Grandmamma and Grandpapa Olivier were buried in one half of the plot under a white marble slab. In the other half, on the bare grass, a white marble curb marked out a place for another grave.

Roddy said, "Who's buried there?"

Mamma said, "Nobody. Yet. That's for—"

Mary saw Aunt Lavvy frown again and put her finger to her mouth.

She said, "Who? For who?" An appalling curiosity and fear possessed her. And when Aunt Lavvy took her hand she knew that the empty place was marked out for Mamma and Papa.

Outside the cemetery gates, in the white road, the black funeral horses tossed their heads and neighed, and the black plumes quivered on the hearses. In the wagonette she sat close beside Aunt Lavvy, with Aunt Lavvy's shawl over her eyes.

She wondered how she knew that you were frightened when Mamma didn't. Mamma couldn't, because she was brave. She wasn't afraid of the funeral.

When Roddy said, "She oughtn't to have taken us, she ought to have known it would frighten us," Mark was angry with him. He said, "She thought you'd like it, you little beast. Because of the wagonette."

Darling Mamma. She had taken them because she thought they would like it. Because of the wagonette. Because she was brave, like Mark.

VI.

Dead people really did rise. Supposing all the dead people in the City of London Cemetery rose and came out of their graves and went about the city? Supposing they walked out as far as Ilford? Crowds and crowds of them, in white sheets? Supposing they got into the garden?

"Please, God, keep me from thinking about the Resurrection. Please God, keep me from dreaming about coffins and funerals and ghosts and skeletons and corpses." She said it last, after the blessings, so that God couldn't forget. But it was no use.

If you said texts: "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night." "Yea, though I walk through the City of London Cemetery." It was no use.

"The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall arise ... Incorruptible."

That was beautiful. Like a bright light shining. But you couldn't think about it long enough. And the dreams went on just the same: the dream of the ghost in the passage, the dream of the black coffin coming round the turn of the staircase and squeezing you against the banister; the dream of the corpse that came to your bed. She could see the round back and the curled arms under the white sheet.

The dreams woke her with a sort of burst. Her heart was jumping about and thumping; her face and hair were wet with water that came out of her skin.

The grey light in the passage was like the ghost-light of the dreams.

Gas light was a good light; but when you turned it on Jenny came up and put it out again. She said, "Goodness knows when you'll get to sleep with that light flaring."

There was never anybody about at bedtime. Jenny was dishing up the dinner. Harriet was waiting. Catty only ran up for a minute to undo the hooks and brush your hair.

When Mamma sent her to bed she came creeping back into the dining-room. Everybody was eating dinner. She sickened with fright in the steam and smell of dinner. She leaned her head against Mamma and whimpered, and Mamma said in her soft voice, "Big girls don't cry because it's bed-time. Only silly baby girls are afraid of ghosts."

Mamma wasn't afraid.

When she cried Mark left his dinner and carried her upstairs, past the place where the ghost was, and stayed with her till Catty came.



VII

I.

"Minx! Minx! Minx!"

Mark had come in from the garden with Mamma. He was calling to Mary. Minx was the name he had given her. Minx was a pretty name and she loved it because he had given it her. Whenever she heard him call she left what she was doing and ran to him.

Papa came out of the library with Boag's Dictionary open in his hand. "'Minx: A pert, wanton girl. A she-puppy.' Do you hear that, Caroline? He calls his sister a wanton she-puppy." But Mamma had gone back into the garden.

Mark stood at the foot of the stairs and Mary stood at the turn. She had one hand on the rail of the banister, the other pressed hard against the wall. She leaned forward on tiptoe, measuring her distance. When she looked at the stairs they fell from under her in a grey dizziness, so that Mark looked very far away.

They waited till Papa had gone back into the library—Mark held out his arms.

"Jump, Minky! Jump!"

She let go the rail and drew herself up. A delicious thrill of danger went through her and out at her fingers. She flung herself into space and Mark caught her. His body felt hard and strong as it received her. They did it again and again.

That was the "faith-jump." You knew that you would be killed if Mark didn't catch you, but you had faith that he would catch you; and he always did.

Mark and Dan were going to school at Chelmsted on the thirteenth of September, and it was the last week in August now. Mark and Mamma were always looking for each other. Mamma would come running up to the schoolroom and say, "Where's Mark? Tell Mark I want him"; and Mark would go into the garden and say, "Where's Mamma? I want her." And Mamma would put away her trowel and gardening gloves and go walks with him which she hated; and Mark would leave Napoleon Buonaparte and the plan of the Battle of Austerlitz to dig in the garden (and he loathed digging) with Mamma.

This afternoon he had called to Mary to come out brook-jumping. Mark could jump all the brooks in the fields between Ilford and Barkingside, and in the plantations beyond Drake's Farm; he could jump the Pool of Siloam where the water from the plantations runs into the lake below Vinings. Where there was no place for a little girl of seven to cross he carried her in his arms and jumped. He would stand outside in the lane and put his hands on the wall and turn heels over head into the garden.

She said to herself: "In six years and five months I shall be fourteen. I shall jump the Pool of Siloam and come into the garden head over heels." And Mamma called her a little humbug when she said she was afraid to go for a walk with Jenny lest a funeral should be coming along the road.

II.

The five elm trees held up their skirts above the high corn. The flat surface of the corn-tops was still. Hot glassy air quivered like a thin steam over the brimming field.

The glazed yellow walls of the old nursery gave out a strong light and heat. The air indoors was dry and smelt dusty like the hot, crackling air above the corn. The children had come in from their play in the fields; they leaned out of the windows and talked about what they were going to be.

Mary said, "I shall paint pictures and play the piano and ride in a circus. I shall go out to the countries where the sand is and tame zebras; and I shall marry Mark and have thirteen children with blue eyes like Meta."

Roddy was going to be the captain of a cruiser. Dan was going to Texas, or some place where Papa couldn't get at him, to farm. Mark was going to be a soldier like Marshal McMahon.

It was Grandpapa and Grandmamma's fault that he was not a soldier now.

"If," he said, "they'd let Papa marry Mamma when he wanted to, I might have been born in eighteen fifty-two. I'd be eighteen by this time. I should have gone into the French Army and I should have been with McMahon at Sedan now."

"You might have been killed," Mary said.

"That wouldn't have mattered a bit. I should have been at Sedan. Nothing matters, Minky, as long as you get what you want."

"If you were killed Mamma and me would die, too, the same minute. Papa would be sorry, then; but not enough to kill him, so that we should go to heaven together without him and be happy."

"Mamma wouldn't be happy without him. We couldn't shut him out."

"No," Mary said; "but we could pray to God not to let him come up too soon."

III.

Sedan—Sedan—Sedan.

Papa came out into the garden where Mamma was pulling weeds out of the hot dry soil. He flapped the newspaper and read about the Battle of Sedan. Mamma left off pulling weeds out and listened.

Mark had stuck the picture of Marshal McMahon over the schoolroom chimney-piece. Papa had pinned the war-map to the library door. Mark was restless. He kept on going into the library to look at the war-map and Papa kept on turning him out again. He was in a sort of mysterious disgrace because of Sedan. Roddy was excited about Sedan. Dan followed Mark as he went in and out; he was furious with Papa because of Mark.

Mamma had been a long time in the library talking to Papa. They sent for Mark just before dinner-time. When Mary ran in to say good-night she found him there.

Mark was saying, "You needn't think I want your beastly money. I shall enlist."

Mamma said, "If he enlists, Emilius, it'll kill me."

And Papa, "You hear what your mother says, sir. Isn't that enough for you?"

Mark loved Mamma; but he was not going to do what she wanted. He was going to do something that would kill her.

IV.

Papa walked in the garden in the cool of the evening, like the Lord God. And he was always alone. When you thought of him you thought of Jehovah.

There was something funny about other people's fathers. Mr. Manisty, of Vinings, who rode along Ley Street with his two tall, thin sons, as if he were actually proud of them; Mr. Batty, the Vicar of Barkingside, who called his daughter Isabel his "pretty one"; Mr. Farmer, the curate of St. Mary's Chapel, who walked up and down the room all night with the baby; and Mr. Propart, who went about the public roads with Humphrey and Arthur positively hanging on him. Dan said Humphrey and Arthur were tame and domestic because they were always going about with Mr. Propart and talking to him as if they liked it. Mark had once seen Mr. Propart trying to jump a ditch on the Aldborough Road. It was ridiculous. Humphrey and Arthur had to grab him by the arms and pull him over. Mary was sorry for the Propart boys because they hadn't got a mother who was sweet and pretty like Mamma and a father called Emilius Olivier. Emilius couldn't jump ditches any more than Mr. Propart; but then he knew he couldn't, and as Mark said, he had the jolly good sense not to try. You couldn't be Jehovah and jump ditches.

Emilius Olivier was everything a father ought to be.

Then suddenly, for no reason at all, he left off being Jehovah and began trying to behave like Mr. Batty.

It was at dinner, the last Sunday before the thirteenth. Mamma had moved Roddy and Mary from their places so that Mark and Dan could sit beside her. Mary was sitting at the right hand of Papa in the glory of the Father. The pudding had come in; blanc-mange, and Mark's pudding with whipped cream hiding the raspberry jam. It was Roddy's turn to be helped; his eyes were fixed on the snow-white, pure blanc-mange shuddering in the glass dish, and Mamma had just asked him which he would have when Papa sent Mark and Dan out of the room. You couldn't think why he had done it this time unless it was because Mark laughed when Roddy said in his proud, dignified voice, "I'll have a little piece of the Virgin's womb, please, first." Or it may have been because of Mark's pudding. He never liked it when they had Mark's pudding. Anyhow, Mark and Dan had to go, and as they went he drew Mary's chair closer to him and heaped her plate with cream and jam, looking very straight at Mamma as he did it.

