Poems made of the white dust, of the wind in the green corn, of the five trees—they would be the most beautiful poems in the world.

Sometimes the images of these things would begin to move before her with persistence, as if they were going to make a pattern; she could hear a thin cling-clang, a moving white pattern of sound that, when she tried to catch it, broke up and flowed away. The image pattern and the sound pattern belonged to each other, but when she tried to bring them together they fell apart.

That came of reading too much Byron.

How was it that patterns of sound had power to haunt and excite you? Like the "potnia, potnia nux" that she found in the discarded Longfellow, stuck before his "Voices of the Night."

Potnia, potnia nux, hypnodoteira ton polyponon broton, erebothen ithi, mole, mole katapteros ton Agamemnonion epi domon.

She wished she knew Greek; the patterns the sounds made were so hard and still.

And there were bits of patterns, snapt off, throbbing wounds of sound that couldn't heal. Lines out of Mark's Homer.

Mark's Greek books had been taken from her five years ago, when Rodney went to Chelmsted. And they had come back with Rodney this Easter. They stood on the shelf in Mark's bedroom, above his writing-table.

One day she found her mother there, dusting and arranging the books.
Besides the little shabby Oxford Homers there were an Aeschylus, a
Sophocles, two volumes of Aristophanes, clean and new, three volumes of
Euripides and a Greek Testament. On the table a well-preserved Greek
Anthology, bound in green, with the owner's name, J.C. Ponsonby, stamped
on it in gilt letters. She remembered Jimmy giving it to Mark.

She took the Iliad from its place and turned over the torn, discoloured pages.

Her mother looked up, annoyed and uneasy, like a child disturbed in the possession of its toys.

"Mark's books are to be kept where Mark put them," she said.

"But, Mamma, I want them."

Never in her life had she wanted anything so much as those books.

"When will you learn not to want what isn't yours?"

"Mark doesn't want them, or he'd have taken them. He'd give them me if he was here."

"He isn't here. I won't have them touched till he comes back."

"But, Mamma darling, I may be dead. I've had to wait five years as it is."

"Wait? What for, I should like to know?"

"To learn Greek, of course."

Her mother's face shivered with repugnance. It was incredible that anybody should hate a poor dead language so.

"Just because Mark learnt Greek, you think you must try. I thought you'd grown out of all that tiresome affectation. It was funny when you were a little thing, but it isn't funny now."

Her mother sat down to show how tired she was of it.

"It's just silly vanity."

Mary's heart made a queer and startling movement, as if it turned over and dashed itself against her ribs. There was a sudden swelling and aching in her throat. Her head swam slightly. The room, Mark's room, with Mark's white bed in one corner and Dan's white bed in the other, had changed; it looked like a room she had never been in before. She had never seen that mahogany washstand and the greyish blue flowers on the jug and basin. The person sitting on the yellow-painted bedroom chair was a stranger who wore, unaccountably, a brown dress and a gold watch-chain with a gold tassel that she remembered. She had an odd feeling that this person had no right to wear her mother's dress and her chain.

The flash of queerness was accompanied by a sense of irreparable disaster. Everything had changed; she heard herself speaking, speaking steadily, with the voice of a changed and unfamiliar person.

"Mark doesn't think it's vanity. You only think it is because you want to."

The mind of this unfamiliar self had a remorseless lucidity that seemed to her more shocking than anything she could imagine. It went on as if urged by some supreme necessity. "You're afraid. Afraid."

It seemed to her that her mother really was afraid.

"Afraid? And what of?" her mother said.

The flash went out, leaving her mind dark suddenly and defeated.

"I don't know what of. I only know you're afraid."

"That's an awful thing for any child to say to any mother. Just because I won't let you have your own way in everything. Until your will is resigned to God's will I may well be afraid."

"How do you know God doesn't want me to know Greek? He may want it as much as I do."

"And if you did know it, what good would it do you?"

She stood staring at her mother, not answering. She knew the sound patterns were beautiful, and that was all she knew. Beauty. Beauty could be hurt and frightened away from you. If she talked about it now she would expose it to outrage. Though she knew that she must appear to her mother to be stubborn and stupid, even sinful, she put her stubbornness, her stupidity, her sinfulness, between it and her mother to defend it.

"I can't tell you," she said.

"No. I don't suppose you can."

Her mother followed up the advantage given her. "You just go about dreaming and mooning as if there was nothing else in the wide world for you to do. I can't think what's come over you. You used to be content to sit still and sew by the hour together. You were more help to me when you were ten than you are now. The other day when I asked you to darn a hole in your own stocking you looked as if I'd told you to go to your funeral.

