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 advantage over us there. One misses a lot by attempting to know things thoroughly.”

“He knows Greek thoroughly,” said Katharine. “But then he also knows a good deal about painting, and a certain amount about music. He’s very cultivated—perhaps the most cultivated person I know.”

“And poetry,” Cassandra added.

“Yes, I was forgetting his play,” Katharine remarked, and turning her head as though she saw something that needed her attention in a far corner of the room, she left them.

For a moment they stood silent, after what seemed a deliberate introduction to each other, and Cassandra watched her crossing the room.

“Henry,” she said, next moment, “would say that a stage ought to be no bigger than this drawing-room. He wants there to be singing and dancing as well as acting—only all the opposite of Wagner—you understand?”

They sat down, and Katharine, turning when she reached the window, saw William with his hand raised in gesticulation and his mouth open, as if ready to speak the moment Cassandra ceased.

Katharine’s duty, whether it was to pull a curtain or move a chair, was either forgotten or discharged, but she continued to stand by the window without doing anything. The elderly people were all grouped together round the fire. They seemed an independent, middle-aged community busy with its own concerns. They were telling stories very well and listening to them very graciously. But for her there was no obvious employment.

“If anybody says anything, I shall say that I’m looking at the river,” she thought, for in her slavery to her family traditions, she was ready to pay for her transgression with some plausible falsehood. She pushed aside the blind and looked at the river. But it was a dark night and the water was barely visible. Cabs were passing,