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particularly at the beginning of the year, when their income figured before their ever-sanguine eyes, untouched, infinite and inexhaustible in its possibilities. For they had a little besides professional earnings; only it happened somehow that they spent always rather more than they had, superfluities being so essential to their existence. Lent, of course, came in opportunely, just when the first riotous flush of the year was subsiding; in Lent one could not live in luxury and go to theatres, even if one could afford it. The iron hand of necessity clasped the more pliable fingers of duty, forcing them to an unrelaxing hold. The Crevequers' confessor would, no doubt, have approved of youth thus constrained. But, with all its inconveniences, life was a charmingly entertaining game. In the faces of the children asleep, there was, besides sheer weariness, a youthfulness almost ridiculous. They might have been fourteen and fifteen. They were always young--very young--but when they slept they were as two twin babes. Their youth, their childhood, seemed somehow to obscure an aspect of them; there might have been also in it, to the sentimentalist, a touch of pity, and to the moralist a vague rising of dubious hope. Tommy, waking at a quarter-past two, stretched himself, yawned, and threw an empty cigarette-box into Betty's lap. 'Come to bed,' he said. CHAPTER II THE IMPRESSION-SEEKER Have you reckoned the landscape took substance and form that it might be painted in a picture? Or men and women that they might be written of, and songs sung? Or the attraction of gravity and the great laws and harmonious combinations and the fluids of the air as subjects for the savants? Or the brown land and the blue sea for maps and charts? WALT WHITMAN. It was probable that Mrs. Venables came to Naples in order to absorb impressions. This was the business of her life; she made of herself a sponge, and let the waters of her experiences fill her. Later, she squeezed them out. It is admitted, of course, that any sponge will a little colour with its own individualities of hue the water which passes through it. She had really a fine power of discerning and appraising significance in matters the most ordinary. When all is said, to be easily 'struck' (her own word) must be accounted a gift, like any other of the manifold gifts of receptiveness. Mrs. Venables was struck--immensely struck--by
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