ASCENT 
 
 OF. CALIF. LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES
 
 ASCENT 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCES RUMSEY 
 
 Author of "Mr. Gushing and Mile. Du 
 Chastel and "Cash" 
 
 Boni and Liveright 
 New York 1922
 
 Copyright, 1922, by 
 
 BONI AND LlVERIGHT, INC. 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 
 2132435
 
 Non mortuis laudabunt te, Domine, necque omnes 
 qui descendant in infernum. . . .
 
 LATE in a summer afternoon, and above all an 
 afternoon when the light is not bright but pale 
 and grey with the first twilight, to turn from 
 the wide highway stretching from Wickford to the 
 south into the still deep side road which leads to the 
 highest of the Wickford hills, is to lose one s self in 
 increasing loneliness in the increasing dusk. The 
 villages scatter into isolated houses, the dusty frame 
 barns grow fewer, and the hum of the perpetually 
 passing motors drops away. After a mile or two the 
 ground begins to rise with the eastern slope of the 
 valley. The stretch of country is so far towards the 
 footlands of the Alleghenies that, as the road lifts, the 
 fields below can be seen narrowing and sharpening 
 into ridges, like the surface of a mounting sea. The 
 waves of grain and the roughened waters of corn flow 
 into longer and sparser lines until they thin into the 
 greyer tint of the stony hillsides. The green amongst 
 the rocks gradually pales and fades; and the byway 
 itself becomes at last a path and finally only a broken 
 track, which rises sharply to ascend the last lift of 
 the hill. 
 
 From this summit the earth lies freely open to the 
 sky, with one the reflection of the vast undulations of 
 the other. To the south the signs of habitation remain. 
 The eye can still trace where the streams must begin 
 to widen and grow deep and the long white farmhouses 
 gather into villages, and divine that where the folds 
 
 C9]
 
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 of the hills unclose the last sunshine must still be 
 lighting the gold in the grain. But to the west the 
 slopes swing into deeper shadows and mount more 
 and more largely, with the moving effect, as their 
 surfaces touch the paler sky, of long dark lines traced 
 against the fluidity of light; and at the horizon they 
 merge inperceptibly in the mountains. 
 
 Perhaps the fact that this is a last vantage point 
 makes more poignant one s sense of a wider and 
 darker country beyond. The summit itself, with its 
 split rocks and its faint show of a stunted underbrush, 
 is the first to show the complete immunity of a region 
 which is still a wilderness. The last farm runs out 
 into stubble three miles back and the last road ends 
 at its base. The glimpses of habitation, in the country 
 immediately below, are reminders that the progression 
 of the seasons, in the valley which must deepen to 
 green and redden to brown under their touch, leaves 
 the monotony of the upland unbroken. It seems 
 beyond the sequences in the circle of fulfilment; and 
 the picture one most readily forms of it is with the 
 moving drift, across its barren face, of a perpetual 
 snow, falling with the same immensity as the immensity 
 of the skies. 
 
 As one s glance lowers from the wider view which, 
 in the thinning light, flows out with all its significances 
 and carries thought beyond the horizon, and drops to 
 the roughened surface of the ground, one sees that at 
 one s feet, and scarring the broken earth with its 
 unmistakable outline, there is a grave. There is no 
 stone, no attempt at an enclosure, and no effort to 
 forestall the ultimate pervasion of nature. The narrow 
 mound is the sole commemoration. Its presence breaks, 
 
 [10]
 
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 with a sudden severance, on the accepted premises 
 which the sight of these large spaces of beauty has 
 inspired and on the classic allusions of death with pro 
 gression. It does not lift imagination to the freedom 
 and finality of a paradise. It rather draws the fancy 
 back to all that the living being, before evanescence, is 
 compelled to experience; not to a poetised renunciation 
 of life, but to the surrender inexplicably forced upon a 
 sentient creature; and it draws it with the brutal jerk 
 of a chain.
 
 II 
 
 OLD Elias Lacy had come to Ware within the 
 memory of only its older inhabitants. He had 
 been young enough, at the time, to make both 
 his situation and his attitude peculiar. To the few 
 people who questioned him he replied briefly that he 
 had lost his money; later he explained, in his odd 
 moments of confidence, that he had lost his ambition. 
 But from the first days of his residence there, his tall 
 figure, in the drowsing village, was instinct with the 
 energy of a tradition. His clothes had a set of worn 
 gallantry, his voice the easy inflexions of dealing in 
 many societies, and his light thin hands the delicacy, 
 in their movements, of a long-trained taste. The time 
 of this was far enough distant to throw some of the 
 suggestions of romance around his position, and Ware 
 had wondered, for the first months, into what category 
 of definition the contradiction of his presence there 
 could fit. But the shrewd country judgments, if they 
 had not penetrated him, had none the less, with the 
 passage of time, placed him, and had understood that 
 there was in his closed personality some disaster of 
 character beyond the disasters of action. 
 
 As he grew into age he increased his assertions, with 
 his smile drier from year to year, that he had come 
 to like cheap rents. He remained, he said, with a 
 brevity in his comments which suited the fine egoistic 
 wrinkles around his eyes, because all the more sympa 
 thetic places were distasteful to him. They had been 
 
 [12]
 
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 full of reproaches when he was young, and now 
 they were full of reminders. He could stand being 
 reproached by the Ware people, whom he frankly 
 admitted he detested, because they did not compre 
 hend him; but he could not stand the reproaches of 
 more animate beings, who would meet him with his 
 own irrefutability. "I know my cynicism is cheap," 
 he constantly told Mr. Basker, the Episcopal clergy 
 man. "But so am I; it is quite logical. I m not tragic 
 enough to justify you in praying for me. I m not Job. 
 I am merely the reaction from Emerson and transcen 
 dentalism." His penetration had discovered the fact 
 that what people most resented and he savoured their 
 resentment was their incapacity to name and date 
 what was wrong in him. They did not understand 
 wrong, he invariably ended these acidulous conversa 
 tions. To them wrong was merely the absence of 
 right; his wrong, he thanked heaven, was interesting 
 and constructive. It was committed with entire con 
 sciousness, and he knew it was worth while; and as he 
 lifted his whitened head, with a quick action of intol 
 erance, he seemed, even to the narrow range of such 
 opinion, to be brushed by poetry and by a sense of 
 some larger fate that it understood. 
 
 His wife had in the earliest years dropped with 
 imperceptible ease into lethargy. It was not that she 
 became part of the little world of the women around 
 her; between them and her there were evident sepa 
 rations of capacity; but she did not trouble to keep 
 alive her differences with it, and in time they ceased 
 to be potential. Her husband plainly expected her 
 not to show dissatisfaction with restrictions against 
 which he so constantly chafed. Their relation was 
 
 [13]
 
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 explained by the fact of her flawless beauty, and his 
 eyes never lit on her without a tolerant amusement at 
 what he evidently regarded as the immorality of his 
 admiration for her. Her early death had scarcely 
 touched the current of his habits. He continued to 
 sun himself in the patch of garden behind his little 
 frame house, with his future bound, as he said, by the 
 nervous irregularities of its architecture. 
 
 It was absurd, as he was the first to acknowledge, to 
 be so clear in one s vision, and yet so annoyed; but 
 what else could one expect in the face of the incon 
 sistency of Ware? Its refusal to limit its interest to 
 what suited the class of its intelligence made it as 
 spurious, in his eyes, as the pseudo-colonial portico of 
 the Court House and the imitation stone which orna 
 mented so many of the house fronts. How could one 
 ask him to deal dispassionately with people who 
 thought that taste could be acquired and never applied, 
 who admired the stained glass in the Methodist church, 
 and, for all their study of the Art of the East, thrust 
 the most extravagantly bad Japanese fans between the 
 slats of the shutters, on the porches where they per 
 petually rocked? He could not tolerate their limita 
 tions for the sake of their types; yet, as he never failed 
 to finish his raillery, was he himself any better? He 
 read his Wordsworth, and raised his glance to the raw 
 wild beauty of the northern valley without seeing it. 
 Even the landscape lost its loveliness under the wreck 
 age of his dissection. All he could consistently con 
 sider was his irritation. His own inadequacies were 
 far more garish, he insisted, than Ware s. It produced 
 inanimate contradictions, like .bad architecture and 
 dead minds; and he had produced a constant and 
 
 [14]
 
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 conscious contradiction and his look, as he considered 
 it, always sharpened to its most incisive irony in 
 that his taste was forever being proved ineffectual and 
 ridiculous in his son. 
 
 His failure here was what old Lacy named his single 
 complete distinction. When Philip Lacy had passed 
 from a pale angular little boy into a young man equally 
 pale, with no charm in his attenuation and no intelli 
 gence in the querulousness of his eyes, the father s look 
 had changed with his son s. From the time of the 
 definite establishment of his disappointment, his sharp 
 ness had had a new edge. Philip was difficult to blame; 
 his father not only acknowledged it but declared it. 
 He had worked well in high school, and had for years 
 been paid a small salary at the only lawyer s office in 
 the village. What old Lacy found most intolerable 
 in him was his complete lack of mistakes. He was all 
 wrong, he would insist, and never wrong in traceable 
 details. There was never an occasion when one couldn t 
 irrefutably prove that he was right. "You don t need 
 sin, my dear fellow," he had never tired of saying; 
 "but you need to have been a sinner. Be a reformed 
 one I see one couldn t get your imagination past that. 
 But you need the experience of abnegation. It enriches 
 life; it creates taste. I should think heaven would 
 revolt at your correctness. It s the first use I ve ever 
 discovered for myself. My character was evidently so 
 composed that I should give you the distinction of a 
 martyrdom. Come! Don t stand there staring! Go 
 to your room and pray for me." . . . 
 
 If Philip had not enough energy of nature for the 
 solace of a definite egoism, he gradually developed, 
 in this constant opposition, the tenacious obstinacy
 
 ASCENT 
 
 which was his only form of strength. His father did 
 not see the processes of this growth, since he roused 
 himself from his Boccaccio or his Alfieri too seldom 
 to note any of his son s qualities ; but on the evening 
 when Philip paused, on his way to bed, and with his 
 hand on the refuge of the sitting room door announced 
 that he had decided to marry Rebecca Trail, who lived 
 next door, Mr. Lacy s silent stare of response took 
 in the finality of the determination. He had never 
 hesitated, as he said to himself, to recognise the final. 
 In his pause he was evidently passing, in retrospect, 
 over the causes which had made the inevitability of 
 this result, back to his wife and to farther things 
 beyond Philip s memory. When he spoke it was oddly 
 without the recrimination for which his son had braced 
 himself. He briefly said that the two could live with 
 him while he endured and have his bit of money when 
 he died; he had no doubt they would be very happy. 
 He had no comment to offer concerning Rebecca except 
 that, across the narrow strip of lawn, he had long 
 observed her daily habits as indicative of her mind, 
 and the specious tidiness at the front of her house and 
 the familiarity of confusion at the back; and that 
 since Philip wished to marry a housekeeper, it might 
 have been well to choose one with aspirations. But 
 Philip must not make the mistake of supposing he 
 would be intolerant; his intolerance would always be 
 reserved for himself. 
 
 Old Lacy was not entirely without opportunities 
 of reaction. He had been attracted one day, in the 
 Wickford museum, by the face of a stooping, fragilely 
 built man, of young middle age, who was bending in 
 an absorbed pleasure over the few Chinese bronzes. 
 
 [16]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 In the deserted rooms they had fallen easily into talk, 
 and later into a bond of friendship. Wickford was a 
 centre, with the sophisticated political movements and 
 the growing museum of the smaller of the large 
 American cities. It was because of the museum that, 
 a year or so before their meeting, John Devon had 
 established himself there. Lacy learned, in their sub 
 sequent talks, that he was a scientist of repute, whose 
 works on minerals were recognised and quoted. He 
 had spent half a large fortune in acquiring one of the 
 famous collections of jades, and had travelled to all 
 the odd corners of the world to complete it. His taste 
 for rarities, he told old Lacy, had driven him from the 
 larger museums, and he had determined, by the advice 
 of a curator there, to fix the distinction of the Wick- 
 ford foundation by endowing a wing to receive his 
 collection. 
 
 It was one of the forces which constituted the 
 attraction the two had for each other that Devon was 
 feeling his way, at his age, to the impermeable attitude 
 which Lacy had long since achieved. He was essen 
 tially a person of attitudes, the old man had at once 
 divined, since his own interest was always roused by 
 any form of an attempted composition of character. 
 By the light of his own logic he had seen the entirety 
 of Devon his taciturnity and his sudden loquacious 
 ness, his dry negations and his inexplicable appeal for 
 sympathy; that there was sentimentality in his harsh 
 ness and superstition in his scepticism. The younger 
 man seldom marked and dated the causes which had 
 created his posture. Where he gave himself away, as 
 old Lacy thought, behind the protection of his smile, 
 was in his dependence on it as a defence.
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "By the way," Devon had said to him, on the 
 occasion of one of their only personal exchanges, as 
 his friend was about to set out for an evening train, 
 after a long day spent in examining the flaws in a 
 rose-coloured crystal, "someone said your son was 
 married." 
 
 Old Lacy paused at the foot of the steps and looked 
 back to the open doorway. The compact little brick 
 house, in the long row of the silent street, always 
 impressed him by its unavowed reticences, and he 
 thought, as he turned, how little he knew of it, except 
 the light oak table in the library and the lunch which 
 was always brought in on a battered tray by a hurried 
 and talkative servant. He had frequently reflected 
 on Devon s obvious neglect of human relations when 
 he saw the arrival of the tray; once it had led him to 
 ask where Mrs. Devon kept herself, and Devon had 
 replied, as cursorily as the old man himself, that he 
 thanked heaven she detested all that he valued and 
 that she was to educate their son in New York. They 
 had been so enchained, in the hot spring hours, with 
 the blinds lowered and their eyes running from a 
 reference book to the gleam of crystallised sunlight on 
 the table between them, that the roll of sleepy traffic 
 in the sleeping street had never sounded for Mr. Lacy 
 and the arrival of the slip-shod girl with her burden 
 had had no significance for the amused curiosity of 
 his eyes. But now, with Devon s question, he was 
 struck more than ever by the inexplicable appeal in 
 the lack of consistency they betrayed. It occurred 
 to him that Devon s philosophy was created by his 
 case and not by a knowledge of general experience, and 
 the discovery seemed to link the younger man s evident 
 
 [18]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 private uncertainties, his loneliness with his solitude 
 and his interest with his indifference. 
 
 "Yes, Philip s married. Her name is Rebecca, 
 Rebecca Trail. She s the aristocracy of Ware not 
 near enough to the soil to have its flavour. The per 
 fection of her pretentiousness reminds me of the 
 perfection of your vase there; I suppose all perfection s 
 alike! I don t specially mind;" he took off his hat 
 and ran his hand through his close white hair, with 
 his critical glance on the meagre hyacinths set in the 
 border below the tortuous porch railing; "no, I really 
 don t. Philip was bound to do it, or of course he never 
 would have done it; and what a shock I should have 
 had if he had upset my theories of him! All I object 
 to is the usual attitude about such things; the supposi 
 tion that, if they ve no money, at least they are in love, 
 don t you know? Love can be quite as ugly as it can 
 be wicked. Taste, my dear fellow, it s the possession 
 of taste that damns us; not because it judges crystals, 
 but because it judges ugliness. It never lets one suffer 
 in peace. Ye gods, but this house of yours is as ugly 
 in its way as this marriage; who could have thought, 
 do you suppose, of anything so constructively hideous? 
 From whom do you rent it? And your boy what s he 
 doing?" 
 
 Devon s thin face was lowered and his foot, as he 
 leaned against the door post, pushed to and fro the 
 edge of the frayed mat. "According to your principle, 
 it doesn t much matter what he does. His condemna 
 tion, like your son s, will take care of itself. At 
 present," he smiled "it assumes, I must admit, 
 impeccable forms. His mother s using the most 
 approved methods to accomplish it."
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "Well, you know," old Lacy bent his stiff back 
 and sniffed delicately the scent of the hyacinths, "one 
 has always the choice to be lost or saved. Even 
 Philip had that. Little John s really little, isn t he? 
 Ten, twelve what is it? Oh, I suppose you ll do as 
 badly as I did; you can t do worse; only don t forget 
 that it isn t to a hell you ll send him by your reasonable 
 ness, but to a Rebecca." 
 
 The dry charm of Devon s smile shone. "It s rather 
 a job, isn t it, to be sensitive in only the right places?" 
 
 Mr. Lacy met his eyes. "A fearful job. And my 
 way, you know, isn t much fun this looking at illu 
 sion through the eyes of disillusion. It s a formula 
 that s the best one can say for it; and sometimes when 
 one s not got a ritual, a formula helps us to be what we 
 pretend we are. Well, and the boy?" 
 
 "He s a nice little chap one of the steady sort. As 
 long as I keep my back turned, he may grow into 
 something. It makes his mother less absurd when 
 she s rid of me. All she wants is enough money 
 and a grievance. Oh, she ll do well enough for 
 him." 
 
 "I ve no patience with this modern way of hating." 
 Lacy glanced at his watch. "I m the one who has 
 mastered hate who discovered it was a fine art. Yet 
 when I thought I could impart it to some one, all I ve 
 succeeded in doing was to teach Philip to be cross! 
 I ve no mercy for myself, you see; he s not naturally 
 cross I taught him to be ! Oh, my dear Devon, don t 
 sublimate me as a stoic or a dreamer. I m an irritable 
 old man, whose restlessness has no motion and whose 
 resignation has no peace; and good heavens, my 
 train!" . . . 
 
 [20]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 It was in the spring of the following year that Mr. 
 Lacy stood in the bow window of his little dining room 
 and looked out at the desiccated lilac bush which, even 
 in its age and after continuous neglect, lifted a single 
 spiral of pale mauve against the pane. The window 
 was open and the scent of upturned earth and the per 
 fume of the flower drifted in to meet the perfume of 
 the pine wood in the grate. He appeared to compare 
 them critically, with his habitual air of absent 
 appraisal more attentuated than usual and the pecu 
 liar directness of his blue eyes less incisive, as if he 
 were repassing in his thoughts the long line of springs 
 behind him, whose loveliness had always discovered 
 him in rooms with light oak woodwork, with bad 
 carpets, with a clatter of plates from the kitchen con 
 tinually in his ears and the prospect out of the win 
 dows bound by a neighbourhood whose idea of beauty 
 was prettiness and whose curiosity was inquisitiveness. 
 Then he turned to take up the single bottle of port on 
 the table beside him, with his thin veined hand quick 
 and sure in all its movements. The door had opened 
 and closed in the last moments; and the tall young 
 doctor who leaned against it, declined, with a dry nod 
 which betrayed his opinion of Mr. Lacy, his host s 
 motion to a chair. 
 
 "She ll live, then?" Mr. Lacy put his question 
 briefly. 
 
 "Yes, Mr. Lacy; I take it that she ll live." 
 
 Mr. Lacy s hand motioned to the glasses on the 
 table. "You won t, my dear doctor? But the last of 
 my best port you will, eh? I got it from my grand 
 father who saw the casks unloaded at Salem. All 
 these years I ve regarded it as an image of morality; 
 
 [21]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 not because I specially like port as a matter of fact 
 I abhor it but because the opposition between such 
 wine and my poverty was such a good discipline for 
 me. Absurd, isn t it, this thing we loosely call life? 
 And here we ve brought another creature into it! 
 You say she ll undoubtedly pull through?" 
 
 "Oh, she ll pull through. A child with vitality like 
 that is bound to react. I ve thought so all along, and 
 to-day I m sure of it." The doctor s glance he was 
 a distant relative of Philip s wife was again defen 
 sive. "From her poor mother she s evidently inherited 
 a constitution." 
 
 Mr. Lacy smiled at the brown lights in his glass. 
 "Are you trying to tell me my son s got no chest and 
 no marrow? Because you don t know nearly as much 
 about it as I do. No, no, I owe Rebecca a debt. I 
 can t say her death has cost me much. If you ll allow 
 me to put it so, I don t believe it cost her much either. 
 Probably, on the whole, to die was easier for her than 
 to live. The emotion of which she always seemed to 
 me most supremely incapable was enthusiasm. I ve 
 often wondered, in the last days, while I ve watched 
 Philip try to feel more grief than he s constitutionally 
 fitted to feel, why sorrow is the sole emotion which it s 
 not considered indelicate to indulge to excess. But 
 there it is; Rebecca, the astounding creature, sur 
 prised me; and of course I like to pretend to myself 
 that the one thing I haven t been for a long time," 
 his smile deepened, "is surprised." 
 
 "Mrs. Lacy went through a great deal;" the 
 doctor s observation had its inevitable sententious- 
 ness. 
 
 "Bless you, of course she did! It s not so easy, it 
 
 [22]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 appears, to bring a child into the world. But that 
 she succeeded, and that then she died ... no, no, 
 that s not what has surprised me. Dear me, no! It s 
 that the baby, her daughter and Philip s, has evidently 
 the taste of life. I m scarcely a romanticist. But I 
 admit it s stirred my imagination to see, for the last 
 fortnight, that tiny being cling with every inch of her 
 incredibly small body to all that I m so long sick of. 
 By Jove, Rebecca s child s got a will!" 
 
 "Well, I don t know that we take much to that kind 
 of idea here in these parts. I should say," the doctor 
 had his caution, "that she had plain vitality." 
 
 "Vitality and what makes vitality? Mere blood? 
 This absurd school that thinks will is the result of 
 things and not the cause of them! No, no, I tell you 
 she s made herself live." 
 
 The port had warmed the doctor s manner a little. 
 "Of course we had everything against us. I admit 
 that a few days ago I wasn t sure, one way or the 
 other. When you can t get an infant nourished . . ." 
 
 Mr. Lacy s glance had passed to the window again 
 and to the house next door, discernible through a 
 hedge of still bare trees and with its decorous pros 
 perity dozing in the sunshine. 
 
 "By all the laws of continuity she should have died; 
 it s sentimentally fitting that the child of two such 
 people should leave this world with her mother. All 
 their bad romances say so. Well, what saved her, I 
 ask you? Something no Trail ever had, and no Lacy 
 either will! Oh, we ve been worse than the Trails 
 in our way; I don t deny it. It s worse to fail in your 
 intelligence than to succeed in your stupidity. Good 
 heaven, no one could be enough of a fool to think I 
 
 [23]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 had a will. I ve obstinacy, but I ve no will. No, it s 
 too much for me. If you could show me the perfec 
 tion of mediocrity better than it was exemplified in 
 her mother ..." He paused and his smile again set 
 on his port . "Though there s one thing! In the even 
 sea of your cousin s dreariness, did you ever notice 
 that she had a single beauty her ears? Yes, it s 
 true! She had delightful little ears; set close and 
 high don t you know? Really charming!" 
 
 The doctor fell into one of the silences which Mr. 
 Lacy frequently inspired. He looked with his masked 
 reticence at his host, and finally, as the more expli 
 cable of the two, back to his wine. "He seemed to 
 think," the old gentleman said to his son that evening, 
 "that I ought to realise that everyone else has ears. 
 He s an odd young man he tends to the safety of the 
 generic. He regards the special as a little indecent. 
 Ah! That s the word! Rebecca s ears were actually 
 a little indecent. Weren t they, eh? No of course 
 you never noticed them!" 
 
 They had gone by mutual consent to the narrow 
 porch, when they rose from the supper table, and 
 drawn two rocking chairs away from the infiltration 
 of light through the closed blinds of the sitting room. 
 The arc lamp at the crossing a few yards away hissed 
 and flickered in the stillness, and every now and then 
 the noises of the kitchen came from the house next 
 door. Rebecca was in this spot still peculiarly 
 present. The high fumed oak stand on which stood 
 a worn Boston fern, in its brown glazed pot, and the 
 hard bright pink cushions on the chairs, had resumed 
 her single effort at the creation of a home. The pub 
 licity of the porch had perhaps seemed to her a pro- 
 
 [24]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 tection. Mr. Lacy had a penetrative effect. He filled 
 the little rooms with the discomfort of uncertainty, 
 with his unexpected violences, his unexpected laugh, 
 and his capitulations which were always more disturb 
 ing than his resistances; and in this comparatively 
 peopled surrounding, she had evidently felt herself 
 secure from his bewildering contact. 
 
 Philip had drawn his chair, with unvarying habit, 
 so that he could discern anyone who passed up or 
 down the street. An instinctive preoccupation with 
 other people s errands was his only form of social 
 feeling, and as his father frequently told him he was 
 happy only in a promiscuity which had none of the 
 interest of human intercourse. He sat with his knees 
 pressed together, his finger tips against each other, 
 and his feet rising from heel to toe with the motion 
 of his chair. Old Lacy noted these details, with a 
 set determination to omit none of the annoyance they 
 caused him, before he continued. 
 
 "I went up for a moment after supper; that trained 
 nurse is such a fool. She d put a hot water bottle at 
 the foot of the crib, and had wrapped it only in a 
 worn-out towel; idiot! I told your mother, years ago, 
 that we couldn t afford cheap linen. Doesn t the 
 woman know flannel when she sees it?" 
 
 Philip sighed. "It s very hard all this responsi 
 bility of a young baby that s come upon me. And 
 the nurse says she ll have to leave at the end of the 
 month. Her brother s to be married to a girl who 
 lives down at Cold Springs. He does very well he 
 works in a shoe factory and they ve saved quite a 
 bit. That s one thing I m thankful for; poor Rebecca 
 can t see all that s hard for me." 
 
 [25]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "My dear Philip, have you ever stopped to think 
 that the only feeling Rebecca created in you was an 
 added obstinacy? No? Well, I have." 
 
 Philip rocked for a moment in silence. He had 
 acquired the habit, in self-defence, of falling back on 
 this safe sense of obscurity in regard to what his 
 father said and of an even pursuit of his own thoughts. 
 "Well, it s a terrible thing to be left as I am; I never 
 expected it no, never. Why, only the week before 
 the baby came I said to Joseph Trail I met him 
 just at the corner, by the church that Rebecca had 
 never looked better. I really did. He remembers it, 
 because the day of the funeral he told Carrie Salter 
 so. Of course I didn t hear him, but Carrie said so 
 to Norah, that night, when Norah went over to the 
 Salters to borrow some olive oil." He glanced, with 
 habitual unease, at his father s erect form. "Some 
 times it seems to me just too much; that I, of all 
 people, should have had it happen to me!" 
 
 Mr. Lacy swerved suddenly. His long habit of 
 intensiveness had given him the power of breaking 
 his rigid silences with all his force of attack. He 
 brought his closed fist down on the arm of his chair 
 and his voice, which had in it a sound strange to 
 Philip, who was so accustomed to his censure, shook. 
 
 "By heaven, you don t know even the little when 
 you see it; you actually don t! Can t you understand 
 that it s not Rebecca who s important, or you or me? 
 If Rebecca has any consciousness, I ll tell you what 
 she is she s glad. She knows now if she knows 
 anything that she ought to be dead. Every woman 
 who s produced a child is forced to admit, con 
 sciously or subconsciously, certain truths. They re 
 
 [26]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 large truths, they re vital truths. Rebecca oh, let 
 us finish with Rebecca! She d be the first to tell you 
 now that she doesn t matter. What matters solely is 
 that little creature upstairs that creature to whom, if 
 I swing for it, I am going to give a chance!" 
 
 Philip s rocking had ceased; he fingered his watch 
 chain helplessly, with the single fear, in the confusion 
 of his mind, that the Trails might be on their porch 
 within earshot. 
 
 "She has clung to life!" Mr. Lacy s voice lifted 
 with menace. "She s beat back annihilation. She s an 
 ugly, strong little thing all resistance and all attack. 
 Oh, I don t fool myself about her. Probably she ll 
 turn out as educated and as unintelligent as all Ameri 
 can women. I ll dish her, if she doesn t dish herself, 
 I take it. But she s got her force of personality. 
 That s what s between her and me. She understands 
 it I know it! She understands that you re an acci 
 dent and that her mother, poor soul, was one of those 
 accidents that happen to all people who are accidents. 
 She knows that I m the one to give her a hand up; well, 
 she ll have it! I tell you, I respect that child!" 
 
 Philip cleared his voice, with the vague sense that 
 this was more violent than his father s usual outbursts 
 and must be arrested; he finally brought out, with an 
 instinctive attempt at the safety of a diversion: 
 "Since she s so much better, I suppose we might ven 
 ture to think of a christening." 
 
 Mr. Lacy s hand again fell on his chair. "Exactly, 
 a christening! You re perfection itself; and call her 
 Rebecca Trail Lacy, after her mother ah, I m wrong, 
 her poor dear mother. But I can tell you one thing;" 
 he turned on Philip, through the obscurity; "she s to 
 
 [27]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 be disposed of by me. She s not to be bothered by 
 stupidities, she s not to be christened. I ll have none 
 of that nonsense. Her name do you hear me? her 
 name s Olive." 
 
 Philip had never more desired the power of 
 insistence. He had an outraged conviction of the 
 comments of the neighbourhood, and he whipped up 
 his resistance. "But why Olive?" 
 
 "Never mind why. I knew a woman once Olive 
 was her name do you see? Oh, centuries and cen 
 turies ago ... a strange creature. And all across 
 the centuries she s been with me. . . . That s some 
 thing wiser people than you can t understand, the 
 way the furtive passing physical contacts perpetuate 
 themselves in one s spirit. For me this child named 
 herself Olive when she refused to die; and who are 
 you and I," Mr. Lacy s malice gleamed like a light 
 in the stillness, "to interfere with her decisions for 
 herself?" 
 
 Philip made some murmur of reply; it struck him 
 as the most incongruous baptismal ceremony he had 
 ever imagined, with his thoughts still circling about 
 a lace dress for the baby and a profusion of white 
 flowers, and himself in the double emotionality of his 
 fatherhood and his grief. 
 
 Mr. Lacy rose, jerked his chair from his path, and 
 turned towards the door. "So that s settled. And 
 you ll never, resign yourself to it, see anything of 
 yourself or her mother, or of accidents and failures 
 in her. She won t need a saving grace; I know. . . ." 
 His look shone again. "I ve examined her ears, and 
 thank God they re rather ugly!" 
 
 [28]
 
 Ill 
 
 MR. LACY never entered the child s room 
 without an accentuated sense of the return 
 in her unintelligent glance. It had frequently 
 struck him in his experience that the ways in which 
 personality is made are traceable by the finer percep 
 tion; and though he could have smiled at the extrava 
 gance of the thought, he felt, each time he looked at 
 the little Olive, that her character was composing itself 
 under his eyes. She seemed not only to extend, as she 
 grew, the range of sharp and inquisitive senses, but to 
 feel about sometimes it seemed to him positively that 
 for the ways she could impress and impose her 
 self. She was always and increasingly possessed of a 
 determination so definite that it carried a suggestion 
 of a strength far beyond her capacity. Her actions 
 were acute with her vitality; and from the hours when 
 he sat beside her bed, and later beside her little 
 carriage, drawn out of the sun on Rebecca s porch, 
 and watched the growing motions of her legs and arms 
 and the reflective power creep into her eyes, he had 
 more and more a sense of the confirmation of his fan 
 tastic idea. 
 
 As the months passed and lengthened, it strengthened 
 with her strength. Throughout her childish relation 
 with him, with her old nurse and with her father, he 
 fancied that he could trace in her this odd effect of a 
 calculation. He never lost sight of the pressure of her 
 tenacity or the pulse of her will. She had become 
 
 [29]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 active and long, with fine bones and little of the usual 
 baby plumpness; and every day Mr. Lacy felt in her 
 a new restlessness. She learned to walk and to talk 
 with the same definiteness, and always, as he guessed, 
 with her quick eyes watching and searching for the 
 new ways of management and manipulation which 
 were becoming apparent to her. He divined already 
 the rapidity and dominance of her quality of response. 
 If he brought her a toy, when she was three or four, 
 Mr. Lacy could have sworn that if he himself showed 
 no admiration for her interest in it, that interest ceased. 
 She was fonder of her tyranny of old Norah, as it 
 seemed to him, than of all Norah s heavily kind care; 
 and she was undoubtedly more diverted in watching the 
 contraction of her father s pale eyebrows and of his 
 pained protests that really she was a strange child to be 
 Rebecca s daughter, than of sitting on his lap and 
 playing with his watch chain. 
 
 It was her treatment of Philip, indeed, which first 
 convinced her grandfather of the beginnings of her 
 selective sense. The year that she was six he could 
 measure the difference with which her eyes passed 
 from him to Philip and from Philip back to him; and 
 finally he was sure that they rested on him whenever 
 he was at his usual task of condemning his son s ineffi 
 ciencies with understanding. She one day even told 
 him that her father and Norah were stupid, scarcely 
 with rancour but with the air of having reached a 
 conclusion which corresponded with his own. It was 
 evident to him that she had begun to listen. She had 
 heard him say so often that his son was illogical and 
 Norah slow that her first observations took the tincture 
 of his. Mr. Lacy grew to have a delightful sense of 
 
 [30]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 her pleasure in his company not based on a facile 
 sentimentality, as he told himself, but because of the 
 added interest it gave the flavour of his own penetra 
 tive adjectives, when he heard them in her mouth. 
 
 Yet if she began to want reasons and facts, they 
 always, as he traced it, came back to herself. When 
 the Salter house, further along the street, burned to 
 the ground, Philip was disturbed by Olive s instant 
 assumption that the catastrophe was after all unimpor 
 tant since it could make no conceivable difference to 
 the Lacys comfort; or that when a little boy, who 
 lived opposite, died in the worst suffering of diphtheria, 
 her only interest should be her personal avoidance of 
 contagion. "She actually said," he told his father, 
 " what do I care as long as it s not me? 
 
 Mr. Lacy s laugh broke out. "You always welcome 
 everything with a preconceived sentiment, don t you? 
 It s astonishing to be so pat as you are, and to have 
 no sense of fitness. Well, and do you think may 
 one ask? that you re going to bring Olive up by the 
 Ten Commandments?" 
 
 "I m sure I don t know why not." Philip had been 
 exasperated as far as his obstinacy. "After all, I happen 
 to believe in them, if you don t." 
 
 "Good heavens, my dear fellow, I shan t stop you! 
 It s not nearly as simple as that. It s Olive herself 
 who will stop you." 
 
 "You mean, I suppose, that you ll encourage her 
 not to obey them;" Philip had never had more clearly 
 his latent sense that he was right, crippled by his 
 personal inhibitions. "No, it s shocking, father, that 
 she should go on like this aping in you what she 
 can t understand."
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Mr. Lacy s face grew graver. "I mean that she 
 hasn t the capacity to obey them. Oh, don t worry; 
 she ll never flatten into sin any more than she ll flatten 
 into virtue! She s got judgment and she s got sense. 
 It s her own judgment and her own sense, I admit; but 
 I doubt if you ever impose on her yours." His look 
 wavered on the edge of a smile. "The child s got a 
 touch of the fateful don t you see? She s all eager 
 ness, and yet she can t absorb." 
 
 He had begun, in the same summer, to plan Olive s 
 lessons; and it was not only the interest and contagion 
 of her awkward curiosity which added to his view of 
 her. If her look, as it continually turned to him, 
 expanded and enriched his world, it also had the power 
 to contract it to the warmth of the personal. It pleased 
 him as no spontaneous action could have pleased him 
 that the more he told her and the wider doors he opened 
 for her, the more readily and warmly her hand slipped 
 into his. In his extravagance of view, she seemed 
 already to prove his theory about her. She felt her way 
 into his personality, he could have said, and found how 
 much she loved him as her intelligence grew. But if 
 her affection could withstand the hard rulings of his 
 mind, he had to admit, with his wry look, that it was 
 through her own mind that he reached her affection. 
 
 "Do you like to be with me?" he abruptly asked her, 
 one morning when she came, fresh and hot from an hour 
 amongst the flower beds, to the sitting room with her 
 reader. 
 
 "Of course, grandfather, I love to dig; but if I have 
 to come in from the garden" . . . she slipped down on 
 his knees and traced with her thin brown finger the 
 thin blue veins on his hand. 
 
 [32]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "I ll do, eh?" 
 
 "I ve not much choice, have I? Just father and 
 Norah! But I think you re dreadfully interesting. I 
 like you for being so disagreeable. Of course father 
 thinks it wrong to be disagreeable. But I m sure you 
 have a much better time than he does. Everyone s 
 afraid of you; and that s what s fun, isn t it? That s 
 what I want to have everyone afraid of me." 
 
 Mr. Lacy hesitated before he spoke again; his mind 
 had so leapt ahead of her childhood that he found him 
 self using, in dealing with her, his own thoughts if not 
 his own terms. He lifted her long brown braid of hair 
 and drew it through his fingers, with one of his sudden 
 changes of tone. "After all, my dear, I m much more 
 dreadful to my useless self than to anyone else!" 
 
 Olive threw up her head, with a motion familiar to 
 her. "Well, I shall be," she spoke clearly, "just as 
 dreadful as I can." 
 
 "It s very lonely, to be dreadful," said Mr. Lacy 
 briefly; he did not know whether his tone quite con 
 cealed his sense of the odd earnestness which underlay 
 all their conversations. 
 
 "You seem to like being lonely; perhaps I shall." 
 She had the sudden frown he had noted in her when 
 she was reflecting. "Though of course it wouldn t be 
 such fun if you were always alone, would it? It 
 wouldn t be such fun" . . . she slipped unconsciously 
 into Philip s favourite descriptive phrase of his father 
 "because then you d have no one to take things 
 out on." 
 
 Her grandfather again waited. He always asserted 
 so openly before her his freedom from all the conven 
 tionalities of altruism that it saturated the atmosphere 
 
 [33]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 she breathed. But the sound of his acidulous theories 
 on her lips gave him for the first time an arresting 
 impression. 
 
 "But what earthly good does it after all do, pussy, 
 to have people think you re dreadful?" 
 
 "Now you re trying to talk like father;" her eyes 
 held him; "and it s not a bit like you. No, I ve 
 decided. I want to make people afraid of me; because 
 if people are afraid of you it means, of course, that 
 they think you re wonderful." 
 
 "Wonderful!" he broke out. 
 
 "Yes. When the Salter children came to play- 
 when father made me ask them didn t you see they 
 thought I was wonderful? They were terribly afraid 
 of me terribly; they ll never come again. You said 
 they were just stupid; but I didn t think them stupid 
 because they thought I was so wonderful." 
 
 Mr. Lacy s hand rested on her hair. "Of course 
 you know I never say anything less than all the truth 
 to you of course you know you are rather wonder 
 ful!" 
 
 "Of course I know it. But what good would it do 
 me to be wonderful" she always had her next idea 
 outlined and ready "if they didn t see how wonderful 
 I was?" 
 
 He pushed her an inch farther. "But suppose you re 
 not wonderful?" 
 
 "But what makes being wonderful, unless it is that 
 people think you re wonderful? That s all that 
 matters," she ended in her definite voice, "to make 
 them all see how wonderful you are." 
 
 In the next weeks Mr. Lacy s thoughts often reverted 
 to her words. They seemed to have defined for him 
 
 [34]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 much that he had felt formlessly. He had progressively 
 the sense not of Olive s development nor of the shaping 
 of her character, but rather that her character already 
 existed, and that her growth was to be a discovering 
 and unfolding of tendencies established because they 
 were complete. He had ended, on this occasion, with 
 a realisation of the futility of combating her basic 
 attack on people her necessity to conquer rather than 
 to convince them, and her imposition of herself by 
 enforcing a recognition of her superiority. She seemed 
 to him to have a hard spiritual concision; and even in 
 her imitation of him, as it grew from day to day, he 
 saw an attempt to put into practice a definiteness all 
 her own. 
 
 He was to remember that it was one hot afternoon, 
 in the August of the same summer, as he sat rocking in 
 the thin shadow of the desiccated creeper which 
 screened the verandah and fanning himself with his 
 straw hat, that his sense of a lack, in his grandchild, 
 of any of the preconceptions of duty reached a point 
 of action. The western sun beat fully on him; but 
 Norah was on the back porch, and the little house full 
 of the drowsy flies which, at this temperature, forced 
 their way everywhere. His physical discomfort had 
 had some part in bringing Mr. Lacy to his moral con 
 clusion. At times he admitted, with a sardonic regret 
 that he must accord her this recognition, that he 
 missed Rebecca. She had at least been able to see 
 that the broken wire nettings at the windows were 
 replaced and the signs of encroaching poverty to some 
 extent tempered. It was his fate, he supposed, to 
 have women in his life who were conveniences and not 
 necessities. The effort at recollection was wearisome 
 
 [351
 
 ASCENT 
 
 to him and even his brighter memories flattened to the 
 stale, in the listlessness of the dead air; but he was 
 aware of wondering what one ever after all knew of 
 the conditions of another mind, and whether his 
 daughter-in-law had not sometimes revolted at the 
 fact that she was condemned to be herself. The idea 
 circled in his heavy thoughts. In the glare of the sun 
 light which flooded the lawn, the deserted dusty street 
 and the open meadow across it, out to the dark line 
 which the hills on the opposite side of the valley drew 
 against the sky a line heavily black in the yellow 
 light his eyes were ponderous and dimmed; but just 
 before the hills rose he saw, in the haze of heat, the 
 scintillating white points of the tombstones in the 
 churchyard. His tired vision fixed on them; and after 
 a few moments of thought, and with his look now 
 changed to a resigned irony, he rose abruptly and 
 called Olive. 
 
 She ran around a corner of the house in an instant 
 and met him at the gate. Her hand slipped into his, 
 she wiped her hot dark brow and drew her hat over her 
 eyes, and her feet tried to fall into his stride. There 
 was always, as he noticed, a happy inevitability in her 
 way of joining him. She never expressed her pleasure, 
 but it was more certain than any expression that she 
 should respond so quickly and that her face should lift 
 with such light to his. They crossed the street, on 
 their way to strike through the meadow. The heat was 
 so intense that it quivered like the fluctuations of a 
 flame in the still air. The village lay immobilised. 
 Along the street, towards the square where the Court 
 House, the Presbyterian church, and the most populous 
 of the shops clustered, a single sleepy wagon was drawn 
 
 [36]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 to the curb, and the motionlessness of the horses, with 
 their rusty tails hanging inertly under the slaughter of 
 the flies, added to the desolation of the scene. Years 
 and years earlier Mr. Lacy had caught himself, when 
 ever he crossed the street, looking down its arid length 
 with expectancy, under the low arch of the maples in 
 summer and through the grey lacework of their boughs 
 in winter. He never knew what he awaited, in this 
 habit of a scrutiny less of his curiosity than of his cyni 
 cism. He would watch the iceman carry his dripping 
 burden to the Basker gate and the baker choosing the 
 heaviest of his pies for the Trails; and the perfection 
 of flatness in his surroundings would enclose him anew, 
 so that even its finality seemed to him mediocre and not 
 tremendous. 
 
 They passed into the meadow, down the slope which, 
 on this side of the valley, rose from its low edges, and 
 crossed the little stream of the Ware river, so dried and 
 silent that the frail footbridge hung high above stones 
 which were bare and grey. In a moment more a 
 shadow of deep green fell on Mr. Lacy s heated face 
 and he felt like a touch the coolness of the trees in the 
 churchyard. He pushed aside the iron gate, beckoned 
 Olive after him through the long wild grass, and sank 
 under a tree with a breath of relief. His hand ran for 
 a second or two over his hair, which was still thick and 
 vividly white and full of his rare vitality, before he 
 turned to look at the child. 
 
 "Well, pussy, this is a place you ve never been!" 
 "No." Olive lifted her head and sent her swift look 
 around her; she had climbed to the top of the grave 
 stone nearest Mr. Lacy and sat swinging her thin legs. 
 "No but of course I know all about it. It s where 
 
 t37J
 
 ASCENT 
 
 they put people when they are dead when they can t 
 get up and go away again. Norah never brings me 
 in when we pass of course I know why! She wants 
 to keep it to frighten me with when I m bad. I can t 
 see that there s much to be afraid of. Why did you 
 bring me here, grandfather?" 
 
 Mr. Lacy took his time before he answered. He 
 had seldom been farther from his usual impulse to 
 treat her intellectually. He was always conscious that 
 the curiosity she inspired in him was as potent as his 
 affection. But his dominant instinct was confused at 
 the moment with the same loyalty which had made 
 him take what he recognised was an absurd walk in an 
 unbelievable heat, and his voice lowered as he spoke. 
 
 "I brought you, my dear, to try to tell you what 
 you ve lost by death. If you re to be like me, you ll 
 want to cast up your account in life the account of 
 what you haven t as well as of what you have. And 
 there s a great deal, my child, that you haven t; you ve 
 lost the irreparable thing; you ve lost your mother." 
 
 She gave a quick absent nod, as if she disposed of 
 the softness in his tone, and her eager eyes remained 
 set on his. "Just what is a mother?" she asked. 
 
 Mr. Lacy s surprise caught him, in spite of himself. 
 "But you must know! Everyone has a mother; it s 
 the name given to a woman when she has a child." 
 
 "Yes, I know; but of course there must be different 
 kinds of mothers. Most of them must be different," 
 she ended, "from mine." 
 
 "Different . . . ?" 
 
 "Yes. Not all mothers could be what you always 
 say she was they simply couldn t. And father liked 
 
 [38]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 her, so I suppose I shouldn t have. I suppose she was 
 as bad was she? as Uncle Joseph Trail." 
 
 "My child, it doesn t matter what your mother was 
 or wasn t. She was your mother, and she s dead. You 
 must think of her with love, and you must think of her 
 love for you." 
 
 "Why?" Her question shot as straight as her glance. 
 "Just because she s dead? But what difference can 
 that make?" 
 
 Mr. Lacy s eyes for a second returned her look. In 
 the reverberation of his own tone, he had never been 
 more presently struck by the fact that it was a tone, 
 limited to an expression of personal idiosyncrasies, and 
 not an assertion of principle. The tortuous ways of 
 her nature had never seemed to him more visibly to 
 underlie it, nor his own impotence more final, in the 
 face of her crystallisation into an iron attitude. 
 
 "I don t know that it can make any difference to 
 her. But certainly it makes some difference to you." 
 
 "How? I don t understand. Of course I like to 
 walk with you anywhere, grandfather; but I d really 
 much rather have played in my swing," she put 
 back her heavy hair from her forehead. "How could 
 it make any difference to me to come here?" 
 
 "Because, my dear, you ll one day have a daughter 
 of your own. You ll understand then you re too 
 little now that to respect one s mother and to be 
 dutiful even to her memory is one of the rules we 
 can t break. Don t forget that. It s a rule which 
 holds, in death as well as in living. One day, pussy, 
 you ll be dead too." 
 
 Olive s feet continued to swing evenly against the 
 [39]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 stone on which she sat. "I shan t die, myself. It 
 would be so lonely and so dirty." 
 
 "Yes, my dear, you will." Mr. Lacy s voice had 
 again its lower note. 
 
 "But I say I shan t." 
 
 "Ah, it s not a question, you see, of what you say!" 
 
 Her feet were abruptly still, and she raised to her 
 grandfather a face which had a sudden pallor. "But 
 I tell you I shan t. Why should I have to die? Has 
 there never been anyone who didn t die who wouldn t 
 die? You ll see I won t die; I won t, I won t. So 
 there! Have you got any of those nice lemon drops 
 in your pocket?" 
 
 She had bent forward, with one sunburnt hand 
 stretched to him; her grandfather saw her eyes pass 
 beyond him, and in an instant she drew back and 
 straightened herself, with the abruptly awkward with 
 drawal of childhood. He turned and saw that a few 
 feet away, advancing from the gate which gave on 
 the road, a young man was approaching them. Mr. 
 Lacy s rapid eyes bent for the space of a moment on 
 him; a second later he had pulled himself to his feet 
 and waved his hand, in a sudden recognition. 
 
 "But, by all that s wonderful, it s young John- 
 grown up! I d know you anywhere! How on earth 
 did you discover me?" 
 
 Young Devon had paused beside Mr. Lacy, and he 
 met his grasp with a cordiality which had a touch 
 of shyness. His general impression was of length and 
 leanness and his body lighter than seemed, in a boy 
 of less than twenty, sufficiently solid. He held his 
 motor cap under his arm, and his eyes, clearly grey, 
 caught the light which penetrated the close branches. 
 
 [40]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Yes, he d found Mr. Lacy, and rather by a miracle, 
 since they d told him, at the house, that it was hopeless 
 to pursue the old gentleman and his granddaughter in 
 their wanderings; yes, it was the first proofs of the 
 jade catalogue he d come about. He was with his 
 father for a week and Devon had made him motor 
 down, the instant the sheets arrived from the printers, 
 for Mr. Lacy s comments. Yes, the roads were bad 
 enough, and he had the keenest recollection of Mr. 
 Lacy of course though it couldn t be less than eight 
 or ten years since, at Wickford, he had first seen him. 
 
 "And here you ve become one of these conquering 
 youths who s going to upset the world ah, if only 
 you could! And this, you know, is Olive. Your 
 father s probably told you about her yes? Olive, 
 come here!" 
 
 Mr. Lacy had turned, with a pride which he never 
 allowed himself to exhibit when he considered it, and 
 faced the child. It was the first time that he had ever 
 noted her capacity to make one wait and, even at her 
 age, to compel attention. Young Devon s smile, as 
 he followed Mr. Lacy s glance, made his face shyer 
 than before, not as if his warmth of interest were 
 difficult to arouse but as if he were unaccustomed to ad 
 mit it. Olive, perched in her raw thinness on the tomb 
 stone, regarded them with an equal blankness. Mr. 
 Lacy s wit could have fancied that there was a touch 
 of the mystery of her sex in her immobility. Her 
 expression was stubborn to the point of sullenness; but 
 it could not conceal the passion of her interest. He 
 felt that her unwavering gaze saw every inch of the 
 young man, his thick close hair, the faint delicacy of 
 his throat, the kindness of his mouth and the ease of 
 
 [41]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 his rather shabby clothes. She saw no less the motor 
 waiting beyond the wall and the vista of the life to 
 which it led a life of mysterious happinesses and lovely 
 adornment, half fairy-tale and half preconception; an 
 escape, actual and thrilling, from all the enclosures 
 of Ware. 
 
 "Come, pussy, come! You re to shake hands, you 
 know." He made a helpless gesture. "You mustn t 
 mind her manners. She s brought up by us two men, 
 you see. Olive, you re exceptionally rude" he again 
 broke off, confronting the child s refusal. "Little girls 
 are such odd imps ..." 
 
 Young Devon s look at her was as friendly as before. 
 "Don t bother her, please! And I left the proofs with 
 your son, who was good enough to say he d give them 
 to you. If father may have them again in three days, 
 by post . . ." 
 
 "Of course, of course." Mr. Lacy nodded. "What 
 a treat I shall have with them to-night! Did your 
 father get the Paris jade he was after?" 
 
 "I think so I m not sure. As if one ever knows, 
 you know, which particular thing father is after, even 
 if he get it !" 
 
 "Ah, he s colossal, he and his sensitivity and his 
 drift! But you ll come back with us, to the house, 
 and let me glance at the first pages with you, before 
 you start for home?" 
 
 "Thanks no. I ve sixty miles to make and bad 
 tires. I mustn t run it close; I ve so little time here. 
 I m due in New York again to-morrow night." His 
 eyes again played on the dark reticence of Olive s face. 
 "So you don t think she ll make friends?" 
 
 "Olive, for the last time, do as you re told!" Mr. 
 [42]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Lacy broke into irritation. "You re really inexcusably 
 naughty!" 
 
 Young Devon s smile had suddenly faded. Mr. 
 Lacy, in his perpetual scrutiny, saw his look touched 
 with an abrupt surprise, an incomprehension so rooted 
 that it blent strangely with his obvious immaturity. 
 The boy s eyes passed rapidly from Olive to him and 
 back to Olive; and the comparison which he divined 
 in the quick transition of the glance made Mr. Lacy 
 turn, in a final exasperation, on the cramped, obstinate 
 figure. As he did so his eyes caught, beneath her 
 stiffened legs, the name on the stone on which she 
 sat. His own face changed. 
 
 "Good heavens, child, get down! I didn t see where 
 you were sitting. If that s not like me; to bring you 
 here on a theory of loyalty, and not to have enough 
 experience of loyalty to put it into decent execution! 
 Get down at once! That s your mother s grave . . ." 
 
 The force of resistance in Olive wilted under their 
 eyes. For a moment she peered down, trying to 
 decipher, beneath her skirts, the letters and the name; 
 then she slid inertly from the stone, and with a final 
 conquest of her hesitation she approached them and 
 raised her flushed face. 
 
 Devon, with a word of excuse for her and the 
 murmur that he himself, when he was little, had always 
 detested manners, had immediately taken her hand and 
 held it. He was evidently again at the mercy of his 
 natural inarticulateness and of a delicacy of considera 
 tion as inhibitive as his reticence and which dealt even 
 with a child s exaggerations. Mr. Lacy, as he speech 
 lessly watched them, did not know which of the two 
 astonished him more. It was surprising enough that 
 
 [43l
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Olive should affect in any way the interest of a boy 
 of nineteen, at the most crowded time of his college 
 life and living in a world of privilege where such 
 incidents were scarcely noticeable; but it was still 
 more surprising that she herself should be so affected. 
 He had never seen her produce a look which was so 
 clearly the result of feeling. Her eyes clung to Devon s 
 with a heat of desperation and of anger at her own 
 awkwardnesses and ignorances. A sudden sensation 
 of pity stirred in Mr. Lacy; yet he recognised, with 
 his fineness in the discovery of such indications, that 
 it was a compassion larger than his compassion for her. 
 It was rather a pity for the operation of that force 
 resident in her, which could create in others the stir 
 of feeling, and bring them, through her, into touch 
 with what he remembered, across his years, as the 
 flame of existence.
 
 IV 
 
 IT had been in Olive s twentieth year, after a gradual 
 failure through the early winter months, that old 
 Lacy fell into his last illness. 
 As November and December had passed he had 
 been more and more frequently by his fire, with his 
 recollections growing not dimmer but slower in their 
 pace. He was still as constant in his assertions, to 
 his granddaughter, that his mind was more acrid and 
 less inclined to foolish hypocrisies than ever. He 
 dissected even his nascent atrophy and told her cease 
 lessly, as she sat beside him with one pointed foot on 
 the fender and her pointed chin propped on her hand, 
 how ignoble the decline of energy was. It was her 
 absent smile which inspired, as he also freely asserted, 
 his only regret at quitting life. In the last year or 
 two, with her gradual entrance into womanhood, she 
 had given him the sympathy of attention for which 
 he had always searched. She was no longer an 
 audience; she was a woman whose responses and the 
 intelligence of whose differences of opinion one could 
 count on. "Don t think I m so credulous as to believe 
 I know anything about you," he told her constantly. 
 "You probably give me only the illusion of sympathy. 
 But you see that s the fun of consciously permitting 
 illusions one can believe in them;" and Olive 
 responded as frequently by the same smile and the 
 same silence, while with her quick competence she 
 shook up his pillow or stirred his broth. 
 
 [45]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Mr. Lacy was always conscious of a sense of effort 
 when, in retrospect, he turned back to the years which 
 had produced her maturity. There had been so little 
 of a traceable antecedence in her outer life. He 
 remembered the opinion he had formed in her child 
 hood that her development would be not so much 
 a growth as a gradual disclosure of a nature which 
 had a certain finality and completeness. He had never 
 discovered in her this he could definitely say any 
 trace of responsiveness to forces other than her own. 
 It was Philip s credulity that when she veered to his 
 way of doing something she had a change of heart, and 
 his father could imagine the confidence with which he 
 thanked heaven for it; but he himself recognised her 
 impermeability no less than he recognised the harsh 
 ness of her determination. He recollected vividly one 
 night a year before, when they had strolled arm and 
 arm up and down the porch he had not for long got 
 beyond this boundary and when he had suddenly 
 broken out: "The only dull thing about you, my dear, 
 is that you can always be explained!" 
 
 She had looked up at him in a puzzled silence, with 
 her face first stiffening and then flushing, and he had 
 continued: "One always knows, I mean, that you do 
 nothing and feel nothing without a reason. Oh, I 
 don t know your reasons, nor do I want to; but any 
 invariable reason is a bore." 
 
 Mr. Lacy could still feel the abruptness of the 
 gesture with which she had withdrawn her arm from 
 his, abandoning him to his weak legs several feet from 
 his chair; and he could still trace the defiant set of 
 her shoulders, as she turned into the house. As his 
 meditation became more and more his sole activity, 
 
 U6]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 his memory could see, in the flames of the coals in 
 his grate, still farther. Any breath of her inner feel 
 ing always took him, at a bound, to the hot afternoon 
 in the churchyard and the nascent force in the face 
 she had shown, not to him, but to the delicacy of 
 quality which her childish instinct had leapt to 
 recognise in young Devon. He had not forgotten his 
 predictive sense of her power to create sensibility in 
 others. One reason for this, as he knew, was that 
 he had never seen it duplicated. She had for him a 
 scrupulous devotion which included no permission 
 to enter the processes of her feeling. Her tenderness 
 itself was too denned a tenderness. As she had 
 grown out of childhood, with the early intellectual 
 development of the American girl, he could say that 
 he had formed her, if only because her perfect 
 duplication of his attitude had been, ever since she 
 was old enough to take an attitude, the scandal of 
 Philip and the Trails. But he had invariably the 
 idea that in spite of the flawlessness of this imitation 
 and the way her analyses and ironies went him, as 
 he said, one better, she was nevertheless using it all 
 as an attitude, and not as a conviction of unconviction. 
 Her real attention was in her silent self-absorption. 
 He could imagine no more complete exemplification of 
 individualism. It seemed, to his literary sense, that 
 that cult of the personal so apparent in the women of 
 her nation had flowered in her restless intelligence. 
 She had what he termed to her a thoroughly trained 
 possessiveness. To see a thing and to understand it 
 was to own it; and to own was her point, whether the 
 acquisition were mental or material. There was as 
 little relaxation in the grip of her insistence as there 
 
 [47l
 
 ASCENT 
 
 was change in the months of the year at Ware; and 
 while he watched her grow into the clear outlines of 
 character, and as her silences deepened with the evi 
 dently longer reverberations of her thoughts, Mr. 
 Lacy felt that her inflexibility could obtain even in 
 the starved circumstances of her surroundings. 
 
 This power to seize and to disregard all she did 
 not want had given her, as he realised, a remarkable 
 steadiness. He explained to himself in this way the 
 surprising justice of her judgments. There had been, 
 at one time, a possibility of sending her away to spend 
 a last year at school and to prepare her for some post 
 of teaching. Philip had ventured on a speculation 
 which was a foregone failure, and the question dropped 
 almost as soon as it was raised. But Mr. Lacy had 
 had, in Olive s answer to his query if she were dis 
 appointed, another of his swift glimpses into the dim 
 region of her mind. What would be the good of her 
 going, she had briefly said; the demonstrable fact of 
 how little she could get out of such an extension made 
 any regret on his part or hers futile. Of course she 
 meant ultimately to get away he must see that; but 
 not to a girl s school, where the world would be as 
 restricted as the world of the Ware street. The 
 school might fit her for a larger world she supposed 
 that was true; but how? By teaching her to teach 
 or to be a second-rate secretary; and she asked him 
 to consider her in such eventualities. There were of 
 course in Ware girls who in harder circumstances and 
 with half her intelligence got away. But they had 
 nothing in themselves to limit the conditions of their 
 emancipation. They didn t know bad things from 
 good, and their ambitions were merely brief and 
 
 [48]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 impulsive. When she went, she wanted to go in her 
 own way, to a life which was on her own terms; and 
 meanwhile she had no self-pity she assured him he 
 could be forever sure of that. Living with Philip, 
 as he very well knew, knocked such softness out of 
 one. When she went, she would go finally, to oppor 
 tunities and surroundings which fitted her. Let them 
 wait for a year or so, and see. 
 
 Her patience was all the stranger to him because 
 of his knowledge and, as he realised, his alone of 
 the white heat of her impatience. Sometimes he had 
 the sense that not so much she as the youth in her 
 watched him fail with slow calculation. It was never 
 that she was hurried; he felt that she saw farther 
 than he in her recognition that when he died she 
 would be in many ways worse off, with the burden of 
 the authority of the little household and her father 
 fully on her hands. She had none of the enthusiasm 
 of her years. The classic stir of the word freedom 
 did not lift her beyond her hard recognition that any 
 freedom she achieved must be crippled and partial. 
 But it was at times miraculous to him that she could 
 so contain not only her energy but the sense he had 
 seen gradually develop in her of a fine susceptibility 
 to beauty. He had been inexorable in his effort to 
 teach her to reject all but the best and to establish 
 an aristocracy of taste in her choices. She would 
 go without a dress for a year, so as to buy for the 
 little sitting room a print he and she had unearthed 
 or to send the money she had saved to New York 
 for a good material, with lustre and softness in its 
 folds. Once or twice he had taken her for the day 
 to Wickford, to lunch with the older Devon, who was 
 
 [49J
 
 ASCENT 
 
 more and more morosely concentrated in his work; 
 and it had surprised both men to see her light unerr 
 ingly on the best jades and on their most subtle and 
 inconspicuous beauties. She had frequently shivered, 
 in this same winter, under a coat which was too thin. 
 With old Norah s help he had ordered from Wickford 
 a little fur jacket for her, and had spread it on his 
 knees to surprise her, one night, in their habitual 
 vigil by the fire. Olive had run her hand smoothly 
 over the fur, while she reproached him for his extrava 
 gance; he was entirely too good and utterly outrageous, 
 she had said; and while she talked and protested, it 
 had flashed through Mr. Lacy s imagination that her 
 hand was a test of the quality of what it touched, and 
 that the fur looked coarse and poor beneath it. 
 
 He was scarcely surprised when she raised her head, 
 with a motion of finality. "It s no use to you or to 
 me, grandfather; let s admit it. You re trying to make 
 out that you ve a right to spend the money, and that 
 for it you re getting what you want for me. All the 
 time, dearest, you see as well as I do that what I need 
 are sables. Don t let s deny it. Your goodness doesn t 
 make this anything but second-class. You must just 
 courageously go without the pleasure, and I must go 
 without the coat." 
 
 "But you ll be cold, my child." 
 
 "No colder than I ve been," she retorted; "and I d 
 rather be cold than ugly." 
 
 He looked at her with the intensity which had sur 
 vived all his physical depletion. "Should you? Youth 
 doesn t like brutal pain; and this wind s real suffering." 
 
 "But of course I should!" 
 
 "Yes I know, I see; but it s wonderful to me," he 
 [50]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 searched for his phrase, "how your love of what s 
 lovely has grown with nothing to feed on!" 
 
 "But I myself have fed it," she had all her usual 
 clearness. 
 
 "Yet what s so extraordinary is that you ve never 
 seen that one doesn t feed it. You don t understand 
 that the realest sense of beauty is feeling; that it s by 
 living the life of feeling that it s created and stimulated. 
 No, pussy; you ve no imagination." 
 
 "I ve had the imagination," she smiled, with her 
 assurance, "to own in this dreadful little house all I ve 
 had to do without." 
 
 "Yes, so long as it was sables. But you ve never 
 imagined the unimaginable. What imagination you ve 
 got is all along tactile lines. You must grasp things, 
 you see. You grasp them by your very rejections; 
 you grasp them by forcing them to recognise you. No, 
 no, my dear. To look at you you re all line line, 
 which is the quintessence of sensitiveness; yet you re 
 not sensitive. You ve a privileged apprehension about 
 life; yet you re not alive." 
 
 "Do you think I haven t been alive in my hatred?" 
 Her voice had a sudden vehemence. "Do you think 
 there s been a night that I ve gone to sleep without 
 detesting what I detest with all the force in me? that 
 I haven t despised not only this house but every house 
 down the street? that I haven t felt the horror of their 
 all being alike?" 
 
 "That I admit." Mr. Lacy s tone was dry. "But 
 you ve always been the sole object in the house. It 
 all comes back to you: that s it." 
 
 "And to whom should it come back?" 
 
 He was silent for a moment with his eyes, in the
 
 ASCENT 
 
 gradual suffusion of his age, set on the coals. "Just 
 what is it, Olive, that you want?" 
 
 "Want?" She had raised her head quickly, and he 
 had never heard her speak more finally. The fingers 
 of the hand clasped on her knee closed sharply. "But 
 I want experience!" 
 
 Mr. Lacy nodded. He had lived with this idea close 
 to the root of his conjectures about her; yet her con 
 firmation of the veracity of his conclusions gave him a 
 moment of ironic regret. 
 
 "But don t you see it s simply no use just experi 
 ence?" His look searched her. "Your experience will 
 stop dead if it s only subjective. You yourself must 
 be it. You ve got to change, you ve got to grow; and 
 you don t grow, pussy." 
 
