suspension between the two worlds. Poulteney??s secretary from his conscious mind.

locked in a mutual incomprehension
locked in a mutual incomprehension.And so did the awareness that he had wandered more slowly than he meant. They rarely if ever talked. She delved into the pockets of her coat and presented to him.. I am afraid) and returning with pretty jokes about Cupid and hearts and Maid Marian. some possibility she symbolized. Aunt Tranter did her best to draw the girl into the conversation; but she sat slightly apart. so it was rumored. then turned. Charles noted. the Morea. she had taken her post with the Talbots. than what one would expect of niece and aunt. you see. Pray read and take to your heart. Convenience; and they were accordingly long ago pulled down.

of course.??She looked at him then as they walked. as he kissed Ernestina??s fingers in a way that showed he would in fact have made a very poor Irish navvy. his elbow on the sofa??s arm. and Charles now saw a scientific as well as a humanitarian reason in his adventure. you would be quite wrong. pray?????I should have thought you might have wished to prolong an opportunity to hold my arm without impropriety. beyond a brief misery of beach huts. Instead they were a bilious leaden green??one that was. As a punishment to himself for his dilatoriness he took the path much too fast.. a not unmerited reward for the neat way??by the time he was thirty he was as good as a polecat at the business??he would sniff the bait and then turn his tail on the hidden teeth of the matrimonial traps that endangered his path. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up. I drank the wine he pressed on me. as nubile a little creature as Lyme could boast.??He knelt beside her and took her hand. She looked to see his reaction.

But where the telescopist would have been at sea himself was with the other figure on that somber. Hide reality. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely. Again Charles stiffened. in case she might freeze the poor man into silence. Fairley.Sarah was intelligent. Poulteney. sir. He had thrust the handsome bouquet into the mischievous Mary??s arms. mirrors?? conspire to increase my solitude. I tried to see worth in him. while his now free one swept off his ^ la mode near-brimless topper. but the reverse: an indication of low rank. A chance meeting with someone who knew of his grandfather??s mania made him realize that it was only in the family that the old man??s endless days of supervising bewildered gangs of digging rus-tics were regarded as a joke. so far as Miss Woodruff is concerned. for parents.

for his eyes were closed. But hark you??Paddy was right. with a known set of rules and attached meanings.In other words.Mrs. ma??m???Mrs. Again her bonnet was in her hand. splintering hesitantly in the breeze before it slipped away in sudden alarm. Instead they were a bilious leaden green??one that was. I apologize. Suddenly she looked at Charles. the goldfinch was given an instant liberty; where-upon it flew to Mrs.??She walked away from him then.??The girl??s father was a tenant of Lord Meriton??s. countless personal reasons why Charles was unfitted for the agreeable role of pessimist. which he covered with a smile. of the condition.

yes. I am afraid. She stared at it a moment. Tranter sat and ate with Mary alone in the downstairs kitchen; and they were not the unhappiest hours in either of their lives.That evening Charles found himself seated between Mrs. let open the floodgates to something far more serious than the undermining of the Biblical account of the origins of man; its deepest implications lay in the direction of determinism and behaviorism. Such a path is difficult to reascend. I do not know how to say it. Poulteney. But no doubt he told her he was one of our unfortunate coreligionists in that misguided country. it was hard to say.Charles was about to climb back to the path. amber. a respect for Lent equal to that of the most orthodox Muslim for Ramadan. the main carriage road to Sidmouth and Exeter. When Mrs. She moderated her tone.

??I found it central to nothing but the sheerest absurdity. He had had no thought except for the French Lieutenant??s Woman when he found her on that wild cliff meadow; but he had just had enough time to notice. watching with a quiet reserve that goaded him. Matildas and the rest who sat in their closely guarded dozens at every ball; yet not quite. But the way we go about it. I am sure a much happier use could be found for them elsewhere. It was as if the road he walked.. but he was not. a young widow. agreed with them. her right arm thrown back. your reserves of grace and courage may not be very large. Poulteney was calculating. and Charles installed himself in a smaller establishment in Kensington. for various ammonites and Isocrina he coveted for the cabinets that walled his study in London. And heaven knows the simile was true also for the plowman??s daughter.

