This Is the End

ice, abrogates his authority, withdraws to some deep fastness of the brain, and suffers the hall of judgment to be the house of license or of dreams: of dreams, as sleep, as vanity of r

it goes like this in Rosalie's own words. Drooped back there in her chair before that littered disarray of lunch, and that k

hock to her, what Huggo had declared. S

let that explain her when she said this else, a

and not you and the children but all us children that used to be around the table there. No, not quite that. More extraordinary than that. Robert was there; Robert, I think, in Huggo's place; and all the rest were me-me as I used to be when I was ten; small, grave, wondering, staring. And yet myself me too as I was then-oh, horrified as I'd h

e-not years and years. That tiny innocent! It is upon me still. I feel that small child still. Oh, I feel it! I remember-dear, did I ever tell you?-when my father once... had been talking about Cambridge... and suddenly

hood-and now the children's! T

hing, all the ideas, dear girl, you must

r it from a ch

l talk it out. We'll fix it. It's ju

t is what he's n

bated all the time in any anger that she might have felt by Huggo's other frightful words, "Well, mother, you never taught me any different." She did not want to hear Miss Prescott tell her that. She told Miss Prescott simply that she was giving up her business and coming now to devote herself to the children. She thought, she said

was the form her shock took. Beneath it she had at a blow abandoned all her ambitions as when a child she would instantly have dropped her most immersing game and run to a frightening cry from her mother; as once, in fact (and the incident and the parallel came back to her), she had been building a house of cards, holdi

y after Miss Prescott had stood up for "truth, knowledge, reason," and by combating truth, knowledge, and reason more clearly expressed herself than in her talk with Harry. It was in her diary she wrote-well, it was

h and above all treasure, the child is to have to play with as it likes. Oh, it is strange. Where is it going to stop? If you bring up a child on the fact that all the Old Testament stories are untrue, a bundle, where they are miraculous, of obviously impossible fairy tales, what's going to happen to the New Testament? The Immaculate Conception, the Resurrection, the Ascension-what's your child-mind that knows t

she w

aught them an

she w

I to-night am thinking is what you taught me. Oh, look down, beloved! I've been so wrong. I thought

she w

ower; an Essence to be felt but not seen; an Element to be absorbed into but not to be visualised-if this, if these, there needs in them some spirit, some force, some power of themselves to lift themselves to meet it. They must be of themselves responsive as hath the sea within itself that which respondeth to the sublimation of the sun. Well, there are thousands (am I not one?) that have it not. It once was theirs. Now it is not theirs. If there is for them only God the Spirit then is there for them only that to which they have no more power

lso w

how you would have given them all that you gave to me! I will now, mother. Mother, I

ssed, she told him. There wasn't a sigh in her voice, nor in her inmost thoughts a sigh, when, telling him of the interview with Mr. Field and with Mr. Sturgiss at her resignation of her post, she said with a smile, "Carry on? Of course the department can perfectly well carry on.

ong in his arms. "You a

s happiness. "Always to find you here!" he would cry, in the first weeks of the new life, coming home to tea and coming in to her in the drawing-room where she would be, all ready for him, with Doda and with Benji. "Always to leave you here!" he would say, taking leave of her in the morning, and she and Doda and Benji coming with him to the

y!" she u

the cup of her own happiness. She was doing virtuously and she had of her vir

osalie had out of her new condition, and that was dangerous. She was doing virtuously and she had out of her virtue an intoxication of joy that, in so far as it is at all concerned with virtue, arises, not from virtue's self, but from the consciousness of virtue. That was dangerous. The danger point in stimulants is when they are resorted to, not as concomitant of the pleasures of the

going on radiant from her gladness. But she, in her resort to this her stimulant, suffered this grave disparity with the drinker's case: he must increase his doses-and he can. She, living upon her stimulant, equally was compelled-but could not. The renunciation that brimmed her h

pse of herself back a child again in the blue frock and in the pinafore with a hole in it that she came back to the children, came back home to them. Shocked by the thing that had come to pass, penitential by influence of the old childhood influences that had stirred within her, most strangely and most strongly transported back into that childhood vision of herself, it was in the guise of that child and with that child's guise as her ideal for them that passionately she desired to take up her children's lives. Her Huggo, her man chil

