Page:Night and Day (1919).pdf/209

 partly because I want to get married. I want to have a house of my own. It isn’t possible at home. It’s all very well for you, Henry; you can go your own way. I have to be there always. Besides, you know what our house is. You wouldn’t be happy either, if you didn’t do something. It isn’t that I haven’t the time at home—it’s the atmosphere.”

Here, presumably, she imagined that her cousin, who had listened with his usual intelligent sympathy, raised his eyebrows a little, and interposed:

“Well, but what do you want to do?”

Even in this purely imaginary dialogue, Katharine found it difficult to confide her ambition to an imaginary companion.

“I should like,” she began, and hesitated quite a long time before she forced herself to add, with a change of voice, “to study mathematics—to know about the stars.”

Henry was clearly amazed, but too kind to express all his doubts; he only said something about the difficulties of mathematics, and remarked that very little was known about the stars.

Katharine thereupon went on with the statement of her case.

“I don’t care much whether I ever get to know anything—but I want to work out something in figures—something that hasn’t got to do with human beings. I don’t want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I’m a humbug—I mean, I’m not what. you all take me for. I’m not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really. And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants.”

Having reached this point, instinct told her that she had passed beyond the region in which Henry’s advice could be of any good; and, having rid her mind of its