"You might have left them alone," Mamma said, "on their last Sunday. They won't be here to annoy you so very long."

Papa said, "There are three days yet till the thirteenth."

"Three days! You'll count the hours and the minutes till you've got what you want."

"What I want is peace and quiet in my house and to get a word in edgeways, sometimes, with my own wife."

"You've no business to have a wife if you can't put up with your own children."

"It isn't my business to have a wife," Papa said. "It's my pleasure. My business is to insure ships. And you see me putting up with Mary very well. I suppose she's my own child."

"Mark and Dan are your own children first."

"Are they? To judge by your infatuation I should have said they weren't. 'Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Silver bells and cockle shells, and chocolate creams all in a row.'"

He took a large, flat box of chocolates out of his pocket and laid it beside her plate. And he looked straight at Mamma again.

"If those are the chocolates I reminded you to get for—for the hamper, I won't have them opened."

"They are not the chocolates you reminded me to get for—the hamper. I suppose Mark's stomach is a hamper. They are the chocolates I reminded myself to get for Mary."

Then Mamma said a peculiar thing.

"Are you trying to show me that you're not jealous of Mary?"

"I'm not trying to show you anything. You know I'm not jealous of Mary. And you know there's no reason why I should be."

"To hear you, Emilius, anybody would think I wasn't fond of my own daughter. Mary darling, you'd better run away."

"And Mary darling," he mocked her, "you'd better take your chocolates with you."

Mary said: "I don't want any chocolates, Papa."

"Is that her contrariness, or just her Mariness?"

"Whatever it is it's all the thanks you get, and serve you right, too," said Mamma.

She went upstairs to persuade Dan that Papa didn't mean it. It was just his way, and they'd see he would be different to-morrow.

But to-morrow and the next day and the next he was the same. He didn't actually send Mark and Dan out of the room again, but he tried to pretend to himself that they weren't there by refusing to speak to them.

"Do you think," Mark said, "he'll keep it up till the last minute?"

He did; even when he heard the sound of Mr. Parish's wagonette in the road, coming to take Mark and Dan away. They were sitting at breakfast, trying not to look at him for fear they should laugh, or at Mamma for fear they should cry, trying not to look at each other. Catty brought in the cakes, the hot buttered Yorkshire cakes that were never served for breakfast except on Christmas Day and birthdays. Mary wondered whether Papa would say or do anything. He couldn't. Everybody knew those cakes were sacred. Catty set them on the table with a sort of crash and ran out of the room, crying. Mamma's mouth quivered.

Papa looked at the cakes; he looked at Mamma; he looked at Mark. Mark was staring at nothing with a firm grin on his face.

"The assuagers of grief," Papa said. "Pass round the assuagers."

The holy cakes were passed round. Everybody took a piece except Dan.

Papa pressed him. "Try an assuager. Do."

And Mamma pleaded, "Yes, Dank."

"Do you hear what your mother says?"

Dan's eyes were red-rimmed. He took a double section of cake and tried to bite his way through.

At the first taste tears came out of his eyes and fell on his cake. And when Mamma saw that she burst out crying.

Mary put her piece down untasted and bit back her sobs. Roddy pushed his piece away; and Mark began to eat his, suddenly, bowing over it with an affectation of enjoyment.

Outside in the road Mr. Parish was descending from the box of his wagonette. Papa looked at his watch. He was going with them to Chelmsted.

And Mamma whispered to Mark and Dan with her last kiss, "He'll be all right in the train."

It was all over. Mary and Roddy sat in the dining-room where Mamma had left them. They had shut their eyes so as not to see the empty chairs pushed back and the pieces of the sacred cakes, bitten and abandoned. They had stopped their ears so as not to hear the wheels of Mr. Parish's wagonette taking Mark and Dan away.

Hours afterwards Mamma came upon Mary huddled up in a corner of the drawing-room.

"Mamma—Mamma—I can't bear it. I can't live without Mark. And Dan."

Mamma sat down and took her in her arms and rocked her, rocked her without a word, soothing her own grief.

Papa found them like that when he came back from Chelmsted. He stood in the doorway looking at them for a moment, then slunk out of the room as if he were ashamed of himself. When Mamma sent Mary out to say good-bye to him, he was standing beside the little sumach tree that Mark gave Mamma on her birthday. He was smiling at the sumach tree as if he loved it and was sorry for it.

And Mamma got a letter from Mark in the morning to say she was right. Papa had been quite decent in the train.

V.

After Mark and Dan had gone a great and very remarkable change came over Papa and Mamma. Mamma left off saying the funny things that Mary could not understand, and Papa left off teasing and flying into tempers and looking like Jehovah and walking by himself in the cool of the evening. He followed Mamma about the garden. He hung over her chair, like Mark, as she sat sewing. You came upon him suddenly on the stairs and in the passages, and he would look at you as if you were not there, and say, "Where's your mother? Go and tell her I want her." And Mamma would put away her trowel and her big leather gloves and go to him. She would sit for hours in the library while he flapped the newspaper and read to her in a loud voice about Mr. Gladstone whom she hated.

Sometimes he would come home early from the office, and Mamma and Mary would be ready for him, and they would all go together to call at Vinings or Barkingside Vicarage or on the Proparts.

Or Mr. Parish's wagonette would be ordered, and Mamma and Mary would put on their best clothes very quick and go up to London with him, and he would take them to St. Paul's or Maskelyne and Cooke's, or the National Gallery or the British Museum. Or they would walk slowly, very slowly, up Regent Street, stopping at the windows of the bonnet shops while Mamma picked out the bonnet she would buy if she could afford it. And perhaps the next day a bonnet would come in a bandbox, a bonnet that frightened her when she put it on and looked at herself in the glass. She would pretend it was one of the bonnets she had wanted; and when Papa had forgotten about it she would pull all the trimming off and put it all on again a different way, and Papa would say it was an even more beautiful bonnet than he had thought.

You might have supposed that he was sorry because he was thinking about Mark and Dan and trying to make up for having been unkind to them. But he was not sorry. He was glad. Glad about something that Mamma had done. He would go about whistling some gay tune, or you caught him stroking his moustache and parting it over his rich lips that smiled as if he were thinking of what Mamma had done to make him happy. The red specks and smears had gone from his eyes, they were clear and blue, and they looked at you with a kind, gentle look, like Uncle Victor's. His very beard was happy.

"You may not know it, but your father is the handsomest man in Essex," Mamma said.

Perhaps it wasn't anything that Mamma had done. Perhaps he was only happy because he was being good. Every Sunday he went to church at Barkingside with Mamma, kneeling close to her in the big pew and praying in a great, ghostly voice, "Good Lord, deliver us!" When the psalms and hymns began he rose over the pew-ledge, yards and yards of him, as if he stood on many hassocks, and he lifted up his beard and sang. All these times the air fairly tingled with him; he seemed to beat out of himself and spread around him the throb of violent and overpowering life. And in the evenings towards sunset they walked together in the fields, and Mary followed them, lagging behind in the borders where the sharlock and wild rye and poppies grew. When she caught up with them she heard them talking.

Once Mamma said, "Why can't you always be like this, Emilius?"

And Papa said, "Why, indeed!"

And when Christmas came and Mark and Dan were back again he was as cruel and teasing as he had ever been.

VI.

Eighteen seventy-one.

One cold day Roddy walked into the Pool of Siloam to recover his sailing boat which had drifted under the long arch of the bridge.

There was no Passion Week and no Good Friday and no Easter that spring, only Roddy's rheumatic fever. Roddy in bed, lying on his back, his face white and sharp, his hair darkened and glued with the sweat that poured from his hair and soaked into the bed. Roddy crying out with pain when they moved him. Mamma and Jenny always in Roddy's room, Mr. Spall's sister in the kitchen. Mary going up and down, tiptoe, on messages, trying not to touch Roddy's bed.

Dr. Draper calling, talking in a low voice to Mamma, and Mamma crying. Dr. Draper looking at you through his spectacles and putting a thing like a trumpet to your chest and listening through it.

"You're quite right, Mrs. Olivier. There's nothing wrong with the little girl's heart. She's as sound as a bell."

A dreadful feeling that you had no business to be as sound as a bell. It wasn't fair to Roddy.

Something she didn't notice at the time and remembered afterwards when Roddy was well again. Jenny saying to Mamma, "If it had to be one of them it had ought to have been Miss Mary."

And Mamma saying to Jenny, "It wouldn't have mattered so much if it had been the girl."

VII.

You knew that Catty loved you. There was never the smallest uncertainty about it. Her big black eyes shone when she saw you coming. You kissed her smooth cool cheeks, and she hugged you tight and kissed you back again at once; her big lips made a noise like a pop-gun. When she tucked you up at night she said, "I love you so much I could eat you."

And she would play any game you liked. You had only to say, "Let's play the going-away game," and she was off. You began: "I went away to the big hot river where the rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses are"; or: "I went away to the desert where the sand is, to catch zebras. I rode on a dromedary, flump-flumping through the sand," and Catty would follow it up with: "I went away with the Good Templars. We went in a row-boat on a lake, and we landed on an island where there was daffodillies growing. We had milk and cake; and it blew such a cool breeze."

Catty was full of love. She loved her father and mother and her little sister Amelia better than anything in the whole world. Her home was in Wales. Tears came into her eyes when she thought about her home and her little sister Amelia.

"Catty—how much do you love me?"

"Armfuls and armfuls."

"As much as your mother?"

"Very near as much."

"As much as Amelia?"

"Every bit as much."

"How much do you think Jenny loves me?"

"Ever so much."

"No. Jenny loves Roddy best; then Mark; then Dank; then Mamma; then Papa; then me. That isn't ever so much."

