e feeling
that those two blue discs were immense, were overwhelming, were like
a wall of blue that shut me off from the rest of the world. I know it
sounds absurd; but that is what it did feel like.

"Don't you see," she said, with a really horrible bitterness, with a
really horrible lamentation in her voice, "Don't you see that that's the
cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world?
And of the eternal damnation of you and me and them... ."

I don't remember how she went on; I was too frightened; I was too
amazed. I think I was thinking of running to fetch assistance--a doctor,
perhaps, or Captain Ashburnham. Or possibly she needed Florence's tender
care, though, of course, it would have been very bad for Florence's
heart. But I know that when I came out of it she was saying: "Oh,
where are all the bright, happy, innocent beings in the world? Where's
happiness? One reads of it in books!"

She ran her hand with a singular clawing motion upwards over her
forehead. Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was exactly that
of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors there. And
then suddenly she stopped. She was, most amazingly, just Mrs Ashburnham
again. Her face was perfectly clear, sharp and defined; her hair was
glorious in its golden coils. Her nostrils twitched with a sort of
contempt. She appeared to look with interest at a gypsy caravan that was
coming over a little bridge far below us.

"Don't you know," she said, in her clear hard voice, "don't you know
that I'm an Irish Catholic?"

V THOSE words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had in my
life. They told me, I think, almost more than I have ever gathered at
any one moment--about myself. I don't think that before that day I had
ever wanted anything very much except Florence. I have, of course, had
appetites, impatiences... Why, sometimes at a table d'hote, when there
would be, say, caviare handed round, I have been absolutely full of
impatience for fear that when the dish came to me there should not be
a satisfying portion left over by the other guests. I have been
exceedingly impatient at missing trains. The Belgian State Railway has
a trick of letting the French trains miss their connections at Brussels.
That has always infuriated me. I have written about it letters to The
Times that The Times never printed; those that I wrote to the Paris
edition of the New York Herald were always printed, but they ne