The Eternal Moment by E.M. Forster — Read

Miss Raby's first novel, The Eternal Moment, was written round the idea that man does not live by time alone, that an evening gone may become like a thousand ages in the courts of heaven -- the idea that was afterwards expounded more philosophically by Maeterlinck. She herself now declared that it was a tiresome, affected book, and that the title suggested the dentist's chair. But she had written it when she was feeling young and happy; and that, rather than maturity, is the hour in which to formulate a creed. As years pass, the conception may become more solid, but the desire and the power to impart it to others are alike weakened. It did not altogether displease her that her earliest work had been her most ambitious.

By a strange fate, the book made a great sensation, especially in unimaginative circles. Idle people interpreted it to mean that there was no harm in wasting time, vulgar people that there was no harm in being fickle, pious people interpreted it as an attack upon morality. The authoress became well known in society, where her enthusiasm for the lower classes only lent her an additional charm. That very year Lady Anstey, Mrs. Heriot, the Marquis of Bamburgh, and many others, penetrated to Vorta, where the scene of the book was laid. They returned enthusiastic. Lady Anstey exhibited her watercolour drawings; Mrs. Heriot, who photographed, wrote an article in The Strand; while The Nineteenth Century published a long description of the place by the Marquis of Bamburgh, entitled "The Modern Peasant, and His Relations with Roman Catholicism."