The Voyage Out
by Virginia Woolf
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

by Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941)

Chapter I

As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment
are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm.
If you persist, lawyers' clerks will have to make flying leaps
into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you.
In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity
must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall,
to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.

One afternoon in the beginning of October when the traffic was
becoming brisk a tall man strode along the edge of the pavement
with a lady on his arm. Angry glances struck upon their backs.
The small, agitated figures--for in comparison with this couple most
people looked small--decorated with fountain pens, and burdened with
despatch-boxes, had appointments to keep, and drew a weekly salary,
so that there was some reason for the unfriendly stare which was
bestowed upon Mr. Ambrose's height and upon Mrs. Ambrose's cloak.
But some enchantment had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice
and unpopularity. In his guess one might guess from the moving lips
that it was thought; and in hers from the eyes fixed stonily straight
in front of her at a level above the eyes of most that it was sorrow.
It was only by scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears,
and the friction of people brushing past her was evidently painful.
After watching the traffic on the Embankment for a minute or two
with a stoical gaze she twitched her husband's sleeve, and they
crossed between the swift discharge of motor cars. When they were
safe on the further side, she gently withdrew her arm from his,
allowing her mouth at the same time to relax, to tremble; then tears
rolled down, and leaning her elbows on the balustrade, she shielded
her face from the curious. Mr. Ambrose attempted consolation;
he patted her shoulder; but she showed no signs of admitting him,
and feeling it awkward to stand beside a grief that was greater
than his, he crossed his arms behind him, and took a turn along
the pavement.

The embankment juts out in angles here and there, like pulpits;
instead of preachers, however, small boys occupy them, dangling string,
dropping pebbles, or launching wads of paper for a cruise.
With their sharp eye for eccentricity, they were inclined to think
Mr. Ambrose awful; but the quickest witted cried "Bluebeard!"
as he passed. In case they should proceed to tease his wife,
Mr. Ambrose flourished his stick at them, upon which they decided
that he was grotesque merely, and four instead of one cried
"Bluebeard!" in chorus.

Although Mrs. Ambrose stood quite still, much longer than is natural,
the little boys let her be. Some one is always looking into the river
near Waterloo Bridge; a couple will stand there talking for half
an hour on a fine afternoon; most people, walking for pleasure,
contemplate for three minutes; when, having compared the occasion with
other occasions, or made some sentence, they pass on. Sometimes the
flats and churches and hotels of Westminster are like the outlines
of Constantinople in a mist; sometimes the river is an opulent purple,
sometimes mud-coloured, sometimes sparkling blue like the sea.
It is always worth while to look down and see what is happening.
But this lady looked neither up nor down; the only thing she had seen,
since she stood there, was a circular iridescent patch slowly floating
past with a straw in the middle of it. The straw and the patch swam
again and again behind the tremulous medium of a great welling tear,
and the tear rose and fell and dropped into the river. Then there
struck close upon her ears--

        Lars Porsena of Clusium
        By the nine Gods he swore--

and then more faintly, as if the speaker had passed her on his walk--

        That the Great House of Tarquin
        Should suffer wrong no more.

Yes, she knew she must go back to all that, but at present she must weep.
Screening her face she sobbed more steadily than she had yet done,
her shoulders rising and falling with great regularity. It was this
figure that her husband saw when, having reached the polished Sphinx,
having entangled himself with a man selling picture postcards, he turned;
the stanza instantly stopped. He came up to her, laid his hand
on her shoulder, and said, "Dearest."  His voice was supplicating.
But she shut her face away from him, as much as to say, "You can't
possibly understand."

As he did not leave her, however, she had to wipe her eyes, and to
raise them to the level of the factory chimneys on the other bank.
She saw also the arches of Waterloo Bridge and the carts moving
across them, like the line of animals in a shooting gallery.
They were seen blankly, but to see anything was of course to end her
weeping and begin to walk.

"I would rather walk," she said, her husband having hailed a cab
already occupied by two city men.

The fixity of her mood was broken by the action of walking.
The shooting motor cars, more like spiders in the moon than
terrestrial objects, the thundering drays, the jingling hansoms,
and little black broughams, made her think of the world she lived in.
Somewhere up there above the pinnacles where the smoke rose in a
pointed hill, her children were now asking for her, and getting
a soothing reply. As for the mass of streets, squares, and public
buildings which parted them, she only felt at this moment how little
London had done to make her love it, although thirty of her forty
years had been spent in a street. She knew how to read the people
who were passing her; there were the rich who were running to and from
each others' houses at this hour; there were the bigoted workers
driving in a straight line to their offices; there were the poor
who were unhappy and rightly malignant. Already, though there
was sunlight in the haze, tattered old men and women were nodding
off to sleep upon the seats. When one gave up seeing the beauty
that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath.

A fine rain now made her still more dismal; vans with the odd
names of those engaged in odd industries--Sprules, Manufacturer
of Saw-dust; Grabb, to whom no piece of waste paper comes amiss--
fell flat as a bad joke; bold lovers, sheltered behind one cloak,
seemed to her sordid, past their passion; the flower women,
a contented company, whose talk is always worth hearing, were sodden hags;
the red, yellow, and blue flowers, whose heads were pressed together,
would not blaze. Moreover, her husband walking with a quick
rhythmic stride, jerking his free hand occasionally, was either
a Viking or a stricken Nelson; the sea-gulls had changed his note.

"Ridley, shall we drive? Shall we drive, Ridley?"

Mrs. Ambrose had to speak sharply; by this time he was far away.

The cab, by trotting steadily along the same road, soon withdrew
them from the West End, and plunged them into London. It appeared
that this was a great manufacturing place, where the people
were engaged in making things, as though the West End, with its
electric lamps, its vast plate-glass windows all shining yellow,
its carefully-finished houses, and tiny live figures trotting
on the pavement, or bowled along on wheels in the road, was the
finished work. It appeared to her a very small bit of work for such
an enormous factory to have made. For some reason it appeared
to her as a small golden tassel on the edge of a vast black cloak.

Observing that they passed no other hansom cab, but only vans
and waggons, and that not one of the thousand men and women she
saw was either a gentleman or a lady, Mrs. Ambrose understood
that after all it is the ordinary thing to be poor, and that
London is the city of innumerable poor people. Startled by this
discovery and seeing herself pacing a circle all the days
of her life round Picadilly Circus she was greatly relieved
to pass a building put up by the London County Council for Night Schools.

"Lord, how gloomy it is!" her husband groaned. "Poor creatures!"

What with the misery for her children, the poor, and the rain,
her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.

At this point the cab stopped, for it was in danger of being
crushed like an egg-shell. The wide Embankment which had had room
for cannonballs and squadrons, had now shrunk to a cobbled lane
steaming with smells of malt and oil and blocked by waggons.
While her husband read the placards pasted on the brick announcing
the hours at which certain ships would sail for Scotland,
Mrs. Ambrose did her best to find information. From a world
exclusively occupied in feeding waggons with sacks, half obliterated
too in a fine yellow fog, they got neither help nor attention.
It seemed a miracle when an old man approached, guessed their condition,
and proposed to row them out to their ship in the little boat
which he kept moored at the bottom of a flight of steps. With some
hesitation they trusted themselves to him, took their places,
and were soon waving up and down upon the water, London having shrunk
to two lines of buildings on either side of them, square buildings
and oblong buildings placed in rows like a child's avenue of bricks.

The river, which had a certain amount of troubled yellow light in it,
ran with great force; bulky barges floated down swiftly escorted by tugs;
police boats shot past everything; the wind went with the current.
The open rowing-boat in which they sat bobbed and curtseyed across
the line of traffic. In mid-stream the old man stayed his hands upon
the oars, and as the water rushed past them, remarked that once he
had taken many passengers across, where now he took scarcely any.
He seemed to recall an age when his boat, moored among rushes,
carried delicate feet across to lawns at Rotherhithe.

"They want bridges now," he said, indicating the monstrous
outline of the Tower Bridge. Mournfully Helen regarded him,
who was putting water between her and her children. Mournfully she
gazed at the ship they were approaching; anchored in the middle
of the stream they could dimly read her name--_Euphrosyne_.

Very dimly in the falling dusk they could see the lines of the rigging,
the masts and the dark flag which the breeze blew out squarely behind.

As the little boat sidled up to the steamer, and the old man shipped
his oars, he remarked once more pointing above, that ships all
the world over flew that flag the day they sailed. In the minds
of both the passengers the blue flag appeared a sinister token,
and this the moment for presentiments, but nevertheless they rose,
gathered their things together, and climbed on deck.

Down in the saloon of her father's ship, Miss Rachel Vinrace,
aged twenty-four, stood waiting her uncle and aunt nervously.
To begin with, though nearly related, she scarcely remembered them;
to go on with, they were elderly people, and finally, as her father's
daughter she must be in some sort prepared to entertain them.
She looked forward to seeing them as civilised people generally
look forward to the first sight of civilised people, as though
they were of the nature of an approaching physical discomfort--
a tight shoe or a draughty window. She was already unnaturally
braced to receive them. As she occupied herself in laying forks
severely straight by the side of knives, she heard a man's voice
saying gloomily:

"On a dark night one would fall down these stairs head foremost,"
to which a woman's voice added, "And be killed."

