The Heat of the Day (15 page)

That habit of Connie's of so silently and in that pert experienced manner quizzing Tom had from the first got on Louie's nerves: Connie often elected _not__ to say something particular when she was on the very point of leaving the room--well she knew, marching out, shutting the door behind her, that she left you wondering what it could have been. As to the remark she had not made this time, Louie gave it up--the more hastily since it could but seem to relate to Tom. She could have suspected a touch of reproof or malice in Connie's repetitive, ostentatious drawing of attention to the photograph at which she herself rarely or never looked. She avoided it. She had seen ever so many times where it said how a photograph comforts you; but the reverse was true. She exposed the photograph out of respect for convention, under which heading came what indubitably would have been Tom's feeling. More, she wrote to him, "I look at your picture daily." One more misrepresentation of love's unamenable truth. Not a point-blank lie: whatever else she forgot she piously daily dusted the chimney-piece, which involved lifting the photo-frame, and what you handle you must in some way see. To see, however, is not to look. He had provided her with the photograph, which he had had taken just before going away: he had not considered the one she already had, the enlarged snap of him in a Byron collar on Seale strand, adequately serious. His going off on his own initiative to the studio had been one among the last of his farewell acts--consequently, what the camera had recorded had been the face of a man already gone. The open moodless cast of his features stood out infinitely remote against the photographer's curdled backdrop--the eyes looking straight, measuringly, un-expectingly at nothing. To attempt to enter or intercept that look at no one was to become no one--after which, how was anything to be the same again, ever? The frame with the regimental crest held a picture of what was at the best abeyance--at the worst, there came out of it a warning to the bottom of her heart, that no return can ever make restitution for the going away. You may imitate but cannot renew safety.

Chapter 9

TO UNLOAD the past on a boy like that--fantastic! And now _you__ mix yourself up in it. No, it's too silly, Stella!" "But now you're talking like Colonel Pole.--I thought you thought Roderick's legacy was a good thing?" "Roderick's inheritance?" "Sorry, Roderick's inheritance." "Anything's better than nothing," admitted Robert, with a touch of the impatience he often showed when one truth got in the way of another. "What I cannot see is, why you should have to go there." "Only for the inside of a week." "It's not how long you are going to be away, it's how much away you are going to be--_there__, you will be away completely." "Nonsense, darling." "Of course, what I don't like is your going away at all," he said, though in the tone of one slighting his own feeling. He let his hand fall from the arm of the low chair and trailed his fingertips idly on the floor. In a minute, however, he was eyeing her more sturdily, as though to say, make what you like of that, and his mouth remained in a simmering unset line, till he again burst out: "The whole thing's a racket of that old lunatic's. To get you back." "After all, he's dead--if you mean Cousin Francis?" "A little thing like that wouldn't bother him." That called up such a speaking picture that Stella laughed. "You might have known him," she said. He went on: "But it's not simply what he wanted, it's what you really want." "_I__ don't want to go back there." Robert raised his eyebrows. "In fact," she said, "I dread it." "I'm not so sure." "Well, I do. But this journey's business; it's not a matter of feeling." "But you say you dread it--isn't dread a feeling? If it meant nothing to you I shouldn't so much mind." "I'd no idea," she said, "you were going to feel like this. Because what does it amount to? Simply a business journey--Roderick's Mount Morris affairs. You know how they have been worrying me lately, all those letters from or about that place, asking for decisions I can't make because I can't grasp, from this distance, exactly what they're about or what they'd entail. The roof, the farm, the extra planting, the cutting of the trees.... Heaven knows, I wish Roderick were free enough and old enough to cope! But as it is, you can't leave a place forever with no master. Somebody? s got to get over there: he can't, I must. _As__ I must, the sooner the better; better get it over--surely?--Really, Robert, I've been through more than enough convincing the Passport Office that this _is__ urgent--do I have to go through it all over again with you? _They__ were perfectly satisfied." "They are not in love with you." "Weeks ago, you agreed I would have to go." "Did I? Yes, I suppose I did." She cried: "Has anything changed since then?" It was seven o'clock in the evening, in her flat. Early tomorrow she must be catching the Irish Mail. Robert had had an unfortunate glimpse of a half-packed suitcase in her bedroom---just not in time she had closed the door: in front of the fire in the other room he had seemed to be busy unwrapping the bottle he had brought. However, now, with one of his turns of mood, he at once contrived to give the impression that it was she, not he, who had been making a scene--he could not help reaching out for the piece of string, which he drew out to its length, admired, then started coiling into a hank with a slow, irresistibly soothing motion. "Here's a piece of string for you, anyway," he remarked, having done. "Where on earth, these days, do they still _tie__ up parcels?" "Where I get my whisky.