"Oh, nothing. I thought you'd be like that. I just wanted to make sure." He smiled to himself. He had funny, secret thoughts that you would never know. "Well," she said, "I didn't beat you." "Form not good enough yet--quite." He promised her it should be perfect by the time Mark came home. VIII. "The pale pearl-purple evening--" The words rushed together. She couldn't tell whether they were her own or somebody else's. There was the queer shock of recognition that came with your own real things. It wasn't remembering though it felt like it. Shelley--"The pale purple even." Not pearl-purple. Pearl-purple was what you saw. The sky to the east after sunset above Greffington Edge. Take out "pale," and "pearl-purple evening" was your own. The poem was coming by bits at a time. She could feel the rest throbbing behind it, an unreleased, impatient energy. Her mother looked in at the door. "What are you doing it for, Mary?" "Oh--for nothing." "Then for pity's sake come down into the warm room and do it there. You'll catch cold." She hated the warm room. The poem would be made up of many poems. It would last a long time, through the winter and on into the spring. As long as it lasted she would be happy. She would be free from the restlessness and the endless idiotic reverie of desire. IX. "From all blindness of heart; from pride, vain-glory and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, "_Good Lord, deliver us_." Mary was kneeling beside her mother in church. "From fornication, and all other deadly sin--" Happiness, the happiness that came from writing poems; happiness that other people couldn't have, that you couldn't give to them; happiness that was no good to Mamma, no good to anybody but you, secret and selfish; that was your happiness. It was deadly sin. She felt an immense, intolerable compassion for everybody who was unhappy. A litany of compassion went on inside her: For old Dr. Kendal, sloughing and rotting in his chair; for Miss Kendal; for all women labouring of child; for old Mrs. Heron; for Dorsy Heron; for all prisoners and captives; for Miss Louisa Wright; for all that were desolate and oppressed; for Maggie's sister, dying of cancer; and for Mamma, kneeling there, praying. Sunday after Sunday. And she would work in the garden every morning, digging in leaf mould and carrying the big stones for the rockery; she would go to Mrs. Sutcliffe's sewing parties; she would sit for hours with Maggie's sister, trying not to look as if she minded the smell of the cancer. You were no good unless you could do little things like that. You were no good unless you could keep on doing them. She tried to keep on. Some people kept on all day, all their lives. Still, it was not you so much as the world that was wrong. It wasn't fair and right that Maggie's sister should have cancer while you had nothing the matter with you. Or even that Maggie had to cook and scrub while you made poems.