 "But I grow in my own ways; don t you see?" She 
 was quick and triumphant. "I get all the more and 
 far more vividly because I follow them. I m all the 
 richer because I won t pay." 
 
 He sighed. "Well, there it is. At my age I ve 
 nothing left but a habit of mind; at yours, you ve 
 got a philosophy. I grant it your appetite s a 
 science." 
 
 "You see you admit it!" she had laid her hand 
 lightly on his. 
 
 "But don t forget that it s a science only of appetite," 
 he had ended, with his amused eyes on the determina 
 tion of her face. 
 
 He had had one definite interest, in the year Olive 
 was eighteen, and that was his final share, with Devon, 
 in the completion of the catalogue of the Wickford 
 jades. In recent years he had more and more com 
 pared Devon s solitude with his own and he had grown 
 
 [52]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 in his sardonic sense of the artificiality of the one and 
 the inexorability of the other. It was not only that 
 Devon saw, from time to time, the progress of life in 
 his boy that nice boy, as old Lacy always character 
 ised him, or that the burden of his erratic wife at 
 least linked him to the world by the realities of its 
 annoyance. Devon was unable to rid himself of the 
 fact that he was in his way famous, any more than he 
 could deny that he had had money and position to 
 disregard in his voluntary renouncement. One never 
 lost the consciousness, as he put it to Olive, of the 
 things waiting around the corner for him and the 
 privileges he could think so unimportant as to condemn 
 them. Whenever he took her with him to Wickford he 
 could see, by the quick shift of her eyes and the rapid 
 deductions of her attention, how she measured this. 
 She never laid particular stress on these visits. Yet 
 Mr. Lacy s conviction of her inner plans and the drive 
 of her inner purposes was immensely augmented by the 
 way she extracted, on each occasion, every information 
 and every possible opportunity to enlarge her world. 
 If she scrutinised the jades, she also scrutinised 
 Devon, as he could see by the impatient contraction of 
 her eyebrows at the stupidities in his cleverness; and 
 she scrutinised no less the minutest habits of the house, 
 down to the way in which the exquisite Venetian finger 
 bowls were placed on the torn tablecloth. 
 
 Mr. Lacy never measured how far this computation 
 was from understanding until one morning, when he 
 and Olive arrived to spend a few final hours with 
 Devon over the proof sheets, they found that the 
 younger Devon was in the little entry to greet them. 
 He had come up from New York the night before, at 
 
 [53l
 
 ASCENT 
 
 his father s summons, to clarify for them an obscure 
 point the facts of which he had verified at the Metro 
 politan Museum, and Mr. Lacy was immediately aware 
 of the touch of change which his lounging figure 
 brought to the cramped, close rooms. Olive had held 
 out her hand to him, with her swift decisiveness; and 
 since they needed her help only at intervals, she had 
 spent most of the morning wandering to and fro in the 
 little garden. As the three men bent over the papers 
 on Devon s table, Mr. Lacy felt that his companions 
 watched no less than he for the occasional glimpses, 
 through the open window, of her finely set shoulders 
 and the gleam of the sun on her hair as she moved. 
 Movement, as it seemed to him, with his eyes wander 
 ing from the sheets in front of him, expressed her 
 essential quality. It penetrated even her silences and 
 her suspense. Her concentration saved her from rest 
 lessness. Her motions conveyed not merely displace 
 ment but a smooth relentlessness of progress; and as 
 she paused in the sunlight, he could trace even in her 
 immobility the beat of her vitality. 
 
 At luncheon she was as definitely cool in her manner 
 and as definitely separate. She smiled, with young 
 Devon, over the renewal of their acquaintance; but she 
 had none of the challenge which a girl of her age, deal 
 ing with a man surrounded by a glamour of the freest 
 life, might be expected to show. She turned on him 
 the same eyes she turned on his father and on the 
 jades; but old Lacy had had, during the hour, a definite 
 extension of his view of her future. As he watched the 
 curiosity with which Devon met her, there had flashed 
 into his memory the qualities which, a few years before, 
 had been implicit in his face. His mental and his 
 
 [54]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 physical signs had all become characterised and accen 
 tuated. He had the same light touch of charm, the 
 same simplicities of reserve; his hands were a little 
 longer and browner and his air of distinctiveness 
 more marked. Mr. Lacy knew the traceable facts con 
 cerning him; of his years at the Beaux Arts, after col 
 lege, and the brilliancy of his record there, and of the 
 rapidity of his rise to importance, with his own firm 
 of architects, in New York. Was it a distinctiveness, 
 he wondered, which matched the strong flavour of his 
 inner distinctiveness? or were not the two, in the cur 
 rent custom of his countrymen, wholly contradictory? 
 Had he the capacity to live by the exactions of his 
 evident taste, and to test the responsiveness of his 
 imagination by actualities? Whatever had happened 
 in his inner world, the old man concluded, he had kept 
 and developed its quality. His growth would probably 
 always be a consequent one; and he would continue 
 to listen to his father with the same lightly amused 
 tolerance and to finger the white jades with the same 
 reticent pleasure. 
 
 It was in his granddaughter s return to the friend 
 liness of the smile with which, from time to time, young 
 Devon s eyes appealed to her, that Mr. Lacy had 
 another measure of her. There was no obvious re 
 sponse in her. Her instinct was trained and tamed 
 to caution. But he had the clearest conviction that 
 the delicacy and susceptiveness of Devon s look con 
 fronted her like an unconscious test. She returned 
 to it the complexity of a girl s state of mind indiffer 
 ence and calculation, curiosity and negligence; but it 
 seemed to Mr. Lacy s wit that it was Devon s fineness 
 which marked her own incapacity. . . . 
 
 [55]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Mr. Lacy had fallen, on a January afternoon when 
 the cold was bitterest and the early dusk hung like a 
 veil of ice in the thin grey air, over the arm of his chair, 
 with his limp figure suddenly divested of the springs of 
 action and intelligence. It was Olive who, an hour 
 later, found him, and who dealt with the situation with 
 her inerrant readiness. She instructed Philip and Norah 
 how to carry him to his room, she dispersed the two 
 or three inquisitive neighbours, and she heard the 
 doctor s verdict. It would be absurd to assume the 
 expense of a nurse, she told Philip, since he could live 
 at most only for a day or so; and with the same calcu 
 lation she warned him that, as his father s mind was 
 likely to clarify, he had better do his utmost not to 
 irritate him by any parade of emotion, not to call in 
 his querulous tones to Norah and not to bang the 
 sitting room door. 
 
 It was not until the next morning that Mr. Lacy, 
 wearily lifting his lids, saw the blur of mist which 
 hung on them change and crystallise into her thin 
 upright figure beside his bed. He traced vaguely the 
 carriage of her head, the whiteness of her face, and 
 finally the penetrating attention of her eyes. The fixity 
 of her look recalled him to the fact of how repellent 
 the decay of life must be, and made him dimly aware 
 of the sudden angles which his face must have assumed 
 and of the rigid immobility of his body. 
 
 "So you re here!" he said faintly. "That incom 
 petent doctor s not about, is he?" 
 
 "Oh, no, grandfather; he came last night; there was 
 nothing more for him to do." 
 
 Mr. Lacy s eyes sharpened. "I suppose that I m 
 dying?" 
 
 [56]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 She laid her hand briefly on his motionless one. "Of 
 course, my dear; you know you ve always told me 
 that it was foolish that it was a personal impu 
 dence to take from people the knowledge of such 
 things. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Lacy breathed evenly for a few seconds. His 
 lustreless eyes appeared to follow the sunlight which 
 quivered, through the closed blinds, on the shabby 
 carpet. His thoughts passed, with unaccustomed 
 heaviness, from his detestation of Wilton designs to 
 the fact that when the light lay like this, in the Ware 
 winters, it meant that the day was so breathlessly cold 
 and so brilliantly still that the mere warmth of one s 
 body, in defiance of such a temperature, was marvellous 
 and exciting. His mind circled listlessly about this 
 physical memory, and then his glance strayed back to 
 the motionlessness of the coverlet across him. 
 
 "He s an extraordinary fool, that doctor," he 
 observed. 
 
 "Yes;" she nodded; "but on the whole not so 
 great a fool do you think? as Mr. Basker. He, of 
 course, wanted to come to you at once. He said to 
 me that, now you were ill, you might be converted to 
 a change of heart. Of course all he really wants to 
 do" her brows drew together "is to have a chance 
 to condemn you." 
 
 Mr. Lacy s lips were touched with a faint amuse 
 ment. "Don t deny him his rights! Don t you see 
 that for the first time he feels himself my superior? 
 Oh, yes, Basker s a marvel. He has imagination and 
 subtlety. He s been wise enough to see that the faith 
 which is inexplicable is always invincible. Dear me, 
 yes. It s effrontery, if you want, but it s an effrontery 
 
 [571
 
 ASCENT 
 
 which works with a beautiful efficiency; and the 
 wonderful part is that he s right." 
 
 "Right? Now, grandfather" she made a gesture 
 of impatience "you re not going to lose all your 
 quality, just because . . ." 
 
 Mr. Lacy took her up, in his dim voice. "Just 
 because I m dying? I haven t, pussy, the least idea 
 what I m going to lose, and Basker has. Don t you 
 see? He s won out and I haven t. I ve nothing, after 
 eighty years of it; he s got a prejudice strong enough 
 to be a belief. Yes it s my perception, by heaven, 
 which has done for me!" 
 
 Olive s sudden movement of tenderness had a touch 
 of awkwardness. "You ve had a hard enough time." 
 
 Mr. Lacy s glance fixed her. 
 
 "Come, my dear, you re lyrical, you re absurd! I ve 
 had nothing of the sort. I didn t believe enough in 
 anything to have a hard time because of it. No, I m 
 inexcusable. I ve had to live the smallest life and 
 I ve understood the terrible difference between small- 
 ness and concentration. Yet I ve been content to be 
 passionately bored; I ve been so inefficient that even 
 my mind has failed me," his voice hesitated and broke, 
 "and years and years since all my thoughts turned into 
 caricature . . ." 
 
 He closed his eyes. It was evident that his sense 
 of an accumulated weariness of years, in all their sepa 
 rate hours and moments, broke over him like a sea. 
 Olive s eyes could trace the actual passage, across his 
 face, of the shadow of heaviness which mounted to his 
 brain. The thin threads which held him quivered and 
 strained under the pressure ; and she felt the imminence 
 of a change so close that she raised her voice, hurriedly. 
 
 [58]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "Grandfather, you must rouse yourself! Come, just 
 for a moment . . . there s something I must ask you!" 
 
 "Well?" His lids lifted again, with a weaker effort. 
 
 "How can I manage? That s what I want you to 
 tell me; what am I to do?" 
 
 "I m not embarrassed by my death, my child." He 
 tried to make his habitual gesture of irritation. "Don t 
 talk like your father. I ve faced all its eventualities." 
 He eyed her for a second with a firmer fixity of atten 
 tion. "Do? You know perfectly well what you mean 
 to do." 
 
 Olive was as instant as he. "Of course I know. All 
 I m uncertain of is how you ve arranged about the 
 money." 
 
 Mr. Lacy appeared to consider. "You must get 
 away at once, of course. I ve left you everything." 
 
 "Get away to teach or to work in a shop?" She had 
 bent nearer him. "No, grandfather, you really must open 
 your eyes for a second! I shan t ever do with any 
 half measures you know that. If the money s mine, 
 can I draw on the principal as long as I may need to; 
 until, that is, I marry?" 
 
 He again tried to keep his attention on her. "Until 
 you marry? I don t see." 
 
 "It s surprising you don t; what on earth can I do 
 but marry? and whom can I marry but John Devon?" 
 
 "So!" Mr. Lacy had a sudden touch of his dryness. 
 "So that s it!" 
 
 "What else could it possibly be?" She straightened 
 the sheet with her quick touch. "Surely you must have 
 worked it out as I have! I ve no possibilities to marry 
 anyone else." 
 
 "I suppose not . . ." Mr. Lacy wavered, and his 
 [59]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 eyes suddenly cleared with energy. "No, my dear, 
 don t do it!" 
 
 "Don t marry him? Why not?" 
 
 He tried to shake his immovable head, and his eyes 
 took up the negation and expressed it, with unconscious 
 pathos. "One doesn t argue with people as far down 
 the hill as I am, pussy. Give me at least the pre 
 rogatives of dying. Take my word for it ... don t 
 marry him." 
 
 "But really you must tell me, grandfather. . . ." 
 
 "Oh, for a thousand reasons, but one will do. He d 
 make you unhappy." He frowned at the assurance of 
 her look. "Yes, my dear, he would. I don t see how 
 I m weary enough of time as it is, and I can t see 
 down the future. But he d make you unhappy because 
 your only happiness is in your own terms; he d make 
 you unhappy," he searched for the end of his thought, 
 "because he s too good for you." 
 
 She caught him up sharply. "But it s my only 
 chance, to marry him; oh, I don t mean to sound 
 unkind to you, but wouldn t it be far unkinder to wait 
 until your back was turned to contradict you? I must 
 marry, and at once. I ve lost enough precious time, 
 as it is!" 
 
 Mr. Lacy gave an inaudible murmur, and closed his 
 eyes again. Through the thickening haze of his intel 
 ligence he had no longer the particular sense of what 
 she said but of its familiarity. He was conscious of 
 hearing the echo of all she had assimilated. The 
 thought drifted through his brain, with the dissective 
 habit which was his strongest link with consciousness, 
 that the full determination of her tone was a testimony 
 not only to her reaction against Philip s indecision and 
 
 [60]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 the fallacy of Rebecca s sacrifice. It was also the 
 penalty of his own undirected force. Such revulsions 
 of character as hers should be taught illusion. He 
 remembered he had often told himself that romanti 
 cism alone could have saved her; and the reflection 
 seemed to him, in his dimmed state, like a last flare 
 of his irony. 
 
 He gathered his strength and again raised his heavy 
 lids. As his perception cleared enough to meet her 
 eyes, he realised that the immobility with which Olive 
 was watching him had in it a peculiar significance. She 
 bent an inch nearer, when his scattered energy braced 
 itself, as if she seized at once on this clearer possibility 
 to deal with him. 
 
 "Tell me I should so like to know," she broke out 
 abruptly "what does it feel like to die?" 
 
 Mr. Lacy still returned her gaze. "Feel like? I 
 don t understand." 
 
 "Yes, what does it feel like to realise that you re 
 slipping into nothing, with every second that passes? 
 Now you can see and speak, you can feel and hear; 
 but every time the clock ticks you re a second nearer! 
 I should think it would be dreadfully strange. . . ." 
 
 She paused, flushed with the concentration of her 
 interest. Mr. Lacy was able to comprehend this 
 much; and the stiffening mask of his face was touched 
 for an instant with the malignity which had always 
 flavoured his authority. 
 
 "My dear child" he hesitated, but clearly from the 
 pressure of his thoughts rather than from his debility, 
 "what on earth s to become of you!" 
 
 Olive s eagerness dropped as suddenly as it had 
 risen: "Of me?" 
 
 [61]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "Yes. You re such a surprising soul. You re all 
 egoism, and yet you relate nothing to yourself. You 
 speak as if you were the one person quit of it of this 
 grotesque necessity to die." He had a flash of his 
 light ease. "Don t lose sight of the fact that you re 
 dying as inevitably as I; and don t talk so impersonally 
 of one second less." 
 
 She did not speak at once; and even in his blunted 
 state Mr. Lacy was aware of the confused flow of feel 
 ing in her silence. The hurrying tick of the china 
 clock on the mantel was the only sound in the room; 
 and as his feeble look strayed to it he instinctively 
 compared its gaudy case and its cheapness with the 
 portentous significance it resumed. He knew, and 
 also instinctively, that Olive was as intent on the 
 sound as he; and he was half-prepared for the sudden 
 ness with which she rose, turned to the mantel and 
 flung the little clock to the earth. The case fell in 
 atoms; the works clicked feebly for a moment and 
 then stopped. 
 
 She turned back to the bed with what Mr. Lacy 
 faintly realised was a look of appeal. "Oh, do you 
 suppose I ll hate it as much as that?" She spoke with 
 the same impulsiveness. 
 
 "Of course, my dear; we put more vitality into our 
 hatred of death than into anything else in our lives; 
 but that s no reason for giving way to an act which 
 puts you on the same emotional plane as Basker!" 
 His energy seemed for an instant to concentrate itself 
 in his eyes; then their light suddenly faded, and they 
 became opaque and grey. "Was there anything," his 
 voice failed with the passage of each second, "in the 
 paper to-day? I m very tired I shan t take it in; but 
 you might read to me for a bit. . . ." 
 
 [62]
 
 AS Mr. Lacy himself said, in one of his last 
 whispers to Olive, it was the completest touch 
 of his perversity that he should die with incom 
 petence. He passed gradually from extreme weakness 
 into a coma whose weight lifted for rarer and rarer 
 instants, and from that imperceptibly into death. 
 
 On the evening when she turned the flame of her 
 candle on his face and realised that her grandfather 
 had finally distanced the point which he claimed to 
 have so inconsiderately delayed, Olive was aware of 
 the depth of her breath of relief. She had laid her 
 hand on his forehead by accident; but she kept it there 
 without repulsion; and as she felt herself penetrated 
 by the new tensity of silence which, with her discovery, 
 had filled the room, she caught herself wondering what, 
 after all, people saw in death which was so impressive 
 and special. 
 
 The clarity of action in her mind had submerged the 
 last latent uncertainty of her feeling. Years ago, so 
 long before that she had ceased to date it except as 
 something instinct in all the processes of her growth, 
 she had measured and arranged all her possibilities 
 by the situation in which she must find herself on the 
 day when Mr. Lacy s death freed her. It was not 
 that she had regarded it as an escape from imprison 
 ment. Her hard logic had made her see her obligation 
 to tend him as practically as she saw the restrictions 
 of her future. But she had understood the difficulties 
 of her making any move in view of his age, his debility 
 
 [63]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 and his dominating judgments, even more accurately 
 than he. She had set a glance no less steady on the 
 chances which might await her. She understood too 
 well that she would be a foregone failure in any contacts 
 of competition, and that her brilliancy had not yet the 
 depth nor her tenacity the patience for a protracted 
 struggle. Her sharpened social instinct was all against 
 any form of a gradual achievement. She felt that she 
 must arrest her opportunities with a firm gesture and 
 by an innate force; and as she left Mr. Lacy s room, 
 late that night, with Philip and one or two of the 
 Trails busily disturbing its bare silence with their 
 whispered comments, she had a sense of satisfaction 
 that she had never accepted any temporary alleviation 
 or palliative, and that even with her restlessness to 
 drive her she had never fallen into any concessions in 
 the standard of what she wanted to do and the kind 
 of life she meant ultimately to achieve. 
 
 She had flung herself on her bed and lain all night 
 face to face with these images. The noises in the 
 house dropped into silence; and only the creaking sway 
 of the arc-light at the corner, in a wind so gusty that 
 it lifted the snow in blind flurries, broke on her 
 thoughts. Now that she touched with actuality the 
 aspect of her future, she saw how it had come to be 
 composed. It had grown with each enrichment of her 
 perception. Her talks with her grandfather of his 
 youthful ardours and enthusiasms, the books she had 
 read, the few personalities which had risen on her 
 horizon, had always instantly related themselves to her 
 own case. She had no more sense that their separate 
 entities existed, as apart from some possible connection 
 with her, than she had a sense of adventure. The details 
 
 [64]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 of what she meant to do were as precise in her mind 
 as the details of the arrangements she had made for 
 the funeral and her plans as to how, in the next weeks, 
 she could manage to see Devon. She was the last 
 person, she thought, as she finally felt the first touch 
 of sleep, to be tricked into any softness of imagination 
 or to believe in any of the dangerous inaccuracies of 
 inspiration. 
 
 She rested so little that it was largely for the sake 
 of a few moments of quiet that she went down to the 
 little sitting room, the following morning, half an hour 
 before the service was to take place. As she closed the 
 door behind her and felt the pervasive differences in 
 the still air, heavy with the unaccustomed profusion of 
 flowers, she realised for the first time her fatigue. 
 They would probably Philip and the Trails think 
 it due her piety to leave her here in solitude; and the 
 last hours had made her long for nothing so much as 
 an escape from her father s insistence on the unimpor 
 tant. During the day before she had come and gone 
 from her grandfather s room freely, with no change in 
 the fall of her step and no attenuation in the rapid 
 movements of her hands. Perhaps she felt the fact 
 of his death so little because he was still so extraordi 
 narily present. As he had lain on his bed, the only 
 change seemed to be that he was somehow transferred 
 to a permanence of inertness. She had even the per 
 sistent sense that he was listening and watching; and 
 when Philip had stipulated all the details of the 
 approaching service, she had turned impatiently out of 
 the room, with a slam of the door which startled every 
 corner of the house, even less for the peace of being 
 rid of such grotesque preoccupations than to ease her 
 
 [65]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 latent sense that Mr. Lacy might turn and smile at 
 her. Philip had insisted on the funeral service, on 
 prayers, as she told him, which Mr. Lacy would never 
 have prayed to a God he could never have believed 
 in. He was ready, she could see, since he had held 
 out for Mr. Basker, to hold out for a white marble 
 cross with a dove perched upon it; how exquisitely 
 amusing, she thought, her grandfather would have 
 found the correlation between Mr. Basker and the 
 dove. . . . 
 
 She had crossed the sitting room, to where the open 
 coffin stood in front of the unlit hearth, and had 
 impatiently moved the pink roses which Philip had 
 disposed with a symmetrical hand. The fautlessness 
 of his bad taste, she reflected, spoilt even his sorrow. 
 As she straightened herself, with her hand still on Mr. 
 Lacy s breast, her image in the mirror above the 
 mantel caught her eyes and arrested her movement 
 in the immobility of surprise. 
 
 Her wonder was so definite that it took her an 
 instant to realise the weary familiarity of the reflected 
 room, the walls she had tried to keep simple and the 
 one or two portraits, testimonials to that strain in 
 her grandfather which, as he had liked to say, showed 
 the incipient insipidity of an aristocracy. Below them 
 was the mass of flowers she had banked there. The 
 sight gave her at once a sense of the appropriate back 
 ground they formed, not for the horizontal black line 
 which was the coffin, but for her figure as it rose above 
 it. Had she ever, she wondered, seen herself before? 
 Her mind instinctively reverted to an attempt to 
 explain her astonishment. She had heard often from 
 Mr. Lacy of the emotionality which death diffused 
 
 [66]
 
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 about it, and of the self-conscious pageantry of man s 
 attempt, as he had called it, to hide his fear of anni 
 hilation. Or was not what startled her merely the 
 large in the terms of the smaller, and reduced to the 
 fact that she had never yet seen herself in such a dress? 
 The week before, just after Mr. Lacy was taken ill, 
 she had sent old Norah in to a Wickford shop. Her 
 instructions had been exact; she was ordering the 
 best mourning Wickford could produce, and she 
 reminded Norah, who was bewildered and vaguely 
 horrified, that she was also ordering her. She had 
 never before seen herself look as she wanted to look, 
 and never seen materials fine enough to keep the flatness 
 of her back and to outline her arms in lines which had 
 all the sensitiveness of the arms themselves. As she 
 caught the picture in the glass, she seemed to herself to 
 have been touched by art; not only by her unaccus 
 tomed appearance, but by her juxtaposition with the 
 flowers behind her and the whiteness of Mr. Lacy s 
 prostrate figure in front of her. 
 
 Her absorption was broken by a sudden sound at 
 the door. She was conscious of some one hesitating on 
 the threshold and of the door once more closing, and 
 she turned from the mirror to find herself facing young 
 Devon. The strangeness of the moment could not 
 have marked itself more definitely for her; and she 
 could have measured its effect entirely by its effect on 
 him. He had made a brief, grave sign of his head to 
 her, while he drew back against the wall to wait; but 
 as he continued to confront her she could see that the 
 courtesy and consideration in his face gradually dis 
 appeared, as if they were absorbed in something deeper. 
 He had once or twice before, she thought, given her 
 
 L67J
 
 ASCENT 
 
 back her own looks in a way which had the touch of 
 revelation, but never so definitely as now. She saw 
 how deeply the sight of her impressed him; and the 
 poignancy of his impression made precise to her all 
 the details of her beauty, as she had caught it in the 
 glass. She could tell, by following his eyes, how deli 
 cately she carried her head and that the line from the 
 tip of her chin down her throat was as clear as the 
 curve of a flame. She understood the fineness of the 
 angles of her face from the fact that not one of them 
 let his attention go, and she felt his look touch the 
 thinness of her eyebrows and the sensitiveness of her 
 nostrils. The power of which she had become aware 
 seemed to her suddenly measurable because of its 
 influence on him; and as she dropped her eyes again 
 to her grandfather, on whom her hand still rested, she 
 felt that their exchange had not lacked the touch of 
 Mr. Lacy s silent irony, to make it complete. 
 
 The door had opened again, this time with an 
 authoritative hand, and Mr. Basker in his cassock and 
 gown entered. The glance he gave her passed with an 
 equal severity to Mr. Lacy s closed face. Olive gave 
 a rapid look of calculation, to see where the richest 
 and darkest roses were placed, and took her stand 
 in front of them; Devon, she noticed, was directly 
 opposite her; a few people filed into the room, headed 
 by Philip, and the service began. 
 
 She was vaguely conscious of the succession of 
 its opening stages and of her habitual dislike of the 
 peculiarities of Mr. Basker s pronunciation; but no 
 latent meaning held before the stirred curiosity in her 
 mind. How intensely her eyes fell again to Mr. 
 Lacy s face it would have interested him. She had 
 
 [68]
 
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 always known that she had points of loveliness; but 
 it had needed the shock of the readjustments caused 
 by his death and her entrance into the fight for a new 
 kind of self-assertion to show her that no beauty 
 counted unless it were actively used. She had learned 
 by her sudden influence on young Devon, an influence 
 which was demonstrable and direct; how delightfully 
 her grandfather would have phrased it, and how neatly 
 he would have composed his definition of the stimulus 
 of spectators, of her overworn nerves, and of a new 
 dress. . . . 
 
 From the pallid monotony of Mr. Basker s voice a 
 phrase struck her; and as he proceeded her mind 
 clung to it and heard nothing further; "for this cor 
 ruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must 
 put on immortality. . . ." Mr. Lacy would have been 
 the first to agree with her that the consciousness of 
 such beauty as hers made theories of survival more than 
 ever grotesque; as if, she thought, she could be ex 
 pressed in the pallor of transmutation or by a transfer 
 ence into spiritual significances. As the words sounded 
 over and over in her ears she found herself looking 
 down not at her grandfather s face but at his crossed 
 hands; and suddenly the difference between corruption 
 and incorruption resumed itself in them. She could not 
 quite believe in his death when she looked at his face; 
 it had lain so often before, in the last year, in this grey 
 silence. But the immobility of his hands affected her 
 intimately. Through their fine thinness she had always 
 fancied that there ran his impatience and his detesta 
 tion of any processes of thought which were not as 
 certain and as rapid as their own movements. On the 
 rare occasions when he touched her he had always done 
 
 [69]
 
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 so lightly, with all his quality of charm; and she re 
 membered the brush of his fingers against her cheek 
 as the vividest conveyance to her of his affection. 
 
 For the first time a sensation of uncertainty caught 
 in her throat. She instinctively turned from the open 
 coffin, and her eyes as instinctively swept across the 
 room and clung for the swiftest moment to Devon s. 
 The sudden softening of her attitude and the appeal 
 in her face were not brief enough or light enough to 
 escape him. His own look changed, in response, to a 
 warmer and kinder reassurance, but also to a reserve 
 which, as her intuition saw, was deepened by the feeling 
 behind it. With the realisation of the depth to which 
 she had affected him, her momentary hesitation was 
 gone; and at a sign from Philip she crossed the room, 
 aware that Mr. Basker s voice had stopped, and went 
 to put on her wraps for the churchyard. 
 
 "You must tell Mr. Devon to come back to the 
 house," she had said to her father, as they turned 
 away from the grave, just before noon; "I must give 
 him the most recent notes on the catalogue. He s not 
 often in Wickford, you know." 
 
 Philip left her and she remained for a moment 
 motionless, with her eyes on the scar of upturned 
 earth which broke the surface of the churchyard. The 
 brilliant penetrating light of the winter midday created 
 in her the sense of a stillness as breathless as the cold. 
 She drew a long draught of the icy air; it seemed to 
 her that she had never experienced so keen a feeling 
 of excitation and suspension, and that all the shadows 
 and attenuations of her thought had vanished in the 
 clear vigour of action. 
 
 [70]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 She turned as Devon approached her, in an evident 
 response to Philip s word with him. 
 
 "It s exceedingly kind of you," he said in a lowered 
 tone, "and of course one so hesitates to bother you 
 just now. . . . But if my father could have the notes, 
 up to date, it would be an immense help to him. He s 
 been in bed for a week; that s the only reason he s not 
 here to-day." 
 
 Olive nodded briefly. a Of course you must have 
 the notes. Nothing would have annoyed my grand 
 father more than to be the cause of delaying them. 
 I ve understood it was essential, and I managed, yester 
 day, to find time to gather them together." Her eyes 
 met his. "I want you to tell your father will you? 
 that I mean to finish grandfather s work for him. 
 I ve enough experience of it now, you know. I under 
 stand the papers backward; and I can easily run up 
 to Wickford, for an hour or two, from time to 
 time. . . ." She glanced at the people who were 
 already dispersing, beyond the freshly filled grave. 
 "Come shall we walk? They ve all gone, haven t 
 they? . . . and the air is delicious." 
 
 Devon made no reply except to lay her hand on his 
 arm. It was exceedingly slippery, he said, but if she 
 were careful they could pick their way across the snow 
 to the path. She felt his eyes on her averted face; and 
 she was conscious that her black furs, as they blew 
 against her cheek, must emphasise its clear pallor. 
 
 At the outer gate she wheded about, with her look 
 rising from the spot they had just left to the blue-white 
 line of the hills against the brilliant sky. "Good 
 heavens" she broke out "but it makes one angry!" 
 
 She understood that Devon s surprise arrested him
 
 ASCENT 
 
 for a moment; not only his surprise at the turn of her 
 feeling, as she instantly comprehended, but at her 
 admission of him to it. His expression, as he con 
 fronted her, made her aware of how perfect her 
 reticence of attitude to him had always been. 
 
 "Angry?" The word evidently held him. "To 
 think of him, do you mean the most brilliant and 
 delightful of people as having to leave you when he 
 so loved you?" 
 
 She shook her head. "Don t you see? Don t you 
 feel the terrible impudence of trying to couple him with 
 those prayers and that grave? Death at least death 
 is positive, final; one s got to bear it; but to put all 
 this weakness of sentiment into it, to try to make a 
 beauty out of what is all cruel ugliness . . . No, no, 
 he would have minded it even worse than he minded 
 dying!" 
 
 She felt Devon s eyes again on her face; what 
 struck her at once was that he was not so much fol 
 lowing what she said as watching her. 
 
 "You re incredibly like him!" He seemed, as he 
 spoke, to be answering his own thought. 
 
 She made a sharp gesture. "But don t you see that s 
 just my difficulty that I m not? What s to become 
 of me, I d like to know? Here he s trained me, 
 whipped me into all his disbeliefs, dropped them 
 slowly, one by one, into my thoughts until I m all his 
 system; and yet I m myself. I m a young woman, 
 and not an old man. I ve no power of distortion about 
 death. It means to me just the horror of his dying, 
 the loss of the person who s shaped me and made me, 
 and who yet was to leave me when I most needed 
 him. I ve no power of distortion about life. Yet 
 
 [72]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 somehow I ve got to live . . ." She caught herself 
 up. "I can t imagine why I impose these things on 
 you, Mr. Devon. We re after all complete strangers 
 to each other. Come, and if there s time before your 
 train I ll show how I ve worked out grandfather s addi 
 tions to the last section." 
 
 They walked in silence for some moments, and it 
 was not until they struck into the white waste of the 
 village street that Devon spoke. "You ve no plans?" 
 
 "None." Her brevity was as sharp as Mr. Lacy s. 
 "For the next months I must stay where I am. We 
 own the house, you understand. It is entirely a ques 
 tion of money. My father and I cannot separate and 
 do much more than keep alive; you see " she gave her 
 quick smile "I m not like a girl who s reached life 
 through companions and dances, good times and all 
 that. I m the result of his old close tradition, and 
 it makes the usual people hate the thing they can t 
 understand in me as they hated it in him. He always 
 told me I d find the world just as hard as I found Ware; 
 and I d rather, I sometimes think, sit here and read, 
 and if I ve got to be smothered, at least be smothered 
 in dignity and privacy. . . ." 
 
 "Perhaps you ll find that his affairs " he began. 
 
 "I shall find nothing. I know everything there is 
 to know. If we can sell the house and if father s 
 investments haven t been too unwise, then we might 
 leave here. But I quite plainly see" her tone per 
 mitted no attenuation "that it s extremely uncertain." 
 
 Devon shot a glance at her. "I ve thought each one 
 of the few times I ve seen you, Miss Lacy, that it s a 
 tragic thing, for anyone like you to have to live only 
 in the future." 
 
 [731
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "I never live in the future." They had paused at 
 the gate, and she raised her eyes directly to his. 
 "You re entirely wrong. I live in this moment, and 
 in its facts rather than in its possibilities. I m not to 
 be pitied I ve my own scale of things. Please have 
 no illusions about me; I have none about myself." 
 
 "Haven t you? I wonder . . ." He broke off. He 
 was half smiling, as if he had the tolerance of his 
 experience for her tone, and his look strayed for a 
 moment back to the undulating fall of the glistening 
 meadow. Olive understood the compound of amuse 
 ment and sympathy in his voice; but what she instantly 
 felt was the slip of his attention. An instinctive 
 tenacity touched the corners of her lips. She hesitated 
 for a second, while her black-gloved finger slowly 
 traced a furrow on the powdery snow which crowned 
 the gate post, and her colour faintly rose. 
 
 "I suppose you re like the rest!" she abruptly said. 
 "You think I ve no heart! Well, perhaps I haven t. 
 But he was the only being who was close to me, who 
 pitied me even when he didn t understand me. I loved 
 him in my own way and I shall mourn him in my own 
 way. . . ." 
 
 She raised her hand uncertainly to her forehead. 
 "We had better go over the papers at once; my head 
 is very tired ;" she stopped. A tear had fallen to 
 her cheek, and as she felt its touch she was aware that 
 she had recaptured Devon s interest. His admiration 
 again vividly lit the eyes he turned to her. As he 
 hurriedly murmured that he d been all wrong to let 
 her delay, that she must come in at once and rest, 
 she knew that she had found her way to the note 
 which would invariably move him. His critical judg- 
 
 L74]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 ments were evidently not strong enough to withstand 
 his response to a charm and his ready rise to a sym 
 pathy. Yet as they went up the trodden path to the 
 door her grandfather flashed again through her mind. 
 He would probably have said, with one of his swift 
 contexts of thought, she reflected, that it served her 
 right for disregarding his warning about young Devon 
 that in order to play on his feelings she was forced 
 to play on her own. 
 
 [751
 
 VI 
 
 DEVON had flung himself back in his seat, 
 when he found himself in the late afternoon 
 train which was to take him to Wickford; and 
 as he watched the wintry country stream past him, 
 his few and scattered hours with Olive Lacy had run 
 together in his thoughts and, linked by the events of 
 the day, had assumed their own sequence. 
 
 He had been aware, since his first moment with her 
 that morning, of having something deeper than his 
 interest so intimately involved that he wanted to think; 
 and when he could at last give himself up to his 
 thoughts, some sense of the largeness of the issues 
 concerned came to him in the fact that his reflections 
 did not cling so much about her as about himself. She 
 had already raised in him questions which dealt with 
 the fibre of his life; and the lift of the beauty in her 
 eyes and the sharpness of intolerance in her voice 
 had stirred his old uncertainties, roused new curiosities 
 and touched in the dimmer regions of his mind doubts 
 which he had never quite known whether to greet with 
 a sceptical amusement or to call inspiring visions. 
 
 This border land in his thoughts was one of the 
 countries where he had most lived. He never remem 
 bered his childhood and his first stirrings of conscious 
 ness without an equal remembrance of a territory of his 
 own, where he could retreat to have his own good 
 times. Farthest back of all in his memory, it was a 
 place where one was merely let alone, where his 
 
 [76]
 
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 mother s periodic accessions of interest could not 
 bother him and where his father s sudden disciplinary 
 excesses could not be an obstacle to his plans. Later 
 his private world had changed to a place to which one 
 went, consciously performing the journey and arriving 
 at a delightful spot where there was complete safety 
 from interruption because no one else knew the trick 
 of admission. His sense of self-preservation had 
 vaguely linked itself with his childish imagination, 
 and he had understood that to maintain his privacy 
 and to make at will his retreats to it was the easiest 
 means of existence. For one thing, it stopped that 
 perpetual appeal to him which, as he had early realised, 
 was the single point his parents had in common. His 
 instinct was too quick not to divine that all they 
 wanted, in their sporadic claims on his affection, was 
 to put each other in the wrong. He could still remem 
 ber the day and he knew it, now, as having been for 
 all three of them an occasion when, sitting at table 
 between them, he had glanced from his mother s futile 
 prettiness, somehow more galling, as her husband said, 
 than anything about her, to the equal futility of his 
 father s cleverness and made the choice of his inde 
 pendence; and when they finally separated and he 
 lived, at such times when he was not at school, first 
 with one and then with the other, he gradually under 
 stood that his neutrality had not only protected him 
 but had led him to develop a life of his own. 
 
 The first results of this determination not to fall 
 into a partisanship were that he should apply to his 
 surroundings a steady criticism. But for more years 
 than his mental activity had been clear, and because 
 of his sensitiveness, he had measured what he had 
 
 [77]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 sacrificed in reaching this point. He had been deprived 
 not only of the warmth of direct relationships. His 
 loss was of a kind beyond mitigation; and as he 
 matured he had realised the price of too compressed 
 and constricted a development, and that instead of 
 falling easily into his natural indifference he had had 
 to rely on its armour too often. The few ideas which 
 reached growth and fruition in him, under these cir 
 cumstances, had had too concentrated a force. After 
 his first year at college, a year which an easy popu 
 larity had made specially broadening, he had made his 
 accustomed journey, from his mother s ornate apart 
 ment in New York to the shabby sitting room at 
 Wickford, with a dry amusement and with the sense 
 that anything was better than to have run the risk of 
 changing all his points of view with the actual transit 
 in the railway. His parents remained very much as 
 his childish justness of vision had seen them; they 
 were as incapable of foregoing a mutual domestic 
 existence even in separation, and of keeping a silence 
 or of making an omission. He grew even to feel that 
 the jades weren t real, and that they existed solely as 
 crystallised symbols of his father s refusal to deal 
 directly with life. 
 
 As a consequence of this indefiniteness of trend in 
 his development, and of too definite revulsions in him 
 self, Devon had lacked even more than the usual young 
 American a plan of existence and of action. A natural 
 aptitude for architecture had determined his drift to 
 Paris. His years at the Beaux Arts had been full of 
 charm, but with the same absence of direction. He 
 sometimes caught himself wondering at the uneven- 
 nesses in his maturity. He was so without the fire of 
 
 [78]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 belief, so content with the idle sense of the charm 
 of the present, so habituated to see ultimate rather 
 than temporary values in what either waked the youth 
 ful scepticism of his contemporaries or stirred them 
 to enthusiasm. Yet he was innately conscious of carry 
 ing within himself a clear definiteness of acceptance 
 and rejection and an immediacy of action in the judg 
 ments of his taste, which were either, he supposed, 
 very ignorant or very astute. 
 
 Most of his companions took the life like the usual 
 temporarily denationalised young Americans. There 
 was not yet war in the air, to stimulate their sense of 
 conduct and to give it new proportions; and there still 
 survived some of the former traditions of excess, rather 
 tame and artificial, as it seemed to Devon, and lacking 
 in personality. He was amused by these accidents and 
 he shared them, but with his sense of detachment 
 clearer than ever. Something in the tone of Paris 
 struck him as a standard. The instinct for order and 
 loveliness affected him intimately. The living beauty 
 of the grey streets, the penetrative sense of art which 
 he discovered anywhere and everywhere, the modeled 
 compactness of the French life, as every now and then 
 he brushed close to it, were like a tonic to his instinc 
 tive differentiations. The young men with whom he 
 found himself became externally more of this existence 
 than he. They achieved their accent and their slang 
 and their passionate French prejudices, whether for 
 an idea, for a supposititious form of socialism or for 
 a love affair. He felt himself more fundamentally 
 touched. He had his national lack of a formative 
 morality and his national ease in adapting himself to 
 extraneous circumstances; and as the months passed 
 
 [79]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 he gradually understood that he was becoming a citizen 
 of everywhere. Sometimes he went to Venice for the 
 autumn exhibitions, and saw the pictures with eyes 
 more and more certainly and easily sophisticated. He 
 spent one September vacation in the flame-like air of 
 northern Tunis, he knew where there was good swim 
 ming all along the Schleswig coast; and one spring, 
 after a successful examination, he took the trans- 
 Siberian to Port Arthur, before going back to begin his 
 work in a New York office. 
 
 He left friends everywhere, but he carried away no 
 sense of something added to himself. He recognised the 
 carnival of the moment, but he did not feel it. The one 
 or two more delicate relations with women which had 
 lightened and deepened these years made this truth 
 more than ever evident to him. Once or twice he had 
 been completely careless of everything but his happi 
 ness. But he was never able to rid himself of the 
 latent reactions of a chivalry rooted in his fineness of 
 fibre, of a question of all temporary certainties and of 
 doubts which required a visible response. He had 
 begun, he knew, with the only kind of metaphysics of 
 which a boy is capable, and which had brought him 
 to a reliance on his perpetually active instinct rather 
 than on actualities; and he had ended where? At an 
 added capacity, or at only added exactions from his 
 sensitiveness? Something profounder than the present 
 stirred in him, as he followed, from the train window, 
 the processes of change in the twilight. He felt Olive 
 scarcely as much as he felt her mystery, and her 
 mystery scarcely as much as the mystery of all feeling. 
 He asked himself, for the first time in his experience, 
 whether the human relation is ever an end in itself, 
 
 [80]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 or whether it serves only its part in the sequences of 
 larger revelations. The shadows on the white world 
 he watched grew from blue to violet and the evening 
 came in a grey pallor; and suddenly his sense of the 
 impermanence of the wide American landscape was 
 lifted and lit by her qualities. The brilliancy of her 
 possibilities revivified his original inspiration of an 
 adventurous future and her aloofness ran out, with the 
 fading light, into the tenuosities of the dusk. His 
 imagination, he supposed, with the accustomed arrest 
 of his self-derision, would of course have to fasten itself 
 to a woman, and to a woman with so clear a moral need. 
 But he caught himself wondering if he should ever 
 recognise the force which penetrated and possessed all 
 capacity, which should put another person between 
 him and his thought itself; which should be so alive 
 that it was always in need of new conquest, yet so 
 intimately his that there was no separation of entity. 
 
 Before he left Wickford, Devon managed to delay 
 his departure twice. Each time it was after he had 
 had an unexpected meeting with Olive. Once she had 
 come to luncheon, in response to a telephone message 
 from his father, who was rapidly absorbing from her 
 the details of the indispensable aid old Lacy had given 
 him, and explained to them some intricacy in her 
 grandfather s notes on the catalogue. He did not know 
 whether it were because of his own sense of a considera 
 tion due her or because of some light implication in 
 herself; but all through the hour he had felt her to 
 be completely unapproachable. She glanced briefly at 
 him, every now and then, across a bowl of red carna 
 tions which his father had arranged in a sudden 
 
 [81]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 attempt at ceremony; and her hands reached out to 
 touch the flowers, in the pauses of the conversation. 
 The sense of her aloofness brought her poignantly 
 close to him. He felt his fancy rise and play on the 
 smallest things about her, the movement of her 
 dress, the way her fingers closed about the stem of 
 her wine glass, with the colour suddenly deepening, 
 under the pressure, at their tips, the lighter brown 
 which the folds of her black veil brought out in her 
 hair, and the clear sharp line of her cheek and chin as 
 she turned her head. Just before they rose she bent 
 forward to take one of the flowers from the bowl, and 
 drew it through the knot of crepe on her dress, where 
 it lay against her bare throat. He could not have said 
 there was the smallest display in the gesture. Her 
 compactness of action showed a premeditation deeper 
 than self-consciousness. All that she did seemed to him 
 a fundamental expression of her quality. The flower 
 in her dress was no more implicative of her than the 
 thorough technical grasp she showed of the matters 
 in question. Part of her magnificence of energy, he 
 felt, was that she had nothing old or tempered in her, 
 no abnegations, no concessions and no antecedent 
 restrictions, and that she was resumed in the positive 
 play of her force. 
 
 She had glanced at her watch, about three o clock, 
 and his father, with one of his quick, irritable glances, 
 had left them to put together some papers which she 
 was to take back to Ware. Devon had instantly spoken 
 to her in a different key, aware that the moment they 
 were alone there was a sudden progress in their 
 exchange. 
 
 [82]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "I know these things must seem horribly dry to you; 
 but father s so set on it . . ." 
 
 "Nothing is easier than for me to look over the 
 papers for him. I have nothing to do, you must 
 remember; now my days and nights are blank spaces." 
 
 She spoke with the coldest clearness. Devon had 
 never felt more penetratively the hard capacity in her 
 voice. He held his next words for a moment. His 
 elbow was on the mantel, and his eyes rose from the 
 wood fire, in the gaudily tiled grate, to follow her action 
 as she stood beside him. She had begun to draw on 
 her long black gloves. Her hands slipped smoothly 
 into one and the other; and he saw the kid take the 
 modelling first of her fingers and then of the fine lines 
 about her wrists. He recalled his thoughts with an 
 effort. 
 
 "But you re a marvel, Miss Lacy. You ll never have 
 blank spaces. It s only us drifting people who fall 
 into them." 
 
 "Oh, if I have them, it s because I mean to have 
 them. Grandfather scarcely taught one, you know, 
 to drift!" 
 
 "It s an absurd word to use in connection with you!" 
 He spoke to himself as much as to her, and as he again 
 raised his eyes to glance at her he saw that her face 
 had stiffened to its look of bitterness. 
 
 "Is it? You know more about it all than I do. 
 You ve seen things, done things. If I ever do get to 
 a larger life, how am I to free myself? How am I to 
 spread my wings and fly? Has one ever, after all, 
 what one calls control?" Her shoulders rose and fell. 
 "No, no. At the end it comes back to drift, after all." 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 "Ah, not with a person like you!" he paused. 
 "You re freer than all the rest of us." 
 
 "Am I?" Her dry amusement lit her eyes. "Do 
 you really believe that, Mr. Devon? If you do, you re 
 less clever than I thought you. You ve fatally declared 
 yourself declared yourself immune from my kind 
 of bondage. No " she raised her hand "I m sure 
 you want to be understanding and all that. I m not 
 alluding just to the facts that I ve my father and that 
 I ve my lack of money. I m alluding to things in my 
 nature which I sometimes think will always keep 
 me from freedom; demands, intolerances. . . ." 
 
 She turned abruptly away. Even the sharpness of 
 her movement had its charm for him. He was keenly 
 aware of every element in her fluctuations ; they stirred 
 his curiosity and intrigued his mind. He wondered, 
 suddenly, if she could not be taught to feel all the 
 finest range of feeling; whether that force in her which 
 was still incomprehensible could not be clarified and 
 defined by arousing her sentiment. For a second, the 
 strangeness of which was definite to him, he seemed 
 to pierce, in his rapidly moving thought, the enclosure 
 about her immaturity, as if he had turned a bright 
 light on the surface of a seemingly impenetrable wall 
 and found it to be made of crystal. 
 
 It was after this talk with her that Devon decided 
 to linger two or three weeks longer with his father; 
 not with any definite hope that he should immediately 
 see her again, but with a vague pleasure in her com 
 parative nearness, in the letters which each day s post 
 brought from her to his father, and an indefinable 
 sense that he shared something in her existence when 
 he felt, in Wickford, the same storms which must 
 
 [84]
 
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 sweep with such white fury along the Ware valley. 
 He was aware that she was daily and hourly more per 
 vasively penetrating his thought and rapidly becoming 
 more personal to him. Where his intelligence had 
 formerly dealt with her, he now found himself instinc 
 tively reverting to the scent which had clung to his 
 hand, after her hand had touched it, and the way her 
 eyes, in their rare moments of softness, rested in his. 
 The imprecision which hung about his judgment of her 
 laid a constant touch on his curiosity; and as a still 
 negative power, which he did not yet acknowledge, she 
 had a wider influence than if he had completely 
 accepted her. 
 
 He was conscious that his father s eyes frequently 
 followed him, in a silence even less implicative than 
 usual. Their lack of any of the established habit of 
 exchange had never been more exposed. One night, 
 however, with one of his unexpected turns, Devon had 
 raised his head suddenly from the papers which were 
 tossed over his desk to say: "I suppose you think that 
 because I ve no use for your mother, I ve no use for 
 all women!" 
 
 The younger Devon, who was smoking on the other 
 side of the table, put a finger in the pages of his book 
 and smiled. "Well no. I shouldn t have thought 
 that. It always strikes me that you resent mother 
 rather than you hate her; after all, her chief fault is 
 that she never gives one anything to condemn her for." 
 
 Devon nodded. "All premises fail where your 
 mother s concerned. She s not real. But there s one 
 thing about her . . ." he waited; "her selfishness has 
 always been traceable, petty oh, rather ridiculous. 
 I m not sure that that Lacy girl s will be as harmless. 
 
 [85]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 She s got in her the only element," he chose his words, 
 "which civilisation s been powerless to modify her 
 instinct of fight. She ll fight to get what she wants, 
 she ll fight to impose herself." 
 
 His son had flushed slightly. "I suppose you re warn 
 ing me. I might remind you, mightn t I? that for a 
 good many years I ve been ready to take the conse 
 quences of what I do." 
 
 "Oh, it s never any good warning a chap with a 
 nature like yours all indifference outside and hard 
 ness in. I might remind you, in my turn, that it s not 
 my habit to bay at the moon. Nor do I think you ll be 
 fool enough to think you can train and tame an instinct 
 as strong as that. You ve enough psychology in you, 
 I suppose, to know the definition of conversion! But I 
 don t want to see her impose on that streak in you 
 which responds to the fluid things in life ... to 
 questions, to chances, to lost causes " He had hesi 
 tated again. "You re not a poet, John, but you ve got 
 a sense of poetry." 
 
 "Then I owe it to the jades," his son had flung 
 back, with his light smile. 
 
 Devon laid his hand on the froth-like white surface 
 of the little ornament which, on its black base, stood 
 always at his elbow. "As if there could be any doubt 
 of that! But they ve been enough for me, the jades; 
 I ve had them because they ve so completely had me. 
 What you need, in life, is something like them. You 
 need a purpose; you need both its guidance and its 
 restraint." 
 
 "I rather think," young Devon still kept his flush, 
 "that I also need its magnificence." 
 
 "Well, you ll not get that from any woman;" he 
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 ASCENT 
 
 laid a long finger on his jade. "The Olive Lacys of 
 the world are after all only a guide in reaching this 
 kind of thing." 
 
 "They may be a guide in reaching feeling," retorted 
 the younger man easily; "and feeling s even closer to 
 art than jades." 
 
 His father gave him a final silent look; his only 
 reply was to murmur that he d talked so much that his 
 cigar had gone out; and a second later he was bent 
 again, in his habitual absorption, over his books. 
 
 It was one afternoon in early March, when the snow 
 was turning to opaque grey water and the noise of the 
 clanging trolleys and the jostling drays had never 
 seemed to him more intolerably full of the reverbera 
 tions of a provincial town, that Devon turned into a 
 little Catholic church, the clerestory of which had 
 lately been lifted and widened by one of his firm. He 
 sat in the darkest part of the nave, grateful for the 
 sudden silence; and almost at once he became aware 
 that both the gloom and the stillness were charged 
 with a personal significance for him and that a few 
 feet in front of him Olive was kneeling. She was the 
 single living presence in the dim light; and she knelt, 
 as he thought, with all her aspect of mystery. The fall 
 of her shoulders and the lines of her long arms, as 
 she had bent them to clasp her hands, had sharp 
 significant angles, and he was struck at once by how 
 beautiful a background so full a surrounding made for 
 her beauty. Even in the passage of the swift instants, 
 he was conscious of the suggestion of drama in her 
 impact with an age-old belief. A church had always 
 meant to Devon, as to many men of his type, only an 
 attempt at dogmatisation to which he could not see 
 
 [87]
 
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 himself subscribe. Yet he knew that in any belief 
 which has for centuries had the accrued allegiances of 
 human piety, there must be an immeasurable knowl 
 edge of good and evil; that the history of Christianity 
 was a development of individuality in order that the 
 individual might be sacrificed, and that in the light 
 of these verities there must be rules and precedents 
 which judged, more fundamentally than he could, even 
 so special a person as she. Her ignorance had never 
 yet so caught and claimed his pity as in the instants 
 while he watched her. It seemed to him that there 
 existed too final a separation between her and any 
 act of prayer. He found himself gripped by the wish 
 that he could have been surer of what her motive might 
 have been, in coming there; and as he slipped out, 
 abandoning her to whatever her communion was, old 
 Lacy rose vividly in his mind and he wondered what 
 any deity could conceivably be, to whom she could 
 bring herself to pray. 
 
 [88]
 
 VII 
 
 "^7"OU know, it s a wonder to me why on earth 
 | you came!" 
 
 As she spoke, Olive had turned to Devon in 
 the seat of the motor, so close to him that her wrap 
 brushed against his arm. He could see the raillery in 
 her eyes and the accent at the corners of her lips; 
 and it occurred to him, with a touch of surprise, that 
 the arresting thing about her words should be their 
 complete lack of either challenge or appeal, and the 
 vivid ring of their truth. 
 
 He had motored down, in the same morning, from 
 Wickford, where he had arrived only the day before. 
 For more than two months he had imagined their 
 meeting; it had hung before him through the last 
 weeks of a busy winter, tinged all his activities with 
 the colour of its possibilities, and made his silences 
 replete. From the time he had left Wickford, in 
 early March, these pictures had arisen in his mind. 
 He could close his eyes and see the manner in which 
 her light self-possession would hold, the quick sur 
 prise of her smile and the way her eyebrows might 
 rise, with their habitual suggestion scarcely so much 
 of a tangible astonishment and more as if she were 
 struck, within herself, by what no one else was agile 
 enough to see. When he had greeted her, an hour 
 before, following close on the heels of the telegram he 
 had sent her, she had been so like his vision of her, in 
 all its forms, that the confirmation was a delicate shock 
 
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 of pleasure. She was sitting in front of the little coal 
 fire, in what had been Mr. Lacy s chair, and she had 
 not risen as he entered. She merely turned, to look 
 over her shoulder at him, with her book laid on her 
 knee and her hands clasped on it; and her eyebrows 
 had lifted and her smile run over her face just as his 
 imagination had prophesied. 
 
 "So you re really here!" she exclaimed. 
 
 "But surely you got my wire, saying I d reached 
 Wickford last night, and that I d arrive if you didn t 
 mind early this afternoon!" 
 
 "Oh, it was the wire that put the final touch to my 
 disbelief! Before since you left you d been just 
 someone I remembered to have seen, someone whom 
 I could believe in because you were so far off. The 
 wire made you positive and human, something which 
 I knew must go wrong because," her touch was light 
 ness itself, "it would be too nice if it came true." 
 
 Devon still held the hand she had given him. "Has 
 everything gone wrong since I ve seen you?" 
 
 "How could everything go wrong when nothing 
 whatever has happened?" she had rejoined easily; 
 then she had suddenly risen, with her book falling to 
 the floor. "If you knew how tired I am of this room! 
 Have you your motor here yes? Do you think it s 
 too cold for you to drive me out to the hills somewhere, 
 so that I can draw breath? No? Very well, then . . ." 
 
 She had spoken very little while they ran along the 
 long Ware road which bent to the south except, every 
 now and then, to direct him. "There s a road not 
 too rough which goes back and up amongst the hills; 
 at least we shan t meet Ware on it! Long Hill you 
 must have heard of it; it s the hill you see to the east, 
 
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 from the train. With a car like this we can get easily 
 to within a climb of the summit; and perhaps we 
 shan t be too late for an early sunset." 
 
 They had struck from the highway a mile or so 
 out of the village and turned, as she had predicted, 
 into a little travelled road which at once became steep. 
 In the pale green of May, the fields which rippled away 
 on either hand showed the rich brown of the soil 
 between the young shoots. The sun was in their faces, 
 and everywhere the clear shadowless light fell with the 
 delicate spring radiance. The sharpness which still 
 hung in the air blent with the smell of fresh earth and 
 the swollen flow of a stream, to the right of the road. 
 But even in this season, when the stir of cultivation 
 was only in its first flush, Devon saw how speedily the 
 country became stern. The fields were poorer and 
 the pastures rougher with the miles; and finally there 
 was visible only a solitary farmhouse of battered grey 
 boards, with its barns in decay and its curtainless win 
 dows half broken, as if it stood as a final attestation 
 of the hopelessness of maintaining the decencies of 
 life in such difficult conditions. When this fell behind 
 them the road itself became a track; and half a mile 
 further Olive motioned him to stop. 
 
 She had briefly nodded when he asked if she 
 were able for the climb, and he had helped her over 
 the broken remains of a stone wall and seen her bend 
 herself for the ascent. The slant of the hill was now 
 so steep that, as she preceded him, he could see her 
 outlined against the blue-grey sky. He traced the 
 nervous fineness of all her movements, the flexibility of 
 her thin ankles and the free sway of her waist. Every 
 now and then she shook her head silently, to his
 
 ASCENT 
 
 remonstrance that she mustn t try it too fast. They 
 had made their way for perhaps fifty yards, over 
 ground which grew every instant more broken, when 
 he began to divine that their destination was at hand. 
 Turning back, he could see the sides of the eminence 
 fall away in contours which immediately below them 
 were steep, but which beyond that dropped with the 
 long undulations of the base of a mountain. The 
 country below was wrapped in a pale veil of light, 
 scarcely a mist as much as an exhalation of the earth. 
 The green was so soft that it verged on grey and the 
 grey, in the distances, had the tenuosity of silver. A 
 suspense like the suspense of premonition lay on the 
 far fields; and over the desiccated stretches nearer 
 them, the stillness hung like a last breath of winter. 
 
 As they paused Devon saw Olive s eyes sweep the 
 horizon. Throughout the climb she had kept the clear 
 pallor which he thought her greatest beauty; and he 
 gave himself time to trace in the quiver of her throat 
 her quickened breathing, before he spoke. 
 
 "But of course you knew I d come!" he broke out, 
 as he recovered from the pressure of his thoughts. 
 "It s been sufficiently obvious hasn t it? that I d 
 have to!" 
 
 "Sometimes I ve felt so sure you wouldn t" . . . she 
 hesitated and waited. 
 
 "Tell me," said Devon abruptly, "have you thought 
 of me at all, in these last weeks? What have you done? 
 What haven t you done?" 
 
 "What have I done !" Her eyes were still rest 
 lessly searching the outline, against the sky, of the 
 farthest hills. "I ve tried to hold life together. That 
 sounds absurd to you, doesn t it? I ve tried to deal 
 
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 with all sorts of little things, and littlest of all my 
 father. You don t know my father! Poor dear, he s 
 rather dreadful! If I were a sentimentalist, I should 
 say I d tried to keep from going mad from loneliness; 
 as it is, I ll say I ve been reduced to being careful to 
 dress myself every night for dinner, as if it were a 
 real dinner. That s how one keeps up, you know 
 when one s very miserable the thing called courage." 
 
 His sense of an irony in her appeal seemed to him to 
 rise and fall with the variant inflexions of her voice. 
 
 "At least you ve known," he said in a lowered tone, 
 "that there was one person whose thoughts clung about 
 whatever you did." 
 
 Her eyes brushed quickly over him for an instant 
 and then returned to the distance. "Have I? And 
 what reason had I to know it? I m not a person to 
 build castles in Spain; I m too used to the brutalities 
 of fact." 
 
 "But you ve guessed all I felt all it was only con 
 siderate to you to feel of the obligation not to hurry 
 you. You re far younger than I, you re completely 
 alone, and you ve had this winter a great loss. But 
 you ve known you must have known all that was 
 under my silence." 
 
 She shook her head. "I ve known nothing. I 
 haven t myself, those delicacies of imagination and of 
 feeling. . . ." 
 
 She stopped. Devon felt the tensity of her pause; 
 and suddenly he was aware that she was quivering 
 and that her hands had rigidly clasped each other. 
 She wheeled around upon him, with her face darkened. 
 
 "I don t see why I came here! " she exclaimed. "I ve 
 always detested this place always. Grandfather and 
 
 [93]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 I sometimes drove up, in summer, in the last years he 
 was strong, and he made phrases about the illusion 
 of distance and the bad poetry that the mere mass of 
 the mountains inspired, and all that. But I always 
 hated it, even when I was tiny; it s always made me 
 feel helpless, reduced to nothing . . ." 
 
 She broke her phrase sharply. "You mustn t marry 
 me no, you mustn t want to. It will spoil everything 
 for you. Can t you see that I m I that I can t be your 
 idea of me? I m governed by laws of my own, and 
 they re not yours. Oh, don t think I ve lost my senses. 
 I know what it would mean." She flung back her 
 head. "No, I tell you it s hopeless." 
 
 Devon had laid his hands on her shoulders. Her 
 face swam uncertainly before him. His eyes were full 
 of the effulgence of that future which, in an instant, had 
 sprung into being and lay extended at his feet like the 
 spread beauties of the country below. Through it all 
 there stood out in his mind the fact that the instinct of 
 his nascent tenderness had been right. She wasn t only 
 the compound of her confused inheritances. What had 
 beckoned him on, what he felt he might call the pilgrim 
 soul in her, was extant and real. In their briefest 
 talks and in her sharpest manner, it had survived. If 
 it had been sometimes submerged, he saw that it had 
 never been completely absent, and the generosity of 
 her gesture had thrown it into sudden light. 
 
 She continued to look at him, with so absorbed a 
 fixity that it seemed to him to expose all her mind, in 
 a simplicity which touched the elemental. Beneath 
 his hands, as he still held her and as he heard himself 
 reassure and quiet her, he could feel the subsidence of 
 the storm which had swept her, as if its gust were 
 
 [94]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 going; and when, a moment later, she bent her head 
 and began to cry, he understood his conquest of her 
 resolution. 
 
 He felt it all the more evident a sign of the depths 
 to which she had been shaken that she did not speak. 
 Her silence to him was as replete as her acquiescence. 
 He had never thought her lovelier than at this moment, 
 with both her physical and mental rigidity collapsed 
 and all the fluidity of her youth apparent. As they 
 turned to go down the hill, with their silence still 
 holding, Devon looked behind him. There seemed to 
 him to be, in the violet and green beauty of the spring 
 evening, some quality which gave it an entity and 
 almost a heart. The farthest hills had in their outline 
 a sudden poignancy of loveliness, whose quality cor 
 responded with the difficult and mute stages of his dis 
 parate life and its final flow into a definite channel. 
 The tremulously still tree tops below had the delicate 
 movement, as it struck him, of nascent feeling. The 
 isolation itself enclosed them with the sense of a wide 
 sympathy; and he felt that in looking back he would 
 always think of the hour and the place as having had 
 a definite personification, large enough to measure the 
 spaces of his own dedication and yet so nearly human 
 that they were like a warm hand laid on his happiness. 
 
 Olive had said nothing more than a low word of 
 thanks, when he put her into her seat in the car and 
 folded the rugs over her knees. Between her soft hat 
 and the high collar of her furs, Devon could see that 
 her face was white with fatigue and her eyes sombre. 
 The light was fading with the instants, and they began, 
 with some difficulty, to make their slow way down. 
 
 [951
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Once or twice he turned to satisfy himself that she 
 was covered and shielded, and then he relapsed again 
 into all the tacit implications of their silence. 
 
 The track had merged into the rough beginnings 
 of a road when Devon paused to deal with some diffi 
 culty in switching on the lights of the car. As he 
 drew up the noise of hoofs disengaged itself from the 
 whir of the engine, and an open trap approached them 
 from the left. There was from that direction scarcely 
 more of a road than that which lay in front of them; 
 but as his eyes penetrated the obscurity he saw that it 
 led to the half -shattered farmhouse which he had 
 noticed during their ascent. There was no light visible 
 and he could discern only its broken outline, against 
 a sky which was almost as dark as the roof; but he 
 made out that in the doorway stood a tall woman, the 
 gleam of whose face and hands he could trace, and 
 who was watching the road with an absorption of 
 curiosity which might be expected in so desolate a 
 spot. 
 
