could be limited by an effort to the persons of Mr. Hirst and Mr. Hewet.  Any clear analysis of them was impossible owing to the haze of wonder in which they were enveloped.  She could not reason about them as about people whose feelings went by the same rule as her own did, and her mind dwelt on them with a kind of physical pleasure such as is caused by the contemplation of bright things hanging in the sun.  From them all life seemed to radiate; the very words of books were steeped in radiance.  She then became haunted by a suspicion which she was so reluctant to face that she welcomed a trip and stumble over the grass because thus her attention was dispersed, but in a second it had collected itself again.  Unconsciously she had been walking faster and faster, her body trying to outrun her mind; but she was now on the summit of a little hillock of earth which rose above the river and displayed the valley.  She was no longer able to juggle with several ideas, but must deal with the most persistent, and a kind of melancholy replaced her excitement.  She sank down on to the earth clasping her knees together, and looking blankly in front of her.  For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone.

“What is it to be in love?” she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea.  Hypnotised by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer.  When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and with her two books beneath her arm returned home again, much as a soldier prepared for battle.

Chapter XIV

The sun of that same day going down, dusk was saluted as usual at the hotel by an instantaneous sparkle of electric lights.  The hours between dinner and bedtime were always difficult enough to kill, and the night after the dance they were further tarnished by the peevishness of dissipation.  Certainly, in the opinion of Hirst and Hewet, who lay back in long arm-chairs in the middle of the hall, with their coffee-cups beside them, and their cigarettes in their hands, the evening was unusually dull, the women unusually badly dressed, the men unusually fatuous.  Moreover, when the mail had been distributed half an hour ago there were no letters for either of the two young men.  As every other person, practically, had received two or three plump letters from England, which they were now engaged in reading, this seemed hard, and prompted Hirst to make the caustic remark that the animals had been fed.  Their silence, he said, reminded him of the silence in the lion-house when each beast holds a lump of raw meat in its paws.  He went on, stimulated by this comparison, to liken some to hippopotamuses, some to canary birds, some to swine, some to parrots, and some to loathsome reptiles curled round the half-decayed