--What I do hope is that your journey won't be horribly cold." She thought, could any journey away from you not be a cold journey?--but said: "It's not so late in the year. I chiefly wish I'd gone earlier because then by now I'd be back." "What shall I do while you're away?" "Don't make me more unhappy!" "You never know," he said, spinning the circular hank of string round on his finger.--"What time of year was it when you were there before?" "Just about this time: autumn." "Twenty years ago?" "Twenty-one years." "What a lot of water," said Robert vaguely, "has flowed under the bridges since then, or hasn't it? Floods enough have washed most bridges away." There was no bridge for a mile up or down the river from Mount Morris. Down its valley the river swept smoothly towards the house, then was turned aside, lost to view, round the high rocky projection on which the house stood. On the far side, unequal cliffs of limestone dropped their whitish reflections into the water; trees topped and in some places steeply clad the cliffs. The river traced the boundary of the lands: at the Mount Morris side it had a margin of water-meadow into which the demesne woods, dark at their base with laurels, ran down in a series of promontories. This valley cleavage into a distance seemed like an offering to the front windows: in return, the house devoted the whole muted fervour of its being to a long gaze. Elsewhere rising woods or swelling uplands closed Mount Morris in. By anyone standing down by the river looking up, sky was to be seen reflected in row upon row of vast glass panes. The façade, dun stucco, seemed to vary in tone, but never altered in colour except at sunset--which, striking down the valley, gave the stucco an oriental pink and enflamed the windows. At the hour when the master's mother arrived, reflections up from the river prolonged daylight; a smoulder of yellow from the woods entered the house. She had forgotten that by travelling west you enter longer days: this hour, as she stood looking down the length of a room at a fire distantly burning inside white marble, seemed to be outside time--an eternal luminousness of dusk in which nothing but the fire's flutter and the clock's ticking out there in the hall were to be heard. Or, in her fatigue she could have imagined this was another time, rather than another country, that she had come to. The indoor air of the library held something outdoor; the windows could have been only lately shut on new-raked gravel of which earth had become a component part. Light lived in the particles of the air only, for the walls and soaring curtains were of a deadening red. Something more than an ancient smell reached the senses from the books cased back into the walls--possibly, these hundreds of books' indifference to the passing thought. The chief other focus of darkness here was an oil painting rising over the fire: horsemen grouped apprehensively at midnight. The room was without poetry if this could not be felt in the arrested energy of its nature--it was in here that Cousin Francis had had his being. On every side remained the meticulous preparations made for his departure. Inconceivably many magazines, pamphlets, prospectuses, circulars, their edges showing every age and stage of brownness, had been corded up into bales, ticketed, stacked on and underneath sideboards, sofas, tables. Balanced upon the bales, a tribe of tray-shaped baskets invited Stella's inspection of their contents so carefully sorted out--colourless billiard balls, padlocks, thermometers, a dog collar, keyless key-rings, a lily bulb, an ivory puzzle, a Shakespeare calendar for 1927, the cured but unmounted claw of a greater eagle, a Lincoln Imp knocker, an odd spur, lumps of quartz, a tangle of tipless tiny pencils on frayed silk cords.... So much for the past: he had thought ahead. Stuck round inside the frame of the dark picture, cards stood out white, still fresh, peremptory to the eye. Injunctions, admonitions and warnings, unevenly block-printed by Cousin Francis, here underlined, there enringed in urgent red. _Clocks__, when and how to wind... _Fire Extinguishers__, when and how to employ... _Locks and Hinges__, my method of oiling... _Live Mice__ caught in traps, to be drowned _Not__ dropped into kitchen fire... _Tim O'Keefe__, _Mason__, not to work here again unless he does better than last time. _Beggars__, bona fide 6d, _Old Soldiers__ 1/- _,,, Hysteria__, _Puppies__, in case of...In case of _Blocked Gutters__... In case of _Parachutists__... _Birds in Chimney__, in case of...In case of _Telegrams__... In case of _River__ entering _Lower Lodge__... In case of _My Death__... In case of _Emergency Message from Lady C__.... She stood for some time drawn up to read the cards, then looked this way, that way along the chimneypiece--but except for another, inaudible, clock, empty branched candlesticks and embossed bronze vases holding charred spills, there was nothing further. Resting