“Perhaps one always envies other people,” Katharine observed vaguely.
“Well, but you've got everything that any one can want.”
Katharine remained silent. She gazed into the fire quietly, and without a trace of self-consciousness. The hostility which she had divined in Mary’s tone had completely disappeared, and she forgot that she had been upon the point of going.
“Well, I suppose I have,” she said at length. “And yet I sometimes think———” She paused; she did not know how to express what she meant.
“It came over me in the Tube the other day,’ she resumed, with a smile; “what is it that makes these people go one way rather than the other? It’s not love; it’s not reason; I think it must be some idea. Perhaps, Mary, our affections are the shadow of an idea. Perhaps there isn’t any such thing as affection in itself. . .” She spoke half-mockingly, asking her question, which she scarcely troubled to frame, not of Mary, or of any one in particular.
But the words seemed to Mary Datchet shallow, supercilious, cold-blooded, and cynical all in one. All her natural instincts were roused in revolt against them.
“I’m the opposite way of thinking, you see,” she said.
“Yes; I know you are,” Katharine replied, looking at her as if now she were about, perhaps, to explain something very important.
Mary could not help feeling the simplicity and good faith that lay behind Katharine’s words.
“I think affection is the only reality,” she said.
“Yes,” said Katharine, almost sadly. She understood that Mary was thinking of Ralph, and she felt it impossible to press her to reveal more of this exalted condition; she could only respect the fact that, in some few cases, life arranged itself thus satisfactorily and pass on. She