Catty was vexed. "You didn't oughter go measuring people's love, Miss Mary."

Still, that was what you did do. With Catty and Jenny you could measure till you knew exactly where you were.

Mamma was different.

You knew when she loved you. You could almost count the times: the time when Papa frightened you; the time when you cut your forehead; the time the lamb died; all the whooping-cough and chicken-pox times, and when Meta, the wax doll, fell off the schoolroom table and broke her head; and when Mark went away to school. Or when you were good and said every word of your lessons right; when you watched Mamma working in the garden, planting and transplanting the flowers with her clever hands; and when you were quiet and sat beside her on the footstool, learning to knit and sew. On Sunday afternoons when she played the hymns and you sang:

"There's a Friend for little children Above the bright blue sky,"

quite horribly out of tune, and when you listened while she sang herself, "Lead, kindly light," or "Abide with me," and her voice was so sweet and gentle that it made you cry. Then you knew.

Sometimes, when it was not Sunday, she played the Hungarian March, that went, with loud, noble noises:

Droom—Droom—Droom-era-room Droom—Droom—Droom-era-room Droom rer-room-room droom-room-room Droom—Droom—Droom.

It was wonderful. Mamma was wonderful. She swayed and bowed to the beat of the music, as if she shook it out of her body and not out of the piano. She smiled to herself when she saw that you were listening. You said "Oh—Mamma! Play it again," and she played it again. When she had finished she stooped suddenly and kissed you. And you knew.

But she wouldn't say it. You couldn't make her.

"Say it, Mamma. Say it like you used to."

Mamma shook her head.

"I want to hear you say it."

"Well, I'm not going to."

"I love you. I ache with loving you. I love you so much that it hurts me to say it."

"Why do you do it, then?"

"Because it hurts me more not to. Just once. 'I love you.' Just a weeny once."

"You're going to be like your father, tease, tease, tease, all day long, till I'm worn out."

"I'm not going to be like Papa. I don't tease. It's you that's teasing. How'm I to know you love me if you won't say it?"

Mamma said, "Can't you see what I'm doing?"

"No."

She was not interested in the thin white stuff and the lace—Mamma's needle-work.

"Well, then, look in the basket."

The basket was full of tiny garments made of the white stuff, petticoats, drawers and nightgown, sewn with minute tucks and edged with lace. Mamma unfolded them.

"New clothes," she said, "for your new dolly."

"Oh—oh—oh—I love you so much that I can't bear it; you little holy Mamma!"

Mamma said, "I'm not holy, and I won't be called holy. I want deeds, not words. If you love me you'll learn your lessons properly the night before, not just gabble them over hot from the pan."

"I will, Mamma, I will. Won't you say it?"

"No," Mamma said, "I won't."

She sat there with a sort of triumph on her beautiful face, as if she were pleased with herself because she hadn't said it. And Mary would bring the long sheet that dragged on her wrist, and the needle that pricked her fingers, and sit at Mamma's knee and sew, making a thin trail of blood all along the hem.

"Why do you look at me so kindly when I'm sewing?"

"Because I like to see you behaving like a little girl, instead of tearing about and trying to do what boys do."

And Mamma would tell her a story, always the same story, going on and on, about the family of ten children who lived in the farm by the forest. There were seven boys and three girls. The six youngest boys worked on the farm with their father—yes, he was a very nice father—and the eldest boy worked in the garden with his mother, and the three girls worked in the house. They could cook and make butter and cheese, and bake bread; and even the youngest little girl could knit and sew.

"Had they any children?"

"No, they were too busy to think about having children. They were all very, very happy together, just as they were."

The story was like the hem, there was never any end to it, for Mamma was always finding something else for the three girls to do. She smiled as she told it, as if she saw something that pleased her.

Mary felt that she could go on sewing at the hem and pricking her finger for ever if Mamma would only keep that look on her face.



VIII

I.

"I can't, Jenny, I can't. I know there's a funeral coming."

Mary stood on the flagstone inside the arch of the open gate. She looked up and down the road and drew back again into the garden. Jenny, tired and patient, waited outside.

"I've told you, Miss Mary, there isn't any funeral."

"If there isn't there will be. There! I can see it."

"You see Mr. Parish's high 'at a driving in his wagonette."

It was Mr. Parish's high hat. When he put the black top on his wagonette it looked like a hearse.

They started up Ley Street towards Mr. Spall's cottage.

Jenny said, "I thought you was going to be such a good girl when Master Roddy went to school. But I declare if you're not twice as tiresome."

Roddy had gone to Chelmsted after midsummer. She had to go for walks on the roads with Jenny now at the risk of meeting funerals.

This week they had been every day to Ilford to call at Mr. Spall's cottage or at Benny's, the draper's shop in the High Street.

Jenny didn't believe that a big girl, nine next birthday, could really be afraid of funerals. She thought you were only trying to be tiresome. She said you could stop thinking about funerals well enough when you wanted. You did forget sometimes when nice things happened; when you went to see Mrs. Farmer's baby undressed, and when Isabel Batty came to tea. Isabel was almost a baby. It felt nice to lift her and curl up her stiff, barley-sugar hair and sponge her weak, pink silk hands. And there were things that you could do. You could pretend that you were not Mary Olivier but somebody else, that you were grown-up and that the baby and Isabel belonged to you and were there when they were not there. But all the time you knew there would be a funeral on the road somewhere, and that some day you would see it.

When they got into the High Street the funeral was coming along the Barking Road. She saw, before Jenny could see anything at all, the mutes, sitting high, and their black, bunched-up weepers. She turned and ran out of the High Street and back over the railway bridge. Jenny called after her, "Come back!" and a man on the bridge shouted "Hi, Missy! Stop!" as she ran down Ley Street. Her legs shook and gave way under her. Once she fell. She ran, staggering, but she ran. People came out of their cottages to look at her. She thought they had come out to look at the funeral.

After that she refused to go outside the front door or to look through the front windows for fear she should see a funeral.

They couldn't take her and carry her out; so they let her go for walks in the back garden. When Papa came home she was sent up to the schoolroom to play with the doll's house. You could see the road through the high bars of the window at the end of the passage, so that even when Catty lit the gas the top floor was queer and horrible.

Sometimes doubts came with her terror. She thought: "Nobody loves me except Mark. And Mark isn't here." Mark's image haunted her. She shut her eyes and it slid forward on to the darkness, the strong body, the brave, straight up and down face, the steady, light brown eyes, shining; the firm, sweet mouth; the sparrow-brown hair with feathery golden tips. She could hear Mark's voice calling to her: "Minx! Minky!"

And there was something that Mamma said. It was unkind to be afraid of the poor dead people. Mamma said, "Would you run away from Isabel if you saw her lying in her little coffin?"

II.

Jenny's new dress had come.

It was made of grey silk trimmed with black lace, and it lay spread out on the bed in the spare room. Mamma and Aunt Bella stood and looked at it, and shook their heads as if they thought that Jenny had no business to wear a silk dress.

Aunt Bella said, "She's a silly woman to go and leave a good home. At her age."

And Mamma said, "I'd rather see her in her coffin. It would be less undignified. She meant to do it at Easter; she was only waiting till Roddy went to school. She's waiting now till after the Christmas holidays."

Jenny was going to do something dreadful.

She was going to be married. The grey silk dress was her wedding-dress. She was going to marry Mr. Spall. Even Catty thought it was rather dreadful.

But Jenny was happy because she was going to wear the grey silk dress and live in Mr. Spall's cottage and talk to him about Jesus. Only one half of her face drooped sleepily; the other half had waked up, and looked excited; there was a flush on it as bright as paint.

III.

Mary's bed stood in a corner of the night nursery, and beside it was the high yellow linen cupboard. When the doors were opened there was a faint india-rubbery smell from the mackintosh sheet that had been put away on the top shelf.

One night she was wakened by Catty coming into the room and opening the cupboard doors. Catty climbed on a chair and took something from the top shelf. She didn't answer when Mary asked what she was doing, but hurried away, leaving the door on the latch. Her feet made quick thuds along the passage. A door opened and shut, and there was a sound of Papa going downstairs. Somebody came up softly and pulled the door to, and Mary went to sleep again.

When she woke the room was full of the grey light that frightened her. But she was not frightened. She woke sitting up on her pillow, staring into the grey light, and saying to herself, "Jenny is dead."

But she was not afraid of Jenny. The stillness in her heart spread into the grey light of the room. She lay back waiting for seven o'clock when Catty would come and call her.

At seven o'clock Mamma came. She wore the dress she had worn last night, and she was crying.

Mary said, "You haven't got to say it. I know Jenny is dead."

The blinds were drawn in all the windows when she and Mark went into the front garden to look for snowdrops in the border by the kitchen area. She knew that Jenny's dead body lay on the sofa under the kitchen window behind the blind and the white painted iron bars. She hoped that she would not have to see it; but she was not afraid of Jenny's dead body. It was sacred and holy.

She wondered why Mamma sent her to Uncle Edward and Aunt Bella. From the top-storey windows of Chadwell Grange you could look beyond Aldborough Hatch towards Wanstead Flats and the City of London Cemetery. They were going to bury Jenny there. She stood looking out, quiet, not crying. She only cried at night when she thought of Jenny, sitting in the low nursery chair, tired and patient, drawing back from her violent caresses, and of the grey silk dress laid out on the bed in the spare room.

She was not even afraid of the City of London Cemetery when Mark took her to see Jenny's grave. Jenny's grave was sacred and holy.



IX

I.

You had to endure hardness after you were nine. You learnt out of Mrs. Markham's "History of England," and you were not allowed to read the conversations between Richard and Mary and Mrs. Markham because they made history too amusing and too easy to remember. For the same reason you translated only the tight, dismal pages of your French Reader, and anything that looked like an interesting story was forbidden. You were to learn for the sake of the lesson and not for pleasure's sake. Mamma said you had enough pleasure in play-time. She put it to your honour not to skip on to the more exciting parts.

