outwardly a cer-tain cynicism about him. He felt himself in that brief instant an unjust enemy; both pierced and deservedly diminished. Strangely..

as if she was seeing what she said clearly herself for the first time
as if she was seeing what she said clearly herself for the first time. After all. and more frequently lost than won. better.The door was opened by Mary; but Mrs. in short?????You must understand we talked always in French.For what had crossed her mind??a corner of her bed having chanced. tantalizing agonies of her life as a governess; how easily she might have fallen into the clutches of such a plausible villain as Varguennes; but this talk of freedom beyond the pale. and by my own hand. Grogan??s little remark about the comparative priority to be accorded the dead and the living had germinated. you must practice for your part. that he had not vanished into thin air. Marx remarked. Now is that not common sense???There was a long silence. He stared at the black figure.??My dear madam. between us is quite impossible in my present circumstances. Or indeed. Charles could perhaps have trusted himself with fewer doubts to Mrs. as innocent as makes no matter. The gentleman is . If Captain Talbot had been there .

because I request it. to ask why Sarah.There were. A day came when I thought myself cruel as well. By that time Sarah had been earning her own living for a year??at first with a family in Dorchester. Fairley reads so poorly. to his own amazement. gathering her coat about her. I will come to the point. But he swallowed his grief. as everyone said. But she was then in the first possessive pleasure of her new toy. invincible eyes a tear. Not to put too fine a point upon it. He must have conversation. and sometimes with an exciting.?? Nor did it interest her that Miss Sarah was a ??skilled and dutiful teacher?? or that ??My infants have deeply missed her. surrounded by dense thickets of brambles and dogwood; a kind of minute green amphitheater. He felt flattered. the kindest old soul. At least the deadly dust was laid. the jet engine.

on his deathbed. for nobody knew how many months.????She speaks French??? Mrs. Their servants they tried to turn into ma-chines.?? According to Ernestina.??Will you permit me to say something first? Something I have perhaps. but fraternal. never inhabit my own home. Thus it was that she slipped on a treacherous angle of the muddied path and fell to her knees. I shall be here on the days I said. and this moment. Poulteney sitting in wait for her when she returned from her walk on the evening Mrs. But then he came to a solution to his problem??not knowing exactly how the land lay??for yet another path suddenly branched to his right. Again you notice how peaceful.. ??You shall not have a drop of tea until you have accounted for every moment of your day.Finally??and this had been the crudest ordeal for the victim??Sarah had passed the tract test. As if it has been ordained that I shall never form a friendship with an equal.??I am most grateful.??She spoke in a rapid. vast. and without the then indispensable gloss of feminine hair oil.

To both came the same insight: the wonderful new freedoms their age brought. He was the devil in the guise of a sailor. very soon it would come back to him. It stood right at the seawardmost end. He plainly did not allow delicacy to stand in the way of prophetic judgment. It came to law..All this (and incidentally. But even then a figure. He seemed to Charles to incarnate all the hypocriti-cal gossip??and gossips??of Lyme. or so it was generally supposed.. who had known each other sufficient decades to make a sort of token embrace necessary.??There was a silence.It so happened that the avalanche for the morning after Charles??s discovery of the Undercliff was appointed to take place at Marlbo-rough House.??He fingered his bowler hat. that was a good deal better than the frigid barrier so many of the new rich in an age drenched in new riches were by that time erecting between themselves and their domestics.. It was true that she looked suspiciously what she indeed was?? nearer twenty-five than ??thirty or perhaps more. he most legibly had. Yes. they seem almost to turn their backs on it.

it was a faintly foolish face. with her saintly nose out of joint. and could not. And there. when it was stripped of its formal outdoor mask; too little achieved. All was supremely well. and his duty towards Ernestina began to outweigh his lust for echinoderms. send him any interesting specimens of coal she came across in her scuttle; and later she told him she thought he was very lazy.Sarah kept her side of the bargain. creeping like blood through a bandage. for the book had been prosecuted for obscenity??a novel that had appeared in France some ten years before; a novel profound-ly deterministic in its assumptions. he did not bow and with-draw.????Yes.?? Sarah made no response. The world would always be this. . in spite of that. And she died on the day that Hitler invaded Poland. were known as ??swells??; but the new young prosperous artisans and would-be superior domestics like Sam had gone into competition sarto-rially. Society. That one in the gray dress? Who is so ugly to look at??? This was unkind of Charles. had pressed the civic authorities to have the track gated.

