rey looked offended. Death, like religion, is one of those subjects
which it is very bad taste to mention under some circumstances.

Katherine went away more disheartened than ever, and more especially
weighed down by the consciousness that she had made a fool of herself.
She knew Audrey to be vain, she divined that she was selfish, but at
least she had believed that she could be generous. By letting her feel
that she held Ted's future in her hands, she had roused all her woman's
vague cupidity and passion for power, and henceforth any appeal to her
generosity would be worse than useless. With a little of her old
artistic egoism, Katherine valued her brother's career very much as a
thing of her own making, and the idea of another woman meddling with it
and spoiling it was insupportable. It was as if some reckless colourist
had taken the Witch of Atlas and daubed her all over with frightful
scarlet and magenta. But the trouble at her heart of hearts was the
certainty that Audrey, that creature of dubious intellect and fitful
emotions, would never be able to love Ted as his wife should love him.

CHAPTER VIII

All true revelations soon seem as old as the hills and as obvious.
Yesterday they were not, to-day they have struck you dumb, to-morrow
they will have become commonplaces, and henceforth you will be incapable
of seeing anything else. So it was with Audrey. Her engagement was
barely a week old before she felt that it had lasted for ever. Not that
she was tired of it; on the contrary, she hoped everything from Ted's
eccentricity. She was sick to death of the polished conventional
type--the man who, if he came into her life at all, must be introduced
in the recognised way; while Ted, who had dropped into it literally
through a skylight, roused her unflagging interest and curiosity. She
was always longing to see what the boy would say and do next. Poor
Audrey! Her own character was mainly such a bundle of negations that you
described her best by saying what she was not; but other people's
positive qualities acted on her as a powerful stimulant, and it was one
for which she perpetually craved. She had found it in Hardy. In him it
was the almost physical charm of blind will, and she yielded to it
unwillingly. She had found it in Ted under the intoxicating form of
vivid emotion. Life with Vincent would have been an unbroken bondage.
Life with Ted would have no tyrannous continuity; it would be a series
of splendi