both hands on the marble she looked down into the fire, regretting she had not any such clear directions as to her own life--which, at this moment more distant than London, would not be less problematic when returned to. Oh to stay here forever, playing this ghostly part! Unwillingly she looked behind her--her gloves, shaped by her hands, her bag, containing every damning proof of her identity, were still, always, there on the centre table where she had put them down. It was on that same table that Donovan, a few minutes later, put down the oil lamp. As he, stooping, turned the two wicks higher the globe welled up strongly with yellow light, throwing the caretaker's Danteesque features into masklike relief against the bookcases. "Every other place," he remarked, "is terribly clumbered up; we have been distracted with the instructions to touch nothing. Latterly this has been a bare sort of time for us, with neither master--this is a poor welcome for you, ma'am, but indeed you're welcome. The daughters went to some lengths preparing the drawingroom for you, but nothing we could do to it would drive out the chill, so that in the end we gave up heart. That room is fine enough, but it has been retired altogether too long." Mary Donovan bore in the second lamp more breathlessly than her father: evidently she had not played this part before. She glanced at Donovan for a cue, got none, so stood her lamp down by the first. The ceremony was concluded. No one making a movement to draw the curtains, the two globes, the Donovans, Stella remained reflected in what had become jet-black panes. "Thank you, Mary," said Stella, looking across at the small girl inside the sheath of great white apron. In reply, Mary's lips moved; as though she had broken down in the very first line of a recitation she knocked back with her wrist a heavy forelock of hair. Donovan explained: "She is over-anxious--she knows there's something further she ought to be doing, but not what. Could _you__ imagine, ma'am, what you might be wanting next?" Stella had had to agree months ago, from a distance, to the paying off of Cousin Francis's servants: there must be no unnecessary charges on the estate. She knew now there was no one left in Mount Morris but the ageless, wifeless Donovan and his two surprisingly young daughters. She did not remember Donovan (who probably at the time of her honeymoon worked in the yard or somewhere out on the place), but did not betray this, as he remembered her. "For the supper," he added, "we killed a little chicken." Stella said, how nice. After what could have seemed a complicated moment of hesitation she asked: "Mary, which is my room?" "Candles!" cried Donovan wildly--"have you the candles, Mary?" A look flashed between father and daughter. The child, in an unexpectedly deep firm voice, declared: "The two of them are above." "Jesus!" said Donovan. "Then there'll be none to carry." "There'll still be light on the stairs," Stella interposed. "And I know my way." Indeed the familiarity of the house was startling; as a whole it rose to the surface in her, as though something weighting it to the bottom had let go. Expectancy rather than memory from now on guided her--she could not tell at which moment of her return journey the sensory train had started itself alight. Now she seemed to perceive on all sides round her, and with a phantasmagoric clearness, everything that for the eye the darkness hid. The declivities in the treads of the staircase, the rounded glimmer of its Venetian window (ever wholly extinguished only by blackest night), the creak of the lobby flooring under the foot, and the sifted near-and-farness of smells of plaster, pelts, wax, smoke, weathered woodwork, oiled locks and outdoor trees preceded themselves in her as she followed Mary. Knowledge of all this must have been carried in her throughout the years which in these minutes fell away. At midday, even, this lobby of many doors at the head of the windowed staircase had been always shadowy: now the doors round her were to be only felt. The suspense, a suspense so long anticipated, in which she waited to hear which handle the child would turn was, now it came _to__ the moment, more than half fictitious, after all neither real nor deep. It was with indifference, almost, that she came to know, Donovan's choice for her _had__ pitched on a room with no history. Mary, marching ahead, quenched herself in an absolute of darkness from which there was no tremor of memory to fear. Inside here, curtains and shutters did double work; Mary's position could be detected only by her striking and breaking of match after match on a damp box; meanwhile nothing guided Stella between the padded head of a sofa and knobbed foot of a bed. Care had raised the temperature of this long-empty room to the tepidity of a normal summer; a smouldering crimson fire was to be seen again in what must be a cheval glass. Then, upon Mary's succeeding in making the candles burn, bed-hangings and presses, _their__ shadows and those again of a woman standing, a girl turning eagerly round to her, staggered up into being, into that minute's meaning, but nothing more. Innocent in its resemblance to no other, the minute merged itself in the immortality of the house. "It was a pity for you the way you bumped yourself," said Mary. "I think I ran on too fast for you?