"It's time you began to take an interest in looking after the house. There's enough to keep you busy most of your time if you only did the half of it."

"Is that what you want me to be, Mamma? A servant, like Catty?"

"Poor Catty. If you were more like Catty," her mother said, "you'd be happier than you are now, I can tell you. Catty is never disagreeable or disobedient or discontented."

"No. But perhaps Catty's mother thinks she is."

She thought: She is afraid.

"Do you suppose," her mother said, "it's any pleasure to me to find fault with my only daughter? If you weren't my only daughter, perhaps I shouldn't find fault."

Her new self answered again, implacable in its lucidity. "You mean, if you'd had a girl you could do what you liked with you'd have let me alone? You'd have let me alone if you could have done what you liked with Mark?"

She noticed, as if it had a separate and significant existence, her mother's hand lying on the green cover of the Greek Anthology.

"If you were like Mark—if you were only like him!"

"If I only were!"

"Mark never hurt me. Mark never gave me a minute's trouble in his life."

"He went into the Army."

"He had a perfect right to go into the Army."

Silence. "Minky—you'll be kind to little Mamma." A hard, light sound; the vexed fingers tap-tapping on the book. Her mother rose suddenly, pushing the book from her.

"There—take Mark's books. Take everything. Go your own way. You always have done; you always will. Some day you'll be sorry for it."

She was sorry for it now, miserable, utterly beaten. Her new self seemed to her a devil that possessed her. She hated it. She hated the books. She hated everything that separated her and made her different from her mother and from Mark.

Her mother went past her to the door.

"Mamma—I didn't mean it—Mamma—"

Before she could reach the door it shut between them.

II.

The library at Five Elms was very small. Emilius used it as a smoking-room; but it was lined with books. Where the rows of shelves met the shutter cases a fold of window-curtain overlapped their ends.

On the fifth shelf, covered by the curtain, she found the four volumes of Shelley's Poetical Works, half-bound in marble-paper and black leather. She had passed them scores of times in her hunt for something to read. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy Bysshe—what a silly name. She had thought of him as she thought of Allison's History of Europe in seventeen volumes, and the poems of Cornwall and Leigh Hunt. Books you wouldn't read if you were on a desert island.

There was something about Shelley in Byron's Life and Letters. Something she had read and forgotten, that persisted, struggled to make itself remembered.

Shelley's Pantheism.

The pages of Shelley were very clean; they stuck together lightly at the edges, like the pages of the Encyclopaedia at "Pantheism" and "Spinoza." Whatever their secret was, you would have to find it for yourself.

Table of Contents—Poems written in 1816—"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." She read that first.

"Sudden thy shadow fell on me:—
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!"

It had happened to Shelley, too. He knew how you felt when it happened. (Only you didn't shriek.) It was a real thing, then, that did happen to people.

She read the "Ode to a Skylark," the "Ode to the West Wind" and
"Adonais."

All her secret happiness was there. Shelley knew about the queerness of the sharp white light, and the sudden stillness, when the grey of the fields turns to violet: the clear, hard stillness that covers the excited throb-throbbing of the light.

"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity"—

Colours were more beautiful than white radiance. But that was because of the light. The more light there was in them the more beautiful they were; it was their real life.

One afternoon Mr. Propart called. He came into the library to borrow a book.

"And what are you so deep in?" he said.

"Shelley."

"Shelley? Shelley?" He looked at her. A kind, considering look. She liked his grey face with its tired keenness. She thought he was going to say something interesting about Shelley; but he only smiled his thin, drooping smile; and presently he went away with his book.

Next morning the Shelleys were not in their place behind the curtain.
Somebody had moved them to the top shelf. Catty brought the step-ladder.

In the evening they were gone. Mr. Propart must have borrowed them.

III.

"To this, then, comes our whole argument respecting the fourth kind of madness, on account of which anyone, who, on seeing the beauty in this lower world, being reminded of the true, begins to recover his wings, and, having recovered them, longs to soar aloft, but, being unable to do it, looks upwards like a bird, and despising things below, is deemed to be affected with madness."

Beauty in itself. In itself—Beauty in beautiful things. She had never thought about it that way before. It would be like the white light in the colours.

Plato, discovered in looking for the lost Shelleys, thus consoled her. The Plato of Bohn's Library. Cary's English for Plato's Greek. Slab upon slab. No hard, still sound-patterns. Grey slabs of print, shining with an inner light—Plato's thought.

Her happiness was there, too.