There were hours when she spoke of their taking refuge in what she called the commonest tact--as if this principle alone would suffice to light their way; there were others when it might have seemed, to listen to her, that their course would demand of them the most anxious study and the most independent, not to say original, interpretation of signs.

She talked now as if it were indicated, at every turn, by finger-posts of almost ridiculous prominence; she talked again as if it lurked in devious ways and were to be tracked through bush and briar; and she even, on occasion, delivered herself in the sense that, as their situation was unprecedented, so their heaven was without stars.

"'Do' ?" she once had echoed to him as the upshot of passages covertly, though briefly, occurring between them on her return from the visit to America that had immediately succeeded her marriage, determined for her by this event as promptly as an excursion of the like strange order had been prescribed in his own case.

"Isn't the immense, the really quite matchless beauty of our position that we have to 'do' nothing in life at all ?--nothing except the usual, necessary, everyday thing which consists in one's not being more of a fool than one can help.

That's all--but that's as true for one time as for another.