As she spoke the last words the woman stood in the doorway. Tall,
large-eyed, draped in purple shawls, Mrs. Ambrose was romantic and beautiful;
not perhaps sympathetic, for her eyes looked straight and considered
what they saw. Her face was much warmer than a Greek face; on the
other hand it was much bolder than the face of the usual pretty Englishwoman.

"Oh, Rachel, how d'you do," she said, shaking hands.

"How are you, dear," said Mr. Ambrose, inclining his forehead
to be kissed. His niece instinctively liked his thin angular body,
and the big head with its sweeping features, and the acute,
innocent eyes.

"Tell Mr. Pepper," Rachel bade the servant. Husband and wife then
sat down on one side of the table, with their niece opposite to them.

"My father told me to begin," she explained. "He is very busy
with the men. . . . You know Mr. Pepper?"

A little man who was bent as some trees are by a gale on one side
of them had slipped in. Nodding to Mr. Ambrose, he shook hands
with Helen.

"Draughts," he said, erecting the collar of his coat.

"You are still rheumatic?" asked Helen. Her voice was low
and seductive, though she spoke absently enough, the sight
of town and river being still present to her mind.

"Once rheumatic, always rheumatic, I fear," he replied. "To some
extent it depends on the weather, though not so much as people
are apt to think."

"One does not die of it, at any rate," said Helen.

"As a general rule--no," said Mr. Pepper.

"Soup, Uncle Ridley?" asked Rachel.

"Thank you, dear," he said, and, as he held his plate out,
sighed audibly, "Ah! she's not like her mother."  Helen was just
too late in thumping her tumbler on the table to prevent Rachel
from hearing, and from blushing scarlet with embarrassment.

"The way servants treat flowers!" she said hastily. She drew
a green vase with a crinkled lip towards her, and began pulling out
the tight little chrysanthemums, which she laid on the table-cloth,
arranging them fastidiously side by side.

There was a pause.

"You knew Jenkinson, didn't you, Ambrose?" asked Mr. Pepper across
the table.

"Jenkinson of Peterhouse?"

"He's dead," said Mr. Pepper.

"Ah, dear!--I knew him--ages ago," said Ridley. "He was the hero
of the punt accident, you remember? A queer card. Married a young
woman out of a tobacconist's, and lived in the Fens--never heard
what became of him."

"Drink--drugs," said Mr. Pepper with sinister conciseness.
"He left a commentary. Hopeless muddle, I'm told."

"The man had really great abilities," said Ridley.

"His introduction to Jellaby holds its own still," went on Mr. Pepper,
"which is surprising, seeing how text-books change."

"There was a theory about the planets, wasn't there?" asked Ridley.

"A screw loose somewhere, no doubt of it," said Mr. Pepper,
shaking his head.

Now a tremor ran through the table, and a light outside swerved.
At the same time an electric bell rang sharply again and again.

"We're off," said Ridley.

A slight but perceptible wave seemed to roll beneath the floor;
then it sank; then another came, more perceptible. Lights slid right
across the uncurtained window. The ship gave a loud melancholy moan.

"We're off!" said Mr. Pepper. Other ships, as sad as she,
answered her outside on the river. The chuckling and hissing of water
could be plainly heard, and the ship heaved so that the steward
bringing plates had to balance himself as he drew the curtain.
There was a pause.

"Jenkinson of Cats--d'you still keep up with him?" asked Ambrose.

"As much as one ever does," said Mr. Pepper. "We meet annually.
This year he has had the misfortune to lose his wife, which made
it painful, of course."

"Very painful," Ridley agreed.

"There's an unmarried daughter who keeps house for him, I believe,
but it's never the same, not at his age."

Both gentlemen nodded sagely as they carved their apples.

"There was a book, wasn't there?"  Ridley enquired.

"There _was_ a book, but there never _will_ be a book," said Mr. Pepper
with such fierceness that both ladies looked up at him.

"There never will be a book, because some one else has written
it for him," said Mr. Pepper with considerable acidity.
"That's what comes of putting things off, and collecting fossils,
and sticking Norman arches on one's pigsties."

"I confess I sympathise," said Ridley with a melancholy sigh.
"I have a weakness for people who can't begin."

". . . The accumulations of a lifetime wasted," continued Mr. pepper.
"He had accumulations enough to fill a barn."

"It's a vice that some of us escape," said Ridley. "Our friend
Miles has another work out to-day."

Mr. Pepper gave an acid little laugh. "According to my calculations,"
he said, "he has produced two volumes and a half annually,
which, allowing for time spent in the cradle and so forth,
shows a commendable industry."

"Yes, the old Master's saying of him has been pretty well realised,"
said Ridley.

"A way they had," said Mr. Pepper. "You know the Bruce collection?--
not for publication, of course."

"I should suppose not," said Ridley significantly. "For a Divine
he was--remarkably free."

"The Pump in Neville's Row, for example?" enquired Mr. Pepper.

"Precisely," said Ambrose.

Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex,
highly trained in promoting men's talk without listening to it,
could think--about the education of children, about the use
of fog sirens in an opera--without betraying herself. Only it
struck Helen that Rachel was perhaps too still for a hostess,
and that she might have done something with her hands.

"Perhaps--?" she said at length, upon which they rose and left,
vaguely to the surprise of the gentlemen, who had either thought
them attentive or had forgotten their presence.

"Ah, one could tell strange stories of the old days," they heard
Ridley say, as he sank into his chair again. Glancing back,
at the doorway, they saw Mr. Pepper as though he had suddenly loosened
his clothes, and had become a vivacious and malicious old ape.

Winding veils round their heads, the women walked on deck.
They were now moving steadily down the river, passing the dark
shapes of ships at anchor, and London was a swarm of lights with
a pale yellow canopy drooping above it. There were the lights
of the great theatres, the lights of the long streets, lights that
indicated huge squares of domestic comfort, lights that hung high
in air. No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no
darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed
dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot;
dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea,
and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt,
eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city
appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

Leaning over the rail, side by side, Helen said, "Won't you be cold?"
Rachel replied, "No. . . . How beautiful!" she added a moment later.
Very little was visible--a few masts, a shadow of land here,
a line of brilliant windows there. They tried to make head against
the wind.

"It blows--it blows!" gasped Rachel, the words rammed down her throat.
Struggling by her side, Helen was suddenly overcome by the spirit
of movement, and pushed along with her skirts wrapping themselves round
her knees, and both arms to her hair. But slowly the intoxication
of movement died down, and the wind became rough and chilly.
They looked through a chink in the blind and saw that long cigars
were being smoked in the dining-room; they saw Mr. Ambrose throw
himself violently against the back of his chair, while Mr. Pepper
crinkled his cheeks as though they had been cut in wood.
The ghost of a roar of laughter came out to them, and was drowned
at once in the wind. In the dry yellow-lighted room Mr. Pepper
and Mr. Ambrose were oblivious of all tumult; they were in Cambridge,
and it was probably about the year 1875.

"They're old friends," said Helen, smiling at the sight.
"Now, is there a room for us to sit in?"

Rachel opened a door.

"It's more like a landing than a room," she said. Indeed it
had nothing of the shut stationary character of a room on shore.
A table was rooted in the middle, and seats were stuck to the sides.
Happily the tropical suns had bleached the tapestries to a faded
blue-green colour, and the mirror with its frame of shells, the work
of the steward's love, when the time hung heavy in the southern seas,
was quaint rather than ugly. Twisted shells with red lips like
unicorn's horns ornamented the mantelpiece, which was draped by a pall
of purple plush from which depended a certain number of balls.
Two windows opened on to the deck, and the light beating through them
when the ship was roasted on the Amazons had turned the prints on
the opposite wall to a faint yellow colour, so that "The Coliseum"
was scarcely to be distinguished from Queen Alexandra playing
with her Spaniels. A pair of wicker arm-chairs by the fireside
invited one to warm one's hands at a grate full of gilt shavings;
a great lamp swung above the table--the kind of lamp which makes
the light of civilisation across dark fields to one walking in
the country.

"It's odd that every one should be an old friend of Mr. Pepper's,"
Rachel started nervously, for the situation was difficult,
the room cold, and Helen curiously silent.

"I suppose you take him for granted?" said her aunt.

"He's like this," said Rachel, lighting on a fossilised fish
in a basin, and displaying it.

"I expect you're too severe," Helen remarked.

Rachel immediately tried to qualify what she had said against
her belief.

"I don't really know him," she said, and took refuge in facts,
believing that elderly people really like them better than feelings.
She produced what she knew of William Pepper. She told Helen
that he always called on Sundays when they were at home; he knew
about a great many things--about mathematics, history, Greek,
zoology, economics, and the Icelandic Sagas. He had turned Persian
poetry into English prose, and English prose into Greek iambics;
he was an authority upon coins; and--one other thing--oh yes,
she thought it was vehicular traffic.

He was here either to get things out of the sea, or to write upon
the probable course of Odysseus, for Greek after all was his hobby.

"I've got all his pamphlets," she said. "Little pamphlets.
Little yellow books."  It did not appear that she had read them.

"Has he ever been in love?" asked Helen, who had chosen a seat.

This was unexpectedly to the point.

"His heart's a piece of old shoe leather," Rachel declared,
dropping the fish. But when questioned she had to own that she
had never asked him.

"I shall ask him," said Helen.

"The last time I saw you, you were buying a piano," she continued.
"Do you remember--the piano, the room in the attic, and the great
plants with the prickles?"