--Will I leave the matches? They're a wicked box." Having addressed herself to the fire, into which she directed an adept kick, she made haste to the washstand, unwrapped a turban of towel, and with both palms tested the heat of a brass can. "It would still scald you!" she could but confide, triumphantly, to Stella--who, with hardly less naïveté, cried: "_Oh__, it's nice, being waited on!" "I'm new to it, too; we'll have to see how we'll shape." Mary gone, Stella remembered Robert's injunction to drink--for them both, as it were, at this hour. She brought to the dressing-table water bottle and tumbler, and unscrewed the top of the flask he had filled for her in London, this time two days ago. Holding up the tumbler between the candles, while she measured water into the whisky, she observed that the candles were not virgin: both had been burned already, and to unequal lengths. This surprised and puzzled her--so great so far had been the Donovans' perfectionism and good grace--it linked up with the confederate look between father and child downstairs, also with that odd air of abstention from
saying or thinking something with which Donovan had stood watching the second lamp in. Stella had assumed there to be no shortages of any kind in Eire. The exciting sensation of being outside war had concentrated itself round those fearless lights--though actually, yesterday night as her ship drew in, the most strong impression had been of prodigality: around the harbour water, uphill above it, the windows had not only showed and shone but blazed, seemed to blaze out phenomenally; while later, dazzling reflections in damp streets made Dublin seem to be in the throes of a carnival. Here, tonight, downstairs, those three yellow oblongs cast unspoilt on the gravel by the uncurtained windows had spelled ease, yes; but still more had set up a barbaric joy, as might wine let run soaking into the ground. _Now__, for a moment to have to ask oneself whether after all there might not be at Mount Morris unbroached packets of candles, drum on drum of oil, became a setback, a small but deep shock. Could the house be short, the Donovans rationed--or had they simply neglected to lay in stores? She must ask, tonight--or perhaps tomorrow. The inquiry, with its just possible hint of a fault found, should be put off, or at least ideally timed. In the end she never remembered to ask the question--what she had not cared to suspect was in fact true. Up here in her bedroom, down there in the library, she was burning up light supplies for months ahead. Well on into the winter after Stella's departure the Donovan family went to bed in the dark. After supper she twiddled perfunctorily the knobs of the wireless beside Cousin Francis's chair--it had pleased him to have the war at his elbow; she was pleased to have only one more and more significant degree of silence added to the library: evidently the battery was dead. There never had been a telephone at Mount Morris--assurance of being utterly out of reach added annullingness to her deep sleep that night. In the morning, dressing at her window, she watched three swans come down the river to pause amidstream looking up at the house with her in it. Unimaginable early sunshine lay on everything--the grassy slopes, the rocks, the last hysterical glory of the trees; it was with the energy of lightness that she embarked on the business of this first day. The beginning, even, took her so far afield, involved so much viewing of things to be looked at many times more and wove itself into so many lengthy standing talks--apart from everything else, the Mount Morris people had not yet had their due, a full and feeling account of Cousin Francis's end and funeral--that it was not till evening, after a very late tea, that she could sit down to her letter to Roderick. She wrote at Cousin Francis's outsize kneehole table with the worn leather top. Sorry, on Roderick's account, to have been able to find no headed Mount Morris paper, she covered sheet after sheet of her own block. Once, tearing off and casting a finished sheet on to others to the left of the inkstand, she knocked against a brass letter-weighing machine--setting the scales in motion, loosening weights in their grooves and releasing, somewhere inside herself, some repugnant, troubling association.... Mrs. Kelway's parcel--_had__ Harrison posted it?... She took up her pen again, reconsidered, let the pen roll away, made the revolving chair twirl and sped from the room to the head of the basement stairs. "Oh, Donovan?" "Ma'am?" He took form at the foot of them. "One thing the master especially wants to know--_is__ there a boat?" He rubbed his wrist back slowly over his stiff white hair. "He wants to know, is there a boat at present?" "Is there a boat at all?" "That would be, any class of a boat?" She became distracted--"Simply, a boat." "Well, there was a flat boat, and she used to hold not badly till the master sank her. He had no great satisfaction out of her at the best of times, and he said to us you were not to know these times what might happen presently, so he had the boys out one morning loading rock into her until she went down. 