te; then about Edward, who
has fallen behind. And then the girl gets hopelessly left behind. I wish
I could put it down in diary form. Thus: On the 1st of September they
returned from Nauheim. Leonora at once took to her bed. By the 1st
of October they were all going to meets together. Nancy had already
observed very fully that Edward was strange in his manner. About the 6th
of that month Edward gave the horse to young Selmes, and Nancy had cause
to believe that her aunt did not love her uncle. On the 20th she read
the account of the divorce case, which is reported in the papers of the
18th and the two following days. On the 23rd she had the conversation
with her aunt in the hall--about marriage in general and about her own
possible marriage, her aunt's coming to her bedroom did not occur until
the 12th of November....

Thus she had three weeks for introspection--for introspection beneath
gloomy skies, in that old house, rendered darker by the fact that it lay
in a hollow crowned by fir trees with their black shadows. It was not
a good situation for a girl. She began thinking about love, she who had
never before considered it as anything other than a rather humorous,
rather nonsensical matter. She remembered chance passages in chance
books--things that had not really affected her at all at the time. She
remembered someone's love for the Princess Badrulbadour; she remembered
to have heard that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering up of the
vitals--though she did not know what the vitals were. She had a vague
recollection that love was said to render a hopeless lover's eyes
hopeless; she remembered a character in a book who was said to have
taken to drink through love; she remembered that lovers' existences
were said to be punctuated with heavy sighs. Once she went to the little
cottage piano that was in the corner of the hall and began to play. It
was a tinkly, reedy instrument, for none of that household had any turn
for music. Nancy herself could play a few simple songs, and she found
herself playing. She had been sitting on the window seat, looking out on
the fading day. Leonora had gone to pay some calls; Edward was looking
after some planting up in the new spinney. Thus she found herself
playing on the old piano. She did not know how she came to be doing it.
A silly lilting wavering tune came from before her in the dusk--a tune
in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and melted
into minor soun