"Yes, and my aunts said the piano would come through the floor,
but at their age one wouldn't mind being killed in the night?"
she enquired.

"I heard from Aunt Bessie not long ago," Helen stated. "She is afraid
that you will spoil your arms if you insist upon so much practising."

"The muscles of the forearm--and then one won't marry?"

"She didn't put it quite like that," replied Mrs. Ambrose.

"Oh, no--of course she wouldn't," said Rachel with a sigh.

Helen looked at her. Her face was weak rather than decided,
saved from insipidity by the large enquiring eyes; denied beauty,
now that she was sheltered indoors, by the lack of colour and
definite outline. Moreover, a hesitation in speaking, or rather
a tendency to use the wrong words, made her seem more than normally
incompetent for her years. Mrs. Ambrose, who had been speaking much
at random, now reflected that she certainly did not look forward to
the intimacy of three or four weeks on board ship which was threatened.
Women of her own age usually boring her, she supposed that girls
would be worse. She glanced at Rachel again. Yes! how clear it
was that she would be vacillating, emotional, and when you said
something to her it would make no more lasting impression than
the stroke of a stick upon water. There was nothing to take hold
of in girls--nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory. Did Willoughby
say three weeks, or did he say four? She tried to remember.

At this point, however, the door opened and a tall burly man
entered the room, came forward and shook Helen's hand with an
emotional kind of heartiness, Willoughby himself, Rachel's father,
Helen's brother-in-law. As a great deal of flesh would have been
needed to make a fat man of him, his frame being so large,
he was not fat; his face was a large framework too, looking, by the
smallness of the features and the glow in the hollow of the cheek,
more fitted to withstand assaults of the weather than to express
sentiments and emotions, or to respond to them in others.

"It is a great pleasure that you have come," he said, "for both
of us."

Rachel murmured in obedience to her father's glance.

"We'll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley. We think
it an honour to have charge of him. Pepper'll have some one to
contradict him--which I daren't do. You find this child grown,
don't you? A young woman, eh?"

Still holding Helen's hand he drew his arm round Rachel's shoulder,
thus making them come uncomfortably close, but Helen forbore
to look.

"You think she does us credit?" he asked.

"Oh yes," said Helen.

"Because we expect great things of her," he continued, squeezing his
daughter's arm and releasing her. "But about you now."  They sat down
side by side on the little sofa. "Did you leave the children well?
They'll be ready for school, I suppose. Do they take after you
or Ambrose? They've got good heads on their shoulders, I'll be bound?"

At this Helen immediately brightened more than she had yet done,
and explained that her son was six and her daughter ten.
Everybody said that her boy was like her and her girl like Ridley.
As for brains, they were quick brats, she thought, and modestly she
ventured on a little story about her son,--how left alone for a minute
he had taken the pat of butter in his fingers, run across the room
with it, and put it on the fire--merely for the fun of the thing,
a feeling which she could understand.

"And you had to show the young rascal that these tricks wouldn't do, eh?"

"A child of six? I don't think they matter."

"I'm an old-fashioned father."

"Nonsense, Willoughby; Rachel knows better."

Much as Willoughby would doubtless have liked his daughter
to praise him she did not; her eyes were unreflecting as water,
her fingers still toying with the fossilised fish, her mind absent.
The elder people went on to speak of arrangements that could be
made for Ridley's comfort--a table placed where he couldn't help
looking at the sea, far from boilers, at the same time sheltered
from the view of people passing. Unless he made this a holiday,
when his books were all packed, he would have no holiday whatever;
for out at Santa Marina Helen knew, by experience, that he would work
all day; his boxes, she said, were packed with books.

"Leave it to me--leave it to me!" said Willoughby, obviously intending
to do much more than she asked of him. But Ridley and Mr. Pepper
were heard fumbling at the door.

"How are you, Vinrace?" said Ridley, extending a limp hand
as he came in, as though the meeting were melancholy to both,
but on the whole more so to him.

Willoughby preserved his heartiness, tempered by respect.
For the moment nothing was said.

"We looked in and saw you laughing," Helen remarked. "Mr. Pepper
had just told a very good story."

"Pish. None of the stories were good," said her husband peevishly.

"Still a severe judge, Ridley?" enquired Mr. Vinrace.

"We bored you so that you left," said Ridley, speaking directly
to his wife.

As this was quite true Helen did not attempt to deny it,
and her next remark, "But didn't they improve after we'd gone?"
was unfortunate, for her husband answered with a droop of his shoulders,
"If possible they got worse."

The situation was now one of considerable discomfort for every
one concerned, as was proved by a long interval of constraint
and silence. Mr. Pepper, indeed, created a diversion of a kind
by leaping on to his seat, both feet tucked under him, with the
action of a spinster who detects a mouse, as the draught struck
at his ankles. Drawn up there, sucking at his cigar, with his
arms encircling his knees, he looked like the image of Buddha,
and from this elevation began a discourse, addressed to nobody,
for nobody had called for it, upon the unplumbed depths of ocean.
He professed himself surprised to learn that although Mr. Vinrace
possessed ten ships, regularly plying between London and Buenos Aires,
not one of them was bidden to investigate the great white monsters
of the lower waters.

"No, no," laughed Willoughby, "the monsters of the earth are too
many for me!"

Rachel was heard to sigh, "Poor little goats!"

"If it weren't for the goats there'd be no music, my dear;
music depends upon goats," said her father rather sharply,
and Mr. Pepper went on to describe the white, hairless, blind monsters
lying curled on the ridges of sand at the bottom of the sea,
which would explode if you brought them to the surface,
their sides bursting asunder and scattering entrails to the winds
when released from pressure, with considerable detail and with
such show of knowledge, that Ridley was disgusted, and begged him to stop.

From all this Helen drew her own conclusions, which were gloomy enough.
Pepper was a bore; Rachel was an unlicked girl, no doubt prolific
of confidences, the very first of which would be: "You see,
I don't get on with my father."  Willoughby, as usual, loved his
business and built his Empire, and between them all she would be
considerably bored. Being a woman of action, however, she rose,
and said that for her part she was going to bed. At the door
she glanced back instinctively at Rachel, expecting that as two
of the same sex they would leave the room together. Rachel rose,
looked vaguely into Helen's face, and remarked with her slight stammer,
"I'm going out to t-t-triumph in the wind."

Mrs. Ambrose's worst suspicions were confirmed; she went down
the passage lurching from side to side, and fending off the wall
now with her right arm, now with her left; at each lurch she
exclaimed emphatically, "Damn!"

Chapter II

Uncomfortable as the night, with its rocking movement,
and salt smells, may have been, and in one case undoubtedly was,
for Mr. Pepper had insufficient clothes upon his bed, the breakfast
next morning wore a kind of beauty. The voyage had begun,
and had begun happily with a soft blue sky, and a calm sea.
The sense of untapped resources, things to say as yet unsaid,
made the hour significant, so that in future years the entire journey
perhaps would be represented by this one scene, with the sound
of sirens hooting in the river the night before, somehow mixing in.

The table was cheerful with apples and bread and eggs. Helen handed
Willoughby the butter, and as she did so cast her eye on him
and reflected, "And she married you, and she was happy, I suppose."

She went off on a familiar train of thought, leading on to all
kinds of well-known reflections, from the old wonder, why Theresa
had married Willoughby?

"Of course, one sees all that," she thought, meaning that one sees
that he is big and burly, and has a great booming voice, and a fist
and a will of his own; "but--" here she slipped into a fine analysis
of him which is best represented by one word, "sentimental," by which
she meant that he was never simple and honest about his feelings.
For example, he seldom spoke of the dead, but kept anniversaries
with singular pomp. She suspected him of nameless atrocities
with regard to his daughter, as indeed she had always suspected
him of bullying his wife. Naturally she fell to comparing her
own fortunes with the fortunes of her friend, for Willoughby's
wife had been perhaps the one woman Helen called friend, and this
comparison often made the staple of their talk. Ridley was a scholar,
and Willoughby was a man of business. Ridley was bringing out the third
volume of Pindar when Willoughby was launching his first ship.
They built a new factory the very year the commentary on Aristotle--
was it?--appeared at the University Press. "And Rachel," she looked
at her, meaning, no doubt, to decide the argument, which was
otherwise too evenly balanced, by declaring that Rachel was not
comparable to her own children. "She really might be six years old,"
was all she said, however, this judgment referring to the smooth
unmarked outline of the girl's face, and not condemning her otherwise,
for if Rachel were ever to think, feel, laugh, or express herself,
instead of dropping milk from a height as though to see what kind of
drops it made, she might be interesting though never exactly pretty.
She was like her mother, as the image in a pool on a still summer's
day is like the vivid flushed face that hangs over it.