'Well, there _she__ goes,' he said, the poor man, standing between myself and the gentleman on the bank.... She should be there in the river yet--will we raise her and see if she's not too much rotted?" "If that could be done, it could be no harm." "It might be," said Donovan, warming to the project, "that all we would have to do would be to give her a lick of pitch." Stella went down a step, Donovan came up two. "It would be a pity," he added, "to disappoint him.--So is the master a boatman?" "Not so much that.--I must show you his photo-graph." "Ah, his picture--but wasn't it queer them not letting him over to us himself? I never heard of the Army impeding a gentleman like that. However, I should imagine his heart's in it, and the war should be a great interest in that case--who knows but he might be coming out of it a general?" "Oh no; I'm afraid he's too young for that!" "Yet by every appearance," said Donovan, not discouraged, "this should be a long ambitious war.--Are you writing a letter to the master?" "Indeed, I am.--When _was__ the boat sunk?" "The last time the gentleman was here." "Which gentleman?--oh, the one on the bank?" "We hadn't so many visitors since the war came--chiefly only this one, and he was fleeting. He came from over. It seemed a marvel these times to see anybody travelling around the way he did--it could be he had some kind of advantage; though whether he was a Mister or Captain we never made out. In any event he was a distraction for the master; the two of them would be gabbing up to any hour into the night. This was a chap or gentleman with a very narrow look, added to which he had a sort of a discord between his two eyes...." It was her heart that now sank; going back to her letter she did not regain speed or the first concentration: she wound up inconclusively, promising more tomorrow, recollecting, as she addressed the envelope, that she had no stamp. She then pushed back her chair and began to examine the many drawers of the table, with unusual stealthiness trying each in turn: all were as locked as they looked. Walking foolishly round the room she searched for the keys, opening boxes and cabinets, shifting objects at random, even attempting once to look in the drawers themselves. She came to the point of denouncing Cousin Francis as a conspiratorial, mischievous, too-old man; when anger ran out she was left alone with uneasiness--liking the library less and less. Now primarily it was the scene, for her, of those conversations late into the nights--what _had__ they been up to in here? what had they been cooking? Evidently Harrison was not a man to have come back and back for nothing. Whatever it was, he had considered it worth while to give his host the impression that he, too, Francis Morris, was in it up to the hilt--therefore, that last London meeting between the two must have been continuation of _some__ actual story, however cock-and-bull. The old fanatical Irishman's first day back in London, last whole day on earth.... Yes, Harrison claimed they had met, and it now looked likely. More than that now looked likely, or at any rate possible. Even the story of papers inaccessibly locked away with the dead man's luggage came up again for review--though who (as she had repeatedly asked herself, and did ask herself, if more faintly and for the last time, now) _would__ hand over anything vital to Cousin Francis? Famous for honour, yes, for discretion, no; above all, famous loser of all he touched? As to the existence, ever, or at any rate the importance, of those papers she had kept a valuable scepticism--valuable because it could be extended to everything else that Harrison said he had or was or did. Harrison, she took it, had simply thought _that__ one up in hopes of involving her; he had not struck lucky.... But, what now? The conceivability of there being a grain of truth in anything he had ever, in any context, said shook her. What was her defence but this--that he lied, must lie, could not but lie, had lied from the very start? He _had__, then, in spite of his having said he had, really been there? This book-dark darkening room, through which imperceptibly the current of time flowed, held truth sunk somewhere in it, as the river held the boat. The very possibility might not allow her to rest again--but what, now she was forcing herself to think of it, _was__ the possibility? Cousin Francis might have, indeed must have (for if, as Robert said, he was mad, he was still no fool) taken a closeish look at Harrison's credentials and been satisfied. As against that, Cousin Francis was safely dead, so could not be asked--or rather, _could__ be asked, as often as Stella chose, and could be relied upon not to answer. She understood, with a shock, that here was a question she would be prepared to put to the dead only--why? Because the answer could mean too much. She had not yet, in London, made one move towards checking up on Harrison. _Was__ he what he had made himself out to be? Was he in the position to know what he said he knew, to act as he had told her he could? She could have come at all three answers: what evasion to tell herself she could not! She was not, as she had indeed told Harrison, a woman who did not know where to go; these last years she had lived at the edge of a clique of war, knowing who should know what, commanding a sort of language in which nothing need be ever exactly said. Now she looked back at that Sunday--how many weeks ago?