Virginia Woolf: Night and Day

21. CHAPTER XXI (continued)

"I think you're very lucky," she observed. "I envy you, living alone and having your own things"--and engaged in this exalted way, which had no recognition or engagement-ring, she added in her own mind.

Mary's lips parted slightly. She could not conceive in what respects Katharine, who spoke sincerely, could envy her.

"I don't think you've got any reason to envy me," she said.

"Perhaps one always envies other people," Katharine observed vaguely.

"Well, but you've got everything that any one can want."

Katharine remained silent. She gazed into the fire quietly, and without a trace of self-consciousness. The hostility which she had divined in Mary's tone had completely disappeared, and she forgot that she had been upon the point of going.

"Well, I suppose I have," she said at length. "And yet I sometimes think--" She paused; she did not know how to express what she meant.

"It came over me in the Tube the other day," she resumed, with a smile; "what is it that makes these people go one way rather than the other? It's not love; it's not reason; I think it must be some idea. Perhaps, Mary, our affections are the shadow of an idea. Perhaps there isn't any such thing as affection in itself. . . ." She spoke half-mockingly, asking her question, which she scarcely troubled to frame, not of Mary, or of any one in particular.

But the words seemed to Mary Datchet shallow, supercilious, cold-blooded, and cynical all in one. All her natural instincts were roused in revolt against them.

"I'm the opposite way of thinking, you see," she said.

"Yes; I know you are," Katharine replied, looking at her as if now she were about, perhaps, to explain something very important.

Mary could not help feeling the simplicity and good faith that lay behind Katharine's words.