when at last suddenly in the middle of a busy morning, she began turning into rounded English words the thorny German text, she eluded his enquiries and hid the book and all signs of her work even from herself. Writing she forgot, and did not see the pages. The moment she saw them, there was a sort of half-shame in their exposure, even to the light of day. And always in transcribing them a sense of guilt. Not, she was sure, a conviction of misspending her employer’s time. Had not they agreed in response to her graceless demands in the course of that first realisation of the undeveloping nature of her employments, that she should use chance intervals of leisure on work of her own? But even abusing this privilege, writing sudden long absorbing letters in the best part of the morning with urgent business waiting all round her, had brought no feeling of guilt; only a bright enclosing sense of dissipation; a sort of spreading, to be justified by the shortness of her leisure, of its wild free quality over a part of the too-long day. It was in some way from the work itself that this strange gnawing accusation came, and as strangely, each time she had fairly begun, there came, driving out the sense of guilt, an overwhelming urgency; as if she were running a race.
Presently everything in her life existed only for the sake of the increasing bunch of pencilled half-sheets distributed between the leaves of her roomy blotter. She thanked her circumstances, into whose shape this secret adventure had stolen unobserved and sunk, leaving the surface unchanged, and finding, ready for its sustaining, an energy her daily work had never tapped, from the depth of her heart. In the evenings she put away the thought of her pages lest she could find herself speaking of them to Mr. Shatov.
But they would arrive suddenly in her mind, thrilling her into animation, lighting up some remote part of her consciousness from which would come pell-mell, emphatic and incoherently eloquent, statements to which she listened eagerly, Mr. Shatov, too, reduced to a strangely silenced listener, and dropping presently off along some single