So Mrs Hilbery in her consciousness of the running green lines of the hedges, the swelling ploughland, the mild blue sky finds a pastoral background to the drama of human life.
So Ralph associates Mary with the mist of winter hedges and the clear red of the bramble leaves: so Mary with regard to Ralph. "Her thoughts seemed even to take their colour from the street she happened to be in. Thus the vision of humanity appeared to be in some way connected with Bloomsbury and faded distinctly by the time she crossed the main road; then a belated organ-grinder in Holborn set her thoughts dancing incongruously; and by the time she was crossing the great misty square of Lincoln's Inn Fields she was cold and depressed and horribly clear-sighted."
Mary, by the way, is nearer our conception of a likeable person than anyone else in the book. She has at any rate attained to the standpoint that life is full of complexity and must, in spite or because of that, be loved to the last fibre of it.
And so it is with us: we carry away, after putting _Night and Day_ down for the last time, an atmosphere of a room full of deep shadows, firelight, unwavering silver candle flames, and empty spaces to be crossed before reaching the round table in the middle of the room, with its frail burden of silver trays and china tea-cups, red parrots swinging on the chintz curtains and arm-chairs warming in the blaze.
And so we come to read _Night and Day_ in a mood very different from that which sends us to _Tom Jones_ or _Wuthering Heights_: there is no full-blooded narrative full of incident or wild, insatiable passion. It is a penetrating, shrewd comedy wherein many feckless people are portrayed to the life. It is essentially modern in so far as there is no attempt to make us fall in love with the hero or heroine: we are never on the verge of tears through pity of their fate, though we are interested by their confused states of mind.
We are never unable to put the book down: on the other hand, there are few that we are more inclined to pick up and read for the _n_th time. There is a rich harvest of beauty on almost every page; there is true satirical humour; there is brilliance of intellect, clarity of aim and complete fearlessness: above all, there is strangeness and individuality, and the reader who turns away from _Night and Day_ because the atmosphere has failed to ensnare him in the first three hundred or so pages deserves our pity. He has missed a real treat, both emotional and intellectual.