Night and Day | Page 4

to live in Manchester,"
Katharine explained. Mr. Denham muttered something, which was
indeed all that was required of him, and the novelist went on where he
had left off. Privately, Mr. Denham cursed himself very sharply for
having exchanged the freedom of the street for this sophisticated
drawing- room, where, among other disagreeables, he certainly would
not appear at his best. He glanced round him, and saw that, save for
Katharine, they were all over forty, the only consolation being that Mr.
Fortescue was a considerable celebrity, so that to-morrow one might be
glad to have met him.
"Have you ever been to Manchester?" he asked Katharine.
"Never," she replied.

"Why do you object to it, then?"
Katharine stirred her tea, and seemed to speculate, so Denham thought,
upon the duty of filling somebody else's cup, but she was really
wondering how she was going to keep this strange young man in
harmony with the rest. She observed that he was compressing his
teacup, so that there was danger lest the thin china might cave inwards.
She could see that he was nervous; one would expect a bony young
man with his face slightly reddened by the wind, and his hair not
altogether smooth, to be nervous in such a party. Further, he probably
disliked this kind of thing, and had come out of curiosity, or because
her father had invited him--anyhow, he would not be easily combined
with the rest.
"I should think there would be no one to talk to in Manchester," she
replied at random. Mr. Fortescue had been observing her for a moment
or two, as novelists are inclined to observe, and at this remark he
smiled, and made it the text for a little further speculation.
"In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Katharine decidedly hits
the mark," he said, and lying back in his chair, with his opaque
contemplative eyes fixed on the ceiling, and the tips of his fingers
pressed together, he depicted, first the horrors of the streets of
Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the
town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live, and
then the professors and the miserable young students devoted to the
more strenuous works of our younger dramatists, who would visit her,
and how her appearance would change by degrees, and how she would
fly to London, and how Katharine would have to lead her about, as one
leads an eager dog on a chain, past rows of clamorous butchers' shops,
poor dear creature.
"Oh, Mr. Fortescue," exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, as he finished, "I had
just written to say how I envied her! I was thinking of the big gardens
and the dear old ladies in mittens, who read nothing but the
"Spectator," and snuff the candles. Have they ALL disappeared? I told
her she would find the nice things of London without the horrid streets
that depress one so."

"There is the University," said the thin gentleman, who had previously
insisted upon the existence of people knowing Persian.
"I know there are moors there, because I read about them in a book the
other day," said Katharine.
"I am grieved and amazed at the ignorance of my family," Mr. Hilbery
remarked. He was an elderly man, with a pair of oval, hazel eyes which
were rather bright for his time of life, and relieved the heaviness of his
face. He played constantly with a little green stone attached to his
watch-chain, thus displaying long and very sensitive fingers, and had a
habit of moving his head hither and thither very quickly without
altering the position of his large and rather corpulent body, so that he
seemed to be providing himself incessantly with food for amusement
and reflection with the least possible expenditure of energy. One might
suppose that he had passed the time of life when his ambitions were
personal, or that he had gratified them as far as he was likely to do, and
now employed his considerable acuteness rather to observe and reflect
than to attain any result.
Katharine, so Denham decided, while Mr. Fortescue built up another
rounded structure of words, had a likeness to each of her parents, but
these elements were rather oddly blended. She had the quick, impulsive
movements of her mother, the lips parting often to speak, and closing
again; and the dark oval eyes of her father brimming with light upon a
basis of sadness, or, since she was too young to have acquired a
sorrowful point of view, one might say that the basis was not sadness
so much as a spirit given to contemplation and self-control. Judging by
her hair, her coloring, and the shape of her features, she was striking, if
not actually beautiful. Decision and