When you had finished Mrs. Markham you began Dr. Smith's "History of England." Honour was safe with Dr. Smith. He made history very hard to read and impossible to remember.

The Bible got harder, too. You knew all the best Psalms by heart, and the stories about Noah's ark and Joseph and his coat of many colours, and David, and Daniel in the lions' den. You had to go straight through the Bible now, skipping Leviticus because it was full of things you couldn't understand. When you had done with Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness you had to read about Aaron and the sons of Levi, and the wave-offerings, and the tabernacle, and the ark of the covenant where they kept the five golden emerods. Mamma didn't know what emerods were, but Mark said they were a kind of white mice.

You learnt Old Testament history, too, out of a little book that was all grey slabs of print and dark pictures showing the earth swallowing up Korah, Dathan and Abiram, and Aaron and the sons of Levi with their long beards and high hats and their petticoats, swinging incense in fits of temper. You found out queerer and queerer things about God. God made the earth swallow up Korah, Dathan and Abiram. He killed poor Uzzah because he put out his hand to prevent the ark of the covenant falling out of the cart. Even David said he didn't know how on earth he was to get the ark along at that rate. And there were the Moabites and the Midianites and all the animals: the bullocks and the he-goats and the little lambs and kids. When you asked Mamma why God killed people, she said it was because he was just as well as merciful, and (it was the old story) he hated sin. Disobedience was sin, and Uzzah had been disobedient.

As for the lambs and the he-goats, Jesus had done away with all that. He was God's son, and he had propitiated God's anger and satisfied his justice when he shed his own blood on the cross to save sinners. Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins. You were not to bother about the blood.

But you couldn't help bothering about it. You couldn't help being sorry for Uzzah and the Midianites and the lambs and the he-goats.

Perhaps you had to sort things out and keep them separate. Here was the world, here were Mamma and Mark and kittens and rabbits, and all the things you really cared about: drawing pictures, and playing the Hungarian March and getting excited in the Easter holidays when the white evenings came and Mark raced you from the Green Man to the Horns Tavern. Here was the sudden, secret happiness you felt when you were by yourself and the fields looked beautiful. It was always coming now, with a sort of rush and flash, when you least expected it.

And there was God and religion and duty. The nicest part of religion was music, and knowing how the world was made, and the beautiful sounding bits of the Bible. You could like religion. But duty was doing all the things you didn't like because you didn't like them. And you couldn't honestly say you liked God. God had to be propitiated; your righteousness was filthy rags; so you couldn't propitiate him. Jesus had to do it for you. All you had to do was to believe, really believe that he had done it.

But supposing you hadn't got to believe it, supposing you hadn't got to believe anything at all, it would be easier to think about. The things you cared for belonged to each other, but God didn't belong to them. He didn't fit in anywhere. You couldn't help feeling that if God was love, and if he was everywhere, he ought to have fitted in. Perhaps, after all, there were two Gods; one who made things and loved them, and one who didn't; who looked on sulking and finding fault with what the clever kind God had made.

When the midsummer holidays came and brook-jumping began she left off thinking about God.

II.

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"—

The picture in the Sunday At Home showed the old King in bed and Prince Hal trying on his crown. But the words were not the Sunday At Home; they were taken out of Shakespeare. Mark showed her the place.

Mark was in the schoolroom chanting his home-lessons:

"'Yet once more, oh ye laurels, and once more, Ye myrtles brown with ivy never sere'"—

That sounded nice. "Say it again, Mark, say it again." Mark said it again. He also said:

"'Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!'"

The three books stood on the bookshelf in the schoolroom, the thin Shakespeare in diamond print, the small brown leather Milton, the very small fat Pope's Iliad in the red cover. Mark gave them to her for her own.

She made Catty put her bed between the two windows, and Mark made a bookshelf out of a piece of wood and some picture cord, and hung it within reach. She had a happy, excited feeling when she thought of the three books; it made her wake early. She read from five o'clock till Catty called her at seven, and again after Catty had tucked her up and left her, till the white light in the room was grey.

She learnt Lycidas by heart, and

"I thought I saw my late espoused wife Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,"—

and the bits about Satan in Paradise Lost. The sound of the lines gave her the same nice feeling that she had when Mrs. Propart played the March in Scipio after Evening Service. She tried to make lines of her own that went the same way as the lines in Milton and Shakespeare and Pope's Iliad. She found out that there was nothing she liked so much as making these lines. It was nicer even than playing the Hungarian March. She thought it was funny that the lines like Pope's Iliad came easiest, though they had to rhyme.

"Silent he wandered by the sounding sea," was good, but the Greek line that Mark showed her went: "Be d'akeon para thina poluphloisboio thalasses"; that was better. "Don't you think so, Mark?"

"Clever Minx. Much better."

"Mark—if God knew how happy I am writing poetry he'd make the earth open and swallow me up."

Mark only said, "You mustn't say that to Mamma. Play 'Violetta.'"

Of all hateful and disgusting tunes the most disgusting and the most hateful was "Violetta," which Mr. Sippett's sister taught her. But if Mark would promise to make Mamma let her learn Greek she would play it to him twenty times running.

When Mark went to Chelmsted that autumn he left her his brown Greek Accidence and Smith's Classical Dictionary, besides Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. She taught herself Greek in the hour after breakfast before Miss Sippett came to give her her music lesson. She was always careful to leave the Accidence open where Miss Sippett could see it and realise that she was not a stupid little girl.

But whether Miss Sippett saw the Accidence or not she always behaved as if it wasn't there.

III.

When Mamma saw the Accidence open on the drawing-room table she shut it and told you to put it in its proper place. If you talked about it her mouth buttoned up tight, and her eyes blinked, and she began tapping with her foot.

There was something queer about learning Greek. Mamma did not actually forbid it; but she said it must not be done in lesson time or sewing time, or when people could see you doing it, lest they should think you were showing off. You could see that she didn't believe you could learn Greek and that she wouldn't like it if you did. But when lessons were over she let you read Shakespeare or Pope's Iliad aloud to her while she sewed. And when you could say:

"Lars Porsena of Clusium By the nine Gods he swore"—

straight through without stopping she went into London with Papa and brought back the Child's First History of Rome. A Pinnock's Catechism of Mythology in a blue paper cover went with the history to tell you all about the gods and goddesses. What Pinnock didn't tell you you found out from Smith's Classical Dictionary. It had pictures in it so beautiful that you were happy just sitting still and looking at them. There was such a lot of gods and goddesses that at first they were rather hard to remember. But you couldn't forget Apollo and Hermes and Aphrodite and Pallas Athene and Diana. They were not like Jehovah. They quarrelled sometimes, but they didn't hate each other; not as Jehovah hated all the other gods. They fitted in somehow. They cared for all the things you liked best: trees and animals and poetry and music and running races and playing games. Even Zeus was nicer than Jehovah, though he reminded you of him now and then. He liked sacrifices. But then he was honest about it. He didn't pretend that he was good and that he had to have them because of your sins. And you hadn't got to believe in him. That was the nicest thing of all.



X

I.

Mary was ten in eighteen seventy-three.

Aunt Charlotte was ill, and nobody was being kind to her. She had given her Sunday bonnet to Harriet and her Sunday gown to Catty; so you knew she was going to be married again. She said it was prophesied that she should be married in eighteen seventy-three.

The illness had something to do with being married and going continually to Mr. Marriott's church and calling on Mr. Marriott and writing letters to him about religion. You couldn't say Aunt Charlotte was not religious. But Papa said he would believe in her religion if she went to Mr. Batty's church or Mr. Farmer's or Mr. Propart's. They had all got wives and Mr. Marriott hadn't. Papa had forbidden Aunt Charlotte to go any more to Mr. Marriott's church.

Mr. Marriott had written a nice letter to Uncle Victor, and Uncle Victor had taken Papa to see him, and the doctor had come to see Aunt Charlotte and she had been sent to bed.

Aunt Charlotte's room was at the top of the tall, thin white house in the High Street. There was whispering on the stairs. Mamma and Aunt Lavvy stood at the turn; you could see their vexed faces. Aunt Charlotte called to them to let Mary come to her. Mary was told she might go if she were very quiet.

Aunt Charlotte was all by herself sitting up in a large white bed. A Bible propped itself open, leaves downwards, against the mound she made. There was something startling about the lengths of white curtain and the stretches of white pillow and counterpane, and Aunt Charlotte's very black eyebrows and hair and the cover of the Bible, very black, and her blue eyes glittering.

She was writing letters. Every now and then she took up the Bible and picked out a text and wrote it down. She wrote very fast, and as she finished each sheet she hid it under the bed-clothes, and made a sign to show that what she was doing was a secret.

"Love God and you'll be happy. Love God and you'll be happy," she said.

Her eyes pointed at you. They looked wise and solemn and excited.

A wide flat piece of counterpane was left over from Aunt Charlotte. Mary climbed up and sat in it with her back against the foot-rail and looked at her. Looking at Aunt Charlotte made you think of being born.

"Aunt Charlotte, do you know what being born is?"

Aunt Charlotte looked up under her eyebrows, and hid another sheet of paper. "What's put that in your head all of a sudden?"

"It's because of my babies. Catty says I couldn't have thirteen all under three years old. But I could, couldn't I?"

"I'm afraid I don't think you could," Aunt Charlotte said.

"Why not? Catty won't say why."

Aunt Charlotte shook her head, but she was smiling and looking wiser and more solemn than ever. "You mustn't ask too many questions," she said.

"But you haven't told me what being born is. I know it's got something to do with the Virgin Mary."

