next field walking side by side.

"I tell you, Mary, it's utter destruction, working away, day after day,
at stuff that doesn't matter a damn to any one. I've stood eight years
of it, and I'm not going to stand it any longer. I suppose this all
seems to you mad, though?"

By this time Mary had recovered her self-control.

"No. I thought you weren't happy," she said.

"Why did you think that?" he asked, with some surprise.

"Don't you remember that morning in Lincoln's Inn Fields?" she asked.

"Yes," said Ralph, slackening his pace and remembering Katharine and
her engagement, the purple leaves stamped into the path, the white paper
radiant under the electric light, and the hopelessness which seemed to
surround all these things.

"You're right, Mary," he said, with something of an effort, "though I
don't know how you guessed it."

She was silent, hoping that he might tell her the reason of his
unhappiness, for his excuses had not deceived her.

"I was unhappy--very unhappy," he repeated. Some six weeks separated
him from that afternoon when he had sat upon the Embankment watching his
visions dissolve in mist as the waters swam past and the sense of his
desolation still made him shiver. He had not recovered in the least from
that depression. Here was an opportunity for making himself face it,
as he felt that he ought to; for, by this time, no doubt, it was only a
sentimental ghost, better exorcised by ruthless exposure to such an eye
as Mary's, than allowed to underlie all his actions and thoughts as had
been the case ever since he first saw Katharine Hilbery pouring out tea.
He must begin, however, by mentioning her name, and this he found it
impossible to do. He persuaded himself that he could make an honest
statement without speaking her name; he persuaded himself that his
feeling had very little to do with her.

"Unhappiness is a state of mind," he said, "by which I mean that it is
not necessarily the result of any particular cause."

This rather stilted beginning did not please him, and it became more
and more obvious to him that, whatever he might say, his unhappiness had
been directly caused by Katharine.

"I began to find my life unsatisfactory," he started afresh. "It seemed
to me meaningless." He paused again, but felt that this, at any rate,
was true, and that on these lines he could go on.

"All this money-making and working ten hours a day in an office, what's
it FOR? When one's a boy, you see,