Page:The Inner House.djvu/122

118 that might have kept love alive; music, art, literature, grace, culture, society—everything."

"We did not take them. They died."

"And then you dressed us all alike, in the most hideous costume ever invented."

"It was Grout's dress."

"What is the good of being Arch Physician if one cannot have his own way?"

Harry sighed.

"My place is in the laboratory," he said. "I experiment, and I discover. The Suffragan administers. It has always been the rule. Yet you live again, Mildred. Tell me more. I do not understand how you contrive to live again."

"We have a little company of twenty or thirty, who meet together in the evening after the dinner is over. No one else ever comes to the Museum. As soon as it is dark, you know very well, the People all creep home and go to bed; but my friends come here. It was Christine who began it. She found or made the dresses for us; she beguiled us into forgetting the Present and going back to the Past. Now we have succeeded in caring nothing at all about the Present. We began by pretending. It is no longer pretence. The Past lives again, and we hate the Present. Oh, we hate and loathe it!"

"Yes, yes. But how do you revive the Past?"

"We have dances. You used to dance very well formerly, my dear Harry. That was before you walked every day in a grand Procession, and took the highest place in the Public Hall. I wonder if you could dance again? Nature's secrets are not so heavy that they would clog your feet, are they? We sing and play: the old music has been found, and we are beginning to play it properly again. We talk; we act little drawing-room