Edgar left the Thornleighs that day with several quite new subjects of thought. His heart was touched to the very quick by that little revelation which Gussy had made to him of her sister’s history. It stopped him quite suddenly in the current of his previous reflections. He had been so full of the unprofitableness and unmeaningness of the new existence into which he found himself thrown, that the discovery of a tragedy so simple and so hopeless, just one step out of it, upset once more all his conclusions. The idea he had been forming was, that within the range of “Society” strong feeling of any kind, much less passion, was impossible--even suffering and death seemed things too great and too human to penetrate within that artificial ring. He could have imagined the same routine going on for ever and ever, without any novelty in it, or touch of the real. Yet here, upon the very edge of the eternal dance, here was a single silent figure who had suffered (as Edgar felt, in the fervour of youthful sympathy) the extremity of human woe. How strange it was! The contrast confused him, and gave another turn, as it were, to his whirling brain. They were then human creatures after all, those people of fashion, whirling on and on in their everlasting round. Sometimes pain, passion, disappointment, tragical rending asunder of hearts and lives, proved their real nature. Perhaps even the man who was trying to take all the use out of his life by means of engagements twenty deep, had been pierced through and through with some such shaft as that which had killed poor Ada’s lover. Perhaps some of those women who hurried from one assemblage to another as fast as hours and horses could carry them had suffered in silence all that Ada had done, and lost all savour and sweetness in life like her. Edgar felt himself pulled up short, and paused in his wholesale criticisms. How could he tell--how could any one tell--what lay underneath the surface of the stream? He paused, and then he went off at a tangent, as young philosophers are apt to do, and asked himself whether this flutter and crowding and universal buzz of amusement was not a vast pretence, adopted by common consent, to hide what everybody was suffering underneath? outside an attempt to appear as if they were having things their own way, enjoying to the height of their capacity all the good the world could give; but underneath a deep universal conviction that life was naught, and happiness a dream! Was this the true theory of life? The question occupied him a great deal more perhaps than the readers of this history will sympathise with; but then, it must be remembered that it was all very new to him, and that every novel phase of life strikes us more strongly than that to which we are accustomed. To Arthur Arden, for instance, the course of existence which startled Edgar was too common to call for a single question. It was the ordinary state of affairs to him. But Edgar knew the other forms so much better.