Virginia Woolf: Night and Day

33. CHAPTER XXXIII (continued)

She could not help ejaculating at last:

"It's all done in five minutes at a Registry Office nowadays, if you think the Church service a little florid--which it is, though there are noble things in it."

"But we don't want to be married," Katharine replied emphatically, and added, "Why, after all, isn't it perfectly possible to live together without being married?"

Again Mrs. Hilbery looked discomposed, and, in her trouble, took up the sheets which were lying upon the table, and began turning them over this way and that, and muttering to herself as she glanced:

"A plus B minus C equals 'x y z'. It's so dreadfully ugly, Katharine. That's what I feel--so dreadfully ugly."

Katharine took the sheets from her mother's hand and began shuffling them absent-mindedly together, for her fixed gaze seemed to show that her thoughts were intent upon some other matter.

"Well, I don't know about ugliness," she said at length.

"But he doesn't ask it of you?" Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. "Not that grave young man with the steady brown eyes?"

"He doesn't ask anything--we neither of us ask anything."

"If I could help you, Katharine, by the memory of what I felt--"

"Yes, tell me what you felt."

Mrs. Hilbery, her eyes growing blank, peered down the enormously long corridor of days at the far end of which the little figures of herself and her husband appeared fantastically attired, clasping hands upon a moonlit beach, with roses swinging in the dusk.

"We were in a little boat going out to a ship at night," she began. "The sun had set and the moon was rising over our heads. There were lovely silver lights upon the waves and three green lights upon the steamer in the middle of the bay. Your father's head looked so grand against the mast. It was life, it was death. The great sea was round us. It was the voyage for ever and ever."