I am trying to bring it all, what I feel, to you. You must understand. This year is different from last, more serious, more beautiful. Think what it will be when we are ready to be together. When I think of it I am almost afraid. No one is ever ready for that, so holy is love. Holy! Holy! Holy! A little boy's voice in a church singing that expresses it as nothing else can. I have to begin to earn my living." He had got so far with his pen racing along in the wake of his thoughts when his mother knocked at his door: "Do go to bed, René, dear. You're not working already?" "No, mother. I wasn't working." "Then you mustn't stay up, wasting the gas and all." III GEORGE MARRIED 'Tis an evil lot, and yet Let us make the best of it; If love can live when pleasure dies We two will love, till in our eyes This heart's Hell seem paradise. GEORGE married and settled in the newly developed region behind Hog Lane West. Before he went, he spent a whole evening with his mother and brother making a list of his possessions, and arguing with them when they claimed a chair or a piece of china he had bought as family property. They had been purchased with _his_ money, and they had only enjoyed a right of user.--(His firm had been through protracted litigation in the Chancery Courts, and he was up in legal phrases.)--They must have known that sooner or later he would have a house of his own. The procuring of a wife seemed to have aggravated George's acquisitive sense. He was exceedingly conscious of the extension of his personality and was groping round for material things wherewith to fortify it. More and more he treated his brother with condescension, and was continually hinting at the things marriage did for a man. He had not been so grossly jubilant since his first encounter with woman, whereof he had given René a full and rapturous account. René had been more able to understand that excitement than this. To George the two adventures were apparently of the same order; to René they were profoundly different, and his brother's boisterousness induced misery in him. What his mother made of it all, he could not discover. All day long, and often late at night she was crocheting at a bed-quilt which she was anxious to have finished against the wedding. The savage communicativeness which had so disturbed René on the night of his home-coming was succeeded by silence and silly chatter, and she was constantly and mysteriously busy at George's house or with Elsie at the shops. Cathleen Bentley had written: "How can you have such a brother? But he is great fun. Tell me more. And I adore your mother. If only we could be engaged, I would come and stay with you." René described: