of some discussion of her plans, but she received no
encouragement. He fell into one of his queer silences, which seemed to
Mary, in spite of all her precautions, to have reference to what she
also could not prevent herself from thinking about--their feeling
for each other and their relationship. She felt that the two lines of
thought bored their way in long, parallel tunnels which came very close
indeed, but never ran into each other.

When he had gone, and he left her without breaking his silence more than
was needed to wish her good night, she sat on for a time, reviewing what
he had said. If love is a devastating fire which melts the whole being
into one mountain torrent, Mary was no more in love with Denham than
she was in love with her poker or her tongs. But probably these extreme
passions are very rare, and the state of mind thus depicted belongs to
the very last stages of love, when the power to resist has been eaten
away, week by week or day by day. Like most intelligent people, Mary
was something of an egoist, to the extent, that is, of attaching great
importance to what she felt, and she was by nature enough of a moralist
to like to make certain, from time to time, that her feelings were
creditable to her. When Ralph left her she thought over her state of
mind, and came to the conclusion that it would be a good thing to learn
a language--say Italian or German. She then went to a drawer, which she
had to unlock, and took from it certain deeply scored manuscript pages.
She read them through, looking up from her reading every now and then
and thinking very intently for a few seconds about Ralph. She did her
best to verify all the qualities in him which gave rise to emotions in
her; and persuaded herself that she accounted reasonably for them all.
Then she looked back again at her manuscript, and decided that to write
grammatical English prose is the hardest thing in the world. But
she thought about herself a great deal more than she thought about
grammatical English prose or about Ralph Denham, and it may therefore
be disputed whether she was in love, or, if so, to which branch of the
family her passion belonged.

CHAPTER XI

"It's life that matters, nothing but life--the process of discovering,
the everlasting and perpetual process," said Katharine, as she passed
under the archway, and so into the wide space of King's Bench Walk, "not
the discovery itself at all." She spoke the last words looking up at