Or was. and the test is not fair if you look back towards land. an uncon-scious alienation effect of the Brechtian kind (??This is your mayor reading a passage from the Bible??) but the very contrary: she spoke directly of the suffering of Christ. the intensification of love between Ernestina and himself had driven all thought. tinker with it . Her look back lasted two or three seconds at most; then she resumed her stare to the south.????I sees her. It retained traces of a rural accent. Poulteney. it kindly always comes in the end. lamp in hand. that is.?? For one appalling moment Mrs. ??Dark indeed. The gentleman is . terror of sexuality. behind her facade of humility forbade it. I deplore your unfortunate situation. either. A slightly bolder breeze moved the shabby red velvet curtains at the window; but in that light even they looked beautiful. and sincerely. Now the Undercliff has reverted to a state of total wildness.

She confessed that she had forgotten; Mrs. born in 1801. I too have been looking for the right girl. mum. flirting; and this touched on one of her deepest fears about him. it was another story.????I do not??I will not believe that. as the one she had given at her first interroga-tion.??I have given. one it is sufficient merely to classify under some general heading (man with alcoholic problems. closed a blind eye. so I must be. never inhabit my own home. you can surely??????They call her the French Lieutenant??s .. invested shrewdly in railway stock and un-shrewdly at the gambling-tables (he went to Almack??s rather than to the Almighty for consolation). a faint opacity in his suitably solemn eyes. He was shrewd enough to realize that Ernestina had been taken by surprise; until the little disagree-ment she had perhaps been more in love with marriage than with her husband-to-be; now she had recognized the man. with a slender. of course. the goldfinch was given an instant liberty; where-upon it flew to Mrs. Where you and I flinch back.

as one returned. AH sorts. I think Mrs. it is a good deal more forbidding than it is picturesque. or no more. It was true that in 1867 the uncle showed. and this moment. even in her happier days. But no doubt he told her he was one of our unfortunate coreligionists in that misguided country. I said ??in wait??; but ??in state?? would have been a more appropriate term. to struggle not to touch her. for she had turned. ??Have you heard what my fellow countryman said to the Chartist who went to Dublin to preach his creed? ??Brothers. Mrs. and back to the fork. I foolishly believed him. to certain characteristic evasions he had made; to whether his interest in paleontology was a sufficient use for his natural abilities; to whether Ernestina would ever really understand him as well as he understood her; to a general sentiment of dislocated purpose originating perhaps in no more??as he finally concluded??than the threat of a long and now wet afternoon to pass.Charles said gently.??It isn??t mistletoe. yes. From another drawer she took a hidden key and unlocked the book. like most men of his time.

mum. to which she had become so addict-ed! Far worse. Charles remembered then to have heard of the place. . who read to her from the Bible in the evenings. First and foremost would undoubtedly have been: ??She goes out alone. touching tale of pain. but fraternal. with odd small pauses between each clipped. sir. which deprived her of the pleasure of demanding why they had not been anticipated.??Dearest. no better than could be got in a third-rate young ladies?? seminary in Exeter. Poulteney was to dine at Lady Cotton??s that evening; and the usual hour had been put forward to allow her to prepare for what was always in essence.????How should you?????I must return. She now went very rarely to the Cobb. For the rest of my life I shall travel. She is asleep. of course??it being Lent??a secular concert.????I should certainly wish to hear it before proceeding. Again she faced the sea. Charles stood dumbfounded.

It had not. yes. so that she had to rely on other eyes for news of Sarah??s activities outside her house. then.Only one art has ever caught such scenes??that of the Renaissance; it is the ground that Botticelli??s figures walk on. but we have only to compare the pastoral background of a Millais or a Ford Madox Brown with that in a Constable or a Palmer to see how idealized. Mr. and it is no doubt symptomatic that the one subject that had cost her agonies to master was mathematics.??Mrs. a millennium away from . Tranter??s niece went upstairs so abruptly after Charles??s departures. Poulteney. In its minor way it did for Sarah what the immortal bustard had so often done for Charles. Poulteney was calculating. Royston Pike. Though set in the seventeenth century it is transparently a eulogy of Florence Nightingale. In secret he rather admired Gladstone; but at Winsyatt Gladstone was the arch-traitor. We could not expect him to see what we are only just beginning??and with so much more knowledge and the lessons of existentialist philosophy at our disposal??to realize ourselves: that the desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutually destructive. in one of his New York Daily Tribune articles. its shadows. calm. Such a path is difficult to reascend.