 The trap had now reached the point where the two 
 paths converged, and its driver stopped with the evident 
 intention of letting the car precede. A voice, coming 
 through the dusk, struck Devon with the surprise of 
 complete incongruity, in its loud note of a friendly 
 cheerfulness. 
 
 "Why, Olive, it s you! To think of it! It s a long 
 enough ride, isn t it? even for people as used to it as 
 I am. I don t see that they ve done much to the roads 
 this spring, do you? I tell father there s not much 
 good in his being a Selectman. No, don t bother about 
 me; please go on ahead! I ve no lantern, but that 
 doesn t matter. The light ll last long enough. Good 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 night ! " The driver evidently turned over her shoulder. 
 "Good night, Lizzie!" 
 
 The light wagon rattled to one side; Devon started 
 the car, and in a second they had passed beyond it. 
 He was absorbing himself in the difficulties of prog 
 ress over the roughened road-bed when he became 
 aware that Olive s hand lay on his arm. 
 
 "Abby!" she said, with her voice still low. "Of all 
 impossibilities! Abby, coming up here to see Lizzie 
 Truslow . . ." 
 
 "Who s Abby, my dear child? And whoever she is, 
 why should she so surprise you?" 
 
 "Abby, if you must know, is my cousin." The 
 softness of her tone had diminished. "She s the 
 only daughter the round, middle-aged daughter of 
 Uncle Joseph Trail, who s the breath of Ware. There s 
 not an angle to her mind, not a hope for her. They live, 
 she and her father, in a house which is considered the 
 best house in Ware. Abby guides the taste of the 
 Book Club, she tells them what music to buy for 
 their pianolas; and to think of her here . . . !" 
 
 "Still, I don t see ... ," said Devon. 
 
 "You d see if you saw Uncle Joseph Trail. No he 
 simply can t know she comes! Otherwise it s past 
 imagination. Uncle Joseph sweeps the Lizzie Truslows 
 out of his life as he d sweep the mud from his doorstep. 
 And that when all Ware at his orders stoned her, 
 Abby should actually come to see her, and evidently 
 often. . . . It s beyond solution! Lizzie, you see," 
 her eyes were hard with her amusement as they turned 
 to him, through the dim light, "is what grandfather 
 used to call the fine perfection of a sinner." 
 
 Devon, with his free hand, pulled her rugs more 
 [97]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 closely about her. "I must say I think it s rather nice 
 of her of your cousin, you know." 
 
 He heard that her intonation had changed to a 
 quality like the glance he had caught from her. "I 
 suspect you re a person who is imposed on by those 
 things! Abbys and Lizzies they re made for each 
 other; one to commit sins, and the other to rescue. 
 Abby must be developing what grandfather loved to 
 define as the dangerous imagination of uninstructed 
 people; and Lizzie, I suppose, relives the pleasure of 
 all the dreadful things she did, when she confesses 
 them!" He felt again the touch of her look. "I sup 
 pose you think it s too scandalous to see things as 
 clearly as that!" 
 
 Devon s smile hesitated. "You ll not trick me into 
 condemning you. I think it s only very ignorant." 
 
 "Perhaps it is! " She turned away, restlessly. "Yes, 
 you turn here. You must drive me back to realities 
 now. And you must stay to dine and see father. I 
 know it will be ridiculous because everything he does 
 is ridiculous; but I suppose it s necessary. . . . Can 
 you ever forgive me for bringing you this long way? 
 And at the end of it she drew a quick sigh, 
 "you ve found only an illusion of me!" 
 
 The throng of impressions and sensations in him 
 was too varied for him to answer her. Before they 
 turned into the lighter high road and left the shadows 
 sinking into the hills, he drew together her bare fingers 
 and kissed them. There was something peculiarly sym 
 pathetic to him in the fact that this should be the first 
 sign of his feeling since he had acknowledged it. The 
 act held all of the quality which was its foundation; 
 and the light responsive pressure of her hand against 
 
 [98]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 his lips made him think of her eyes as they had 
 questioned the spaces of the horizon. 
 
 He had never imagined her lovelier than when she 
 came down and took her seat opposite her father in 
 the narrow dining room. To see her in the mediocrity 
 of the house was to have their incongruity made precise 
 and visible; that had struck him long before, and the 
 contrast of the aged artistocratic streak in her with 
 what was so perfectly specious. Her hands and her 
 carriage marked the drama between themselves and 
 Ware as old Lacy s diatribes had never marked it, and 
 its futile waste had never seemed to Devon more 
 obvious. She had in her, he thought, the aggressive 
 force which reduced the accompaniments of life to a 
 background. He could fancy that as she made even 
 this ugliness unnoticeable, so she would also reduce, 
 in its different degree, a surrounding of beauty to out 
 line her own beauty. But as he watched the high poise 
 of her head he wondered if what most of all made that 
 beauty was not her spirited readiness to battle with 
 any future. Would all of her life be in terms of con 
 quest? He felt himself caught by the question. The 
 clearance of her feeling had been like the clearance of 
 a sky. Not a trace of her softness was left; and as 
 he listened to her Devon recognised that her lucidity 
 had its keenest edge, as if a night of wind and rain 
 had been succeeded, as he had often seen it in the Ware 
 valleys, by the magnificence of a north-west day. Yet 
 here too she had her effect of poignancy for him. 
 Beneath the brilliancy of happiness in her eyes, the 
 tonic of her excitement and her amusement at the 
 astonished pleasure of Philip and her old nurse, there 
 seemed to him to underlie, more visibly than he had 
 
 [99]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 ever seen it, her suggestion of a gallantry which had 
 the touch of a light desperation in its confidence. 
 
 Philip fixed him over his glasses, with an apparent 
 incapacity to cease his murmur that it was all very 
 extraordinary. He shook his head, with no attempt to 
 reply to Olive s gay assurances that it was really the 
 only orthodox thing she d ever done to be engaged to 
 be married. All he needed, she said, was someone to 
 whom he could talk about it, and once he put it into 
 his own phrases of sentiment, it would all seem quite 
 simple. What evidently disconcerted him more than 
 the note to which he was so palpably accustomed was 
 Devon s treatment of him. Devon had begun to talk of 
 the country from the point of its formation, asked 
 Philip a question or two, and drawn from him answers 
 about quarrying, in that part of the state, which, as 
 an architect, he said he ought to be ashamed not to 
 have known. Would Philip tell him more of the things 
 he had picked up, from the gossip of the outlying 
 farmers who drove in at times to Ware and who must 
 know all about the lay of the land and the composition 
 of the soil? He was, he supposed, going down to 
 New York in the next days to see his mother and 
 to tell her his news; but when he came back Philip 
 must come up to Wickford to lunch, where his father 
 would, he knew, be so glad to welcome him. 
 
 Philip could only demur helplessly; he was, he said, 
 puzzled by the changes in the railway time and he 
 always caught a cold in the train. But as he listened 
 to these vague attempts at appreciation, what had 
 struck Devon was Olive. They had just finished 
 dining, and she had suddenly dropped her fruit knife 
 to her plate with an impatience as sharp as the ring 
 
 [100]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 of the metal as it fell. She broke off Philip s wander 
 ing phrases and rose; and as Devon followed her to 
 the door, she turned to him with a tinge in her voice 
 which seemed to reduce his attempts to futility. "I 
 suppose you will insist on being kind to father!" He 
 had felt her raillery extend for an instant to him. "But 
 don t lower the action of your taste by liking him!" 
 
 The pressure of thoughts which the evening had 
 brought him seemed to Devon to simplify itself in a 
 central theme when, towards eleven o clock, they stood 
 together for a moment on the verandah, before he got 
 into his car. She had followed him out and in the dark, 
 with her swift unexpectedness, she had slipped her 
 hand through his arm. The rarity, as he divined, of 
 such signs in her made the gesture rarely valuable. As 
 he closed his hand over hers he seemed to enter some 
 stronghold of her thought; and he had suddenly bent 
 his face to hers, in the obscurity. 
 
 She raised her hand hurriedly to her cheek, as his 
 lips left it, and he could make out through the dim 
 light the altered expression of her eyes. 
 
 He smiled at her surprise; didn t it strike her, he 
 asked, that when he said he cared for her, he 
 meant it? 
 
 "Yes, I suppose so; you see" she hesitated "I ve 
 never thought much about those things. No, it s 
 strange; but really I ve never thought about them." 
 She was silent for an instant. "And you won t think 
 that I m nothing but what I seem?" 
 
 Devon had not answered her at once. He had looked 
 up at the starless sky which, beyond the scattered 
 lights and the soft stillness of the village, hung above 
 them. The air was saturated with the cold freshness 
 
 [101]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 of May and with the mystery of imprecision; and as 
 his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness he could 
 trace the bare trees, stretching long fine fingers to 
 the blue of the night like delicate antennae of percep 
 tion. 
 
 "I shall always be a little shocked, I think, at the 
 only things you understand in me . . . !" 
 
 He had broken off his phrase; but as he turned back 
 to her he had for the first time felt, through the 
 obscurity, that her eyes searched his face and tried 
 to follow his thoughts. 
 
 [102]
 
 II
 
 VIII 
 
 HE had always thought it an amazing scene, one 
 less of brilliancy than of dexterities of arrange 
 ment; but as he slipped into a box, with the 
 rest of the house in darkness and an act of the 
 opera in play, Devon had never more keenly felt, in 
 his idle way, the latent uncertainty of this New York 
 life; that all its current left no bed rich enough to 
 form a past, and that its lack of any form and standard 
 had divested it of all the chances of fostering personal 
 history. 
 
 The months, which had now run to almost a year, 
 since he had stood by Olive for the seconds on the 
 little porch at Ware and felt the flow of his life bend 
 and turn to a change, had been punctuated by a per 
 petual series of events; events all deriving if not in 
 action at least in consequence from that night and 
 from the consciousness of the implication of all his 
 feeling in its issues. He had always lacked the instinct 
 to associate and dissociate his acts and to trace them 
 back to their concurrent commencements; but with 
 his married life and his complete absorption in it, he 
 was aware that he had Olive s processes to trace, Olive 
 as a test and Olive as a conclusion; and the impulse 
 to order his thoughts had crept into the creation of 
 his feeling for her. 
 
 Their marriage had been preceded, in the two or 
 three weeks of hurried preparation, by his difficulties 
 with his father s view of it no less than with his 
 
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 mother s; difficulties which he was entirely prepared 
 to regard as futile and unreasonable, but which never 
 theless seemed to him symbolic of the laws, which had 
 never failed to operate, of the failure of his natural 
 expectancies of sympathy. His mother s objections 
 had been the more phrased, and therefore the less 
 unmanageable, of the two. It was nonsense her mind 
 could not rise beyond this that with all of his world 
 to choose from, with his rising talent and his certainty 
 of a large income, he should marry a provincial girl 
 from heaven knew where. The word provincial 
 enclosed the kernel of her disapproval, and she repeated 
 it, in Devon s view, not to satiety but to the point of 
 insanity. As she grew older, it frequently struck him 
 that experience came to her only as a constant deple 
 tion, as the perpetual immaturity of her face increased 
 in direct ratio to her years. She had ended by saying 
 that she would resign herself to it, since she evidently 
 must; that from her photograph Olive evidently knew 
 how to wear her clothes, that she would not come to 
 the wedding but that she would send a little rope of 
 pearls, and finally that he too closely resembled his 
 father to make any explanation of his course easily 
 definable. 
 
 Devon himself had never again spoken as fully as 
 in their first brief exchange. But he had tacitly asked, 
 by his implications and allusions, if his son could 
 suppose it agreeable to see him charted for a worse 
 failure than his own; "and it will be a failure mind!" 
 he had brought out on the single occasion when his 
 comment was direct. "Worse than mine because it will 
 be less of an inevitability and more of a mess. You ll 
 understand the only thing to do with your mother was 
 
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 to get rid of her. I had to let her make me into a 
 persecutor or a cross or something like that, before 
 she d even relax her grip. She s always had in mind, you 
 know, a mythical woman about whom I lost my head 
 a low creature, a siren. Well, I let her think it; if 
 she d known it was the jades on which I spent my 
 income and silence that I wanted to live with, she d 
 never have let me go. But with you it will be different. 
 That girl s got a will more than a will, an obsession." 
 
 "You must remember that she s very young, and 
 that she s all hunger;" Devon had tried to put it 
 lightly. 
 
 "Greed s the word for her;" his father s terseness 
 was marked. "She s all greed. She s got more greed 
 than she s got soul." He had then wandered easily off 
 into the question of what soul was, apart from the soul 
 he felt to be in his stones if it weren t always a 
 crystallisation of implicit and perfect beauty, and if 
 human beings hadn t ruined it, with their noxious 
 attempts at reform and elaboration. He could do these 
 things divertingly; but his son did not lose the point 
 he had meant to make. The fact that he did not define 
 it left none the less apparent his pride and his dis 
 appointment. Devon didn t quite know what his father 
 had hoped probably that he should go on from success 
 to success in architecture and that his human relations 
 should be confined to a misanthropic scepticism. This 
 ignorance, in its pathos and its absurdity, laid another 
 deterrent hand on his shoulder; a hand which never 
 for a moment touched his confidence, but which 
 increased, to a point at which he had never before 
 realised it, his inherent sense of isolation. 
 
 Just how deep the roots of his resolution had struck 
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 ASCENT 
 
 was progressively apparent to him when he faced again 
 his usual world of contacts, with all of them changed 
 by the change in him. The loose years behind him 
 drifted out of sight with little to mark, in his memory, 
 what their passage had been. All his vague potentiali 
 ties had been caught up in a hand of purpose which 
 gave them a sudden form and force. What he had 
 wanted, he saw, had been more than an incentive; he 
 had needed a stimulant. The magic interplay of 
 response penetrated, for the first time, to the fastnesses 
 of his inarticulacy; and he began to understand that 
 Olive had touched his life at that unique and central 
 point which meant a surrender of all his resistances to 
 surrender and a dedication of the mind itself to 
 change. 
 
 Their first weeks and months had led them step by 
 step through all the surprises of a new existence. 
 Devon was too sensitive to take each of its stages as 
 anything less than it was, and each new happiness 
 and each added intimacy came to him with the fresh 
 ness of discovery. He had scarcely admitted to him 
 self that the time was so astonishing to them both 
 to the long stricture of his reticence as well as to 
 her inexperience that it could not measure itself 
 against any usual scale. They had passed the summer 
 at a camp of his father s in the mountains, and the 
 days remained suffused for Devon in the haze of his 
 earliest feeling for her. Each slant of her smile had 
 meant, to his expectancy, not only what he had but 
 what the future would bring him of her. It had not 
 been until the autumn, when he saw her confronted 
 by the exact facts of their future, that he had caught 
 himself wondering whether her gaiety and softness were 
 
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 so much real in themselves as inevitable responses. As 
 their days began to assume the first outlines of habit, 
 he saw with how firm a hand she manipulated his feel 
 ing. He wondered the thought reverted to him now, 
 as he caught, across the house, the glimpse for which 
 he had been watching of her dark head, held at so 
 fine an angle above the dead white of her velvet dress 
 if all women were as much more simple than men 
 in such a relation. He was perpetually restricted by 
 the numberless complexities of his consideration; 
 while she, with a complete directness, held him 
 inevitably where she wanted him. In their closest 
 moments she escaped him; and he had never faced 
 the fact as to whether it were a refusal of her feeling, 
 or whether the imagination of his own would not always 
 leave her below that place to which he had attained 
 in his response to her. 
 
 Devon had always been amused by the definiteness 
 of purpose in the women of his country and their quick 
 ness in the discovery of means to fulfil it; but Olive s 
 definiteness none the less astonished him. He had the 
 odd sense that once she began to put her wishes into 
 practical execution, she was completely on her own 
 ground. She knew not only exactly how they must 
 live and exactly what house would be most appropriate 
 for them; she also wanted the finer manifestations. If 
 she spent days in the sheer pleasure, as she told him, 
 of the shops and of being able to buy things, she had 
 too the surest discrimination between what she did 
 and didn t want. She would go from an upholsterer s, 
 where they were choosing silks, or turn from the selec 
 tion of the sable muff he had planned for her Christmas 
 present, to slip off to the museum for an hour amongst 
 
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 the prints; and he understood that the quick discern 
 ment she had inherited from her grandfather would 
 always give her an ultimate independence of action. 
 Her power of absorption was at once apparent as 
 no less deep than both her perfect practicality and the 
 swift intelligence of her taste. He saw at each point her 
 eagerness to educate in herself a finer perception; yet he 
 had the pervasive notion, behind the pleasure with 
 which his thoughts followed her, that what she lacked, 
 in spite of her rapid capacity, was the recognition of 
 any standard which would ever satisfy her. 
 
 The qualities she would manifest in her impact with 
 people were made evident to him in what he felt to be 
 the perfectly composed comedy of her relations with 
 his mother. He never watched them together without 
 seeing Mrs. Devon fall into the same position on the 
 edge of her chair, with her small jeweled fingers folded, 
 her pale blue eyes wide and her elaborate white head 
 at an angle of mute astonishment. He had not followed 
 the stages of their intercourse, but he guessed that it 
 had begun with his mother s haunting fear of Olive s 
 solecisms and ended with her equal fear of her own. 
 Olive dated and placed her. She was everything 
 affable and charming to her mother-in-law; but she 
 too evidently gave Mrs. Devon, for the first time in 
 the unbroken security of her existence, a sense of her 
 ignorances. Her relegations ran from Mrs. Devon s 
 comments on a person, a book or a situation which 
 she could with a glance reduce to their elemental fra 
 gility to her acceptance of a form or her espousal 
 of a fashion. New York, and with it all that had 
 made Mrs. Devon s world compact and complete, was 
 after all, as she reminded her, only representative of 
 
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 one place, and as such narrow; had it never occurred 
 to Mrs. Devon that the views of life in any given 
 community, whether it were New York or Ware, were 
 necessarily local? She herself wanted a wider range 
 she wanted the world. Mrs. Devon, if she could 
 not follow her, was none the less helpless before such 
 an extension of scale; and all she could condense it to, 
 Devon saw, with a sense of the unutterable ironies of 
 progression, was a sudden conviction that she had been 
 ordering her shoes at a wrong shop or miscalculated 
 the angle of a hat. 
 
 He had only to shift his eyes to her, across the 
 darkened house, from where he sat in his mother s box, 
 to renew his sense of the perfection with which she 
 had slipped into the conditions of her new existence. 
 To watch her without interruption, in the anonimity 
 of interest necessary in a public place, with the sense 
 of his possessorship of her more intimate and the 
 sense of her inaccessibility more acute, gave his vision 
 of her a sudden different angle. He found himself 
 smiling, in the obscurity, at his recurrent notion that 
 she was the embodiment of the first stage of sophistica 
 tion of her country. The excess and vulgarism of most 
 of the women around her were the last signs of its 
 youth. They showed what had formed both the 
 American weakness and the American astuteness, the 
 great American collections and the American ignorance, 
 and the relapse into sordidness of the original American 
 sense of adventure. He felt as if all these forces had 
 passed into her ambition of ideas, and had become, in 
 her, a personal exemplification. 
 
 She had separated herself from her surroundings 
 in the brilliancy of the house; but when he joined her 
 
 [in]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 in the lobby he had arranged to meet her and take 
 her home, after a meeting which had delayed him for 
 the early evening Devon thought that her trick of 
 the accentuation of her personality was even more 
 finely turned. She had left her hostess, and as she 
 stood alone, with her furs drawn around her and her 
 eyes on the long procession of motors outside, her 
 impenetrable quality and her ease in isolation were 
 such, he reflected, as few women ever captured. 
 
 Her face changed quickly as she saw him. She 
 followed him out to the waiting car, and when she 
 was settled in her corner she was full of her usual 
 rapid questions. How had he enjoyed the evening, and 
 how had he liked her dress; and his mother was she 
 still too scandalised because they were doing the 
 drawing-room walls in a lustreless white rather than 
 in silk? 
 
 "It s too incredible to her, but she mayn t mind 
 when it strikes her as my economy. Isn t is absurd 
 how easily a thing is forgiven if it has a moral sound? 
 Of course I m glad if it costs you less; but then if I 
 happened to prefer old brocade why, I m afraid I 
 should quite simply have it!" 
 
 She laughed; they had just drawn up at their door, 
 and he paused for a second in the lit hallway while 
 she turned back from the lowest stair to look down at 
 him. 
 
 "Every time anyone is too uncertain about me, I 
 drop a hint that your library was the first room I 
 arranged. It s astonishing how such sentimentalities 
 hold people! The human thing is the most dangerous 
 and delicate in the world, and yet the moment you 
 seem to deal in it they feel reassured! They think all 
 
 [112]
 
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 our future is safe because I myself sorted your books; 
 as if I should have done it if I hadn t preferred to! But 
 you were right about the Forain, John; it will be 
 delightful over my white mantel. . . . Come, I ll show 
 you!" 
 
 She moved up the stairs ahead of him with a long 
 trail of her dress, as she gradually rose, drawing a line 
 of glimmering white in the low light, and she opened, 
 on the next landing, the door of the little room which 
 was particularly her own. Her pleasure in it had had 
 an extravagance which, in Devon s view, was often 
 reminiscent of her detestation of the little frame house 
 in Ware. The room was white white, as she had said, 
 being the only thing possible for a person as thin and 
 dark as she and he had brought colour to it by every 
 little object he had been able to pick up for her. It 
 was still full of the disarrangement of their unsettled 
 state, with a long strip of velvet which they were con 
 sidering stretched over the chairs and with her books 
 strewn across the desk; but he never saw her move 
 from the light of the white azaleas in the win 
 dow to the light of the fire, without evoking the contrast 
 which had made so much of the poignancy of her 
 youth. 
 
 He laid his hand abruptly on her arm, as she paused 
 before the mantel where the engraving stood. 
 
 u Do you understand what it means that wonderful 
 as you are I ve been able to give you anything?" he 
 said, with his words as sudden as his touch. 
 
 He was close enough to see her eyebrows tremble 
 for a second, before they rose in their accustomed 
 motion. "No, you re wrong; it s everything that you ve 
 given me."
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Devon smiled. "Don t limit it by saying it s every 
 thing that it s all accomplished!" 
 
 She seemed to put this aside. "And don t you call 
 it everything that you ve been so angelic to me, that 
 you ve brought me to an air I could breathe, that you ve 
 given me all that, what I admit, is my rather exacting 
 fancy, lit upon everything, the old harp downstairs, 
 this room, the lovely Chinese Chippendale, and just 
 to-day the little first edition of Poe there, which grand 
 father always so longed for?" She shook her head, 
 with her smile still on him. "That s the difference 
 between us; you see infinity in something which is to 
 me just well, just a stage of infinity." 
 
 Devon s hand tightened on her arm. "Don t, my 
 dear, apply your criticism to what s rather beyond 
 criticism!" 
 
 She caught him up. "But surely you never thought 
 that I was going to be satisfied for the rest of my life, 
 just because your mother asked people to lunch every 
 day to meet me and because you gave me a band of 
 diamonds for my hair!" She glanced in the mirror 
 over the mantel and loosened the knot of her hair 
 under the jewels. 
 
 Devon was silent; the streak in her of which he was 
 ceaselessly aware, but which in the passage of the last 
 months had so rarely come to light, had seemed in the 
 drift of their few words to flash suddenly into view, 
 like the steely line of a river in a wide landscape. 
 
 "If I had just ambition, like most of these women 
 I see ! How simple ambition after all is! Your 
 mother s delightful to me, and so is everyone else. 
 There s nothing that isn t delightful music, pictures, 
 hundreds of things. If I wanted to refuse to dine out 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 every night, I suppose I could; if I wanted to see and 
 hear everything that s newest, or if I wanted what s 
 called a motive or an inspiration or a cause all those 
 things would be easy enough. But curiosity, you see, 
 is so different from ambition!" 
 
 Devon was still silent. The word seemed to him 
 to express all the penetrative processes of her edu 
 cation. His reversion of thought to her childhood 
 always touched his tenderness, and he dropped the 
 cigarette he held and laid his free hand on her other 
 arm. "Ah, Olive, you re so magnificent and living s 
 so brutal . . ." 
 
 "Nothing s brutal if you refuse to let it be brutal. 
 What I want is the whole thing, all," she drew a 
 deepened breath, as if the current of her idea ran 
 through her; "oh, even the misery of it. I want the 
 little things, and I want the world. Nothing could be 
 either too small or too large for me. You see they re 
 rather immense terms! But they re mine. When I 
 say you ve given me everything," her gesture took in 
 the room, "I mean that for this stage you ve literally 
 given me all I needed, every privilege and chance. You 
 understand, don t you?" 
 
 She had turned to him a glance of appeal, and he 
 saw it stiffen as it met what he was conscious must be 
 the sudden difference in his own face. He still held 
 her before him. 
 
 "Yes; but do you?" 
 
 "Do I? Haven t I always understood grandfather 
 used to say, too much?" 
 
 He seemed for a moment to confront the rush of 
 her confidence, and his eyes held her for an instant 
 like his grasp. "My dear, you re face to face with the 
 
 [US]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 greatest emotion living can give, yet you don t see it!" 
 He shook his head. "Your ultimate everything 
 even yours will always come back to what one person 
 can make you feel and what you can make one person 
 feel. That s" his shoulders rose "oh, that s what s 
 called the miracle of existence." 
 
 "But the personal isn t all of experience!" Her 
 voice had its quick impatience as she broke in. 
 
 "What you re after, my dear, isn t experience but 
 experiences! You don t see I suppose you re too 
 young and too lovely to that everything s quantitative 
 unless it s really lived. If you don t recognise that, 
 all your famous curiosity will go to the dogs!" His 
 face had changed again to its usual quiescence, and 
 he dropped his hands from her arms to take another 
 cigarette from the box on the mantel. "So don t deny 
 the personal. It s rather wonderful, you know, the 
 personal; or rather you don t know, yet, anything 
 about it! Come, it s really too late for you! Yes, it 
 was just right, wasn t it? that line of light for your 
 hair! I hesitated so long about whether the diamonds 
 ought to have a clear edge or a broken one, against 
 it. Oh, and by the way he put his hand into his 
 coat, "I ve something for you." 
 
 Olive stretched out her hand. Her head was still 
 bent over the fire and her thoughts still evidently 
 moving in the tone of their talk. "For me?" 
 
 "Yes; open the box, and you ll see." 
 
 He drew out for her, as she raised the little lid, a 
 long coil of gold which dropped, as he lifted it, into the 
 lines of a rosary. "It s old Spanish you see? Isn t 
 it extraordinary? If you knew who s sent it to you, 
 you d know why! This afternoon I had a telephone 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 message from Ames Robert Ames, the priest, you 
 know." 
 
 Olive was drawing the beads through her fingers, 
 with a frown of concentration. "I don t under 
 stand . . ." 
 
 "Oh, you must have heard me speak of him! When 
 I went up to Oxford for a year he happened to be 
 there just through Stonyhurst, and giving a course 
 on Moral Philosophy. Of course he was already well 
 known, already booked to be what he is, and I was 
 only an unattached young American. But some 
 how we struck up a real intimacy, as men do those 
 things." 
 
 "And he s here?" She hesitated. "Didn t I see in 
 the papers . . ." 
 
 "Yes, he landed yesterday, for his course of lectures 
 here; and he rang me up to-day, from the Archbishop s 
 where he s staying until he can get his own quarters, 
 to say I must stop in to-night, if my meeting broke 
 up in time, just to have a word with him and to take 
 you a belated wedding present. I was able to see him 
 for only a second even then there were other people 
 waiting for him; but he was just the same Ames . . . 
 Oh, they re an amazing lot, that family; as amazing 
 as a thing like this!" He motioned to the rosary. 
 "It s a tradition as tightly woven as anything in the 
 world. They ve been the Catholics of Catholics since 
 the eleventh century, or some such appalling time. 
 When I ve stayed with them, in the country, it s seemed 
 quite natural to hear them pray every day for the con 
 version of England. His brother, you know, is Arch 
 bishop of Stoke; but it s Robert, of course, who is the 
 wonder . . ."
 
 ASCENT 
 
 He laid his hand over hers, and touched the beads 
 through her fingers. 
 
 "Just look at the work on each bead; and the 
 strength and fineness of the links ! One gets some 
 faint idea of what it means to them to Catholics; oh, 
 it s more than that of what it means to us all. A thing 
 like this somehow stands for all growth, for all 
 increased fineness, for all capacity to believe." His 
 fingers closed closely on hers for a second. "That s, 
 my dear, what you need!" 
 
 "An Ames?" Her eyes were again ironic. 
 
 "A rosary!" His retort was as rapid as her own, 
 and it ended in his smile. "Ah yes, you must see 
 Ames. He s too busy, he says, to come to us; but he 
 wants you to go to him, the first day he can rescue an 
 hour . ." 
 
 [118]
 
 IX 
 
 OLIVE had left the house a little past four, on 
 the March afternoon whose greyness was full 
 of the recent snows. She stood for a moment 
 on the doorstep, looking up and down the irregular line 
 of the architecture of the long street, with its pseudo- 
 French fagades still interspersed with the earlier brown 
 stone. The interest with which she had first seen it 
 was still uppermost in her mind. Even the noises of 
 the passing traffic and the closed security of the narrow 
 marble houses like her own had excited her imagina 
 tion. Each detail in her installation had not been a 
 burden and an irritant, as Mrs. Devon had pessimisti 
 cally predicted, but something to linger over with 
 pleasure. She remembered that she had passed a long 
 afternoon in the choice of her window curtains, and 
 she already knew just how the pink geraniums in her 
 window boxes were to be planted, in the coming spring. 
 It had been an interest each time her car stood at the 
 curb, to take her through the moving flow of the city, 
 and she had felt her vitality made more tonic by the 
 effervescent life in the faces which passed her, as if 
 she at last held and fingered the brilliant fabric which 
 was woven not out of the anticipations she had kept in 
 check but of actuality. 
 
 She wondered if it were perhaps the nature of her 
 errand which marked for her the subsidence of these 
 first impressions; but for the first time the street, as 
 
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 she turned out of the entrance, seemed to be differently 
 peopled and her steps bent toward a definite arrival. 
 She had opened Father Ames s note, that morning, 
 with the sense that it contained the promise of some 
 revelation of personality definitely new to her. It was 
 typed by the young priest who was with him as his 
 secretary. But it bore his signature, and she had at 
 once felt, in the rapidly formed, pointed letters, as she 
 said with a smile to Devon, the illusion which surrounds 
 the people whose authority is beyond question. Father 
 Ames had written that, after a delay of two weeks, 
 which his constant engagements had necessitated, he 
 would be glad to see them that afternoon, and she had 
 arranged to meet Devon at the house where he had 
 some temporary rooms. 
 
 The address which had been given her was in one 
 of the west streets beyond the park, and in the neigh 
 bourhood of the Paulist church. The paths across the 
 park were still slippery and deserted; but the hour 
 had so particular a charm for her, with the electric 
 brilliancy of the signs on the buildings flashing into 
 the sunset, that she was glad she had determined to 
 walk. Yet as she looked over the vast stretch of 
 irregular roofs, she felt the direction of the tide of 
 her thoughts sway and change. Her critical sense 
 detached itself, for the first time, from the effects 
 of the heady stimulant of the friction and competition 
 of the existence she had been living. She told herself, 
 suddenly, that New York had presented splendid facts 
 to her, but had not extracted them from her. The 
 quality of a human enrichment had after all been 
 completely absent. Her dissection was too clear not 
 to admit that this lack of any reflective element had 
 
 [120]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 I 
 
 appealed to her. But she knew too that the luxury 
 and the opportunity, the stir of appreciation about 
 her and the first lift of her wings after the constrictions 
 of Ware, had touched only the outer surfaces of her 
 mind. Even the brief sketch in her thoughts of what 
 the conditions of a life like Father Ames s must be 
 had stirred her deeper curiosities. The books she had 
 read with Mr. Lacy and bits of his talk and his tradi 
 tion drifted, after weeks of disappearance, through her 
 memory. As she paused at the outer edge of the park, 
 with her eyes travelling beyond the trees, whose 
 branches had already the first misty grey of spring, 
 to the early lights in the serried wall of the houses to 
 the south, she felt that the foreground of her interest 
 had been altered and displaced; that the life she had 
 been leading had had none of the shadows which com 
 pel one to realise substance, and the people about her 
 none of the impalpabilities of educated personalities, 
 but only inexactnesses. 
 
 After she had left the park, her impending sense of 
 expectation in her errand was heightened by the dif 
 ference in the streets. It took her only a few minutes 
 to pass first into a more dubious and then into a poorer 
 quarter. Even in the lingering cold, the children from 
 the flat houses were clustered noisily about the door 
 steps and screamed from the alley- ways. The house 
 before which she stopped was one of the dingiest, and 
 she hesitated, with a sense of incredulity, when the 
 janitress who watched her from the basement told her 
 this was her destination. Father Ames had sublet 
 Father Croft s rooms on the top floor, she said, and 
 visitors had only to push the bell of the uppermost flat 
 and go up. 
 
 [121]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 The door, which opened automatically, admitted her 
 to stairs which were almost completely dark and she 
 made her way slowly, with her surprise increasing at 
 each step. Her instinctive effort to gratify the out 
 ward element in life left her astonished by this barren 
 discomfort. It was the last surrounding in which she 
 would have expected Ames to be, from the constant 
 accounts of his activities in the daily papers. As she 
 mounted the last flight, a woman pushed past her, or 
 her way down. Her dress was ornate and shabby and 
 heavy with perfume, and her face reddened and sullen. 
 She was the most unlikely type of person to consult a 
 priest of Father Ames s type; and some dim sense of 
 the dramatic element in the contradiction of such cir 
 cumstances drew Olive s wonder after her, as she 
 descended, and sharpened the curiosity with which she 
 stopped on the last landing. 
 
 The door of the flat stood ajar, and after a momen 
 tary uncertainty she pushed it open and made her way 
 across the narrow entry which immediately confronted 
 her. As she paused on the threshold of the front 
 room, an exclamation of surprise broke from her. The 
 room, which was long and low and lit from the south, 
 lifted her instantly to a different world. She imagined 
 that in itself it was bare and plain enough to match the 
 rest of the house; but her single glance at it was enough 
 to show her what it held. A long strip of dim tapestry 
 a faded sixteenth century Adoration, with a charm 
 ing naivete of execution was stretched across the 
 shabby wall. The mantel was crowned by a slim young 
 St. Stephen, of the same period, with pointed flames 
 about his raised head, and the triptych of which his fig 
 ure formed the centre was heavy with gold. There was 
 
 [122]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 a carved Virgin and Child, on a French Renaissance 
 pillar, at whose base a bowl of the first jonquils had 
 been placed ; and over the littered desk hung an enamel 
 of some saint, with a lovely inlay of blue. The tables, 
 amongst their piled papers, held piles of books, with 
 every now and then a little ornament. A tiny ivory 
 St. Catherine trod with exaltation on the dragon 
 beneath her, and the brown of the missal which lay 
 beside her was so old that it seemed to Olive like the 
 richest earth touched with sun. Yet the cross which 
 stood on the desk her sense of contradiction returned 
 as her eyes lit on it, below the brilliancy of the enamel, 
 was of the plainest wood. Its presence laid a baffling 
 hand on her, as she turned, at the sound of a step in 
 the doorway, to face Father Ames. 
 
 He came forward immediately, with a cordial assur 
 ance. Her instant impression of him was that he was 
 tall and thin, with markedly dark hair and eyes, and 
 that his smile ran over his face like a light. 
 
 "I m so sorry, Mrs. Devon, to receive you like this! 
 You found the door open, I hope? You see, we ve no 
 servant here in the afternoon, and there s no other 
 way to manage. I was finishing up some instructions 
 to Father Meryon, in his room, and all afternoon I ve 
 been trying to give the fathers at the church a little 
 help with their penitents. . . . They re so endlessly 
 kind to me! And John? He s to join us? But 
 come . . . you must sit down!" 
 
 Olive had been conscious of the way his rapid tone 
 held her; but as he ended she felt all the vividness 
 of the power which chained her attention. She had 
 no analogies for it, in either her experience or her 
 imagination; and she was only aware, at the moment, 
 
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 that in the face of so trained a force her own capacity 
 seemed suddenly dissolved into the accidental and 
 fortuitous. 
 
 She murmured that John had agreed to join her, 
 and she followed him to the little fire in the grate. 
 Father Ames paused for a second at his desk, to replace 
 a paper and to throw down a sheaf of telegrams, and 
 then drew a chair opposite hers. 
 
 "Of course I ve seen John he s perhaps told you? 
 If I have time for sleep and food, I ve time for John; 
 I don t willingly do without him! One night we had 
 just a few words; but I was off to Pittsburgh at mid 
 night, and we d a chance only to realise all we wanted 
 to say; and then, of course, my great desire was to 
 see you . . ." his eyes played on her. 
 
 "It was no more than mine to see you," she returned 
 his smile; "and to judge for myself how such an 
 incredible thing as a friendship could come to exist 
 between you." 
 
 Father Ames laughed. "You must go, I fear, a long 
 journey; not far back into my capacity for mine s 
 a poor thing but to that strange mixture of tenderness 
 and determination which makes up your husband. I 
 always tell him he s one of the few modern men of 
 course one knows some mediaeval ones who s got the 
 real love of the unseen, of the thing felt and not 
 defined. If he d defined it, he d have had a religion; 
 as it is His gesture ended the phrase; she had 
 a sense that even the motions of his hands had point 
 and intention, as if they matched the incisiveness of his 
 briefest phrase, and as if all of him had been composed 
 to penetrate every obscurity and impress every surface. 
 "Now tell me! You ve been married almost a year, 
 
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 haven t you? And had you known John long was it 
 a long attachment?" 
 
 Olive felt herself stiffen instinctively against the 
 light note of authority which underlay his ease. 
 
 "I had known him always, ever since I was the 
 littlest child; but as to the length of our attach 
 ment . . ." 
 
 He took up her hesitation instantly. "It is really 
 measured, then, by the length of time you knew him; 
 that s clear enough ! No one could know John without 
 feeling him. You ve a great opportunity before you 
 granting his nature, and with his evident devotion for 
 you;" his smile deepened; "and an opportunity is all 
 that a woman who is young and intelligent can ask." 
 
 She felt again the rapid touch of the impersonality in 
 his personalities. It held her for the pause of a 
 moment, and then she shook her head. "I m afraid I 
 should call it a necessity and not an opportunity. I 
 see very little of the stimulant of glory in what is for 
 some reason I can t define not one s privilege but 
 one s routine. I am not, you see, a Catholic; and what 
 you call faith, I call a capacity for illusion. You must 
 forgive me; I was brought up by an atheistic old grand 
 father." 
 
 Father Ames fell back in his chair, pressing together 
 the tips of his fingers, which, it struck her, had the 
 length and the pallor of the hands in the portraits of 
 the old ecclesiastics. 
 
 "At least, then, you ve faith in your own lack of 
 illusion. It s not may I say it? an uncommon 
 disease!" 
 
 "No," said Olive; her shoulders rose and fell lightly. 
 "But I have it uncommonly. I was taught to believe 
 
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 in something wider than the personalities of Chris 
 tianity." 
 
 "God is not a person, God is a force " he 
 
 smiled again as he paused. "But of course the mys 
 teries of revelation would not touch a person with your 
 training. Again and again I commit the error of 
 expecting the Holy Ghost to work faster than He does. 
 It is not for us to hurry you, Mrs. Devon;" he laughed; 
 "living is full of contradictions, and those contra 
 dictions, as you will find, are explained only by the 
 inexplicable." 
 
 Olive let her slower smile answer his. "No contra 
 dictions of my heresy could be stranger than the con 
 tradictions of your faith; than the contradiction, for 
 instance" she glanced about her "between this 
 room and the woman I met on the stairs!" 
 
 "The woman ? Yes, of course! She was looking 
 for Father Croft, and since he has been called down 
 to the University at Washington, Father Meryon and 
 I see everyone who comes here for him. He s one 
 of the young priests over at the Paulists a most holy 
 man; and anything I can do to give him a hand he, 
 who is doing work of the soul when my work is far 
 too much of the brain . . ." His eyes narrowed for 
 an instant on her. "It puzzles you, I suppose disci 
 pline?" 
 
 "It scarcely so much puzzles me as it seems to me 
 futile. To couple your little St. Catherine there with 
 the needs and emotions of such a creature . . ." she 
 broke off. 
 
 Father Ames shot a look around them. "My things 
 here ... I see! They are most of them from our 
 chapel at home, you know, and they go wherever I can 
 
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 take them with me; sometimes in the desert or on 
 the other side of the world, they ve been the only 
 sense of a chapel that I had! But don t you under 
 stand," his glance turned back to her, "that it s only 
 because of their connection with such a woman or 
 with every soul that they ve any value whatever, 
 that they exist at all?" 
 
 Olive was suddenly silent. Her rapid perception was 
 fastening on each detail of her extraordinary impres 
 sion of his direction, the conquest of human relations 
 which it implied and the play of experience. Yet what 
 principally held her was her knowledge that it was 
 inaccessible to her; that for the first time she had 
 touched a world where her own weapons and premises 
 were inadequate. All the aggressive element in her 
 impact with people rose, and hardened the corners of 
 her lips into a set line. She bent forward a little, with 
 her furs falling back, and dropped her eyes from 
 Father Ames s. 
 
 "I quite see what you mean;" her voice was as clear 
 but lower. "To exist at all for you and even for such 
 people as she, if once they believe beauty must be 
 linked with God. There s nothing is there? like 
 the caste of belief no laws so rigid and so exclusive! 
 But don t forget that for some of the rest of us, these 
 things and this room may have their own meaning, and 
 that if your Virgin there isn t a saint to us, at least 
 she s a symbol . . . and of something you can t under 
 stand!" 
 
 She felt instinctively the suddenly closer mesh in 
 the chain of his attention. His scrutiny seemed to her 
 to have all the training of the confessional and of a 
 habit of the balance of human quantities. He did not 
 
 [127]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 question her, as if he had long since recognised the 
 dispersement of thought which comes with the too 
 facile phrase; but his attention pressed her to continue. 
 
 "I, who have merely touched your room" she made 
 a rapid gesture "already it has made me feel freer. 
 I ve felt in it the promise of the things I ve been search 
 ing for this long time; nothing like faith, no! My 
 disbelief has its own commandments, and more than 
 ten of them! But I ve felt the enrichment of living, 
 the inner quality which makes experience valuable, 
 the seen and the unseen; all of the things without which 
 this existence, here about us, is so intolerable. . . ." 
 
 Father Ames considered her for a moment. "And 
 you re not satisfied with what your life s giving you? 
 But you must command everything, Mrs. Devon! And 
 New York s a marvellous place in which to command 
 everything!" 
 
 Olive frowned. "Don t misunderstand me. Of 
 course I ve enjoyed being here, of course it s intoxi 
 cated and thrilled me. I came, perhaps you know, 
 from a little village, where I d had nothing but my 
 imagination to live on. I m worthy of no sort of 
 sympathy; I ve gone in for it all for its restlessness 
 and its splendour as thoroughly as my mother-in-law; 
 and you know my mother-in-law? But I don t know 
 how to put it to you" she laid her hand on her breast 
 "I ve not been content." 
 
 He seemed easily to disregard the personal comment 
 she had made for the larger one. 
 
 "It s an amazing life" he hesitated. "And most of 
 it is sincere. New York is always a lesson to me. Its 
 noble people, its fabulous generosity, its fever of 
 pleasure and its lack of consistency. It s the image 
 
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 of what is in us all, of our readiness to have and to 
 deal, our acceptance of the outer aspect, our fear of 
 the quiet that is in ourselves. We re after all, each 
 one of us, as inconsistent, in our way!" 
 
 "That s a danger which can t confront you, Father!" 
 Her retort had a sharpened edge. "Even the contradic 
 tions in your room can be explained, I suppose, if one 
 applies a creed to them!" 
 
 "Ah, you re beginning to see, then, that the applica 
 tion, as you call it, of a creed explains everything!" 
 Father Ames s smile still held. "You re beginning to 
 admit the fact that God, for His inscrutable reasons, 
 deals both in the little Catherine there and the woman 
 you passed on the stairs! No, no!" He drew his 
 hand across his eyes. "My consistency is nothing as 
 weak as all human consistency; but God s is His 
 own." 
 
 She measured his silence silently for a moment. 
 "Then even yours has its lapses?" Her gesture inter 
 rupted the sudden movement with which he raised 
 his hand to interpose. "No, don t deny or affirm it! 
 I see that it has, and that that s why it s a help to one 
 to be here. More, I see that s the reason why, the 
 instant that I came in, I had a sense of escape and 
 of something deeper of explanation." 
 
 "The opposite to what one is doing always seems 
 an escape; and I doubt" his lightness was glancing 
 "if you are really searching for explanations!" 
 
 "The explanation which your room has been to me 
 is purely personal, and I have no right to trouble you 
 with it." She had stiffened in her chair, with an accent of 
 reserve; then her hands flew out, with a sudden move 
 ment of appeal and she again bent forward. "But don t 
 
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 you see, Father, that it brings one to the human soul, 
 your room? Oh, not only to yours, but even to mine? 
 We ve all got our ugly shells; we ve all got our beauties 
 not, I admit" she looked up at the Virgin above her 
 "as definite and as exquisite as yours; still they 
 exist! And we ve all got," her finger pointed to the 
 cross on the table, "to be stripped at the end. That s 
 why it makes me feel dumb; because I I, whom you 
 wouldn t know if you passed me in the street to-mor 
 row, see here something which I haven t seen before, 
 and which I don t want to admit. . . ." 
 
 She had dropped back, with her hands fallen to her 
 lap. Her eyes, in their fixity on Father Ames s face, 
 searched for his response. In the last instants she had 
 definitely measured the closer approach to her of his 
 concentration and that with each word she pro 
 nounced he had more clearly seen her as she could 
 fancy she presented herself with the low lamp beside 
 her casting a shadow rather than a light on her and 
 her outline, from her soft dark hat to her feet, drawn 
 in black against the blues and creams of the tapestry 
 behind her. The sense of feeling her way through 
 avenues more tortuous and reserves more initial than 
 any she had ever imagined was vividly present to her. 
 All her prehensiveness had turned to the weapons she 
 could use to drive home that personal insistence which 
 she instinctively regarded as the single issue at stake. 
 
 She could have told the precise instant when Father 
 Ames s mood assured itself. 
 
 "I am glad if it is of the smallest service to you to 
 see these things," he said easily. "But do not let your 
 evident talent for exaltation lead you into credences 
 which you do not really possess." 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 "That I don t possess ?" Her voice faltered. 
 
 "I mean what one must always mean in dealing with 
 a woman who has no rule of belief, and consequently 
 no law of sacrifice to consider. It s my duty, as a 
 priest, to remind you that where one of my own chil 
 dren is trained in the way she can take help from me, 
 you are not; and that it would be unjust to you to 
 offer you a solace which you might afterwards regret 
 having asked. I ve had confessions enough from non- 
 Catholics, in my time, but they ve always seemed to 
 me tragic things; indeed, what else could they be, with 
 no faith behind them and no absolution to attain ?" 
 
 "Then, Father," her tone was keener "you shut 
 people like me out?" 
 
 Father Ames s hand lifted. "Ah, never, my dear 
 lady! You shut yourselves out! Don t give such a 
 cruel name, either," his voice changed to a warmer 
 graciousness, "to what I hope more than ever, since 
 I ve seen you will be a real friendship between us." 
 
 She shook her head. "What an absurdity! As if, 
 with our differences, we could ever have a friendship!" 
 
 "Ah, I admit," Father Ames had the quickest depre 
 cation, "that all the space in the world lies between us ! " 
 
 She gave him a long, clear look; her smile was 
 touched, for a second, with the lightest shadow of old 
 Lacy s; then, turning with an evident effort to the 
 table at her elbow, she took up the only photograph, a 
 small framed snapshot, which the room contained. 
 Her question had a conscious accent of banality as she 
 spoke again. 
 
 "What a charming group the black habits of the 
 nuns against that old wall! And the lady with them 
 and the man beside her . . . it s all in the picture " 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 Father Ames followed her tone instantly. "Yes, it 
 has charm, hasn t it? That was taken at Trant, in 
 Wiltshire you ve heard of Trant? one day when the 
 nuns drove over from Trowbridge, to the chapel, for 
 Benediction. The lady with them Lady Isabel Bour- 
 das and her brother Terence are two of my oldest 
 friends. We grew up together, and we hope to grow 
 old together. You may perhaps have met her, when 
 her father the old Duke was Governor General, in 
 Canada? No? She is a devoted friend of my sister, 
 who is one of the nuns in the group. My sister is known 
 in religion as Sister Martha of the Cross . . ." 
 
 His words broke off. Olive had risen, with one of 
 her sudden motions, and drawn from her muff a long 
 shining object. She took a step forward, to the figure of 
 the little Virgin on the pillar beside him, and with a 
 rapid gesture she flung about the shoulders of the 
 statue the rosary he had sent her. As she drew back 
 and turned to him, her voice was more hurried and 
 insecure than he had yet heard it. 
 
 "I hope you don t mind. . . . But since I ve seen 
 you, I can t keep it; no, I can t! It s full of all I ll 
 never have, all I ve been taught against, all that con 
 demns a rootless creature like me. Thank you, Father 
 ... it was most good of you, and it s so beautiful; 
 but I d rather not. . . ." She turned again, this time 
 to the door. "Ah, and here s John. . . ." 
 
 [132]
 
 X 
 
 OLIVE found herself increasingly desirous to be 
 alone, as the next days passed; yet she quite 
 realised that the close sequence of her engage 
 ments, with all the variation of contact they brought 
 with them, lent a more dramatic savour to the obscuri 
 ties in her mind. She had been suddenly furnished 
 with the contrast of inner comparisons. To come in 
 from seeing pictures with Mrs. Devon or from the 
 crowds at a concert, to fling herself into a chair 
 beside her fire, without ringing for lights or for tea, 
 and to let the coals fall slowly to ashes in the grate 
 and the room turn dark and cold, was to return 
 as suddenly to her private thoughts. The stir of her 
 questioning came to her daily more insistently; she 
 caught it across the press of the streets and through the 
 conversation about her; and it enriched and warmed 
 her quality so palpably that she had a touch of abstrac 
 tion in her brilliancy and her luminance was softened 
 by her evident sense of the inexplicable. 
 
 The echoes which Father Ames had aroused in her 
 went back, as she realised, beyond her own memory. 
 Her chief wonder, as she searched for some tracery in 
 these currents and counter-currents, was how she had 
 come to be equipped with definitions so absolute in 
 their superficiality. She could imagine no phrase more 
 alien to her instinct than any which dealt with an inner 
 world. It was consequent to this, she supposed, as well 
 as to all the suppressions of poverty, that her sense of 
 life had been quantitative and that the adventure of 
 
 [133]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 experience had been to her an objective one. With 
 the touch of new forces in her thoughts and the sense 
 of a new balance in her relations, such a view seemed 
 to her extraordinary in its puerility. She had an intrin 
 sic belief that she ought to feel herself lifted and freed 
 by this widened vision; but she instinctively applied it 
 in her personal ways, and this sudden extension of scale 
 seemed to her real because it offered so vast a field for 
 the play of the insistencies of her will and the intrica 
 cies of her ambition. 
 
 The discovery lent a deeper and deeper tone to her 
 reflections. She supposed with the sardonic twist of 
 comment which at times so leapt out in her that the 
 fact that she had never been more careful of her 
 beauty and her dress was her first approach to a ritual, 
 in her initiation into the subtleties of introspection. All 
 her consciousness of her personality had never been 
 keener. She even turned a new eye back on the 
 elements which had produced her, and there was for the 
 first time something poignant to her in Rebecca s death 
 and in Philip s failures. What she had regarded as the 
 rich possibilities of her nature and the ultimacy of her 
 powers seemed, under the recollection of Father Ames s 
 standard, to be poor and thin. Any personal insistence, 
 she felt, would be too fragile without such a guidance; 
 and she never examined her thoughts without a sense 
 of his eyes on her face and of the blend, in his voice, 
 of authority with humility. 
 
 Devon had been surprised that she one afternoon 
 asked him to take her that same evening to a lecture, 
 the first which Ames was to give, on Lourdes. "I m not 
 astonished you should want to hear him, because even 
 your talk with him must have been enough to show 
 
 [i34]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 what he is; but Lourdes ! Oh, I know that in his 
 hands it will have not only all the swing of its emotion 
 the collective emotion of a crowd but that he ll 
 handle with the easiest touch the scientific end; all 
 it says which science can t help out, and all it does to 
 help science itself out. No somehow you ve not yet 
 got he smiled, with his gravity softening "the 
 generosity of imagination for Lourdes!" 
 
 She surprised him further by nodding acquiescently. 
 He had come in to her room to find her stretched on 
 her sofa; she was looking beyond him to the pale sun 
 in the window, and the white of the lace coverlet, of 
 the lace wrap on her shoulders and of the pillow behind 
 her, gave her eyes a deeper darkness. 
 
 "I know I ve so much to see and to feel; yes, I know; 
 but it seems too that it s from him I ll get it." 
 
 Devon laughed, as he drew out his watch. "I ve 
 exactly twenty minutes before I must leave the house; 
 but I could spend every one of them in telling you that 
 you ll never get anything from Ames until you re will 
 ing to get it from Catholicism; that he s all that, and 
 it s all of him!" 
 
 She nodded again. He had seldom seen her more 
 pliant. "But I want to go to-night, and I want you 
 to take me. You see" her finger traced the web of 
 the lace across her knees "if we saw him afterwards 
 for an instant, you would arrest his attention and I 
 shouldn t." 
 
 "Your honesty s amazing; but incredible as it may 
 seem when one looks at you," he lifted from her fore 
 head a heavy wave of her hair, "it s true." His voice 
 changed. "Nothing could make me happier than to 
 have him help you. Then to-night ?" 
 
 [i35]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 She nodded once more, with her face suffused with 
 meditation; and after he had left her she lay motion 
 less, comparing in her mind the dull, unretentive 
 passage of the days as she lived them, with the rever 
 berations of a life like Father Ames s, every action of 
 which seemed to send its sound down all the various 
 corridors of eventuality. 
 
 It was when she saw him on the bare stage of the 
 hall that night, however, that she got her vividest 
 glimpse of all the intricacies of what she felt to be 
 his peculiar asceticism. The hall was filled to its 
 utmost extension, a visiting Cardinal was present, and 
 an eminent Bishop made the introduction; but as he 
 stepped forward, with his preliminary bow to the 
 upper box, Father Ames seemed to her to kave stepped 
 back into the tapestry of which he was, for a beat of 
 time, only a detached figure. His hands were clasped 
 behind him and his eyes on the ground ; and his words 
 fell with the unbroken rapidity which marked the flow 
 of his thoughts. She had never imagined such a light 
 ning connection between brain and expression, made 
 with so infallible a security. Yet in his fixed motion- 
 lessness, with the beat on his lowered face of the 
 lights and the attention of the crowd, his chief con 
 veyance of himself seemed to her to be in his humility. 
 He had that voluntary recognition of his place in the 
 scale of authority which only a religious hierarchy 
 can impose. Her thoughts flew back to the long 
 journeys of conquest of which this arrival must be the 
 result; of the adventures of his way, of his pitfalls 
 and victories, and of what had put beauty into the 
 bareness of his thought and bareness into its beauty. 
 His history lay spread before her like a rich old 
 
 [136]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 book, bound and shaped in a way to draw all her 
 powers of imagination, yet in a language whose charac 
 ters melted, under her eyes, into mystery. 
 
 She laid her hand on Devon s arm as the audience 
 rose, and murmured that she would rather hurry out 
 at once, without any effort to greet Father Ames. 
 When they stood on the high windy steps, waiting for 
 their motor, he bent towards her. "You didn t want 
 to stay? Why?" 
 
 Olive frowned restlessly. "Because I get more out 
 of it this way. What other reason should there be?" 
 
 "It s truer and truer," said Devon absently . . . 
 "there s no one like him. Believe it or don t believe 
 it; but after hearing him to-night, one can never again 
 think of Lourdes as able to be solved by our present 
 human apparatus. One knows that there s something, 
 even if one only calls it a miracle. . . ." 
 
 She turned to look at him, with the clearest aston 
 ishment. "You have the most fantastic notions . . . !" 
 
 The wide surprise in her eyes, which, he could see, 
 was a surprise of all her sequences of thought, struck 
 Devon again on the following day. He had stopped at 
 his house in the early afternoon, on his way to a 
 nearby engagement, to have coffee with Olive, who had 
 told him that she would be lunching alone; there, at 
 the opposite end of the sofa before his library fire, 
 he had found a person whom it took him a moment or 
 two to place as Abby Trail. Seated with an irref 
 ragable stolidity, with none of the grace of Olive s 
 uprightness, she had greeted him and his surprise with 
 a superficial awkwardness which, as he had at once 
 divined, matched so poorly the certitude of her wide 
 smile. 
 
 [137]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "Of course I didn t know if I d find you home," 
 she repeated, as if to deprecate her temerity in making 
 the attempt. "But I thought you d want news of 
 your father, Olive; and somehow it didn t seem just 
 right, if you did want it, not to give it to you." 
 
 As she ceased Devon had turned to look at his 
 wife. He knew enough of her now to expect in her the 
 peculiar acerbity which disagreement and, as he 
 thought, she was still young enough to call a lack of 
 acquiescence disagreement always struck to life in 
 her, like a friction which produces sparks. But he 
 had not for long seen her attitude as tense and her 
 smile as sharp. The warm little brown room, with 
 the glow of the fire so pleasantly touching his books, 
 the rose of the flowers at Olive s elbow and the crystal 
 of the coffee service in front of her, was suddenly 
 replete with the recollections Abby must have brought 
 in with her, from the wet spring day; and he imagined, 
 with a flash of amusement, how satisfied Miss Trail 
 must be that she had not ventured to come to lunch. 
 
 Olive, whose hands were constantly busy with the 
 coffee tray, bent forward to hand him his cup. "Yes, 
 you can imagine, John, how much I m about to ask 
 Abby who s this second dropped on me. You won t 
 change your mind, Abby, no? No coffee? And you 
 can imagine. . . ." 
 
 Miss Trail interposed. "I guess Mr. Devon ll 
 imagine just as much all I m not about to ask you." 
 Her friendly brown eyes appealed to him, with a tart 
 humour. "I used to say I never knew which was 
 harder on which Ware on Olive or Olive on Ware. 
 But after all, though, I guess she was the one that had 
 the most to put up with. She was just alone, all by 
 
 [138]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 herself; and Ware was made up of all the rest of us. 
 By the way, Olive, do you know I ve another nephew? 
 Yes, Carrie s boy; he s just two weeks old. He s to 
 be named for father, and father s just as pleased 1 
 And Uncle Philip he doesn t seem in such good 
 health as he should be. I stop in when I can and see 
 what Norah s up to; but somehow he seems changed 
 since you left, and Norah says he doesn t relish his 
 food . . ." 
 
 "Then we must at once run up to see him," said 
 Devon decisively. "We ve tried to get him down, 
 haven t we, Olive? but you can imagine, Miss Trail, 
 what he is to stir! I can manage a day or so off next 
 week, I think, and we might arrange it for then." 
 
 Olive s voice rose. "What an absurdity, John! You 
 know very well that we ve people coming to dine next 
 week, to meet Father Ames ; and what s more you know 
 that kind of attitude won t hold, where father s con 
 cerned. Abby understands him as well as I do, and 
 she knows too that he d be thrown into a fit of con 
 sternation if I suddenly turned up. Probably his only 
 peace in life has been since I left!" 
 
 Miss Trail s flush had slowly mounted; but after a 
 quick glance at Devon, her dry smile showed again. 
 "Well, I guess that s something you and your father ll 
 have to settle between you. And I don t know as you 
 ever have settled things with him; most times it s 
 seemed to me you haven t. But somehow it doesn t 
 grow easier to let people manage their own business in 
 this world. I know I just go on, year in and year out, 
 thinking how much more I know than anyone else, 
 and I m always wrong!" 
 
 [i39]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "You re at least philanthropic," said Olive; she had 
 finished pouring the coffee, and her cool hands had 
 dropped to her lap. "I ought to have been prepared to 
 have you set out to benefit father. I recollect how 
 you set out to benefit that woman who lives at Long 
 Hill Farm. You don t perhaps remember that we 
 met you, one afternoon, as you were leaving there. . . ." 
 
 If Miss Trail had not rapidity, she had at least, 
 Devon thought, an admirable sureness. After her 
 momentary hesitation, she shook her head easily. 
 "Goodness, no! I ve not forgotten; and I guess Lizzie 
 hasn t, either. She saw you pass, on your way up; 
 and somehow it must have seemed to her just one of 
 those things that well, that remind you of the dif 
 ferences in life." Her slow glance turned toward 
 Devon, as if she were no less instinctively aware of 
 his unexpressed comprehension than of the thrust of 
 Olive s antagonism. "I don t think I was ever sorrier 
 for Lizzie than that day." 
 
 "Long Hill Farm as a refuge for despised sinners 
 the very end of the earth! It s a perfect setting! 
 I call your putting her there a stroke of drama. And 
 I suppose you ve never failed to tell her, like the good 
 Presbyterian or is it Baptist? that you are, that she 
 deserved nothing better!" 
 
 "No!" Abby shook her head good-humouredly 
 "I don t tell her that." Her eyes rejoined Olive s look, 
 steadily. "Sometimes when I see her up there, just all 
 alone in that lonesome house, with nothing but sky 
 and fields and sky, it seems no use to remember any 
 thing more than that once she was just a good-hearted, 
 silly girl, too fond of a good time. . . ." 
 
 "And what did she do," Olive s sharpness rose, "to 
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 ASCENT 
 
 make her good times excessive? Tell us it would be 
 an interesting contribution." 
 
 Miss Trail s lips set. "I guess Lizzie s good times 
 and bad times belong just to her. If you or I were 
 living up in that dreary place, like a dog the children 
 have hooted out of town, it wouldn t somehow seem 
 just fair" her smile returned, as she glanced about 
 her "to have people turn things over and pick them 
 to pieces in a place like this." She turned to Devon. 
 "I did want so much to go to see a good piece at the 
 theatre, while I was down. We get all the new lists 
 through our Culture Club. But last night father and 
 I tried, and I thought it was just the poorest kind of 
 thing- 
 Devon was just turning to answer her, with a sense 
 of relief that they had reached a point safe from 
 Olive s unexpectedness, when the door opened and, as 
 if to complete the element of contrast, Mrs. Devon 
 came in. She was preceded by the stir which she 
 always generated, and she joined them at the fire-side 
 with the effect, as he thought, of a mob without direc 
 tion or intention in its approach. She looked from 
 Abby to Olive, with the helplessness of a bird, and the 
 light of her pale eyes and the light of the diamond 
 which hung at her throat gave him the sense of an 
 equally conscious arrangement in their glitter. 
 
 She had come, she said, to see what Olive had 
 finally decided about the ermine cape; and her talk 
 ran on, like an indefinitely extensive glacier on whose 
 surface one could never get an instant s foohold, 
 from her sympathy for colour and the tint of the hat 
 she had last worn when she lunched on the Imperial 
 
 [141]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 yacht at Kiel, to her reminiscence of a woman who, 
 on that occassion, hadn t known enough to take off her 
 veil. "Oh, and by the way, John, I ve just had a letter 
 from Rene Malary de la Rivaudiere s mother, telling me 
 about a new Revue. He told her to see if you had 
 heard of it that as an Ami du Louvre you d want 
 to watch the illustrations. Illustrations they re won 
 derful nowadays, aren t they? There was an extraor 
 dinary man at the Grafton Gallery last spring Scotch, 
 and so clever. He did such a sweet eau-forte of the 
 Petrucci child, when they came up from Rome to 
 have the eldest of the little princesses presented . . . 
 How girls are to be taught manners nowadays, without 
 trains! Such a foolish economy of the Queen s! 
 And I almost forgot to tell you that, speaking of 
 economy, that Bank president whose name I can never 
 recollect is coming in to lunch to-morrow. At one 
 will you make time, John? He wants to see those 
 Persian tiles your father left in the library you re 
 member he said I could have them because they got on 
 his nerves? So absurd! And so absurd for a banker 
 to like Persian tiles! Then, Olive, you do think that 
 snowy white would be amusing against your hair, at 
 
 night ?" 
 
 It was astonishing to Devon that, in spite of his 
 mother s furtive glances in her direction and her uncer 
 tainty as to whether she ought to place her as an 
 anachronism or a type of cleverness, Abby should be 
 the one who sustained the only ease possible, in the 
 few moments more that she remained. She even 
 smiled at Mrs. Devon a comprehension of her incom 
 prehensible chatter, with what seemed to him a touch 
 of gallantry. As he went down to the door with her, 
 
 [142]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 he was surprised at the warmth with which he found 
 himself thanking her for her visit. 
 