Aunt Charlotte said, "Sh-sh-sh! You mustn't say that. Nice little girls don't think about those things."

Her tilted eyes had turned down and her mouth had stopped smiling. So you knew that being born was not frightening. It had something to do with the things you didn't talk about.

And ye—how could it? There was the Virgin Mary.

"Aunt Charlotte, don't you wish you had a baby?"

Aunt Charlotte looked frightened, suddenly, and began to cry.

"You mustn't say it, Mary, you mustn't say it. Don't tell them you said it. They'll think I've been talking about the babies. The little babies. Don't tell them. Promise me you won't tell."

II.

"Aunt Lavvy—I wish I knew what you thought about Jehovah?"

When Aunt Lavvy stayed with you Mamma made you promise not to ask her about her opinions. But sometimes you forgot. Aunt Lavvy looked more than ever as if she was by herself in a quiet empty room, thinking of something that wasn't there. You couldn't help feeling that she knew things. Mamma said she had always been the clever one, just as Aunt Charlotte had always been the queer one; but Aunt Bella said she was no better than an unbeliever, because she was a Unitarian at heart.

"Why Jehovah in particular?" Aunt Lavvy was like Uncle Victor; she listened politely when you talked to her, as if you were saying something interesting.

"Because he's the one you've got to believe in. Do you really think he is so very good?"

"I don't think anything. I don't know anything, except that God is love."

"Jehovah wasn't."

"Jehovah—" Aunt Lavvy stopped herself. "I mustn't talk to you about it—because I promised your mother I wouldn't."

It was very queer. Aunt Lavvy's opinions had something to do with religion, yet Mamma said you mustn't talk about them.

"I promised, too. I shall have to confess and ask her to forgive me."

"Then," said Aunt Lavvy, "be sure you tell her that I didn't talk to you. Promise me you'll tell her."

That was what Aunt Charlotte had said. Talking about religion was like talking about being born.



XI

I.

Nobody has any innate ideas. Children and savages and idiots haven't any, so grown-up people can't have, Mr. Locke says.

But how did he know? You might have them and forget about them, and only remember again after you were grown up.

She sat up in the drawing-room till nine o'clock now, because she was eleven years old. She had taken the doll's clothes out of the old wooden box and filled it with books: the Bible, Milton, and Pope's Homer, the Greek Accidence, and Plutarch's Lives, and the Comedies from Papa's illustrated Shakespeare in seven volumes, which he never read, and two volumes of Pepys' Diary, and Locke On the Human Understanding. She wished the Bible had been bound in pink calf like Pepys instead of the shiny black leather that made you think of wet goloshes. Then it would have looked new and exciting like the other books.

She sat on a footstool with her box beside her in the corner behind Mamma's chair. She had to hide there because Mamma didn't believe you really liked reading. She thought you were only shamming and showing off. Sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Farmer would come in, and Mr. Farmer would play chess with Papa while Mrs. Farmer talked to Mamma about how troublesome and independent the tradespeople were, and how hard it was to get servants and to keep them. Mamma listened to Mrs. Farmer as if she were saying something wonderful and exciting. Sometimes it would be the Proparts; or Mr. Batty would come in alone. And sometimes they would all come together with the aunts and uncles, and there would be a party.

Mary always hoped that Uncle Victor would notice her and say, "Mary is reading Locke On the Human Understanding," or that Mr. Propart would come and turn over the books and make some interesting remark. But they never did.

At half-past eight Catty would bring in the tea-tray; the white and grey and gold tea-cups would be set out round the bulging silver tea-pot that lifted up its spout with a foolish, pompous expression, like a hen. Mamma would move about the table in her mauve silk gown, and there would be a scent of cream and strong tea. Every now and then the shimmering silk and the rich scent would come between her and the grey, tight-pressed, difficult page.

"'The senses at first let in particular ideas and furnish the yet empty cabinet: and the mind growing by degrees familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory and names got to them.'

"Then how—Then how?—"

The thought she thought was coming wouldn't come, and Mamma was telling her to get up and hand round the bread and butter.

II.

"Mr. Ponsonby, do you remember your innate ideas?"

"My how much?" said Mr. Ponsonby.

"The ideas you had before you were born?"

Mr. Ponsonby said, "Before I was born? Well—" He really seemed to be considering it.

Mamma's chair, pushed further along the hearthrug, had driven her back and back, till the box was hidden behind the curtain.

Mr. Ponsonby was Mark's friend. Mark was at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich now. Every Saturday Mr. Ponsonby came home with Mark and stayed till Sunday evening. You knew that sooner or later he would find you out behind Mamma's chair.

"I mean," she said, "the ideas you were born with."

"Seems to me," said Mr. Ponsonby, "I was born with precious few. Anyhow I can't say I remember them."

"I was afraid you'd say that. It's what Mr. Locke says."

"Mr. how much?"

"Mr. Locke. You can look at him if you like."

She thought: "He won't. He won't. They never, never do."

But Mr. Ponsonby did. He looked at Mr. Locke, and he looked at Mary, and he said, "By Gum!" He even read the bits about the baby and the empty cabinet.

"You don't mean to say you like this sort of thing?"

"I like it most awfully. Of course I don't mean as much as brook-jumping, but almost as much."

And Mr. Ponsonby said, "Well—I must say—of all—you are—by Gum!"

He made it sound like the most delicious praise.

Mr. Ponsonby was taller and older than Mark. He was nineteen. She thought he was the nicest looking person she had ever seen.

His face was the colour of thick white honey; his hair was very dark, and he had long blue eyes and long black eyebrows like bars, drawn close down on to the blue. His nose would have been hooky if it hadn't been so straight, and his mouth was quiet and serious. When he talked to you his mouth and eyes looked as if they liked it.

Mark came and said, "Minky, if you stodge like that you'll get all flabby."

It wasn't nice of Mark to say that before Mr. Ponsonby, when he knew perfectly well that she could jump her own height.

"Me flabby? Feel my muscle."

It rose up hard under her soft skin.

"Feel it, Mr. Ponsonby."

"I say—what a biceps!"

"Yes, but," Mark said, "you should feel his."

His was even bigger and harder than Mark's. "Mine," she said sorrowfully, "will never be as good as his."

Then Mamma came and told her it was bed-time, and Mr. Ponsonby said, "Oh, Mrs. Olivier, not yet."

"Five minutes more, then."

But the five minutes were never any good. You just sat counting them.

And when it was all over and Mr. Ponsonby strode across the drawing-room and opened the door for her she went laughing; she stood in the doorway and laughed. When you were sent to bed at nine the only dignified thing was to pretend you didn't care.

And Mr. Ponsonby, holding the door so that Mamma couldn't see him, looked at her and shook his head, as much as to say, "You and I know it isn't a joke for either of us, this unrighteous banishment."

III.

"What on earth are you doing?"

She might have known that some day Mamma would come up and find her putting the children to bed.

She had seven. There was Isabel Batty, and Mrs. Farmer's red-haired baby, and Mark in the blue frock in the picture when he was four, and Dank in his white frock and blue sash, and the three very little babies you made up out of your head. Six o'clock was their bed-time.

"You'd no business to touch those baby-clothes," Mamma said.

The baby-clothes were real. Every evening she took them from the drawer in the linen cupboard; and when she had sung the children to sleep she shook out the little frocks and petticoats and folded them in a neat pile at the foot of the bed.

"I thought you were in the schoolroom learning your lessons?"

"So I was, Mamma. But—you know—six o'clock is their bed-time."

"Oh Mary! you told me you'd given up that silly game."

"So I did. But they won't let me. They don't want me to give them up."

Mamma sat down, as if it was too much for her.

"I hope," she said, "you don't talk to Catty or anybody about it."

"No, Mamma. I couldn't. They're my secret."

"That was all very well when you were a little thing. But a great girl of twelve—You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

Mamma had gone. She had taken away the baby-clothes. Mary lay face downwards on her bed.

Shame burned through her body like fire. Hot tears scalded her eyelids. She thought: "How was I to know you mustn't have babies?" Still, she couldn't give them all up. She must keep Isabel and the red-haired baby.

But what would Mr. Ponsonby think of her if he knew?

IV.

"Mr. Ponsonby. Mr. Ponsonby! Stay where you are and look!"

From the window at the end of the top corridor the side of the house went sheer down into the lane. Mary was at the window. Mr. Ponsonby was in the lane.

She climbed on to the ledge and knelt there. Grasping the bottom of the window frame firmly with both hands and letting her knees slide from the ledge, she lowered herself, and hung for one ecstatic moment, and drew herself up again by her arms.

"What did you do it for, Mary?"

Mr. Ponsonby had rushed up the stairs and they were sitting there. He was so tall that he hung over her when he leaned.

"It's nothing. You ought to be able to pull up your own weight."

"You mustn't do it from top-storey windows. It's dangerous."

"Not if you've practised on the banisters first. Where's Mark?"

"With your Mater. I say, supposing you and I go for a walk."

"We must be back at six o'clock," she said.

When you went for walks with Mark or Mr. Ponsonby they always raced you down Ley Street and over the ford at the bottom. They both gave you the same start to the Horn's Tavern; the only difference was that with Mr. Ponsonby you were over the ford first.

They turned at the ford into the field path that led to Drake's Farm and the plantation. He jumped all the stiles and she vaulted them. She could see that he respected her. And so they came to the big water jump into the plantation. Mr. Ponsonby went over first and held out his arms. She hurled herself forward and he caught her. And this time, instead of putting her down instantly, he lifted her up in his arms and held her tight and kissed her. Her heart thumped violently and she had a sudden happy feeling. Neither spoke.

Humphrey Propart had kissed her once for a forfeit. And she had boxed his ears. Mr. Ponsonby's was a different sort of kiss.

