angers, his dependence on praise and
admiration. She had no jealousy now of his frequent confidential
intimacies with other attractive women; they were harmless enough, and
he never lost the need of and dependence on her; but they may have helped
to clarify her vision of him.

Rodney had no failings beyond what are the common need of human nature;
he was certainly good enough for her. Their marriage was all right. It
was only the foolish devil of egotism in her which goaded to unwholesome
activity the other side of her nature, that need for self-expression
which marriage didn't satisfy.

2

In February she suddenly tired of London and the British climate, and was
moved by a desire to travel. So she went to Italy, and stayed in Capri
with Nan and Stephen Lumley, who were leading on that island lives by
turns gaily indolent and fiercely industrious, finding the company
stimulating and the climate agreeable and soothing to Stephen's defective
lungs.

From Italy Neville went to Gre