 "Well, I rather thought she ought to know." She 
 jerked her head toward the upper room. "You see, 
 her father s not as well as he ought to be. Oh, I guess 
 he ll just run along forever this way; but Norah says 
 he neglects himself, and that he doesn t take any 
 interest in anything. He needs company; that s it. 
 Somehow as people get older they seem to get more 
 and more lonesome. . . ." 
 
 "It was extremely good of you to spare time to tell 
 us, and I ll talk it over with Olive." His eyes met hers 
 fully. "She ll be only too happy, as I m sure you know, 
 to do what s right for him." 
 
 Abby smiled back at him. "Why, of course I know. 
 Just think how good she was to old Mr. Lacy; and I 
 don t believe I d have had the patience she had, living as 
 she did and wanting things so different from most of us. 
 Good-bye, Mr. Devon, and don t worry. I ll look in 
 on Uncle Philip as often as may be, and I ll send you 
 a word if there s anything really out of the way. . . ." 
 
 He had found his mother on the stairs as he turned 
 to go up. Her small arresting presence, clinging to 
 his elbow, claimed for a moment as much of his atten 
 tion as he was ever able to concentrate on her. She 
 had murmured, vaguely, that Miss Trail must be 
 exceedingly interesting; but when she had ventured 
 this opinion to Olive, it was evident that Olive had 
 made some such reply as that Mrs. Devon thought so 
 only because she had no premises in her experience 
 by which to explain Abby. "Really, you know, John, 
 at times Olive does rather leave one gaping. But, my 
 dear boy, the way she carries herself . . . it s too 
 
 [i43l
 
 ASCENT 
 
 marvellous! Did you know that your father has 
 bought a yacht? Yes, really! It appears he told 
 someone he couldn t breathe at that awful place in 
 July and that except there the sea was the only 
 place he d be safe from intrusion. So like him, isn t 
 it? You look tired, my dear; you need a tonic 
 
 The only way to terminate their talk was to turn 
 her over to her footman, on the step, and Devon had 
 drawn a breath of relief as he closed the door. He 
 saw, by a glance at the clock, that he was already late 
 for his appointment; yet some sense of disquietude 
 made him turn up the stairs again. 
 
 Olive was sitting in the same position she had held 
 when he left the room, her back against the corner of 
 the sofa, her hands pressed together and her eyes set 
 on the window opposite; but the face she turned on 
 him was like a sudden flame of resentment. 
 
 "Well, are you satisfied?" she broke out. "You 
 who think I ought to learn, to soften aren t those the 
 safe sentimentalities you believe in? Are you at last 
 convinced I can t be a charitable Christian like Abby? 
 Oh, but she brought it all back to me their smugness, 
 their security! There s no use telling me what they 
 are I know what they are! I detest that weak kind 
 ness, that softness of judgment. I d a thousand times 
 rather be condemned by them than admire them !" 
 
 Devon caught both her hands. "Very well. But you 
 can t escape admitting they re real, Abby and Ware 
 too as real as you, and with things you haven t got." 
 
 "I suppose you d like me," she flung at him, "to go 
 to Long Hill Farm and sympathise with Lizzie Trus- 
 low!" 
 
 "I d like you to be capable of it!" His pressure on
 
 ASCENT 
 
 her hands held, with his habitual gesture, as if he 
 unconsciously betrayed in this physical effort his 
 attempt to lay a hold on her force. "Do you see 
 nothing in kindness except that it s a concession? Do 
 you see nothing in feeling except that it s vulnerable? 
 Are you incapable of it? In a way, my dear, you re 
 afraid of those people afraid because, though you 
 can t understand it, they re superior to you. Ames 
 would be the first to tell you so." 
 
 He had then caught from her a repetition of her 
 astonished look. Her anger died down, and she met 
 his eyes with an incredulous surprise. It seemed to 
 him to be compounded of all the things which con 
 fused her; and he had never more clearly felt her lack 
 of any knowledge of human exchange, her instinctive 
 combat of a benefit or a generosity, and the corrosive 
 power of her mind. 
 
 [145]
 
 XI 
 
 SHE had not seen Father Ames until the following 
 week, when he fulfilled his promise to dine with 
 them; and the first words he had spoken as he 
 took his seat beside her, after dinner, had made her 
 realise how instantly he could turn and direct the 
 angle of her thoughts. 
 
 He had drawn forward the chair she had motioned 
 him to, with his suggestion of a fundamental fatigue 
 beneath his nervous force, and his eyes had touched her 
 face keenly. 
 
 "Ah, this is good of you, Mrs. Devon! I wanted 
 a word with you; but then you ve talked to me, in 
 your silences, all evening !" 
 
 His greeting to her, on his arrival, had seemed to 
 Olive to set the tone of their communication. He could 
 not have been more evidently gracious, more affec 
 tionate in the way his hand lingered on Devon s arm 
 or more perfect in the response of his courtesy to 
 the few older people whom she had asked to meet him; 
 but an amused look from Devon had reminded her of 
 his private assurance of Ames s detestation of a dinner 
 and of how rare it was for him to accept one. The 
 light note of authority in him, so carefully separate 
 from his personal humility, was necessarily predomi 
 nant in the face of the questions put to him by an 
 international lawyer, who had read him exhaustively, 
 by a Harvard professor of Metaphysics, who wanted 
 some points on a recent Stonyhurst course, and by a 
 
 [146]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 railroad president, a devout Catholic, whose desire it 
 was to found a chair of Scholastic Philosophy at a 
 western university. During dinner he had rarely 
 turned, from his seat beside Olive, to look at her; and 
 if he did so his glance passed over her with the same 
 rapid preoccupation with which it passed over the other 
 faces, as if he noted between a thinker and a supersti 
 tious financier, between her mother-in-law and herself, 
 only such differences as were differences of soul and the 
 vast likenesses of humanity at large. 
 
 She had not needed Mrs. Devon s emphatic nod of 
 admiration to assure her that she had shown through 
 out the evening that skill which, as she had instinctively 
 known, was rarer than too marked a competence or 
 too easily effusive a cordiality. She could fancy that 
 her mother-in-law was once more exclaiming to her 
 self that that was the marvel the things she instinc 
 tively knew; that the guests were so carefully chosen and 
 so few, the table and the food of so simple an arrange 
 ment; that she had displaced the other ladies present 
 and put Mrs. Devon at Devon s right, and that she 
 had asked a Catholic present to ask Father Ames to 
 say grace, rather than to make the request herself. It 
 was in the habit of her judgments to regard such occa 
 sions in the light of their tribute to her personal 
 success; and she was conscious that her touch of 
 management was so perfectly sure and firm that it 
 was natural. The finer demands on her capacity and 
 her intelligence which the evening had made had con 
 vinced her more than ever of all she had avoided that 
 her adaptability had not been too easy and too fluid, 
 that her judgment held, even in the dazzle of all she 
 couldn t possibly know, and that she was learning the 
 
 [i47]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 literature of the best, in all the habits of her taste, and 
 not, like Mrs. Devon, its dangerous jargon. But where, 
 she had asked herself, could she stand in Father Ames s 
 point of view? He had once again the effect for her of 
 creating a standard, of relegating the temporary to 
 unimportance and extracting from the permanent its 
 intrinsic values. The talk about the table, the sub 
 jects it touched, the streets outside and that sense of 
 the city which was still so present to her, took their 
 place in their relation to civilisation and history, as 
 she listened to him; just as his smile at Mrs. Devon s 
 absurdities did not change the fact, as he watched her, 
 that he seemed amusedly conscious of her fractional 
 relation to eternity. 
 
 He pursued, when he joined Olive after dinner, with 
 a quick sign of recognition towards the few people scat 
 tered in the room. "I noticed your reticences because 
 one doesn t often have them to notice here. What a 
 great chance your countrymen have got if only you 
 don t waste your greatness in size! I ve seen so much 
 of you all in the past weeks, as I ve travelled from place 
 to place and that s all wrong, you know: I should 
 have been able to see so little! Life here must move, 
 people must communicate even at the cost of the 
 experience;" he smiled; "and so I noticed what you 
 didn t say." 
 
 "Reticences must be very full, Father, to reach the 
 places in which you live!" Olive s voice had the tinge 
 of antagonism which, with his tone, came to her instinc 
 tively. 
 
 "Oh, very!" Father Ames was completely acquies 
 cent. "I should be an even poorer servant than I am 
 if that weren t so. You see we Catholics have what one 
 
 [148]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 might call the trained conscience; and a priest in par 
 ticular has to learn to discern what it s his duty and 
 obligation to hear from what s only a manifestation of 
 life which he judges, but in which he has no part." 
 He turned in his chair towards her. "It must be 
 strange, may I say it? I thought of it the day when 
 you and John were good enough to come to my rooms 
 it must be strange to be like you, and to have all 
 one s idea of reality in information!" 
 
 Olive was silent for an instant. She had again the 
 vital sense that their words, as they exchanged them, 
 were like a series of events. Each one of his phrases, 
 in its affective sequences, seemed to her to bring her to 
 a decision or force her to a recognition more stirring 
 than any accident or encounter of tangibility. What 
 confounded her most in Ames was that she felt her 
 habitual weapons to be useless. She was always 
 fundamentally prepared for opposition, in her unfail 
 ing tendency to regard whoever resisted her insistence 
 as an adversary; but she felt lost before the complete 
 ness of his refusal to treat her on any terms which 
 were not his own. 
 
 She shifted her eyes to the group across the room, 
 from the accentuated colours of the dresses which 
 surrounded Mrs. Devon to the dark coats of the men. 
 
 "I suppose, Father, that you think I know nothing!" 
 her brows drew impatiently together. 
 
 Father Ames laughed. "I should never be as pre 
 sumptuous as that! But I do think, if you want me 
 to answer you, that you know nothing" he chose his 
 words "of the great tonic of idea. No I really 
 may be frank? You re so clever and rare a person, 
 as I ve told John, that one s struck by the absence
 
 ASCENT 
 
 of certain things in you. You ve got a marvellous 
 will, but remember, I ve your permission! you ve 
 no selective sense. Your ignorance hasn t yet become 
 refusal. He had another deprecatory touch of 
 amusement. "I ve the hideous habit of the platform, 
 you see; and you re giving me such a charming eve 
 ning that I ought to be ashamed of myself! John tells 
 me he s been reading the last Bryce. Have you, too, 
 looked through it? A tired book, don t you think ?" 
 
 She interrupted him with a sudden gesture of intol 
 erance. "Why don t you tell me at once," she brought 
 out sharply, "that you think I m all wrong? I d much 
 rather you said it directly." 
 
 Father Ames waited for the shortest second, as if he 
 selected the key in which to pitch his reply. "Ah, I ve 
 more hope! For you to fancy I am accusing you of 
 being, as you say, all wrong, is much more spiritually 
 advanced than for you to fear my accusing you of 
 ignorance! My dear Mrs. Devon, who am I to tell 
 you how far you are, from one or the other?" His 
 smile had an instant kindness. "I ve no possible privi 
 lege to condemn you." 
 
 "But you do your premises do; and they, to 
 you . . ." 
 
 "Are everything, of course. But so are yours to 
 you, I don t doubt. We ve talked for possibly all 
 told an hour; and if, in that short time, I haven t seen 
 any scheme in your life, or once more, you ll allow 
 me? in your thought, at least I very clearly realise 
 that you re actuated by premises quite different from 
 mine, and in which you probably profoundly believe." 
 
 "How absurd to suppose," her voice was sharper, 
 "that I believe in anything! Don t you see, you who 
 
 [150]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 see so much," she made a rapid gesture, "that that s 
 my difficulty? Oh, no, not the usual scepticism of 
 youth you re too wise not to know that; but a dis 
 belief in disbelief itself." 
 
 "And why?" 
 
 She felt definitely more than the question in his 
 words, as if he had for the first time asked her for 
 a personal disclosure. 
 
 "Because I m made that way; action and reaction 
 they re equal and opposite in more than one science, 
 aren t they? And more, because I m trained that way. 
 My old grandfather taught me a ritual as exact as 
 yours, Father 1 Oh, what can you, with all your 
 inheritances, know of what it is to be trained to ques 
 tion every conclusion, to undermine every supposition, 
 to prick the bubble of every impression by a phrase, 
 to interrogate every act for its absurdity or its 
 insincerity . . ." Her hands clasped each other 
 against the dark velvet of her dress. "No it s useless 
 to try to tell you!" 
 
 Father Ames s rapid smile again just showed. 
 "Then why, if you re so completely trained, aren t you 
 satisfied?" 
 
 The tensity of Olive s concentration dissolved. Her 
 eyes widened and her hands separated. "I don t 
 know!" There was an impotence in her tone which 
 she made no effort to attenuate. 
 
 He was thoughtful for a moment, with his glance set 
 once more across the room and his face resting against 
 his hand. "Does John know that you feel this ? 
 that you re dissatisfied with your inner life?" 
 
 "John!" Her voice vibrated with difference and 
 then lowered again. "Oh, yes. I ve told him; more 
 
 [151]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 than that, he knows. He knows that I m the last per 
 son on earth to be happy living an existence which I 
 can t understand where I ve no premises." 
 
 "But you see it s not a question of your happiness! 
 It s a matter far deeper. Tell me you are a Prot 
 estant, aren t you?" 
 
 She again hesitated for a second. It had never 
 occurred to her to define a bond the ludicrous aspect 
 of which old Lacy had never subordinated to its 
 other significance; and Ames s words called up in her 
 mind an incongruous train of memories of the Ware 
 church, of Abby s efforts with the choir, of the hardness 
 of the bare benches, the clang of the bell before Sunday 
 service, and of Mr. Basker. 
 
 "Yes, I suppose I could call myself a Protestant, 
 in the same contradictory way that I m everything 
 else. Here, of course" her hands rose to touch her 
 breast "I m nothing." 
 
 Father Ames had again one of his prolonged pauses. 
 The light of the intelligence in his face seemed to her 
 even finer as he finally spoke. "But you want to be 
 nothing!" 
 
 "No, no, no!" she caught him up. "I don t! I 
 don t want to accept my moment of consciousness here 
 quantitatively and crudely. I want everything but 
 I want the best! How is living to be worth while to 
 me if I haven t comprehension and apprehension? 
 How else am I get it all?" 
 
 "There s rather a difference, you know," his voice 
 still kept the accent of what he said in the range of 
 conversational comment "between one s mind and 
 one s soul. You must let me say that you seem to 
 confuse your interests and your salvation!" His 
 
 [152]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 words paused again. "You want to get a morality into 
 your life that I understand; and you re willing to 
 work to get it. But once more, you ll forgive me if 
 I say that to let a thing go isn t to renounce it. 
 Renouncement is never a passive ignorance; and 
 renouncement is never enough . . ." 
 
 "Then what you require is nothing less than every 
 thing?" 
 
 He shook his head. "What God requires." 
 
 "And there s no other way?" 
 
 "There s no other way but the way we have indicated 
 to us. As one of the Catholic writers has said, that 
 soul which is outside the church remains until death in 
 the outer dark." 
 
 She fixed him as his words ended, with her eyes 
 deepening under the pressure of her determination. 
 "And have you any conception of what it means to be 
 a creature utterly alone?" 
 
 "I ve seen, my dear Mrs. Devon, many creatures 
 utterly alone; but don t forget that the facts which 
 make you lonely are greater than you." 
 
 She waited for another instant and then broke out, 
 with a sharp accent in her sudden irrelevance. "Why is 
 it that you make me feel differently than anyone has 
 ever made me feel? Oh, I ve always resisted, Father ! 
 and I ll resist you ! I m born to resistance. But remem 
 ber how stripped I am that in all your experience 
 you ve never seen anyone more completely a beggar." 
 
 Her voice had changed to a lower note of confidence, 
 and from confidence to appeal, as if his presence 
 brought out in her an intuitive imitation of the pitch of 
 tone to which he would be most accustomed. His eyes, 
 as they continued to meet hers, seemed to be measuring 
 
 [153]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 this, as if his thoughts were running rapidly over his 
 knowledge of the instant self-exposure of the American 
 woman and the immediacy of her surrender. 
 
 "Ah, I fear " his answer was slow enough to give 
 her time to gather herself "that you don t see how 
 little we all make of personality! We want humanity 
 in human beings yes! You remember, perhaps, the 
 story of the old Jesuit Superior who dismissed one of 
 his novices because he had no passions? But there, 
 after all, it is; one s got to lose one s soul to find 
 it. . . ." 
 
 Olive held her pause for so long that the laughter 
 mingled with Mrs. Devon s sharp notes, across the 
 room, drifted to them. Her shoulders straightened and 
 set at their habitual angle before she replied. 
 
 "Well, I must go my own way, then." 
 
 Father Ames s eyes left hers as he spoke. "If you 
 are set on it, then you must!" 
 
 Her look was still on his face. "Are you off again 
 at once?" 
 
 "No; I shall be here now, for six weeks or so. I ve 
 my lectures in and near New York; and I believe 
 they ve some new plan for me . . ." 
 
 "Then you will be lecturing here?" 
 
 "Yes, there will be, I think, an announcement in 
 the morning papers. I can t say it s to my taste but 
 since it seems to be the will of God . . ." his shoulders 
 rose and fell. 
 
 "You detest it?" she asked quickly. 
 
 "Oh, unutterably ! " He laughed. "I should have liked 
 a quiet parish and a library. But I had enough of 
 books, it appears, in my first youth; and now I m 
 condemned, I suppose forever, to talk about the 
 
 [i54]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 thoughts and doings of people whom I haven t the 
 leisure properly to study. Some day perhaps 
 
 "Some day you ll change it?" 
 
 "Some day my superiors may change it. And now 
 you must forgive me ... I say the first mass to-mor 
 row;" he rose and held out his hand; "and take my 
 advice ! Take to God those vague heresies which you so 
 accurately express 1 " 
 
 [155]
 
 XII 
 
 THE early June afternoon had in its air an 
 oppressive stillness, above the clatter of the 
 streets. Olive had closed the door and leaned 
 against it, catching her breath in her satisfaction at 
 finding the room empty. A week or so before Father 
 Ames had mentioned, to her and Devon, that the lock 
 was always on the latch, so that when young Father 
 Croft was called over to the church, he and his secre 
 tary could get in and out without delay. She had 
 met no one on the stairs; there was no sound from 
 the inner room; and the dust-flecked light which 
 flooded the open windows laid on everything the 
 enchantment of a separation from the outer world. 
 
 Her thought had so enmeshed itself about the 
 room, in the two months since she had first entered 
 it, that she had the odd sense, as she glanced about 
 her, of knowing it better than it existed. The flowers 
 which were placed at the foot of the little column had 
 no freshness fresher than her impression of them and 
 the Virgin s slimness above them was no frailer than 
 it had lived in her recollection. There still hung from 
 the shoulders of the statue, with its fine links dropping 
 motionlessly to the cross, the rosary she had flung over 
 them. As her eyes caught it she felt the touch of a 
 sudden feeling pass through her. The testimony that, 
 through her own conflicts and contradictions of the 
 past weeks, this contributive sign from her had 
 remained, arrested her not with a sense of her impor 
 tance but of its own. In the face of what it represented, 
 
 [156]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 her struggles and her aspirations were suddenly 
 reduced to an equal evanescence, like spray tossed 
 against such solid perpetuity. 
 
 It was the single occasion, she reflected, that, in the 
 constantly restless movement of her mind, any place 
 had held her. She had recognised surroundings either 
 to subordinate them to herself or to disregard them, 
 as a setting of whose impermanence she was com 
 pletely conscious. But the room, since first she entered 
 it, had stood for the symbol of her stirred sense of 
 form and meaning, consequence and derivation. Be 
 tween its asceticism and its richness there was a moral 
 balance which had given a sudden relevance to the 
 loose manifestations of her hunger. It was here, she 
 said to herself, that she had first awakened to the 
 adventure of the passions of the intelligence, and had 
 first realised that experience could have no savour 
 for her without the comparison of a standard. The 
 infusion of a sense of these relations into her uncharted 
 existence seemed to her to have thrown all its dramatic 
 significance into proportion. 
 
 Yet to realise when she stood, in the light of these 
 fresh values, and to look forward, had also been to 
 look back. She crossed the room to where the Virgin 
 rose on her pedestal. Between the fixed serenity of 
 the painted eyes and the turmoil of her own there 
 stretched, as she felt, every moment of the recent 
 weeks. They laid on her a hand of reclamation. . . . 
 
 The stages by which she had come to the recognition 
 of an authority outside her own marked the passage 
 of the recent days more than any division of time. 
 Her constant sense that she was progressing to a pre 
 conceived end had penetrated her until, with a twist 
 
 [157]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 of her imagination, she could regard it as having the 
 poignancy of the fatalistic. She remembered first her 
 powerlessness to fling off the impression of Father 
 Ames s lectures. His inaccessibility was explained to 
 her anew, every time she heard him, as if the crowd 
 which separated him from her were symbolic of the 
 thronged issues of life which stood between them. Yet 
 she never turned, as she went out, to catch a final 
 glimpse of his prepossessed look, that she did not 
 equally feel that what enchained her most was the mys 
 tery as to how, in the midst of such galling routine, 
 he kept his fervour. The contradiction of the two 
 was a continual excitation to her. Each time they met 
 she had felt the perfect withdrawal of his predestina 
 tion. But she had felt no less all that had put soft 
 ness into his severity and fire into his opinions; and 
 she began insensibly to turn and regard herself in the 
 light of them. 
 
 In their earlier talks, the touch of his thoughts on 
 hers had invariably involved a clash of her judgment 
 with his, and her display of a defiance of his conclusions 
 which, as she was always the first to tell him, was only 
 show. But with the passage of each week, the stimula 
 tion of her sense of combat had seemed to her more and 
 more, in the light of his amused smile, a mere agility. 
 The circumstances in which they met deepened this 
 impression. As the spring grew later, Devon had 
 suggested that his quiet library, with such masses of 
 books at hand that even Ames might condescend to 
 glance at, was a better place to put together his lectures 
 than Father Croft s room, with its incessant inter 
 ruptions. Olive never passed Father Ames on the stairs 
 or watched him across the table, on the rare occasions 
 
 [158]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 when he could be persuaded to stay to lunch, without 
 being conscious of an alteration in herself. Old Lacy s 
 penetration in her was too just for her not to see that 
 this influence was not a temporary fashion of her 
 opinion. It was daily apparent to her, in the swing 
 of their arguments, in the sudden thrust of her con 
 tradictions and the sudden surrender of her point of 
 view, that she was sacrificing something of the integ 
 rity of her individualism. The delicate pleasure 
 involved in the abandonment of her cult of a hard per 
 sonality had shaken her old premises and certainties; 
 and the distances she had travelled had not yet struck 
 her as forcibly as when she looked up at the statue, 
 with the sense of all its significance to Ames. . . . 
 
 She turned abruptly. An instinct of defensiveness 
 rose in her for an instant, so powerfully that she felt 
 herself caught in the sharp revulsion of revolt. Her 
 eyes ran over the room with a new and harder intelli 
 gence. What, after all, had led her to yield herself 
 to this adventure of incongruity? The piety of the 
 objects on the wall and strewn over the tables seemed 
 to her suddenly thin; why had she not sooner seen, 
 she wondered, the attitude in it? The beat and roar 
 of the streets below filled her thoughts for a moment; 
 why, she wondered, had she done so fantastic a thing 
 as to come? Father Ames had made, four or five days 
 before, one of his swift departures, with only a 
 telephone message from his secretary to explain that 
 for the rest of the week he would not trouble them to 
 let him use the library. She had seen in the papers, 
 the same morning, that he had just returned, from 
 Baltimore, and was to speak in the evening; and she 
 had instantly assumed, as an opportunity of seeing 
 
 [159]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 him, the obligation to tell him that his books and 
 papers were on Devon s table and waiting for him 
 where he had left them. Yet had she a real desire 
 she put it to herself with a touch of roughness to 
 see him? In her momentary reaction even his com 
 pelling figure paled and all its outlines wavered and 
 faded into unreality. Their terms of thought were 
 so fatally different, she told herself, that if she con 
 fessed to him the inspiration of feeling which had 
 brought her, he would put it down as a cheap fugitive 
 impulse. . . . 
 
 Her back had been towards the door when she was 
 aware of a light sound, and as she wheeled about she 
 saw him standing on the threshold. She had heard no 
 preliminary step on the stairs, and she had been confi 
 dent that the other rooms were empty; yet she had been 
 so possessed by her reflections of the last moments that 
 she looked at him with a preoccupation beyond sur 
 prise. He evidently caught something of the conflicting 
 uncertainties in her face, for without speaking he 
 closed the door and confronted her. 
 
 As the seconds passed, it seemed to her that they 
 had never before exchanged a glance so clear and sus 
 tained. His look was none the less perfectly a defence 
 of his thought; but for the first time she felt it admitted 
 and revealed to her as defence, and as an infinitely fine 
 assemblage of his array of weapons. 
 
 He was silent for so long that when she spoke she 
 was conscious of his tacit admission that the tone of 
 their talk was to be beyond the usual exchange. 
 
 "Well, Father, I offer no apology for coming. I d 
 scarcely one framed in my head but if I had I 
 shouldn t use itl" 
 
 [160]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Father Ames took her up instantly. "No apology is 
 ever necessary in coming here. That s what a priest 
 expects ; and people are in and out all day, to see Father 
 Croft if not to see me." 
 
 Olive s smile dealt for a second with the accent in 
 which he spoke. 
 
 "You dispose easily enough of my being here; 
 perhaps you will be stirred a little more out of your 
 point of view your comfortable point of view when 
 I tell you what brought me. I m here to say nothing 
 more or less than that I can t go on seeing you." 
 
 Father Ames remained motionless. Only his eyes 
 carried his animation and returned it to meet her 
 insistence. 
 
 She pursued, with another brief touch of her irony. 
 "I ve little illusion about it; you will do me the justice 
 to admit I m honest! I ve made and unmade this 
 decision a hundred times; but each time it s none the 
 less a decision, and since you and John will aways 
 have so close a friendship you understand? It s 
 quite clear? I shan t come here again, nor, if I can 
 help it, see you again." 
 
 "Why not?" His voice was as rapid as before. 
 
 "Why not as if I could answer that! You must 
 ask so deep a question of your famous God . . ." 
 She cut herself off. "Oh, I don t know any reason. I 
 know only the condition that I can t go on as I am, 
 that I can t see you." 
 
 "My dear Mrs. Devon," his tone was measured to 
 the lightest shading, "I must really ask you to leave 
 me out of what is a matter of the salvation of your 
 soul!" 
 
 "Your phrase will do well enough to cover it, I 
 [161]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 suppose." Her retort was as quick as his. "I have 
 come to suspect, you know, that your terms of morality 
 are sometimes convenient! Oh, I don t mean to be 
 harsh, and you ll have to forgive me if I am. The 
 truth, quite simply, is that you ve brought me to a 
 new state of mind, you ve put me face to face with 
 these things, and yet you refuse to solve them for me. 
 That s what you regard as fair. No, I tell you I m 
 utterly miserable. . . ." 
 
 For a second their silence hung between them; then 
 Father Ames s hand made a sudden motion, in the 
 direction, she saw, of the little Virgin on the pedestal. 
 
 "It s my profound belief that in His time God will 
 solve them for you; meanwhile, may I say that I 
 scarcely think your judgment of them goes beyond a 
 momentary feeling." His smile showed for an instant, 
 as if he consciously eased the strain of her attitude. 
 "You ve never read, I suppose, that greatest of the 
 mystics, who says that faith must be both certain and 
 obscure. Yours we must admit it isn t yet strong 
 enough to be either." 
 
 "That s what you say, and that s what of course 
 you think. But I have tried to believe; indeed, I ve 
 most truly tried! And what s the result? There s 
 something in me w r hich drops like an acid on the first 
 motion of belief. It s always whispering over my 
 shoulder. ... I question and I deny with each breath 
 I draw. I know I never lived any sort of life until 
 I came to this pass; but the question now is, how 
 am I to go on living it at all?" She stretched her hand 
 towards him, with a sharp gesture. "It s you, Father, 
 who ve done it to me, done it as evidently and directly 
 as anything s ever been evident and direct. In the last 
 
 [162]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 weeks, since I ve seen you and listened to you, there s 
 never been a day . . ." she caught and controlled her 
 voice. "Oh, I know you ve said nothing direct! But 
 you ve changed me. I m different, my premises are 
 vanished, you ve shaken my confidence. I don t know 
 where I am or where I m going. . . ." 
 
 He arrested her. "Ah, I ve seen your suffering. I 
 believe it s been deep, and I m sorrier for it than I 
 can say; but 
 
 She confronted him steadily. "But you haven t 
 understood it." 
 
 "You must let me remind you that it s scarcely 
 been my business to understand it." 
 
 "Oh, I know all that!" Her impatience flared up 
 like a light. "But what s a theoretic pity at the place 
 I ve reached? I can t exist, I can t go through this 
 routine called living, without belief; that much I know; 
 and yet I can t believe. It s grim enough, isn t it? 
 You ve killed my trust in nothingness, and yet you 
 haven t given me a God. I go to mass why? Because 
 you would want me to; not because I want to; and I 
 come away well, critical and incredulous, and asking 
 myself how on earth it can mean to you what it does. I 
 read the books I hear you speak of, because you ve 
 named them; if it were anyone else who cited them, I d 
 laugh in his face. . . ." She held herself again. "I ve 
 tried, Father believe it or not, but I have. I ve tried 
 to imagine what you d think I ought to do, and to do 
 it. I ve made sacrifices that were intimate and 
 cruel. . . ." 
 
 Father Ames s response also hung for an instant. 
 His eyes seemed to play on the new exposure of her 
 beauty which came with the exposure of her pain, and 
 
 [163]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 then his slight smile recurred. "Don t we all make 
 them such sacrifices? And are they really, in the 
 light of larger things, very important?" 
 
 Her voice sharpened, as if she instinctively felt the 
 sharper thrust necessary to penetrate his sympathy. 
 "Yes, but do you know how intimate they ve been and 
 how cruel?" She took a step nearer him. "Do you 
 know that it s because of what you think is a woman s 
 duty that I ve made up my mind to have a child? Oh, 
 yes, I ve made up my mind to it! It is not a case, 
 with a person like me, of the will of heaven or of the 
 accidents of feeling. I ve told John I want a child, 
 and I ll have one I ll go through what I must go 
 through because I know as well as if you d said it that 
 it lifts me an infinitesimal bit higher in your judg 
 ment. You see," she made a wide gesture "there s 
 the beginning and the end of it. I ve tried to believe 
 and I ve succeeded only in believing in you." 
 
 Father Ames confronted her with his silence still 
 complete. But as she ended, it reached her confused 
 consciousness that for the first time she was seeing 
 in his face the force of his certitude, in all its structural 
 parts. Even in her exaltation she traced for an instant, 
 in its profound pity, the history of the growth of his 
 sympathy, the turbulences he must have seen people 
 traverse, the wreckage he had had made of his confi 
 dence and the dust into which some of his conquests 
 must have fallen. Then his expression changed to its 
 habitual aspect. He drew out his watch, crossed the 
 room to his desk and selected with a critical hand a 
 sheaf of papers from those which encumbered it. 
 
 "When you are ready to view this matter in its 
 proper proportions, we ll talk of it. I m always need 
 
 [164]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 I say it? at your service. You ve complicated your 
 question, so far. Your immense and very generous 
 responsiveness and your keen creative sense have lost 
 the mass for you in detail. That will pass soon enough. 
 Until then " he bent his eyes again on the papers he 
 held, and detached one or two of them. "I m lecturing 
 to-night, and I ve just had news, in this worst of 
 rushed days, of the arrival of my old friend Terence 
 Bourdas and his sister. They sail for home to-morrow, 
 and I d sent you a note, which must just have missed 
 you, to your house, to say what pleasure it would give 
 me if you could find a moment to call on Lady Isabel. 
 Perhaps you could make time to run in early this 
 afternoon? I shall hope to save half an hour to see 
 her myself, just before dinner if only things are kind 
 to me! You ll find her one of the most remarkable of 
 unremarkable women." 
 
 The impenetrability of his voice seemed to close 
 like a wall around her. She dropped into a chair 
 and pressed her hands to her face. 
 
 "So that," she broke out, "is all it means to you!" 
 
 His voice sounded to her as if it had travelled an 
 immeasurable length before it reached her. 
 
 "Do you seriously think that after my life as a 
 priest the suffering of a human soul means nothing 
 to me?" 
 
 She had never so clearly felt in his tone the note 
 of his office. Under its impact she wavered for a 
 second and then rose. Her tears trembled on her 
 cheeks, as she tried to steady herself. Then she man 
 aged to raise her hands, and touched, uncertainly, her 
 hair and the lace on her dress. 
 
 "I can only apologise to you, Father. I can t imagine 
 [165]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 what has made me burden you with all this complaint. 
 Let us call it the heat. It was really most inconsiderate 
 of me to drop in here, in this sudden way." The fixity 
 of his eyes steadied her, and she pursued. "Yes, of 
 course, I ll go to see Lady Isabel. Your note s at the 
 house, you say, with her address? And has Father 
 Croft, do you suppose, such a thing as a mirror? If 
 there s one anywhere about, I should like to see if 
 all this hysteria I ve imposed on you hasn t perhaps 
 disarranged my hat. . . ." 
 
 [166]
 
 XIII 
 
 " T F you know, Father, how completely enchanted 
 I am to see you!" 
 
 Lady Isabel had caught his hand with the same 
 eagerness which warmed her eyes and her large smile. 
 "What a dreadful dreary little room in which to talk 
 to you you whom one would always want to see in 
 such delicious quiet places; no, don t reproach me! 
 I ll put up with it! I couldn t very well do less, con 
 sidering all you yourself have had to bear of hotels 
 and turmoil. And now tell me; tell me, please, all 
 that s happened!" 
 
 Father Ames, for an instant, reflected the pleasure 
 of her smile in his own, without speaking; and in his 
 pause the first thing of which he was aware was that 
 here, confronting him, was the person who had always 
 best comprehended his silences. Ever since his fifth or 
 sixth year, and hers, it had been inevitable to him that 
 when he met her frank and frequently impatient eyes, 
 he should meet in them this sudden apprehension. He 
 could remember it, in days of games in which he had 
 usually been the most turbulent and the wildest, in his 
 childish punishments, his sicknesses and his recoveries, 
 and through all the uncertainties of his last youth and 
 his first maturity. One of the most valuable things 
 about Isabel Bourdas, he had always thought, was the 
 muteness essential in her sympathy. She had never 
 expressed a solicitude or uttered a comment; and this 
 had made him trust her to see the signs of inner experi- 
 
 [167]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 ences as intricate as those he traversed before he took 
 his vows. She was instinctively incapable of pausing 
 at the detail; he fancied her always, in his view of her, 
 with her sharp experienced gaze on nothing nearer 
 than the horizon, and her rigidity of judgment only for 
 herself. 
 
 As he had waited for her, in the hotel sitting room 
 perched high above the out-spread city, and with its 
 windows full of the late afternoon light, he had thought, 
 as he watched the vast outlook with all its effulgent 
 vitality flaring up to the sky, how empty his past 
 months had been not only of such a presence but of 
 such surroundings as produced it. It was significant 
 that this was the first hour in which he had drawn 
 breath slowly enough to measure this lack the first 
 when he had extricated himself, on his receipt of 
 Isabel s note, from the intricacies of his engagements 
 for any personal reason. He had known with exactitude 
 that it was not merely the long sequence of rooms like 
 this and of views like the one beyond, of a constant 
 succession of duties which it required all his will to 
 save from the crystallisation of monotony and minds 
 which one s best sincerity couldn t penetrate, which had 
 touched the springs of his energy to the point of an 
 exhaustion. For some years the terms of his intellect 
 had been the terms of his activity, as the terms of his 
 faith were those of his subsistence. There had never 
 existed any doubt in his judgment, any more than in 
 the judgment of his superiors, that his services were 
 to be by means of a mind which was so plainly pre 
 pared to be an instrument. His lectures had begun 
 early, his preaching had immediately been a duty, 
 and the lines of his special use had always been clear. 
 
 [168]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 But in the last weeks his thirst for a change to some 
 comparative peace had slowly allied itself to a thirst 
 for a change in his spiritual apprehension, as if the 
 confused traffic of life through which he had passed 
 had exposed to him the nudity of the constructive parts 
 of existence. 
 
 In his last months in Europe, several of which he 
 spent in Rome, the fatigue of a too constant concentra 
 tion had as he had recently begun to think already 
 touched him. He was perpetually used for service in 
 situations where he was in attack or defence. The 
 unrelaxing strain of this attitude took something from 
 him beside meditation. He had sometimes wondered 
 if his religious ardour itself did fan to flame more 
 slowly and if it had not less penetration in its heat. 
 He remembered in particular one cold spring after 
 noon when he had spent hours, after a ceremony in 
 St. Peter s, with the Cardinal-Secretary. The dim 
 rooms, filled with the touches of red and violet, the 
 smooth insistence of the English Cardinal who was 
 recommending that he be sent to America, the delicate 
 flattery which had been accorded him, all the fine 
 machinery of so immensely simple a whole had never 
 seemed to him of a closer perfection, nor that perfec 
 tion more nearly wearisome in its inexorable complete 
 ness. As soon as he was released he had gone back to 
 the rooms he occupied, over a little fruit shop in the 
 Bocca di Leone; and seated at his writing table, with 
 his head in his hands, he had let the dusk deepen as 
 the force of his prayer for isolation deepened, and for 
 the freedom to express in his outer occupation the felt 
 mystery of his inner life. . . . 
 
 He turned back from his thoughts, with an effort, 
 [169]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 to face his companion, as she sat on the sofa beside him. 
 
 "My dear child, if you ve any notion of how good 
 it is to have you here! When I found your note on 
 my desk this morning, I could think only of my grati 
 tude except that I thought, too, as I always do, of 
 how Miss Hibson you remember Miss Hibson, our 
 worst governess? used to scold you for the way you 
 made your g s. And Terence where s he?" 
 
 "Oh, Terence has gone to pore over the fourteenth 
 century woodcuts in the museum, of course. He started 
 after breakfast and I probably shan t see him until 
 midnight; though if he d known you were coming ! 
 You may find him, at any moment, on your doormat, 
 like the faithful, shaggy creature he is. If you knew 
 how I thank heaven for him! Since all the rest of us 
 are so magnificently married and placed, it seems as if 
 we two had just been meant for this to see each other 
 through. You know, since you ve been away, that 
 I ve definitely become the lonely old maid of fiction!" 
 
 The intelligence in Father Ames s eyes deepened. 
 "Yes I heard." 
 
 "You saw in the papers, I suppose?" She put her 
 question with no change in her smile. 
 
 "Could one escape it?" 
 
 Lady Isabel laughed. "It was rather heralded, I 
 admit. Francis always has his eye on possible con 
 stituents, hasn t he? And he s very far up, you know 
 immeasurably far up. Father says that if there were 
 a division to-morrow, he d head the party as inevitably 
 as dawn follows night." 
 
 "And you thought it was better ?" The delicacy 
 in his tone seemed a link in the long chain of considera 
 tion which bound him to her. 
 
 [170]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "Oh, obviously! You ve always told me, you know, 
 that it oughtn t to come off, our marriage. Yes and 
 I know what you ve always thought of Francis. Oh, 
 I don t deny it! But isn t it all according to chance, 
 to opportunity, to a luck he s never had for all his 
 amazing luck? He s a simple person, you know, and 
 he needed the simplest discipline. He needs the luck 
 of the right unsuccesses and the right failures." She 
 made an impatient gesture. "You see I ve had my 
 revolts, my scepticisms, my arguments which were both 
 sensible and foolish ! But the end was that one after 
 noon, when we were sitting stolidly over the tea table, 
 I told him our engagement had become a myth, that 
 people were tired of it, that even after two years I 
 wasn t yet convinced it was best it should come to 
 anything, and that he ought to marry." 
 
 "And he acquiesced?" 
 
 "He asked me," her smile was rapid "of course 
 he asked me, what the Duke thought. I said father 
 thought quite simply nothing he was too busy with 
 salmon; and I also pointed out what I was sure he 
 hadn t noticed! that Mrs. Montagu was a widow. 
 Not divorced he s clever enough to see the dis 
 advantage of that kind of perpetual remarriage but 
 a widow. Oh, she s already doing magnificently for 
 him, she and her millions. She s as indispensable to 
 him as his horses and his secretaries. She has a hard 
 effulgence which is admirable in public; one rarely 
 sees her, yet she s always there. So, as I tell you . . ." 
 
 Father Ames s hand touched her arm. "I think 
 the thing I m gladdest you have is your recognition 
 of what it s cost you, your generosity of payment, 
 your sense of proportion and of result. No I have 
 
 [171]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 always been completely confident in your judgment. 
 I ve prayed for you and I ve thought of you need I 
 say it? And I ve had my comfort, not only in, the fact 
 that you were right, but in all you have to do, in your 
 privileges and responsibilities." 
 
 "Yes; I know all that." Lady Isabel shook her 
 head. "But the world s so changed; and when it 
 comes down to the truth, there s nothing in particular 
 that I m good for. What is a woman good for, who s 
 seen the world go by, as I ve seen it go by at B rough, 
 and yet who s never been part of it? who s heard 
 everything discussed, and yet who s never been of any 
 use in the discussion? My situations have all been 
 simple too simple! Don t you see, Father, there s 
 been nothing to relate me to life? I open a bazaar 
 now and again, I trot about with father, I go down 
 to Harringford if Minnie wants to yacht and the 
 children are ill. And Terry there s always dear 
 Terry. . . ," She ended, and in an abrupt instant her 
 tone altered. "But it would have been a great luxury 
 to me if I had been able never to see Francis again!" 
 
 The sensitiveness of his face wavered. "Ah, I can 
 imagine . . .1" 
 
 Isabel Bourdas, with her eyes kept toward the win 
 dow, made a quick gesture. 
 
 "Why, with you, is one perpetually in the confes 
 sional? Oh, I don t mean that you re always testing 
 and pardoning though your judgment always does 
 seem to me to test and your taste to pardon! But you 
 draw out something in one draw out a definition of 
 one s life. I m not silent with other people you know 
 that! But I m silent with myself, and you make me 
 break all those ugly reticences. . . . How much 
 
 [172]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 lovelier to have lovely complex armour like yours, all 
 inlaid with golden flowers, to make one forget its pro 
 tective use!" Her smile was touched for a moment 
 with the intricacies of her knowledge of him. "But 
 you can t divert me from the personal! What has 
 made you look so tired?" 
 
 Father Ames returned her amusement. "You mean 
 that I generally manage to conceal myself better? After 
 all, I suppose, it s a wonder that I m alive, with a lecture 
 in Quebec one minute and in the south the next. But 
 as if one minded that, if one s body can stand it; 
 and thank heaven mine can!" 
 
 "You ve had a terrific success." 
 
 "The Archbishop here seems to think it hasn t gone 
 so badly. I ve seen a few helpful and delightful men; 
 I ve had a few responsive audiences; for the rest 
 His shoulders rose and fell; he had risen to stand in 
 front of the ornate brass-trimmed hearth and the 
 fireless grate, and his eyes passed over the room, whose 
 only personality seemed to be in the long-accumulated 
 signs of transient occupancies. "For the rest, if you 
 ask me what has happened, nothing s happened. My 
 life has been as dead as these walls." 
 
 Lady Isabel nodded, with her eyes on her large 
 white hands, clasped on her knee. When she next 
 raised her look it had a touch of something more 
 intimately alive with the recollections of their com 
 panionship. 
 
 "I know! If only you d been born a Franciscan 
 haven t I often said it? Your intellectuality is 
 almost too unbelievably aristocratic; you simply can t 
 help all your preferences and your refusals; you simply 
 can t save yourself from your delicacies. You, you 
 
 [i73]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 see, have inflexions of thought; the rest of us have 
 just thoughts. We all live on the manifestations of 
 life, and you you live on its causes!" 
 
 "Well, if it be the will of God," Father Ames 
 laughed "111 do in the future a little better by those 
 causes. W T hen I was young, or younger, I used to 
 think I d try for a parish in the East End; but now I 
 know that if I could choose it would be something far 
 different. It isn t so much that I want to get away 
 from all this over-activity of the mind it s that I 
 want to get beneath it." He made one of his quick 
 gestures. "I want to let my inner self breathe, to 
 search for those hidden mysteries which lie beyond 
 the senses. That s why I sometimes pray," his eyes 
 caught her eyes, "that I may be allowed to end in a 
 monastic life." 
 
 She met the gravity of his look for another second 
 and then drew her brows together, as if she refused 
 the idea consideration. "As if I hadn t always seen 
 it hovering over you, ever since I can remember any 
 thing! And as if I hadn t always been convinced of 
 the utter impossibility of it! You, with your rapidity, 
 your trained attack no, you couldn t!" 
 
 His smile again disposed of the intolerance of her 
 tone. "It s all very well to say no, but I very 
 well could! Oh, sometimes all the trend of things 
 seems to me so clearly towards it! I, who ve 
 expounded theories, to be free at last to deal per 
 petually in the drama of the religious existence; to 
 deal, after all my theological differentiations, in a 
 community of spirit which lies forever beyond ques 
 tion. If you knew how tired I am of individualism! 
 It s what I ve most detested and what I ve most
 
 ASCENT 
 
 prayed to be saved all this surface development of 
 the human being and this neglect of his soul!" 
 
 She could only repeat her protestation. "It s out 
 of the question. It would be too much against the 
 very talents heaven has given you it would be a 
 brutal wrong." Her glance sharpened, as it bent on 
 him. "Is this what America s done to you?" 
 
 He was as instant as she. "And do you think I d 
 blame poor America, if I considered it had led me to 
 a spiritual advancement? No, but what America has 
 done for me is to make me wonder what I am. Do 
 I at all exist, except as a kind of trickster, playing 
 with the right weapons, yes! but always juggling! 
 Oh, I hope I needn t tell you that if ever God gives 
 me this grace, it s a move I ll make with all of me 
 that the continuity with me will strive to be organic, 
 and not mere form that my soul will take all the 
 vows!" He drew out his watch. "And now let me 
 ask you you saw Mrs. Devon?" 
 
 Isabel turned with an evident difficulty from her 
 thoughts. "Yes. She came, of course. And of 
 course I thought her extraordinary. We talked for 
 half an hour, in the politest phrases; and at the 
 end " her attention fixed itself again on him. "Why 
 in the world did you want me to see her?" 
 
 Father Ames s face lightened with his ease. "I 
 scarcely expected you to find each other out! Yes, 
 she s extraordinary enough. So extraordinary that, 
 as you ll see, it s easier for me to tell you who she is 
 than what. You don t perhaps remember Devon, the 
 most charming of men, full of sensitiveness and intelli 
 gence? He was up at Oxford for a year when I was 
 so frequently there, and I may or may not have taken 
 
 [175]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 him for a week-end to you at Trant no, I think not. 
 But what you probably can t help remembering is his 
 mother, a very pretty woman who s eternally at royal 
 garden parties. . . ." 
 
 He had run along under the fixity of her gaze, which 
 deepened to recollection as she answered. 
 
 "I have a thread of remembrance. Someone brought 
 her to see us, a year or so ago. But nothing like her 
 husband or her mother-in-law explains this girl." 
 
 "No, nothing short of larger causes. She s beyond 
 the usual definition. That s why " his eyes again 
 softened "I wanted her to know you; why, knowing 
 you had only this one day before sailing, I asked you 
 to give her half an hour." 
 
 Isabel had a touch of impatience for his explanation. 
 "As if you had to say such things to me! Yet 
 
 "Yes, that s what I too say to myself. Yet what 
 can one do? I ve seen her and her husband constantly. 
 In these last weeks, since the spring turned so warm, 
 they ve let me have Devon s library to work in, where 
 I had silence and a breeze. They ve been endlessly 
 kind to me; yet there it is. For him I d do quite simply 
 anything, and for her what I can. But how is 
 one to reach her? How is one ever to touch such a 
 surface?" 
 
 Isabel s raillery seemed to be compounded of the 
 variety of her experiences. "You never used to pros 
 elytise!" 
 
 He seemed to have been carried, with his thoughts, 
 beyond her exclamation. 
 
 "The first time I saw Mrs. Devon, I hope I had 
 also the vision to see beneath her attitude of mind, 
 just as one sees beneath what is really the attitude 
 
 [176]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 of her beauty. Not solely for Devon s sake, no; very 
 much so, but not solely, since she s after all got a 
 soul of her own." He waited. "That s why I wanted 
 you to see her because she has got her soul to deal 
 with, and no dealing short of her soul will help her. 
 And I wanted her to see you because I wanted her 
 to see what the Church does for a woman of your type 
 even in such ways as she could penetrate." He 
 paused again. "Your eyes are keen enough, my dear 
 Isabel, to have caught the fact that if she is very 
 amazing she is also very sad." 
 
 Lady Isabel s tart glance seemed to question the 
 word for a moment; then her hand continued to 
 smooth back her thick hair, which was half dark and 
 half touched with grey. "I admit she s elusive! She 
 came in most charmingly, saying how good it was of 
 me to see her and of you to have sent her, and all 
 that. Couldn t she do anything to help us get off 
 to-morrow, and couldn t we possibly delay? It was 
 all beautifully managed. But not for one instant 
 did I touch her. Oh, she was clever; clever enough 
 not to care who I was, or about B rough and all the 
 rest of it. She told me she knew very little, that she d 
 lived in the country and read all her life and had had 
 no opportunities, that she longed to travel, that she 
 longed to do this and that. But somehow, at the end, 
 she had slipped through my fingers like water. Here 
 was I, definite and placed, just as definable as my 
 hands and feet; and there was she nothing." She 
 hesitated. "Yes, she is sad. I see it. You re right, 
 as usual." She waited again. "What she really left 
 me with, in spite of all her loveliness and it is lovely 
 and her cleverness and her nervous vitality, was the
 
 ASCENT 
 
 fact that you alone, of all people, could have the 
 science and the fineness to penetrate her." 
 
 "I knew you d see it oh, not that I could help 
 her, but that she must have help, and of the most 
 difficult kind to lend ; and that once you d seen it, you d 
 give me the touch of your intuition, in dealing with 
 her Father Ames s brows drew together. "Of 
 course just at first she sweeps one off one s feet. It s 
 all the youth of the world which confronts one, isn t 
 it? But in another second it s all changed into imper- 
 manence, into the tragic lack of any basic experience. 
 Sad! the more I see of her, the sadder she is. Yet 
 tragic is just what she isn t. One needs a conscious 
 ness, a contrast, a choice, a problem and a denouement, 
 for the tragic; and she s quite incapable of it." 
 
 Isabel broke into a note of acquiescence. "Yes, 
 incapable. And even her loveliness 
 
 "Ah, even her loveliness isn t subtle it s just com 
 plex. There s no straightness in her to make alive 
 the straightness of her beautiful back! The discon 
 certing thing is that she looks fine things and isn t 
 fine" he had turned restlessly up and down the 
 room, and as he reached the window he paused for 
 an instant beside it. "Like all this out here! It s 
 large, but it s not fine. There s no consistent develop 
 ment, no education; all its eagerness is greed and all 
 its aspiration is restlessness. And till a soul or a 
 people is lifted !" He broke off, with a resigned 
 amusement at himself. "So you see Mrs. Devon has 
 stirred me; stirred my pity and stirred my interest 
 because she represents difficulties more difficult than 
 herself." He turned, and sank on the sofa beside her. 
 
 [178]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "There s only one solution for her, and that s the 
 Church." 
 
 "You think, then ?" Her tone was full of a dry 
 uncertainty, but her eyes hung on the affirmations of 
 his look with the practice of a long recognition of 
 authority. 
 
 "I think that if ever a being was adrift outside the 
 Church, it s she. She needs direction, she needs an 
 enforced recognition of what s beyond her mind. And 
 I wanted her to see," he once more caught her eyes, 
 "all that, in all the centuries that your blood has been 
 of it, it s done for you. Oh, she must come to it her 
 self, and she thinks now that she never will. But if 
 ever she does consider it, she ll remember you she ll 
 have been struck by your wisdom and your tolerance, 
 and the way life has left you only richer. One gets 
 that much, you know, even in half an hour!" 
 
 Lady Isabel s smile hesitated for a second. 
 
 "I don t believe she saw anything beyond the way 
 I dressed!" 
 
 Father Ames rose. "Ah, well, always remember 
 that converts are made by reaction! I m going to 
 make the time how I don t know, but somehow 
 to see you and Terence for a second in the morning. 
 Thank you, my child; and in the autumn, perhaps, in 
 London. . . ." 
 
 "You think you ll then be home?" 
 
 "I think nothing I know nothing. I know only 
 what I must do to-morrow." He drew a rapid breath. 
 "You must pray for me I m very tired. And one of 
 these days, when we talk again, I ll finish the history 
 of Mrs. Devon s soul or rather the Church will!"
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Isabel shook her head, with her lucidity still sharp. 
 "I can t see her with a soul!" 
 
 "Then we must help her to find itl" His retort, 
 as he turned back from the door, was clear with his 
 usual energy. "No I know it s a puzzle. Sometimes 
 I ve said to myself that the only explanation of her 
 is that she s a genius; and she pays the penalty of a 
 genius without a talent ! Then to-morrow, my dear 
 Isabel? " 
 
 [180]
 
 XIV 
 
 OLIVE had clearly decided that she would not 
 sleep that night. She had left Devon after 
 dinner and gone to her room; and wrapped in 
 her dressing gown she had dropped into a chair by 
 her window, with her thoughts swept up to the stars 
 by the turmoil in her mind. 
 
 This small break in the sequences of her habit 
 seemed to her like a first sign of the difference in the 
 integral causes of all her habits. One of the excite 
 ments of the decision on the brink of which she found 
 herself was her consciousness that it would initiate her 
 into a new code of custom and new rules of daily 
 performance. She felt herself about to enter a world 
 whose presuppositions allowed for and consecrated 
 the emotional in human experience consecrated the 
 vigils of self-analysis and the prostration of penitence 
 no less than the exaltation of absolution. To steep 
 herself not only in the richness of a ritual but to 
 have all her curiosity stirred by the conflicts and 
 exactions of a moral order, brought a new actuality 
 close to her. All her drama, even in the sordid condi 
 tions of Ware, seemed to her, as she looked back at it, 
 to have been theoretic the drama of an attitude rather 
 than of a participation. She felt that for the first time 
 her inner barriers were broken and the fibres of her 
 resistances dissolved, and that with the end of her con 
 flict she had passed into a definable connection with 
 existence. 
 
 [181]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 She put it in the terms of conflict, and not of con 
 viction. For weeks she had been increasingly aware 
 that her character had been subjected to the influence 
 of a strong determinant; or, as she seemed to hear 
 Mr. Lacy s corrective voice reminding her, if not her 
 character at least her own view of her character. The 
 threat of this irruption had been in itself a stimulant. 
 She had never before experienced the magnetism of 
 idea; not the tart pleasure of her definitions or the 
 gymnastic quality of her brilliancy, but of a force 
 extraneous to herself and with an authority outside 
 her personal presuppositions. In her immediate recogni 
 tion of the power of Father Ames s weapons and the 
 integrity of his authority, she had reversed her usual 
 term of conquest and seen the immeasurable oppor 
 tunity of being conquered. It must be a surrender 
 which proceeded, to give it its full value, bit by bit. 
 She had measured its progress by the slightest signs. 
 She knew that the tone of his predominance had never 
 varied, as their meetings became more constant. It 
 was in herself that she had felt the sudden insecurity 
 which had meant, as she recognised, the approach to 
 a final issue. 
 
 The gathering wave of her uncertainties had never 
 risen higher than during her unexpected moments with 
 him that afternoon. Yet her baffled sense of her 
 incapacity to shake him had never been less deniable; 
 and she had descended the stairs with the conviction 
 that any question of her conversion was a madness. 
 In her car, as she drove home, she had even composed 
 the brief sharp note which should tell him that her 
 words with him had been definitely her last. It was 
 not until she stood in her hall again and picked up 
 
 [182]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 from the table the note he had sent her earlier, express 
 ing his hope that she would go to see Lady Isabel 
 Bourdas, that she had felt the arrest of a hesitation. 
 As she turned the phrases over and over, with their 
 easily carried allusions to a deep friendship and the 
 personality of an old relation, an inexplicable curiosity 
 had leapt up in her. It was the last impulse for which 
 she was, at the moment, prepared. Her moments with 
 Father Ames had left her too sore for the stir of such 
 an interest; but something unsatisfied in her mind 
 had made her glance at her watch to see if it was too 
 late, turn back to the car, and give the address of the 
 hotel to her chauffeur. 
 
 When she found herself beside Lady Isabel, and 
 across what she felt to be the careful banality of their 
 phrases, she had been able to define this curiosity. 
 The very fact of Isabel s presence, the width of her 
 implications and the inevitability of her reserves, had 
 thrown open sudden vistas down which Olive s rapid 
 thoughts travelled. All the intricacies of the inter 
 dependence between her and Father Ames were as 
 apparent as all its ultimate simplicities. As she looked, 
 from her seat beside Isabel, over to the hard afternoon 
 light which streamed in the north windows, she was 
 dimly divining the Ames she had never known. The 
 delicate threads which bind confessor and penitent were 
 stretched before her, in all the fineness of their con 
 struction and their responsiveness to human emotion. 
 The excitement of her ignorance had never before so 
 irritated her. She felt for the first time the impera 
 tive necessity to have a hand laid firmly on her personal 
 assertiveness. From time to time there drifted across 
 the increasingly clear landscape of her thoughts the 
 
 [183]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 remembrance of Mr. Lacy s old phrases concerning 
 her protean quality and that if she were unchangeable 
 it was because she so readily changed. But the present 
 moment seemed to her to touch so vitally her inner 
 sanctities that it was proof enough of their existence. 
 Her lips had set with determination; and as she held 
 out her hand to Lady Isabel she was conscious that 
 her decision had been taken. 
 
 She saw the stars brighten to white and the dawn 
 come with a sudden surprise. The hour had never 
 had any reality of existence for her, in itself; but 
 while the familiar room grew grey, she felt the extraor 
 dinary poignancy of the re-emergence of life and the 
 cold verities of the thin light. She flung herself by 
 her bed on her knees; and as her words broke from 
 her bits of Catholic invocations she had read, a line 
 or two from the Episcopal services and a verse of a 
 strident Baptist hymn, the only approach to prayers 
 which she knew, it struck her that this was the first 
 time she had ever made any attempt to pray, except 
 for momentary supplications to be delivered from the 
 infliction of old Norah s talkativeness or Philip s 
 presence; and the strangeness of lifting her mind from 
 the tangible held her, for a moment, motionless and 
 confused. 
 
 As she fastened her dress before her mirror she 
 realised how she had already been touched by her 
 determination. Her shoulders drooped with the fatigue 
 of her sleeplessness, her face had a dull pallor and her 
 eyes were deeply circled. Something made her glad, 
 as she regarded herself, of this extinction of her beauty; 
 even in its momentary sacrifice, she felt she had 
 
 [184]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 attained a comprehension of Father Ames s standard 
 of what either gave appearance a soul or turned it 
 into a vulgarism. 
 
 The streets, as she slipped out of the house, had all 
 the silence of the earliest morning. But the few slink 
 ing figures she passed, as she crossed the park and 
 entered the poorer quarter, struck her, through their 
 sordidness, with a human quality. She had never 
 speculated, she realised, as to the mechanics of any 
 lives outside her own ; and now she had a sudden sense 
 of the significance of the hulking men and the occa 
 sional girls with too adroit eyes. 
 
 A woman whom she had not seen before was scrub 
 bing the entry as she went up the steps of Father 
 Ames s house, and turned to look at her with a half- 
 awakened resentment. What did Olive want, anyway, 
 she asked? If it was the priests, they weren t there; the 
 younger one was away somewhere he d left in the 
 evening with a bag; and the older one the English 
 man had been sent for, an hour before, to go to a 
 dying woman. With this she resumed her scrubbing, 
 pouring the greyish water over the blotched marble and 
 leaving untouched the corners clogged with dust, as if 
 she were aware of the hopelessness of her task. 
 
 "And there s no use in taking up my time, neither," 
 she flung over her shoulder, as she proceeded. 
 
 Olive stared at her for a moment, with her thoughts 
 revolving around the strange disarray, at this un 
 heard-of hour it was barely half past six of custom 
 and of authority. 
 
 "Do you know where he s gone, the English priest? 
 You say he was sent for; was it to go far?" 
 
 The woman jerked her head over her shoulder. 
 [185]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "It s down the block here, to the Healeys . The same 
 side, a few doors farther on number 431, on the 
 ground floor." She straightened on her knees, with an 
 abrupt ferocity. "And who are you, I d like to know, 
 coming at such a time?" 
 
 Olive returned her look steadily. "I m one of Father 
 Ames s penitents;" the words gave her a light flush, as 
 she pronounced them, and as she saw the immediacy 
 with which the woman s face changed. 
 
 "Well, it s all right, then; 431, and the ground floor," 
 and she became reabsorbed in her scrubbing. 
 
 It was at once apparent, in the entry of the house 
 further down the street, that even in this crowded 
 environment where the shocks of eventuality must pass 
 so obscurely, more than the usual morning occupations 
 were stirring. The door of the ground floor flat stood 
 ajar; and as Olive slipped across the threshold she 
 heard a voice which she instantly recognised as Father 
 Ames s, coming from what was evidently the front 
 room of the flat. 
 
 Pressed against the wall, in the dark hall-way, she 
 covered her face with her hands and listened. The 
 words began gradually to pierce her strained atten 
 tion. She had never before heard the Litany of 
 the Dying. Its phrases, in their sonorous poignancy, 
 broke into the empty spaces of her mind; and as 
 they penetrated her they seemed to her to spread 
 Father Ames s scale of perpetuity before her. She saw 
 for the first time his view of the universal balance, the 
 brevity of existence and the vastness of a hereafter, the 
 instabilities of living and the certitude of eternity, and 
 the sand and water which these huge measurements 
 made of the present moment. 
 
 [186]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 With her utmost sense of urgency she tried to aban 
 don her resistance and to believe herself caught up in 
 the immense movement of the prayers. Every fibre 
 of her mind was alive with the desire to follow her 
 emotion; but from the open door, and along the little 
 passage, there seemed to creep upon her, as if she 
 saw it, a terror of actuality. The flight of each second 
 took her more bodily and inevitably back to the days 
 of her grandfather s death. She recovered their 
 briefest details, with the vividness of a vision; how he 
 had lain, how he had looked not when he was dead, 
 for that, after all, had had the finality of the inexorable, 
 but when his last spark of life was battling against the 
 encroaching indignity of dissolution. The words beat 
 now against her ears and penetrated no farther. All 
 that filled her mind, until she had forgotten every 
 circumstance of her coming and of Ames, was her 
 certainty that because of some physical weakness, by 
 a turn of accident or by the stupid swerve of a car 
 in the street, she herself must ultimately face this 
 unescapable fact. 
 
 The revulsion which caught her was so bodily that, 
 with a vague sense that she must not lose her self- 
 command, she turned to try to find, along the dark 
 wall, the outlet of the door. As she moved forward a 
 threshold at the farthest end of the hall was darkened 
 for an instant by a figure which crossed it, and Father 
 Ames came towards her. 
 
 She put out her hand to arrest him, with her back 
 still against the wall, and aware that her unsteadiness 
 shook her voice. 
 
 "Father, I must speak to you! Stop don t you 
 know me? It s I, Olive Devon." 
 
 [187]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 He wavered and paused. 
 
 "No, it s not possible! Mrs. Devon! What is it? 
 You want to see me?" He drew his hand across his 
 eyes, as if he made a visible effort to clear his mind. 
 "Where can we go for a moment, I wonder? There s a 
 little room, I think, across the hall. Will you come 
 this way, here?" 
 
 She followed him into the little bedroom, and while 
 he drew forward the single chair she looked around 
 her. The room was filled by the bed, which had not 
 been slept in, by a rough washing stand and by a 
 chest of maple drawers, surmounted by countless 
 ornate photograph frames and by a bright-blue plaster 
 Virgin. The window was so close to the wall of the 
 adjacent house that only a pallid light reached the 
 interior. Olive seated herself at the edge of the bed 
 and motioned Father Ames to the chair. As she tried 
 to collect herself, in her sudden confrontation of him, 
 she strove to fasten her attention on the significance 
 of the little statue rather than on its strident colour 
 and not to notice that behind its head there hung a 
 brilliantly yellow calendar, representing a goddess of 
 liberty who advertised some brand of beer. 
 
