THE WINDOW 123out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of re-flected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting,the spectral, like a ruby; so that again to-night shehad the feeling she had had once to-day already, ofpeace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, thething is made that remains for ever after. Thiswould remain.‘Yes,’ she assured William Bankes, ‘there is plentyfor everybody.'‘Andrew,' she said, ‘hold your plate lower, or Ishall spill it.’ (The Bœuf en Daube was a perfecttriumph.) Here, she felt, putting the spoon down,was the still space that lies about the heart of things,where one could move or rest; could wait now (theywere all helped) listening; could then, like a hawkwhich lapses suddenly from its high station, flauntand sink on laughter easily, resting her whole weightupon what at the other end of the table her husbandwas saying about the square root of one thousandtwo hundred and fifty-three, which happened to bethe number on his railway ticket.What did it all mean? To this day she had no
notion. A square root? What was that? Her
sons knew. She leant on them; on cubes and square
roots; that was what they were talking about now;on Voltaire and Madame de Staël; on the characterof Napoleon; on the French system of land tenure;on Lord Rosebery; on Creevey’s Memoirs: she let it
uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of
the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down,crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanningthe swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that shecould trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes,