Meanwhile Helen herself was under examination, though not from either
of her victims. Mr. Pepper considered her; and his meditations,
carried on while he cut his toast into bars and neatly buttered them,
took him through a considerable stretch of autobiography. One of
his penetrating glances assured him that he was right last night
in judging that Helen was beautiful. Blandly he passed her the jam.
She was talking nonsense, but not worse nonsense than people usually
do talk at breakfast, the cerebral circulation, as he knew to his cost,
being apt to give trouble at that hour. He went on saying "No" to her,
on principle, for he never yielded to a woman on account of her sex.
And here, dropping his eyes to his plate, he became autobiographical.
He had not married himself for the sufficient reason that he had
never met a woman who commanded his respect. Condemned to pass
the susceptible years of youth in a railway station in Bombay,
he had seen only coloured women, military women, official women;
and his ideal was a woman who could read Greek, if not Persian,
was irreproachably fair in the face, and able to understand
the small things he let fall while undressing. As it was he
had contracted habits of which he was not in the least ashamed.
Certain odd minutes every day went to learning things by heart;
he never took a ticket without noting the number; he devoted
January to Petronius, February to Catullus, March to the Etruscan
vases perhaps; anyhow he had done good work in India, and there
was nothing to regret in his life except the fundamental defects
which no wise man regrets, when the present is still his.
So concluding he looked up suddenly and smiled. Rachel caught
his eye.

"And now you've chewed something thirty-seven times, I suppose?"
she thought, but said politely aloud, "Are your legs troubling you
to-day, Mr. Pepper?"

"My shoulder blades?" he asked, shifting them painfully.
"Beauty has no effect upon uric acid that I'm aware of," he sighed,
contemplating the round pane opposite, through which the sky and sea
showed blue. At the same time he took a little parchment volume
from his pocket and laid it on the table. As it was clear that he
invited comment, Helen asked him the name of it. She got the name;
but she got also a disquisition upon the proper method of making roads.
Beginning with the Greeks, who had, he said, many difficulties
to contend with, he continued with the Romans, passed to England
and the right method, which speedily became the wrong method,
and wound up with such a fury of denunciation directed against
the road-makers of the present day in general, and the road-makers
of Richmond Park in particular, where Mr. Pepper had the habit
of cycling every morning before breakfast, that the spoons fairly
jingled against the coffee cups, and the insides of at least four
rolls mounted in a heap beside Mr. Pepper's plate.

"Pebbles!" he concluded, viciously dropping another bread pellet
upon the heap. "The roads of England are mended with pebbles!
'With the first heavy rainfall,' I've told 'em, 'your road
will be a swamp.'  Again and again my words have proved true.
But d'you suppose they listen to me when I tell 'em so, when I
point out the consequences, the consequences to the public purse,
when I recommend 'em to read Coryphaeus? No, Mrs. Ambrose, you will
form no just opinion of the stupidity of mankind until you have sat
upon a Borough Council!"  The little man fixed her with a glance
of ferocious energy.

"I have had servants," said Mrs. Ambrose, concentrating her gaze.
"At this moment I have a nurse. She's a good woman as they go,
but she's determined to make my children pray. So far, owing to
great care on my part, they think of God as a kind of walrus;
but now that my back's turned--Ridley," she demanded, swinging round
upon her husband, "what shall we do if we find them saying the Lord's
Prayer when we get home again?"

Ridley made the sound which is represented by "Tush."  But Willoughby,
whose discomfort as he listened was manifested by a slight movement
rocking of his body, said awkwardly, "Oh, surely, Helen, a little
religion hurts nobody."

"I would rather my children told lies," she replied, and while
Willoughby was reflecting that his sister-in-law was even more eccentric
than he remembered, pushed her chair back and swept upstairs.
In a second they heard her calling back, "Oh, look! We're out at sea!"

They followed her on to the deck. All the smoke and the houses
had disappeared, and the ship was out in a wide space of sea very
fresh and clear though pale in the early light. They had left
London sitting on its mud. A very thin line of shadow tapered on
the horizon, scarcely thick enough to stand the burden of Paris,
which nevertheless rested upon it. They were free of roads,
free of mankind, and the same exhilaration at their freedom ran
through them all. The ship was making her way steadily through small
waves which slapped her and then fizzled like effervescing water,
leaving a little border of bubbles and foam on either side.
The colourless October sky above was thinly clouded as if by the trail
of wood-fire smoke, and the air was wonderfully salt and brisk.
Indeed it was too cold to stand still. Mrs. Ambrose drew her arm
within her husband's, and as they moved off it could be seen from
the way in which her sloping cheek turned up to his that she had
something private to communicate. They went a few paces and Rachel
saw them kiss.

Down she looked into the depth of the sea. While it was slightly
disturbed on the surface by the passage of the _Euphrosyne_,
beneath it was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until
the sand at the bottom was only a pale blur. One could scarcely
see the black ribs of wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made
by the burrowings of great eels, or the smooth green-sided monsters
who came by flickering this way and that.

--"And, Rachel, if any one wants me, I'm busy till one," said her father,
enforcing his words as he often did, when he spoke to his daughter,
by a smart blow upon the shoulder.

"Until one," he repeated. "And you'll find yourself some employment,
eh? Scales, French, a little German, eh? There's Mr. Pepper who knows
more about separable verbs than any man in Europe, eh?" and he went
off laughing. Rachel laughed, too, as indeed she had laughed ever since she
could remember, without thinking it funny, but because she admired her father.

But just as she was turning with a view perhaps to finding
some employment, she was intercepted by a woman who was so broad
and so thick that to be intercepted by her was inevitable.
The discreet tentative way in which she moved, together with her
sober black dress, showed that she belonged to the lower orders;
nevertheless she took up a rock-like position, looking about her to see
that no gentry were near before she delivered her message, which had
reference to the state of the sheets, and was of the utmost gravity.

"How ever we're to get through this voyage, Miss Rachel, I really
can't tell," she began with a shake of her head. "There's only
just sheets enough to go round, and the master's has a rotten place
you could put your fingers through. And the counterpanes. Did you
notice the counterpanes? I thought to myself a poor person would
have been ashamed of them. The one I gave Mr. Pepper was hardly fit
to cover a dog. . . . No, Miss Rachel, they could _not_ be mended;
they're only fit for dust sheets. Why, if one sewed one's finger
to the bone, one would have one's work undone the next time they
went to the laundry."

Her voice in its indignation wavered as if tears were near.

There was nothing for it but to descend and inspect a large pile
of linen heaped upon a table. Mrs. Chailey handled the sheets
as if she knew each by name, character, and constitution. Some had
yellow stains, others had places where the threads made long ladders;
but to the ordinary eye they looked much as sheets usually do look,
very chill, white, cold, and irreproachably clean.

Suddenly Mrs. Chailey, turning from the subject of sheets,
dismissing them entirely, clenched her fists on the top of them,
and proclaimed, "And you couldn't ask a living creature to sit
where I sit!"

Mrs. Chailey was expected to sit in a cabin which was large enough,
but too near the boilers, so that after five minutes she could
hear her heart "go," she complained, putting her hand above it,
which was a state of things that Mrs. Vinrace, Rachel's mother,
would never have dreamt of inflicting--Mrs. Vinrace, who knew every
sheet in her house, and expected of every one the best they could do,
but no more.

It was the easiest thing in the world to grant another room,
and the problem of sheets simultaneously and miraculously solved itself,
the spots and ladders not being past cure after all, but--

"Lies! Lies! Lies!" exclaimed the mistress indignantly, as she
ran up on to the deck. "What's the use of telling me lies?"

In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a child
and come cringing to a girl because she wanted to sit where she
had not leave to sit, she did not think of the particular case, and,
unpacking her music, soon forgot all about the old woman and her sheets.

Mrs. Chailey folded her sheets, but her expression testified to
flatness within. The world no longer cared about her, and a ship
was not a home. When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors
went tumbling above her head, she had cried; she would cry
this evening; she would cry to-morrow. It was not home. Meanwhile she
arranged her ornaments in the room which she had won too easily.
They were strange ornaments to bring on a sea voyage--china pugs,
tea-sets in miniature, cups stamped floridly with the arms of the city
of Bristol, hair-pin boxes crusted with shamrock, antelopes' heads in
coloured plaster, together with a multitude of tiny photographs,
representing downright workmen in their Sunday best, and women
holding white babies. But there was one portrait in a gilt frame,
for which a nail was needed, and before she sought it Mrs. Chailey
put on her spectacles and read what was written on a slip of paper
at the back:

"This picture of her mistress is given to Emma Chailey by Willoughby
Vinrace in gratitude for thirty years of devoted service."

Tears obliterated the words and the head of the nail.

"So long as I can do something for your family," she was saying,
as she hammered at it, when a voice called melodiously in the passage:

"Mrs. Chailey! Mrs. Chailey!"

Chailey instantly tidied her dress, composed her face, and opened
the door.

"I'm in a fix," said Mrs. Ambrose, who was flushed and out of breath.
"You know what gentlemen are. The chairs too high--the tables
too low--there's six inches between the floor and the door.
What I want's a hammer, an old quilt, and have you such a thing
as a kitchen table? Anyhow, between us"--she now flung open the door
of her husband's sitting room, and revealed Ridley pacing up and down,
his forehead all wrinkled, and the collar of his coat turned up.

"It's as though they'd taken pains to torment me!" he cried,
stopping dead. "Did I come on this voyage in order to catch
rheumatism and pneumonia? Really one might have credited Vinrace
with more sense. My dear," Helen was on her knees under a table,
"you are only making yourself untidy, and we had much better recognise
the fact that we are condemned to six weeks of unspeakable misery.
To come at all was the height of folly, but now that we are here I
suppose that I can face it like a man. My diseases of course will
be increased--I feel already worse than I did yesterday, but we've
only ourselves to thank, and the children happily--"

"Move! Move! Move!" cried Helen, chasing him from corner
to corner with a chair as though he were an errant hen.
"Out of the way, Ridley, and in half an hour you'll find it ready."