 Her words in the corridor had broken from her in 
 her haste; but she saw, with a sudden astonishment, 
 as her look finally rested on him, that her question had 
 been relevant. He scarcely knew her. His face was 
 still absorbed and absent and his eyes clear with a 
 mystery of initiation. Olive s glance of furtive wonder 
 deepened to a stare of astonishment. For the first time 
 an approximation of the elements of his strength 
 entered her mind. She felt in herself some dim sense 
 of what his sensitiveness must mean in a life perpetually 
 
 [188]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 controlled, and of his passionate participation in all the 
 acts of living. 
 
 He turned to her with an evident difficulty. 
 
 "You say you came here to find me? There s 
 nothing wrong, I hope no? You must try to under 
 stand, Mrs. Devon. I know it must be difficult for 
 anyone who believes as little as you believe. But I ve 
 just seen a woman die; an ignorant creature, clinging to 
 life and to her children and her husband, and yet 
 sustained by that incalculable miracle of the faith. 
 No matter how long I live, it s a thing I shall never 
 see without an immeasurable humility and gratitude 
 to God, Who, when everything else is stripped from 
 us, gives us that. And now you say you want to see 
 me?" 
 
 Olive s breath quickened. "Yes, Father." 
 
 "For what reason? Yesterday afternoon, I remem 
 ber" he seemed to readjust his mind to the stringen 
 cies of her case "you were very much adrift; you 
 were deeply unhappy." 
 
 She had a sudden sense of the abandonment of her 
 resistance. "Yes; but I m past unhappiness now;" 
 she slipped to her knees before him; "I m broken, 
 Father. I came to tell you that I ve surrendered, 
 that I m ready to become a Catholic." 
 
 "Ah!" said Father Ames quickly. She felt, with 
 her averted eyes, the swift intensity of his look. Above 
 her inclined head she was conscious that he signed her 
 with the cross and blessed her. She waited; it had 
 half occurred to her that he would stretch out his hand 
 to help her rise; but when, after a moment or two 
 of hesitation, she straightened herself and resumed her 
 seat on the bed, what instantly struck her was the 
 
 [189]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 change in his attitude to an assertiveness completely 
 strange to her. 
 
 . "You must be very grateful," he said instantly. 
 "You must realise the great privilege which has come 
 to you. When did you feel in yourself the capacity to 
 take this step?" 
 
 "Oh, I ve felt it for weeks, Father; you must know; 
 only since yesterday, it s been inevitable and irresis 
 tible. And you will help me you will guide me?" 
 
 He pursued the trend of his thought. "Yes it has 
 been, I think, inevitable. And we can only feel the 
 profoundest appreciation of the mercies of God. You 
 are sure?" His glance fixed her fully. "This really 
 reaches your inner self? You really are, as it s called, 
 converted?" 
 
 "Yes," she drew a deepened breath "I m really 
 sure." 
 
 "It will not, you know, be an easy way. Ah, you 
 won t have the small frictions which come to most 
 converts, for John s generosity is perfect. But you ll 
 naturally have to hold on to new things and cancel 
 old ones; and that may perhaps mean a struggle with 
 yourself. You re ready for that? It s much harder, 
 you see" his smile just touched his lips "to be 
 faithful to an affirmation than to a negation, to a belief 
 than to a disbelief to a faith than to one s self!" 
 
 "Yes, Father; I can do anything, if you ll teach me." 
 
 "We must see about your instruction at once. 
 There s Father Norton, at the Paulists a man of tact 
 and penetration, and accustomed to the care of young 
 Catholics . . ."he glanced at his watch. "I must go 
 back to these poor people; and you, my child, must 
 go around to the Church, to the eight o clock mass. 
 
 [190]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Later in the day I shall send you a word of counsel, 
 probably by Father Norton, if he s free. I ll find a 
 chance to speak to him." 
 
 "But can t I have my first instruction" she hesi 
 tated now "from you?" Her eyes clung to his. 
 "After all, Father, whether you grant it or not, it s you 
 to whom I owe it all." 
 
 "You owe it all, as you put it," said Father Ames 
 easily, "to God. Ah, Mrs. Devon, you have now indeed 
 everything in the world. And what you ll have to 
 construct with !" 
 
 She bent her head, without speaking, and Father 
 Ames rose. 
 
 "Your life until now has been accidental; it has 
 lacked the ritual of a purpose. But now you will 
 understand. You will measure even the simple facts 
 like those" he pointed "in the next room there; 
 and they take the widest of comprehension." 
 
 "Yes, Father, I know." 
 
 "I need not assure you that I am unutterably thank 
 ful and infinitely rejoiced;" he half turned to the door; 
 "yes, later in the day I shall send you a word of advice. 
 Put all your confidence in Father Norton and tell him 
 all your difficulties. He can solve them for you" he 
 arrested her interruption "no, a thousand times better 
 than I. I, you see, have no experience with the soul 
 which has had the privilege of your illumination, and 
 he has." 
 
 "But I need you; I need the things only you can 
 give me!" Her words broke out before she could 
 shape them to anything better. 
 
 "You need something far beyond my gift to give; 
 all I am worthy to offer is my prayers, and those are 
 
 [191]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 yours. No remember! Your actions now" she 
 had risen and they confronted each other, in the dim 
 light "are the immediate symbols of your soul, since 
 you admit you have a soul! There s the closest sort 
 of continuity between the two. Where before you ve 
 done what you pleased, it s been because there s been 
 no true development in you, but only your instinct 
 to control you. Now all that is changed. Remember 
 that in everything you say and do. Your life must be 
 an effort to manifest your faith. And" he touched 
 her hand lightly "be worthy of it." 
 
 In the pressure of her feeling and under the burden 
 of her fatigue, the little room for a moment swam 
 around her. All she could definitely outline in her 
 mind was a vagrant recollection, which persisted in 
 wandering through her tossed thoughts, of her grand 
 father s habitual definition of the distorted suscepti 
 bilities of enthusiasts. 
 
 The energy in Father Ames s voice strengthened. 
 
 "I can only repeat that my thankfulness has no 
 bounds. It has seemed to me too sad, you know," 
 his smile now had a peculiar beneficence, "that a 
 person so extraordinary as you should be so little 
 great!" 
 
 Olive s head lifted, with a touch of her habitual 
 defiance. "And now you expect so much of me?" 
 
 "Everything!" he said briefly. He bent to pick up 
 his breviary, and a second later he passed out of the 
 door. She hesitated. The weariness singing in her 
 ears warned her that she had better go. A sense of the 
 relaxation of achievement and arrival penetrated her. 
 There was a stir down the hallway, and she could hear 
 a clatter in the kitchen which meant the preparation 
 
 [192]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 of breakfast. A drifting odour of stale cabbage came 
 through the open window, and she raised her handker 
 chief to her nose; yet before she turned she looked 
 once more around her, with the instinct that she must 
 impress on her mind the setting of so contradictory a 
 scene.
 
 XV 
 
 FATHER AMES S telephone message had come 
 to Devon while he was at dinner. He had heard 
 it without a definite surprise, except at the fact 
 that his own vague presentiment had been fulfilled. 
 When, at the end of June, Ames had suddenly been 
 called to Michigan, Devon had bade him good-bye 
 with his habitual impression that he was under the 
 direction of orders whose untraceable requirements of 
 so highly delicate a mind must always inspire a sense 
 of too summary an authority laid upon too fine an 
 instrument. He happened to see him off, on this 
 occasion, from the station, and in the jostle of the 
 crowd he had said as much to him; and he remembered 
 vividly the amused significance of the look with which 
 Ames had replied. 
 
 "You see only a police method, don t you? The 
 imposition of a system of morality? And what is the 
 use of any life without a system of morality, I d like 
 to know? What s the use of a morality, without a 
 system? What good is even your morality, good as it 
 is, without one? Just as any fact is useless in itself, 
 unless it s been tempered and composed by thought, 
 so your goodness, my dear John, needs a code. You 
 have a magnificent morality, but no God." The 
 sharply drawn lines of his face had accentuated them 
 selves. "But there it is! Je n ai pas su me simplifter 
 and you have! You are wonderful, you know, and 
 I m always your devoted friend!" . . . 
 
 He had disappeared in the press of people, leaving
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Devon with the clearest impression he had ever had of 
 all that underlay not only his omissions but his com 
 plete negation of even a past, in the completeness of 
 his negation of any personal existence. Devon had 
 guessed, years before, that the extreme compression 
 of all his force into one dedication of activity was no 
 less than the modelling of his actual being; that where 
 most men denied and repressed, he had long since 
 struck not at the manifestation but the root, and that 
 clear as his action was, his inner action had the clarity 
 of a perfection. But in the light implications of his 
 face, Devon had seemed suddenly to see a door stand 
 ajar and to have a rapid flash of vision of the world 
 beyond it. He felt the vague presence of the drama 
 in a life without drama and the stir of accidents, not 
 of human derivation and heaven knew, he thought, 
 Ames s sympathy struck to the fibres of human ques 
 tions but of the deeper workings of an inner mind. 
 So ceaseless a search for the manifestations of a God 
 seemed to him, suddenly, the most poignant feeling, 
 as actual feeling, that his imagination could picture; 
 and as he turned out of the pushing crowd in the 
 station, he had thought of nothing so much as of St. 
 Augustine s words, "Where there shineth unto my soul 
 a light which space cannot contain" . . . 
 
 His suspicion of some change in this world in which 
 only the great changes were important had made him 
 half await a sudden turn in Ames s action, during the 
 summer months. The message just brought to him had 
 said that Father Ames had unexpectedly reached New 
 York that same afternoon, because of an unforeseen 
 alteration in his movements. Could Devon go to his 
 rooms that evening, after dinner? and would he make, 
 
 [i9S]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 to this end, every effort, since the extreme uncertainty 
 of Ames s plans made it, for the moment, his last posi 
 tively free time? 
 
 The words, even as they were transmitted through 
 a servant, had an odd touch of finality; and sinking 
 back in his chair, with his scarcely touched dinner 
 before him, Devon had let his speculation people the 
 hot, empty room, whose windows stood open to the 
 oppressive September night. It had instantly surprised 
 him that Ames should not have offered to come to him, 
 to the cool little library where he had so often written 
 in the spring and whose privacy he knew; yet had he, 
 after all, not somewhat evaded that hospitality and 
 been with them less frequently in the days immediately 
 preceding his departure for the west? Devon tried to 
 reconsider it. But the thought merged too instantly 
 in a closer thought; and while he poured out his coffee 
 and lit his cigar, his mind slipped back into its constant 
 preoccupation. 
 
 From the moment Olive had told him of her 
 impending motherhood, he had been aware that a 
 change in values had come to his universe. If he had 
 always more or less and inevitably expected such a 
 sentiment to touch him deeply, he was none the less 
 surprised at the strength in its vivacity. He found that 
 his hopes for a child had gathered some of the force of 
 the sense of frustration which had run through the 
 satiric days of his boyhood. They had never perhaps 
 asssumed a particular definiteness, but he had none 
 the less had a constant consciousness that there was 
 to be some award, in the eventualities of chance, for 
 the suppression of his capacities of affection. He 
 didn t know, and still less cared, how most men felt 
 
 [196]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 about it; but when his wish had become actuality, 
 what he had first thought of, as a matter of fact, was 
 not so much that his future had suddenly extended in 
 a new commitment, but that the child would bear in 
 itself so much of Olive. His constant sense of being 
 bound, in his feeling for her, to something ultimate 
 had never been so strong as when he found that it 
 pervaded the possibilities of this new relation. 
 
 The suddenly different element in their future had 
 already woven differences into their tie. Devon vividly 
 remembered when she had told him of its imminence; 
 not in the current way, with either emotion or with 
 regret, and with no more revolt at her already per 
 sistent discomfort than with what she called a senti 
 mental exaggeration of the situation. "I haven t the 
 classic attitude, I know," she had said, with her dryest 
 conciseness, "and I suppose you expect me to have! 
 I am sure it will be a great experience and I am equally 
 sure it will interest and instruct me; and that s what 
 I m out for, you know ! It appears a woman s not alive, 
 physically or mentally, unless she s had a child. I ve 
 never yet been afraid of difficulties, and I m not afraid 
 of them now. I m far more oppressed by the terrible 
 triteness of view about it. I ve had a wonderful letter 
 from father. Do you know what it most resembles? 
 the letter I ve also had from your mother I She s so 
 overflowing with the poetry of it that she s almost cut 
 short her cure in the south. Fate is delicious to have 
 suddenly made those two alike; and I assure you that, 
 except for the variations of their note paper, their 
 banality s undistinguishable ! But you, John " she 
 had abruptly broken off and waited for his reply, with 
 an attention rare in her. 
 
 [i97l
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Devon had smiled. "Are you expecting of me the 
 same banality? Well, you ll get it. Motherhood s a 
 marvel and a miracle." 
 
 "And you ve so wanted a child?" 
 
 "Yes, of course I have." 
 
 "Yet there s something more?" 
 
 He had laid his hands, without speaking, on her 
 shoulders. The measure of his feeling was his fear to 
 risk it in words. He couldn t have her analyse it anew. 
 The immense fact that her youth, in its aggressive inde 
 pendence, was subjected to an inexorable law, had 
 unnerved him more than the thought of its fruition. 
 The tissue of gentleness which enclosed her in his 
 thought seemed to him to wrap her round like veils 
 of light, to lay every beat of his separate vitality under 
 her feet and to reflect every motion of her hands in a 
 correspondent stir in his blood. 
 
 His feeling had only been enriched by this silence, 
 and his silence had deepened as each week of the 
 summer passed. He saw her always, now, as his vision 
 of her since June had perpetually shaped itself lying 
 inertly on her sofa, with her eyes darker than ever 
 and her face grey. Whether he sat beside her or 
 read to her through a sleepless night or helped her nurse 
 or her maid in some small ministration for her com 
 fort, the tightening of his apprehension was the same. 
 He seemed to himself to have brought her face to face 
 with an actuality which she could not deny, in spite 
 of the high-handed attitude with which she accepted 
 it. Whatever her revolt or her resistance had been, it 
 was pent up behind her constantly compressed lips. 
 He stared before him, across the bare table at which, 
 for almost four months, he had had his silent meals, 
 
 [198]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 with the lights striking in through the opened windows 
 from the noisy night which had none of the mystery 
 of darkness. Her touch on the chords of his sensi 
 bility had never seemed closer; and he asked himself, 
 with a sudden access of curiosity, what the miracle of 
 feeling after all was. Why was it the best chance life 
 could hold, that one should so penetrate and be pene 
 trated; that one should be dedicated to a slavery, to 
 the sacrifice of one s closest privacies to the action 
 of another entity? What was it that made the miracle, 
 that struck a cry out of silence, that measured the 
 moments and cancelled the hours, and broke one 
 while it saved one? and did it in reality exist, apart 
 from his unbelievable sensitiveness to it? He saw his 
 hands clasped on the table in front of him, and he 
 recalled himself, with his touch of dry amusement 
 at his own exaggeration, and rose. Yet he caught 
 himself telling the servant who opened the door for 
 him to say to Olive s maid that he was going out for 
 an hour or two and shouldn t see her again that night. 
 He could not shake off the impression that, at the 
 moment, his committal to her, in some inexplicable way, 
 transcended his need of her actual presence. 
 
 The sudden turn of Father Ames s head, away 
 from his desk and over his shoulder, and his sharp 
 movement, as he rose, gave Devon an instant sense 
 that there was an even more definite purpose than 
 he divined, behind the summons he had received. 
 
 "My dear John! " he held Devon s arm closely; 
 "but why should I thank you for coming? Aren t 
 you always a little beyond my thanks? There can 
 you be comfortable? Heavens, what heat! And the
 
 ASCENT 
 
 noise, and the dust!" He drew forward a chair to the 
 open window nearest the writing table. "You ve a 
 cigar to console you? and you won t mind just this 
 one light? There are still mosquitoes, I see; I d never 
 expected to see the worst of the climate in Sep 
 tember ... 1" 
 
 Devon nodded. Looking behind him into the 
 darkened room, he was struck by the sense of a 
 change in it. Its shadows had curiously disappeared. 
 It was pervaded by a certain hardness, and all he 
 could be sure of defining were the letters sorted on the 
 desk and the pile of books on the centre table. As 
 he turned back to Ames, he had the odd notion that 
 in his face, too, there was a sudden lack of shadows. 
 The determined openness of his look reminded Devon 
 of nothing so much as the exposure of some delicate 
 surface to the harshest light, and his mouth was set 
 in its firmest lines. 
 
 "You look," Devon put it with his habitual brevity, 
 "as if you ve had rather a pull of it, out in Michi 
 gan." 
 
 Father Ames laughed. "My dear fellow, the places 
 I ve been would be shocked to think they weren t all 
 of life, but alas! they aren t! It takes more than 
 three mad months of hurry and heat to undermine one, 
 you know; though I admit it s had its share! The 
 crowds, my dear John, and the crowded minds, without 
 a trace of population! They re so kind, and so colos- 
 sally childish. I ve seen everything, from nuns who 
 ought to have been running department stores, to 
 millionaires who believed in their mission to reform 
 China." 
 
 "It s been another experience, then?" 
 [200]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "I put my experiences, you know," his smile glanced 
 across his face, "as lessons. It s been a lesson, yes, 
 added to all the other lessons. It s over, I m thank 
 ful to say, it s done; now I m on the threshold of the 
 next thing." 
 
 Devon smiled, in his turn. "Are you ever away from 
 that threshold?" 
 
 "By my vows and my calling no." His familiar 
 impatience, which, as Devon reflected, was characteris 
 tically with himself, just gleamed. "Yet isn t that law 
 almost too difficult a one which expects some of us to be 
 in perpetual aggression which takes us from the inner 
 thresholds so that we may always stand ready at the 
 outer? You see, there s where the world really divides 
 us, you and me, just as men! I m pledged to be con 
 stantly exposing my deepest processes, I m committed 
 to live this tenuous, invisible thing called faith; and 
 you . . ." 
 
 Devon s rare colour had slowly risen. It had needed 
 no more than Father Ames s tone to place their talk 
 on terms more personal than any which they had yet 
 touched. Often enough, at Oxford, they had discussed 
 the metaphysics of belief, Ames always with an even 
 more open vocabulary of treatment than his companion, 
 since he had the easy fluency of his impersonality. But 
 Devon s imagination had at once divined that to-night 
 he was not an instance of his obedience to his hierarchy 
 nor a symbol of renunciation, but an individual whose 
 private thought was for the hour open. His own 
 reserve softened as he took up the broken phrase, with 
 an impulse whose extent he scarcely realised until he 
 had pronounced the words. 
 
 "Well, I m committed, too; only you re committed 
 
 [201]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 to a faith in a deity, and I m committed to a faith 
 in a personality !" 
 
 Father Ames s question was instant. "You mean 
 your wife?" 
 
 Devon s reticence seemed for a second to reclaim 
 him; then he pursued. "Sometimes when you talk of 
 one s need of a God, and all that, I wonder no less than 
 you must have wondered, what this insistent need of 
 faith is above all, what it is for those of us who 
 don t see any one moral principle, like God, and who yet 
 have an absolute need to cling to something outside 
 themselves, which they can slave for and serve." He 
 struck the ash from his cigar. "Don t misunderstand 
 me! I ve no illusions about my situation that it s 
 exalted or flawless, or even, as situations go, extraor 
 dinary. You used the word committed. There it is!" 
 He rose abruptly and stared for a moment out of the 
 window, with his eyes set on the effulgent city and 
 the stars which had, in the softness of a damp night, 
 some of the tremulousness of golden flowers. As he 
 turned back he had again a faint smile. "Whatever 
 you d call my faith, I m bound to it, and I ve passed 
 my final threshold." 
 
 Father Ames s silence seemed to prolong and deepen 
 the silence which had lain between each of Devon s 
 words. His eyes, at first, had a flash of gratitude. His 
 sensitiveness, always more composed and expressed 
 than Devon s, had evidently seen more clearly than 
 Devon himself this first direct sacrifice of their reserves 
 and had apprehended it as a generosity that Devon 
 made it. But his look, raised as it was, stiffened after 
 a moment or two in the lines of a resolve. 
 
 "Well, my dear fellow, and I ve passed mine." He 
 [202]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 shook his head. "No, I hadn t already passed it when 
 I became a priest! And I ve been that, in soul and 
 in heart, ever since I had a mind to think with. This 
 is different. It s the end of my road, the termination 
 of my service, and the last move of my soul. I asked 
 you to come to-night to tell you that I d to-day written 
 to my Bishop and to the Superior, and that on my 
 return to England and that s to be immediate I 
 enter the Carmelites." 
 
 Devon had moved from the window with the slow 
 ness which he always opposed to Father Ames s 
 rapidity of gesture. His hand fell on Ames s shoulder 
 and he stood, for an instant, looking down at him 
 before he dropped into his chair. 
 
 "It s so blessedly like you, John, to say nothing 
 when everyone else has said and will say so des 
 perately much! But what is there to say, when one s 
 passed beyond reasons and arguments, claims and 
 obligations? For months or perhaps for years it s 
 been in me; now, I m clear. The tumult s done with. 
 I ve had hot opposition and cold opposition; from 
 my brother the Archbishop, even from Rome. But 
 when you re sure as I m sure He let his look close 
 his sentence. 
 
 "We shall never see you, I suppose?" Devon put 
 his question cursorily. 
 
 "In the ordinary course of things, never. Oh, in 
 the extraordinary circumstance, perhaps; but what 
 one is after all vowed to is one s perpetuity, to a con 
 secration of one s every thought to travelling that road 
 we call prayer, which stretches between man and the 
 ultimate sources of his strength." 
 
 Devon smiled. "Well, you won t change! You ll 
 [203]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 pray as well, as fervently and as brilliantly, as you ve 
 lectured and written; and what right has one, after 
 all, to say you re wrong?" His eyes again shifted. 
 "Only one doesn t much like such partings!" 
 
 "No, I know! That, you now see, was the reason 
 I sent for you." Father Ames paused. "That, and 
 something more." He raised his head, so that his 
 face met the light more clearly. "I wanted to tell 
 you, too, just how much, in my decision, I indirectly 
 owe to your wife." 
 
 Devon turned in his chair. "To Olive?" he 
 repeated. 
 
 "I should like you to understand," Father Ames 
 continued, with his sharp incision, "because you re 
 the only person I know fine enough to understand 
 what has been so tortuous a situation. You know what 
 my life has been . . . the rush and the tear of it, 
 the chances I ve had to serve and which I ve so 
 badly used the constant play of mind in which 
 I ve had to exist. It was my duty to fight along as I 
 did; that s obvious. But it was a situation every inch 
 of which was a pitfall. There was every conceivable 
 danger in my path; too superficial a grip, too easy 
 conquests, too rapid thought. Because people so 
 readily listened to me, the risk was that I shouldn t 
 test myself. Because I was told to do the spectacular 
 thing, the risk was that I d forget the foundations of 
 it. It was all very amazing. When I was twenty my 
 superiors told me I had these weapons to use, 
 and I ceased to exist except in their use. That you 
 know!" 
 
 He spoke more rapidly than usual, but Devon 
 instinctively felt that his words had never, before his 
 
 [204]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 most critical audiences, been more actually expressive 
 of what was in his mind. 
 
 "In other words, it just so happened that when your 
 wife crossed my path amongst all the other people 
 who crossed my path she called into a special play 
 in me the methods of attack I d been developing all 
 these years. I d used them enough, heaven knows, 
 with this problem or with that, and sometimes with a 
 convert; but she needed them all, and all at once. The 
 very ease with which I dealt with her was a revelation 
 to me that my ease was too sure. Just because one 
 needs the best of one s brain, with her, she was a 
 constant illustration to me of how far along the road 
 I d travelled. I did it well, John but I did it too 
 well! It s a thing holier men than I have done with 
 half my education and training; and I began to say to 
 myself what after all is this life, so much of the 
 technique of which I ve mastered and the mystery of 
 which I never touch?" 
 
 He drew his brows together. "Don t misinterpret 
 what I say. Your wife herself had her part in it; it 
 wasn t only a case of intellectual reaction. It wasn t 
 only the illustration of her needs but the illustration of 
 her personality, which was perfect in its use as a 
 lesson for me. You know I told you at the time 
 she was received into the Church how careful I had 
 been not to influence her unduly; but I d had to see 
 her let me influence her unduly, whether I would or no. 
 She was incredibly rapid in her reaction, and incredibly 
 adrift; and there wasn t an occasion when I hadn t 
 to keep her turned to the real issues . . ." 
 
 Devon laid his hand, for a quick instant, on the 
 hand with which Ames still grasped his arm. 
 
 [205]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "Well, there it was. It s a great battle, the battle 
 for a soul or the battle for an idea; and one s the other 
 made human. But it happened to be the symbolism of 
 your wife s struggle which showed me I was done with 
 it. Oh, I shall miss it; it was wonderfully stimulating 
 to fight for an imposition, or a definition, or a moral, 
 as I fought. Only, for the time that s left me, I must 
 learn to pray!" 
 
 Devon still maintained his silence, as if all his 
 thought were turning to and fro between Father Ames s 
 sentences, with the quantity of their implications and 
 the bare simplicity of their conclusions. He had the 
 persistent sense, in the back of his mind, that nothing 
 had ever mattered to him more than this impending 
 relegation of a living person to inanition. He pulled 
 himself together, with an abrupt effort, as Ames again 
 spoke, with his voice charged now with a different 
 energy. 
 
 "And now, my dear fellow, before I m off, is there 
 nothing I can do for you, or for Mrs. Devon either? 
 Your child it s to be born in the winter?" 
 
 Devon could feel the effort of the reversion of his 
 attention, as if he resumed again a physical burden. 
 "Yes February. Olive s been very poorly, you know; 
 perhaps she s written you? No? Well, she is a dumb 
 creature when she s in pain, and she s been dumb 
 enough, since spring. I d hoped that perhaps you . . ." 
 
 "Ah, she ll have better guidance than I could ever 
 have given her. Father Norton, of the Paulists, has 
 been her director, hasn t he?" 
 
 "Yes; yet since she was received into the Church, in 
 July, she s seemed to me to get from him extraor 
 dinarily little. Oh, it s not been his fault; that s ob- 
 
 [206]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 vious. I know he s come often, since she wasn t well 
 enough to do anything but drive; but he s frequently 
 talked more to me than to her. At first she seemed 
 eager to see him just at the time, you know, of your 
 leaving . . ." He broke off. "You understand Olive 
 well, because your imagination touches her. You 
 mustn t blame Father Norton; in a sense, you mustn t 
 blame her. She s inherited from her extraordinary old 
 grandfather that she s always caustic to the person to 
 whom she s too much accustomed. There you are!" 
 
 Father Ames thought for a second. "And the 
 Church itself the thing that s all of Father Norton, or 
 me, or any of us? Hasn t she appeared to grow in 
 her faith? No, John it s seemed to me, frankly 
 speaking, of a rare beauty that her belief in God 
 should come to her just as she was about to be a 
 mother; that in the construction of her child she is also 
 constructing a great spiritual apprehension. . . ." He 
 stopped, with his eyes on Devon s smile. Its sophis 
 tication seemed to hold for a moment all his thought. 
 "Ah, but it is you who know everything about it all, 
 and I who know nothing!" 
 
 Devon did not reply. The quality of initiation in 
 his face deepened and something of the pressure of 
 the past months touched his features. His habitual 
 inexpressiveness could not cloak it, and for the space 
 of a moment or two, he was conscious that Father 
 Ames must be seeing the visible exposition of the clash 
 of the forces of his feeling with the difficult terms 
 of living. 
 
 "Don t you see," he searched for the word, "that 
 Olive s not yet real?" 
 
 Father Ames s face lit with animation. "Then the 
 [207]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Church will create her you ll see!" and as Devon 
 mutely shook his head, he took up the negation. "No, 
 you think not? But my dear boy, forgive me no 
 feeling will save her!" 
 
 "No; she s not a woman to be saved by feeling. All 
 I know," his shoulders rose and fell, "is my instinct to 
 hold on." 
 
 "You re wonderful no, not you, but your gen 
 erosity! Haven t I always said it?" He rose, with 
 his hand on Devon s shoulder. "Leave her to God. 
 He chooses the most unrecognisable ways ... I 
 shall be praying for you both. Tell her so, from me, 
 will you? And now it s nearly eleven, and at mid 
 night my train leaves. I go, you see, to Montreal and 
 take a boat there to-morrow. . . ." 
 
 Devon slowly pushed back his chair. His pause 
 seemed again to measure the facts. "And shan t one 
 ever hear of you or from you?" 
 
 "Oh, I ll have information larger than any human 
 information!" His accent, Devon could have fancied, 
 was compounded to make the moment pass easily. "I 
 shan t hear of your ups and down, or your goings and 
 comings; but I shall know, as I believe, the great facts 
 about your welfare, either here or in another world. 
 And I shall always remember our good talks at Oxford, 
 and all our controversies ... So many things as I 
 shall have to remember!" 
 
 Devon s glance, under the sense of his impending 
 departure, had turned away. He looked around the 
 obscure room, and for the first time realised the extent 
 of its nudity. "And all your things what you used 
 to call your treasures?" He was half astonished at the 
 relevance his question seemed to have to the moment. 
 
 [208]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Father Ames s look followed his, as if he saw in the 
 stripped walls his own sense of their significance. 
 "They and I have parted; I and all outward symbols 
 have parted you see? It s been a strange fate, you 
 know! I ve stood on a little oasis, beyond human 
 beings, and watched them commit the follies and mag 
 nificences of existence. I ve lectured them while 
 they ve lived and recommended them to God when 
 they ve died." His eyes again met Devon s. "But 
 there s no one for whose happiness I more ardently 
 pray than yours ! That you know ! " 
 
 Devon caught his hand, and a moment later he had 
 closed the door. 
 
 [209]
 
 XVI 
 
 AS Devon stood in the silence of his hall, just at 
 midnight, all that peopled the stillness seemed 
 to drop like a weight on the tense cords of his 
 nerves and to hold him motionless. 
 
 It was as he paused for a second, to switch off the 
 electric light, that Olive s voice had suddenly sounded, 
 from her room. It carried its habitual accent of 
 impatience; but coming out of the dark, at this hour 
 and when all the house was asleep, it conveyed to 
 him a touch of her mystery and stirred his constant 
 sense of an inexplicable quality in her, which shaded 
 her like the wings of a fate. His balance, he sup 
 posed, was displaced by his talk with Father Ames 
 and their parting. The wrench was intimate to him, 
 and its circumstances had appealed not only to his 
 feeling but to the innate respect he bore to a cause. 
 The brevity of their words, he realised, had been the 
 measure of all they held; and the impending immola 
 tion of so vital a mind and the artificial relegation 
 of it to such a sterility, gripped his thought and 
 tossed through it traceless uncertainties. What 
 would he himself have done he wondered for a 
 second, with his foot on the stairs signed to a great 
 idea and the servant of such a belief? What would 
 have been the corresponding enrichment? And all 
 his fertility of feeling was wrapped, as it was, about 
 the resonances of a voice. He knew that like most 
 
 [210]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 of his countrymen, with no elaborations in the refine 
 ments of sense, he was capable of putting his ardour 
 only into a personal emotion for a woman. Beside 
 Ames s, his seemed to him suddenly a tracked, mapped 
 world, without winds or stars. 
 
 Olive was raised in her bed, as he turned from the 
 darkness of the hall into the darkness of her room. 
 He could hear her quick movement of expectation and 
 the sudden drop, as she realised his presence, of her 
 shoulders against the pillows. She had shut out every 
 possible ray of light, and the room had an opaque 
 blackness which was as stifling as its lack of air. The 
 night was still so warm that it was difficult to breathe; 
 but when he moved towards the window she arrested 
 him. 
 
 "No, I want it this way. If you open the curtains, 
 the light from the street will come in, and I shall see. 
 It s that, that I can t manage to see. . . ." Her 
 voice had for a second the sharpness of overstrained 
 feeling. "Well! And you ve been out, walking like a 
 free being through the streets, without the sense that 
 all your life was contorted and changed into a servi 
 tude. I suppose I once did that, too; only it seems so 
 long ago." 
 
 He knew well enough these signs of too great a 
 tension in her, and he tried for a second to deflect her 
 mind. She must be suffocated, he said, in this airless 
 dark; and had her nurse left a glass of milk on the 
 table within her reach, and had she taken her bouillon 
 at nine? But she cut him off peremptorily, with a weari 
 ness which was more piercing than her irritation. 
 
 "Oh, I ve everything everything. I m fed and 
 cared for. I m even at last commanding some of 
 
 [211]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 the experience I ve longed for. At least, John, do me 
 that justice! I m like grandfather I storm, but I 
 don t complain!" 
 
 Devon had raised her hand and laid it against his 
 face, as if his comprehension transcended any defini 
 tion of its depths, and he could feel, in her thin fingers, 
 the tremor which lay beneath her silence. With his 
 words with Father Ames dominating his mind, her 
 isolation and exclusion had never appeared to him 
 so complete. He felt the poignancy of the coarseness 
 he faced the word of the contradictions in her, the 
 perfect brutality of her egoism, and yet the streak 
 of something large which always saved it from con 
 demnation. It seemed to him for an instant symbolised 
 by the crucifix whose outlines he could just discern, 
 and which she placed, without a thought, amongst the 
 powder boxes and scent bottles on her dressing-table. 
 
 The strain of his reflections made her immeasurably 
 alien and yet intimately close, for a moment; then he 
 spoke. "Soon, my dear, you ll be well and free again." 
 
 Olive laughed in a deeper tone than her usual short 
 one. "Don t you see that s just the misery of it? Of 
 course I shall be well and as free as the wind freer 
 than any mother, since I ll outgrow my baby in a month 
 or two. Oh, have no illusions about it! I know my 
 freedom is a hideous thing." 
 
 Devon searched for something with which to meet 
 her hard lucidity. "But can t you perpetuate your 
 self, in this way in your child as nothing else can 
 ever perpetuate you?" 
 
 He could almost feel, through the obscurity, her 
 stare of wonder; and he instinctively caught up her 
 protest. 
 
 [212]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "I ve no illusions either, remember. I see farther 
 than your incapacities to your capacities . . ." 
 
 Her hand for an instant touched his cheek, with a 
 responsive pressure. "Do you never wonder what 
 the return of my freedom of my bodily activity is 
 going to make you pay? The future s a strange thing; 
 and for all of it you ve linked yourself up to my fate, 
 whatever it is, when you ought to have married a 
 woman who would have thought only of you, and I 
 ought to have married a man who would have ignored 
 me. . . ." He could hear her head shift against her 
 pillow, and she drew a long breath. "It s terrible to 
 think, John, that all your life has to be determined by 
 my moods; by what you call my growth, but by what is 
 in reality only new forms of my wretched restlessness I " 
 
 For a moment again Devon did not speak. Nothing 
 had ever seemed to him sadder than this imprint of 
 her nascent experience and her sense of her own limita 
 tions and penalties. He bent over her on the bed. In 
 the dark all he felt was the warm braid of her hair; 
 he lifted it to his lips, and in its touch against them 
 he felt that he touched the intimacies of her thought. 
 
 "My dearest child, I ve some news for you news 
 which it s only a happiness to tell you, for when you 
 let me see a little way into you, Olive, I m surer than 
 ever of your comprehension. To-night I went to see 
 Ames. I ve got so many messages for you from him 
 messages that are too deep for the term mes 
 sages . . ." 
 
 He heard her turn towards him, with a slowness 
 which marked her concentration. "Yes?" 
 
 "But the main point s brief enough. He s leaving 
 to-night, by the midnight train, for Canada." 
 
 [213]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "I thought he was to be here all autumn and all 
 winter, to lecture; is that plan changed?" 
 
 As she moved her hair had fallen from his hands; 
 and her withdrawal into the obscurity which so sepa 
 rated them seemed to Devon to break the current of 
 the exchange of feeling between them. 
 
 "Every plan has changed." He responded with his 
 tone unconsciously altered. "He s sailing to-morrow. 
 He goes directly to his brother, the Archbishop, in 
 London, and from there he goes to Farnborough." 
 
 "To Farnborough . . . But why!" she exclaimed. 
 
 "It s unthinkable to us both, but as he himself says, 
 it s completed. He s decided to enter the order of the 
 Carmelites; and you know what that means. We ve 
 got to face it that Ames, as we ve known him, is lost 
 to us." 
 
 She was silent for so prolonged a moment that Devon 
 could almost count the pulses of his expectancy. In 
 the tension of his relation to her, he had never felt 
 so clearly the storm of the unassuaged forces in her 
 or their beat against all his own presuppositions. The 
 inadequacy of his knowledge of her reactions seemed 
 to numb his mind and leave his thought inert. If 
 only he could foreseje, he caught himself wishing, what 
 she would feel, he could help her; but what was the 
 use of any effort in this separation? 
 
 He felt her hand clutch his arm, and she suddenly 
 sat up and bent forward. "What time is it?" she asked. 
 "Strike a match and see . . ." 
 
 He laid his hand on hers. "It s no use, my dear. 
 His train s gone. I heard the clock chime the quarter 
 after midnight as I came upstairs." 
 
 [214]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 She dropped back. He could hear her quickened 
 breath, and his sympathy rose in a tide. 
 
 "Oh, Olive, you must understand it better than I 
 you who are of his own faith. But, my dear, to you 
 it s so far greater a grief than to me! It s you to 
 whom he taught the greatest things, the things that 
 make us live and die ..." 
 
 She broke out with an impetuosity which swept his 
 words aside. "Oh, don t, don t, don t! As if I care 
 for what he taught me for what s only theoretic and 
 dead! What I need is himself, his personality, his 
 mind, his knowledge. When I think what our rela 
 tion was of the amazing adjustment between us, of 
 the magnificent stimulant I was to him and he to me 
 when I think of what we might have experienced 
 together, no, it s too miserable, it s too stupid!" 
 
 Devon rose; he was aware of the carved end of 
 the bed, under his hand, and the lighter oblong of 
 the door leading to the hall, opposite him. He heard 
 her continue to murmur to herself, with every now 
 and then the broken interruption of a sob; but her 
 grief was incapable of attenuating the hard outlines of 
 the image of her which hung before him in the dark. 
 For a second his impulse to leave her was so pressing 
 that he fought with it. Some intimation rose in his 
 mind that he could never cease to see her as she had, 
 in her few words, drawn herself. 
 
 He turned back to the bed, and spoke in a voice 
 which struck him as no less forced and artificial than 
 his words. 
 
 "You ve got your glass of milk, you say, and your 
 bell is under your pillow? Very well, then; good 
 night." 
 
 [215]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 He was conscious that she twisted towards him and 
 raised her head, as if she were trying to see him. 
 
 "You know, John, that when all is said and done, 
 you detest me!" 
 
 His ceaseless preoccupation with the special con 
 sideration due her relaxed its stricture for a moment, 
 and he wheeled about sharply. 
 
 "There are things in you which I detest yes." 
 
 They waited for an instant. "Let me go, then!" 
 she exclaimed. "Oh, I m not the sort of woman who 
 would sentimentalise about it, or about leaving you 
 at such a time before my child s born. I ve some 
 thing of those bare Ware hills in me, I suppose; haven t 
 we all in us the stamp of what we most hate? I 
 shouldn t be frightened by the conventionalities of 
 failure. I ll never make you anything but miserable. 
 I offend everything in you. No, no, it s hopeless!" 
 
 "Sometimes, I admit," Devon spoke slowly, "it seems 
 to me hopeless enough that I should ever reach you. 
 I ve caught myself, lately, not looking ahead. Don t 
 think I trick myself. All I do with my life is to knock 
 my brain against the problem of what s to become of 
 you." 
 
 The touch of defiance with which she always instinc 
 tively spoke of herself tinged her voice. "Even grand 
 father, who wasn t given to hysteria, said there was 
 nothing to save me!" 
 
 Devon did not reply. Perhaps, he thought, the 
 profundity of her own scepticism had communicated 
 itself to him. His thoughts turned suddenly back to 
 Ames s capacity to sacrifice all his participation for 
 the unseen and for the single reality which could never 
 be proven. Something in him had been touched and 
 
 [216]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 aged; during the last weeks, and to-night, he was 
 conscious of it. He would go on with the same per 
 sistency, he knew, the same dependence on his feeling 
 for her and the same complete devotion, but with no 
 belief. He did not deny that he would always be 
 driven and dominated by it, and that his sense of 
 obligation to it was, as far as human immutability went, 
 immutable. But its miracle, he saw, would be per 
 formed in him alone. The isolation inherent in all 
 dedication had never struck him before. He drew 
 the covers around her shoulders without any further 
 word, and felt his way across the hall to his room. 
 
 [217]
 
 Ill
 
 XVII 
 
 IN the still light of the September afternoon, the 
 curled golden leaves of the chestnut trees drifted 
 noiselessly down from the interlaced branches, 
 through the luminance of the autumn air. Their fall 
 had the long motion of time. Hasteless and sure, there 
 was some grace in its inevitability which caught Olive s 
 eyes and lifted them. Not the least of her amazements, 
 since she had touched the mystery which enwraps 
 Paris like a pale veil of mauve and blue, had been this 
 sense of the sudden implications which it resumed. 
 The very drop of a leaf, the fall of the light, the stir 
 of the alleys of the Luxembourg, so full of the vitality 
 of Parisian life and so far fuller of the deep silences 
 of history, cast her thought back to the flow of time 
 and to the drama of significance in the poetry of an 
 enriched age. 
 
 In the last days, she had caught her breath enough, 
 free from the first pressure of the excitement of arrival, 
 to measure how deep her wonder was. All the technical 
 differences of a new civilisation had diverted her at first. 
 It had been marvellous to trace the outline of the cliffs 
 and the quaintness of the harbour, when they landed, to 
 see gestures so free and hear voices so pitched to 
 other shadings. All the arid recollections of her child 
 hood contributed to her surprise. But she had brushed 
 them by, with as easy a rapidity as she traversed her 
 first days. She had exclaimed to Devon, when they 
 first stood in the Louvre and watched their first sunset 
 
 [221]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 stream magnificently along the Champs Elysees, that, 
 astonished as she was, it was above all wonderful that 
 she was to be more astonished to-morrow; and he had 
 turned over his shoulder to her to say, with his eyes 
 full of amusement, that he never could get over the 
 easy familiarity of her terms with astonishment. The 
 rapidity of her impressions, indeed, struck him no less 
 than her adaptability to them. She fell into them as 
 easily as she fell into French, and with a competence 
 as unfailing as the competence she showed in accustom 
 ing herself to French meanings, in engaging her ser 
 vants and in directing the details of their installation. 
 
 Devon had secured a sublease of a little apartment 
 in the rue Pierre Charron which, as Olive said when 
 she first looked about the single salon, was exactly 
 on the scale of what her initiation was at present worth. 
 She would be absurd, she said, in rooms too old; there 
 was too little which was ripe about her. Here, with 
 the few pieces of good furniture, the highly waxed 
 brown floors and the blue and buff hangings of old 
 Jouy, they would at least be separate from the outer 
 habits of tourists. Her flash of wisdom struck Devon 
 most, as she saw, in its consistency. She might take 
 to it all like a duck to water, and with all the American 
 fluency, she assured him; but she knew what she 
 could not do. By the terms of her nature she was 
 condemned to be in perpetual motion. She was even 
 condemned she had put it with her sardonic touch 
 to be herself the poorest kind of tourist, who had such 
 a thirst for seeing that she never saw deeper than the 
 outer aspect. 
 
 She was constantly remembering, from the farthest 
 days at Ware, old Lacy s amusement at what he called 
 
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 his incapacity to travel. When he was young, or 
 younger, and before the collapse of his resources, it 
 appeared that he had made the tour of Europe then 
 consecrated by custom; and he had never after ceased 
 to comment with pride on his refusal, as he put 
 it, to displace himself. "I was made to criticise, 
 not to absorb," he had been fond of saying; "I am not 
 French, my dear, no, no, no; my emotions are far too 
 complex and my appreciations too simple. But I don t 
 have, thank God, any real participation. Intellectually 
 I am just local nothing more and not like Goethe 
 who, as Mme. de Stael so delightfully says, made him 
 self a pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity. 
 You re probably more like me, pussy, than you are 
 like Goethe. Since you re a woman you ll be sacrificed 
 to a woman s plasticity, but in reality you ll be just 
 little Olive Lacy. Think it as extraordinary as it 
 really is, but don t be fooled by it, my dear don t 
 be fooled!" 
 
 As long before as when their leaving America had 
 been determined, she had had a constant and vivid 
 vision of the same steady regard which had pierced all 
 the mists of her childhood, watching her with a new 
 element of appraisal. Her grandfather s quick touch 
 had lain more than ever on her remembrance, as if his 
 vigil over her had never been more close and critical. 
 She had recovered from the birth of her little daughter, 
 in the February before, with a difficulty which her 
 doctors could not explain. For weeks her physical 
 lassitude had dominated her and all her energy seemed 
 dispersed in the monotony of her pain. Her delicacy 
 of constitution had never been more apparent; and 
 Devon had admitted to her that she herself came 
 
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 closest to an understanding of it when she said, with 
 a smile just touching her pallor, that her bodily condi 
 tions would always be determined by what was in her 
 mind, and that just now she had no enthusiasm to 
 tonic her. Her interest rose at moments, and even her 
 suffering would pale in her attempt to define it. But 
 whatever other women might get out of the experi 
 ence she had traversed, she said that she had finished 
 with it. What made her baby most real to her, as 
 she frankly assured Devon and Father Norton, was 
 the imposition inherent in the law of reproduction and 
 the unfair demand on her vitality. Her comments 
 had never had a sharper thrust of truth nor had her 
 honesty ever been barer; and she did not attempt to 
 deny that what she felt for the child was a residue of 
 feeling, something come to fruition long after the 
 impulse which created it had permanently vanished. 
 
 She had wondered if Father Norton, as he listened 
 to her, had ever applied the same terms to her relation 
 with her faith. She never talked to him nor received 
 his instruction without asking herself if her sense of 
 Father Ames s absence did not make her replies too 
 caustic and her responses too dry. When she was 
 again able to resume her religious duties, she per 
 formed them with a sudden eagerness. To grow in 
 familiarity with their ritual meant an echo of the 
 ritual of Ames s thought, and she had seemed at times 
 to recapture an actual sense of him and of a present 
 and unseen bond with his consciousness. Frequently, 
 when she heard mass, she caught herself fixed in a con 
 centration of remembrance, suddenly separate from her 
 surroundings, and his presence, in what had been the 
 moment of the greatest consecration of all his adher- 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 ence, was a reality to her. She fell into the ways and 
 attitudes of mind she conceived he would have expected 
 of her with the same rapid adaptability with which she 
 genuflected and crossed herself. But as her memory 
 of him thinned, under the friction of her impatience, 
 her adherence to his habits thinned. She had no 
 instinctive reliance on any of the outer forms of the 
 faith, and the impulse which had made her assume 
 them seemed to her so lightly rooted that she wished, 
 at times, that Father Norton would relax a vigilance 
 which was beginning to irk her. 
 
 The return of her physical resistance, when it came, 
 had taken the form of a sharp recrudescence of her will. 
 During the long months of her convalescence her 
 determination had had countless hours in which to 
 clarify itself. She was measuring such elemental dis 
 tances and balancing such wide facts that she often 
 found herself back in front of the coal grate in the 
 Ware sitting room, with Norah rattling the plates in 
 the pantry, the dead creeper tapping the pane and her 
 grandfather asleep in his chair. Her quality of domi 
 nance had risen with her strength and had sharpened 
 her energy; and as her pulses stirred, it had seemed to 
 her as if no horizon were wide enough to satisfy her. 
 She wanted to travel, she wanted change and a sort of 
 instruction newer than the easy conditions of New 
 York. In New York she knew too exactly, she told 
 Mrs. Devon, who heard her with a more and more 
 uncomfortable uncertainty as to all her own presupposi 
 tions, what to expect. 
 
 "But, my dear, there s an enormous amount of 
 life here!" her mother-in-law had insistently pro 
 tested. "I m not too old-fashioned, you know, and 
 
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 I can tell you many and many an instance of people 
 who, as it s called, have lived." 
 
 "But what do you mean by lived?" Olive had shot 
 her quick glance at the amiable elegance of Mrs. 
 Devon s face. "I suppose you mean they ve been 
 immoral; and immorality means to most people just 
 the relation of the sexes. Yes, but they could be 
 ceaselessly immoral, if they wanted, and to my mind 
 they wouldn t be living. They re empty, ignorant 
 they re like me. We re all the same, as a race. We re 
 sure, we re dull." 
 
 "Yet you must admit, my child, that there s a 
 splendour in New York!" Olive could tell that lately, 
 across luncheon tables, she had picked up an attitude 
 of acute patriotism; "the skyscrapers how magnifi 
 cent! And the roar and rush of it, the bare beauty of 
 those steel frame works and those great swinging 
 cranes, against the sunset!" 
 
 Olive shook her head. "I don t see it. Life is 
 universal, and I ve too much thirst to limit it to some 
 thing which is so little conscious of itself as our own 
 civilisation." 
 
 "But people admire you so, Olive!" Mrs. Devon s 
 tone with her, Olive noted, was always set now at a 
 pitch of protestation. 
 
 "Yes; but their admiration," Olive s smile hesitated, 
 "is too easy. They ve asked me endlessly to their 
 houses or they ve neglected me, they ve liked me or 
 disliked me, but there s been no character in either 
 their antipathy or their kindness. I begin to think my 
 grandfather was right when he said it took a long time 
 for a community to deal in character. New York s a 
 crowd, and that s all." 
 
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 "Well, you and John are beyond me!" was all Mrs. 
 Devon could sententiously say. "And he s going to 
 have a quite marvellous career, they tell me. Too 
 odd, isn t it? One can think of John solid enough, 
 but not with a career. And if you trot him off to 
 Europe to do nothing . . ." 
 
 "Oh, he has a design to make for a competition in 
 the spring," said Olive lightly. "That will take him 
 two or three months of Paris; and he deserves a holi 
 day. Besides, as I tell him, either we live according 
 to rote or we don t, and rote, here, means expensive 
 food, expensive servants, and a house with a white 
 marble front. Forgive me if I say again that that s 
 not life." 
 
 Mrs. Devon regarded her, with her small glance 
 suddenly shrewd. "And when do you expect to reach 
 China?" 
 
 "In my progress? Oh, ultimately." 
 
 "Can John be an architect in China, my dear?" 
 
 "Probably; and if not, it will all be learning, experi 
 encing, adventuring." 
 
 Mrs. Devon broke out suddenly. "But you re not 
 going because you want adventure! You re going 
 because you want to have a good time. I m sure I 
 don t know what the difference between the two is, 
 but I feel it in my bones." 
 
 Olive had laughed, and she herself was the one to 
 remark that it was fortunate that Devon had an 
 income apart from his business. "It won t give us 
 a house with a marble front, even in China, but it 
 will give us what we want, you see; what we happen 
 to want." 
 
 Mrs. Devon s glance was more than ever puzzled. 
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 ASCENT 
 
 "But when your sables fade !" was all she could 
 exclaim. "And what you want she hesitated. 
 "Does John always want just what you do?" 
 
 "Always," said Olive instantly; and when Mrs. 
 Devon murmured that that was rather magnificent, she 
 ended the conversation, with her surest touch, by 
 remarking that she herself called it convenient rather 
 than magnificent. 
 
 Nothing could have been less in the key of his 
 mother s tone than Devon s acceptance of her wish 
 to displace themselves. She remembered the one rapid, 
 silent glance he had given her, the night when she had 
 first opened the question, looking across at her from 
 beneath his lowered lids, with his paper fallen to his 
 knees and his hand, which kept the brown thin look 
 of youth, stroking his chin. It was like his brevity of 
 comment that this charged look should alone have 
 expressed to her all the shades of his opinion, all the 
 cross-questions involving his work and his connections, 
 and all his dislikes and likes in the matter. Before 
 she could catch it, it was gone, and he said, in his 
 absent way, that he supposed it could somehow be 
 put through, that his competition design could very 
 well be done in Paris, and that they might let their 
 house. 
 
 Most of their communication in the last months had 
 been tacit, so far as any definition of his feeling went. 
 This instinctive silence in him surprised Olive more 
 than anything else. The friction which she naturally 
 stimulated had always, in one way or another, been 
 expressed. Silence had never been one of the attributes 
 of life in the little house at Ware, and she had inherited 
 something of her grandfather s assumption that unless 
 
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 opposition were phrased and vociferous, it had not 
 been provoked to a point where sheer imposition could 
 down it. She recognised, now that he fell more and 
 more into it, how deep the reticence in Devon had 
 always been. His devotion was none the less constant 
 and none the less lit by his dry glancing criticism, like 
 the flash of a fantastic light in an intelligence she could 
 never measure. Since their last talk about Ames there 
 had once or twice risen to the surface of her mind the 
 suspicion that there were things in Devon himself 
 which she could not compute. But the thought had 
 no resonances for her, and she had summarily disre 
 garded it. 
 
 Yet she recognised that the balance between them, 
 since that night, had been to the slightest extent dis 
 arranged. This had been most evident to her in the 
 differing ways of their acceptance of the little Beatrix, 
 who was named for Mrs. Devon and who seemed, for 
 the moment, like nothing so much as her grandmother, 
 with a frail blonde quality completely removed from 
 Olive s. Devon was glad of this, he had said, in the 
 first hour when he bent over her and Olive on the 
 bed. 
 
 "There s to be only one of you, you see!" he had 
 exclaimed, with his smile full of what lay behind his 
 comment, as he laid a hand first on her shoulder and 
 then on the fine gold of the child s head. 
 
 Her weakness had surged over her in a sudden wave, 
 and she had lifted her hands to grasp his arm. 
 
 "You ve still this wonderful faith in me?" she had 
 asked. 
 
 "Oh, in much more than you in her!" He had 
 evaded it with perfect kindness, and had turned to ask 
 
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 the nurse a question. But her impression that he had 
 closed a door had been definite enough to have a 
 definite effect on her. The sense that she was missing 
 an experience which he possessed had touched her 
 obstinacy and stirred her desire to imitate it. She had 
 looked down at the little creature on her arm, and had 
 repeated to herself the facts of its dependence and 
 helplessness, that it was part of herself, that this was 
 the greatest of initiations. For days she tried to give 
 these thoughts force and life and to place some credence 
 in them. She asked perpetually to have the child 
 with her, she kept it close to her while she was saying 
 her prayers, and felt continually for its warmth against 
 her shoulder. As she rested in her darkened room, 
 with the curtains drawn against the hard winter sun 
 light and only the rise of the fire to tire her strained 
 head, she seemed to see what Ames would have said 
 to this attitude and how fitting he would have con 
 sidered it, and that she would have earned the com 
 mendation of even his difficult taste as she lay with 
 the shining head against her and her rosary twined 
 through her clasped fingers. 
 
 Devon had spoken less of the child and seemed less 
 occupied by it than she. He held it at times, usually 
 alone in his library, and when she was able to walk 
 from room to room, Olive found him frequently beside 
 the cradle, watching the fragile hands move. The 
 more she surprised these slow disclosures of his feeling, 
 the more her own silence grew. But there frequently 
 swept across her face, like the darkening of a cloud, 
 a gust of exasperation that her attitude should be so 
 invariably tested by the reality of his own; and as 
 soon as she was strong enough, she had broached 
 
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 to him the subject of her restlessness and her desire 
 to travel. 
 
 She let her eyes follow the slant of the afternoon 
 sun down the long alley. Beyond her the grey front 
 of the palace faced the pale light, with all the compact 
 ness of a tradition older than itself, immemorial and 
 secure. The assurances of her surroundings seemed to 
 her beyond the rise and fall of history and the vicissi 
 tudes of change. Whatever France did, it existed as 
 a spirit, far above even the beauty of its manifestation. 
 The clear pool of sunshine around the pond, with the 
 gay French children moving at its edges, the inimitable 
 personality of the bent black-bonetted women and the 
 light intelligence of the younger ones, all appeared to 
 her to unite and blaze with a quality representative of 
 a whole people. She felt her sense of life palpably 
 quicken. The pulse of enthusiasm had never in just 
 this way beat in her veins. For the first time she was 
 experiencing the sense of the dominance of a civilisa 
 tion; and when she measured these laws of long 
 developments and consequent adjustments against her 
 infinitesimal individuality, her former conception of 
 beauty seemed to her to have been limited and con 
 stricted to nothing but the image in her glass. 
 
 She had turned her eyes along the alley leading to 
 the gates which gave on the Boulevard Saint Michel; 
 and suddenly she made out, amongst the moving 
 figures, one which easily detached itself as Devon s. 
 Her attention set fixedly on him, as he made his way 
 in and out of the scattered people and approached, 
 sometimes in view and sometimes hidden from her. 
 Perhaps this heightened apprehension was what she 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 felt him to be constantly in search of. For the first 
 time his participation was explained to her by this 
 sense of a sharper and finer taste of living than any she 
 had yet imagined. The stimulation of the thought that 
 she could capture it lifted her eyes and heightened the 
 carriage of her head; then she dropped impatiently 
 back in her chair. What good would an added sensi 
 tiveness and a quickened consciousness like his after all 
 do her, since they would impose upon her laws which 
 wouldn t, in her instinctive terms, pay? Did she see 
 herself, she wondered ironically, living in an unseen 
 inner world, like Devon, or in a Carmelite monastery, 
 perhaps, like Ames? 
 
 [232!
 
 XVIII 
 
 WHEN Devon was only a few yards distant 
 and finally emerged from the shifting knot 
 of children and mothers, as they moved to 
 and fro in the summery softness of the afternoon, 
 Olive saw that he was not alone. 
 
 The young man who was beside him, suiting his 
 shorter pace to Devon s long one, and with his whole 
 presence a flash of Gallic cordiality, was nearer her 
 own age. He was fair, with a fair upturned moustache 
 and eyes so light that their quick vivacity was some 
 times grey and sometimes blue. He wore his rather 
 loose clothes with a carelessness a trifle studied, and 
 swung his stick with a touch of amusement at his own 
 energy. Even as they drew near Olive was instinc 
 tively aware, in his rapid conveyance of ability, that 
 she had not yet seen anyone so completely of his race. 
 Perhaps because of her sense of contrast, her first 
 look, however, as the two paused before her chair, 
 was at Devon. Against his companion s blondness, 
 his lean dark face, whose light lines showed already 
 in a visible tracery, had suddenly a particular quality. 
 His eyes looked at once more smiling and more grave, 
 and his tall thin figure fuller of both his indolence and 
 energy. She wondered whether this rapid play of a 
 new light on him had not struck from his carefully 
 neutral tints new characteristics. He had always been 
 more himself, she remembered, with Ames s rapid 
 interest playing on him. . . . 
 
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 She drew her thoughts together, with a sudden 
 effort. To feel herself confronted by different qualities 
 of the same admiration, in both men s faces, made her 
 immediately aware of how charming she must look, 
 with her dark wrap outlining the whiteness of her 
 throat, and some white carnations drawn through the 
 lace which fell away from it. She held out her hand, 
 in response to what Devon was saying, with the smile 
 which always touched her beauty like a light. 
 
 "It s Rene Mallary de la Rivaudiere, you know, 
 of whom you ve heard me talk so often! My wife s 
 done worse than that, my dear boy. She must have 
 heard my mother talk, not of you you frighten 
 mother too much but of your own mother and your 
 terrific estates and all that; and since I caught him at 
 our door, I refused to let him go away without seeing 
 us, and brought him along with me to meet you." 
 
 Rivaudiere released her hand, with a light pressure. 
 "Devon, of course, like all Americans, goes in compe 
 tently for detail, and incompetently misses the truth! 
 The truth is quite simply that I insisted on coming. 
 Not the worst report your so charming mother-in-law 
 could have given of me would have deterred me. 
 You haven t" he turned his quizzical look to Devon 
 "troubled yourself to condemn me to your wife?" 
 
 Devon interpolated that he had left that responsi 
 bility to the future, but his smile at the younger man 
 was full of liking. "He s a socialist, Olive, and heaven 
 knows what else; you see his English is better than 
 ours because he s studied it; in addition to these talents 
 he s got some remarkable dry points, and he s a captain 
 in the Armee de 1 Air, with all sorts of honours and 
 more than twenty victories to his credit ..." 
 
 [234]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 As Devon ran on Olive s eyes fixed on the young 
 Frenchman s face. Her instinctive search, in the aspect 
 of anyone who for the first time confronted her, for a 
 sign of response to her own insistive attitude, had never 
 been more immediately gratified. Standing with his 
 hat still in his hand and his face turned to the clear 
 late light, Rivaudiere s eyes were as full of the play of 
 his frank pleasure as his smile. His easy courtesy 
 seemed outspread to express his appreciation. 
 
 "That is all quite true, dear Mrs. Devon. Even 
 Devon s untruths are true, aren t they? He is such 
 a magnificent example of your conscientious, nervous 
 race. But we sometimes find do we not? that if 
 one pulls these alleged glories to pieces " his gesture 
 was full of a resigned amusement. "I assure you mine 
 are very pale; except for the fact that your husband 
 is my charming friend, and that you and he are at 
 last in Paris, and confronting me. And now what will 
 you do? Will you both come off somewhere to tea?" 
 
 Devon laughed and glanced at his watch. "Your 
 guile, my dear boy, is as I expected. When I ve just 
 told you I was this moment due at old Destournelles s 
 the old chap who used to make us so miserable with 
 our scale drawing at the Beaux Arts. I ll leave Olive 
 to you, as you so evidently mean I should, provided 
 you ll finally see her to a taxi and started for home. 
 We re dining out at eight, I think?" 
 
 Young Rivaudiere had listened with his light sem 
 blance of attention while Devon confirmed the details 
 of their evening engagements, and had taken his hand 
 just as effusively, at parting, as his look had seemed 
 to play over Olive s beauty. But when Devon, with 
 his dry nod, had turned away and passed on down 
 
 [2351
 
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 the alley, amongst the crowd, he took the vacant chair 
 beside Olive and bent forward with a suddenly different 
 accent in his smile. 
 
 "I am so immensely glad to see you, Mrs. Devon! 
 But then, let us admit it, I have seen youl" 
 
 "You ve seen me?" Olive s eyebrows raised. 
 
 "Yes. Last night, at the Varietes. Seen you !" 
 He laughed. "It would have indeed been difficult not 
 to see you! You were you ll forgive me so ex 
 quisite. You had such a special quality, which so 
 separated and isolated you in that crowd. From my 
 seat I was with a friend I couldn t trace more than 
 the back of your head and sometimes, as you turned, 
 almost your profile. I didn t at all, from the back 
 of his head, make out Devon; so that though I saw 
 you were a stranger, I didn t place you. Now I find 
 myself confronted by the happiest of coincidences. 
 But as if one needed to place the universal, by a name 
 or a nationality! And you again you will allow me? 
 are universal." His gesture amplified his smile. 
 "And what a charming play, wasn t it? As old as 
 all the hills, but so lightly and surely done!" 
 
 Olive s thoughts were rapidly moving, warmed with 
 the warmth of Rivaudiere s enthusiasm. She could 
 even fancy that her attitude, in the garden chair, grew 
 a little finer, that her head rose more delicately and 
 that her hands, in their long gloves, crossed in her 
 lap with a deeper repose. But his last phrase, in its 
 easy transition to the intrusion of another note, caught 
 her with a touch of astonishment. 
 
 "Ah I think I remember!" she paused. "Once I 
 turned to lift my cloak, or for some such reason and 
 I caught sight of you. You were about two rows 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 behind, I believe? I remember noticing how a very 
 fair Frenchman stands out in a crowd. I think," her 
 amusement was full of ease, "there was a lady with 
 you." 
 
 Young Rivaudiere answered immediately and dis 
 tinctly. "There was and a charming one." 
 
 Olive s thought paused again. She had never before 
 heard quite this competence of tone. One of the finest 
 of Father Ames s qualities, in her view, had been his 
 finish and his command of every form of human 
 exchange. She recognised this as different. Nothing 
 she had before called ease equalled this intellectual 
 agility which took the forms of a courtesy. Rivau- 
 diere s last words were as impersonal as the pleasure 
 he had expressed in the play, a moment before. But 
 she realised that they were meant both to guide her 
 and to warn her, and that his companion on the pre 
 ceding evening had been a person who both deserved 
 recognition and for whom he insisted on it. 
 
 He was meanwhile bending forward again, with his 
 voice returned to its earlier key. 
 
 "Of course, you Americans are always amazing, and 
 you must know it! Your facility s part of your beauty. 
 You learn a nation as you pick up an accent; but 
 you . . . ! You seemed to me, last night, the epitome 
 of all of you!" He laughed. "I said to the lady I 
 was with and who is a person all penetration that 
 you were more, that you were the epitome of all the 
 women I d ever seen. Your rarity, the vivacity of 
 your intelligence ah, one gets those things even from 
 the back of your neck!" 
 
