But, while still intending self-destruction, she had written to her
husband: "Forgive me, respectable man, for disposing of a life that I had
consecrated to thee." In quoting this I mean to make no too-easy effect
with the word "respectable," grown grotesque by the tedious gibe of our
own present fashion of speech.

Madame Roland, I have said, was twice inarticulate; she had two spaces of
silence, one when she, pure and selfless patriot, had heard her
condemnation to death. Passing out of the court she beckoned to her
friends, and signified to them her sentence "by a gesture." And again
there was a pause, in the course of her last days, during which her
speeches had not been few, and had been spoken with her beautiful voice
unmarred; "she leant," says Riouffe, "alone against her window, and wept
there three hours."




FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD


To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour, disappointed
of your pathos, and set freshly free from all the preoccupations. You
cannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by year, do not
compose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not the tone, but
the note alters. So with the uncovenanted ways of a child you keep no
tryst. They meet you at another place, after failing you where you
tarried; your former experiences, your documents are at fault. You are
the fellow traveller of a bird. The bird alights and escapes out of time
to your footing.