looks--but I
might as well have let it alone. The great end of nature," Hilda went
on, putting down her cup, "reasonable beings in their normal state would
never lend themselves to. So she invents these temporary insanities.
And therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be permanent.
That's a platitude, I know," she added, "but it's irresistibly
suggested."

Stephen looked with some fixedness at a point on the other side of
the room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the
vision of a drawing-room in Addison Gardens, occupied by his mother and
sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the
moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed
sense that they might characterise such a statement differently, if,
indeed, they would consent to characterise it at all. He looked at the
wall as if, being a solid and steadfast object, it might correct the
qualm--it was really something like that--which the wide sweep of her
cynicism brought him.

"From what he told me last week I thought we shouldn't see it. He seemed
determined enough but depressed, and not hopeful. I fancied she was
being upheld--I thought she would easily pull through. Indeed, I wasn't
sure that there was any great temptation. Somebody must be helping him."

"The devil, no doubt," Hilda replied concisely; "and with equal
certainty, Miss Alicia Livingstone."

Arnold gave her a look of surprise. "Surely not my cousin!" he
protested. "She can't understand."

"Oh, I beg of you, don't speak to HER! I think she understands. I think
she's only too tortuously intelligent."

Stephen kept an instant of nervous silence. "May I ask?--" he began,
formally.

"Oh yes! It is almost an indecent thing to say of anyone so exquisitely
self-contained, but your cousin is very much in love with Mr. Lindsay
herself. It seems almost a liberty, doesn't it, to tell you such a thing
about a member of your family?" she went on, at Arnold's blush; "but
you asked me, you know. And she is making it her ecstatic agony to bring
this precious union about. I think she is taking a kindergarten method
with the girl--having her there constantly and showing her little
scented, luxurious bits of what she is so possessed to throw away.
People in Alicia's condition have no sense of immorality."

"That makes it all the more painful," said Arnold; but the interest in
his tone was a little remote, and his gesture, too, which