She turned him out of the room, and they could hear him groaning
and swearing as he went along the passage.

"I daresay he isn't very strong," said Mrs. Chailey, looking at
Mrs. Ambrose compassionately, as she helped to shift and carry.

"It's books," sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes
from the floor to the shelf. "Greek from morning to night.
If ever Miss Rachel marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man
who doesn't know his ABC."

The preliminary discomforts and harshnesses, which generally make
the first days of a sea voyage so cheerless and trying to the temper,
being somehow lived through, the succeeding days passed pleasantly enough.
October was well advanced, but steadily burning with a warmth that made
the early months of the summer appear very young and capricious.
Great tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun, and the whole
of England, from the bald moors to the Cornish rocks, was lit up from
dawn to sunset, and showed in stretches of yellow, green, and purple.
Under that illumination even the roofs of the great towns glittered.
In thousands of small gardens, millions of dark-red flowers were blooming,
until the old ladies who had tended them so carefully came down
the paths with their scissors, snipped through their juicy stalks,
and laid them upon cold stone ledges in the village church.
Innumerable parties of picnickers coming home at sunset cried,
"Was there ever such a day as this?"  "It's you," the young men whispered;
"Oh, it's you," the young women replied. All old people and many sick
people were drawn, were it only for a foot or two, into the open air,
and prognosticated pleasant things about the course of the world.
As for the confidences and expressions of love that were heard not
only in cornfields but in lamplit rooms, where the windows opened
on the garden, and men with cigars kissed women with grey hairs,
they were not to be counted. Some said that the sky was an emblem
of the life to come. Long-tailed birds clattered and screamed,
and crossed from wood to wood, with golden eyes in their plumage.

But while all this went on by land, very few people thought
about the sea. They took it for granted that the sea was calm;
and there was no need, as there is in many houses when the creeper
taps on the bedroom windows, for the couples to murmur before
they kiss, "Think of the ships to-night," or "Thank Heaven,
I'm not the man in the lighthouse!"  For all they imagined, the ships
when they vanished on the sky-line dissolved, like snow in water.
The grown-up view, indeed, was not much clearer than the view
of the little creatures in bathing drawers who were trotting in to
the foam all along the coasts of England, and scooping up buckets
full of water. They saw white sails or tufts of smoke pass across
the horizon, and if you had said that these were waterspouts,
or the petals of white sea flowers, they would have agreed.

The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England.
Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small island,
but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned.
One figured them first swarming about like aimless ants, and almost
pressing each other over the edge; and then, as the ship withdrew,
one figured them making a vain clamour, which, being unheard,
either ceased, or rose into a brawl. Finally, when the ship was
out of sight of land, it became plain that the people of England
were completely mute. The disease attacked other parts of the earth;
Europe shrank, Asia shrank, Africa and America shrank, until it seemed
doubtful whether the ship would ever run against any of those wrinkled
little rocks again. But, on the other hand, an immense dignity had
descended upon her; she was an inhabitant of the great world, which has
so few inhabitants, travelling all day across an empty universe,
with veils drawn before her and behind. She was more lonely than
the caravan crossing the desert; she was infinitely more mysterious,
moving by her own power and sustained by her own resources. The sea
might give her death or some unexampled joy, and none would know of it.
She was a bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men;
in her vigor and purity she might be likened to all beautiful things,
for as a ship she had a life of her own.

Indeed if they had not been blessed in their weather, one blue
day being bowled up after another, smooth, round, and flawless.
Mrs. Ambrose would have found it very dull. As it was, she had her
embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side
on which lay open a black volume of philosophy. She chose a thread
from the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed
red into the bark of a tree, or yellow into the river torrent.
She was working at a great design of a tropical river running
through a tropical forest, where spotted deer would eventually browse
upon masses of fruit, bananas, oranges, and giant pomegranates,
while a troop of naked natives whirled darts into the air.
Between the stitches she looked to one side and read a sentence
about the Reality of Matter, or the Nature of Good. Round her men
in blue jerseys knelt and scrubbed the boards, or leant over the rails
and whistled, and not far off Mr. Pepper sat cutting up roots with
a penknife. The rest were occupied in other parts of the ship:
Ridley at his Greek--he had never found quarters more to his liking;
Willoughby at his documents, for he used a voyage to work of arrears
of business; and Rachel--Helen, between her sentences of philosophy,
wondered sometimes what Rachel _did_ do with herself? She meant
vaguely to go and see. They had scarcely spoken two words to each
other since that first evening; they were polite when they met,
but there had been no confidence of any kind. Rachel seemed to get
on very well with her father--much better, Helen thought, than she
ought to--and was as ready to let Helen alone as Helen was to let
her alone.

At that moment Rachel was sitting in her room doing absolutely nothing.
When the ship was full this apartment bore some magnificent title
and was the resort of elderly sea-sick ladies who left the deck
to their youngsters. By virtue of the piano, and a mess of books
on the floor, Rachel considered it her room, and there she would sit
for hours playing very difficult music, reading a little German,
or a little English when the mood took her, and doing--as at this moment--
absolutely nothing.

The way she had been educated, joined to a fine natural indolence,
was of course partly the reason of it, for she had been educated
as the majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth
century were educated. Kindly doctors and gentle old professors had
taught her the rudiments of about ten different branches of knowledge,
but they would as soon have forced her to go through one piece of drudgery
thoroughly as they would have told her that her hands were dirty.
The one hour or the two hours weekly passed very pleasantly,
partly owing to the other pupils, partly to the fact that the window
looked upon the back of a shop, where figures appeared against
the red windows in winter, partly to the accidents that are bound
to happen when more than two people are in the same room together.
But there was no subject in the world which she knew accurately.
Her mind was in the state of an intelligent man's in the beginning
of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; she would believe practically
anything she was told, invent reasons for anything she said.
The shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked,
or money was invested, what laws were in force, which people wanted what,
and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a system in
modern life--none of this had been imparted to her by any of her
professors or mistresses. But this system of education had one
great advantage. It did not teach anything, but it put no obstacle
in the way of any real talent that the pupil might chance to have.
Rachel, being musical, was allowed to learn nothing but music;
she became a fanatic about music. All the energies that might have
gone into languages, science, or literature, that might have made
her friends, or shown her the world, poured straight into music.
Finding her teachers inadequate, she had practically taught herself.
At the age of twenty-four she knew as much about music as most
people do when they are thirty; and could play as well as nature
allowed her to, which, as became daily more obvious, was a really
generous allowance. If this one definite gift was surrounded by
dreams and ideas of the most extravagant and foolish description,
no one was any the wiser.

Her education being thus ordinary, her circumstances were no more out
of the common. She was an only child and had never been bullied and
laughed at by brothers and sisters. Her mother having died when she
was eleven, two aunts, the sisters of her father, brought her up,
and they lived for the sake of the air in a comfortable house
in Richmond. She was of course brought up with excessive care,
which as a child was for her health; as a girl and a young
woman was for what it seems almost crude to call her morals.
Until quite lately she had been completely ignorant that for women
such things existed. She groped for knowledge in old books,
and found it in repulsive chunks, but she did not naturally care
for books and thus never troubled her head about the censorship
which was exercised first by her aunts, later by her father.
Friends might have told her things, but she had few of her own age,--
Richmond being an awkward place to reach,--and, as it happened,
the only girl she knew well was a religious zealot, who in the fervour
of intimacy talked about God, and the best ways of taking up
one's cross, a topic only fitfully interesting to one whose mind
reached other stages at other times.

But lying in her chair, with one hand behind her head, the other
grasping the knob on the arm, she was clearly following her
thoughts intently. Her education left her abundant time for thinking.
Her eyes were fixed so steadily upon a ball on the rail of the ship
that she would have been startled and annoyed if anything had chanced
to obscure it for a second. She had begun her meditations with
a shout of laughter, caused by the following translation from _Tristan_:

        In shrinking trepidation
        His shame he seems to hide
        While to the king his relation
        He brings the corpse-like Bride.
        Seems it so senseless what I say?

She cried that it did, and threw down the book. Next she had
picked up _Cowper's_ _Letters_, the classic prescribed by her
father which had bored her, so that one sentence chancing to
say something about the smell of broom in his garden, she had
thereupon seen the little hall at Richmond laden with flowers
on the day of her mother's funeral, smelling so strong that now
any flower-scent brought back the sickly horrible sensation;
and so from one scene she passed, half-hearing, half-seeing,
to another. She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging flowers in the drawing-room.

"Aunt Lucy," she volunteered, "I don't like the smell of broom;
it reminds me of funerals."

"Nonsense, Rachel," Aunt Lucy replied; "don't say such foolish
things, dear. I always think it a particularly cheerful plant."

Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her aunts,
their views, and the way they lived. Indeed this was a subject
that lasted her hundreds of morning walks round Richmond Park,
and blotted out the trees and the people and the deer. Why did
they do the things they did, and what did they feel, and what was
it all about? Again she heard Aunt Lucy talking to Aunt Eleanor.
She had been that morning to take up the character of a servant,
"And, of course, at half-past ten in the morning one expects to find
the housemaid brushing the stairs."  How odd! How unspeakably odd!
But she could not explain to herself why suddenly as her aunt spoke
the whole system in which they lived had appeared before her eyes
as something quite unfamiliar and inexplicable, and themselves as
chairs or umbrellas dropped about here and there without any reason.
She could only say with her slight stammer, "Are you f-f-fond of
Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Lucy?" to which her aunt replied, with her nervous
hen-like twitter of a laugh, "My dear child, what questions you
do ask!"