They tore through the plantation as if nothing had happened, clearing all the brooks in a business-like way. Mr. Ponsonby took brook-jumping as the serious and delightful thing it was.

Going home across the fields they held each other's hands, like children. "Minky," he said, "I don't like to think of you hanging out of top-storey windows."

"But it's so jolly to feel your body come squirming up after your arms."

"It is. It is. All the same, promise me you won't do it any more."

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to India when I've passed out, and I want to find you alive when I come back. Promise me, Minky."

"I will, if you're really going. But you're the only person I allow to call me Minky, except Mark."

"Am I? I'm glad I'm the only person."

They went on.

"I'm afraid," she said, "my hand is getting very hot and horrid."

He held it tighter. "I don't care how hot and horrid it gets. And I think you might call me Jimmy."

It was long after six o'clock. She had forgotten the children and their bed-time. After that day she never played with them again.

V.

"If I were you," Mamma said, "I should put away that box of books. You'll be no use if you read—read—read all day long."

"You oughtn't to say that, Mamma. I am of use. You know I can make the sewing-machine go when you can't."

Mamma smiled. She knew it.

"And which would you rather took you over the crossing at the Bank? Me or Papa?"

Mamma smiled again. She knew she was safer with Mary at a crossing, because Papa teased her and frightened her before he dragged her over. But Mary led her gently, holding back the noses of the horses.

"There's that Locke on the human understanding," said Mamma. "Poor Jimmy was frightened when he found you reading it."

"He wasn't. He was most awfully pleased and excited."

"He was laughing at you."

"He wasn't. He wasn't."

"Of course he was laughing at you. What did you think he was doing?"

"I thought he was interested."

"He wasn't, then. Men," Mamma said, "are not interested in little book-worms. He told me it was very bad for you."

Shame again. Hot, burning and scalding shame. He was only laughing at her.

"Mark doesn't laugh at me," she said. The thought of Mark and of his love for her healed her wound.

"A precious deal," Mamma said, "you know about Mark."

Mamma was safe. Oh, she was safe. She knew that Mark loved her best.

VI.

On the cover of Pinnock's Catechism there was a small black picture of the Parthenon. And under it was written:

"Abode of gods whose shrines no longer burn."

Supposing the candles in St. Mary's Chapel no longer burned?

Supposing Barkingside church and Aldborough Hatch church fell to bits and there were no more clergymen? And you only read in history books about people like Mr. Batty and Mr. Propart and their surplices and the things they wore round their necks?

Supposing the Christian religion passed away?

It excited you to think these things. But when you heard the "Magnificat" in church, or when you thought of Christ hanging so bravely on the cross you were sorry and you stopped thinking.

What a pity you couldn't ever go on without having to stop.

END OF BOOK TWO



BOOK THREE ADOLESCENCE (1876-1879)

XII

I.

Mary went slowly up the lane between the garden wall and the thorn hedge.

The air, streaming towards her from the flat fields, had the tang of cold, glittering water; the sweet, grassy smell of the green corn blades swam on it. The young thorn leaves smelt of almonds and of their own bitter green.

The five trees stood up, thin and black, in an archway of golden white fire. The green of their young leaves hung about them like an emanation.

A skylark swung himself up, a small grey ball, spinning over the tree tops to the arch of the sunset. His song pierced and shook, like the golden white light. With each throb of his wings he shrank, smaller and greyer, a moth, a midge, whirling in the luminous air. A grey ball dropped spinning down.

By the gate of the field her sudden, secret happiness came to her.

She could never tell when it was coming, nor what it would come from. It had something to do with the trees standing up in the golden white light. It had come before with a certain sharp white light flooding the fields, flooding the room.

It had happened so often that she received it now with a shock of recognition; and when it was over she wanted it to happen again. She would go back and back to the places where it had come, looking for it, thinking that any minute it might happen again. But it never came twice to the same place in the same way.

Catty was calling to her from the bottom of the lane. She stood still by the gate, not heeding Catty, holding her happiness. When she had turned from the quiet fields it would be gone.

II.

Sometimes she had queer glimpses of the persons that were called Mary Olivier. There was Mrs. Olivier's only daughter, proud of her power over the sewing-machine. When she brought the pile of hemmed sheets to her mother her heart swelled with joy in her own goodness. There was Mark Olivier's sister, who rejoiced in the movements of her body, the strain of the taut muscles throbbing on their own leash, the bound forwards, the push of the wind on her knees and breast, the hard feel of the ground under her padding feet. And there was Mary Olivier, the little girl of thirteen whom her mother and Aunt Bella whispered about to each other with mysterious references to her age.

Her secret happiness had nothing to do with any of these Mary Oliviers. It was not like any other happiness. It had nothing to do with Mamma or Dan or Roddy, or even Mark. It had nothing to do with Jimmy.

She had cried when Jimmy went away, and she would cry again to-night when she thought about him. Jimmy's going away was worse than anything that had happened yet or could happen till Mark went to India. That would be the worst thing.

Jimmy had not gone to India as he had said. He had had to leave Woolwich because of something he had done, and his father had sent him to Australia. He had gone without saying good-bye, and he was never coming back. She would never in all her life see Jimmy again.

Jimmy had done something dreadful.

Nobody but Mamma and Papa and Mark knew what he had done; but from the way they talked you could see that it was one of those things you mustn't talk about. Only Mark said he didn't believe he really had done it.

Last Sunday she had written a letter to him which Mark posted:

"Dear Jimmy,—I think you might have come to say good-bye to us, even if Papa and Mamma do think you've done something you oughtn't to. I want you to know that Mark and I don't believe you did it, and even if you did it won't make any difference. I shall always love you just the same, next best to Mark. You can't expect me to love you really best, because he will always come first as long as I live. I hope you will be very happy in Australia. I shall keep my promise just the same, though it's Australia and not India you've gone to.

"With love, ever your loving

"Minky.

"P.S. No. 1.—I'm reading a new poet—Byron. There was a silly woman who said she'd rather have the fame of Childe Harold than the immortality of Don Juan. But I'd rather have the immortality, wouldn't you?

"P.S. No. 2.—Do you think that you will keep Kangaroos? They might help to make you happy."

III.

Mary was picking French beans in the kitchen garden when Mamma and Aunt Bella came along the path, talking together. The thick green walls of the runners hid her.

"Mary is getting very precocious," said Mamma.

"That comes from being brought up with boys," said Aunt Bella. "She ought to see more girls of her own age."

"She doesn't like them."

Mary shouted "Cuckoo!" to warn them, but they wouldn't stop.

"It's high time," Aunt Bella said, "that she should learn to like them. The Draper girls are too old. But there's that little Bertha Mitchison."

"I haven't called on Mrs. Mitchison for two years."

"And why haven't you, Caroline?"

"Because I can't afford to be always hiring wagonettes to go to Woodford Bridge."

"Cuckoo!"

"Caroline—do you think she could have heard?"

"Cuckoo, Aunt Bella! Cuckoo!"

IV.

On the high road the white dust had a clear, sharp, exciting smell. At the wet edges of the ford it thickened.

When you shut your eyes you could still see Bertha's scarlet frock on the white bridge path and smell the wet earth at the edges of the ford.

You were leaning over the white painted railing of the bridge when she began. The water flowed from under the little tunnel across the road into the field beyond. Deep brown under the tunnel, tawny in the shallow ford, golden patches where the pebbles showed through, and the water itself, a sheet of thin crystal, running over the colours, sliding through them, running and sliding on and on.

There was nothing in the world so beautiful as water, unless it was light. But water was another sort of light.

Bertha pushed her soft sallow face into yours. Her big black eyes bulged out under her square fringe. Her wide red mouth curled and glistened. There were yellowish stains about the roots of her black hair. Her mouth and eyes teased you, mocked you, wouldn't let you alone.

Bertha began: "I know something you don't know."

You listened. You couldn't help listening. You simply had to know. It was no use to say you didn't believe a word of it. Inside you, secretly, you knew it was true. You were frightened. You trembled and went hot and cold by turns, and somehow that was how you knew it was true; almost as if you had known all the time.

"Oh, shut up! I don't want to hear about it."

"Oh, don't you? You did a minute ago."

"Of course I did, when I didn't know. Who wouldn't? I don't want to know any more."

"I like that. After I've told you everything. What's the good of putting your fingers in your ears now?"

There was that day; and there was the next day when she was sick of Bertha. On the third day Bertha went back to Woodford Bridge.

V.

It was dreadful and at the same time funny when you thought of Mr. Batty and Mr. Propart with their little round hats and their black coats and their stiff, dignified faces. And there was Uncle Edward and his whiskers. It couldn't be true.

Yet all true things came like that, with a queer feeling, as if you remembered them.

Jenny's wedding dress. It would be true even of Jenny. Mamma had said she would rather see her in her coffin than married to Mr. Spall. That was why.

But—if it was true of everybody it would be true of Mamma and Papa. That was what you hated knowing. If only you had gone on looking at the water instead of listening to Bertha—

Mamma's face, solemn and tender, when you said your prayers, playing with the gold tassel of her watch-chain. Papa's face, on your birthday, when he gave you the toy lamb. She wouldn't like you to know about her. Mark wouldn't like it.

Mark: her mind stood still. Mark's image stood still in clean empty space. When she thought of her mother and Mark she hated Bertha.

And there was Jimmy. That was why they wouldn't talk about him.

Jimmy. The big water-jump into the plantation. Jimmy's arms, the throb of the hard muscles as he held you. Jimmy's hand, your own hand lying in it, light and small. Jimmy's eyes, looking at you and smiling, as if they said, "It's all right, Minky, it's all right."

Perhaps when Papa was young Mamma thought about him as you thought about Jimmy; so that it couldn't be so very dreadful, after all.



