mmered away on something soft and yielding and yet
unbreakable, like putty. I felt sick at having been so hard, and sick too
that she was so soft. Sick of words, and phrases, and facile emotions,
and situations, and insincerities, and Potterisms--and yet with an odd
tide of hope surging through the sickness, because of human nature, which
is so mixed that natural cowards will sometimes take a steep and hard way
where they might take an easy one, and because we all, in the middle of
our egotism and vanity and self-seeking, are often sorry for what we have
done. Really sorry, beneath all the cheap penitence which leads nowhere.
So sorry that we sometimes cannot bear it any more, and will break up our
own lives to make amends....

And if, at the same time, we watch our sorrow and our amends, and see it
as drama and as interesting--well, after all, it is drama and it is
interesting, so why not? We can't all be clear and steely
unsentimentalists like Katherine Varick.

One has to learn to bear sentimentalism. In parishes (which are the
world) one has to endure it, accept it. It is part of the general
muddle and mess.

6

I got a _Daily Haste_ next morning early, together with the _Pink
Pictorial_, the illustrated Pinkerton daily. I looked through them
quickly. There was no reference to the Hobart Mystery. I was relieved.
Clare Potter had kept her word, then--or anyhow had said enough to clear
Gideon (I wasn't going further than that about her; I had done my utmost
to make her do the straight thing in the straight way, and must leave the
rest to her), and the Pinkertons were withdrawing. They would have,
later, to withdraw more definitely than by mere abstaining from further
accusation (I intended to see to that, if no one else did), but this was
a beginning. It was, no doubt, all that Pinkerton had been able to
arrange last night over the telephone.

It would have interested me to have been present at that interview
between Clare and her parents. I should like to have seen Pinkerton
provided by his innocent little daughter with the sensation of his life,
and Leila Yorke, the author of _Falsely Accused_ forced to realise her
own abominable mischief-making; forced also to realise that her messages
from the other side had been as lacking in accuracy as, unfortunately,
messages from this side, too, so often are. I hoped the affair Hobart
would be a lesson to both Pinkertons. But, like most of the lessons set
before us in