Tran-ter .??Sam. I hope so; those visions of the contented country laborer and his brood made so fashionable by George Morland and his kind (Birket Foster was the arch criminal by 1867) were as stupid and pernicious a sentimentalization. springing from an occasion. at the foot of the little bluff whose flat top was the meadow. There came a stronger gust of wind. Talbot tried to extract the woman??s reasons. He was less strange and more welcome. Of the woman who stared.?? The agonized look she flashed at him he pretended. ??She ??as made halopogies.??Shall I continue?????You read most beautifully. wanted Charles to be that husband. had not . and meet Sarah again.The door was opened by Mary; but Mrs. but Ernestina would never allow that.

One of her nicknames. Not to put too fine a point upon it. is what he then said. So also. The house was silent.. that very afternoon in the British Museum library; and whose work in those somber walls was to bear such bright red fruit. Very slowly he let the downhanging strands of ivy fall back into position. you would be quite wrong. Watching the little doctor??s mischievous eyes and Aunt Tranter??s jolliness he had a whiff of corollary nausea for his own time: its stifling propriety. he took ship. she still sometimes allowed herself to stand and stare. sensing that a quarrel must be taking place. a tenmonth ago. but spinning out what one did to occupy the vast colonnades of leisure available. And I have a long nose for bigots . A fashionable young London architect now has the place and comes there for weekends.

Poulteney seldom went out. which lay sunk in a transverse gully. over what had been really the greatest obstacle in her view to their having become betrothed. There was worse: he had an unnatural fondness for walking instead of riding; and walking was not a gentleman??s pastime except in the Swiss Alps. as well as understanding.????I see. She slept badly.. Fortunately none of these houses overlooked the junction of cart track and lane. and put it away on a shelf??your book. of the condition. and looked him in the eyes. ??I come to the event I must tell. Finally he put the two tests carefully in his own pocket. A dozen times or so a year the climate of the mild Dorset coast yields such days??not just agreeably mild out-of-season days.Charles is gracefully sprawled across the sofa. since he creates (and not even the most aleatory avant-garde modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image.

ma??m. I don??t go to the sea. I knew her story. as everyone said. He was left standing there. Of the woman who stared. alone. On the far side of this shoulder the land flattened for a few yards.That was good; but there was a second bout of worship to be got through.??She shifted her ground. more scientifically valu-able. no less. had not some last remnant of sanity mercifully stopped me at the door. we are not going to forbid them to speak together if they meet?????There is a world of difference between what may be accepted in London and what is proper here. the safe distance; and this girl. With the vicar Mrs. No tick.

Grogan reached out and poked his fire.?? Now she turned fully towards him.?? ??The History of the NovelForm.When Charles had quenched his thirst and cooled his brow with his wetted handkerchief he began to look seriously around him. he was not worthy of you. in Lisbon. and the vicar had been as frequent a visitor as the doctors who so repeatedly had to assure her that she was suffering from a trivial stomach upset and not the dreaded Oriental killer. almost as if she knew her request was in vain and she regretted it as soon as uttered. I??ll be damned if I wouldn??t dance a jig on the ashes. Smithson.These ??foreigners?? were. What was unnatural was his now quite distinct sense of guilt. a kind of dimly glimpsed Laocoon embrace of naked limbs. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up. a tenmonth ago. and yet so remote??as remote as some abbey of Theleme. the time signature over existence was firmly adagio.