"How fond? Very fond!"  Rachel pursued.

"I can't say I've ever thought 'how,'" said Miss Vinrace.
"If one cares one doesn't think 'how,' Rachel," which was aimed
at the niece who had never yet "come" to her aunts as cordially
as they wished.

"But you know I care for you, don't you, dear, because you're
your mother's daughter, if for no other reason, and there
_are_ plenty of other reasons"--and she leant over and kissed
her with some emotion, and the argument was spilt irretrievably
about the place like a bucket of milk.

By these means Rachel reached that stage in thinking, if thinking
it can be called, when the eyes are intent upon a ball or a knob
and the lips cease to move. Her efforts to come to an understanding
had only hurt her aunt's feelings, and the conclusion must be that it
is better not to try. To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss
between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently.
It was far better to play the piano and forget all the rest.
The conclusion was very welcome. Let these odd men and women--
her aunts, the Hunts, Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest--
be symbols,--featureless but dignified, symbols of age, of youth,
of motherhood, of learning, and beautiful often as people upon the stage
are beautiful. It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant,
or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.
Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt, but did not talk about,
one could accept a system in which things went round and round
quite satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling
to think about it, except as something superficially strange.
Absorbed by her music she accepted her lot very complacently,
blazing into indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and subsiding
as she subsided now. Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion,
her mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded
and combined with the spirit of the whitish boards on deck,
with the spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven Op.
112, even with the spirit of poor William Cowper there at Olney.
Like a ball of thistledown it kissed the sea, rose, kissed it again,
and thus rising and kissing passed finally out of sight. The rising
and falling of the ball of thistledown was represented by the sudden
droop forward of her own head, and when it passed out of sight she
was asleep.

Ten minutes later Mrs. Ambrose opened the door and looked at her.
It did not surprise her to find that this was the way in which Rachel
passed her mornings. She glanced round the room at the piano,
at the books, at the general mess. In the first place she considered
Rachel aesthetically; lying unprotected she looked somehow like a victim
dropped from the claws of a bird of prey, but considered as a woman,
a young woman of twenty-four, the sight gave rise to reflections.
Mrs. Ambrose stood thinking for at least two minutes. She then smiled,
turned noiselessly away and went, lest the sleeper should waken,
and there should be the awkwardness of speech between them.

Chapter III

Early next morning there was a sound as of chains being drawn
roughly overhead; the steady heart of the _Euphrosyne_ slowly ceased
to beat; and Helen, poking her nose above deck, saw a stationary
castle upon a stationary hill. They had dropped anchor in the mouth
of the Tagus, and instead of cleaving new waves perpetually,
the same waves kept returning and washing against the sides of the ship.

As soon as breakfast was done, Willoughby disappeared over
the vessel's side, carrying a brown leather case, shouting over
his shoulder that every one was to mind and behave themselves,
for he would be kept in Lisbon doing business until five o'clock
that afternoon.

At about that hour he reappeared, carrying his case, professing
himself tired, bothered, hungry, thirsty, cold, and in immediate need
of his tea. Rubbing his hands, he told them the adventures of the day:
how he had come upon poor old Jackson combing his moustache before
the glass in the office, little expecting his descent, had put him
through such a morning's work as seldom came his way; then treated him
to a lunch of champagne and ortolans; paid a call upon Mrs. Jackson,
who was fatter than ever, poor woman, but asked kindly after Rachel--
and O Lord, little Jackson had confessed to a confounded piece
of weakness--well, well, no harm was done, he supposed, but what
was the use of his giving orders if they were promptly disobeyed?
He had said distinctly that he would take no passengers on this trip.
Here he began searching in his pockets and eventually discovered a card,
which he planked down on the table before Rachel. On it she read,
"Mr. and Mrs. Richard Dalloway, 23 Browne Street, Mayfair."

"Mr. Richard Dalloway," continued Vinrace, "seems to be a gentleman
who thinks that because he was once a member of Parliament,
and his wife's the daughter of a peer, they can have what they
like for the asking. They got round poor little Jackson anyhow.
Said they must have passages--produced a letter from Lord Glenaway,
asking me as a personal favour--overruled any objections Jackson made
(I don't believe they came to much), and so there's nothing for it
but to submit, I suppose."

But it was evident that for some reason or other Willoughby was
quite pleased to submit, although he made a show of growling.

The truth was that Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway had found themselves
stranded in Lisbon. They had been travelling on the Continent for
some weeks, chiefly with a view to broadening Mr. Dalloway's mind.
Unable for a season, by one of the accidents of political life,
to serve his country in Parliament, Mr. Dalloway was doing the best
he could to serve it out of Parliament. For that purpose the Latin
countries did very well, although the East, of course, would have
done better.

"Expect to hear of me next in Petersburg or Teheran," he had said,
turning to wave farewell from the steps of the Travellers'. But
a disease had broken out in the East, there was cholera in Russia,
and he was heard of, not so romantically, in Lisbon. They had been
through France; he had stopped at manufacturing centres where,
producing letters of introduction, he had been shown over works,
and noted facts in a pocket-book. In Spain he and Mrs. Dalloway had
mounted mules, for they wished to understand how the peasants live.
Are they ripe for rebellion, for example? Mrs. Dalloway had
then insisted upon a day or two at Madrid with the pictures.
Finally they arrived in Lisbon and spent six days which, in a journal
privately issued afterwards, they described as of "unique interest."
Richard had audiences with ministers, and foretold a crisis at no
distant date, "the foundations of government being incurably corrupt.
Yet how blame, etc."; while Clarissa inspected the royal stables,
and took several snapshots showing men now exiled and windows now broken.
Among other things she photographed Fielding's grave, and let loose
a small bird which some ruffian had trapped, "because one hates
to think of anything in a cage where English people lie buried,"
the diary stated. Their tour was thoroughly unconventional,
and followed no meditated plan. The foreign correspondents
of the _Times_ decided their route as much as anything else.
Mr. Dalloway wished to look at certain guns, and was of opinion
that the African coast is far more unsettled than people at home
were inclined to believe. For these reasons they wanted a slow
inquisitive kind of ship, comfortable, for they were bad sailors,
but not extravagant, which would stop for a day or two at this
port and at that, taking in coal while the Dalloways saw things
for themselves. Meanwhile they found themselves stranded in Lisbon,
unable for the moment to lay hands upon the precise vessel they wanted.
They heard of the _Euphrosyne_, but heard also that she was primarily
a cargo boat, and only took passengers by special arrangement,
her business being to carry dry goods to the Amazons, and rubber
home again. "By special arrangement," however, were words of high
encouragement to them, for they came of a class where almost
everything was specially arranged, or could be if necessary.
On this occasion all that Richard did was to write a note
to Lord Glenaway, the head of the line which bears his title;
to call on poor old Jackson; to represent to him how Mrs. Dalloway
was so-and-so, and he had been something or other else,
and what they wanted was such and such a thing. It was done.
They parted with compliments and pleasure on both sides, and here,
a week later, came the boat rowing up to the ship in the dusk with
the Dalloways on board of it; in three minutes they were standing
together on the deck of the _Euphrosyne_. Their arrival, of course,
created some stir, and it was seen by several pairs of eyes that
Mrs. Dalloway was a tall slight woman, her body wrapped in furs,
her head in veils, while Mr. Dalloway appeared to be a middle-sized
man of sturdy build, dressed like a sportsman on an autumnal moor.
Many solid leather bags of a rich brown hue soon surrounded them,
in addition to which Mr. Dalloway carried a despatch box, and his wife
a dressing-case suggestive of a diamond necklace and bottles with
silver tops.

"It's so like Whistler!" she exclaimed, with a wave towards the shore,
as she shook Rachel by the hand, and Rachel had only time to look
at the grey hills on one side of her before Willoughby introduced
Mrs. Chailey, who took the lady to her cabin.

Momentary though it seemed, nevertheless the interruption was upsetting;
every one was more or less put out by it, from Mr. Grice,
the steward, to Ridley himself. A few minutes later Rachel passed
the smoking-room, and found Helen moving arm-chairs. She was absorbed
in her arrangements, and on seeing Rachel remarked confidentially:

"If one can give men a room to themselves where they will sit,
it's all to the good. Arm-chairs are _the_ important things--"
She began wheeling them about. "Now, does it still look like a bar
at a railway station?"

She whipped a plush cover off a table. The appearance of the place
was marvellously improved.

Again, the arrival of the strangers made it obvious to Rachel,
as the hour of dinner approached, that she must change her dress;
and the ringing of the great bell found her sitting on the edge of her
berth in such a position that the little glass above the washstand
reflected her head and shoulders. In the glass she wore an expression
of tense melancholy, for she had come to the depressing conclusion,
since the arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was not the face
she wanted, and in all probability never would be.

However, punctuality had been impressed on her, and whatever face
she had, she must go in to dinner.

These few minutes had been used by Willoughby in sketching to the
Dalloways the people they were to meet, and checking them upon his fingers.