for another wind was blowing in 1867: the beginning of a revolt against the crinoline and the large bonnet. since many a nineteenth-century lady??and less.????I am told you are constant in your attendance at divine service. She was certainly dazzled by Sam to begin with: he was very much a superior being.??Shall I continue?????You read most beautifully. with an expression on his face that sug-gested that at any moment he might change his mind and try it on his own throat; or perhaps even on his smiling master??s. At first he was inclined to dismiss her spiritual worries. but my heart craves them and I cannot believe it is all vanity . cut by deep chasms and accented by strange bluffs and towers of chalk and flint. One day. It is true that the more republican citizens of Lyme rose in arms??if an axe is an arm. First and foremost would undoubtedly have been: ??She goes out alone. a swift sideways and upward glance from those almost exophthalmic dark-brown eyes with their clear whites: a look both timid and forbidding. he added a pleasant astringency to Lyme society; for when he was with you you felt he was always hovering a little. to where the path joined the old road to Charmouth. But she lives there. the difference in worth.Also. But that face had the most harmful effect on company. too spoiled by civilization. adrift in the slow entire of Victorian time. you bear.

from previous references. We got by very well without the Iron Civilizer?? (by which he meant the railway) ??when I was a young man. I fear I addressed you in a most impolite manner.*[* The stanzas from In Metnoriam I have quoted at the beginning of this chapter are very relevant here. how untragic. Grogan called his ??cabin.Two days passed during which Charles??s hammers lay idle in his rucksack. I think no child. her apparent total obeisance to the great god Man. I??m not sitting with a socialist. truly beautiful.Of the three young women who pass through these pages Mary was.??And she has confided the real state of her mind to no one?????Her closest friend is certainly Mrs. I??ave haccepted them.??Mr. clean. She had finally chosen the former; and listened not only to the reading voice. She was trained to be a governess. She would instantly have turned. was not wholly bad. which meant that Sarah had to be seen.??Mrs.

waiting for the concert to begin. to his own amazement. It was this that had provoked that smoth-ered laugh; and the slammed door. I will not be responsible otherwise. Poulteney seemed not to think so. and more frequently lost than won. .????I do not??I will not believe that. I foolishly believed him. a begging him to go on. already been fore-stalled. .It was to banish such gloomy forebodings. and she wanted to be sure. agreeable conformity to the epoch??s current. or at least not mad in the way that was generally supposed. Such a path is difficult to reascend.????I see. He had to act; and strode towards where the side path came up through the brambles.And then too there was that strangely Egyptian quality among the Victorians; that claustrophilia we see so clearly evidenced in their enveloping. each guilty age. He died there a year later.

though it allowed Mrs. one with the unslum-bering stars and understanding all. ??I was called in??all this. and the white stars of wild strawberry. suitably distorted and draped in black. servants; the weather; impending births. some forty yards away. that you??ve been fast. had not his hostess delivered herself of a characteristic Poulteneyism. and ray false love will weep. If no one dares speak of them. too tenuous. you bear. The real reason for her silence did not dawn on Charles at first. a community of information. She knew.Yet this time he did not even debate whether he should tell Ernestina; he knew he would not. both in land and money. But how could one write history with Macaulay so close behind? Fiction or poetry. A dry little kestrel of a man. tho?? it is very fine. so that where she was.

So much the better for us? Perhaps.. the heart was torn out of the town; and no one has yet succeeded in putting it back. and in places where a man with a broken leg could shout all week and not be heard. it was of such repentant severity that most of the beneficiaries of her Magdalen Society scram-bled back down to the pit of iniquity as soon as they could??but Mrs.Of the three young women who pass through these pages Mary was. Sheer higgerance. She moderated her tone. Charles noted the darns in the heels of her black stockings. . to ring it. there gravely??are not all declared lovers the world??s fool???to mount the stairs to his rooms and interrogate his good-looking face in the mirror.??I have no one to turn to. There came a stronger gust of wind. an irrelevant fact that had petrified gradually over the years into the assumption of a direct lineal descent from the great Sir Francis. but I will not have you using its language on a day like this. His thoughts were too vague to be described. Ernestina??s qualms about her social status were therefore rather farfetched. Tranter smiled. or at least realized the sex of. splintering hesitantly in the breeze before it slipped away in sudden alarm. Life was the correct apparatus; it was heresy to think otherwise; but meanwhile the cross had to be borne.

however kind-hearted. and their fingers touched. She at last plucked up courage to enter. of inappropriateness. but to be free. Hall the hosslers ??eard. by any period??s standard or taste.????Since you refused it.??I think it is better if I leave. His uncle viewed the sight of Charles marching out of Winsyatt armed with his wedge hammers and his collecting sack with disfavor; to his mind the only proper object for a gentleman to carry in the country was a riding crop or a gun; but at least it was an improvement on the damned books in the damned library.?? She began to defoliate the milkwort. The girl??s appearance was strange; but her mind??as two or three questions she asked showed??was very far from deranged. unable to look at him. The logical conclusion of his feelings should have been that he raised his hat with a cold finality and walked away in his stout nailed boots. He had indeed very regular ones??a wide forehead.????Cut off me harms. surrounded by dense thickets of brambles and dogwood; a kind of minute green amphitheater. an uncon-scious alienation effect of the Brechtian kind (??This is your mayor reading a passage from the Bible??) but the very contrary: she spoke directly of the suffering of Christ. those brimstones. She is employed by Mrs. panting slightly in his flannel suit and more than slightly perspiring. and could not.

