ure,
to arrive at sureness by thinking things thoroughly out.

'We've all been wrong, and all through different lacks in us--different
failures of understanding. I've hated ugliness so much that I haven't
tried--I haven't even wanted--to see the beauty that's always tangled
into it. I've just looked the other way. That was through being a prig,
and stupid. You've minded ugliness so little (though you've seen it all
right) that you've accepted it, traded on it. That was through being
lacking in some sense--I think, perhaps, the sense of beauty, and a
little in the moral sense, too.' Prudence was being offensively frank,
as she was apt to be when she thought things out aloud. 'And the
Crevequers haven't known, really, what ugliness was. That was through
never having learnt, chiefly. And,' she summed up after a moment, 'there
we all stand.'

'So it seems,' Warren said. 'It must be a satisfaction to have it all so
clearly arranged.'

Prudence went on, undisturbed.

'And what I should like to know is where we shall eventually stand. You
say it doesn't matter; of course, as a matter of fact, it is the one
thing which does. Where we go, and what we see by the way--oh, what else
is there?'

'Where we mayn't go,' Warren answered her drearily, 'and what we miss by
the way. It matters more, for it's better--more worth going to, better
worth seeing.'

To that she said nothing. They both thought of it all, silently: of how
four ways had come together for a little at the cross roads, how those
who travelled along them had met and spoken and taken again the parted
ways, where they ran beyond range of sight into a grey land, towards
horizons blind with mist--blind and dark to one of the two who stood now
and looked; but to the other limitless, luminous, soft with the shrouded
brightness of the dawn.

'Oh,' said Prudence presently, her thought running on what we miss by
the way, 'we--our sort of people--being so respectable and so honest and
so refined, sit on our pedestals and look down and talk and analyse,
because we've got a few things that they haven't; but, really, I am
looking up all the time. For, whatever they haven't got and haven't
done, they've at all events lived. They keep on doing that all the time;
they always will, in whatever particular way they do it. It's such an
immense thing, that. Living is like an art, that some people never learn
at all; I suppose the Crevequers were born knowing it--they had no need
t