Chapter 12

The effect of something like unreality produced in the mind of the
mature and experienced by a girl creature, can only be equaled by the
intensity of the sense of realness in the girl herself. That centre of
the world in which each human being exists is in her case more
poignantly a centre than any other. She passes smiling or serious, a
thing of untried eyes and fair unmarked smoothness of texture, and
onlookers who have lived longer than she know that the unmarked
untriedness is a sign that so far "nothing" has happened in her life and
in most cases believe that "nothing" is happening. They are quite sure
they know--long after the thing has ceased to be true. The surface of
her is so soft and fair, and its lack of any suggestion of abysses or
chasms seems to make them incredible things. But the centre of the world
contains all things and when one is at the beginning of life and sees
them for the first time they assume strange proportions. It enters a
room, it talks lightly or sweetly, it whirls about in an airy dance,
this pretty untested thing; and, among those for whom the belief in the
reality of strange proportions has modified itself through long
experience, only those of the thinking habit realise that at any moment
the testing--the marking with deep scores may begin or has perhaps begun
already. At eighteen or twenty a fluctuation of flower-petal tint which
may mean an imperfect night can signify no really important cause. What
could eighteen or twenty have found to think about in night watches? But
in its centre of the world as it stands on the stage with the curtain
rolling up, those who have lived longer--so very long--are only the dim
audience sitting in the shadowy auditorium looking on at passionately
real life with which they have really nothing whatever to do, because
what they have seen is past and what they have learned has lost its
importance and meaning with the changing of the years. The lying awake
and tossing on pillows--if lying awake there is--has its cause in _real_
joys--or griefs--not in things atrophied by time. So it seems on the
stage, in the first act. If the curtain goes down on anguish and despair
it seems equally the pitiless truth that it can never rise again; the
play is ended; the lights go out forever; the theatre crumbles to dust;
the world comes to an end. But the dim audience sitting in the shadow do
not generally know this.

To those who came in and out of the house in Eaton Square the figure
sitting at the desk writing letters or taking orders from the Duchess
was that of the unconsidered and unreal girl. Among the changing groups
of women with intensely absorbed and often strained faces the
kind-hearted observing ones were given to noticing Robin