 Olive s smile showed. "Your calculations are too 
 rapid to be profound. If you d stopped to think, you d 
 
 [237]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 never have mentioned such a conclusion about one 
 woman to another!" 
 
 Rivaudiere s gesture seemed to her to mark the 
 boundaries of her narrower sophistication. "Ah, but to 
 such a woman as I had the pleasure to be with, one 
 mentions everything! And Devon; every time I see 
 him he seems to me only more himself, more intact, 
 more firm and yet more feeling. We ve all, in my 
 family, the highest regard for him. My sister asked 
 me about him and you only the other day; and for her, 
 in her cinema-like life, to remember anyone !" 
 
 "If John told you anything, on the way here, he must 
 have told you how I ve read your sister. The first 
 volume of her poems I ran across was like a sudden 
 glimpse of all the countries of the world; and my 
 youth " her shoulders rose and fell "wasn t so full 
 of those brilliant accidents!" 
 
 Rivaudiere regarded her for an instant more closely. 
 "Wasn t it? You weren t of New York, like the Devons 
 that I remember hearing my mother say; and to 
 look at you one sees you blooming, like a flower that s 
 very pale and yet very strong, out of some cold spot 
 in the northern country!" 
 
 Olive shook her head. "You re fatally wrong. Yes, 
 it was a cold enough and bare enough place, and in a 
 hard, bitter climate; but I never bloomed. No, no! 
 I grew angrily and savagely, with every man s hand 
 against me and my hand against every man s. You 
 see, I ve not the usual woman s temptation to see my 
 beginning as extraordinary or unusual." Her eyes 
 lingered for a second on his. "I m as much a realist, 
 in my way, as your sister is in hers." 
 
 "Oh, my sister . . . ! But she has done what all 
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 ASCENT 
 
 realists do at the last; she had been tricked into a 
 realistic romanticism." 
 
 "Well, I shall never be," said Olive clearly. "But 
 it s my disadvantage that it doesn t matter what I 
 am; and Madame de Rives s advantage is that she s 
 great." 
 
 "But surely you know it that you ve the great 
 quality!" 
 
 Rivaudiere s exclamation broke from him with such 
 warmth that she felt the stir of it. She bent forward, 
 following with her eyes the stretch of the converging 
 walks and the bright figures which thronged them, and 
 with her look rising to the golden faun of the trees and 
 the clear still sky. 
 
 "Have I? Or isn t it rather true that it has me; 
 that I m the victim, as everyone with the desire for 
 experience is always the victim?" She waited for a 
 second, as if she permitted him a further step in her 
 confidence. "I must admit to you that I ve never felt 
 a more intimate loneliness than I have already felt, 
 here, in Paris." 
 
 "Loneliness? And why?" 
 
 She shook her head. "You are all marvellous and 
 brilliant and secure. Even a few hours have taught me 
 that. But what good does that do me, I, who want 
 so much that I never get anything?" 
 
 "You say you want so much?" Rivaudiere broke in; 
 his interest now, beneath his admiration, was undeni 
 able. 
 
 "I want everything," she exclaimed; she was con 
 scious that she had grown a shade paler and that her 
 pallor must be doubly exquisite, as he saw it against the 
 open stretch of western sky. "There s no boundary, no 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 nationality, no field left, when one wants all I want. 
 Oh, I shall have a taste of life here, as I ve had it 
 in New York, as I had it in my childhood and a 
 taste only. That s the only thing that s great about 
 me my avidity." 
 
 "But can t you, here, satisfy it your avidity?" 
 
 "No" she hesitated. "I m better than that. I 
 know too much, you see, to be able to satisfy it; and 
 France has already shown me," she chose her phrase, 
 "all I want and all I shall never have." 
 
 "Ah, my dear Mrs. Devon, I told you you were a 
 miracle . . ." 
 
 He paused, and she felt his look on her half-averted 
 cheek. She shared his silence for a second before 
 she spoke again. 
 
 "It s absurd, isn t it the lack of any sense of fitness 
 in fate! Here John and I come to Paris for a few 
 months, for him to work and for me to educate myself 
 in all I don t know. It sounds simple enough. Yet 
 underneath there are always lying the great facts 
 about ourselves so near the surface, so terribly 
 unescapable. Absurder still," she turned back to him, 
 "you who came to see me as a dull duty, to give me 
 addresses and to do me the small services one does 
 to travellers, find yourself talking not to a person but 
 to a human being!" 
 
 She waited. The last light was showing on the 
 bright parterres and the clock over the Senate Chamber 
 struck six. Behind her she could hear the drip of the 
 Medici fountain, against the deep stir of the city and 
 the long flow of the traffic. For the first time, in weeks 
 so innumerable that they stretched back to her hours 
 with Father Ames, she felt a sudden consciousness of 
 
 [240]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 the vivacity of her intelligence and the secure power 
 of her personality. By one of her quick reversions 
 of thought, she found herself transported across the 
 intervening years and at the end of a thread of 
 recollection which had spun out beyond her present 
 consciousness. She could remember the still penetra 
 tion of the vivid winter day and see the sparkle of the 
 illumined snow, and feel that her eyes were wide and 
 smarting from her unaccustomed tears. Across the 
 road lay the Ware churchyard, and she and Devon 
 stood for a moment, indecisively, at the Lacy gate. 
 From this point of dissection she could see that she 
 must have been very young and maladroit in her deal 
 ing with him; but it remained in her mind the first 
 occasion when she had made use of her emotion to 
 exert an influence and determine a tribute. 
 
 "And now," the inner stir of her face faded in her 
 smile, "I shall get you to fulfil your promise to John, 
 and see me into a cab." 
 
 It took Rivaudiere a moment, she realised, in spite 
 of his own rapidity, to follow her lead and to rise. 
 
 "Miracles can t wander in cabs alone!" his lightness 
 met her own. "No I insist! I must be allowed to see 
 you home. You can do amusing things like sitting here 
 in the Luxembourg, but you cannot do mad things, like 
 getting lost. Ah, you Americans are so courageous; but 
 the trouble is that you don t know what to be afraid 
 of, so that your courage is no virtue to you ... ! " 
 
 [241]
 
 XIX 
 
 IN the next weeks, Olive frequently told Rene 
 de la Rivaudiere, with her restless glance turning 
 to him, that the chance which had thrown him in 
 her path had meant her to see in him all of France. 
 As the autumn drew itself out and lengthened into the 
 first winter days, her apprehension of Paris, of the 
 nation, of its stored treasures, of the clear simplicity of 
 its actions and the amazing intricacy of richness in 
 their results, ran side by side with her knowledge of 
 his quick charm, of the gesture which every one of his 
 words contained and with the perpetual significances 
 in his smile. 
 
 He was constantly at her door and in her motor, with 
 an easy persistency which, he didn t disguise from her, 
 was permissible only because she was a foreigner. He 
 had begun to be with her in her first days of strange 
 ness, when Paris had looked at her, she felt, as exteri 
 orly as she looked at it; and as their companionship 
 deepened and grew, her surroundings had in their 
 turn grown both closer and wider to her. Rivaudiere 
 had, even at the first, laughed with her over the dif 
 ferences in her errand from that of the usual person. 
 She wasn t looking for the highest manifestation of 
 pleasure, either in the large or in the details of theatres, 
 shops, and food. Nor was she set persistently on the 
 acquirement of a culture such as so many of her com 
 patriots were pursuing with what Rivaudiere cited as a 
 cruelty of relentlessness. She wanted the Sorbonne 
 as little as she wanted the races. What she was 
 
 [242]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 in search of was a profounder information. "I want 
 it to teach me myself," she often told him, as they 
 turned, on the bright chilly mornings, between the pale 
 brilliance of the Tuileries walks, or saw the stars, at 
 night, over the golden Invalides dome; "I ve always 
 been aware of my force oh, forever. But it s been an 
 irresponsible force. Here, you re all intelligence, and 
 your intelligence can teach me that science of person 
 ality I want most to know." 
 
 Rivaudiere s eyes never failed in their admiration; 
 but neither did he fail in the note which, in their first 
 talk, he had sounded. His growing intimacy with her 
 never lost sight of his criticism, in the light flavour 
 of his personalities. He would readily rejoin, to such 
 observations, that she was feeling the stimulation of 
 Paris so intelligently because she herself was nothing 
 but intelligent. 
 
 "Nothing?" She threw the question to him one 
 afternoon in her open car, with her eyes bright with 
 amusement over the soft fauns and browns of her 
 sables. 
 
 "Nothing," he retorted, with his inerrant confidence. 
 "You re perfectly ignorant of all but your mind. Your 
 ignorance is so vast that it is complete." 
 
 "But after all my intelligence is radically me," she 
 had persisted. "It must in itself teach me." 
 
 "No it s not a personal intelligence. It s a mag 
 nificently egoistic one you know the only virtue of a 
 poor devil like me is that I m frank! but it hasn t the 
 quality of personality. It is still combatting, imposing, 
 insisting. It doesn t simply exist." 
 
 "Like Madame de Rives s?" she suggested. 
 
 "Perfectly like my sister s. And against all this old 
 [243]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 slow world of ours, which hasn t your facile American 
 enthusiasm, you re measuring your egoism. Some 
 day," he made his usual gesture, "perhaps you ll cease 
 to measure and really be." 
 
 "Time has nothing whatever to do with it!" she 
 broke out, with her sudden frown. She was always 
 puzzled, in view of his persistent care to keep the flash 
 and answer of their talks light above the variety of 
 their suggestions, to feel in herself a lack of any corres 
 ponding lightness. "What you miss in me may come 
 to pass in a second ! " 
 
 He shook his head. "No, my dear lady that would 
 mean you died. We know too much about life it never 
 does those things. Death alone might give you such 
 an initiation. I ve seen the war, you see; ah, it s a 
 sad enough thing to have survived it. And one does 
 not want you," his smile met hers, "to die just yet." 
 
 He was never more pointedly personal than this, in 
 their prolonged talks and their free wanderings 
 together; but, as a nascent sensitiveness in her felt, 
 all his attitude to her was a personal one. At first 
 she had expected from him some of the signs of a 
 warmer admiration such as she had accustomed her 
 self to demand. Yet his avoidance of them was perfect. 
 He would pay her, and in anyone s and everyone s 
 presence, tributes fantastic in their gaiety of extrava 
 gance. She felt them bodiless things, light decorations 
 used to trim his easy talk; and at the same time a 
 deeper current ran beneath them, of the assurance of 
 an inner feeling which was never exposed. For the first 
 time in her experience she began to be aware of a 
 light manipulation in a highly personal relation. 
 Rivaudiere s very ardour was composed of shadings 
 
 [244]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 which ended in a smile, as if his civilisation had taught 
 him that the chief charm of such a situation was in 
 the play of its uncertainties, while all its circum 
 stances drove forward to a certain end. 
 
 This compactness of form seemed to her, in her 
 imagined parallel between him and his race, to be the 
 acutest manifestation of the French power. She had 
 never imagined that living could be so a matter of 
 the intelligence as it was in his hands or that every 
 thought could have so sharp a point. There had been 
 nothing lax or flaccid about old Lacy s mind. But 
 its hardness had been without shape or outline and its 
 intention had all gone into bitterness. Rivaudiere s 
 brain had the tempered fmenesss of a worked metal 
 and the resiliency of life. It was not congealed by 
 prejudice or weakened by violence. As she listened 
 to the quick comments he threw out, on experience, 
 on art, on the human relations, interspersed with his 
 embroidery of speculation and ending always in the 
 finish of a conclusion, she felt that she had never 
 before been aware of an intellectuality which so repre 
 sented the finest delicacy of sophistication and the 
 fusion of charm with mind. 
 
 Her sense of her own potentialities had never been 
 more deeply stirred to action. Every circumstance 
 of her days added to her conviction of her capacity. 
 She was aware of the sensitive rapidity of her apprecia 
 tion, in the face of whatever picture or building Rivau- 
 diere took her to see, of the aptness of her quick 
 comments and of the ease with which her thoughts 
 made their allusions. The aridity of her youth seemed 
 to her to have bloomed in a sudden efflorescence. 
 Under this sunny light even her old resentment of her 
 
 [245]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 restrictions grew kinder, because the long days at 
 Ware, when she had so tenaciously nourished in her 
 self the effort at preparation for future opportunities, 
 had now their use and consequence. Her reading 
 and her studies with her grandfather gave her horizon 
 a present enrichment and extension. All her respon 
 siveness rose to the tests of so highly organised a 
 system of living and of so intimate and extended a 
 consciousness of vivacity. The clarity in the morn 
 ings, the slant of the thin grey rains, the scent of 
 the flowers in the vendors carts, all the diversity of 
 a scene which was all movement, quickened not only 
 her beauty but her thought; and the stimulation was 
 constantly personified in the light sure pressure of 
 Rivaudiere s feeling. 
 
 It had come to her, with the suddenness of sur 
 prise, that the look which was always expectantly in his 
 face held an element which was incomprehensible to her. 
 For his admiration she had been prepared since the 
 moment of their meeting; and she had seen it warm 
 and deepen to a devotion with her general expectancy 
 that it was her due. But the simplicity of its feeling, 
 as it grew, had come to her with a slight shock. For 
 all his tenuous phrases and the gay involutions of his 
 wit, Rivaudiere confronted her with a complete direct 
 ness. He never pressed her or urged her in words to 
 recognise the actualities of his sentiment; but she had 
 never fancied closer intimacies than lay in his assump 
 tions, and at times all her attention set in her attempt 
 to discern, not them or their outcome, but herself. 
 
 It was instantaneous with her that, as soon as she 
 had apprehended, through Rivaudiere s response to 
 her, her own lack of any physical prescience, she had 
 
 [246]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 set herself to get it. She began to discover what most 
 readily warmed his eyes and his voice, and to stimulate 
 the signs of his appreciation. Latent in her mind there 
 remained a constant astonishment that so vast and 
 rich a field of human incidence should have stirred so 
 little of her curiosity. From the night when she had 
 stood on the little porch at Ware and had felt the 
 changed quality in Devon s touch, she had shrunk from 
 every manifestation of feeling, not because of the form 
 it took but because it seemed to her an inner exposure 
 and a sacrifice of her own invulnerability. Was it not 
 that which she chiefly feared, she asked herself, and 
 which made the mystery of her perpetual separateness 
 from any deep sentiment of emotion? She had begun to 
 admit to herself that the sense of her ignorances more 
 and more weighed on her; that she realised them with 
 an increasing force, and with an increasing intimacy 
 of exasperation. 
 
 One night she and Rivaudiere had gone together to 
 a concert at the Trocadero, from which Devon had 
 at the last moment excused himself; and when she 
 found herself driving home, with Rivaudiere beside 
 her, this sensation of her isolation from the usual 
 human experience had suddenly gripped and held her. 
 The concert had been moving and lovely; and in the 
 little car, as it moved smoothly through the dark 
 streets, she felt less their companionship and the charm 
 and amusement of their exchange, than her own 
 extreme separateness. 
 
 Rivaudiere was evidently touched by some similar 
 current. His talk gradually died and it was solely in 
 the fluctuating glow at the end of his cigarette and in 
 the steadiness with which his profile was turned, so 
 
 [247]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 that he faced the passing lights, that she was aware 
 of him. His bare hand lay on the fur rug drawn 
 across his knees. Her eyes fell to it; and with the 
 touch of her reflections, she abruptly turned, with a 
 sharp motion, to the opposite window. 
 
 She was conscious that, with the unusual accent in 
 her action, Rivaudiere s attention had been caught and 
 deflected from whatever absorbed his thoughts. 
 
 "Are you tired?" he asked, with an unaccustomed 
 brevity. 
 
 She shook her head. In her muteness she felt his 
 scrutiny closer. 
 
 "Because sometimes I wonder " he made a gesture 
 to amplify his words "how it is that you re not 
 fatigued to death! Facts, facts, facts; and never a 
 moment s digestion of them." His voice sounded 
 ironical in the darkened car. "And is that what, 
 at the end, is going to be the sum and substance of 
 you?" 
 
 To her immeasurable surprise perhaps, she thought, 
 with an instinctive impulse to explain it, because of the 
 music they had heard, or the lateness of the hour, or 
 her tightened nerves she felt the tears hang for a 
 second on her lashes. "Don t ask me that," she broke 
 out, in a sharper note than she had ever used with 
 him. "Don t you see that I disbelieve in myself most 
 of all?" 
 
 Rivaudiere shook his head. "Your scepticism has 
 none of the quality of real scepticism. It does not 
 make you happier, or for the matter of that, sadder 
 more careless or riper. Even your disbelief is dis 
 belief, now." He waited. "Is it ever to be different 
 I ask myself!" 
 
 [248]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "No one has ever really wanted it to be different," 
 she said impetuously. 
 
 "No, no! I must contradict you! You yourself 
 have never wanted it to be different; and until you 
 reach that point ! Now " his face again turned to 
 her "your eyes have no thought in them. The 
 psychological belle au bols dormant, isn t it? The 
 difference between a strong odour and a scent with a 
 mystery, between mere food and flavour that s what 
 your difference is!" 
 
 The sense she had constantly had, since their first 
 hour together, of a reserve in him which amounted to a 
 commitment and to which he never unbarred the short 
 est step, leapt, for some sudden reason, into life. 
 
 "You have evidently known very much of some one," 
 her voice had its keenest tartness, "who has all these 
 admirable qualities ! " 
 
 "Ah, thank God yes!" said Rivaudiere instantly. 
 "Life would be too dull without that! But I ve never 
 known anyone," his smile, she divined, had in the 
 obscurity a suddenly changed quality, "who was as 
 lovely as you!" 
 
 She was conscious of an intense wish to speak, either 
 to give him the lash of her resentment or to make him 
 with her hand, which lay so close to his, a motion of the 
 appeal which ran throughout her. But the turbulence 
 of her thoughts held her dumb; and all she could do 
 was to raise her head and set her lips with purpose. 
 
 Devon, from the first, had been with her very little. 
 It had dawned on her, bit by bit, that his feeling for 
 Paris was something which he kept apart and within 
 himself. He disappeared for hours at a time, and she 
 
 [249]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 would discover that he had been wandering amongst 
 the print shops, exchanging recollections with some 
 of his friends who had never left the rue Bonaparte, 
 or drinking his afternoon coffee under an extended awn 
 ing on the boulevard and watching the river of its 
 population flow. Like all of his compatriots who had 
 studied here and received from Paris their first enthu 
 siasms, he had continued to regard it as the author 
 and instrument of all their culture. He told Olive that 
 his work on his designs was going well, and this was, 
 in these days, the measure of his confidences. But 
 sometimes, in the Louvre or before a mutilated bit of 
 sculpture in the Cluny, the quiver of response across 
 his face startled even her inattention. It was gone in 
 less than a second; but she felt its imprint in his 
 silences. His original love of the fineness of the city 
 and of its immemorial beauty of thought and aspect 
 seemed now to measure itself against his maturity, 
 and to enlighten his ripeness more than it had ever 
 stimulated his youth. 
 
 If she felt the new force in his muteness she was 
 never able to define it. She was becoming more and 
 more aware of the division between his superficial con 
 cessions to her and the integrity with which he guarded 
 his own opinions. He was unfailing in his careless good 
 temper, he played with the baby each day and saw 
 that her little salon was full of flowers; but so far as 
 any expression of his thoughts went, its absence was 
 unfailing. 
 
 She had shut her book one rainy late afternoon, 
 when he came in from a matinee at the Franc.ais 
 to find her still in front of their little fire; and as she 
 looked up at the closed mask of his expression she 
 
 [250]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 was conscious of a deeper incapacity than she had yet 
 realised in regard to him, and a correspondent irrita 
 tion of her mind. It was one of the few days when 
 she had not had a message or a note from Rivaudiere; 
 and the suspicion had crossed her mind, when Devon 
 took up the theatre list at luncheon and said he was 
 off for an afternoon with Corneille, that he had been 
 so readily sure that Polyeucte and Pauline would bore 
 her because he wanted to be alone. 
 
 Nothing ever puzzled her more than her sense that 
 there might be something wearing in the extreme con 
 centration in which she existed; and for a few seconds, 
 with her head thrown back against the cushion of her 
 chair and her fingers still holding apart the pages of the 
 old brown Montaigne Rivaudiere had brought her the 
 day before, she searched Devon s face. 
 
 She listened absently while he declined her sugges 
 tion of tea, observed how wise she had been not to 
 go out in such a rain, and said he was off to his room 
 to put in an hour on his designs, before dinner; then 
 she broke into one of her sudden exclamations. 
 
 "Sometimes I wonder if in the last weeks you ve even 
 seen me!" 
 
 She was definitely aware, as she spoke, that her 
 purpose was not so much to elicit a reply from him as 
 to stir his interest. He turned slowly she had noticed 
 that his movements were always more deliberate when 
 he was surprised and with his hand on the door he 
 looked back at her, across the little room. 
 
 "I might answer, have you been here to see?" 
 
 Olive s gesture had a sweep in it like one of old 
 Lacy s movements. "And you d also find such a vague 
 phrase, I suppose, to explain away Rene de la Rivau- 
 
 [251!
 
 ASCENT 
 
 diere? I suppose he s not been a reality, either?" 
 
 Devon laughed. "No, my dear, I m not sure that he 
 has." He broke off, with the irony of his eyes on her 
 for a second. "Rivaudiere s got too much the tech 
 nique of such situations to make them real." 
 
 "But you re not sure that I have?" She put her 
 retort in the form of a question. 
 
 He waited before he answered. "You re using 
 weapons you don t understand; that s the reason 
 they re dangerous." 
 
 His tone was so implicative that she felt her annoy 
 ance quicken under it. He was always puzzling her 
 by his arrival at certainties which she had only half 
 divined. She hesitated for a second and then drew an 
 opened note from her book and tossed it over to him. 
 "It doesn t seem so very mysterious, when one reads 
 that!" 
 
 Devon ran through the letter. He kept it in his 
 hands as he ended, with a brief laugh. 
 
 "Well, I was more nearly right than I thought! 
 The old mother has actually packed her up to Paris 
 and they detest to leave the country in winter to 
 look you over. And you ll see, in consequence, one 
 of the most interesting women in Europe. Oh, don t 
 mistake her flattery ! My brother writes such delight 
 ful accounts of seeing you and all that! Her end s 
 simple enough." 
 
 "Her end," said Olive tartly, "will, I m afraid, have 
 to be mine." 
 
 "Perhaps; but she ll find a way," he waited again,- 
 "to let you know its necessary limitations. Americans 
 are too romantic for Frenchwomen to allow the men 
 of their families to lose their heads over them, as they 
 
 [252]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 might think it healthy and educative for them to lose 
 their heads over Europeans." 
 
 She raised her brows. "My dear John, I m not 
 accustomed to impose on people anything less than 
 my own terms." 
 
 "Ah, but here you re dealing with a system; and an 
 individual, you know, against a system shows up as 
 rather pale!" His tone was as easy as he had always 
 lately made it. "No, I shan t go to see her with you, 
 in spite of her elaborate allusions to me. I don t think 
 I want to see Ghislaine de la Rivaudiere again!" His 
 eyes half closed. "When I was over here, just grown, 
 and she a little more than just grown, she seemed to 
 me one of the wonders of the world. Her first poems 
 were being published; and I remember," he smiled at 
 his recollection, "that I didn t know whether to be more 
 astonished at their extreme feeling or their extreme 
 dispassion. She was the first great human work of 
 art I d ever seen; no I don t want to repeat it." 
 
 Olive had risen, as he spoke. She stretched out her 
 hand, as he ended, and followed with her finger the 
 lines and curves of the cloth of his sleeve as she stood 
 beside him. Her touch went from his shoulder to his 
 elbow and from his elbow to his wrist, and slipped over 
 his hand to linger for an instant. 
 
 "Why on earth you ever cared for me . . . !" she 
 said absently, with one of her quick sighs. 
 
 She was aware that Devon s motionlessness changed 
 suddenly to intention, and for the quickest second she 
 felt his lips on the parting of her hair. All he said, 
 however, was that he d planned to spend the next day 
 at Chartres and that she must make his excuses to 
 Madame de Rives. 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 "You re extraordinary in your knowledge, John !" 
 she broke out impetuously. "Of Rivaudiere, of every 
 thing about me!" 
 
 "Yes," he put it dryly; "I rather think I am. But 
 I ve my own ideas, you know. You can follow your 
 line all you please but I must follow mine. You 
 don t know anything about my line, do you? Except, 
 vaguely enough, that it s you! You don t know that 
 I shall always refuse everything except exactly what I 
 want from you. No," he paused "it s not that I know 
 very much, but that I divine a great deal!" 
 
 He took up a long fall of yellowish lace from the 
 neck of her tea gown and drew it slowly through his 
 fingers. 
 
 "My dear Olive, in these weeks you ve been extraor 
 dinary never more extraordinary." He dropped the 
 lace he held. "But perhaps the reason you ve been so 
 was that everyone expected you to be. . . ." 
 
 [254]
 
 XX 
 
 THE next afternoon, when she looked up at the 
 ornate front of the hotel on the Cours la 
 Reine, Olive realised that Devon s natural grasp 
 of shadings had displaced her confidence. 
 
 If Madame de Rives had lived in one of the dim old 
 houses of the older Paris, she would have seemed less 
 confusing to deal with. But in a quarter the fashion 
 of which was as evident as its luxury, Olive felt her 
 traditions allied with the immediacy of the day. At 
 the moment it seemed to her that she would be less 
 at a disadvantage before an inherited knowledge than 
 before the more surface sophistication which would 
 criticise her conduct and discount her appearance. She 
 vaguely recollected, and with a sense of wonder as to 
 what they could produce, some of the facts she had 
 picked up about the Rives s household its perfect 
 outer correctness and what were said to be its private 
 conformities, that Rives s had had, from his mother 
 who had been a Roumanian of royal stock, a princely 
 fortune, and kept at Chantilly a racing stable on the 
 largest scale; that his wife had contrived to create 
 about her conduct the mystery of an austerity more 
 unfathomable than any excess, and that her verse 
 was never more tenuous than when the shares in the 
 motor company Rives had exploited and controlled 
 under her influence were rising to a more fantastic 
 value. 
 
 To graft this information on her suppositions of 
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 ASCENT 
 
 what Rivaudiere s sister must be shook her certainty 
 for a moment. Her glance travelled across to the 
 grey winter river, and between its expanse and her 
 eyes the significance of the past weeks composed and 
 took on form and outline. The delicate pleasure of 
 her hours with Rivaudiere was apparent in a new light; 
 the readiness of his look, beyond the perfect courtesies 
 of his consideration, and the fine formalities which so 
 accentuated the eagerness of his eyes. Because her 
 possession of his devotion was threatened, it assumed 
 a value suddenly different from that which she had 
 before ascribed to it; and she turned to the door with 
 a sense of alert defensiveness. 
 
 As she was ushered down the long length of the suc 
 cessive drawing rooms, she made out at once an immo 
 bile figure seated by the fireless grate in the farthest 
 room. Beside it all her other impressions were reduced 
 to insignificance. She was vaguely aware of the rich 
 brown tint of the highly waxed floors, of the magnifi 
 cence of the petit point, from which the coverings had 
 evidently just been removed, and of the multiple orna 
 ments of the great chandeliers, through their swathings 
 of netting. Upright in her carved chair, with her back 
 rigidly straight, Madame de Rives was facing the hard 
 light of the uncurtained windows with a fixity of absorp 
 tion. As she drew nearer Olive made out that she 
 wore a dress as severe as the single rope of pearls 
 clasped at the top of her thin throat, that there was no 
 book on her lap or on the table beside her, and that 
 her hands were folded and motionless. The last thing, 
 in this hasty scrutiny, that Olive could fancy her was 
 surprised. The sound of approaching steps was evi 
 dently permitted to impinge on her concentration only 
 
 [256]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 when she wished it to, and she turned her head only 
 at precisely the right instant. 
 
 As she rose, her small pallid face stirred gradually 
 to attention, as if she visibly changed her preoccupa 
 tion. She did not smile as she held out her brownish 
 hand. 
 
 "I am very pleased to see you," she said immediately, 
 and with a perfect gravity, "and I thank you for 
 coming. Will you sit there?" 
 
 There was a drop of silence. Across the few feet 
 between them, as she took her seat, Olive s eyes set 
 persistently on her hostess. She was rapidly trying to 
 relate the circumstances of the occasion Madame de 
 Rives s note, the mere fact of which, in its invitation, 
 was a certain commitment to cordiality, and the bare 
 severity of her reception. Opposite her, with her back 
 still at the angle of the back of her marquise, Madame 
 de Rives returned her look without the slightest deepen 
 ing or warming of tone and without the smallest con 
 cealment of the free play of her inspection. She made 
 a few prescribed observations as to the interest which 
 Paris usually stirred in Americans, and Americans in 
 Paris; but Olive instinctively felt that even in these 
 banalities her mind was prearranged with the same 
 rigour as the chairs were placed in juxtaposition and 
 that the room lacked the warmth or welcome of a fire 
 and tea. 
 
 For a moment Olive s response hung, in the unaccus 
 tomed strangeness. Her very beauty, as she divined 
 it must appear against the pale grey taffetas of her 
 chair, seemed to droop under such a measurement. It 
 had at once told with Madame de Rives of that her 
 prehensive faculty was certain; but it was already 
 
 [257]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 catalogued and weighed, and what existed of it was 
 only its relation to standards of which Olive had no 
 cognisance. 
 
 "We feel it so particularly fortunate, my mother and 
 I, that my brother, who is really all intelligence, should 
 through this charming chance of knowing you have 
 known a little of the modern America." Madame de 
 Rives had as she spoke the complete absence of move 
 ment which made a gesture, in its rare occurrence, 
 so significant. Her scrutiny played as fixedly as a 
 light in her dark face. "We travel, you know, so badly; 
 and for Rene to gain so much of America through you 
 has been like gaining it through a delightful work 
 of literature. You have an apartment in the rue Pierre 
 Charron, I believe. But do you not pay a frightful 
 price for it?" 
 
 Olive smiled, with her clear eyebrows rising. 
 "Really, I don t know that by our computation we do. 
 I suppose we pay more than we ought to pay; but in 
 contrast to the gain of our months here, it is so 
 absurdly small a comparison . . . Do not think all 
 Americans are mere spendthrifts." Her smile deep 
 ened. "Some of us are imaginative, which may easily 
 be mistaken for extravagance." 
 
 "Ah!" said Madame de Rives vaguely. "And your 
 husband I recollect him very well, when he was here 
 some years ago. He was so sympathetic and delightful. 
 We had never seen an American in the least like him. 
 It must be a very vast country, is it not? My sister- 
 in-law had a friend who was once taken by some 
 people, of colossal fortune, on a private train to San 
 Francisco. It was amazing, she said; one had even 
 a typist to write one s letters; but she could not con- 
 
 [258]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 ceive why they invited her to go. You are all very 
 hospitable, are you not?" 
 
 "No more so, I am sure," Olive s return was rapid, 
 "than your brother has been to my husband and me." 
 
 "Yes, Rene is a dear boy. Yet a little less easy than 
 one fancies, perhaps, to deal with. And your mother- 
 in-law? She and my mother were friends, it appears, 
 in their girlhood, when they were at school not, of 
 course, at the same school. We cannot afford your 
 luxuries of education. Is she as charming as ever? 
 I remember that once when your husband was here, 
 he brought from her to my mother one of those 
 inimitably fine shawls, made of the Scotch wool. It 
 has been washed now countless times, and would you 
 believe that it never shrinks!" 
 
 Olive s muteness held her for an instant. She was 
 trying to associate her interlocutress s even tones with 
 the fiery beauty of her verse, whose glow had reached 
 her in the distant Ware winters. Her very words, as 
 they fell with the purity of accent which means a 
 command of several languages, had, beyond their mean 
 ing, their fine contradictions. They were as expressive 
 as her appearance itself. Its simplicities were so 
 carefully composed, and the hand on which she wore 
 only her wedding ring was thin with a sensitiveness of 
 feeling. She had all the marks of the varieties of an 
 achieved experience; and yet Olive thought she 
 could talk with an unsimulated interest in these terms 
 and observe the small niceties of a universe in which 
 they were important. 
 
 Her instinct of aggression gave a light tinge to her 
 voice. 
 
 "My reason for accepting your suggestion that I 
 [259]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 should come to-day beyond the pleasure of seeing 
 you was really to tell you just that how much we 
 appreciate your brother s kindnesses. My husband has 
 always valued their friendship, and he s been so parti 
 cularly glad to renew it. With me, of course," she 
 spoke slowly, "it s been different." 
 
 "Indeed?" Madame de Rives s eyes were as opaque. 
 "And how, different?" 
 
 "Different because of the differences," Olive s answer 
 was as prompt, "in his kindness. I needed perhaps 
 more help in understanding things than my husband; 
 and perhaps that is the reason why his kindness to me 
 has been special. I ve lived, you see, a more isolated 
 life than most American women;" her smile gleamed; 
 "but now, at last, we are beginning to learn the strength 
 of our isolation." 
 
 "Ah!" said Madame de Rives again. It was her 
 single word. She held her position of impartial atten 
 tion, with her fingers as motionless in her lap. The 
 inscrutability of her attitude was so perfectly beyond 
 the reach of the conveyances of words that Olive felt 
 her own cleverness suddenly denuded of point and 
 fibre and useless in its very agility. She felt herself 
 moved by a quick touch of impulsiveness. 
 
 "I hope you will realise that, in the matter of all 
 your brother has done for me, I do very greatly appre 
 ciate it." Her words had the tincture of her sudden 
 feeling. 
 
 "My brother likes strangers," said Madame de Rives 
 imperturbably. "He is always a little intrigued by the 
 qualities in their minds which he does not understand 
 especially if the stranger is a lady, and so charming 
 as yourself." 
 
 [260]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 The quiver of obstinacy at the corner of Olive s 
 mouth hardened. "He doesn t strike me as a person 
 whose taste in such matters is general." 
 
 "Men are all general; the instinct to be specific 
 occurs with them so rarely. They have, of course, their 
 enthusiasms her eyes caught Olive s, "and I am 
 particularly interested to see you because my mother 
 and I have both understood that Rene has had a 
 very real enthusiasm for you." 
 
 Olive was conscious that her flush slowly rose, and 
 her look fell to her hands; she smoothed the wrinkles 
 of her long gloves reflectively. "So far as that goes, 
 I don t know " she was again held by her uncertainty. 
 
 "Ah, but you must very well know as intelligent 
 and sympathetic as you are! And you must also 
 know," her voice carried on clearly, "Rene s nature. 
 His evanescence, his charm for the moment they are 
 inseparable. His personality is not yet aware of itself. 
 Even all these mad modern theories that he has 
 Madame de Rives paused, as if she selected the key 
 of her continuance. "Theories they tell me that in 
 America everyone has them. Our forms, I suppose, 
 transplanted. But do you ever hold very long to one? 
 That is what I say to Rene. He is so diverted by these 
 intellectual performances of his. But for the important 
 things of existence, he is a more inexorable formalist 
 than I. I mention these things," her shoulders rose 
 and fell with an imperceptible lightness, "because I 
 know, as a woman, how one builds any such friendship 
 as exists between you and Rene on these facts. I 
 myself," she made one of her incomparably brief ges 
 tures, "should not of course consider Adeline Bray an 
 obstacle." 
 
 [261]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 All the insinuation of her instinct and the echoes 
 of Rivaudiere s reserves flashed, in a second, into the 
 name, as Olive heard it. It took her only that second 
 to smile and to steady her look, but she had no illusion 
 that her response had been rapid enough for her com 
 panion. 
 
 "I don t know the person you mention," she 
 responded; "nor do I know of her." 
 
 The movement of Madame de Rives s hand was 
 now more definite. "But the odd part of it is that my 
 mother and I do; we know both the situation, and her. 
 An admirable child, wholly admirable. She has a 
 real devotion for Rene. And a person of quite the last 
 note of this new culture. At her little apartment, in 
 the rue de Seze, they tell me one hears the newest 
 music . . . Stravinsky, Mor, and all the rest. Her 
 father, too, was an admirable person a professor in 
 the University at Rennes, so poor and with five 
 children. This girl brought up the little ones, at the 
 mother s death, with an exemplary care. When the 
 war came, of course she must needs go off as a nurse, 
 and she and Rene met. She is not of a distinguished 
 cast, perhaps she is too short, too solid, too dark; 
 her contours lack fineness; but such an eager, rapid 
 face . . ." 
 
 She waited, as if she gave her words the emphasis 
 of a pause; then her even tone continued. 
 
 "Her good sense has been admirable, too. Of 
 course these young people of to-day must make their 
 gesture of freedom, and she has no religion, no code, 
 to dictate to her. She and Rene spent last spring in 
 the Pyrenees, and her father did not seem to consider 
 it other than a pleasant holiday. . . . Yes. But she 
 
 [262]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 quite realises her situation. My elder brother, you 
 see, has no children, so sooner or later our poor Rene 
 must attach himself and have a son. My mother s 
 ideas are still of the old sort; but no more so at 
 heart than Rene s. He is the revolutionary who will 
 become, in five years, a reactionary. And Adeline 
 understands all this perfectly. She has even played 
 the violin to me and I have been there to tea ..." 
 
 There was the drop of a final silence. Olive s eyes 
 had mechanically turned back to the vista of the suc 
 cessive drawing rooms with their shrouded gilt con 
 sols, the high glint of a mirror here and there, the 
 long cool stretch of the floors and finally, at the end, 
 the grey stone of the antechamber. Down this 
 expanse she could see advance the figure which pos 
 sessed her thoughts, more vividly than in actuality. 
 The looks she had from time to time caught in Rivau- 
 diere s face, his sudden preoccupation, the accent in 
 his tastes and preferences, illuminated and enriched it 
 until the girl was there, with all her restrictions and 
 impotentialities, yet with the innate power of her 
 accomplishment. She was touched with reality by the 
 results of her relation with Rivaudiere. The portrait 
 of her was alive. In a few strokes she existed; her 
 strictly dutiful childhood, her adventure of the war, 
 her eager espousal of independence, even the violin so 
 like what would be a deep shade of her skin and rest 
 ing Olive was sure against a square, graceless 
 shoulder . . . 
 
 She rose and held out her hand. "It has been charm 
 ing to see you. You have indeed been most kind." 
 
 Madame de Rives s smile was for the first time deep. 
 Its light ran over the fatigued lines of her face and 
 
 [263]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 lingered in her eyes, as if she had her own measure 
 ment of their exchange. She remarked that it had 
 been only a pleasure to make a smallest sign of thanks 
 to one who had given her brother the dear boy, of 
 whom she was so fond so many pleasures. She sup 
 posed that Olive was very surrounded, very gay, like 
 all her people nowadays; it was good for Rene to see 
 his world she felt it indeed necessary for one with his 
 absurd intellectual curiosities. When Olive spoke of 
 the dinner at the British Embassy where so many 
 of the guests had expressed a hope of seeing her, her 
 comment grew absent again. Yes, she regretted not 
 to go, but the last time she had dined there she had 
 suffered from an indigestion of unequalled severity, 
 and heaven knew, with the present ambassadress, what 
 cook they had. To Olive s mention in a murmur 
 of whose constriction she was conscious of the final 
 volume of her poems, she returned only her vague 
 exclamation, the sound of which was as impenetrable 
 as her expression, and her eyes wandered to the window 
 again, as she drifted off to a comment on the heaviness 
 of the winter rains in the country and the consequent 
 illness of their old steward. At the door of the second 
 drawing room, where a footman was waiting, she 
 seemed to recollect herself; "and we are sorry not to 
 be able to ask you to dine. But our house is, as you 
 see, closed. My husband is in Belgrade and my 
 mother never leaves Mallary now." 
 
 She murmured an order to the servant and made 
 once more her grave inclination of the head; and a 
 second later Olive found herself descending the wide 
 sweep of the stairs. 
 
 The perfect security of her hostess s look reflected 
 [264]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 itself, with a sudden accrescence of force and will, in 
 her eyes. As she passed out of the high entrance doors 
 she was already composing the message which, from the 
 nearest telegraph office, she would send to Rivaudiere. 
 Her need to see him more, to face clearly the issue 
 with him had suddenly become imperative. Yet as 
 she stared for a moment into the deep dusk, with the 
 cold starry lights on the river moving through the first 
 darkness, the wonder flashed through her mind if here, 
 too, she were not being manipulated; if the interview 
 which had just terminated had not been planned to 
 bring her to a crisis, and if this would not prove to be 
 the final point of Madame de Rives s science. 
 
 [265]
 
 XXI 
 
 AS she sat, in the thinning January light, and 
 looked out across the greenish pond, with the 
 grey carp as motionless as silence in the still 
 water, a sharp touch of the same uncertainty arrested 
 for an instant the progressive drive of her thoughts. 
 
 Rivaudiere had telephoned her, late the night before, 
 and immediately on receipt of her telegram, in so 
 definite a tone that she was conscious that nothing had 
 escaped him, even in the compressed words of her 
 message. It was evidently enough for him that she 
 had summoned him, that she had said there was 
 something she must discuss with him; and that she 
 had put it with such implications of importance, in 
 spite of her haste, that he had felt himself justified 
 in suggesting that they go, the next morning, to Fon- 
 tainebleau in his motor, to lunch and to spend the 
 day. 
 
 Their drive out had had a silence which their 
 drives usually lacked. Olive was beginning to probe 
 some of the beauty of spacing, in an older world, and 
 some of the finer relations between omission and elision. 
 Whenever he made an evident effort of detachment 
 from his thoughts, to point out to her the curve of a 
 hillside or the rise of a spire, she could see, in the 
 quieter quality of his smile, how deeply he was savour 
 ing the significances the day had for him. He had 
 turned to her only once with a spoken comment. 
 
 "What a still winter sky and how beautiful all 
 France is under it, with the monotonous green gone 
 
 [266]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 and only the bare earth and the bare branches left! 
 Yes, the country s lovely enough to show its bones!" 
 
 "Does it add to it for you, to see it with me?" 
 she had abruptly asked. 
 
 He showed her for an instant an expression so 
 genuinely astonished that his usual elaborate courtesies 
 were submerged. "But the presence of no single human 
 being could add to France ! You don t yet understand, 
 do you, the indifference and impersonality of time, as a 
 country creates itself?" His smile changed, as he 
 looked at her. "But if it s not wonderful to see France 
 with you, it s wonderful to see you with France!" 
 
 After their luncheon he had left her to go on to the 
 park alone, while he delayed at the entrance to give an 
 order about his car. His single question to her, as 
 they stopped at the gates, had been the query whether 
 she were willing to stay and dine, and drive back in the 
 evening. She had let her quick glance answer him, and 
 had turned abruptly to trace with her eyes the sweeping 
 curve of the double staircase, with its creamy tint 
 warmed by the faint sun; and as she had passed 
 through the gates into the park, she was conscious that 
 her sense of expectation had never been keener. 
 
 From the first moment she saw it, some quality in 
 Fontainebleau had held her. She told herself, with her 
 ironic flash, that here least of all, in so personal a 
 setting of the past, could she be unaware of ghosts. It 
 was invariably difficult for her to picture any antece 
 dence except in its allusion or relation to qualities like 
 her own. But something in the still rooms, so royal 
 yet so intimate, had touched her rarely touched 
 imagination. She felt them peopled by the residue of 
 feeling that creatures wholly human in the magnifi- 
 
 [267]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 cence of their pleasure and vitality had here made 
 their brief contribution to the long tapestry of human 
 incidence which the centuries wove. The same forces 
 which had animated these lives were, as it seemed to 
 her, in the complex play of consequence now touching 
 her own. Her gradual initiation in finer values and 
 in the implicative sense had prepared her to compre 
 hend them; and to comprehend them was to measure, 
 for the first time, the meaning of Rivaudiere s presence, 
 as he drew near her, along the walk. He passed 
 between the silvery tree trunks, with the long line of 
 the palace behind him and his shadow falling in 
 front of him on the gold-coloured trodden earth, and 
 the sound of his steps disengaged itself against the 
 soft drip of the water, as it ran into the pond. She 
 saw that he did not hurry. His evident enjoyment of 
 a gradual approach to their situation, coupled with his 
 quickly stimulated warmth, seemed to her extraor 
 dinarily indicative of his quality, his fearless transi 
 tions and his delicate balance of values. She caught in 
 her mind a flare of wonder as to whether she herself 
 could not master such methods of manipulation, and 
 acquire their secret as she had acquired Rivaudiere s 
 idioms. 
 
 As he took his seat beside her, on the stone bench, 
 the significance beneath the ready ardour of his 
 expression was so visible that the words she had meant 
 to greet him with were arrested. She felt her colour 
 rise, with the pause. She was conscious that her eyes 
 fell, that her hands made a quick, nervous gesture, 
 and she shrank with a sudden uncertainty to her corner 
 of the seat. 
 
 The motion, so unaccustomed in her, clearly deep- 
 [268]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 ened the light in Rivaudiere s eyes. He laid his hand 
 on her gloved arm, and bent nearer to her. 
 
 "So you re at last going to let me say to you what 
 I ve known I must say ah, ever since our first hour 
 together, in September?" 
 
 Her lips moved uncertainly. "You said, then do 
 you remember? that I seemed to you a miracle." 
 
 "And then, when I only divined all that you really 
 were !" His clasp tightened. "It s going to make 
 you wonderfully happy, you know . . . ! Ah, you re 
 too exquisite a creature not to be approached with all 
 delicacy! I ve wondered enough what I dared to say 
 to you, I assure you; your people have all of the 
 audacities, but what they see is the audacity, not the 
 feeling behind it. And you know my immeasurable 
 regard for Devon; but he s not French he seems 
 completely to let you take care of yourself! And you 
 yourself, by your own sign, are willing to listen to 
 me . . ." His eyes searched hers, with as clear a 
 charm in their play of feeling as the care with which 
 he had chosen his words. 
 
 Olive waited for a second. The tonic beauty of the 
 day, of the clear pale sunlight, the packed significances 
 of the spot and Rivaudiere s tone stirred slowly 
 through her. She had never yet been more conscious 
 of her imperative personal insistence, and her self- 
 imposition had never seemed more alive with directive 
 power. 
 
 "You have been extraordinary; but what has been 
 most extraordinary to me has been my own slowness 
 she broke off, and the gesture with which she raised her 
 clasped hands to her breast had still the imprecision of 
 uncertainty. "You see, I seem to have thought so little 
 
 [269]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 about it all ... I have been so ignorant of what 
 gives living reality; and through you yes, you and 
 through our wonderful days in all this wonderful 
 beauty, I have learnt. No it will be like seeing 
 another marvellous thing with you! You have given 
 me so much; and I am ready," her head rose "for you 
 to give me more." 
 
 He again bent nearer her, with his look warming to 
 a sudden incandescence. "Ah, but you too have known 
 you have seen and felt all the different qualities in 
 my feeling for you! For your beauty and your 
 brilliancy and the rarity of your mind; but above all 
 for your unawakened, untouched capacity, which is 
 the finest form of your loveliness. Ever since I saw 
 you under the tree, with your chin tilted up and your 
 eyes so full of the sky what haven t I thought of 
 you!" 
 
 She gave him his look back fully, with her last 
 reserves gone before the insistence of his words. 
 "And I of you." 
 
 "That s what I d hoped beyond everything that you 
 would give me the same devotion which I have so 
 deeply given you . . . ! Ah, there s no feeling in the 
 world, is there, which isn t a real gift, a real surrender 
 of one s self . . ." 
 
 As he broke his exclamation and she felt the warmth 
 of his hand on her bare hand, from which she had 
 slipped her glove, Olive drew a sharp breath. She 
 was at last face to face with the word from him of 
 which, in the last two months, she had been in con 
 stant expectation; and her expectation, she knew, 
 stretched as far back as her arid girlhood, with its 
 pitiless exactions of energy and its lack of any touch 
 
 [270]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 of poetry. This, at last, was her fulfilment of participa 
 tion. Then something in his last phrase abruptly 
 caught her. Her look of expectancy widened and her 
 hands fell to her lap. 
 
 "Surely you have seen, you have anticipated!" he 
 was continuing, with his voice deepening from phrase 
 to phrase. "You ve seen what it s going to do for 
 you to be enriched by enriching even a poor beggar 
 like me, who is so little fit to touch your charming 
 feet! One of your beauties is your lovely, cool 
 immunity. But just because it s been so maintained, 
 so separate and so sure, the happiness of sacrificing 
 it is going to be all the more brilliant to you ..." 
 He searched her eyes. The surprise in her face was 
 now so evident that it arrested him. "But isn t it?" 
 he finally ended. 
 
 She shook her head. "I don t know." 
 "You don t know? But that is delightful of you!" 
 She made again a negative sign; her lips parted 
 and she stared for a second in front of her. 
 
 "It isn t," said Rivaudiere, "that you fear in me any 
 lack of consideration for you surely I don t deserve 
 that!" Her gesture cut him short. "No I thought 
 not I What is it, then?" 
 
 She made a faint movement with her hands. Her 
 eyes were persistently set on the last and thinnest bare 
 twigs, which interwove the trees and stretched to the 
 greyish sky. The deserted park, the stillness of the 
 winter air, and all the scene about them, had moved 
 her sense of drama;. Rivaudiere s words moved it still 
 more; yet she was clearly conscious that all of these 
 outward signs of what people called emotion paled 
 beside the opposition which his words startled in her. 
 
 [271]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 She didn t yet know whether it were an extreme of 
 ignorance or of incapacity; whether she had lived with 
 these facts dormant in herself, or whether she had 
 touched them all along the line of her experience and 
 was incapable of ever learning them. But she turned, 
 at the end of her silence, a look to him whose confusion 
 came from her crowded thoughts. 
 
 "You really mean it that you expect me to feel 
 that way? That you expect me " she touched her 
 breast as if she tried to emphasise her incredulity, 
 "to sacrifice what is my inner self to you?" 
 
 "Does it seem so strange?" Rivaudiere s smile was 
 all reassurance. 
 
 She rose suddenly, with her hands still clasped, and 
 looked down at him. "But it never occurred to me you 
 would expect that of me!" 
 
 From the bench where he was evidently held motion 
 less by the discrepancy between her tone and his 
 warmth, Rivaudiere s eyes looked up at her with a 
 frankness which was all sophistication. "I ve hoped 
 I can t say expected that you d really care for me!" 
 
 "Oh, I m not afraid of caring for you . . ." She 
 brushed his doubt aside. "I only ask to live it; but 
 as to sharing with you my thought, my independence, 
 my separateness . . ." 
 
 "But what else is caring? You ve an amazing 
 beauty; but surely you never thought me so dull a brute 
 that I could be sensible only to that; surely that s 
 what makes feeling that it extends beyond itself, that 
 it s all life!" He paused, as the concentration of her 
 look and her immobility forced itself on him. "But 
 have you never yet understood what a personal rela 
 tion means? That it s far beyond the outer things, 
 
 [272]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 the however loved possession, the bodily and definable 
 thing? that it s a real concession, a real gift?" 
 
 She shook her head. "Never." 
 
 "Not in your girlhood? Oh, I don t ask about 
 Devon, for that would be indelicate but never? Not 
 in your childhood? One has those relations in the 
 strangest way in friendship as well as in love, with 
 one s people, with children, with old servants." 
 
 "Never," she repeated; her hands were still clasped 
 and the fixity of her look unbroken. 
 
 He continued to search her face for a moment, and 
 then a note of impatience broke in on the ardour of 
 his voice. "But isn t that all the more reason for you 
 to want it a real relation? Isn t that what you d 
 expected, in letting me care for you and in giving 
 me to understand you cared for me?" 
 
 Olive s thought seemed to sweep rapidly ahead. 
 "I don t know I don t understand it. I don t see 
 why it should be. The outer thing " her shoulders 
 rose "is simple enough; but the moment you ask 
 me to yield to you my independence of feeling, to 
 modify, to change Her brows drew together in a 
 heavy line. 
 
 They exchanged for a moment a long glance. The 
 fragrance of her beauty in the still cold air, the warm 
 softness of her hair against her forehead and the rest 
 lessness of her hands still lent Rivaudiere s look a glow. 
 But his critical faculty was so evidently stirred that 
 it was almost traceable in the mobility of his face. 
 
 He waited again. "If you repulsed me that I 
 could understand; if I offended you, or if you had a 
 principle in the matter, I could respect it. But to 
 ask of life all its contribution of charm, to want to 
 
 [273]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 be stimulated and yet to refuse to feel and not 
 because you fear feeling, but because you fear 
 giving ... !" His incredulity once more arrested 
 him. "There is no consequence about you. Your 
 magnificence it all fades into airl" 
 
 Her eyes caught his, with a new hardness in their 
 depths, as if the sudden sense of antagonism between 
 them were patent and visible. 
 
 "And yet you say you have cared for me; is it 
 so impossible for you to care for me as I am? I ve 
 told you I was willing. . . ." Her sarcasm pierced 
 her voice, as his silence continued. "It looks very 
 much as if I hadn t been a miracle to you, after all!" 
 
 Rivaudiere s flush had risen under the touch of her 
 tone. He hesitated a moment moxe, and then flung 
 out his hands. 
 
 "But one doesn t order and extort those things they 
 bloom! Ah, the day I first saw you it seemed simple 
 enough. I thought of you perpetually, you followed 
 me, you disturbed me, you gave that sting to my 
 imagination which comes only when two people are to 
 have a mutual experience. Of course I d never seen 
 anyone like you; who has? I, on my side, have been 
 ready to give you everything and anything; but that 
 you should for a moment consider my feeling for you 
 so slight, so poor a thing, that it could be merely what 
 we call in our stupid definitions physical, experi 
 mental, tentative ... no, all women are not like you! " 
 he declared. 
 
 Her quick glance shot at him. Her sense of his 
 retention of the private facts in his life, which his 
 homage to her had never been able to complicate or 
 disturb, had never been more alive. For a moment 
 
 [274]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 she had a dim apprehension of this dual existence of 
 emotion and affection in an old people, of its warm 
 efflorescence, its rigid demarcations, its scrupulous 
 alignment of passions to their own realm and of its 
 deeper dedications. The action of such forces, so 
 simple yet so rich, carried her thoughts far, like one 
 of the long straight vistas of the winter forest; and 
 there hung before her for an instant, in the still air, 
 the little apartment in the rue de Seze, not a detail of 
 her slight information of which had escaped her the 
 Stravinsky in the evenings, the gaiety of an uncon- 
 formed existence, the spring in Spain, the rigid provin 
 cial past and the sudden emancipation which would 
 produce such a girl 
 
 Her frown again drew her brows sharply together. 
 "I am not denying the truth of what you say . . ." 
 She broke off; then with a wavering motion, full of 
 beauty, she took a step towards him and her hands 
 spread and opened. "Perhaps you will teach me; per 
 haps you will help me to learn, to understand. . . ." 
 
 "Perhaps!" Rivaudiere had answered instantly. 
 His tone had a perfect accent of vivacity. But the 
 equal perfection of the blankness underneath it fell like 
 a lash across her sensitiveness. She heard the long 
 reverberation of the door he had closed, and closed so 
 rapidly and finally that he had hidden from her, not 
 for her protection but for the protection of his own 
 regret even his astonishment and his pity. With a 
 word, she felt as if she had passed for him into history 
 and was no more than a pallid portrait on the walls 
 of the palace. 
 
 He rose and stood beside her. His face was as 
 blank, under its vivid courtesy, as his voice. 
 
 [275]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "And now the light is changing . . . you see? We 
 ought not to start too late; and you wanted once more 
 to look at that splendid chimney piece, with the F s 
 set over it. . . ." 
 
 There was some delay in getting their motor; and 
 as she waited while Rivaudiere went in search of it, 
 Olive wandered down the street and found herself in 
 front of the church, which he had named to his 
 chauffeur as a meeting place. 
 
 In response to an impulse she did not stop to ques 
 tion, she mounted the steps and lifted the leather 
 curtain. In the chilly dusk the interior was colder 
 than the winter air. The flames of the candles before 
 the shrines burned with a fixed pallor and had none 
 of the warmth of light. The silence was absolute. She 
 pulled forward one of the rush-covered stools and 
 sank on her knees, with her eyes set on the Sacred 
 Heart; and her mechanical drop into concentration was 
 suddenly infused with life, and she felt a recollection 
 touch her like a hand. 
 
 What drew her thoughts back, she realised, was 
 not the Litany of the Saints, which mechanically 
 occurred to her and which she had never yet suffi 
 ciently learnt, but the dead scent of spent incense, of 
 melted wax, and of the human beings who ordinarily 
 thronged the seats. She tried again to expand her 
 thoughts in prayer, but the formula only contracted 
 them. She caught herself wondering why the paper 
 flowers about the Virgin s altar must always be so 
 hideously arranged. As her wandering memories rose 
 and fell she remembered the statue of the Virgin in 
 Father Ames s room, and that his taste had never been 
 
 [276]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 finer than in its arrangement; and there again broke 
 across her mind a flash-like impression of his face. 
 
 Her instinctive motion was always to avoid it. 
 Whenever she had knelt for a moment, in the churches 
 she and Rivaudiere visited, it had always been with a 
 definite denial of any survival of his influence. But 
 under the pressure and turmoil of her sensations, the 
 remembrance became every second more insistent; and 
 she had the pervasive sense that, in some inexplicable 
 way, he with his profundities and Rivaudiere with his 
 dilettantism were linked in a like reality. 
 
 [277]
 
 IV
 
 XXII 
 
 "It yTRS. DEVON!" Isabel Bourdas exclaimed, 
 V/l "of course I perfectly remember her!" 
 
 Her eyes followed the long line of the 
 terrace where she stood, down its length and across the 
 scattered groups between the warm brick front of the 
 house and the overflowing stone urns of pink geraniums 
 on the balustrade. Against the spring sky the first 
 green of the trees on the lawns below detached itself; 
 and sifting through their branches came the unmis 
 takable murmur, so special and personal, of the London 
 streets. 
 
 Her companion, whose glance was also on the shifting 
 interchange of figures on the terrace, smiled for a 
 second before he answered her, as if her tone gave 
 him his own reserves of thought. As they stood 
 together he was taller than she, built on the same long 
 lines of thinness, with his hair and his moustache 
 already white, against his brownish skin. The ease 
 of his attitude, beside her, testified to a familiarity 
 of companionship which his look, when it turned to 
 her, only accentuated. 
 
 "You really are inimitable, you know your easy 
 observances, your easy lacks of observance and yet 
 your constant kindness! You can t help being kind, 
 even when you forget people!" 
 
 She brushed aside his tone with a touch of impa 
 tience. "Is it at this late day, my dear Francis, that 
 
 [281]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 I must remind you that I m just nothing at all but 
 a type? I ve no character and I m too sensible to 
 want to imitate character by being eccentric, which 
 is the only outlet left to women in my unfortunate 
 position. . . ." She laughed. "But I do very clearly 
 recollect Mrs. Devon." 
 
 Sir Francis Passmore s glance again passed along 
 the terrace. "She s scarcely a person one forgets." 
 
 "She s certainly a person you wouldn t forget!" 
 Her amusement seemed to apologise for her tone. 
 "And where did you run into her?" 
 
 "With Minnie Harringford who, I see, has brought 
 her to you to-day. It was last night, at dinner. At 
 first, I said to myself, another of these rich clever 
 creatures, as one always does say about Americans; 
 but afterwards, when I d had a nearer look at her, 
 I changed my mind." He paused. "She looks extraor 
 dinary; but probably she isn t." 
 
 Lady Isabel seemed to make, in her mind, a choice 
 which determined the note of her answer. "Well, 
 to you she might be." . . . She waited to follow the 
 direction of his look. "It s amusing, isn t it, that 
 Minnie dear soul should venture to like anyone 
 so evidently definite!" 
 
 "It s even more amusing," Passmore rejoined, "that 
 Mrs. Devon, on her side, should have the sense not 
 to like dear Minnie. My first impression of her for 
 of course her beauty s striking was that she was, as 
 I tell you, like all the rest; aping a life to which 
 she didn t belong, all an affectation of individualism, 
 but in reality fluid boneless. I thought she d accept 
 anything and above all your sister-in-law and Brough 
 House; but she doesn t. She s impressed but she s 
 
 [282]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 not interested. She s apart" he hesitated; "and yet 
 she s not indifferent." 
 
 Lady Isabel s quick grey glance met him. At first 
 her look was rapid and had the furtive touch of a per 
 sistent detachment of attitude; but as it lingered it 
 deepened. 
 
 "It is so extraordinary the way all your judg 
 ments of a woman come back to the qualities of per 
 sonal insistence! We re all alike to you. We all seem 
 to you out for the same thing. You see us, invariably, 
 as invariable the Mrs. Devons, the Minnies, even 
 I . . . ! You re too much affected by women to have 
 any sensitiveness in your view of them Her laugh 
 interrupted her. "Sometimes, you see, I m almost 
 tempted to say to you what I mean!" 
 
 Passmore nodded, with a touch of brevity. It was 
 evident that he was constantly relating his companion 
 to the scene about them, the murmur of talk, the 
 light dresses moving amongst the trees, the groups 
 of men smoking on the terrace and the low deep 
 rooms to which the windows behind them gave view. 
 Her quick voice and the ease of the movement of her 
 thought linked themselves, it was apparent, with all 
 that had produced her. Yet as he confronted her his 
 expression witnessed that she affected his imagination 
 as definitely and as personally as she affected him 
 by her angular distinction. Even in his days of a 
 comparative inexperience the remembrance evidently 
 passed through his mind he had felt the force of her 
 attitude of detachment quite as much as he had felt 
 the importance of the traditions which produced it. 
 
 "I can t say you ve ever been tolerant to my faults," 
 his voice had a touch of dryness. "But then you can t 
 
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 say I ve ever expected you to be! At least I ve that 
 consolation that you re a little more pointedly hard 
 on me than you are on anyone else." He waited an 
 instant. "We re hard on each other. There is that 
 touch of what would one call it, asperity? between 
 us which is evident in people between whom too much 
 and too little has happened." 
 
 Lady Isabel had taken up her sunshade from the 
 bench beside her and the gesture seemed to put an 
 end to their exchange. 
 
 "No, not even in any citation of the past can you 
 appeal to me!" she said easily. "You re marvellous, 
 Francis, but I ve finished with you! I m glad we had 
 our few minutes together; it s the first time we ve 
 exchanged a word in ages, isn t it? And of course 
 you know that in reality I ve never finished with you! 
 There s Mamma, lying in wait for you; do you see? 
 Your wife s too magnificent. Good heavens, what lace ! " 
 She had advanced a step beyond him, and she turned. 
 "As for Mrs. Devon, look out! Oh, mt for her, but 
 for her egoism. It s worse than yours!" 
 
 Passmore s eyes followed her gesture. "She looks, 
 in that deep violet colour, as if she were the complete 
 actress, doesn t she? Oh, not as all women look 
 actresses to-day, but as if all her roles were real!" 
 
 Lady Isabel s head tilted critically. "No your real 
 actress immolates herself, she dedicates herself to her 
 interpretation; Mrs. Devon s only interest is to glance 
 over her shoulder and see how much she s impressing 
 her audience. . . . Come; there are too many people 
 you must speak to!" 
 
 She had threaded her way, amongst the scattered 
 people, as she spoke, with a word here and there, 
 
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 and a whisper, as she passed him, to her younger 
 brother who, with his greyish hair and beard ruffled, 
 was fixing his large shell spectacles on the Swedish 
 biologist with whom he was in deep discussion that 
 he must remember his manners and talk to Lady 
 Passmore, and had approached the lower end of the 
 terrace. As she paused, close to Olive, her instinc 
 tive retraction of cordiality was arrested. Young 
 Lady Harringford, who had brought her to lunch, had 
 just left, and Olive was alone. She had been looking 
 down to the lawn, across the balustrade of the terrace, 
 and in the face she turned and raised, at Isabel s ad 
 vance, there seemed to linger for an instant the residue 
 of her thoughts. Her beauty appeared to Isabel as 
 intact and unchangeable as she had remembered it. 
 Her penetration had then divined that under the 
 younger woman s dominant certitude there was the rest 
 less movement of a force without direction. Yet her 
 eyes were now definitely brushed by the nascent realisa 
 tion of an insecurity. Some inner pressure had added 
 a touch of strain to the angles of her lips and darkened 
 her glance, as if the steady consistency of her limita 
 tions had begun to reach her consciousness; and Isabel 
 felt her curiosity rise into play, before the suggestion. 
 
 Olive rose at once, with her look softening under 
 her smile of recognition. 
 
