out it was left her to cultivate. She had long since learned to know it
for a feeble one, though its feebleness was perhaps scarce the reason for
her saying to herself each evening as her time for departure approached:
"No, no--not to-night." She never failed of that silent remark, any more
than she failed of feeling, in some deeper place than she had even yet
fully sounded, that one's remarks were as weak as straws and that,
however one might indulge in them at eight o'clock, one's fate infallibly
declared itself in absolute indifference to them at about eight-fifteen.
Remarks were remarks, and very well for that; but fate was fate, and this
young lady's was to pass Park Chambers every night in the working week.
Out of the immensity of her knowledge of the life of the world there
bloomed on these occasions as specific remembrance that it was regarded
in that region, in August and September, as rather pleasant just to be
caught for something or other in passing through town. Somebody was
always passing and somebody might catch somebody else. It was in full
cognisance of this subtle law that she adhered to the most ridiculous
circuit she could have made to get home. One warm dull featureless
Friday, when an accident had made her start from Cocker's a little later
than usual, she became aware that something of which the infinite
possibilities had for so long peopled her dreams was at last prodigiously
upon her, though the perfection in which the conditions happened to
present it was almost rich enough to be but the positive creation of a
dream. She saw, straight before her, like a vista painted in a picture,
the empty street and the lamps that burned pale in the dusk not yet
established. It was into the convenience of this quiet twilight that a
gentleman on the doorstep of the Chambers gazed with a vagueness that our
young lady's little figure violently trembled, in the approach, with the
measure of its power to dissipate. Everything indeed grew in a flash
terrific and distinct; her old uncertainties fell away from her, and,
since she was so familiar with fate, she felt as if the very nail that