XIII

I.

Mary was glad when Bertha went away to school. When the new year came and she was fourteen she had almost forgotten Bertha. She even forgot for long stretches of time what Bertha had told her. But not altogether.

Because, if it was true, then the story of the Virgin Mary was not true. Jesus couldn't have been born in the way the New Testament said he was born. There was no such thing as the Immaculate Conception. You could hardly be expected to believe in it once you knew why it couldn't have happened.

And if the Bible could deceive you about an important thing like that, it could deceive you about the Incarnation and the Atonement. You were no longer obliged to believe in that ugly business of a cruel, bungling God appeased with bloodshed. You were not obliged to believe anything just because it was in the Bible.

But—if you didn't, you were an Infidel.

She could hear Aunt Bella talking to Uncle Edward, and Mrs. Farmer and Mrs. Propart whispering: "Mary is an Infidel."

She thought: "If I am I can't help it." She was even slightly elated, as if she had set out on some happy, dangerous adventure.

II.

Nobody seemed to know what Pantheism was. Mr. Propart smiled when you asked him and said it was something you had better not meddle with. Mr. Farmer said it was only another word for atheism; you might as well have no God at all as be a pantheist. But if "pan" meant "all things," and "theos" was God—

Perhaps it would be in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Encyclopaedia told you all about Australia. There was even a good long bit about Byron, too.

Panceput—Panegyric—Pantheism! There you were. Pantheism is "that speculative system which by absolutely identifying the Subject and Object of thought, reduces all existence, mental and material, to phenomenal modifications of one eternal, self-existent Substance which is called by the name of God.... All things are God."

When you had read the first sentence five or six times over and looked up "Subject" and "Object" and "Phenomenal," you could see fairly well what it meant. Whatever else God might be, he was not what they said, something separate and outside things, something that made your mind uncomfortable when you tried to think about it.

"This universe, material and mental, is nothing but the spectacle of the thoughts of God."

You might have known it would be like that. The universe, going on inside God, as your thoughts go on inside you; the universe, so close to God that nothing could be closer. The meaning got plainer and plainer.

There was Spinoza. ("Spinning—Spinoza.") The Encyclopaedia man said that the Jewish priests offered him a bribe of two thousand florins to take back what he had said about God; and when he refused to take back a word of it, they cursed him and drove him out of their synagogue.

Spinoza said, "There is no substance but God, nor can any other be conceived." And the Encyclopaedia man explained it. "God, as the infinite substance, with its infinity of attributes is the natura naturans. As the infinity of modes under which his attributes are manifested, he is the natura naturata."

Nature naturing would be the cause, and Nature natured would be the effect. God was both.

"God is the immanent"—indwelling—"but not the transient cause of all things" ... "Thought and Extension are attributes of the one absolute substance which is God, evolving themselves in two parallel streams, so to speak, of which each separate body and spirit are but the waves. Body and Soul are apparently two, but really one and they have no independent existence: They are parts of God.... Were our knowledge of God capable of present completeness we might attain to perfect happiness but such is not possible. Out of the infinity of his attributes only two, Thought and Extension, are accessible to us while the modes of these attributes, being essentially infinite, escape our grasp."

So this was the truth about God. In spite of the queer words it was very simple. Much simpler than the Trinity. God was not three incomprehensible Persons rolled into one, not Jesus, not Jehovah, not the Father creating the world in six days out of nothing, and muddling it, and coming down from heaven into it as his own son to make the best of a bad job. He was what you had felt and thought him to be as soon as you could think about him at all. The God of Baruch Spinoza was the God you had wanted, the only sort of God you cared to think about. Thinking about him—after the Christian God—was like coming out of a small dark room into an immense open space filled with happy light.

And yet, as far back as you could remember, there had been a regular conspiracy to keep you from knowing the truth about God. Even the Encyclopaedia man was in it. He tried to put you off Pantheism. He got into a temper about it and said it was monstrous and pernicious and profoundly false and that the heart of man rose up in revolt against it. He had begun by talking about "attempts to transgress the fixed boundaries which One wiser than we has assigned to our intellectual operations." Perhaps he was a clergyman. Clergymen always put you off like that; so that you couldn't help suspecting that they didn't really know and were afraid you would find them out. They were like poor little frightened Mamma when she wouldn't let you look at the interesting bits beyond the place she had marked in your French Reader. And they were always apologising for their God, as if they felt that there was something wrong with him and that he was not quite real.

But to the pantheists the real God was so intensely real that, compared with him, being alive was not quite real, it was more like dreaming.

Another thing: the pantheists—the Hindu ones and the Greeks, and Baruch Spinoza—were heathen, and the Christians had tried to make you believe that the heathen went to hell because they didn't know the truth about God. You had been told one lie on the top of another. And all the time the truth was there, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Who would have thought that the Encyclopaedia could have been so exciting?

The big puce-coloured books stood in a long row in the bottom shelf behind her father's chair. Her heart thumped when she gripped the volumes that contained the forbidden knowledge of the universe. The rough morocco covers went Rr-rr-rimp, as they scraped together; and there was the sharp thud as they fell back into their place when she had done with them. These sounds thrilled her with a secret joy. When she was away from the books she liked to think of them standing there on the hidden shelf, waiting for her. The pages of "Pantheism" and "Spinoza" were white and clean, and she had noticed how they had stuck together. Nobody had opened them. She was the first, the only one who knew and cared.

III.

She wondered what Mark and her mother would say when they knew. Perhaps Mark would say she ought not to tell her mother if it meant letting out that the Bible said things that were not really true. His idea might be that if Mamma wanted to believe in Jehovah and the Atonement through Christ's blood, it would be unkind to try and stop her. But who on earth would want to believe that dreadful sort of thing if they could help it? Papa might not mind, because as long as he knew that he and Mamma would get into heaven all right he wouldn't worry so much about other people. But Mamma was always worrying about them and making you give up things to them; and she must be miserable when she thought of them burning in hell for ever and ever, and when she tried to reconcile God's justice with his mercy. To say nothing of the intellectual discomfort she was living in. When you had found out the real, happy truth about God, it didn't seem right to keep it to yourself.

She decided that she would tell her mother.

Mark was in the Royal Field Artillery now. He was away at Shoeburyness. If she put it off till he came home again she might never do it. When Mamma had Mark with her she would never listen to anything you had to say.

Next Sunday was Epiphany. Sunday afternoon would be a good time.

But Aunt Lavvy came to stay from Saturday to Monday. And it rained. All morning Mamma and Aunt Lavvy sat in the dining-room, one on each side of the fireplace. Aunt Lavvy read James Martineau's Endeavours After the Christian Life, and Mamma read "The Pulpit in the Family" out of the Sunday At Home. Somehow you couldn't do it with Aunt Lavvy in the room.

In the afternoon when she went upstairs to lie down—perhaps.

But in the afternoon Mamma dozed over the Sunday At Home. She was so innocent and pretty, nodding her head, and starting up suddenly, and looking round with a smile that betrayed her real opinion of Sunday. You couldn't do it while she dozed.

Towards evening it rained again and Aunt Lavvy went off to Ilford for the Evening Service, by herself. Everybody else stayed at home, and there was hymn-singing instead of church. Mary and her mother were alone together. When her mother had sung the last hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light," then she would do it.

Her mother was singing:

"'Jesu, Lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom fly, While the nearer wa-a-ters roll, While the tempest still is high'"—

She could see the stiff, slender muscles straining in her mother's neck. The weak, plaintive voice tore at her heart. She knew that her mother's voice was weak and plaintive. Its thin, sweet notes unnerved her.

"'Other refuge ha-ave I none: Hangs my helpless soul on Thee'"—

Helpless—Helpless. Mamma was helpless. It was only her love of Mark and Jesus that was strong. Something would happen if she told her—something awful. She could feel already the chill of an intolerable separation. She could give up Jesus, the lover of her soul, but she could not give up her mother. She couldn't live separated from Mamma, from the weak, plaintive voice that tore at her.

She couldn't do it.

IV.

Catty's eyes twinkled through the banisters. She caught Mary coming downstairs and whispered that there was cold boiled chicken and trifle for supper, because of Aunt Lavvy.

Through the door Mary could see her father standing at the table, and the calm breasts of the cold chicken smoothed with white sauce and decorated with beetroot stars.

There was a book beside Papa's plate, the book Aunt Lavvy had been reading. She had left it open on the drawing-room table when she went to church. She was late for supper and they sat there waiting for her. She came in, slowly as usual, and looking at the supper things as though they were not there. When she caught sight of the book something went up and flickered in her eyes—a sort of triumph.

You couldn't help thinking that she had left it lying about on purpose, so that Papa should see it.

He stood waiting till she had sat down. He handed the book to her. His eyes gleamed.

"When you come here," he said, "you will be good enough to leave James Martineau behind you."

Mamma looked up, startled. "You don't mean to say you've brought that man's books into the house?"

"You can see for yourself, Caroline," said Aunt Lavvy.

"I don't want to see. No, Mary, it has nothing to do with you."

Mamma was smiling nervously. You would have supposed that she thought James Martineau funny, but the least bit improper.

"But look, Mamma, it's his Endeavours After the Christian Life."

Her mother took up the book and put it down as if it had bitten her.

"Christian Life, indeed! What right has James Martineau to call himself a Christian? When he denies Christ—the Lord who bought him! And makes no secret of it. How can you respect an infidel who uses Christ's name to cover up his blasphemy?"

Aunt Lavvy was smiling now.

"I thought you said he made no secret of it?"

Mamma said, "You know very well what I mean."

"If you knew Dr. Martineau—"

"You've no business to know him," Emilius said, "when your brother Victor and I disapprove of him."

Emilius was carving chicken. He had an air of kindly, luscious hospitality, hesitating between the two flawless breasts.

