I listened to his comments on the sermon, feeling all the time most uncomfortable. Gordon and Thomas tried to climb about my chair, but I kept them off with a firm hand. The parlour door was open, probably the kitchen door too, for all at once there came a scream from that department, not very loud, yet distinctly audible. I glanced at Alice. The others hadn’t heard it. Uncle George was still in the midst of his mild enthusiasm, and Gordon and Thomas, flattening their little round red noses with a finger, were practising squinting with remarkable success. Alice had become perfectly still, her big black eyes fixed on mine: and, as for me, I knew the mouse had been discovered and felt vastly relieved. Conceive of my amazement, therefore, when the soup after all appeared at table. Alice and I did not take any, and Aunt Margaret did not either, so that there was enough left to do Monday’s dinner; but of the mouse I never heard again. CHAPTER XXIV My friendship with Owen was at present the one quite satisfactory thing in my life. Neither at school nor at home was I particularly successful. I worked very little, merely sufficiently to prevent myself from getting into trouble; I did not play games. I had gone to the School of Art for a few weeks, but as I was never put to draw anything except curves and squares and geometrical flowers, I got sick of this and gave it up. I saw a good deal of Owen, though not so much as I should have liked. Of course I saw him every day at school, but I had never been inside his house, and I could not ask him to mine. I did not want to let him see the kind of people I had sprung from. I was ashamed of them. On Saturdays and Sundays we usually went for long walks together, during which we threshed out the affairs of the universe, and built it over again. It was all quite new to me, just as was the peculiar type of Owen’s mind, its extraordinary eagerness in the pursuit of ideas. My head already swarmed with an amazing mass of unsettled notions which buzzed in it like bees in a shaken hive. It seemed to me we never discussed anything less serious than the immortality of the soul. Owen was not sure of the existence of God, and I, so far as Christianity was concerned, was an Agnostic also. But to Owen it appeared to make an enormous difference, he was positively unhappy about it; while to me, though I did not let him suspect this, it was a matter of supreme indifference. Levine’s acceptance of Christianity, at the end of “Anna Karénine,” was for Owen an endless source of dissatisfaction and query. We discussed it by the hour. Yet, when actually reading the book, I had been far more struck by the appearance in Wronsky’s and Anna’s dreams of the strange little man, who seems to pass out of vision into reality just before the suicide. What did _that_ mean? Why was he there? Had he, like some added flick of colour in the work of a master, been put