Nothing completed itself there.  Nothing happened.

The morning sunshine poured into the library through ten long narrow windows; birds were singing; the autumn air, rich with a faint aroma of November melancholy that stung the imagination pleasantly, filled my antechamber.  I looked out upon the undulating wooded landscape, hemmed in by the sweep of distant Downs, and I tasted a whiff of the sea.  Rooks cawed as they floated above the elms, and there were lazy cows in the nearer meadows.  A dozen times I tried to make my nest and settle down to work, and a dozen times, like a turning fastidious dog upon a hearth rug, I rearranged my chair and books and papers.  The temptation of the Catalogue and shelves, of course, was accountable for much, yet not, I felt, for all.  That was a manageable seduction.  My work, moreover, was not of the creative kind that requires absolute absorption; it was the mere readable presentation of data I had accumulated.  My notebooks were charged with facts ready to tabulate—­facts, too, that interested me keenly.  A mere effort of the will was necessary, and concentration of no difficult kind.  Yet, somehow, it seemed beyond me:  something forever pushed the facts into disorder ... and in the end I sat in the sunshine, dipping into a dozen books selected from the shelves outside, vexed with myself and only half-enjoying it.  I felt restless.  I wanted to be elsewhere.

And even while I read, attention wandered.  Frances, Mabel, her late husband, the house and grounds, each in turn and sometimes all together, rose uninvited into the stream of thought, hindering any consecutive flow of work.  In disconnected fashion came these pictures that interrupted concentration, yet presenting themselves as broken fragments of a bigger thing my mind already groped for unconsciously.  They fluttered round this hidden thing of which they were aspects, fugitive interpretations, no one of them bringing complete revelation.  There was no adjective, such as pleasant or unpleasant, that I could attach to what I felt, beyond that the result was unsettling.  Vague as the atmosphere of a dream, it yet persisted, and I could not dissipate it.

Isolated words or phrases in the lines I read sent questions scouring across my mind, sure sign that the deeper part of me was restless and ill at ease.

Rather trivial questions too—­half-foolish interrogations, as of a puzzled or curious child:  Why was my sister afraid to sleep alone, and why did her friend feel a similar repugnance, yet seek to conquer it?  Why was the solid luxury of the house without comfort, its shelter without the sense of permanence?  Why had Mrs. Franklyn asked us to come, artists, unbelieving vagabonds, types at the farthest possible remove from the saved sheep of her husband’s household?  Had a reaction set in against the hysteria of her conversion?  I had seen no signs of religious fervor in her; her atmosphere was that of an ordinary, high-minded woman, yet a woman of the world.  Lifeless, though, a little, perhaps, now that I came to think about it:  she had made no definite impression upon me of any kind.  And my thoughts ran vaguely after this fragile clue.