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226 more than the thing itself. Tread softly—what idiot said that?—tread softly, because you tread on my dreams! Such nonsense! Dreams are more durable than oilcloth. Tread softly, because you tread on the facts of life, would be a far more sensible; command. The facts of life are the things that go into holes, that crack and let you through into ice-cold water. Dreams bear all right; life doesn't."

Lucia laughed softly.

"Decidedly I must have eaten something to disagree with me," she said; "but I'm getting rid of it emotionally, aren't I? Oh, I'm not at loggerheads with life; I'm only at little loggerheads with myself. Years ago I planned to get everything. Well, in a sense I have got everything. I meant to climb out of that wayside ditch at Brixham, to rise out like the larva of a dragonfly, to spread my wings, to climb, to soar. And, indeed, I've got everything I can think of. I am at the top, you know; it is no use denying it. And it isn't a mere smart top; we think, we work, we are tremendously alive. But what next? Oh, Maud, I must think of something next. I've got to go much higher than this. But this, to be exact, is what I am afraid of I am afraid that wherever you get to appears to be dead level. I really must take out my spyglass and find another mountain-peak. Now you say you disagree—disagree."

"But easily, eagerly," she said. "Don't you see, Lucia, you are only dissatisfied with quite the minor things of life. That I can understand is possible, though I don't realize it yet. But when love is yours, when, to crown it, you and I are going to bear children to the men we love, how is it possible not to be far more than content, not to be divinely unsatisfied? That happiness, that divine uncontent, it seems to me, must always rise from height to height. There is no top to it; it joins straight on to the infinite."

Lucia laughed with a sudden harshness of sound.

"Ah, mine does not," she said. "There is a considerable gap."

She rose quickly, giving herself a little shake.

"And I am using all these words to express what can be expressed in half a dozen," she said. "It's a little fit of the blues that I've got. Really, one makes much ado about nothing; that is the worst of having a mind that insists on working. 'Arry and 'Arriet—the mental ones—never wonder and guess about things. If they feel depressed, they say they've got the