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110
AN ADVENTURE

be endured, the recurring consolation to Miss Morison was, "She has forgiven it all now, and knows the true meaning of the French Revolution on both its good and bad sides, and also the exact proportion of her own part in it."

But the act of memory which had so strangely and mechanically clung to the place, with which we had, perhaps, been associated in the grounds, was incoherent and pictorial. It was oppressive to us because it represented a more limited view of those times than after a hundred years we have learnt to take of them, and was far more limited than any thought the Queen can have about them now.

12. Our answer to the suggestion that we were in a state of suspended consciousness is that our conversation and sense of the quiet continuity of things remained unbroken, and, in spite of oppression, believed ourselves to be particularly wide awake and on the alert. When we were first asked whether the man from the side building was real or not, we laughed at the idea of any unreality; all was so quietly natural that we are still uncertain whether the tall gardener belonged to another century or not. It has