“ And suddenly out of the far-away of the woods a nightbird loosed its cry: "A-hoo.... Ahoo-oo-oo-hooh!"
There is a hunter in us all. I laughed inwardly as I watched. A few months more and I was to watch a lion-tamer ... but let me keep to one thing at a time. I needled myself in, and, almost hooting the sound through my mouth, as if in echo of the bird, I heard myself call stealthily across the air, "Fanny!—Fanny Bowater!" ”

“ I climbed Mr Bates's clumsy staircase, put down my dressing-case, and slowly removing my gloves, faced dimly the curtained window. Beyond it lay the distant hills, misty in the morning sunbeams, the familiar meadows all but chin-high with buttercups.
"Oh, Mrs Bowater," I turned at last, "here I am. You and the quiet sky—I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one's self, if one is always changing?"
"There comes a time, miss, when we don't change; only the outer walls crumble away morsel by morsel, so to speak. ”

“ How curious it is to see others as they must sometimes see ourselves. Should I have gasped like that, if Mr Crimble had been Fanny's Mercury?
"A letter from Miss Bowater," I whispered, "and I am to say," the cadaverous face was close above me, its sombre melting eyes almost bulging behind their glasses, "I am to say that she is giving yours 'her earnest attention, let alone her prayers.'"
I remember once, when Adam Waggett as a noisy little boy was playing in the garden at home, the string of his toy bow suddenly snapped: Mr Crimble drew back as straight and as swiftly as that. ”

“ Adam stepped to the gate. I clutched Rose's soft, cool fingers. And spongily, ponderously, there, beyond the bars, debouched into view a huge-shouldered, mole-coloured elephant, its trunk sagging towards the dust, its small, lash-fringed eye gleaming in the sun, its bald, stumpy, tufted tail stiff and still behind it.
On and on, one after another, in the elm-shaded beams of the first of evening, the outlandish animals, the wheeled dens, the gaudy, piled-up vans of pasteboard scenery, the horses and ponies and riff-raff of a travelling circus wound into, and out of, view before my eyes. ”

“ She hastened out of the room with the tea things, poising an instant like a bird on a branch as she pushed open the door with her foot. The slave left behind her listened to her footsteps dying away in a mingling of shame, sorrow, and of a happiness beyond words. I know now that it is not when we are near people that we reach themselves, not, I mean, in their looks and words, but only by following their thoughts to where the spirit within plays and has its being. Perhaps if I had realized this earlier, I shouldn't have fallen so easy a prey to Fanny Bowater. ”

“ Since nothing, perhaps, could make me more exceptional in appearance than I had been made by Providence, I fell in with all Mrs Monnerie's fancies, and wore what she pleased—pushing out of mind as well as I could all thought of bills. I did more than that. I really began to enjoy dressing myself up as if I were my own doll, and when alone I would sit sometimes in a luxurious trance, like a lily in a pot. Yet I did not entirely abandon my old little Bowater habit of indoor exercise. When I was alone in my room I would sometimes skip. ”

“ I said, in a last wrestle with conscience.
"No, no," said Fanny Bowater, "it isn't the stars I'm after. The first fine night we'll go to the woods. You shall wait for me till everything is quiet. It will be good practise in practical astronomy." She watched my face, and began silently laughing as if she were reading my thoughts. "That's a bargain, then. What is life, Miss M., but experience? And what is experience, but knowing thyself? And what's knowing thyself but the very apex of wisdom? Anyhow it's a good deal more interesting than the Prince of Denmark." ”

“ When his muffled footsteps had passed away, I looked at Fanny.
"Oh, yes," she agreed, shrugging her shoulders, "it was a lie. I said it like a lie, so that it shouldn't deceive him. I detest all that wheedling. To come here two days running, after.... And why, may I ask, if it is beneath your dignity to dance to the parish, is it not beneath mine to sing? Let the silly sheep amuse themselves with their bleating. I have done with it all."
She rose, folded her gloves into a ball and her veil over her hat, and once more faced her reflection in her mother's looking-glass. ”