 "You don t perhaps quite remember me ? I went 
 to see you during your few hours in New York 
 Her tone, Isabel had to admit, was far from any 
 insistence. From the good taste of her ease to the fall 
 of her long dress, the drop of the feathers against 
 her hair, her lack of jewels, her lack of display of 
 any sort, she had mastered imitation, to the closest 
 
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 point; yet wouldn t Ames have said Isabel asked her 
 self the sudden question that it was imitation and 
 not subtlety? 
 
 She warmed her voice, as she responded. "I not 
 only remember you, but I was so sorry when I realised, 
 before luncheon, that you were you, that my sister-in- 
 law had had the pleasure of bringing you to us, and not 
 I. My mother is delighted that you came. We seldom 
 see anything so lovely, you know! Yes, of course, I ve 
 the keenest memory of our talk in New York." She 
 had dropped into the seat beside Olive. "You came 
 to see me at the very kind suggestion of our mutual 
 friend, Father Ames." 
 
 Olive s eyes met hers for an instant and then turned 
 to an urn of the salmon-coloured flowers beside them. 
 She took up a long trail of geranium vine and drew it 
 through her fingers before she spoke. 
 
 "Yes. It was just at the tine of my conversion." 
 
 "I remember that in a note to me, soon afterwards, 
 he said you had entered the Church. And now, I -sup 
 pose you have arrived," Isabel s look was not unkind, 
 "to conquer London!" 
 
 Olive smiled and her eyes again shifted to the lawns 
 below. "Yes, or to be conquered by it. My husband, 
 my little daughter and I were in Paris all winter- 
 where it s strange enough to me, but not strange like 
 this. Here I m scarcely able to get my breath. 
 Oh, it doesn t make one thrilled; it s crushing, enor 
 mous!" 
 
 "But anyone so charming as you finds it easy enough 
 to reduce! " said Isabel lightly. "I m sure you re doing 
 it. Minnie says you dine out every night!" 
 
 Olive s look slowly turned to her. In their direct 
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 exchange of regard it deepened to an irony and a mis 
 trust, Isabel was surprised to see, of herself. 
 
 "I think you will understand why I am at such a 
 particular disadvantage here; I am, and you see it. 
 It s not that I m a stranger, a passer-by, a restless 
 inconsequent being. Many of us are that, and yet we 
 manage to attach ourselves. No I m just wise enough 
 to see the uselessness of us all. I like us better when 
 we stay at home, unsophisticated and raw. Even when 
 we re transplanted, we re accidental; oh, I don t mean 
 only Americans! One can t dispose of us in any one 
 nation. I mean all of us who are eternally unrooted 
 and displaced." 
 
 "Yes London s not the city for the displaced; 
 you re right. It has its cruelties, hasn t it? And 
 even to people who so belong to it. . . ." 
 
 Isabel s smile was reminiscent. She was comparing 
 the Olive who had sat, so stiff in spite of her apparent 
 ease, and talked with her in the stiffest tone, in the 
 New York hotel, with these richer ways and this 
 rounder and surer personality. She showed the ripe 
 ness of more varied contacts and a less tart aggression; 
 but fundamentally was she touched, Isabel wondered? 
 
 As her thoughts drifted she could see that Olive s 
 attention had passed for a second beyond her, to 
 the group nearest them on the terrace. A sudden 
 change touched her expression, and Isabel was con 
 scious of an equally sudden warmth in her beauty 
 and a radiation in her vivacity, as if she instinctively 
 responded to the sense of having created an admira 
 tion, even at this distance. She turned back to Isabel 
 in a different tone. 
 
 "We have a little house in Hill street, which my 
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 mother-in-law found for us. I hope you will come to 
 see us there. My husband s international competition 
 for the plans for the inter-allied building in Paris is 
 just on, you know; but when he is really settled here, 
 in a week or so, I shall be so happy if you will lunch 
 or dine. . . ." 
 
 Isabel rose. She vaguely wondered if her first 
 impression of the younger woman had not been too 
 delicate. It was difficult to couple so perfect a plas 
 ticity with a progress of sensitiveness or with the 
 difficult stages of any education. She glanced over her 
 shoulder. 
 
 "I must let Sir Francis Passmore speak to you; he s 
 waiting to do so, I see. You ve not met, I think? 
 That s his wife, with the huge jeweled bag. He s 
 recently married the great Mrs. Montagu, you know. 
 She s astonishingly handsome, isn t she? She always 
 sits straight and motionless, like that; as if she were 
 afraid of cracking her surface, my brother Terence 
 says! Her only sign of life seems to be that every now 
 and then that little Pom on her lap barks and snarls. 
 You see it s as absurd a world here as anywhere else! 
 And have you heard any of the Irish debate, in the 
 House? Father says that last night it was so amusing." 
 
 Olive looked at her keenly. Her curiosity had 
 sharply penetrated beneath Isabel s broad smile. In 
 spite of her easy suppositions and habits of a single 
 angle of judgment, something in Isabel had caught and 
 held her. It was like the flash of a beauty in her 
 marked plainness not easily decipherable, she felt, 
 and far from obvious. But even to her usual unalert 
 prescience it was evident that Isabel had somewhere 
 had an encounter, an adventure, an agitation, which 
 
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 accentuated and deepened her. At the thought a stir 
 moved through her mind. 
 
 "I should like to ask " her voice was high and clear, 
 "do you ever have news of Father Ames?" 
 
 Isabel s look changed at once to a visible sympathy. 
 "Ah, no little enough. He s been at the house at 
 Malaga, you know, ever since he took his vows; so his 
 brother the Archbishop said, only the other day, to 
 Mamma. No, of course his silence and ours must be 
 absolute. There was some talk, a month or two ago, 
 of his being given permission to come to England and 
 see his family because of the grave illness of his sister. 
 But one never knows one never hears. She s Sister 
 Martha of the Cross, you know, with the Dominicans. 
 She can t live more than a few weeks, at most; such 
 a gay wild creature as she was, Ernestine Ames . . ." 
 she turned, at a step behind them. "I must go to see 
 how Papa is faring with our Serene Highness, whom 
 we ve a little on our hands; she s rather a dear, isn t 
 she? And here you are, Francis!" 
 
 Passmore had taken the seat Isabel left, with no 
 response to her comment beyond his smile. As Olive s 
 eyes turned back to him his silence, beneath the 
 deliberation of his manner, seemed to her as much 
 of his particular quality as the rapidity and concentra 
 tion of his glance, as she had caught it to-day and, 
 on the preceding evening, had felt its directness down 
 the length of a long dinner table. He had the easy 
 infractions of rule of his type. His look, as she met 
 it, was at this closer range so denned in its simplicity 
 that she had never imagined so perfect an adherence 
 to the nudity of plain dealing, and she detached her 
 
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 thoughts, with an effort, from the memory which had 
 touched them. 
 
 "I ve unfortunately only a moment," he began, 
 "I ve a committee at half past three but I want to 
 tell you the pleasure it has been to me, both last night 
 and to-day, to see you; I mean, of course, merely to 
 look at you. You ll think I ve cast manners to the 
 winds. One does, you know, with a person like you!" 
 
 His tone made a gulf so unexpectedly wide between 
 itself and her last words with Isabel, that it held 
 Olive for a moment motionless; he had touched his 
 words with an insinuation as definite as his look. 
 
 "I m afraid I must tell you that it s fortunate, in 
 that case, that it doesn t seem wise that you should 
 do more!" 
 
 Her voice had a note of firmness which did not 
 escape him, for he made a gesture of amused resigna 
 tion. 
 
 "No, probably you re right. You d find me very 
 little, stripped of my courage, and I should find you 
 were less lovely as I saw you oftener. It s really 
 inexcusable that I should be as rude as this! You re 
 keen on prerogatives and not on form in America, 
 aren t you? That s the inevitable result, I suppose, 
 in a country where freedom has been too easy to get 
 and too hard to keep." His eyes half closed. "That 
 colour s extraordinary, you know; it suits you amaz 
 ingly." 
 
 Olive waited an instant. She had felt, the night 
 before, the sudden sense of being affected by his 
 admiration, brief as it had been; and as he spoke she 
 had known that her eyes softened to a warmer brown 
 and that the colour touched her pallor, as clearly as 
 
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 she had noted the fact that the other guests had seen 
 Passmore approach her and the interest which his 
 moves elicited. The gradations in her responses had, 
 in the last months, been refined in their variations. 
 Yet, as her smile quivered under the assurance of his, 
 it had her faint touch of irony. She turned her face 
 to the gardens; what was she drifting to, she wondered, 
 that she had passed to this sort of acceptance without 
 differentiation, and that she was so far beyond either 
 the real provocation or the real indifference which are 
 the actions and reactions of feeling? 
 
 "I wanted only to pay you my tribute, before I 
 went," Passmore was continuing; he hesitated. "Of 
 course you ought, you know, to have a history; or 
 perhaps you oughtn t! It s more delightful to have 
 all the signs of one without the wear; and you don t 
 look," he again waited, "you don t look as if you d 
 think anything worth the wear!" 
 
 Olive returned his directness of manner; her own, 
 she knew, was the more deeply sardonic of the two. 
 "At least one would always be sure," she said briefly, 
 "that the wear missed you. You d not stay long enough 
 to see it. You must let me say that I don t see you 
 dealing in mysteries, Sir Francis!" 
 
 Passmore rose, as he laughed. "Even amongst your 
 country-people I ve never seen anyone so tremendously 
 intellectualised and so profoundly ingenuous! You re 
 no mystery, dear Mrs. Devon you re only ignorant. 
 There! The Princess is going, I see, and so I can be 
 off. My wife s opening a bazaar somewhere, and she s 
 promised to drop me. . . ." 
 
 [291]
 
 XXIII 
 
 OLIVE had ordered her car, as she left the 
 courtyard of B rough House, to turn away from 
 the park and to run slowly, for the next hour, 
 through the streets. She was conscious that she wanted 
 the sense of anonymity which comes in a crowd; and 
 with her eyes following the flow of traffic and the inter 
 mingling figures on the curb, she let her thoughts 
 wander. 
 
 Since the dim rainy morning when she first stood 
 on the platform at Waterloo and watched Devon busy 
 himself with finding a shelter for little Beatrix and 
 her nurse and struggle with the complexities of rescuing 
 their luggage, she had felt, above the throng of the 
 people in the station and the noises of arrival and 
 departure, how differently London was to touch her 
 imagination. Paris hung for her in a haze of delicate 
 light. The glancing intelligence of the French mind 
 remained for her like a shining crystal, which she had 
 fingered with what she knew as the finest form of her 
 curiosity. But even in the dull morning, with the 
 fatigue of the crossing behind her and so little to 
 shape the accent of her impressions, she was at once 
 conscious of the dissemblances between this civilisa 
 tion and the enrichment and penalty of the French 
 civilisation. The very light in the dark sky was not 
 as clear but deeper, not as glancing but more lasting, 
 than the Paris light, as if it conserved reticences 
 rather than exposed them. In the close, grimed houses 
 
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 there was a quality which seemed to her so remote and 
 so indifferent of appreciation that it gave them an air 
 of incomparable isolation, and in the isolation itself 
 there lurked the weight of greatness rather than of 
 brilliancy. 
 
 Her impressions had deepened day by day; so 
 penetratively that she had never been more conscious 
 of reticences in herself, as if to be in a place where all 
 the shadows had form and life deepened the outline of 
 her own evanescence and made her receptivity more 
 lasting. Mrs. Devon had chanced to be in London for 
 the spring. It was a season she frequently spent there, 
 at the most expensive of hotels, and occupied in a 
 perpetuated series of engagements. With her head at 
 its familiar angle above the high pearl collar about her 
 throat and the bird-like motions of her pink and white 
 hands, her appearance seemed to Olive more than ever 
 indicative of all the absurd motions of her mind. Yet 
 her small glancing look, as it rested on Olive s deepened 
 beauty, had its power of penetration. The extreme 
 limitation of her range, Olive sometimes thought, 
 enabled her to see the single point she got with perfect 
 exactness. Her sole comment was that her daughter- 
 in-law had evidently mastered a new arrangement of 
 her hair; but she set to work, with complete willing 
 ness and good humour, to find them a little house, for 
 the next two months, and through the time when Devon 
 could excusably say he was occupied with his competi 
 tive schemes, between London and Paris. 
 
 What was more, she had secured for them, by means 
 of her small machinery a word dropped here and 
 there at a lunch table, and a telephone message or 
 two a house which, as Olive admitted, could not 
 
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 have shown more fully the signs of her particular form 
 of astuteness. The Devons needed, as she insisted, 
 something much more serious in tone than she would 
 have needed herself, and what had determined her 
 selection was that the house in Hill street was small, 
 quiet and grave. Its air of compactness had character, 
 the furniture was of a charming Adam, the nursery 
 for Beatrix was light and the servants were responsible. 
 She showed in such matters the same minute efficiency 
 which she showed in the innumerable fittings at her 
 dressmakers . She accepted Devon s gratitude for 
 these services with the same air of puzzled wonder 
 with which she accepted Olive s sharp comments of 
 approval or disapproval. What had evidently seized 
 her fugitive attention was the baby, who in the last 
 months had developed a pale gold prettiness, the image 
 of her own. It was evidently, as Devon said, not the 
 child s increasing personality or her clinging charm 
 which impressed themselves on her glancing con 
 sciousness, so much as her own potentialities in the 
 position of a grandmother. It had renewed her sense 
 of youth to be told how incredibly young she looked 
 to be in such a relation; and where she had at first 
 regarded Beatrix s existence as an indelicate reminder 
 and had invented pet names to avoid the title of grand 
 mother, she now insisted on it with persistency, took 
 Beatrix to drive with her every day, and compounded 
 from their devoted relation a philosophy to dispose 
 of all her sentimental disasters. 
 
 Olive sometimes looked at them together, with so 
 slight a seeming separation of any of the vitality of 
 experience between them, and wondered why she was 
 so unable to get from the touch of the child s head, 
 
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 which rested so closely against Mrs. Devon s laces and 
 silver foxes, any clarifying of her own turbulent uncer 
 tainties. Devon s constant preoccupation for Beatrix s 
 care was more comprehensible to her than the complete 
 dependence he felt on her existence. With her latent 
 conviction that she was being outdone in something 
 which was by right her due, she tried, several times, 
 to sit in the evening by the nursery fire and to hold 
 between her own the pink fragrant hands, warm from 
 their bath, in a determination to blow her feeling into 
 a flame. But her mind was too restless and her 
 patience too thin; and she laid Beatrix back in her 
 bed, again and again, with her rapid frown. The child 
 seemed to her too plainly contradictory. She felt her 
 to be the living sign of her impulse, which had long 
 since evaporated not for Devon, but for the fulfilment 
 of rules of experience which Father Ames had tried 
 to teach her; and what she was more conscious of 
 than anything else was the reactive sense of her own 
 failure. 
 
 It had been easily in accordance with Devon s plans 
 that they should arrange to spend the spring in London ; 
 at least he had so perfectly acquiesced, when she made 
 the suggestion, that she had been surprised at the dry 
 smile with which he greeted her assumption that he 
 wanted to go. 
 
 "I do it so well now," he said, absently, "that you 
 don t question my complete participation; and of 
 course you re right. I want to go," his eyes rose for 
 one of their rapid looks at her, "because you want to." 
 
 They had been sitting at dinner, with the table drawn 
 to the fire, on a rainy March night when the comfort 
 of the little apartment in the rue Pierre Charron had 
 
 [295]
 
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 seemed more than usually warm and full of charm. 
 But as soon as the words had left his lips, it had been 
 evident from Devon s face that in Olive s uncontrollable 
 movement of vexation, he had discerned the fact that 
 he had passed a milestone. It was for the first time 
 apparent that his feeling for her was beginning to 
 irritate her. Where before she had brushed by it, 
 with the security of indifference, she had none the 
 less counted and insisted on its tribute. She had 
 dropped her fork to her plate; and something in the 
 ring it made sent his thoughts back, no less than hers, 
 in the flash of an instant, to her irritation with her 
 father, at Ware, on the evening they had told him 
 of their engagement. 
 
 His indissoluble reticence quivered for a moment be 
 neath the touch of the recollection, and then gave way. 
 
 "Do you mean always to dispose of me; or perhaps 
 not even that to cease to notice me?" 
 
 "I don t understand what you mean," she had broken 
 in impatiently. 
 
 "You re tired, my dear child, and that makes you 
 less astute than usual." He rose and threw down his 
 napkin. The look he bent on her was charged with 
 a quality beyond her definition. "You have completely 
 the upper hand. You ve every advantage. But there s 
 one thing don t mistake my acquiescence for care 
 lessness! It s taken all my strength, you know not 
 my weakness to accept the things you ve imposed 
 on me." 
 
 "I know it s impossible for you to explain why I do or 
 don t do things . . ." she began, but he cut her short. 
 
 "Come, Olive, you are less astute than usual! You 
 know, if you know anything, that if I didn t so perfectly 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 understand you, I shouldn t bank all my future on it." 
 Their eyes for a moment retraced, in their quick give 
 and take, the stages of the recent weeks, and she felt 
 her look waver. "I could explain to you everything, 
 even yourself," he ended, with his brevity unusually 
 sharp; then he drew out his watch. "I shan t finish 
 dinner I m off. They re doing some new thing of 
 Ravel s at the Comique. . . ." 
 
 As her gaze passed over the movement of the crowds 
 and up to the afternoon sky, she vividly relived the 
 reaction of that moment, when he had closed the door 
 and left her, with the candles and flowers and the lux 
 ury of their dinner so suddenly gone. She had wondered 
 then, as she wondered now, whether all the stages of 
 her development were to come to her not by growth 
 but by these hard contradictions. She knew that, in 
 the last months, her thoughts had become less sensitive. 
 The conviction that her character was moulding into 
 lines less and less malleable increased in her almost 
 daily. Outwardly she felt herself little changed. Her 
 dominance was even quicker, in the immediacy of 
 its effect, and the broadening of her contacts had given 
 it more point and form. But she had the persistent 
 sense that, even in the brilliancy of her weeks in 
 France, she had had a less fine receptivity than in the 
 period when she had been so eager to be swayed and 
 influenced by Father Ames; and that to him she had 
 brought something less susceptive and sincere than even 
 the crudity of her girlhood. 
 
 It was not Rivaudiere s loss which she had most felt, 
 in the chill of the afternoon at Fontainebleau which had 
 so clearly terminated their possibilities of feeling. Even 
 then, and in the empty silence in which they had driven 
 
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 back to town, she had realised that one of the torments 
 of her incapacity was that she could not experience the 
 wrench or depletion of a live regret, in the knowledge 
 that their relation was as plainly ended as if it had been 
 struck a blow. But she had had a humiliating con 
 sciousness that she was hurt, less intact and less secure 
 and with her loveliness tarnished. What was slipping 
 from her was all the quickness of differentiation, the 
 stimulation of taste and the refinement of pleasure, 
 which Rivaudiere had carried so like a waving banner. 
 She had lost in him something beyond himself; and 
 in his complete incapacity to comprehend her, his per 
 fect refusal to be involved in any experiment of feeling 
 except a real one, she felt herself more deeply degraded 
 than she could have believed degradation possible. 
 They met a few times more in Paris, for his care for 
 appearances was as natural to him as his breathing; 
 but the flawlessness of his politeness, his easy inclusion 
 of Devon and his sudden engagement to play polo at 
 Biarritz, lay like a scar on the fine tissue of her mind. 
 She turned from it as instinctively as she turned from 
 her memories of Father Ames, and with a humiliation 
 almost as deep. 
 
 Her innate response to the stimulation of what was 
 new to her sprang to life, however, in her first days 
 in London. With the same pliancy with which she 
 had responded to the touch of Paris, she felt herself 
 fall into the key of her present surroundings. Her 
 natural astuteness marked for her the limits of how 
 far this should be apparent and placed the accent of 
 sophistication on her reticences and refusals; but 
 something in the quick, surface dealing with the human 
 exemplification, rather than with the French criticism 
 
 [298]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 and comment, was of peculiar appeal to her at the 
 moment. Mrs. Devon was always ready with a sug 
 gestion or an invitation, or had someone especially 
 in mind whom it would amuse to see her. Olive noted 
 that her mother-in-law had long since given up any 
 attempt to deal with her except on the basis of how 
 she affected other people, as if she were a curiosity to 
 be produced for an inspection which need never be 
 repeated. She was ready enough to live these agitated 
 days, conscious everywhere either of admiration or 
 of the resentment which always indicated, in her 
 opinion, the same tribute, to absorb herself in the 
 multiplicity of her engagements, in driving out to Hur- 
 lingham or in the selection of her summer frocks. 
 Sometimes, when she stood before a picture, with Mrs. 
 Devon s ceaseless readiness of comment beside her and 
 an eye always alert to see who composed the crowd of 
 a vanishing day, she reminded herself that she was not 
 seeing what was in front of her; that it was weeks 
 since she had used her eyes, weeks since she had read, 
 and that music struck her eardrums and no further. 
 If she caught sight of herself, outlined against other 
 figures, her appearance itself seemed written over with 
 the progress of these processes. Her beauty had a 
 stronger accent. In spite of her maintenance of its 
 delicacy, it was heavier in outline and coarser in 
 effect; with the same coarsening, she sometimes told 
 herself, with one of her sharp turns of recognition, that 
 one saw in the progression of narcotism. 
 
 She had agreed to be at home by four if she wanted 
 to join Devon and his mother, who were driving out 
 in Mrs. Devon s motor to see the tennis at Wimbledon. 
 
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 But her reflections had left her listless, and with her 
 more and more constant touch of nervous irritability 
 she watched the little clock in front of her pass the 
 hour and then called to the chauffeur the Hill street 
 address. 
 
 She was indeterminately aware that the parlour 
 maid, at the door, looked at her with an odd suggestion 
 of both evasion and curiosity, as she murmured that 
 tea was in the drawing room. Olive went up the stairs 
 and opened the door on the small brownish room, with 
 the afternoon sun striking through the long windows 
 and lighting the clusters of flowering plants and the 
 yellow inlay of the old brown furniture. A man was 
 standing on the hearth rug, in evident expectation of 
 her entrance. He threw down his cigarette and turned, 
 as she closed the door; and she saw that it was Pass- 
 more. 
 
 It was immediate to her that his errand was beyond 
 the need, for the instant, of any comment. His single 
 look, which he maintained and deepened, caught her 
 as firmly as a grasp with its significances. She had 
 become familiar enough with his face, in the illustra 
 tions of papers, in public, across the House, and last 
 night at dinner and to-day at lunch; but what the bald 
 ness of his quick smile revealed was something far 
 more, as the criticism of life she had inherited could 
 not deny, than any temporary and personal purpose. 
 He was representative, she felt, the perfect example of 
 a mind with power and without imagination, which used 
 fineness and never responded to it. In the rawness of 
 his assurance and the security with which he stood, 
 watching in her face the effect of his sudden presence, 
 she could feel all that had made him and all that might 
 
 [300]
 
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 at any second unmake him. It shot through her mind 
 that, in her search for feeling and her eager responsive 
 ness to the surface stimulus, she had become almost 
 imitatively like the people who influenced her; and she 
 wondered, with her wonder sustained for a long second, 
 if she were to become like Passmore. 
 
 "You see, my dear Mrs. Devon," he broke the 
 silence easily, "I wanted to belie as soon as possible the 
 theory that we shouldn t again meet; and on my way 
 from my meeting I stopped, to see if your plans had 
 changed with your husband s. . . ." 
 
 Olive remained where she had paused, with her arm 
 over the back of one of the chairs by the hearth. The 
 futility of any of the usual expressions and comments 
 struck her so completely that for a moment she did 
 not speak. 
 
 "My plans changed? I don t understand!" she 
 said briefly. 
 
 "Ah, then I m glad I waited! Your servants said 
 you d shortly be in, and so I made up my mind to give 
 you at least a second or two to arrive before I left. 
 Oddly enough, when I stopped for an instant at my 
 wife s bazaar for whatever it was, the first person I ran 
 across was your charming mother-in-law; and she told 
 me, in a distracted way, this news which I seem to be 
 the first to bring you." 
 
 Olive s eyebrows lifted a little. "Well?" she asked. 
 
 "It appears that your father-in-law s very ill 
 they ve had two or three cables, all in a rush ; and your 
 mother-in-law and your husband are sailing instantly, 
 at dawn to-morrow, or something like that, to join him. 
 Mrs. Devon was quite delightful in wanting to share 
 with me the confidences of her life and to tell me why 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 she must go to her husband, whether he wanted her or 
 no! But I hadn t, unfortunately, the time. I merely 
 said I hoped it didn t mean you d also go; and she said 
 she thought certainly not, and flew off to make her 
 arrangements. They ll be here in a moment, probably, 
 all excitement and activity; meanwhile I wanted, for 
 just a second, to see you. . . ." 
 
 The step he had taken nearer her was his sole 
 motion; yet under his glance she felt, above the rapid 
 whirl of her thoughts, the closer pressure of his insist 
 ence. "I hope," he pursued, "that it s definite that 
 you won t go?" 
 
 She answered him immediately. "No. I shan t go." 
 As their silence again fell, something made her 
 conscious that her look was giving him a response 
 more definite than her words. Her head had gradually 
 lifted, with its backward tilt emphasising the depth of 
 her eyes and the firmness of her chin. She knew that 
 the expression with which she met his was as beyond 
 resentment and beyond any insistence on his disregard 
 of conformities, as she knew the tension of the few 
 seconds behind them. She had, she felt, a smile lighter 
 than his own, of a deeper derision, and at a wreckage 
 of things he couldn t measure. It evidently caught his 
 attention for a quick second. She could see him note 
 it, with a touch of incomprehension, and then return 
 to the simplicity of his usual judgments; and he 
 opened the door and left her, with his voice breaking, 
 in the hall and in earshot of the waiting parlour-maid, 
 into expressions of regret that they had been put to all 
 this worry and confusion. 
 
 [302]
 
 XXIV 
 
 OLIVE was still standing with her arm across 
 the chair and her eyes set on the sensitive 
 designs of the shifting sunlight on the floor 
 when, a few moments later, Devon came in. 
 
 Even with her attention so heavily concentrated at 
 a sole point, she saw at once the gravity of the line of 
 preoccupation drawn between his eyes. He dropped 
 into the armchair at the farther side of the fire, with 
 a breath of fatigue. 
 
 "Heavens, that was luck but I ve done it! Mother 
 hasn t stopped here, on her way to Claridge s, to tell 
 you? We re off, she and I, from Liverpool to-mor 
 row. By the merest chance I got two cabins and put 
 all our arrangements through before the offices closed. 
 I had a cable just after you d left for your lunch, and 
 I rang her up and found she d had two, within the hour. 
 Father s gravely ill. We must face it clearly that the 
 facts are all against him. A bad bronchial pneumonia 
 and at sixty-eight, and with his habits of neglecting 
 himself ..." 
 
 He seemed finally to notice her, and the face he 
 turned to her softened. 
 
 "I knew you d understand that I had to decide it 
 instantly. If all goes well, I can be back here, and 
 finish up my work in Paris, within three weeks or so; 
 if it doesn t that must take care of itself. There 
 wasn t time to talk it over with you. But I felt of 
 course that you wouldn t want to go. . . ." 
 
 She murmured how sorry she was, and how desirous 
 [303]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 to help him, how hard it seemed, with the final days 
 of the competition at hand and with all his plans so 
 adjusted. But he caught her up. 
 
 "Oh, I can think of nothing but that wretched 
 uncomfortable little house, strewn with jades and 
 dust. It was the Wickford doctor who evidently 
 insisted on telegraphing; and I ve cabled the two best 
 specialists I could think of to go on from New York, 
 immediately. . . It s heavily on my mind that I ve 
 not been square about it not right. I know him so well 
 I know all his helplessnesses and his shyness; and 
 yet I ve been off for months, living my own life 
 
 "You ve scarcely been doing that," she interrupted 
 him with one of her sudden turns. "It s been mine." 
 
 His smile caught her eyes. "Well, it s the same 
 thing. I ve had my ideas, vague as they ve seemed; 
 and I ve been set on following them through to an 
 end. . . . And now this comes !" His quizzical look 
 deepened. "I really should have waited till the Satur 
 day boat, so as to make things more secure for your 
 comfort, if mother hadn t insisted on rushing off 
 to-morrow. Nothing will deter her. She s bent on a 
 scene, on some drama of reconciliation; and you can 
 guess what that will mean! It s an emotional pos 
 sibility which stirs all her imagination ... I think 
 the best thing you can do, if you will, is to go to her 
 now and let her unburden herself of all the feeling 
 which she ll have accumulated since I left her." 
 
 He had risen, as he glanced at his watch, and coming 
 over to her he laid his hands on her shoulders. "You ll 
 be all right?" was all he said. But his look at her 
 penetrated like a swiftly flung light amongst the 
 shadows in her mind. 
 
 [304]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 She felt herself sway uncertainly, with her will sud 
 denly dissolved in a complete fatigue. It seemed 
 impossible for her to frame any words. 
 
 Devon held his glance on her. "Of course I know 
 how safe you are here, and I ll leave everything in 
 order for you at the bank. And there are so many 
 people to do things for you and give you a good time. 
 It s only my absurd idea about you, always, you 
 know!" His smile showed again. "For all your seem 
 ing confidence and independence, you ve something 
 impending I m always imagining poised over you, 
 like a poised fate. ..." 
 
 She was conscious, with her rarely stirred prehen- 
 siveness, that he meant it to be the instant of their 
 good-bye. For a second the desire to make him some 
 sign held her forcibly; then her disbelief in even her 
 own pain reasserted itself, and she felt the moment 
 pass. 
 
 "The car s still waiting, I suppose?" she said. "Then 
 I ll go to your mother at once." 
 
 They left the next morning. As the train pulled out 
 from the Euston platform, and with her last vision of 
 Mrs. Devon s small agitated hand, waving in the 
 various directions of the friends who had come to see 
 her off, and of Devon s preoccupied face, over her 
 shoulder, Olive had the sharpest sense of the closure 
 of a stage of her existence. On her return to the house 
 in Hill street, its silence, on the sunny morning, after 
 the constant stir of trunks and messengers, seemed to 
 her symbolic. Beatrix was in the park with her nurse; 
 the regularity of her small hours never impinged, in 
 any case, on Olive s attention, and she sat down at her 
 desk, in the drawing room, to answer a few notes and 
 
 [305]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 rearrange some of her engagements, in view of Devon s 
 departure, with a sudden drop of relaxation. But as 
 she looked across the room, to where Passmore had 
 stood for their few moments exchange, she felt her 
 expression harden into fixity. Her pen fell from her 
 fingers. In the long concentration in which she stared 
 at the empty space which he had so peopled, she meas 
 ured, for the first time, her change of balance. In her 
 decisive determination for acquirement, she saw that 
 she was prepared to yield the integrity of her will to his 
 management. She felt all the irony of the thought that 
 this should be the most difficult form of her surrender. 
 No control she had ever put on herself was harder than 
 this consent to nullify her own choice and her own judg 
 ments. Yet she understood that it was only by an 
 acquiescence such as a person of his type exacted that 
 she could penetrate and possess the realities most 
 people knew and of which she was still so ignorant. In 
 the stillness of the house, with the low murmur of the 
 streets coming through the open windows and the room 
 so quiet that she heard the faint stir of the flowers on 
 the table beside her in the draught, the tick of the little 
 clock on the desk caught her half conscious attention. 
 She dropped her eyes to it. It was an old French one, 
 scarcely more than the length of her hand, with delicate 
 gold-bronze figures traced against the fawn-coloured 
 marble. It had one day caught Devon s interest, in 
 one of the old shops he frequented, and he had brought 
 it home to her, with one of his vague comments and his 
 air of waiting to see her pleasure. He had given her 
 everything he had ever offered her in just this way, 
 she recalled the various things he had made special 
 gifts in the house in New York, her furs, her rings, all 
 
 [306]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 showing the mark of his exigent taste. His look, as 
 he put them in her hands, seemed to her always to 
 have contained an element of half amused doubt; 
 not so much, she could have fancied, as to whether the 
 gift were equal to her but equal to his feeling for 
 her. . . . But the sound of the hurried hands carried 
 her thought beyond these facts. She was across the 
 intervening spaces, as she followed the thread of recol 
 lection, and back beside her grandfather s bed at Ware, 
 with the little china clock making its fatuous sound on 
 the mantel and his dim deep gaze set on her with the 
 peculiar intensity of the moment. Time, it seemed to 
 her, had suddenly flung about her again its network of 
 enclosure. The little she had done and had, the per 
 vasive restlessness of her hope, the nervousness of an 
 aspiration which was all individual, drew with a sharp 
 stroke across her stretched perceptions, like the bow 
 of a violin which emitted no sound. . . . 
 
 She was fully expectant of a message from Passmore, 
 during the day. Yet she had no word from him until 
 the middle of the following week. One afternoon in 
 Bond street, his tall figure suddenly detached itself 
 from the crowd, as he paused to speak to a man who 
 had arrested him; and the instant her eyes lit on him 
 she realised how potently the memory of their interview 
 lay in her mind and how keenly she was keyed to the 
 expectation of what his next sign to her would be. She 
 realised something more. He turned deliberately, as 
 her car was held by the traffic, and bowed to her. Even 
 across the distance between them, his manner seemed to 
 her charged with definiteness and decision; and in a 
 flash there was apparent to her the fact that his coarse 
 ness was only the coarser for having its inflexions. The 
 
 [307]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 courtesy of his smile carried an assumption which no 
 broader statement could have equalled; and his post 
 ponement of an attempt to see her had, in the light 
 of her growing knowledge of him, a sudden implication 
 that in the delay he was only giving her time to realise 
 the assurance of facts as to whose ultimacy he felt no 
 doubt. 
 
 When she got back to Hill street she found that he 
 had already telephoned a message for her, as if their 
 mute interchange had decided him. He would call 
 for her in his car early the next afternoon, the message 
 ran, to run her out to the country for tea, if she could 
 arrange to be free. As the maid recited the phrase, 
 Olive s smile rose at the final words. Their careful 
 courtesy, she thought, could not impose on her cyn 
 icism. He would continue to make his concessions 
 to appearance perfect; but he would not for a moment 
 let her forget the fact that they were to impress 
 the servants rather than to placate her. She was 
 drawing off her gloves in front of her dressing table, 
 as the woman spoke, and she caught in her mirror the 
 reflection of her eyes. Something in them held her. 
 She saw behind her the accustomed room, the white 
 ness of the curtains, the maid s face over her shoulder 
 and the gold-topped bottles and boxes in front of her. 
 Yet all the security of habit and the protection of the 
 presuppositions in which she had lived seemed suddenly 
 annihilated by his complete confidence in her acqui 
 escence. She was as conscious as if she had traced 
 the lines connecting them that it was this sense which 
 made her fling down her gloves and say: "Yes tele 
 phone Sir Francis Passmore that I can arrange to be 
 disengaged at three o clock." 
 
 [308]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 The afternoon had turned hazy and softer than the 
 sunlight when Passmore, at the door of the little Inn 
 at Horsham, had given her a cushion and put a rug 
 about her knees for the drive home. He had insisted 
 on stopping in the long village street, with the closed 
 house fronts facing them with the English imperturb 
 ability, and going into the deserted parlour of the Inn 
 for tea, so as not to have the bother, as he put it, of 
 being roped behind the great iron gates which gave so 
 magnificently on the more open high-road. 
 
 "The trouble with me is, you see, that I m uncon- 
 cealable," he had exclaimed tartly. "Of course Isabel 
 Bourdas would say that most of the time I like it; 
 but on this occasion it would probably mean that we 
 were let in for a huge family gathering of Godlys, 
 who are always, you know, here. Oh, they ll discover 
 me, even in this place; but not until it s too late to 
 annoy us. So if you don t mind execrable teacake . . ." 
 
 The words drew from Olive the same smile she had 
 met him with, at her door. She had the sense that she 
 was as removed from him as she felt the wrapping of 
 her dark veils to remove her; yet something revealed to 
 her that their separation itself was part of the planning 
 of his astuteness. He had driven her out in an open 
 motor, with his chauffeur behind them, in reach of 
 every word. Their talk across the stolid round table 
 of the little parlour might have taken place before a 
 crowd. Passmore had touched lightly on one or two 
 people she knew, on her portrait, which was just on 
 exhibition, by a clever young friend of Devon s 
 "your husband s got an eye, it appears; do you know 
 it? Terence Bourdas says he has the best natural 
 taste he knows . . . they ve met over prints, it 
 
 [309]
 
 seems;" on the inaccuracies in the newest book of 
 historical gossip, and on some of the things which, in 
 America, had impressed him extraordinarily when he 
 was there as special envoy. "You re an amazing people, 
 aren t you? Admirable, serious . . . that s as I saw 
 you, with purpose, fairness and uplift in everything you 
 do! I don t at all make you out as hard-hearted or 
 vain or selfish, but just as very middle-class. You re 
 not young, you re raw. Youth knows so much by 
 instinct France is eternally young; and even your 
 vices seemed to me so sadly inefficient. The aristo 
 cratic sins are the worst, you know. . . ." And he 
 passed on to speak of a young General who had just 
 gone out to try his hand at the Turkish situation and 
 of what he hoped might shape itself as a policy at a 
 forth-coming Council of Ambassadors at the Hague. 
 She felt the flattery of his easy allusions, but he never 
 for a moment flattered her. Her grandfather had given 
 her the habit of a political curiosity and of political 
 opinions; but when she questioned Passmore or 
 expressed a view, he put her easily aside. Not only the 
 assurance of a habit of defence but also his personal 
 computation of her seemed to bar the way, with com 
 plete defmiteness, to the entrance of any note which 
 he did not determine; and under her consciousness of 
 his relegation of her she had felt her flush rise, beneath 
 the folds of gauze which covered her face. 
 
 His conveyances to her had been so entirely com 
 pounded of implications that she was alive to the light 
 change in his manner, as he took his place beside her 
 for the drive back to town. His sudden observance 
 concerning her comfort had struck her; and his glance, 
 as she caught it through her veil, had a deeper commit- 
 
 [310]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 ment. For the first miles he was silent. Every now and 
 then, with a gesture the man behind them must miss, he 
 drew up her rug and asked her if she were tired. His 
 voice had none of the accent of solicitude, but of an 
 intimacy the closer in that it was so terse; and she 
 was not surprised when, as the houses began to gather 
 in the first suburbs, he spoke abruptly and with a 
 definite change of tone. 
 
 "One wonders, you know, what all you Americans 
 since we ve been speaking of you get out of life. 
 Most of you are so unwilling to involve yourselves, 
 and above all in the human relations. You, for 
 instance, you re all the curiosity of your mind; where 
 if you were of an older race, you d realise that there s 
 a different shall we say empiricism?" 
 
 She had a defensive determination to draw his words 
 back to their widest issues. 
 
 Don t forget that we ve in America our own 
 methods, as well as you," she spoke uncertainly. "And 
 even if we ve only the illusion of them, at least we ve 
 codified them into a creed!" 
 
 "But you ve codified them! And a codified illusion 
 great heaven, how hideous! Strange, though, that 
 with all your instinct to make codes you never see a 
 fact." He turned with deliberation, in his seat, to face 
 her fully. "You, for instance, you don t see a fact." 
 
 "I see what I consent to see," she said clearly; the 
 play of his words was so perfectly indirect that at one 
 moment she felt she must have mistaken all his insinua 
 tions, and at the next that they were the surest point 
 of his method. 
 
 "Then you miss and of course you know it all the 
 existence of existence. How dull it would be, to live
 
 ASCENT 
 
 only by one s dull determinations! As if it rested with 
 you!" He gave a brief glance, to measure the atten 
 tion of the man over his shoulder. "But of course it 
 does, you know!" 
 
 She met him for a full instant. "Ah, but it doesn t." 
 
 His smile at her suddenly deepened. 
 
 "That s charming of you! You ve a largeness of 
 generosity, a magnificence what is really an imperial 
 quality." 
 
 Olive s face darkened in one of its ready changes. 
 "Yes in the terms of my fate, I sometimes think I 
 have." 
 
 Passmore laughed. "Possibly it sounds better to call 
 it fate!" 
 
 She felt herself caught by an irresistible impulse for 
 frankness, and she turned sharply on him. "Do you 
 see nothing but what s visible nothing but what you 
 can touch?" she broke out. 
 
 "Nothing! I ve found, I admit, that it s the only 
 way which pays." His smile held for an instant more, 
 and then his voice fell into its former key. "And here s 
 London upon us. In a moment we ll be in the worst 
 of crowds. You ve indeed been delightful to come. 
 You re dining at Brough House to-morrow, aren t 
 you? So, by chance, am I. Just what they call a 
 family party, the Duke told me; what a relief after 
 the mob one generally finds there! But the Duchess, 
 who s of course a dear, is never happy unless she s in 
 Piccadilly. . . ." 
 
 [312]
 
 XXV 
 
 THE force of Passmore s tone and its concentra 
 tion, beneath its practised fluency, caught 
 Olive again when she faced him, across the 
 dinner table at Brough House, the next evening. In 
 the intervening hours she had gone ceaselessly over the 
 few sentences of their conversation, its careful attenua 
 tions and its sudden flares of significance. She felt the 
 confusion which his confidence inspired. It was 
 difficult for her to trace the convergence between his 
 rapidity of touch, his easy relegations, and the warmth 
 which so evidently generated them. Her own realism, 
 as she was fully conscious, was as intact in its opera 
 tions as his. She saw him without the slightest illusion 
 to soften his image. His mind seemed to her totally 
 without the embroidery and bloom of comment and 
 bare of any grace of appreciation, and solely a secure 
 instrument for dealing with his own universe. With 
 the increasing obsession of her curiosity as to such 
 methods, she had relived each second of their after 
 noon together. The sense that her nature was exposed 
 to him that because of his own particular qualities he 
 was able to divine her insecurity, her inhibitions, her 
 lack of any physical prescience and the uncertainty of 
 her audacities, had already given her a belief in the 
 fatality of her concessions to him; and she was con 
 scious of a shock of actuality when, as she faced him 
 between the high branched candelabra and over the 
 wide gold epergnes, she heard his voice fall again into
 
 ASCENT 
 
 the same kind of phrase which was so vividly running 
 in her thoughts. 
 
 Every now and then, from her place beside the Duke, 
 she caught Passmore s glance. There lay in it a con 
 viction rather than a message, something evidently 
 allied to their interchange of the day before, and at 
 moments she felt herself slight and uncertain under its 
 import. He was talking constantly, with the ease of 
 his intimacy in the house; and it appeared to her not 
 the smallest of his capacities that he could so per 
 fectly maintain the flow of his comment, his tart 
 friendly give and take with Lord Terence, his affec 
 tionate intolerance of the Duchess and his attention 
 to the Duke, and combine with these an implication 
 to herself, so private yet so definite that her thin 
 shoulders straightened whenever she caught the turn 
 of his head or the motion of his hands. 
 
 The Duchess had for once belied her reputation, 
 and there was gathered about the table only the always 
 large family group, young Lord and Lady Harring- 
 ford, who were up from the country, the Duke s 
 secretary, and Terence and Isabel Bourdas. Olive had 
 measured the implied flattery of this inclusion to 
 cheer her up, as Lady Isabel put it, until she heard 
 better news from Devon and her mother-in-law as 
 carefully as she had measured the effect of her black 
 lace against the magnificent dull gilt of the panelling 
 behind her, the slimness of her silvery shoes and the 
 delicacy of the diamonds in her hair. She was aware 
 that Passmore not only computed these facts, but that 
 her beauty was enhanced for him because of Isabel s 
 admission of her to so warm a friendliness. She felt 
 that throughout the dinner she managed to maintain
 
 ASCENT 
 
 her own tone, in her responses to the old Duke and 
 in her reserves with the Duchess, in spite of the pres 
 sure on her nerves of Passmore s look. Her alert dis- 
 trustfulness divined that there was only one direction 
 from which any question lit on the changes of her 
 face. Once she caught Isabel Bourdas -eyes; and the 
 lack of any repetition of the glance warned her as 
 rapidly as Passmore s insistent care to defer to the 
 raillery of Isabel s tone with him. 
 
 She was too experienced, by now, to dispose of this 
 attitude by assuming it to be a tribute. She knew she 
 could deal more securely with the Duchess s uncon 
 cealed suspicion of anyone who was capable of enjoying 
 the inconvenience and extravagance of displacement, 
 than she could deal with the cordiality of Isabel s 
 assurances. She could not clarify the causes of such 
 a kindness; and when Isabel had for the final time 
 assured her mother and sister-in-law that they were 
 dull and unimaginative and that it took a modern young 
 creature like Mrs. Devon to wake them up, and then 
 turned to her, to ask if she would care to see the 
 Raphael, she had acquiesced readily, with a sense that 
 their moments alone might elucidate her uncertainty 
 for her. 
 
 They had broken up the informal group in one of 
 the small drawing rooms, and Olive had followed Isabel 
 down the corridors to the farthest west end of the 
 house, returning every now and then the brief observa 
 tions Isabel made over her shoulder. 
 
 "It s in the chapel, you know. It has indeed been 
 there ever since we ve existed. Sometimes father talks 
 of moving it, and perhaps Bobby and Minnie may, one 
 of these days or one of their Bobbies and Minnies!
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Certainly they must give up either Trant or this, if 
 taxation goes on at this pace. But thank heaven for 
 the moment it s here ... if you can make it out!" 
 
 She opened a low door, and Olive passed after her 
 into a sudden darkness. All she could discern, in the 
 gloom, was the host lamp, the gleam of gold on the 
 wall behind it, and the dim outline of the worn red 
 velvet chairs and stools. Isabel touched an electric 
 switch, and before them, over the altar, there leapt 
 into radiance the clear face of a rapturous St. Catherine. 
 It was as fresh in its purity as the green of the palm 
 on her shoulder and the deep blues and reds of the 
 robe which fell to her bare feet. The lighting of the 
 chapel was concentrated on the painting, and thin in 
 itself an evidently grudged concession to the darkness 
 of the surrounding buildings; but Olive s dramatic 
 sense instantly seized on the beauty of this seclusion. 
 She thought of the artistocracy of an attitude which 
 could keep so inimitable a treasure here, for the house 
 hold alone, reducing it to its contributive part in the 
 appurtenances of ritual. Nothing had ever so illus 
 trated to her the English integrity and the Catholic 
 preoccupation, or the penetration of private faith into 
 every gesture of mind, habit and taste. 
 
 It seemed to her like a reply to her thoughts that 
 Isabel had dropped to her knees, on one of the velvet 
 stools, with her eyes set before her and her hands 
 clasped. She had thrown her lace scarf over her head; 
 and in her evening dress, with her arms and neck bare, 
 she added the final note to Olive s sense of the values of 
 the scene. For an instant Olive saw how perfectly she 
 herself could imitate what she felt to be so picturesque 
 a gesture; but an unaccustomed hesitation held her 
 
 [316]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 motionless. She felt suddenly separate and alien, with 
 an invisible hand denning for her a line beyond which, 
 for reasons she did not stop to measure, she could 
 not pass. 
 
 Isabel rose after a moment. 
 
 "Poor Robert," she suddenly said, in a low voice 
 "he did so adore her! When he was a tiny creature, 
 he d come in here to stare at her and we d find him, 
 lost to the world. I say Robert now; one thinks of 
 him as if he were dead. I wonder so much how he s 
 taking this matter of Ernestine. She died, you know, 
 four days ago, and he was given permission to be with 
 her at the end. He loved her so passionately; she 
 always had a flash of St. Catherine s spirit, he used 
 to say. Now, heaven knows where he is here, within 
 a few miles of us, perhaps, or gone back. Somehow 
 it s worse than death itself, this inexorable separation." 
 
 She turned to switch off the light; and in the semi- 
 darkness, and in a sudden silence, with a motion which 
 was abrupt and full of hesitancy she laid her hand on 
 Olive s arm. There was no warmth in the action; 
 Olive s strained nerves were conscious at once of its 
 absence. She felt rather the determination it betrayed 
 of Isabel s effort to overcome a withdrawal which had 
 the directness of instinct. Its definition was of facts 
 too deep for her to name them; but she was conscious 
 that as they passed out to the corridor, her flush had 
 swept from her neck up to her forehead. 
 
 The others had risen, in preparation for departure, 
 when Isabel and Olive rejoined them. Passmore, 
 indeed, had said his good night and was clearly linger 
 ing as they entered. 
 
 "I know what you are, Isabel, when you have the
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Raphael on your mind, and I was almost hopeless! 
 Since Mrs. Devon s not got her husband here, perhaps 
 she ll let me take her in my car to the Ormsby s 
 you re going, Mrs. Devon? Yes?" 
 
 Isabel answered him instantly. "And so am I. No, 
 mother, I think I shall, after all; and you, Minnie, of 
 course? Mrs. Devon s too tired? Then, my dear 
 child, we ll drop you in Hill street as we go by, and 
 go on with Francis. It s too bad, but you must some 
 time see their ballroom lit; and they are having Casals 
 to play, aren t they?" 
 
 Olive had passed into the outer hall, with the even 
 sound of Isabel s voice behind her. Lady Harringford 
 was delaying, as she parted from her mother-in-law; 
 and for an instant she found herself alone, in front 
 of the gilt mirrors and at the foot of the curved stairs, 
 with Passmore. 
 
 He signed to the footman who held his coat to wait, 
 and bending towards her he spoke in a low tone. 
 
 "I leave town to-morrow, you know; I cross for 
 the meeting at Brussels. Saturday night in three 
 days I shall be in Paris, at my flat there, alone for the 
 week-end. How singularly nice if you ran over!" 
 
 She met in silence the complete lack of concealment 
 in the declaration of his look, and he pursued: 
 
 "53, avenue Montaigne; you ll remember? I ll 
 be there late Saturday; perhaps you ll dine with me? 
 What s your hotel there the Crillon? You ll find 
 my man waiting there for you with a message, any 
 time you arrive." His quick glance took in the open 
 ing of the door behind them, for Isabel and Lady 
 Harringford. "And remember," his smile just showed, 
 "that at the Crillon my name s Parker!"
 
 ASCENT 
 
 She was singularly silent as they drove through the 
 streets, which had already the stillness of the late 
 evening; and she had only the briefest word for Lady 
 Harringford and Isabel, at her door, and the briefest 
 good night for Passmore. They must forgive her, she 
 said; she was really tired out. 
 
 Her indecision lay on her thoughts like a heavy fog. 
 All night she saw nothing but this mist, in which she 
 seemed to toss without direction. She did not attempt 
 to predict to herself her determination; but her caustic 
 honesty recognised that she grasped with relief at the 
 fact that it was only Wednesday night, and that hours 
 intervened when her logic of action might clear itself. 
 
 In the morning she was conscious of a sudden depen 
 dence on her normal routine. She interviewed the 
 servants, saw Beatrix, and set out to keep an appoint 
 ment at her dressmakers . At times the weight of her 
 preoccupation gave her a sensation of acute physical 
 exhaustion, and she resolutely tried to lose herself in 
 the details of the close scented fitting rooms, the hurry 
 ing messengers, with their arms full of lace and tulle, 
 and the stimulus to her beauty of a more expert treat 
 ment than it had ever received. 
 
 As she walked down the street, just at noon, some 
 submerged instinct stirred in her, and she turned in 
 between the green railings of the Farm street church. 
 A moment later she was in the dim interior. Following 
 the faint thread of her impulse, she walked down the 
 aisle to the farthest end and dropped on her knees 
 before the altar of the Virgin. Her first reflection was 
 that it was a stupidity of accident that the church was 
 empty and that there should be no one to see her as
 
 ASCENT 
 
 she knelt, in her soft dress and with all her small 
 appurtenances her sunshade, the gold bag on her 
 arm, the sables on her shoulders and the flowers at 
 her waist. Then her thought rose with her eyes and 
 fastened on the cool removed white figure. She was too 
 trained in her realism, she recognised, to believe that 
 she could find any decision in an invisible and intangible 
 world. Yet suddenly, as she gazed in front of her, the 
 tangle of her situation was cleared. If she went to 
 Paris to meet Passmore, she knew, with her instinctive 
 definiteness, that her action would lack some accent to 
 give it salience. With a rapid combination of thoughts, 
 she saw what that accent ought to be. She was conscious 
 that, deep in her shrewd judgment, lay the presupposi 
 tion that she must extract from the situation all she 
 could, in order to make its crudity worth while. For 
 a few moments more her mind worked at avenues of 
 possibility. Then, with a gesture of decision, she took 
 from her belt the orchids Passmore had sent her and 
 laid them on the ground before the statue, as she began 
 to pray; as if, she thought, with the habitual twist of 
 her cynicism, she laid them before Ames. . . .
 
 XXVI 
 
 THE House established by the Carmelites near 
 Reading resembled, as far as Olive s eyes 
 could penetrate beyond its closed stone wall, 
 one of the larger houses of the countryside. Yet even 
 the glare of its modern brick had a quality of with 
 drawal. Its silence, as the little cab she had found to 
 bring her the two miles drive from the station drew 
 up at the entrance, was at once apparent; and the long 
 echoes of the bell set in the high gate trembled through 
 the sunshine and rose to the dark cross, set over the 
 gables and drawn in outline against the morning sky. 
 
 Olive turned and looked across the road, beyond the 
 drowsing horse whose driver she had ordered to wait 
 for her. The fields quivered with light in the noon 
 heat. They were already changing to a deeper gold, 
 and the leaves had the darker green of summer. The 
 sweetness of the honeysuckle on the wall drifted to her 
 nostrils like the odour of the month, and above the 
 elms which bordered the road she watched a bird wheel 
 and drop, and rise into the opalescent light, scarcely 
 conscious that her attention was fixed by such details. 
 It was vaguely present to her that ever since her 
 decision had formed itself in her mind, twenty-four 
 hours before, she had felt the sudden stimulus to her 
 senses and the finer quality in her thought which any 
 impact with Ames had always evoked in her. The 
 same energy of response and the same heightened sense 
 of vitality had animated her when, late the afternoon 
 before, she had finally succeeded in seeing the Arch- 
 
 [321]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 bishop of Stoke. Her note, on her card, had empha 
 sised the extreme urgency of a word with him; and 
 face to face with him, in his study, with the glow of his 
 robe outlined against the dark bookcases and his 
 closed expression confronting her, she had been con 
 scious that some insistence carried, in her look and her 
 voice, which brought a visible conviction to even the 
 habituated reticences of his mind. Her hands had 
 been clasped on the arm of her chair as she spoke. It 
 was of primary importance, she said, that she obtain 
 permission to see Father Ames before he left for his 
 return to Malaga immediately; what steps should she 
 take, and would he lend her his advice and support? 
 She made the request only because it was imperative. 
 She was not only one of his penitents, but his convert 
 to the church; and on a matter concerning which only 
 he could advise her, there hung the happiness of some 
 of his dearest friends. 
 
 The Archbishop s face, as he listened, and though 
 he was, in his secure conformity of expression, only the 
 faintest image of his brother, had enough of the family 
 quality to respond. Olive could see that he hesitated, 
 and with his hesitation she felt the possibility of accom 
 plishment. It was of course extremely unusual, he 
 repeated, like a formula. Many people, she would 
 understand, had wanted to see his brother, particularly 
 at the time of the death of Sister Martha of the Cross; 
 his old instructor in Scholastic Philosophy at Stony- 
 hurst, for instance, and the Duke of Brough. They 
 had broached the subject to him, and Lady Isabel had 
 been, almost daily, to the palace, to learn at second 
 hand how Ames was standing the shock of his sister s 
 death. But she had never directly suggested seeing 
 
 [322]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 him. It was plain enough to them, her interlocutor con 
 cluded, that reminders of his life in the world were not 
 what, in this situation or in any conceivable one, he 
 wanted. 
 
 Olive had dropped her eyes, under the implication; 
 but a second later all she was conscious of was that her 
 confusion had inevitably added to her beauty. It was 
 evident to her that her only chance to succeed was an 
 emotional one, and she had resolutely used it Her 
 only additional word was that Father Ames himself 
 would be the first to recognise the validity of her claim, 
 which was a claim to his Christian charity, and for 
 succour in the cruelest of situations; and she had left 
 the house with an affable note from the Archbishop to 
 the Superior in charge in London, and another to the 
 head of the Reading House, where Father Ames had 
 been permitted to stay during the last days of his 
 sister s life and her funeral. 
 
 The first of these, when she had presented herself 
 in the evening at the door of the chief house of the 
 Order in London, she had found to be fortunately 
 away. It left her free to deal with an inferior, in tem 
 porary authority, but less insistent, so she understood 
 from the air of the monk to whom she talked, than his 
 superior would have been; and she was given an addi 
 tional word of recommendation and instructions how 
 to reach the house at Reading. There was noth 
 ing more to be done until, in the morning, she 
 could take the first train which would not get her 
 to her destination too early. But the rapid move 
 ment of her mind was such that every act seemed con 
 certed with its larger activity. She arrived at Hill 
 Street, late and tired out, and flung herself on her sofa 
 
 [323]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 to stare before her, all evening, at the visible images 
 which her thoughts took. The hours passed, and still 
 she was too absorbed to undress. The night had 
 brought to her mind its resemblance with the night 
 before she had gone to Father Ames to announce to 
 him her readiness for conversion, and when she had 
 refused to sleep for fear of curtailing the stages of her 
 initiation. Once or twice she dropped on her knees 
 and tried to pray. She was keenly convinced that 
 unless her participation were complete she would lose 
 its full import. But the formula was always a con 
 striction on her imagination ; and as she murmured the 
 words she kept vagrantly wondering whether, a day 
 or so hence, she would be taking the lace dressing 
 gown, which lay on her bed underneath her extended 
 arms, with her to Paris. . . . 
 
 A footfall finally sounded on the flagging beyond 
 the gate, and she turned, with an effort to brace her 
 self. A lay brother slowly undid the door and con 
 fronted her. She was aware solely of his surprise, 
 as he took her two letters and compared the luxury of 
 her appearance with the deserted country road and 
 the shabby cab. Visitors were allowed in the outer 
 court, he said; and she could wait there while he went 
 to the sub-Prior. 
 
 It was at least a step in the advancement of her pur 
 pose; and after a few moments in the unsheltered 
 enclosure, with the sun blazing on the flowerless beds 
 and the narrow brick walk which led to the house, 
 Olive saw him return. He made no comment, but with 
 the taciturnity of habit signed to her to follow him. 
 They passed through a door and into a narrow hall 
 way, and entered what appeared to her to be a little 
 
 L324]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 parlour where, without an additional word, he left her. 
 
 Olive looked about her, with her instinctive measure 
 ment of a setting. The room had the extreme sim 
 plicity and cleanliness of all religious houses. It was 
 furnished by the plainest wooden table, by one or two 
 chairs and a few religious books on a deal shelf, and 
 its high window was uncurtained. On the table was a 
 statue of the Virgin, in the brightest colours, with a 
 rosary of glass beads hanging from the clasped hands. 
 Its presence seemed to accentuate the bareness, and 
 she felt that she could never have imagined so harsh 
 an ugliness. The door behind her had opened, during 
 the uncertain moment of her effort to accustom herself 
 to the strangeness of such an aspect; and she turned, 
 with a rapid exclamation, and found herself face to 
 face with Father Ames. 
 
 His own astonishment was evidently sufficient to 
 hold him motionless. It pierced the reticences of his 
 face and lightened the concentration in his eyes, as if 
 the sight of her were both a memory and an anticipa 
 tion so differing from the tenor of his accepted routine 
 that his effort at readjustment was a visible one. 
 
 He had made, after his pause and without moving 
 forward, a low murmur of recognition and greeting. 
 But something arrested Olive, in her turn. Even the 
 clarity of purpose in her mind was for a second unex 
 pectedly impotent. His former force held her as 
 actually as a clasp, and under the shock of its revision 
 she was motionless. The flash of a second revealed in 
 his face the power of his accomplished renunciation, 
 and its concentration was so strong that she could feel, 
 for an instant, only her own exclusion. Then, with a 
 renewed effort of will, she tried to listen to him. 
 
 [325]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "My superior has granted me the privilege of seeing 
 what I can do for you," he was evidently reiterating. 
 "A day more, and I should have been gone. And in a 
 few weeks, you understand, it would have been im 
 possible! And how is my dear John?" 
 
 His smile had appeared, as he spoke, and he moved 
 forward to the chair at one side of the table and 
 signed to her to take the seat opposite. His voice 
 had its familiar inflexion of friendliness; yet it was 
 when he expressed so human a concern that the sense 
 of his removal was for the first time complete to her. 
 She obeyed his gesture and sat down, with her eyes 
 still fixed on his face. She could not get beyond her 
 consciousness of his distance. It rose before her not 
 as a sudden severance but as a progressive atrophy of 
 his personality. Something in his tone retraced the 
 stages of his last months. It seemed to her as if the 
 felicities and infelicities of living had ceased to be 
 actual to him, had become wholly interior and existed 
 only as phases of an artificial development, and had 
 now finally died. It was more than detachment; it was 
 a complete committal to the impositions of his faith. 
 
 "Oh, Father, yes! I had to insist on seeing you!" 
 she finally spoke. "Don t tell me other souls have 
 needed you too; you know I always need things worse 
 than any one else! But am I really seeing you?" 
 
 "Perhaps not your idea of me," he had his former 
 rapidity of return; "but the me who exists to-day and 
 who has ceased, you see, to be of any use to his fellows 
 outside of praying for them!" 
 
 "Praying! ..." she ended her phrase with the 
 exclamation. "And all of you the great you has 
 really passed into prayer?" 
 
 [326]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "Very much more poorly so than it should have," 
 he retorted. "When I see the holiness of some of the 
 brothers, I wonder if ever in my useless life I ve 
 thought a thought which wasn t transitory and evanes 
 cent." 
 
 "And you re dead wholly dead?" Her intensity 
 of interest never wavered. 
 
 Father Ames smiled. "Or alive wholly alive. All 
 experience is relative even your pagan philosophers 
 grant that. I ve the sole one which isn t relative, 
 which is directly and measurably true. I have, with 
 the help of God, a constant communication in prayer 
 with my Maker." 
 
 Olive s lips opened without a sound and then set. 
 Once the first effect of his presence was over, she was 
 conscious of a rising impulse of revolt. The aridity 
 of his responses seemed to her like the aridity of the 
 room. There was no significance for her in the 
 stripped walls, any more than there was poetry in his 
 absorption. All she saw was a mechanical transfer 
 ence of personality into impersonality and an enforced 
 negation; the differentiations of so susceptive a mind 
 passing into the artificial resemblances and dissem 
 blances of a community. 
 
 Her look changed with the return of her determina 
 tion. 
 
 "Well, are you so secure in this achievement of a 
 paradise that you have forgotten those of us who are 
 suffering and struggling? . . ." Her voice broke on 
 the words, and she bent forward, across the table. 
 "Oh, Father, I am in trouble, terrible trouble; and if 
 you won t advise me, won t save me, I m lost! " 
 
 "Indeed, my child, I am deeply sorry;" Father 
 [327]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Ames s tone had the quality of his glance. "I divined, 
 of course, that something must threaten you, the 
 moment I heard you had obtained permission to come. 
 John he s all right?" 
 
 "Oh, John!" She caught herself. "John s all right; 
 he s on his way to America, and he s sure of himself, 
 sure of life he s everything safe. John! Can t you 
 help me for myself," her voice wavered again, "and 
 not for John?" 
 
 Father Ames s eyes searched hers. "And have you 
 been to your confessor?" 
 
 "My confessor!" She spoke with the same exas 
 peration of feeling. "I ve no director. I ve not been 
 to communion for months. My faith oh, let us not 
 beg the question, Father! You know as well as I 
 do what and in whom my faith has always 
 been. ..." 
 
 The immunity of his expression perfectly held. His 
 only response, for the next second, was to stretch out 
 his hand and draw from the feet of the statue of the 
 Virgin, on the table between them, the long gloves she 
 had flung down. He folded them and laid them at her 
 elbow before he spoke. 
 
 "I repeat that I m exceedingly sorry; but it s clearly 
 a case in which I have no right to act. I cannot hear 
 your confession. I have ceased to be a judge of the 
 problems a confession involves. If you will go to a 
 priest, on your return to town . . ." 
 
 Olive s broken exclamation interrupted him. Her 
 eyes had dropped to his hands, as he clasped them 
 on the table. Their alteration to what seemed to her 
 heavier and insensitive lines, compared with her recol 
 lection of their fineness, expressed for her at the 
 
 [328]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 moment the sterility of his mind. She had a latent 
 sense that some obstacle of experience which was 
 incomprehensible to her interposed between them, and 
 she felt the uselessness of her effort in the face of it. 
 