"There's my brother-in-law, Ambrose, the scholar (I daresay
you've heard his name), his wife, my old friend Pepper, a very
quiet fellow, but knows everything, I'm told. And that's all.
We're a very small party. I'm dropping them on the coast."

Mrs. Dalloway, with her head a little on one side, did her best
to recollect Ambrose--was it a surname?--but failed. She was made
slightly uneasy by what she had heard. She knew that scholars
married any one--girls they met in farms on reading parties;
or little suburban women who said disagreeably, "Of course I know
it's my husband you want; not _me_."

But Helen came in at that point, and Mrs. Dalloway saw with relief
that though slightly eccentric in appearance, she was not untidy,
held herself well, and her voice had restraint in it, which she held
to be the sign of a lady. Mr. Pepper had not troubled to change
his neat ugly suit.

"But after all," Clarissa thought to herself as she followed Vinrace
in to dinner, "_every_ _one's_ interesting really."

When seated at the table she had some need of that assurance,
chiefly because of Ridley, who came in late, looked decidedly unkempt,
and took to his soup in profound gloom.

An imperceptible signal passed between husband and wife, meaning that
they grasped the situation and would stand by each other loyally.
With scarcely a pause Mrs. Dalloway turned to Willoughby and began:

"What I find so tiresome about the sea is that there are no flowers
in it. Imagine fields of hollyhocks and violets in mid-ocean!
How divine!"

"But somewhat dangerous to navigation," boomed Richard, in the bass,
like the bassoon to the flourish of his wife's violin. "Why, weeds
can be bad enough, can't they, Vinrace? I remember crossing in the
_Mauretania_ once, and saying to the Captain--Richards--did you know
him?--'Now tell me what perils you really dread most for your ship,
Captain Richards?' expecting him to say icebergs, or derelicts,
or fog, or something of that sort. Not a bit of it. I've always
remembered his answer. '_Sedgius_ _aquatici_,' he said, which I
take to be a kind of duck-weed."

Mr. Pepper looked up sharply, and was about to put a question
when Willoughby continued:

"They've an awful time of it--those captains! Three thousand souls
on board!"

"Yes, indeed," said Clarissa. She turned to Helen with an air
of profundity. "I'm convinced people are wrong when they say it's
work that wears one; it's responsibility. That's why one pays
one's cook more than one's housemaid, I suppose."

"According to that, one ought to pay one's nurse double;
but one doesn't," said Helen.

"No; but think what a joy to have to do with babies, instead of saucepans!"
said Mrs. Dalloway, looking with more interest at Helen, a probable mother.

"I'd much rather be a cook than a nurse," said Helen. "Nothing would
induce me to take charge of children."

"Mothers always exaggerate," said Ridley. "A well-bred child
is no responsibility. I've travelled all over Europe with mine.
You just wrap 'em up warm and put 'em in the rack."

Helen laughed at that. Mrs. Dalloway exclaimed, looking at Ridley:

"How like a father! My husband's just the same. And then one talks
of the equality of the sexes!"

"Does one?" said Mr. Pepper.

"Oh, some do!" cried Clarissa. "My husband had to pass an irate
lady every afternoon last session who said nothing else, I imagine."

"She sat outside the house; it was very awkward," said Dalloway.
"At last I plucked up courage and said to her, 'My good creature,
you're only in the way where you are. You're hindering me, and you're
doing no good to yourself.'"

"And then she caught him by the coat, and would have scratched
his eyes out--" Mrs. Dalloway put in.

"Pooh--that's been exaggerated," said Richard. "No, I pity them,
I confess. The discomfort of sitting on those steps must be awful."

"Serve them right," said Willoughby curtly.

"Oh, I'm entirely with you there," said Dalloway. "Nobody can condemn
the utter folly and futility of such behaviour more than I do;
and as for the whole agitation, well! may I be in my grave before
a woman has the right to vote in England! That's all I say."

The solemnity of her husband's assertion made Clarissa grave.

"It's unthinkable," she said. "Don't tell me you're a suffragist?"
she turned to Ridley.

"I don't care a fig one way or t'other," said Ambrose.
"If any creature is so deluded as to think that a vote does
him or her any good, let him have it. He'll soon learn better."

"You're not a politician, I see," she smiled.

"Goodness, no," said Ridley.

"I'm afraid your husband won't approve of me," said Dalloway aside,
to Mrs. Ambrose. She suddenly recollected that he had been
in Parliament.

"Don't you ever find it rather dull?" she asked, not knowing exactly
what to say.

Richard spread his hands before him, as if inscriptions were to be
read in the palms of them.

"If you ask me whether I ever find it rather dull," he said, "I am
bound to say yes; on the other hand, if you ask me what career do
you consider on the whole, taking the good with the bad, the most
enjoyable and enviable, not to speak of its more serious side,
of all careers, for a man, I am bound to say, 'The Politician's.'"

"The Bar or politics, I agree," said Willoughby. "You get more run
for your money."

"All one's faculties have their play," said Richard. "I may be
treading on dangerous ground; but what I feel about poets and artists
in general is this: on your own lines, you can't be beaten--
granted; but off your own lines--puff--one has to make allowances.
Now, I shouldn't like to think that any one had to make allowances for me."

"I don't quite agree, Richard," said Mrs. Dalloway. "Think of Shelley.
I feel that there's almost everything one wants in 'Adonais.'"

"Read 'Adonais' by all means," Richard conceded. "But whenever I
hear of Shelley I repeat to myself the words of Matthew Arnold,
'What a set! What a set!'"

This roused Ridley's attention. "Matthew Arnold? A detestable prig!"
he snapped.

"A prig--granted," said Richard; "but, I think a man of the world.
That's where my point comes in. We politicians doubtless seem to you"
(he grasped somehow that Helen was the representative of the arts)
"a gross commonplace set of people; but we see both sides;
we may be clumsy, but we do our best to get a grasp of things.
Now your artists _find_ things in a mess, shrug their shoulders,
turn aside to their visions--which I grant may be very beautiful--
and _leave_ things in a mess. Now that seems to me evading
one's responsibilities. Besides, we aren't all born with the
artistic faculty."

"It's dreadful," said Mrs. Dalloway, who, while her husband spoke,
had been thinking. "When I'm with artists I feel so intensely
the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one's own,
with pictures and music and everything beautiful, and then I go
out into the streets and the first child I meet with its poor,
hungry, dirty little face makes me turn round and say, 'No, I
_can't_ shut myself up--I _won't_ live in a world of my own.
I should like to stop all the painting and writing and music
until this kind of thing exists no longer.'  Don't you feel,"
she wound up, addressing Helen, "that life's a perpetual conflict?"
Helen considered for a moment. "No," she said. "I don't think
I do."

There was a pause, which was decidedly uncomfortable.
Mrs. Dalloway then gave a little shiver, and asked whether
she might have her fur cloak brought to her. As she adjusted
the soft brown fur about her neck a fresh topic struck her.

"I own," she said, "that I shall never forget the _Antigone_.
I saw it at Cambridge years ago, and it's haunted me ever since.
Don't you think it's quite the most modern thing you ever saw?"
she asked Ridley. "It seemed to me I'd known twenty Clytemnestras.
Old Lady Ditchling for one. I don't know a word of Greek, but I could
listen to it for ever--"

Here Mr. Pepper struck up:

{Some editions of the work contain a brief passage from Antigone,
in Greek, at this spot. ed.}

Mrs. Dalloway looked at him with compressed lips.

"I'd give ten years of my life to know Greek," she said, when he
had done.

"I could teach you the alphabet in half an hour," said Ridley,
"and you'd read Homer in a month. I should think it an honour
to instruct you."

Helen, engaged with Mr. Dalloway and the habit, now fallen into decline,
of quoting Greek in the House of Commons, noted, in the great
commonplace book that lies open beside us as we talk, the fact
that all men, even men like Ridley, really prefer women to be fashionable.

Clarissa exclaimed that she could think of nothing more delightful.
For an instant she saw herself in her drawing-room in Browne Street
with a Plato open on her knees--Plato in the original Greek. She could
not help believing that a real scholar, if specially interested,
could slip Greek into her head with scarcely any trouble.

Ridley engaged her to come to-morrow.

"If only your ship is going to treat us kindly!" she exclaimed,
drawing Willoughby into play. For the sake of guests, and these
were distinguished, Willoughby was ready with a bow of his head
to vouch for the good behaviour even of the waves.

"I'm dreadfully bad; and my husband's not very good," sighed Clarissa.

"I am never sick," Richard explained. "At least, I have only been
actually sick once," he corrected himself. "That was crossing
the Channel. But a choppy sea, I confess, or still worse, a swell,
makes me distinctly uncomfortable. The great thing is never
to miss a meal. You look at the food, and you say, 'I can't';
you take a mouthful, and Lord knows how you're going to swallow it;
but persevere, and you often settle the attack for good. My wife's
a coward."

They were pushing back their chairs. The ladies were hesitating
at the doorway.

"I'd better show the way," said Helen, advancing.