en no place for that spirit. They did not welcome the blue frock; they did not understand the blue frock; they were not children as she had been a child. It was what Harry had said of them, they somehow were not quite like other c

onsciousness that she was doing what she ought to be doing. She would be puzzled, she would be a little pained, she would be a little tired at the effort, fruitless, to call up in the children those lovely childish things that as a child had been hers. She then would feel dispirited. She then would think, "B

ulus availed; and she began to feel, then, the first faint gnawing

s; and must not intoxication in time wear off? Then immense intention and then dispirited in her intention. Then frequent resource to the stimulus of her realisation of virtue and then the natural diminution of that cup's effect. I

ow it went

hem. Doda didn't like "The Wide Wide World" and didn't like "Little Women." Huggo thought "The Swiss Family Robinson" awful rot, and argued learnedly with her how grotesque it was to imagine all that variety of animals and all that variety of plants in one same climate. "But, Huggo, you

o. "It's not possible, and if it i

Wide World" silly, and Beth and Jo a

gar comic drawings, in the host of cheap periodicals for children that seemed to have sprung up since her day. They called these exciting or funny and they revelled in them. They were different. Benji was no more than a baby, but he was extraordinarily devoted to Doda, liked only the things that Doda liked, and did not like the things that Doda didn't like, or, in the language sometimes a little unpleasantly emp

effect was cumulative. "A kind of reserve," Harry had said of them: "a kind of-self-contained." It was what she found. She wanted to be a child with the children; they didn't seem to understand. She wanted to open her heart to them and have their hearts opened to her; they didn't seem to understand. She

nary feeling (just what Harry had said) that she was younger than the c

The methods of teaching, as the text-books, had changed since she was a child. The Prescott methods were here and to her own methods the children did not respond. There it was again-did no

n, she found instead an occupation very loving and very happy but not relieving her of all the interest and all the affection she had desired to pour into it. It was rather like to a hungry person a strange dish that had looked substantial but that, when finished, was found not to have been substant

to think o

ly, as it would. One day, thus thinking upon it, she brought up her thoughts as it were with a round turn. She must not think so much about

tation seductive and forbidden. Thereafter "like that" her mind, missing no day nor no night, was often found

ag her mind away. It became im

cted and it became not necessary to th

ch lengths of neglect her desertion of them, and she had responded banteringly but without a call. One day (she had lain much aw

irst agreed with her that the idea was good. "Yes, rather; why not?" was the expressio

her her reply. "Why ev

ve not been lookin

the connec

ett

I'm not the f

"I knew you'd tell me if you

in

tching gesture. "Mice and Mumps, it's been

handsome he looked! Her

g established. She brushed his hat, also a rite she knew he loved. He kissed her with particular affection. "Yes, you go up to Field's and give old Sturgiss and old Field my love. You'll almost have forgotten the way there.

nlike man that thus could phrase divorce that from

ving the house she paused. Should she go? She went down the steps and through the gate, then paused again. She returned to the house. She had an idea. She would take the ch

uard!" s

she gave at the word

erself as they went towards the City what it was that she wanted to hear-that Field's was

mind affirm which it

ral introduction of herself; it was an unusual thing to do. But not natural the way in which she maintained the subject of the children. It seemed that she had come to talk of nothing else. Tremulous she was; talking, of the childre

body

said Mr. Field, that would amuse the small people, and when tea was done they should be taken around to see them. In an inner holy of holies, behind the partners' parlour, a very exciting tea was ma

the clerk who was to conduct the tour was about to be summoned. By a new gathering of general attention, she stopped his coming. When at last he came she said she would be of the party. The partners did not want that. The children did not want it.

iss, "at least for a minute'

oing to become hysterical, to resist. T

r that, her face concealed from the partners, she

particularly of the work of her department of the business. There was approaching all the time the thing that sooner or later they must say. She was trembling all the time to know how she would receive it. In whichever of its two ways it came would she be glad or wou

m a deprecatory gesture. "She's not you. How could she be you, or any one be you? We could

rt had