if you are going to help him, if he is to keep true to anything at all — ’

‘And I don’t WANT to suffer hourly and daily,’ said Ursula. ‘I don’t, I should be ashamed. I think it is degrading not to be happy.’

Hermione stopped and looked at her a long time.

‘Do you?’ she said at last. And this utterance seemed to her a mark of Ursula’s far distance from herself. For to Hermione suffering was the greatest reality, come what might. Yet she too had a creed of happiness.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘One SHOULD be happy — ’ But it was a matter of will.

‘Yes,’ said Hermione, listlessly now, ‘I can only feel that it would be disastrous, disastrous —