hear what you have on your mind," she said.
"Have Kally Nath Mitter's relations prevailed over his convictions?
Won't your landlord let you have your oratory on the roof after all?"

"You get these things so out of perspective," Stephen said, "that I
don't think I should tell you if they were so. But they're not. Kally
Nath is to be baptised to-morrow. We are certain to get our oratory."

"I am very glad," Hilda interrupted. "When one prays for so long a time
together it must be better to have fresh air. It will certainly be
better for Brother Colquhoun. He seems to have such a weak chest."

"It will be better for us all." Arnold seemed to reflect, across his
tea-cup, how much better it would be. Then he added, "I saw Lindsay last
night."

"Again? And----"

"I think it is perfectly hopeless. I think he is making way."

"Sickening! I hoped you would not speak to him again. After all--another
man--it's naturally of no use!"

"I spoke as a priest!"

"Did he swear at you?"

"Oh dear no! He was rather sympathetic. And I went very far. But I could
get him to see nothing--to feel nothing."

"How far did you go?"

"I told him that she was consecrated, that he proposed to commit
sacrilege. He seemed to think he could make it up to her."

"If anyone else had said that to me I should have laughed--you don't
suspect the irony in it," Hilda said. "Pray who is to make it up to
him?"

"I suppose there is that point of view."

"I should think so, indeed! But taking it, I despair with you. I had her
here the other day and tried to make the substance of her appear before
him. I succeeded, too--he gave me the most uncomfortable looks--but I
might as well have let it alone. The great purpose of nature," Hilda
went on, putting down her cup, "reasonable beings in their normal state
would never lend themselves to. So she invents these temporary
insanities. And therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be
permanent. That's a platitude, I know," she added, "but it's
irresistibly suggested."

Stephen looked with some fixedness at a point on the other side of the
room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the
vision of a drawing-room in Addison gardens, occupied by his mother and
sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the
moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed
sense that they might characterise such a statement differently, if,
indeed, they