and for once in her life, that sense of mortal tenderness and divine
uplifting which is the message of Spring to all lovers.

But that emotion, which had had its momentary intensity for Anne
Fletcher, was over and done with for Anne Majendie. Like some mourner for
whom superb weather has been provided on the funeral day of his beloved,
she felt in this young, wantoning, unsympathetic Spring the immortal
cruelty and irony of Nature. She was bearing her own heart to its burial;
and each street that they passed, as the slow cab rattled heavily on its
way from the station, was a stage in the intolerable progress; it brought
her a little nearer to the grave.

From her companion's respectful silence she gathered that, though lost
to the extreme funereal significance of their journey, he was not
indifferent; he shared to some extent her mourning mood. She was grateful
for that silence of his, because it justified her own.

They were both, by their temperaments, absurdly and diversely,
almost incompatibly young. At two-and-thirty Majendie, through very
worldliness, was a boy in his infinite capacity for recoil from trouble.
Anne had preserved that crude and cloistral youth which belongs to all
lives passed between walls that protect them from the world. At
seven-and-twenty she was a girl, with a girl's indestructible innocence.
She had not yet felt within her the springs of her own womanhood.
Marriage had not touched the spirit, which had kept itself apart even
from her happiness, in the days that were given her to be happy in. Her
suffering was like a child's, and her attitude to it bitterly immature.
It bounded her; it annihilated the intellectual form of time,
obliterating the past, and intercepting any view of a future. Only,
unlike a child, and unlike Majendie, she lacked the power of the