“ And for sole evidence of him basked on my table, beneath a thread of sunlight, his blue-ribboned box.
"Isn't he a ninny?" sighed Fanny. "And yet, my dear: there—but for the grace of God—goes Mr Fanny Bowater."
Her anger had evaporated. There stood my familiar Fanny again, slim as a mast, her light eyes coldly shining, her bearing, even the set of her foot showing already a faint gilding of Mrs Monnerie. She laughed—looking straight across at me, as if with a challenge.
"Yes, my dear, it's quite true. I'm not a bit cross now. Milk and Honey. So you see even a fool may be a lightning conductor. ”

“ Lady Pollacke hung like a cloud at sunset over us both, her cheek flushed with the effort to be amused at every sentence which Mrs Monnerie uttered and to share it as far as possible with the rest of her guests.
"A little pale, eh?" mused Mrs Monnerie, brooding at me with her great eye. "She wants sea-air; sea-air—just to tinge that rose-leaf porcelain. I must arrange it."
I assured her that I was in the best of health.
"Not at all," she replied. "All young people boast of their health. When I was your age every thought of illness was as black as a visitation of the devil. ”

“ There was once a philosopher called Plato, my dear. He poisoned Man's soul."
Flesh and spirit, Fanny must have been very tired. Her voice fluttered on like a ragged flag.
"But listen, listen!" I entreated her. "I haven't blamed you for that, Fanny. I swear it. I mean, you can't help not loving. I know that. But perhaps if only we had—— It's a dreadful thing to think of him sitting there alone—the vestry—and then looking up 'with a smile.' Oh, Fanny, with a smile! I dare hardly go into his mind—and the verger looking in. I think of him all day." ”

“ My cheekbones gradually rounded their angles; a livelier colour came to lip and skin, and I began to be as self-conscious as a genuine beauty. One twilight, I remember, I had slipped across from out of my bath for a pinch of the "crystals" which Mrs Monnerie had presented me with that afternoon; for my nose, also, was accustoming itself to an artificial life. An immense cheval looking-glass stood there, and at one and the same instant I saw not only my own slim, naked, hastening figure reflected in its placid deeps, but, behind me, that of Fleming, shadowily engrossed. ”

“ I think Mrs Monnerie was in secret a more remarkable woman than she affected to be. However thronged a room might be, you could never be unaware that she was in it. And in the gentle syllabub of polite conversation her silence was like that of an ancient rock with the whispering of the wavelets on the sands at its base. I remember once seeing a comic picture of an old lady with a large feather in her bonnet placidly sitting on a camp-stool beneath a pollard willow on one side of a stream, while a furious, frothing bull stood snorting and rampaging on the other. ”

“ And when one morning I awoke early and heard, still half in dream, a thrush in all but darkness singing of spring, it seemed it was a voice pealing in the empty courts of paradise. What ridiculous care I took to conceal my misery from Mrs Bowater. Hardly a morning passed but that I carried out in a bag the food I couldn't eat the day before, to hide it away or bury it. But such journeys were brief.
I have read somewhere that love is a disease. Or is it that Life piles up the fuel, a chance stranger darts a spark, and the whole world goes up in smoke? ”

“ In my long carriage journey to Mrs Monnerie's through those miles and miles of grimed, huddling houses, those shops and hoardings and steeples, I had realized for the first time that its capital is not a part of England, only a sprawling human growth in it; and though I soon learned to respect it as that, I could never see without a sigh some skimpy weed struggling for life in its bricked-up crevices. It was nearly all dead, except for human beings, and that could not be said of Lyndsey, or even of Beechwood Hill. ”

“ It seemed a sheer waste of Pollie to take her to the woods. Thoughts of St Peter's, the nocturnal splendour in the cab, a hunger for novelty, the itch to spend money, and maybe a tinge of dare-devilry—without a moment's hesitation I chose the shops and the "town." Once more in my black, with two thicknesses of veil canopying my head, as if I were a joint of meat in the Dog Days, I settled myself on Pollie's arm, and—in the full publicity of three o'clock in the afternoon—off we went. ”

