The thoughts of Rosalie, not sequent, but going about and amounting thusly, were thus: “That is very pathetic. That is horribly sad and pathetic. Coming at the end like that and without any strokes and flourishes, it is as if she was exhausted of her hate and rage and just put out an utterly tired hand and set this here like a sigh. That’s pathetic, the mere look of it and that thought of it. And then what she says. The dreadfully simple naivete of the beginning of it. Staring at a fallen horse in the street. It’s just where they would be, both of them. They’d stand there for hours and just stare and stare. And then she steps back on his foot and there’s ‘his dear face’ smiling at her; ah, it’s pathetic, it’s poignant! I can see it absolutely. Yes, I can. As if I were in the crowd around the horse, watching them. There they are, the horse between us, and all the doltish, staring faces round about; and their two dull and stupid faces; and as their eyes meet that sudden look upon their foolish faces, as of irradiation out of heaven, that would make a clown’s face beautiful and cause the hardest heart to twist. But it doesn’t cause mine to twist. That’s the odd thing. I remember perfectly when a thing like that would have given me a little blinky kind of feeling. I’ve always been awfully quick to notice things like that. I’ve often seen them. Quite recently, so little, I believe, as a year ago, things like that, things like this, would have moved me a lot. They somehow do not now. That frightful ending of hers: ‘You could get dozens and dozens of men to love you, but you have taken mine and I can never, never get another.’ That is most terribly pathetic. I think that is the most poignant thing I have ever heard. Well, I can realise its utter pathos; I can realise it but I cannot feel it. It does not move me. ‘And I never, never can get another.’ It’s frightful. I could cry. But I do not a bit want to cry. I must have somehow changed. I am not a bit sorry if I have changed. I would be sorry to go back and be as, if I have changed, I must have been--sentimental. I have changed. I believe I can look back and see it. About the time I left the Sultana’s, mother’s letters, and keeping them and answering them, began to be--yes they did begin to be a little, tiny bit of a nuisance to me. Yes, it was beginning then, this. And I expect earlier, if I worked it out. There’s nothing in it to regret. It’s just a growing out of a thing. It’s not, when I see a thing that’s pathetic, that I’ve grown blunt or blind and can’t see it for pathetic. It’s just--I know what it is--it’s just that it doesn’t appeal to me in the same way. It’s like seeing a dish of most tempting food in front of you, not that I ever remember my mouth, as they say, watering at anything; but say strawberries and cream--I’m fond of strawberries and cream--it’s like seeing a dish of strawberries and cream in front of you, and knowing it’s good and knowing it’s delicious,