If it is an illusion I'd rather know it. How _can_ I know? There isn't anybody here who can tell me. Nobody you could believe if they told you--I can believe _myself_. I've burnt everything I've written that was bad. You believe yourself to-day. You believed yesterday. How do you know you'll believe to-morrow? To-morrow-- V. Aunt Lavvy had come to stay. When she came you had the old feeling of something interesting about to happen. Only you knew now that this was an illusion. She talked to you as though, instead of being thirty-three, you were still very small and very young and ignorant of all the things that really mattered. She was vaguer and greyer, more placid than ever, and more content with God. Impossible to believe that Papa used to bully her and that Aunt Lavvy had revolted. "For thirty-three years, Emilius, thirty-three years"-- Sunday supper at Five Elms; on the table James Martineau's _Endeavours After the Christian Life_. She wondered why she hadn't thought of Aunt Lavvy. Aunt Lavvy knew Dr. Martineau. As long as you could remember she had always given a strong impression of knowing him quite well. But when Mary had made it clear what she wanted her to ask him to do, it turned out that Aunt Lavvy didn't know Dr. Martineau at all. And you could see she thought you presumptuous. VI. When old Martha brought the message for her to go to tea with Miss Kendal, Mary slunk out through the orchard into the Back Lane. At that moment the prospect of talking two hours with Miss Kendal was unendurable. And there was no other prospect. As long as she lived in Morfe there would be nothing--apart from her real, secret life there would be nothing--to look forward to but that. If it was not Miss Kendal it would be Miss Louisa or Dorsy or old Mrs. Heron. People talked about dying of boredom who didn't know that you could really die of it. If only you didn't keep on wanting somebody--somebody who wasn't there. If, before it killed you, you could kill the desire to know another mind, a luminous, fiery crystal, to see it turn, shining and flashing. To talk to it, to listen to it, to love the human creature it belonged to. She envied her youth its capacity for day-dreaming, for imagining interminable communions. Brilliant hallucinations of a mental hunger. Better than nothing.... If this went on the breaking-point must come. Suddenly you would go smash. Smash. Your mind would die in a delirium of hunger. VII. "It's a pity we can't go to his lecture," said Miss Kendal. The train was moving out of Reyburn station. It was awful to think how nearly they had missed it. If Dr. Charles had stayed another minute at the harness-maker's. Miss Kendal sat on the edge of the seat, very upright in her black silk mantle with the accordion-pleated chiffon frills. She had sat like that since the train began to pull, ready to get out the instant it stopped at Durlingham. "I feel sure it's going to be all right," she said.