--when Harrison had come to her with the story. "Who are you, to know?" she had in so many words said. Had he more than discreetly shifted his eyes?--she could or dared not be certain; she remembered only what she had felt. As a whole her memory of that evening was distorted, a thing of blurs, inconsistencies, bruises and blanks and queries, such as can but be left by any internally dreadfully violent scene. Since then, it might have shifted further out of the true. She did, however, somewhere keep one impression--that Harrison had not so much defied as invited her to check up. What had he expected her to do? Or had he expected her to do nothing?--in that case, he had been right. She had asked nobody anything about Harrison--why, yes, but of course she had: had she not asked Robert? She had asked Robert nothing about himself--but, again, what but a question about himself had been, really, the question about Harrison? On that occasion--flippancy, boredom, love: how sweet, how grateful had the diversion been! Diversion, not answer; not end, only beginning--beginning of her watch on Robert's doors and windows, her dogging of the step of his thoughts, her search for the interstices of his mind. Her espionage--but, apparently, better that. Better that than what? Than the saying of "I am told you are selling our country: are you?" She should by now, Robert might well reply, be able to judge for herself whether that could be possible. And he would be right, she _should__ know--her having ever asked must end all equability between them. A demonstration of innocence, as from him to her, could be nothing but icy cold--the more final it were, the more it must be final to everything. Volatility was a great part of Robert, but not the whole of him--laugh he might, but as a man he would not forgive her.... Or, he could lie; or rather, lie once again--the first lie spoken not being, in most cases, the first lie acted.--"Is he," Harrison had wanted to know, "anything of an actor?"--_If__ actor, to her and for her so very good an actor, then why not actor also of love? Incalculably calculating, secretly adverse, knowing, withheld had Robert been, all this time, from the start? No, no, no, she thought: better anything! Better what, then? Better to hear him say, "Since you _have__ chosen to ask me--yes." That would be love; that would be the consummation. What in effect were they but one another's accomplices already; deep into, and involving everything else in, the confederacy of love? Stop--stop him? It would _be__ stopped when Harrison closed the trap. The lamp, borne by Mary, came to the open door. "Mary, will you put the lamp in the drawingroom?" "Oh, there's no fire lit there, ma'am!" "I shan't be long." It was not so cold in there; the shuttered drawingroom had conserved a temperature of its own. Evidently Donovan and the girls, in finding anything at fault in the tranquil chill, had finer senses than Stella: indeed, it was most of all with the sense of some sense in herself missing that she looked, from mirror to mirror, into misted extensions of the room. She was proof against it. Constrained to touch things, to make certain that they were not their own reflections, she explored veneers and mouldings, corded edges, taut fluted silk, with the nerves of her fingers; she made a lustre tinkle, breathed on the dome over a spray of birds, opened the piano and struck a note, knowing all the time she was doing nothing more than amuse herself, if she _could__ amuse herself, and was outside the society of ghosts. Was it not sad, though, that a drawingroom should have so little power over a woman?--wondering why, she carried the lamp to meet one of its own reflections in a mirror, and, lifting it, studied the romantic face that was still hers. She became for the moment immortal as a portrait. Momentarily she was the lady of the house, with a smile moulded against the drapery of darkness. She wore the look of everything she had lost the secret of being. There was something inexorable in the judgement: she turned away from it. After all, was it not chiefly here in this room and under this illusion that Cousin Nettie Morris--and who now knew how many more before her?--had been pressed back, hour by hour, by the hours themselves, into cloudland? Ladies had gone not quite mad, not quite even that, from in vain listening for meaning in the loudening ticking of the clock. (She listened, looking back over her shoulder at the chimney-piece: in the marble centre, silence--the gilt nymphs' arms upheld only a faceless hollow.) Virtue with nothing more to spend, honour saying nothing, but both present. Both, also, rising and following the listener when she left the drawingroom: she had been unaccompanied by them along no path she took. Therefore, her kind knew no choices, made no decisions--or, did they not? Everything spoke to them--the design in and out of which they drew their needles; the bird with its little claws drawn to its piteously smooth breast, dead; away in the woods the quickening strokes of the axes, then the fall of the tree; or the child upstairs crying out terrified in its sleep. No, knowledge was not to be kept from them; it sifted through to them, stole up behind them, reached them by intimations--they suspected what they refused to prove. That had been their decision. So, there had been the cases of the enactment of ignorance having become too