the last twenty yöhs. I suppose it mattuhed in the eighteenth centureh, but after all,” she neighed with an impatient scorn, “who cares today? Who cares,” she went on recklessly, “what lovely woman stoops to? I cawn’t see that it makes the slightest difference. It’s not as if it mattuhed any longah! No one cares!”
“Ow!” the young man said with his air of coldly startled interest. “Yes, I think I follow you, but I don’t entirely agree. How can we be certain what is sentimental and what’s not?”
“But it seems to me that he misses the whole point!” the girl exclaimed with one full, mouth-like rush. “After all,” she went on scornfully, “no one is interested in woman’s folly any longah—the ruined-maiden broken-vows sawt of thing. If that was what she got she should have jolly well known what she wanted to begin with! I’ll not waste any pity on her,” she said grimly. “The greatest folly is not knowin’what you want to do! The whole point today is to live as cleveleh as possible! That’s the only thing that mattahs! If you know what you want and go about it cleveleh, the rest of it will take care of itself.”
“Um,” the mother now remarked, her gaunt bare smile set grimly, formidably, on her weathered face. “That takes a bit of doin’, doesn’t it?” And as she spoke these quiet words her grim smile never faltered for an instant and there was a hard, an obdurate, an almost savage irony in her intonation, which left them all completely unperturbed.
“Oh, a ’strawd’n’ry thing! A ’strawd’n’ry thing!” the huge clerical creature whispered dreamily at this point, as if he had not heard them. And delicately he set his little cup back on the saucer.
Eugene’s first impulse when he saw and heard them was to shout with an astounded laughter—and yet, somehow, one never laughed. They had a formidable and impregnable quality that silenced laughter: a quality that was so assured in its own sense of inevitable rightness that it saw no other way except its own, and was so invincibly sure in its own way that it was indifferent to all others. It could be taken among strange lands and alien faces, and to the farthest and most savage colonies on earth, and would never change or alter by a jot.
Yes, they had found a way, a door, a room to enter, and there were walls about them now, and the way was theirs. The mark of dark time and the architecture of unnumbered centuries of years were on them, and had made them what they were; and what they were, they were, and would not change.
Eugene did not know if their way was a good way, but he knew it was