“ Life was nothing but an evil dream, a world of terrifying shadows and phantoms. But our old friend Dr Grose was familiar with my constitution, and at last I began to mend. Pollie, stricken with remorse, nursed me night and day, giving my small bed every hour she could spare in a house stricken and disordered. I was never told in so many words that my mother was dead. In my extreme weakness I learned it of the air around me, of every secret sound and movement in the house.
Morning and evening appeared my father's great face in the doorway, his eyebrows lifted high above his spectacles. ”

“ When next Fanny and I met, it was in the cool grey-green summery drawing-room at Monk's House, and Mrs Monnerie and Susan shared tea with us. One covert glance at Mrs Monnerie's face had reassured me. That strange mask was as vigilant and secretive, but as serene, as when it had first smiled on me in the mauves and gildings of Brunswick House. She had set her world right again and was at peace with mankind. ”

“ Dear Midgetina,—Don't suppose, because I have not written, that Fanny is a monster, though, in fact, she is. I have often thought of you—with your stars and knick-knacks. And of course your letters have come. My thanks. I can't really answer them now because I am trying at the same time to scribble this note and to correct 'composition' papers under the very eyes of Miss Stebbings—the abhorred daughter of Argus and the eldest Gorgon. Dear me, I almost envy you, Midgetina. It must be fun to be like a tiny, round-headed pin in a pin-cushion and just mock at the Workbox. ”

“ Whenever I parted from him, his remembrance was like that of one of those strange figures which thrust themselves as if out of the sleep-world into the mind's wakefulness; vividly, darkly, impress themselves upon consciousness, and then are gone. So I sometimes wonder if I ever really knew him, if he was ever perfectly real to me; like Fanny, for instance. Yet he made no pretence to be mysterious, and we were soon talking together almost as naturally as if we were playmates of childhood who had met again after a long separation. ”

“ Isn't it, Mrs Bowater, that you and I haven't quite so many things to pretend about? It is easy thinking of others when there are only one or two of them. But whole drawing-roomsful! While here; well, there is only just you and me."
"Why, miss," she replied, "as for pretending, the world's full of shadows, though substantial enough when it comes to close quarters. If we were all to look at things just bare in a manner of speaking, it would have to be the Garden of Eden over again. It can't be done. And it's just that that what's called the gentry know so well. ”

“ I said, "take me away, take me away. I can't bear it, Mrs Bowater. I don't want to be alive."
"There, miss, rest now, and think no more." She smoothed my hair, clucked a little low, whistling tune, as if for lullaby. "Why, there now," she muttered sardonically, "you might almost suppose I had been a mother myself!"
There was silence between us for a while, then, quietly raising herself, she looked down at me on the pillow, and, finding me to be still awake, a long smile spread over her face: "Why, we don't seem neither of us to be much good at daytime sleeping." ”

“ That being so, of this I am certain; that it will be impossible to free myself, to escape from this world, unless in peace and amity I can take every shred of it, every friend and every enemy, all that these eyes have seen, these senses discovered with me. I know that. And perhaps for that very reason, in spite of the loving gratitude that overcomes me at the thought of what my existence might have been, I sometimes dread the ease and quiet and seclusion in which I live. And this tale itself? As Mrs Monnerie had said, what is it but once more to have drifted into being on show again—in a book? ”

“ But quiet, and the magnificence of night, vanquished all folly at last. It seemed to me that a Being whom one may call Silence was brooding in solitude where living and human visitants are rare, and that in his company a harmless spirit may be at peace. Oblivious of my ungainly knife, yet keeping a firm arm on it, self seemed to be the whole scene there, and my body being so small I was perhaps less a disturber than were most intruders of that solemn repose.
Why I kept these night-walks secret, I cannot say. It was not apprehension of Mrs Bowater. ”