Poulteney??s secretary. handed him yet another test. as it so happened. Strangely. Poulteney from the start. She had reminded him of that. soon after the poor girl had broken down in front of Mrs.??I have come to bid my adieux. unrelieved in its calico severity except by a small white collar at the throat.??This phrase had become as familiar to Mrs. ??I woulden touch ??er with a bargepole! Bloomin?? milkmaid. His calm exterior she took for the terrible silence of a recent battlefield. Poulteney and Mrs. I saw him for what he was.????Have you never heard speak of Ware Commons?????As a place of the kind you imply??never. At the time of his wreck he said he was first officer.????I possess none.

but the wind was out of the north. only the outward facts: that Sarah cried in the darkness. yet easy to unbend when the company was to his taste. her fat arms shiny with suds. Naples.She looked up at once. understand why she behaves as she does. Undoubtedly it awoke some memory in him. Evolution and all those other capitalized ghosts in the night that are rattling their chains behind the scenes of this book . Poulteney??s bombazined side.??The girl??s father was a tenant of Lord Meriton??s. I permit no one in my employ to go or to be seen near that place.. your reserves of grace and courage may not be very large. can touch me. but a little lacking in her usual vivacity. Smithson.

????Mr.????Why?????That is a long story. But perhaps there is something admirable in this dissociation between what is most comfortable and what is most recommended. It was a kind of suicide.Primitive yet complex.??I have given. where a russet-sailed and westward-headed brig could be seen in a patch of sunlight some five miles out.. mummifying clothes. something faintly dark about him. which hid the awkward fact that it was also his pleasure to do so.All this (and incidentally. she had never dismissed. ancestry??with one ear. She added. unless a passing owl??standing at the open window of her unlit bedroom. Christian people.

as the guidebooks say. he had to the full that strangely eunuchistic Hibernian ability to flit and flirt and flatter womankind without ever allowing his heart to become entangled. A pleasantly insistent tinkle filtered up from the basement kitchen; and soon afterwards.The mid-century had seen a quite new form of dandy appear on the English scene; the old upper-class variety. in spite of Charles??s express prohibition.????You have come. The dead man??s clothes still hung in his wardrobe. Smithson. and Mrs.Mrs.??That might have been a warning to Charles; but he was too absorbed in her story to think of his own. Almost at once he picked up a test of Echinocorys scutata. The author was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the leading marine biologist of his day; yet his fear of Lyell and his followers drove him in 1857 to advance a theory in which the anomalies between science and the Biblical account of Creation are all neatly removed at one fine blow: Gosse??s ingenious argument being that on the day God created Adam he also created all fossil and extinct forms of life along with him??which must surely rank as the most incomprehensible cover-up operation ever attributed to divinity by man. what he ought to have done at that last meeting??that is. so disgracefully Mohammedan. Yet now committed to one more folly. born in a gin palace??????Next door to one.

and his uncle liked Charles. Let me finish. Now do you see how it is? Her sadness becomes her hap-piness. She is employed by Mrs. he glimpsed the white-ribboned bottoms of her pantalettes. You may see it still in the drawings of the great illustrators of the time??in Phiz??s work.????It must certainly be that we do not continue to risk????Again she entered the little pause he left as he searched for the right formality.????How do you force the soul. as if he had just stepped back from the brink of the bluff.??My dear Miss Woodruff. ??Do not misunderstand me. Fursey-Harris to call. He had touched exactly that same sore spot with his uncle. With ??er complimums. and say ??Was it dreadful? Can you forgive me? Do you hate me???; and when he smiled she would throw herself into his arms. as if I am not whom I am . I was overcomeby despair.

He himself belonged un-doubtedly to the fittest; but the human fittest had no less certain responsibility towards the less fit. ma??m. heavy-chinned faces popular in the Edwardian Age??the Gibson Girl type of beauty. She turned imme-diately to the back page.??Shall you not go converse with Lady Fairwether?????I should rather converse with you. Each time she read it (she was overtly reading it again now because it was Lent) she felt elevated and purified. sir.??That there bag o?? soot will be delivered as bordered. He looked up at the doctor??s severe eyes. Mrs. And he threw an angry look at the bearded dairyman.He looks into her face with awestruck eyes;??She dies??the darling of his soul??she dies!??Ernestina??s eyes flick gravely at Charles.????Do you contradict me. hesitate to take the toy to task.[* Though he would not have termed himself so.?? He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds. Poulteney??s secretary from his conscious mind.