 "So that s what you ve done to me what you re 
 willing to have done to me!" her tone was tremulous. 
 "I say I became a Catholic because of you; of course 
 I did! But I ve tried I ve at least been honest. 
 And now I come to you in the greatest moment, and 
 you shirk the responsibility. ..." His look had 
 turned indeterminately to her, for a second, and she 
 seized on his uncertainty; she dropped to her knees 
 and stretched out her hands. "No, Father, I must 
 speak to you; oh, not as a confessor, as a friend as 
 anything you please. Don t you see it s common jus 
 tice for you to hear me out? Here is what my life s 
 come to this! You know my will, that I m all will; 
 and yet I m powerless to save myself from the cheapest 
 and most sordid end. It s a man of course it was 
 bound to come to that! I ve always been searching 
 for something to satisfy me. I ve tried to live by my 
 mind, by faith, by anything and everything, and I ve 
 perpetually sunk. Now I m here ! " 
 
 She waited. Father Ames s eyes had left her, and 
 were set on the open window and the tree tops beyond. 
 Even at the moment, she could feel his wider application 
 of her special case, and that his pity instinctively passed 
 from her problem to such problems as a whole. 
 
 "No, you re not so far gone on your road of holiness 
 as that! You will listen to me! You will, if it s the 
 last thing you do in this outer world, help me. . . . 
 Do you want to see me come to this?" She made a 
 wide gesture. "Do you want to see me descend to what 
 
 [329]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 I know is descent to reducing all my hope and my 
 eagerness to nothing but the coarseness of experience? 
 and with such a man with Francis Passmore? That s 
 what you ve got to save me from; that s what you ve 
 got to fight for me. ..." 
 
 Father Ames s face turned slowly, as if the term 
 recalled him from his concentration of a moment before. 
 She watched the process of the readjustment of his 
 attention, and saw that it was followed by his rare 
 frown. 
 
 "I don t quite understand you. Are .you trying to 
 say to me that " 
 
 She caught his words. "That I m about to have 
 with Francis Passmore the most brutalised kind of 
 relation? Yes. Ah, Father, you can t yet so have 
 forgotten human sins and human degradations that 
 you don t know they exist! You know him and you 
 know me! Well, it is brutal, isn t it? that all my 
 youth and my desire should come to this?" She felt 
 her tears on her cheeks. "I ve no illusions; I ve all 
 my old clarity; and I know as well as that I m here, 
 that it s the beginning of the end for me. He s the first 
 step; but what has been my history? Haven t I 
 always gone beyond, always pursued things farther and 
 farther? And if he gives me an illusion of life, of 
 experience, on I ll go. The future . . . oh, I see it 
 as a horrible search, lower, meaner, crueller each time. 
 It s that you must save me from. It s him you must 
 help me to resist." 
 
 She had covered her eyes with her hands, with her 
 head bent against the table. As she paused, something 
 in Father Ames s silence made her raise her face to 
 confront the intensity of the look he bent on her. 
 
 [330]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 It instantly struck her that she had never seen the 
 lines about his mouth so tightly defined or his eyes 
 darker. The effect was so compelling that she heard 
 herself break out, scarcely knowing what words she 
 used. "Oh, Father, I didn t mean ..." 
 
 He arrested her with an imperative gesture. "Get 
 up, Mrs. Devon," he said briefly. 
 
 She rose uncertainly, wiping with her bare hands 
 the tears which still stood on her cheeks. "I don t 
 think you understand," she began again; but in an 
 instant he had cut her short. 
 
 "Understand ... if only I didn t!" 
 
 "Then you mean " she was again unable to end 
 
 her sentence. 
 
 "I mean that in your confused wretched existence, I 
 seem to have been the only person who s had the 
 penalty of understanding you." 
 
 She returned his look silently, with the traces of her 
 emotion fading from her face. 
 
 "It isn t I who ve had the power to judge you;" his 
 voice, as he proceeded, was unconsciously touched 
 with his former accent of authority. "It s the laws of 
 which I ve been so poor a servant. Measured by any 
 faith or by any honour, you re an outcast, Mrs. Devon. 
 I admit that you were born with heavy penalties of 
 nature, as all misguided force must always be a penalty. 
 But you ve had chances which were inimitable; you 
 have had the Church, you have been married to the 
 best of men, and you have had the responsibility of 
 your child; and your mind and your will . . . nothing 
 but chances! Yet what has it come to? I should 
 prefer to see you," the stroke of his words fell delib 
 erately, "debase your life with any man rather than 
 
 [33i]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 have you come to me, in this way, to save you from 
 what you haven t the intention to save yourself!" 
 
 Olive felt herself on the farthest verge of her con 
 trol; there seemed to her no denning line between her 
 emotion and her anger, and she searched helplessly 
 for a phrase of reply. She was instinctively trying to 
 chain her attention to the fact that the Ames she had 
 known had disappeared, that his prescience had 
 become bigotry and that she was no longer dealing 
 with a human being but an attitude of mind. "So this 
 is your charity! You and the Church this is what 
 you do to a creature in such misery as I am!" 
 
 Father Ames s hand lifted, and with the gesture he 
 seemed to show her the fruitlessness of any continu 
 ance. 
 
 "Why did you want to see me?" His accent was 
 shorter with each second. "I ve no illusion in this, any 
 more than you. To give you an added sense of adven 
 ture to bring the excitement of transgression into 
 your situation; wasn t it that? I was to struggle, to 
 dissuade you, to implicate myself, to combat," he had 
 the quickest cynicism, "not only your contemplated act, 
 but Passmore, for you. Your errand has had a sur 
 prisingly different outcome. You are too intelligent 
 not to see its revelation. It is your contact with spirit 
 ual things which has betrayed what you really are." 
 
 Olive was conscious that she stretched her hands to 
 where her gloves lay on the table and began to draw 
 them on. She could not trust her voice, in the tumult 
 of her mind; and it was only after a moment, and with 
 the tonic of her rising sense of revulsion, that she tried 
 to speak. 
 
 "Your position is admirably clear, and also your 
 [332]
 
 Christian charity. I shall remember them, when you, 
 Father," her tone mounted, "have steeped yourself in 
 a comfortable oblivion. How easy your heaven is to 
 attain! I prefer the human struggles, I admit. I need 
 scarcely say that I m sorry I disturbed you and the 
 perfection of your obedience. I don t dispute your 
 right to it. It s as egoistic, in its way, as my right to 
 do what I please with Francis Passmore. You and a 
 theory for your life is a theory I and he. All such 
 emotions have their resemblances!" Her fingers were 
 struggling, through her dimmed vision, with her gloves, 
 and suddenly she threw back her head, with as sudden 
 a reality in the motion. "Oh, Father, you won t 
 send me away like this! You will pity me and help 
 me!" 
 
 Father Ames s immobility held, for the long instant 
 of the look they exchanged. It seemed to her, in their 
 silence, that it was a moment which in itself resumed 
 the flow of years. When he spoke she was as conscious 
 as if he had denned it that its termination was com 
 plete. 
 
 "You are out of the reach of any man s help, Mrs. 
 Devon; what you need is God s. To Him I can com 
 mend you, and I do. That s all I have to say to you. 
 No !" She had wavered, with the sense of impend 
 ing departure, and had supported herself for a second 
 against the chair beside her. "I m sorry for you, 
 indeed, but I cannot allow our talk to end on any note 
 of appeal or of untruth. It is one of the consolations 
 of my renouncement of the world that I need never see 
 such a tortured mind again." He made a quick motion 
 towards the door. "Let us put an end to this, please 
 and without anything further. There I believe you 
 
 [333]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 have forgotten your sunshade. It s useless for us to 
 say more. . . . 
 
 She moved towards the door, with so heavy a feeling 
 of faintness that all she could discern in front of her 
 was the wooden panel and the knob she must turn. 
 With her hand on it, she raised her head and looked 
 once more over her shoulder at the rigidity of his figure 
 from where, beside the table, he faced her. His face 
 was unchanging; and it was dimly present to her that 
 nothing he had said penetrated her like his refusal 
 to accord any existence to the moment of her departure. 
 
 [334]
 
 XXVII 
 
 OLIVE had reached Paris on the Saturday morn 
 ing, travelling by the night boat. 
 The journey had remained in her mind as a 
 long series of mechanical incidents. The succession of 
 her thoughts had never seemed to her more rapid, more 
 determined or more completely rootless. Her power of 
 reflection and of derivation was atrophied. She had 
 gone from the train to the boat and from the boat to 
 the French train, with the sense of as relentless a pro 
 gression in a series of precomposed events as she had, 
 in London, made her preparations and given her 
 instructions to the servants. Her determination to act 
 wholly in accordance with the decision of her will 
 was deeper than a desire. She found herself potentially 
 incapable of anything else, in a moral universe the 
 simplifications of which were complete. 
 
 The sense of merely fulfilling her part in the various 
 details of her final choice held when, as she turned 
 away from the bureau at her hotel, she was immediately 
 accosted by an indescribable individual, in the neatest 
 black. His eyes were so schooled that she could not 
 even divine how absolute had been his expectation that 
 she would come; and his tones, those of an attentive 
 secretary with a careful regard for the interests of his 
 employer, perfectly bore out her impression. 
 
 "I beg your pardon, Madam, but Mr. Parker will 
 be so pleased and surprised to think you are here. He 
 is expected from Brussels to-night, at 6:40, and he 
 
 [335]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 thought you might possibly be passing through Paris. 
 I was just attending to a little business for him yes. 
 He mentioned, since I had to call here, that I might 
 enquire if you were expected, and ask if you would 
 dine with him at his flat to-night; and perhaps, he 
 said, if the heat continued, you would care to motor 
 out to the country. . . ." 
 
 "Yes. I will go I will dine with him," said Olive; 
 the clarity of her voice seemed to her like the clarity 
 of the action of her thoughts. 
 
 "Mrs. Parker will probably already have left for 
 the country, but she is hoping to see you there." 
 
 He paused. Her distaste at his adroitness and at the 
 expertness of his evident experience rose for a second 
 to her lips; then she heard that he continued. 
 
 "While I was asking, here, at the desk, if you were 
 expected, a lady who was asking for another name 
 heard me mention yours. She enquired whether you 
 were to be in Paris long. I told her I believed not 
 that I understood you were coming to attend to some 
 business in connection with Mr. Devon s leaving for 
 America, and to pass the week-end with friends out 
 of town. Her name, I believe, was the Comtesse de 
 Rives." 
 
 Olive s instinctive distrust of a warning and a 
 frankness which were so much more implicative than 
 evasion, was submerged in an instant, as he pronounced 
 the name. There were echoes in her resentment, she 
 thought, longer than Passmore s methods could ever 
 stir. She made a decisive gesture. 
 
 "I shall be very pleased to see Mr. and Mrs. Parker. 
 Please tell them both so, when you see them." 
 
 "Thank you. And as to dinner, I shall leave a word, 
 [336]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 then, for Mr. Parker at the flat; you have the address, 
 I think? He asked me to say that he would dine at 
 half past eight . . ." 
 
 Her glance followed his inconspicuous figure through 
 the crowd in the hall. She must of necessity see him 
 so frequently, she supposed, that she would shortly 
 become familiar with the inflexions of his concealments. 
 She could even imagine how perfectly adjusted her own 
 evasions of notice and her own acceptances of insinua 
 tion must in time become to his. For this too she 
 would have she knew her grandfather would have 
 said her perfect adaptability. 
 
 Later in the morning she went out. She had brought 
 very little luggage, and she made her way directly to 
 one or two shops. Here her impression of moving in 
 a totally new existence was no less perfect. As she 
 turned over the linen and the laces spread in front of 
 her and examined the tortoise-shell and gold brushes 
 and boxes and the jewel-like colours in the bottles of 
 scent, she seemed to see some of the avenues by which 
 the concession of her dignity was to be made actual 
 her sudden extravagances, her complete irresponsi 
 bility, the coarsening of her fibre and the failures of 
 her taste. Her imagination was already alive to the 
 ways in which the processes of her debasement would 
 be elaborated. Not the least of her recognitions was the 
 conviction that she would show, in her treatment of 
 Passmore, all of her hard capacity. She could fancy 
 her gradual education, in lines in which he would give 
 her a thorough initiation, and that in the shortest time 
 the action of her mind itself would resemble his, after 
 she had ceded every point of her separate integrity. 
 She turned repeatedly from the obsession of this 
 
 [337]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 impression, and busied herself again with her pur 
 chases; but she could not throw off the sensation that 
 the pressure of her humiliation was bending her 
 momentarily lower. 
 
 As she started to walk back to her hotel, the famil 
 iarity of the streets held her for a moment in front of 
 the steps leading to the Tuileries Gardens. The soft 
 June light, the movement of the motors, the vitality 
 of the French inflexion, laid, whether she permitted 
 it or not, a touch on her indurated consciousness. She 
 saw Rivaudiere s smile as she saw the other elements 
 which composed the scene; most of all she was aware 
 of the honest incomprehension of the look which, 
 through the pale afternoon light at Fontainebleau, 
 seemed to her to have resumed his character even more 
 than his charm. Her thought wavered for a second. 
 Then, with the rapidity of reaction, it fastened on a 
 brief word Passmore had said to her, in one of their 
 enigmatic exchanges. "I don t want you to have hopes 
 of me I don t think I m capable of feeling," she had 
 broken out, with one of her flashes of frankness; and 
 it seemed to her that, between Rivaudiere s sacrifice 
 she could call it that of her at Fontainebleau and 
 the amused acceptance with which Passmore had met 
 her exclamation, lay the stages of the collapse of what 
 had made her character. 
 
 She was looking across the crowded restaurant, 
 during her lunch, with little consciousness of the figures 
 at the various tables other than as pieces in the puzzle 
 of her impressions, when her eyes idly fell on a woman, 
 alone like herself, seated against the light of one of 
 the large windows. A second later she was stirred 
 to attention. The mention of Madame de Rives s 
 
 [338]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 name, that morning, had brought her vividly into view; 
 but the force her presence carried, as she sat rigidly 
 alert on her reflections, with her hands in her lap, 
 her shoulders inflexible and her look set, was enough 
 to transport Olive back to the hour of their talk. Con 
 trasted with the darkness of her own mind, such 
 perfect compactness had more than ever a directive 
 force. Olive tried for an instant to fancy what such 
 an absorption of thought must deal with and what such 
 indifferent eyes see. Wherever one surprised Madame 
 de Rives, and in whatever circumstances, she could 
 imagine the complete logic of her preoccupation, the 
 steadiness of her criticism and the consistent dispassion 
 of her conclusions. 
 
 It was the last personality the impositions of which 
 accorded with Olive s thoughts; yet one of her rarely 
 indeterminate impulses made her pause, as she 
 approached the door to go to her room, at the table in 
 the window. 
 
 Madame de Rives s look had at first its former sug 
 gestion of being recalled from a distance; but as she 
 met the uncertainty of Olive s face, her own definitely 
 changed. 
 
 "I am glad to see you I have often thought of you," 
 she said unhesitatingly. "Yes! You are pleased to 
 find yourself in Paris again? It is odd, the way you all 
 like to return. . . ." 
 
 "I am on my way to spend Sunday with some friends 
 in the country." Olive found herself stating the phrase 
 with a gradually growing apprehension of the impor 
 tance to her position of open comment; "I chanced, 
 from across the room, to see you. And your brother?" 
 
 She had put the question with the same sense of 
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 irresponsibility which had prompted her to stop beside 
 the table. Madame de Rives s glance for a moment 
 seemed to measure this accent in her manner, as if, 
 now that she had traced its relation to Rivaudiere and 
 had disposed of its possibilities, she could permit her 
 self an interest in it. 
 
 "My brother is in Tunis . . . you did not know, 
 perhaps? Yes, a party of friends, on a yacht. We 
 have had a rather confused spring, owing to the illness 
 of my mother-in-law, here in this hotel. She completely 
 refuses, in Paris, to be with us or with my sister-in-law 
 and keeps always her rooms here; such a place, too, for 
 an illness! But it appears that even the habits of 
 the old are changing. Since to-day I am in attendance 
 on her, I am obliged to lunch here, and I came down 
 from her salon to see this curious scene." Her glance 
 was ceaselessly examining the room, as she spoke, with 
 a frankness of astonishment which betrayed the tone 
 of her own habits. "Extraordinary, is it not?" 
 
 Olive s curiosity was still fastened to her. At this 
 near range she could examine the tissue of her expres 
 sion. Its continuity of attitude completely held; yet 
 Olive found herself suddenly wondering what forms of 
 richness in the field of the human experiences so evi 
 dently involved a person had extracted, and whether 
 anyone could be so consistently detached who had not 
 been with equal consistency involved. The suggestion 
 made her feel, in regard to Rivaudiere s sister, markedly 
 more intimate and inexorably more distant. For the 
 first time, in the emptiness of Madame de Rives s ex 
 pression, she felt she could trace what had denuded it. 
 She, it was plain, had given herself to all the possible 
 participations. She had evidently sounded the oppo- 
 
 [340]
 
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 sites between generosity and refusal, between acquire 
 ment and sacrifice; and if there had been no alliance 
 between her morality and the hard conditions of her 
 taste, Olive could imagine nothing clearer than the 
 separation between the lapses she had permitted her 
 self and the rigour of her achievements. In contrast 
 to so developed an art of feeling, her own seemed only 
 the more inconsequent and fictitious and more clearly 
 emphasised in its rootlessness ; and under the sense 
 of the test, she felt her obstinacy of determination rise, 
 as she made some excuse and continued to the door. 
 
 About two o clock, with her sense of the rapid 
 passage of the hours, she was more and more possessed, 
 as she sat at her window and watched the interweaving 
 of the traffic below, by an irresistible restlessness. Her 
 single requirement was for the last spark of her critical 
 discrimination and her finer apprehension to expire. 
 At the moment even the enjoyment she foretold in 
 front of her, the luxury of her indifference, the 
 opportunities for commerce with important people, the 
 inevitable growth of her callousness and her careless 
 ness of results, was held back by this thinning image 
 of her former self. Immeasurably far off, it seemed 
 to her that she still saw her hopes of experience as 
 something high. She was too completely without the 
 enthusiasm of emotion not to know that the least part 
 of her approaching debasement would be her actual 
 relation to Passmore. It would merely be the symbol 
 of her entire concession. Whether it affected her only 
 cursorily, or whether it struck from her a spark of 
 some derivative good, she knew none the less exactly 
 that she could never fool herself as to its soilure. 
 
 [34i]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 The resurgence of these thoughts, however she 
 tried to deflect them, became so little tolerable that she 
 decided to go out. It was present to her that she 
 wanted above everything to be where she ran no risk 
 of having her fixity of decision touched by any such 
 accidental encounter as that with Ghislaine de Rives; 
 and she put on a plain dark dress and, once in a motor- 
 cab, she called to the driver to stop at the Pont des 
 Invalides, with the vague intention of taking one of 
 the little Seine boats and of perhaps reaching St. Cloud 
 for an early cup of tea. 
 
 Under the brilliant sunshine on the little deck and 
 in the noisy cheerfulness of the crowd of the summer 
 afternoon, so bent on the moment of enjoyment, some 
 thing assuaged her inner strain. The gaiety of the 
 banks, as the boat glided along, the sudden darkening 
 under the bridges and the blaze of the moving water, in 
 the tremulous light, shut out her reflections. She had 
 indeed, she felt, passed beyond them. Their immediacy 
 had ceased; and all she could trace in her mind were 
 the long reverberations of recollection. For some 
 unfathomable reason, she thought of the village store 
 at Ware, of Norah s irritating habit, before she was 
 old enough to protest, of tying a peculiarly crude shade 
 of pink ribbon at the end of her long braids, and of 
 the quick motion of annoyance with which her grand 
 father used to raise his head from his Ovid, when he 
 particularly disliked to be interrupted. It crossed the 
 threshold of her mind, for the first time, that she must 
 accustom herself to live on such disassociated images. 
 Her thoughts would shortly pass into facts without 
 reflection. Events were to be merely events to her, 
 quantitative and valuable only for their intrinsic expe- 
 
 [342]
 
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 diencies. She would cease to have the morality of judg 
 ment and of comparison. There would be no relations 
 between her actions; each one of them would minister 
 solely to the necessities of her personal rules, and the 
 only rule left her was that of extortion. . . . 
 
 She had raised her eyes, with the feeling that it 
 cost her a definite effort to lift them, as the boat 
 slipped out to the more open reaches of the river, and 
 they lit fugitively on the bench across the deck. A 
 man and a woman were seated opposite her, as isolated 
 as she, since the boat was approaching Sevres and most 
 of the passengers had disembarked. Olive s empty 
 glance passed over the couple, left them, and abruptly 
 returned. Side by side and turned to face each other, 
 they appeared as absorbed as she in their own pre 
 occupations. They were both dressed with an evi 
 dently composed simplicity and their attitude was 
 scrupulously attuned to the inconspicuous. Yet, as her 
 eyes clung to them, Olive felt herself suddenly in the 
 presence of an emblazoned fact. The reserves fell from 
 her face, in the intensity of her curiosity. As she tried 
 to discover what, in their perfect attentuation of aspect, 
 had so sharply impressed her, she tried equally to 
 pierce its meaning. Their motionlessness was as much 
 part of them as the motionlessness of the man s eyes, 
 steadily fixed on the bright water, and of the woman s, 
 as they imitated the direction of his. Her hands lay 
 inertly on her lap and his were on his knee; yet some 
 thing extraordinarly poignant struck Olive in the fact 
 that, near as they were and with the inexplicable com 
 pression of feeling about them, they did not touch each 
 other. The woman s averted face might have had the 
 variations of any past written in it, beneath its con- 
 
 [343]
 
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 ventionality; but what was undeniable was that its 
 past existed. Between them there stretched, to Olive s 
 intensified consciousness, the thousand threads of some 
 dearly purchased exchange, bought at such an evident 
 cost and shaped with such an evident concentration that 
 it seemed to have an immeasurable age. What a record 
 must unite them, she wondered, for this hour of propin 
 quity to touch with such a tranquillity such profundities 
 of experience as kept them motionless and silent. The 
 woman s eyes lifted, every now and then, with a quality 
 deeper than a smile, in their return to his face. Her 
 muteness was evidently determined by recollections and 
 anticipations beyond the necessities of phrasing. The 
 man s very feeling had the practised correctness of an 
 accepted attitude, not of concealment so much as of 
 a sustained repression in the face of the exigencies of 
 experience. When his companion s fur boa slipped 
 down, as she turned her sunshade on her shoulder, he 
 instantly bent forward to replace it. His fingers 
 lingered for the quickest instant on her arm; she turned 
 her head, with the sharpest rapidity of movement, 
 towards him; and it seemed to Olive as if all their 
 history was in the emotion of the brief touch. 
 
 She found her hands had dropped to her lap, and 
 that she was gazing before her, oblivious of the dis 
 closures of the humiliation in her face. Opposed to 
 what she saw in front of her, she saw, as vividly as 
 the figures opposite, the rail of the boat and the sun 
 shine, herself with Passmore. The realism of the whole 
 detail flared up in her brain, like a light flung into 
 the darkness of an unsuspected room. The complete 
 vacuity of an alliance with no possible gift of participa 
 tion, of its debasement and its traffic, came to her, in 
 
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 the comparison. She had a sudden insupportable sense 
 of the extradition of herself from all which, in the evan 
 escence of each hour, she knew was durable. She 
 somehow understood that it was in her attempt at 
 such an enforcement, with Passmore or with anyone 
 else, that her isolation from any such sentiment would 
 become completely unlivable and that she would most 
 finally lose the possibility of the passion and the repose 
 of such a comprehension. 
 
 The bell had sounded, for the withdrawal of the 
 gangplank, when there struck through the mists in 
 her brain the call of St. Cloud. She hurried forward, 
 just before the gates closed. Once she was on the quay 
 her thoughts fell into a complete precision of propor 
 tion. She asked a passer-by the way to the nearest 
 telegraph office. Through her walk along the inter 
 vening streets, and in front of the little wicket, her 
 determination remained as certain. She drew towards 
 her a telegraph blank and wrote on it Passmore s name 
 and the avenue Montaigne address, and her irony had 
 never seemed to her more expressive than when she 
 added the word "useless." 
 
 [3451
 
 XXVIII 
 
 DEVON had received Olive s telegram as he 
 came out of his father s room, on the June 
 morning of his arrival and, with the movement 
 of his hand suddenly attenuated, closed the door behind 
 him. 
 
 He passed the slip-shod servant who, whatever the 
 variegations of her personality, never altered in type 
 as she thrust the envelope into his hand, and went 
 out with it into the little front garden. A hot early 
 summer wind was blowing over the dusty unweeded 
 walks and the few desolate spring blossoms which sur 
 vived. The sun beat fully on the shabby house front 
 and on the closed faded yellow blinds. The familiar 
 sounds were everywhere, the clang of the trolleys at 
 the end of the street, the cry of a vendor, and the nasal 
 voices of the children at play in the yards of the nearby 
 public school. The crudity of ugliness which had sur 
 rounded his father had never seemed to him more com 
 plete; yet even in face of the finality inscribed on the 
 mute figure over which he had just drawn the sheet, 
 he felt some particular significance in the words on 
 the yellow leaf he held. 
 
 His eyes wandered aimlessly beyond the sparse pale 
 tree tops, along the stretch of street, and out to where, 
 as one divined, the edges of the city merged gradually 
 into the open country and the end of the long valley 
 which led to Ware. His uneven youth here, with his 
 sudden arrivals and his embarrassed departures, his 
 
 [349]
 
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 first sense of Olive and the gradual establishment of 
 her permanence in his mind, all fell into the respective 
 proportions which had been established by the fact 
 which had greeted him on his arrival. He felt that his 
 face must look older, as he raised it in the sunlight; 
 he was conscious, for the first time, of an ultimate 
 finality for himself, and that he too would inevitably 
 face this computation, which his father had now made, 
 of the gain and loss of experience. He asked himself 
 what in the world he had done with his life. Even 
 his feeling, the predominant note of his imagination 
 and his fact, must finally be tempered into a connection 
 with the eternal verities. Yet his devotion had never 
 seemed to him to be more of the stuff of reality. He felt 
 it more directly close to him than Olive herself. It was 
 the penalty, he supposed, of having lived so persistently 
 rather with his vision of her than with her as a fact. 
 Whatever his definition, he was suddenly sure, in the 
 moments of his reflection, that it was the last thing, in 
 his relation to living, which he would have been willing 
 to do without; and the thought made his mind revert, 
 with the inexorability of contrast, to the shut dusty 
 library, kept always locked since there were apt 
 to be priceless jades strewn loosely on the table, the 
 chair at the desk, with its ripped covering, the rusty 
 pens and the thick ink, and all the touches which had 
 composed the single scene of his father s life of the 
 emotions. 
 
 He had already wondered, during the morning, if it 
 were not the elder Devon s sole fortunate escape from 
 the fantastic misappropriateness which had pursued 
 him that he should have died the evening before, while 
 Devon himself and his mother, just off their steamer, 
 
 [350]
 
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 were already on their way, by the night train, to Wick- 
 ford. The final caricature of his wife s arrival had, his 
 son felt, been spared him. Devon could see, as his 
 mother stood by the bed, puzzled and incredulous, with 
 the scene she had planned so spoilt and all the possi 
 bilities of her gesture finally stripped from her, that 
 she had for the first time asked herself why she had 
 conceivably come. The heat and the annoyance of 
 detail which beset her assumed a sudden element of 
 unfairness. In spite of her experiences, Mrs. Devon 
 still regarded love as symbolised by a wreathed maiden 
 or a lovely child; and a sentiment which could with 
 stand the confusion of the house and the lack of a 
 dressing table, in the room to which the embarrassed 
 maid showed her, was unthinkable to her. Devon saw 
 that sooner or later she would reconstruct the situation 
 on her own terms ; his father would have died bequeath 
 ing her either the special consecration of his foregive- 
 ness or his immortal persecution. But for the moment 
 she was frankly exasperated, and she submitted easily 
 to Devon s suggestion that she go to the hotel and back 
 to New York at the earliest possible moment. 
 
 For this too his father would once have had his ready 
 comment; and something poignant struck Devon in the 
 fact that the consolation of all these little acrimonies 
 was now gone, from that consecutive silence. From the 
 artificiality and the affected absurdity, if one put it 
 so, in which he had passed years, he had finally touched 
 a reality. His laborious attempts to create himself a 
 personality had, with a single finger of fate laid on 
 them, exposed their futility. The severance of this 
 odd morose nature and life was not what seemed to 
 Devon difficult of credence or sad; but that severance 
 
 [35i]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 without a shadow of foregone happiness, with symbols 
 for beliefs and with irritabilities for feeling, struck him 
 as a loss deeper than the cessation of being. He saw 
 the flow of his own existence as uncharted enough, 
 vague and dissolved, and without that sense of a pur 
 pose which had meant, in Ames, a morality and a creed. 
 He knew he had drifted too easily. But at least he 
 had measured himself against the forces of human 
 laws; and the final word, as he thought, to be said 
 about his father was that in the close arid little room, 
 with all his concentration on the stones spread before 
 him he had for most of his life bent over beauty and 
 never seen it. 
 
 The moment Olive came down the gangplank, and 
 as he caught sight, under her dark hat, of her increased 
 pallor, the flash of prescience with which he had read 
 the telegram announcing her sudden return had 
 reverted to him. 
 
 She had replied to all his questions that the reason 
 she had followed him so quickly was that she felt 
 really ill. A heavy cold had settled on her chest, in 
 London, and she coughed frequently; and when they 
 reached their hastily opened house and she flung her 
 self on a sofa, he could tell at once that she had an 
 unusual lassitude. He had never seen silence so 
 visible as it was in her face, with her eyes set and 
 empty. But as soon as she had rested for an hour 
 she went at once to Mrs. Devon, and he could feel 
 the effort she was making to listen patiently to the 
 already inflated account of his father s last moments 
 and of his perversity in dying while they were on the 
 last stage of their journey to him. 
 
 [352]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 Her reserves were so invariable that, in the hurry of 
 the next days, Devon found himself treating her with 
 an unquestioning acceptance. The burden of his 
 father s estate promised to be a heavy one, complicated 
 as it was by the elder Devon s elaborate precautions 
 that his wife should not interfere with the disposition 
 of his fortune except for his generous legacy to John 
 to the Wickford museum. His tartness had pene 
 trated even the legal document, Devon thought; and it 
 was a grim amusement to him to see his mother s wide- 
 eyed astonishment as to how she was going to build an 
 attitude of bereavement on so publicly stated a sever 
 ance on her husband s part. They had decided to 
 remain in town for the moment, with week ends in the 
 country with his mother where, with Beatrix to help her, 
 she was fast reacting to the position of a person cruelly 
 maligned. Their house had just been vacated by the 
 tenants who had occupied it during their absence 
 abroad; and Olive insisted that she must have time 
 to put things right and to erase the marks of their 
 occupancy, before she could make new plans. When 
 he came home, on the already warm evenings, Devon 
 was apt either to find her busy, with all her concentra 
 tion fixed on some small details, or in an inert idle 
 ness the listlessness of which was more and more 
 remarkable to him. The turn of her head in his direc 
 tion was without any of the tonic energy she had 
 shown in London, and there was an inexplicable 
 inertia in her interest and a lifeless quality in her 
 quickest motions. 
 
 He had delayed very late at his library desk, one 
 evening in early July, with the various papers con 
 cerning the intricacies of the division of the jades 
 
 [353]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 heaped about him. Olive had left him about ten 
 o clock, with her habitual plea that she was tired and 
 wanted the quiet of her room; but just after midnight 
 struck he heard a slight stir at the door, and when he 
 opened it he discovered her standing motionlessly, in 
 the hall, as if she could not determine the direction of 
 her next action. 
 
 In her thin evening dress, as she leaned against the 
 dark paneling, and with her loosened hair against the 
 whiteness of her neck, she suddenly struck him as 
 dangerously thin. He rose abruptly, with the softness 
 which his manner assumed with her when it was 
 unguarded. 
 
 "My dear child, you re ill! What s wrong? Can I 
 do nothing for you?" 
 
 She shook her head. "No I want to talk to you." 
 
 Her reply was as brief as ever, but her tone, he heard, 
 was changed in quality. In response to his murmur 
 that his job was over for the night that he wished 
 she d come in and interrupt him she crossed the 
 threshold. Her step, as she came forward, wavered 
 and paused; and in its uncertainty and its lack of her 
 usual driving quality, it moved him inexplicably. 
 
 She rested her hands on his desk and, still standing, 
 she gave him a long look. It was the first, he instantly 
 felt, since her return. He began to speak and then, 
 as her glance deepened, he was abruptly silent. His 
 scale of the measurement of what her face exposed 
 grew with the instants, as if the consecutive stages of 
 the two years since their marriage and of his knowl 
 edge of her, back to her childhood, were being displayed 
 before him. 
 
 On Olive s side, their confrontation had the effect 
 [354]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 of a sudden relaxation, after the steady pressure of 
 control she had maintained. The past weeks had 
 marked her with signs deep enough, she felt, to be 
 beyond any further concealment. She could not say 
 that her inexorability of vision had declined, in any 
 degree, since the moment when her sense of values 
 had had the shock of an acceptance of new proportions. 
 She knew that she had gone back to London and made 
 her plans for departure, with so complete a sense of 
 immunity that she had not feared any accident which, 
 in the chance of the streets or of drawing rooms, might 
 bring her face to face with Passmore. The imputation 
 of the fact that he made no sign to her had struck her 
 forcibly. It was the last penalty of her sacrifice of her 
 self-respect, she had told herself, that he should accept 
 her denial as easily as he had accepted her acqui 
 escence; and she had received the implication of his 
 indifference as steadily as she had received her recog 
 nition of its justice. 
 
 She had seen very few people, but she had wished 
 to spare herself nothing which could illustrate, in her 
 own view, her independence of what she had done. 
 One afternoon, with a determined disregard of her 
 hesitation, she had called at Brough House, and had 
 found Isabel and the Duchess with people on the 
 terrace. There was too little privacy for her to have 
 any special word with Isabel; but as she lingered in 
 front of her for a moment, by the tea table, and in 
 earshot of everyone else, she had lowered her 
 voice to say: "Has Father Ames gone back, do you 
 think?" 
 
 Isabel had instantly lifted to her a look of surprise, 
 across the high tea urns and the crowded cups. "Yes; 
 
 [355]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 I believe he went some days ago. Of course I m not 
 certain. . . ." 
 
 Olive had drawn for an instant a complicated de 
 sign, with her long gloved finger, on the tea cloth; it 
 had been the sole moment when she felt her self- 
 command in question because of her foregone knowl 
 edge of Isabel s next response. 
 
 "Shall you ever, do you think, see him?" 
 
 "Ah, no! He takes his final vows, you see, next 
 month." Her look hesitated. "But, my dear child, 
 if any message is ever possible ..." 
 
 Olive caught up her uncertainty. "If, in the 
 chances of things, any of you should ever get a word 
 to him through his brother, or in any way I should 
 like him to know that I have left England, that I have 
 gone away, that I have left ..." Her manner had 
 been as authoritative as usual, but her words had con 
 fused themselves, helplessly. 
 
 Isabel s look had never shown her as definite a 
 liking. "Whether any actual message can reach him 
 or not, don t all one s messages reach him?" She 
 motioned aside a footman, who waited with an empty 
 cup. "It is so impossible for us to talk, here! Can t 
 we see each other again, before you go?" 
 
 Olive shook her head. "Thank you but I cannot 
 manage to be free; and I cannot talk. It s useless." 
 She had held out her hand, without further comment. 
 The failure and f ruitlessness of their few words seemed 
 to her symbolic; and the suffering in her mind had been 
 submerged again, with her dominance firmly upon it, 
 to prevent any possibility of a resurgence which, she 
 knew, must incapacitate her. . . . 
 
 She seemed to give to Devon, in the uninterrupted 
 [356]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 message of her eyes, the history of these fluctuations 
 before she spoke. 
 
 "I ve been wanting to talk to you, and I ve tried, 
 from day to day, to do it; and yet " her amusement 
 showed dimly "I have nothing but the old thing to 
 say!" 
 
 As her smile lit her face, it seemed to Devon like a 
 rapid incandescence. The frank avowal, in her look, 
 of what she had traversed, was so unlike her that his 
 words halted for a moment, and she pursued: "When 
 you got my telegram, saying I had decided I must 
 rejoin you at once, had you no inkling that I d been to 
 the end of the world" her shoulders rose under their 
 thin wrappings "and back again?" 
 
 Some instinct informed Devon that their exchange 
 was too serious for him to sacrifice the crudity of the 
 facts of her case. 
 
 "I very distinctly had an inkling. I ve not the habit, 
 you know, of having you rejoin me; and I knew my 
 father s condition could have meant very little to you. 
 So my inkling remained unexplained. You re not a 
 person about whom one has much sensitiveness of 
 imagination;" he tried in his turn to smile; "you re all 
 fact." 
 
 She was persistently silent for a second, with her 
 eyes set on his desk. The strain in her face, as the 
 moments passed, was so increased that it seemed more 
 and more to trace for him the disintegration which had 
 taken place in her thoughts. She raised her look again, 
 abruptly, to say: "I can t live any more like this. 
 I m too miserable; and you ve got to help me." She 
 made one of her sudden gestures. "I can t feel so con 
 demned, so separate from life, so devoid of feeling. It s 
 
 [357]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 useless I can t bear it; and only you, John, can teach 
 me. That, in these last weeks, I ve understood." 
 
 Devon watched her fixedly. "Why? What has 
 made you understand it?" 
 
 "Oh, my failures, my bitternesses, my needs. ..." 
 
 He caught her up. "Your needs, but not your feel 
 ings." 
 
 Olive s head lowered again. "I know; you re right. 
 But who is to teach me to feel, if it isn t you?" 
 
 She was motionless for an instant more, and then she 
 sank into the chair beside her, with her arms stretched 
 on the desk and her head on them, in a stream of tears. 
 Devon s arm was instantly around her, and he felt all 
 the force with which her head pressed against his 
 shoulder. She cried for some moments, with the hope 
 lessness of a child; and when he had calmed her, all 
 she would reiterate was that he must help her. It was 
 not until her sobs had subsided that she sat sharply 
 upright, with the tears still on her face and neck and 
 her hands still grasping his. 
 
 "I want to tell you I want you to know," she began, 
 "what happened to me in London. ..." 
 
 His sudden motion had a definitiveness which made 
 hers, by contrast, only a nervous gesture. "As to that, 
 no. You ll tell me nothing." 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 "That I ll consent to hear nothing, that I want to 
 hear nothing. The details by which you ve come to 
 feel as you feel aren t the point. I don t want them. 
 They don t belong to me; and this," he rapidly touched 
 her head, "does." 
 
 "But you ought to know ..." she broke in, per 
 sistently. 
 
 [358]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "Ah, my dear, I won t know! I ve believed for 
 years that you d ultimately need me; and perhaps, 
 now ..." It was his turn to let his sentence trail off, 
 with his habitually quizzical look. 
 
 "But my need it s as wide as the world! " She pur 
 sued with her insistent accent. "I ve got to ask of you 
 everything, from the simplest things up. It isn t only 
 that I know nothing; I am nothing. The basis of all 
 my living seems to have been fatally wrong. I ve yet 
 to learn every sort of thing most people know innately. 
 I ve got to learn a consciousness of life. . . . It s only 
 through human feeling I shall do it. Well, then " 
 her eyes dropped again to him "you must help me 
 to that." 
 
 He met her gaze without comment. Nothing in 
 what she said seemed to him more touching than the 
 fact that she said it; then his mind gave a sharp 
 turn. 
 
 "So that s what all I liked to call my dedication has 
 come to! " He spoke without any trace of acerbity and 
 merely with his habitual brevity. "My quest, my 
 consecration to you it s finally won from you your 
 permission to help you on the road to your famous 
 curiosity!" 
 
 She again pressed her cheek against him. "I believe 
 I have loved you always, and not known it!" 
 
 Devon s face showed, for the shortest second, the 
 signs of a quicker emotion than hers. "No, ytm 
 haven t; and more, my dear, you don t!" He laid his 
 hands once more on her shoulders, with an abrupt 
 energy. "But all you can give me I want all, all!" 
 
 She drew back to look at him. He could see the 
 gathering of an unfamiliar expression in her eyes. 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 "John, you are an extraordinary person!" she ex 
 claimed. 
 
 He shook his head, with his usual dry smile. "It 
 would be easier to let you suppose it, but I m not! 
 For years, you know, I ve refused to accept you on any 
 terms but my own. To the end and even against 
 you yourself I ll hold out for them!" 
 
 [36o]
 
 XXIX 
 
 THE weeks ran into the summer months and 
 through them; and still it seemed to Devon as 
 if Olive s fingers, when she touched him, held 
 him with an increased force of the appeal she had made 
 to him, on the July evening. The summer was already 
 so far past and her debility, the moment she made 
 any effort, so marked, that they had concluded to let 
 their plans drift and, Beatrix being safely in her grand 
 mother s hands, to save Olive the effort of any decis 
 ion. Through July Devon frequently motored her to 
 his mother s nearby country house, on a barren stretch 
 of Long Island sand, built in what Mrs. Devon con 
 ceived to be a perfect imitation of a Norman manoir. 
 There, in the cool breeze, some of Olive s colour 
 wavered at times across her face. But it was apparent 
 that she was less and less well, if only in the intensity 
 of her voice and the sharpness of her eyes; and by 
 September Devon had opened the town house, in spite 
 of the season, and was trying, under the instructions 
 of his doctor, to yield to any of her desires which 
 would give her no effort and arrest her persistent 
 depletion. 
 
 One of the ideas to which she most closely clung was 
 that she could not leave him. Even a day or so away 
 made her restless and febrile. Devon was too engaged 
 with his affairs, after his long absence and with the 
 executorship of his father s estate, to consider holidays 
 from his own point of view; but when he offered, with 
 his smile, to toss the jades to the dogs if she would
 
 ASCENT 
 
 come with him to the mountains, she had only pro 
 tested. What she wanted to do, he could see, on the 
 days she felt stronger, was to move ceaselessly about 
 the house, making the most elaborate arrangements for 
 his comfort. So new a consideration struck his grim 
 sense of contrast, and he scarcely knew whether it were 
 pathetic or exasperating to see her bending over his 
 piles of linen and arranging the division of the clothes 
 in his wardrobe. 
 
 She was increasingly conscious of a sensation of ex 
 haustion, more than an actual pain, in her back, and 
 more and more he saw her erect shoulders tend to lapse 
 into listlessness. By the early autumn most of her day 
 seemed to him to reduce itself to the hours she spent 
 on her sofa. Devon called in a specialist, and felt 
 a nascent sense of real alarm; but the vague talk of 
 her general fatigue and of her rapid powers of reac 
 tion was so born out by his knowledge of her that he 
 put aside the instinct to phrase, even to himself, any 
 definite question. 
 
 If the terms of her activity were restricted, he had 
 never seen her mind more positive in its force. For 
 the first weeks after their talk, she was as rapid and 
 as clear as he had ever seen her rapid and clear. Her 
 plasticity of intelligence, even in her ill health, had 
 never seemed to him more responsive or more sure. 
 He never came to her room without finding her deep 
 in a book on architecture; she questioned him per 
 petually about matters of his knowledge, about his 
 tastes, his theories of design, where he had picked 
 things up and why. She studied even the jades, he 
 saw, with the assertion that she must help him to 
 disentangle the intricacies of the elder Devon s reasons 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 for the division of his bequests. "I ve all the years 
 to make up for, you see," she said to him, when he 
 commented on the fatigue her effort must cost her. 
 "I ve all of you to learn." 
 
 Devon touched her hands absently for a second 
 before he brought out: "Why don t you just rest, and 
 learn Beatrix?" 
 
 "Sooner or later I must learn her, of course. But 
 not because she s herself or even because she s partly 
 me, but because she s you!" 
 
 "No because it s part of your idea! " He separated 
 slowly, one by one, her long fingers, as her hand lay 
 on her coverlet. "You ve a terrible realism!" 
 
 Her fingers moved spasmodically to catch his. "It 
 is marvellous the way you understand me!" 
 
 Devon laughed. "Oh, my dear, I ve understood you 
 yes; even better than poor Ames ever understood 
 you! He judged you, you see, by a code; I ve judged 
 you by something larger than a code. Everyone sees 
 you re wonderful, and Ames was wise enough to see 
 you were wonderful without any real wonder in you. 
 It s taken a vague person like me to understand that 
 the wonder was coming to you." His face changed, 
 with one of its rare variations, and his hands returned 
 her grasp. "I really believe it is!" 
 
 Her look clung to his, with a sudden uncertainty. 
 "Oh, is it? Is it?" She spoke eagerly, and her voice 
 immediately changed, as if she suppressed her own 
 doubt. "I m so little accustomed to faith, you know, 
 that you mustn t mind if sometimes I sound ridicu 
 lous," she ended. 
 
 His first definite association of himself with the 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 possibilities of happiness had struck Devon, one Octo 
 ber afternoon, when the press of his reflections had so 
 absorbed him that he had left his car, on his way up 
 Fifth avenue, and had set out to walk the remaining 
 distance to his house. Olive s steadily increasing depen 
 dence on him was more and more persistently in his 
 thoughts. He had been for some reason conscious all 
 day of the suspense which only the special moments of 
 feeling bring. In the past weeks his sensation of 
 safety with her of the subsidence of her criticism and 
 of the softening of the sharp angles of her personality 
 had been definite enough to let his vigilance relax 
 and to leave him free with her. For the first time 
 in their relation he had begun to accept her uncon 
 ditionally and with a sense of security in the quality 
 of her reactions. He knew that his tendency of mind 
 was too largely towards the negative view and towards 
 too close a conservatism of thought; but lately and 
 particularly during the day she had seemed to him, 
 as he thought of her, to have softened to the point of a 
 generosity which freed all the constriction of his 
 feeling. 
 
 This sense of an assurance of his possession of her 
 response had increased in him unremittingly. He had 
 fancied that he could watch her rapid curiosity discover 
 and trace the ways to his character, with the consistent 
 energy he had always seen it show. His judgment of 
 her was still invariable and separate enough to recog 
 nise what, even in her sublimation of him, she would 
 always see; that his tolerance was still, in her view, 
 weakness, and that she had never yet gauged the deli 
 cate difference between his constant construction and 
 her own dangerous fluidity. With her inerrant instinct 
 
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 for acquisition, he had watched her create for him such 
 a personality as her invariable play of restlessness let 
 her create; not with imagination, perhaps, but with 
 the first signs of a sincerity of devotion he had ever 
 seen in her and the existence of which was enough 
 to leave him unquestioning. 
 
 He had reached the upper and clearer stretches of 
 Fifth avenue, and he paused for a moment, looking 
 over the wall which edged the park, where he could 
 trace, across the thinning trees, the gathering colour 
 of the last light and the first flash of the evening illumi 
 nation in the sky. He found his thoughts clinging to 
 the astonishing fact of what made her power with him. 
 He had often tried to solve why it was that whatever 
 she did or failed to do, she had the capacity to give 
 him the stirring sense of upward movement, and to 
 reduce to unimportance any penalties in the importance 
 of a second of her clear feeling. He had more than 
 ever recently asked himself, as he watched her try to 
 temper the intolerance of her judgments and change her 
 conclusions to a different note, whether her poverty had 
 ever been so apparent as now when, in this revulsion 
 of her experience, she tried to learn the meaning of 
 contribution. The falsity of all her processes of manu 
 facture had never seemed to him so absolute as since he 
 had seen them displayed with himself as their goal. 
 Her rapidity of assimilation was as innate, in regard 
 to the terms of sentiment, as it had been in all her 
 experiments. It had been when she assured him, with 
 all the elaboration her capacity could put into the 
 assertion, that here, finally, was her greatest adventure, 
 that he had been most fully sure of the inescapable 
 condemnation of her temperament that she must 
 
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 seize, and could never learn. Yet there, he told him 
 self, with his habitually caustic conclusion, was where 
 he came in. It had needed, at times, all his self- 
 command to withstand the force of her very gener 
 osity. But no certainty had ever seemed to him as 
 immutable as the fact that it had been worth it, and 
 that to see her try to dedicate herself and to respond 
 had quickened the pulse of his existence so that every 
 thing else below this point had lost its savour. 
 
 He opened her sitting room door, half an hour later, 
 to find the room dark. By the light of the wood fire, 
 as it flared up, he made out that the lace covering on 
 her sofa was tossed to one side and the sofa empty; and 
 after the second which it took his eyes to suit them 
 selves to the obscurity, he saw that she was standing, 
 drawn to a rigid fixity, against one of the dark velvet 
 curtains. 
 
 Devon was in an instant conscious of a change in 
 the atmosphere; and a shock of incertitude touched his 
 mind. It suddenly occurred to him that both of them 
 had insensibly come, in their absorption she in her 
 own processes and he in watching her to measure less 
 steadily the progressive signs of her weakness; and he 
 remembered that the specialist he had last consulted 
 might again have come to see her. 
 
 "I thought you weren t to leave your sofa just yet! 
 I thought you weren t to stand!" he protested. 
 
 "I know; that s it ... I am to lie flat;" her words 
 might have made any meaning conceivable, without 
 reaching his brain. All he could find the force to com 
 prehend was the quality of a stroke in her tone. 
 
 "Owen has been here?" he tried to speak naturally. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 Devon stepped towards her, with a deeper sense of 
 vagueness. "And he s told you ?" 
 
 "It s I," she had all her precision, "who have told 
 him. Oh, they both came, he and Dr. Freeborn. They 
 nodded their heads a great deal they said they d at 
 last got results from the cultures they ve been taking. 
 Owen is coming back, at seven, to see you; he tried 
 to telephone you, just before they left, but you d gone 
 from your office." 
 
 She was still motionlessly white against the curtain, 
 with her attenuated strength stretched, as he saw, to 
 its furthest verge. 
 
 "What they weren t prepared for was what I told 
 them. It came across my mind . . . one of those 
 things to which I ve been so accustomed that I d long 
 since forgotten it ... that my mother, when she died, 
 was found to have tuberculosis of the spine." 
 
 The dusk of the room seemed to Devon, for an 
 instant, to blaze into clarity; he kept an instinctive 
 hold on his control, but words were past his capacity. 
 
 "Uncle Joseph Trail died of it," her phrases fell 
 without hesitation; "and his mother my grandmother 
 before him. There was another sister, too, who 
 showed symptoms; and Abby, I seem to remember, 
 had a little brother who. . . ." She lifted her hand 
 helplessly to her forehead. "I can t think it out. 
 They ve all always seemed to me so foolish and so 
 contemptible. . . ." 
 
 She waited for another moment. "My heritage from 
 the Trails the one thing they ve ever given me . . ." 
 and Devon heard her murmur, as she swayed and sank 
 to the ground, "how grandfather would have laughed!" 
 
 [367]
 
 XXX 
 
 PHILIP was rocking cautiously, in his low chair 
 beside the grate, with Beatrix curled closely on 
 his knees. Beneath his breath he murmured, in 
 a tone carefully muffled, the scraps of nursery rhymes 
 which came vagrantly into his mind. He had forgotten 
 so many of the words that every now and then his near 
 sighted eyes peered down uncertainly at her head, bent 
 in the curve of his arm, to see how many of his lapses 
 reached her. His strangest surprise, in the serried rank 
 of surprises of the last twenty-four hours, was Beatrix. 
 His knowledge of her, until now, had been limited to 
 occasional moments with her, when she was dressed in 
 her embroidered frocks and held by her nurse s hand. 
 The miracle of it seemed to him that she came to him 
 naturally and without criticism. It struck him as so 
 astonishing that it was disquieting; and again and again, 
 during their long day together, with the house hushed 
 and the sense that there were gathered, outside the 
 closed pine door, so many forces and facts which he 
 could not comprehend, he had glanced furtively at her 
 unconscious face, to see what sudden relegation of 
 him might as suddenly flare out of her eyes. 
 
 Into the even security of his days his stroll to the 
 village law office where he maintained a fictional 
 activity, his long gossips over the soiled table-cloth in 
 the fly-blown dining room of the Ware hotel, heated 
 by its iron stove to the temperature of July, his call at 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 the post office for the evening paper, on his way home, 
 and his supper, with Norah to gossip over his shoulder, 
 under the students lamp Devon s telephone message, 
 a few days before, had come with the effect of an over 
 turning of all his confidence. That Olive was ill 
 gravely ill, Devon had briefly said seemed somehow 
 less perturbing than the fact that they were to arrive, 
 with a trained nurse and maids and heaven knew how 
 many trunks. In his mind their luggage multiplied 
 itself endlessly, until the station master at Ware was 
 crushed under its bulk and his friendship for Philip 
 alienated in perpetuity. The details were all incom 
 prehensible enough to him; but there hovered at the 
 edges of his vague thought the fact that it was most 
 incomprehensible of all that Olive had wished to come. 
 He had tried to express his uncertainties to his son-in- 
 law, that morning; but Devon had asked him, with a 
 directness which always disconcerted his flurried con 
 sciousness, to wait. Olive had stood the journey 
 badly; that was the one fact paramount in Devon s 
 mind, and he was off to Wickford for the day, he said, 
 to meet and bring back an excellent man from Paris, 
 who happened to be at the hospital there for a series 
 of lectures, and another nurse. 
 
 "Olive will talk to you when she s rested enough 
 later in the day," he had ended, as he drew on his 
 gloves, and the lines thickly drawn under his eyes 
 had relaxed for an instant in their look at Philip. 
 "Don t worry too much, Mr. Lacy. Let s wait until 
 we see this new man. . . . And I ve the specialist who 
 has been looking after her in New York, the best 
 in the world, they say, coming up next week and 
 whenever we want him." 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 The questions seething in Philip s brain where was 
 the trained nurse to have her meals, did Beatrix s milk 
 need to be boiled, and what in the world could be done 
 about the broken places in the back stairs, since he 
 hadn t had time to have them mended? had had to 
 be content with this. Throughout the day, which he 
 and Beatrix had spent in the sitting room, he had 
 heard no sound except every now and then the nurse s 
 quick footfall on the stairs. At five o clock she had 
 opened the sitting room door, with a request which 
 had added perceptibly to his nervous apprehension. 
 Olive sent him word that of all things she wanted 
 to see Abby Trail. He was to have Norah run over 
 and ask Abby to come to her at six; she was generally 
 at her best about then; and he himself was to go up 
 to her with Abby. He had repeated the facts endlessly 
 to himself, as if repetition could denude them of some 
 of their strangeness, between the verses he was declaim 
 ing with a ritual regularity. 
 
 A step sounded on the porch outside, followed by 
 the sharp tinkle of the electric bell at the front door, 
 and Philip s face smoothed with relief. He rose 
 eagerly, to find Miss Trail s square figure already in 
 the passage way. Her open face acted upon him with 
 an unconscious reassurance, and he drew her into the 
 sitting room. 
 
 "Oh, Abby, I thought you d never come; and Norah 
 says the cold s awful. Olive s here you know, of 
 course! They took the day train and arrived last 
 night. She s been ill, you know, and they re so 
 anxious and she wants to see you; it s something 
 particular, of course it must be. You can imagine 
 how surprised I was why, it was the very last thing 
 
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 ASCENT 
 
 I ever expected! And she s ill really ill. No, it does 
 seem as if all the trouble in the world had to come to 
 me !" 
 
 Miss Trail, with a pat on his arm, had motioned him 
 to silence. The nurse was standing at the door again, 
 and she went forward and exchanged a rapid word or 
 two with her. Philip set down Beatrix on the hearth 
 rug, with her bricks in front of her, and gave a cautious 
 eye to the coals; then, with his deepening expression 
 of pained incomprehension, he followed Abby up the 
 stairs. 
 
 Olive had been taken, the night before, to her grand 
 father s room; and its small confines, in the gathering 
 dusk, threw into sharp relief the narrow bed and the 
 blackness of her hair on the pillow. She lay with the 
 same immobility the thought had circled in her mind, 
 throughout the day with which Mr. Lacy, in his last 
 hours, had lain. The years between them, as well as 
 the years since his death, had been cancelled with the 
 idea, and she had caught herself wondering if he had 
 been as annoyed as she at the constant sounds from 
 the kitchen and the pattern of the ornate wall paper, 
 as one s glance followed it; and if from the same pillow 
 he had looked at his approaching exploration of an 
 infinitude with anything like her eyes. Her look, as 
 Philip and Abby stood in the doorway, was as full as 
 ever of its reticences. It had attached itself, with a 
 fixity of absorption, to her bare arm, lying across the 
 sheet, with her rope of pearls twisted two or three 
 times about it and slipping between her wrist and her 
 sharpened elbow. 
 
 She turned her head, at a word from the nurse, and 
 as she greeted them her voice had its definite quality. 
 
 [37i]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 "Well, Abby " she made a motion with her hand 
 "it was nice of you to come in. Times change, 
 don t they? It must be quite a journey for you from 
 the idea you ve had of me all these years to see me 
 prostrate ! Yes, and asking a charity of you I ! " 
 
 "Of course, Olive, I m glad to see you," Miss Trail 
 had touched the coverlet, as she stood by the bed, with 
 a hand accustomed to sickness. Her reddened face 
 was deep in its gravity. "And I m glad you re here 
 since we heard you wanted to be here ! The trip wasn t 
 so easy for you, I guess, and it s a good thing it s over 
 with. I ve been so sorry to hear it all you ve had to go 
 through. And as for favours, well, anything I can 
 ever do for you is done; I m sure you know that!" 
 
 Olive again shifted her head, with an added rest 
 lessness in the motion. A bright blaze of colour in her 
 cheeks seemed to rise and fall with her breathing. 
 
 "I told the nurse I wanted father here when you 
 came; I m going to shake all your preconceived notions 
 of me, and it s so much shorter work to shake you 
 together. What s become of that house of your 
 father s, Abby, on Long Hill? The Long Hill farm, 
 they called it, I think." 
 
 "Long Hill!" Miss Trail hesitated. "Why, of 
 course . . . ! I m surprised you remember it. The 
 house has been empty now, for nearly a year; it s a 
 dreary kind of place, way off on that hill-top, and poor 
 soil. But in the spring we were thinking we d try to 
 fix it up a little, so as to get a good tenant ..." 
 
 "Well, here s your tenant." Olive spoke with all 
 her succinctness. "I want the house." 
 
 "You!" Abby had broken out before Philip could 
 murmur. "Why, Olive. . . ." 
 
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 "Yes, I want it. John understands, and he s willing. 
 He ll manage everything. He s used, you know, to my 
 impossible ways. Beatrix, father, can stay down here 
 with you and with her nurse; and the doctors can 
 come to me. John wants to see you at once, Abby, 
 about getting it a little tidy for us. I don t suppose 
 it s luxurious! But as soon as it s ready and when 
 I can stand it they ll move me up. They ll have to 
 hurry," her ironic gaze swept the figures beside her 
 bed; "I ll have to get through the roads before the 
 snow comes, won t I?" 
 
 Abby s pale puzzled eyes fixed her. "Of course you 
 can have the house, and welcome. But it s in no kind 
 of order; and way off there ... I really do think 
 you d best think about staying here, if it s the high air 
 you want, and letting us all fix you up com 
 fortably. . . ." 
 
 "But there s no plumbing!" Philip broke in; his 
 final mystification was reached. 
 
 "And really, Olive, it s the wildest sort of place . . ." 
 
 Olive s attention seemed to cling suddenly to the 
 words. 
 
 "That s just what I want. I don t care about the 
 paint or the plumbing, father or anything else." She 
 made her impatient gesture. "I ve done with all the 
 rest of it! What I want is the bareness." Her eyes 
 closed for a moment. "I know you think I m mad 
 enough. I think I m rather mad myself. It s only 
 John who doesn t; and when I said to him that I had 
 to come back to Ware, away from the ease and the 
 care and the doctors, and everything most people want, 
 and had to come because I d so hated it, he understood 
 oh, better than I did. And now, when I want to go 
 
 [373]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 to the loneliest place possible, what I d hate even more 
 than Ware itself, he understands that too. I daresay 
 it s not orthodoxy, father; but it s easier to die in 
 ugliness to let life go when it s stripped. ... So now 
 you know why I ve come. I m trying," her smile lit 
 her eyes for a second, "to get used to eternity . . ." 
 
 Her voice trailed off. "Do you remember, Abby, 
 that John and I met you there, one evening when you 
 were coming out of the farm, and we passed you on 
 the road such a road!" 
 
 "Yes; I remember just as if it was yesterday;" 
 Abby s voice was grave. 
 
 "And Lizzie what was her name, who lived at Long 
 Hill? Lizzie with the history, you know; what s 
 become of her?" 
 
 "She got in bad ways again," Miss Trail s tone was 
 reluctant. "I couldn t do anything with her, and she 
 slipped off, one night no one ever knew how. But, 
 my dear " she hesitated. 
 
 "How far more consistent than I ! " Olive s look had 
 drawn Miss Trail again to the bedside, and her eyes 
 met her fully. "She at least had the courage to get 
 what she wanted, while I ... No, Abby, you wouldn t 
 call my irreligious state of mind pretty, I see!" 
 
 Abby bent over her. "It s such a wonderful climate, 
 you know, and things do happen that are so extraor 
 dinary ... !" 
 
 Olive s hand touched hers. "That s nice of you! 
 But really I don t need it; or perhaps I ought to say, 
 it s no good. Then it s all right about the house? And 
 now do, if you don t mind, let me rest. . . ." 
 
 As he watched her gradual depletion, Devon thought 
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 ASCENT 
 
 chiefly of two things. What was most ceaselessly in 
 his mind was the progressive loss he had for so long 
 traced of her first integrity, that youthful wholeness 
 which had given her, even in her egoism, more than 
 anyone he had ever seen, an eagerness as high and pure 
 as the most bodiless illusion; and of the concessions 
 and soilures in her sacrifice of herself. No chance of 
 accident could so have hurt her not, he felt, the 
 coarsest and the most promiscuous experience as 
 her consuming individualism and her ignorance of 
 any values but her own. The others would have been 
 errors and faults of standard; but her preserved 
 incapacity to feel and be and her perpetual imposition 
 of herself, had frayed and destroyed her personality, 
 until that fact in itself seemed intolerable to him. 
 
 The second thought so constantly present to him 
 was the persistent impression, which he had always 
 felt, of her identification with larger issues than her 
 own. Her lack of any visible tradition or standard, 
 except of the miniature personal ones, her failure in her 
 faith, her complete negation of any obligations to 
 individuals or to a society, had made her extraor 
 dinarily suggestive of processes and penalties of which 
 she was only an exemplification. She loosed her hold 
 on the conditions of her life with this same suggestion 
 of dealing in wider spaces than the miseries of even her 
 suffering. At times, when he sat beside her bed, in the 
 immeasurable desolation of the farmhouse kitchen, 
 which, at this temperature, was the only habitable 
 room, Devon felt himself caught up by the high hand 
 with which she carried her surrender. Her confidence 
 in the validity of her idea never quivered at the thought 
 of their removal. She had had a profound revolt, but 
 
 [375]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 saying, ceaselessly, how kind Abby is . . . ! And I 
 used to say, when I was tiny, that I wouldn t die; yes, 
 and believed it, too! Well, perhaps it s better; perhaps 
 I should only have made you unhappy again . . ." 
 Her voice stopped and changed. "If I hadn t been 
 frightened into it, I should never have admitted that!" 
 she ended, with a flare of old Lacy s sagacity. 
 
 He raised his head to look at her. "But of course 
 you d have made me unhappy; you d have gone against 
 oh, not so much me, but the laws of feeling. You re 
 a rebel, Olive;" his grasp tightened. "As if I minded! 
 My relation with you has been in spite of yourself; 
 but what does that count? My devotion to you has 
 been, you know, in some ways, your only approach to 
 a soul!" 
 
 Her rare smile showed. "I don t understand you; 
 but since you say it. . . ." 
 
 Her eyes closed, and as he leaned close to her he 
 could see, with the fading of her strength, that the 
 thought faded from her face. 
 
 Devon rose and, moving silently across the room, 
 he opened the door and stepped out into the profundity 
 of the night. A snow was falling through the darkness. 
 The mystery of its sound, in the still air, laid on him 
 the touch of ultimacy. He stood and listened to it, 
 tracing, as it seemed to him, with his vitality itself, the 
 long stages which had led to her final arrival. The 
 mysterious alchemy of a fate, working against her 
 personal volition and concessions, had never appeared 
 to him larger. While this sense of extension so pos 
 sessed him he could see that, even in her dependence 
 and in her attempt at response, she had given him 
 something the inevitability of which was almost as rich 
 
 [378]
 
 ASCENT 
 
 as the emotion of which she was incapable. With the 
 passage of his thoughts and his beliefs, out through 
 the obscurity which was to be the next stage of her 
 journey, he felt his own personality pass. It was this 
 same conviction of the identity of himself with her, 
 with which, one spring morning a few weeks later, he 
 saw her carried out to the hill-top and laid in her grave. 
 
 Finis. 
 
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 $2.00 
 
 A 000110635 o
 
 
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