Really. He made me believe that his whole happiness de-pended on my accompanying him when he left??more than that. and was not deceived by the fact that it was pressed unnaturally tight. a little irregularly. looked round him. conspicu-ously unnecessary; the Hyde Park house was fit for a duke to live in.????Mr. I keep it on for my dear husband??s sake. clutching her collar. And heaven knows the simile was true also for the plowman??s daughter. She was so very nearly one of the prim little moppets. For she suddenly stopped turning and admiring herself in profile; gave an abrupt look up at the ceiling. I have my ser-vants to consider. She held a pair of silver scis-sors. There is One Above who has a prior claim. she took exceedingly good care of their spiritual welfare. and they would all be true. whence she would return to Lyme. which stood.. let me add). That he could not understand why I was not married.

Speaker.?? He did not want to be teased on this subject. only to have two days?? rain on a holiday to change districts. But this steepness in effect tilts it. promising Miss Woodruff that as soon as he had seen his family and provided himself with a new ship??another of his lies was that he was to be promoted captain on his return??he would come back here. Not what he was like. Woman. in some back tap-room. television. clapped on the back by the papas and simpered at by the girls. It was all. be ignorant of the obloquy she was inviting. but she had also a wide network of relations and acquaint-ances at her command.??So the vicar sat down again. And he had always asked life too many questions. then spoke.She led the way into yet another green tunnel; but at the far end of that they came on a green slope where long ago the vertical face of the bluff had collapsed. that is.??It was outrageous.. out of its glass case in the drawing room at Winsyatt. come clean.

??Then.????It is too large for me. ??I will dispense with her for two afternoons. Charles. that Ernestina fetched her diary.000 years. Poulteney. the worst . I know that by now I should be truly dead . This is why we cannot plan.??Madam!??She turned. Smithson. it was another story. as it were . The family had certainly once owned a manor of sorts in that cold green no-man??s-land between Dartmoor and Exmoor. Poulteney??s presence. 1867.??Varguennes recovered. Certhidium portlandicum. as at the concert.?? But the doctor was brutally silent. He murmured.

since there are crevices and sudden falls that can bring disaster. I cannot tell you how. Sarah??s bedroom lies in the black silence shrouding Marlborough House. Tranter. the more real monster. and this moment. Charles thought of that look as a lance; and to think so is of course not merely to de-scribe an object but the effect it has.000 females of the age of ten upwards in the British population.????But it would most certainly matter.?? cried Ernestina. and hand to his shoulder made him turn. which lay sunk in a transverse gully. she took advan-tage of one of the solicitous vicar??s visits and cautiously examined her conscience. until he came simul-taneously to a break in the trees and the first outpost of civilization. to take up marine biology? Perhaps to give up London. and glanced down with the faintest nod of the head. and meet Sarah again. allowing a misplaced chivalry to blind his common sense; and the worst of it was that it was all now deucedly difficult to explain to Ernestina. a hedge-prostitute. Charles passed his secret ordeal with flying colors. on her back. and ray false love will weep.

?? He paused cun-ningly. we have settled that between us. and waited. a slammed door. He came to his sense of what was proper. I felt I would drown in it.??She spoke in a rapid. he was welcome to as much milk as he could drink. fussed over. timid. soon after the poor girl had broken down in front of Mrs. and seemed to hesi-tate. There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. one of whom was stone deaf. If gangrene had inter-vened. had not some last remnant of sanity mercifully stopped me at the door. It had always seemed a grossly unfair parable to Mrs. social stagnation; they knew. But you must show it. which she beats.??Mrs.Charles was about to climb back to the path.

he would do. perhaps. as now. A dry little kestrel of a man. Mr. only a year before. There could not be.Gradually he worked his way up to the foot of the bluffs where the fallen flints were thickest. in the case of Charles. ??Then . Tests vary in shape.. a very limited circle. So let us see how Charles and Ernestina are crossing one particular such desert. as I say. Poulteney. ma??m. It fell open. There was outwardly a cer-tain cynicism about him. He felt himself in that brief instant an unjust enemy; both pierced and deservedly diminished. Strangely..