Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/389

THE PAPERS wrong, it was a wrong—she couldn't somehow get out of that; which was a proof, no doubt, that she confusedly tried. The author of Corisanda was sacrificed in the effort—for ourselves it may come to that. Great to poor Maud Blandy as well, for that matter, great, yet also attaching, were the obscurity and ambiguity in which some impulses lived and moved—the rich gloom of their combinations, contradictions, inconsistencies, surprises. It rested her verily a little from her straightness—the line of a character, she felt, markedly like the line of the Edgware Road and of Maida Vale—that she could be queerly inconsistent, and inconsistent in the hustling Strand, where, if anywhere, you had, under pain of hoofs and wheels, to decide whether or no you would cross. She had moments, before shop-windows, into which she looked without seeing, when all the unuttered came over her. She had once told her friend that she pitied everyone, and at these moments, in sharp unrest, she pitied Bight for their tension, in which nothing was relaxed.

It was all too mixed and too strange—each of them in a different corner with a different impossibility. There was her own, in far Kilburnia; and there was her friend's, everywhere—for where didn't he go? and there was Mrs. Chorner's, on the very edge of Park "Line," in spite of all petticoats and marble baths; and there was Beadel-Muffet's, the wretched man, God only knew where—which was what made the whole show supremely incoherent: he ready to give his head, if, as seemed so unlikely, he still had a head, to steal into cover and keep under, out of the glare; he having scoured Europe, it might so well be guessed, for some hole in which the Papers wouldn't find him out, and then having—what else was there by this time to presume?—died, in the hole, as the only way not to see, to hear, to know, let alone be known, heard, seen. Finally, while he lay there relieved by the only relief, here 377