"Dr. Martineau is the wisest and holiest man I ever knew," said Aunt Lavvy.

"I daresay your sister Charlotte thinks Mr. Marriott the wisest and the holiest man she ever knew."

He settled the larger breast on Aunt Lavvy's plate and laid on it one perfect star of beetroot. He could do that while he insulted her.

"Oh—Papa—you are a br—"

Aunt Lavvy shook her gentle head.

"Lavinia dear" (Mamma's voice was gentle), "did you have a nice service?"

"Very nice, thank you."

"Did you go to Saint Mary's, or the Parish church?"

Aunt Lavvy's straight, flat chin trembled slightly. Her pale eyes lightened. "I went to neither."

"Then—-where did you go?"

"If you insist on knowing, Caroline, I went to Mr. Robson's church."

"You went to Mr.—to the Unitarian Chapel?"

"To the Unitarian Chapel."

"Emilius—" You would have thought that Aunt Lavvy had hit Mamma and hurt her.

Emilius took up his table napkin and wiped his moustache carefully. He was quite horribly calm.

"You will oblige me by not going there again," he said.

"You forget that I went every Sunday when we were in Liverpool."

"You forget that is the reason why you left Liverpool."

"Only one of the reasons, I think."

"Can you tell me what reason you have for going now? Beyond your desire to make yourself different from other people."

"Aren't Unitarians other people?"

She poured out a glass of water and drank. She was giving herself time.

"My reason," she said, "is that I have joined the Unitarian Church."

Mamma put down her knife and fork. Her lips opened and her face turned suddenly sharp and sallow as if she were going to faint.

"You don't mean to say you've gone over? Then God help poor Charlotte!"

Emilius steadied himself to speak. "Does Victor know?" he said.

"Yes. He knows."

"You have consulted him, and you have not consulted me?"

"You made me promise not to talk about it. I have kept my promise."

Mary was sure then that Aunt Lavvy had left the book open on purpose. She had laid a trap for Emilius, and he had fallen into it.

"If you will hold infamous opinions you must be made to keep them to yourself."

"I have a perfect right to my opinions."

"You have no right to make an open profession of them."

"The law is more tolerant than you, Emilius."

"There is a moral law and a law of honour. You are not living by yourself. As long as you are in Victor's house the least you can do is to avoid giving offence. Have you no consideration for your family? You say you came here to be near us. Have you thought of us? Have you thought of the children? Do you expect Caroline to go to Victor's house if she's to meet the Unitarian minister and his wife?"

"You will be cutting yourself off completely, Lavinia," Mamma said.

"From what?"

"From everybody. People don't call on Nonconformists. If there were no higher grounds—"

"Oh—Caroline—" Aunt Lavvy breathed it on a long sigh.

"It's all very well for you. But you might think of your sister Charlotte," Mamma said.

Papa's beard jerked. He drew in his breath with a savage guttural noise. "A-ach! What's the good of talking?"

He had gone on eating all the time. There was a great pile of chicken bones on his plate.

Aunt Lavvy turned. "Emilius—for thirty-three years"—her voice broke as she quivered under her loaded anguish—"for thirty-three years you've shouted me down. You haven't let me call my soul my own. Yet it is my own—"

"There, please—please," Mamma said, "don't let us have any more of it," just as Aunt Lavvy was beginning to get a word in edgeways.

"Mamma, that isn't fair, you must let her speak."

"Yes. You must let me speak." Aunt Lavvy's voice thickened in her throat.

"I won't have any discussion of Unitarianism here," said Papa.

"It's you who have been discussing it, not I."

"It is, really, Papa. First you began. Then Mamma."

Mamma said, "If you've finished your supper, Mary, you can go."

"But I haven't. I've not had any trifle yet."

She thought: "They don't want me to hear them; but I've a right to sit here and eat trifle. They know they can't turn me out. I haven't done anything."

Aunt Lavvy went on. "I've only one thing to say, Emilius. You've asked me to think of Victor and Charlotte, and you and Caroline and the boys and Mary. Have you once—in thirty-three years—for a single minute—thought of me?"

"Certainly I have. It's partly for your own sake I object to your disgracing yourself. As if your sister Charlotte wasn't disgrace enough."

Aunt Lavvy drew herself up stiff and straight in her white shawl like a martyr in her flame. "You might keep Charlotte out of it, I think."

"I might. Charlotte can't help herself. You can."

At this point Mamma burst into tears and left the room.

"Now," he said, "I hope you're satisfied."

Mary answered him.

"I think you ought to be, Papa, if you've been bullying Aunt Lavvy for thirty-three years. Don't you think it's about time you stopped?"

Emilius stared at his daughter. His face flushed slowly. "I think," he said, "it's time you went to bed."

"It isn't my bed-time for another hour yet."

(A low murmur from Aunt Lavvy: "Don't, Mary, don't.")

She went on. "It was you who made Mamma cry, not Aunt Lavvy. It always frightens her when you shout at people. You know Aunt Lavvy's a perfect saint, besides being lots cleverer than anybody in this house, except Mark. You get her by herself when she's tired out with Aunt Charlotte. You insult her religion. You say the beastliest things you can think of—"

Her father pushed back his chair; they rose and looked at each other.

"You wouldn't dare to do it if Mark was here!"

He strode to the door and opened it. His arm made a crescent gesture that cleared space of her.

"Go! Go upstairs. Go to bed!"

"I don't care where I go now I've said it."

Upstairs in her bed she still heard Aunt Lavvy's breaking voice:

"For thirty-three years—for thirty-three years—"

The scene rose again and swam before her and fell to pieces. Ideas—echoes—images. Religion—the truth of God. Her father's voice booming over the table. Aunt Lavvy's voice, breaking—breaking. A pile of stripped chicken bones on her father's plate.

V.

Aunt Lavvy was getting ready to go away. She held up her night gown to her chin, smoothing and folding back the sleeves. You thought of her going to bed in the ugly, yellow, flannel night gown, not caring, lying in bed and thinking about God.

Mary was sorry that Aunt Lavvy was going. As long as she was there you felt that if only she would talk everything would at once become more interesting. She thrilled you with that look of having something— something that she wouldn't talk about—up her sleeve. The Encyclopaedia man said that Unitarianism was a kind of Pantheism. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps she knew the truth about God. Aunt Lavvy would know whether she ought to tell her mother.

"Aunt Lavvy, if you loved somebody and you found out that their religion wasn't true, would you tell them or wouldn't you?"

"It would depend on whether they were happy in their religion or not."

"Supposing you'd found out one that was more true and much more beautiful, and you thought it would make them happier?"

Aunt Lavvy raised her long, stubborn chin. In her face there was a cold exaltation and a sudden hardness.

"No religion was ever more true or more beautiful than Christianity," she said.

"There's Pantheism. Aren't Unitarians a kind of Pantheists?"

Aunt Lavvy's white face flushed. "Unitarians Pantheists? Who's been talking to you about Pantheism?"

"Nobody. Nobody knows about it. I had to find out."

"The less you find out about it the better."

"Aunt Lavvy, you're talking like Mr. Propart. Supposing I honestly think Pantheism's true?"

"You've no right to think anything about it," Aunt Lavvy said.

"Now you're talking like Papa. And I did so hope you wouldn't."

"I only meant that it takes more time than you've lived to find out what honest thinking is. When you're twenty years older you'll know what this opinion of yours is worth."

"I know what it's worth to me, now, this minute."

"Is it worth making your mother miserable?"

"That's what Mark would say. How did you know I was thinking of Mamma?"

"Because that's what my brother Victor said to me."

VI.

The queer thing was that none of them seemed to think the truth could possibly matter on its own account, or that anything mattered besides being happy or miserable. Yet everybody, except Aunt Lavvy, was determined that everybody else should be happy in their way by believing what they believed; and when it came to Pantheism even Aunt Lavvy couldn't live and let live. You could see that deep down inside her it made her more furious than Unitarianism made Papa.

Mary saw that she was likely to be alone in her adventure. It appeared to her more than ever as a journey into a beautiful, quiet yet exciting country where you could go on and on. The mere pleasure of being able to move enchanted her. But nobody would go with her. Nobody knew. Nobody cared.

There was Spinoza; but Spinoza had been dead for ages. Now she came to think of it she had never heard anybody, not even Mr. Propart, speak of Spinoza. It would be worse for her than it had ever been for Aunt Lavvy who had actually known Dr. Martineau. Dr. Martineau was not dead; and if he had been there were still lots of Unitarian ministers alive all over England. And in the end Aunt Lavvy had broken loose and gone into her Unitarian Chapel.

She thought: "Not till after Grandmamma was dead. Till years after Grandmamma was dead."

She thought: "Of course I'd die rather than tell Mamma."

VII.

Aunt Lavvy had gone. Mr. Parish had taken her away in his wagonette.

At lessons Mamma complained that you were not attending. But she was not attending herself, and when sewing time came she showed what she had been thinking about.

"What were you doing in Aunt Lavvy's room this morning?"

She looked up sharply over the socks piled before her for darning.

"Only talking."

"Was Aunt Lavvy talking to you about her opinions?"

"No, Mamma."

"Has she ever talked to you?"

"Of course not. She wouldn't if she promised not to. I don't know even now what Unitarianism is.... What do Unitarians believe in?"

"Goodness knows," her mother said. "Nothing that's any good to them, you may be sure."

Mary went on darning. The coarse wool of the socks irritated her fingers. It caught in a split nail, setting her teeth on edge.

If you went on darning for ever—if you went on darning—Mamma would be pleased. She had not suspected anything.

VIII.

"'Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.'"

Between the lovely lines she could hear Mamma say, "They all scamp their work. You would require a resident carpenter and a resident glazier—"