The irony of fate, coming out so bitterly in all that her mother had said, was like a cold hand on Emily’s heart.  She sat again in the chair from which she had risen, and let her head lie back.  Her vitality was at a low ebb; the movement of indignation against the cruelty which was wrecking her life had passed and left behind it a weary indifference.  Happily she need not think yet.  There were still some hours of respite before her; there was the night to give her strength.  The daylight was a burden; it must be borne with what patience she could summon.  But she longed for the time of sacred silence.

To a spirit capable of high exaltations, the hour of lassitude is a foretaste of the impotence of death.  To see a purpose in the cold light of intellectual conviction, and to lack the inspiring fervour which can glorify a struggle with the obstacles nature will interpose, is to realise intensely the rugged baldness of life stripped of illusion, life as we shall see it when the end approaches and the only voice that convinces tell us that all is vanity.  It is the mood known by the artist when, viewing the work complete within his mind, his heart lacks its joy and his hand is cold to execute.  Self-consciousness makes of life itself a work of art.  There are the blessed moments when ardour rises in pursuit of the ideal, when it is supreme bliss to strive and overcome; and there are the times of aching languor, when the conception is still clear in every line, but the soul asks wearily—­To what end?  In Emily it was reaction after the eagerness of her sudden unreasoning hope.  Body and mind suffered beneath a burden of dull misery.  Motives seemed weak; effort was weary and unprofitable; life unutterably mean.  It could scarcely be called suffering, to feel thus.

She was roused by voices below, and, immediately after, her mother came to her door again.

‘Isn’t it vexatious?’ Mrs. Hood whispered.  ’Here are Jessie and Geraldine.  I’m obliged to ask them to stay tea.  Do you feel well enough to come down?’

Emily went down at once, almost with a sense of relief, and presented herself to the girls very much in her usual way.

‘Now, I know very well you don’t want us,’ said Jessie, with her sprightly frankness.  ’We shouldn’t have thought of coming if it hadn’t been that we met Mr. Hood just this side of the bridge, and he forced us to come on; he said it wouldn’t be very long before he was back himself.  But of course we shan’t stay tea, so it’s no use—­’

‘Oh, of course not,’ put in Geraldine.  ’We know Mrs. Hood’s always far too busy on a Saturday afternoon.  I didn’t want to come; I told Jessie it would be far better to put it off till to-morrow—­’

‘All the same,’ resumed her sister, ’she wanted to see you very much.  She’s got something to tell you.  Now you may as well get it out and done with, Jerry; you needn’t expect I’m going to help you.’

The two giggled together.