Rachel followed. She had taken no part in the talk; no one had
spoken to her; but she had listened to every word that was said.
She had looked from Mrs. Dalloway to Mr. Dalloway, and from Mr. Dalloway
back again. Clarissa, indeed, was a fascinating spectacle.
She wore a white dress and a long glittering necklace.
What with her clothes, and her arch delicate face, which showed
exquisitely pink beneath hair turning grey, she was astonishingly
like an eighteenth-century masterpiece--a Reynolds or a Romney.
She made Helen and the others look coarse and slovenly beside her.
Sitting lightly upright she seemed to be dealing with the world as
she chose; the enormous solid globe spun round this way and that beneath
her fingers. And her husband! Mr. Dalloway rolling that rich deliberate
voice was even more impressive. He seemed to come from the humming
oily centre of the machine where the polished rods are sliding,
and the pistons thumping; he grasped things so firmly but so loosely;
he made the others appear like old maids cheapening remnants.
Rachel followed in the wake of the matrons, as if in a trance;
a curious scent of violets came back from Mrs. Dalloway, mingling with
the soft rustling of her skirts, and the tinkling of her chains.
As she followed, Rachel thought with supreme self-abasement,
taking in the whole course of her life and the lives of all
her friends, "She said we lived in a world of our own. It's true.
We're perfectly absurd."

"We sit in here," said Helen, opening the door of the saloon.

"You play?" said Mrs. Dalloway to Mrs. Ambrose, taking up the score
of _Tristan_ which lay on the table.

"My niece does," said Helen, laying her hand on Rachel's shoulder.

"Oh, how I envy you!"  Clarissa addressed Rachel for the first time.
"D'you remember this? Isn't it divine?"  She played a bar or two
with ringed fingers upon the page.

"And then Tristan goes like this, and Isolde--oh!--it's all
too thrilling! Have you been to Bayreuth?"

"No, I haven't," said Rachel. `"Then that's still to come.
I shall never forget my first _Parsifal_--a grilling August day,
and those fat old German women, come in their stuffy high frocks,
and then the dark theatre, and the music beginning, and one couldn't
help sobbing. A kind man went and fetched me water, I remember;
and I could only cry on his shoulder! It caught me here" (she touched
her throat). "It's like nothing else in the world! But where's
your piano?"  "It's in another room," Rachel explained.

"But you will play to us?"  Clarissa entreated. "I can't imagine
anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music--
only that sounds too like a schoolgirl! You know," she said,
turning to Helen, "I don't think music's altogether good for people--
I'm afraid not."

"Too great a strain?" asked Helen.

"Too emotional, somehow," said Clarissa. "One notices it at once
when a boy or girl takes up music as a profession. Sir William
Broadley told me just the same thing. Don't you hate the kind of
attitudes people go into over Wagner--like this--" She cast her eyes
to the ceiling, clasped her hands, and assumed a look of intensity.
"It really doesn't mean that they appreciate him; in fact, I always
think it's the other way round. The people who really care about
an art are always the least affected. D'you know Henry Philips,
the painter?" she asked.

"I have seen him," said Helen.

"To look at, one might think he was a successful stockbroker,
and not one of the greatest painters of the age. That's what I like."

"There are a great many successful stockbrokers, if you like looking
at them," said Helen.

Rachel wished vehemently that her aunt would not be so perverse.

"When you see a musician with long hair, don't you know instinctively
that he's bad?"  Clarissa asked, turning to Rachel. "Watts and Joachim--
they looked just like you and me."

"And how much nicer they'd have looked with curls!" said Helen.
"The question is, are you going to aim at beauty or are you not?"

"Cleanliness!" said Clarissa, "I do want a man to look clean!"

"By cleanliness you really mean well-cut clothes," said Helen.

"There's something one knows a gentleman by," said Clarissa,
"but one can't say what it is."

"Take my husband now, does he look like a gentleman?"

The question seemed to Clarissa in extraordinarily bad taste.
"One of the things that can't be said," she would have put it.
She could find no answer, but a laugh.

"Well, anyhow," she said, turning to Rachel, "I shall insist upon
your playing to me to-morrow."

There was that in her manner that made Rachel love her.

Mrs. Dalloway hid a tiny yawn, a mere dilation of the nostrils.

"D'you know," she said, "I'm extraordinarily sleepy. It's the sea air.
I think I shall escape."

A man's voice, which she took to be that of Mr. Pepper, strident
in discussion, and advancing upon the saloon, gave her the alarm.

"Good-night--good-night!" she said. "Oh, I know my way--do pray
for calm! Good-night!"

Her yawn must have been the image of a yawn. Instead of letting her
mouth droop, dropping all her clothes in a bunch as though they depended
on one string, and stretching her limbs to the utmost end of her berth,
she merely changed her dress for a dressing-gown, with innumerable
frills, and wrapping her feet in a rug, sat down with a writing-pad
on her knee. Already this cramped little cabin was the dressing
room of a lady of quality. There were bottles containing liquids;
there were trays, boxes, brushes, pins. Evidently not an inch of her
person lacked its proper instrument. The scent which had intoxicated
Rachel pervaded the air. Thus established, Mrs. Dalloway began
to write. A pen in her hands became a thing one caressed paper with,
and she might have been stroking and tickling a kitten as she wrote:

Picture us, my dear, afloat in the very oddest ship you can imagine.
It's not the ship, so much as the people. One does come across
queer sorts as one travels. I must say I find it hugely amusing.
There's the manager of the line--called Vinrace--a nice big Englishman,
doesn't say much--you know the sort. As for the rest--they might
have come trailing out of an old number of _Punch_. They're like
people playing croquet in the 'sixties. How long they've all been
shut up in this ship I don't know--years and years I should say--
but one feels as though one had boarded a little separate world,
and they'd never been on shore, or done ordinary things in
their lives. It's what I've always said about literary people--
they're far the hardest of any to get on with. The worst of it is,
these people--a man and his wife and a niece--might have been,
one feels, just like everybody else, if they hadn't got swallowed up
by Oxford or Cambridge or some such place, and been made cranks of.
The man's really delightful (if he'd cut his nails), and the woman
has quite a fine face, only she dresses, of course, in a potato sack,
and wears her hair like a Liberty shopgirl's. They talk about art,
and think us such poops for dressing in the evening. However, I can't
help that; I'd rather die than come in to dinner without changing--
wouldn't you? It matters ever so much more than the soup.
(It's odd how things like that _do_ matter so much more than what's
generally supposed to matter. I'd rather have my head cut off
than wear flannel next the skin.) Then there's a nice shy girl--
poor thing--I wish one could rake her out before it's too late.
She has quite nice eyes and hair, only, of course, she'll get
funny too. We ought to start a society for broadening the minds
of the young--much more useful than missionaries, Hester! Oh,
I'd forgotten there's a dreadful little thing called Pepper.
He's just like his name. He's indescribably insignificant,
and rather queer in his temper, poor dear. It's like sitting down
to dinner with an ill-conditioned fox-terrier, only one can't comb
him out, and sprinkle him with powder, as one would one's dog.
It's a pity, sometimes, one can't treat people like dogs!
The great comfort is that we're away from newspapers, so that Richard
will have a real holiday this time. Spain wasn't a holiday. . .
.

"You coward!" said Richard, almost filling the room with his
sturdy figure.

"I did my duty at dinner!" cried Clarissa.

"You've let yourself in for the Greek alphabet, anyhow."

"Oh, my dear! Who _is_ Ambrose?"

"I gather that he was a Cambridge don; lives in London now,
and edits classics."

"Did you ever see such a set of cranks? The woman asked me if I
thought her husband looked like a gentleman!"

"It was hard to keep the ball rolling at dinner, certainly,"
said Richard. "Why is it that the women, in that class,
are so much queerer than the men?"

"They're not half bad-looking, really--only--they're so odd!"

They both laughed, thinking of the same things, so that there
was no need to compare their impressions.

"I see I shall have quite a lot to say to Vinrace," said Richard.
"He knows Sutton and all that set. He can tell me a good deal about
the conditions of ship-building in the North."

"Oh, I'm glad. The men always _are_ so much better than the women."

"One always has something to say to a man certainly," said Richard.
"But I've no doubt you'll chatter away fast enough about
the babies, Clarice."

"Has she got children? She doesn't look like it somehow."

"Two. A boy and girl."

A pang of envy shot through Mrs. Dalloway's heart.

"We _must_ have a son, Dick," she said.

"Good Lord, what opportunities there are now for young men!"
said Dalloway, for his talk had set him thinking. "I don't suppose
there's been so good an opening since the days of Pitt."

"And it's yours!" said Clarissa.

"To be a leader of men," Richard soliloquised. "It's a fine career.
My God--what a career!"

The chest slowly curved beneath his waistcoat.

"D'you know, Dick, I can't help thinking of England," said his
wife meditatively, leaning her head against his chest. "Being on
this ship seems to make it so much more vivid--what it really means
to be English. One thinks of all we've done, and our navies,
and the people in India and Africa, and how we've gone on century
after century, sending out boys from little country villages--
and of men like you, Dick, and it makes one feel as if one couldn't
bear _not_ to be English! Think of the light burning over
the House, Dick! When I stood on deck just now I seemed to see it.
It's what one means by London."

"It's the continuity," said Richard sententiously. A vision of
English history, King following King, Prime Minister Prime Minister,
and Law Law had come over him while his wife spoke. He ran his
mind along the line of conservative policy, which went steadily
from Lord Salisbury to Alfred, and gradually enclosed, as though
it were a lasso that opened and caught things, enormous chunks
of the habitable globe.

"It's taken a long time, but we've pretty nearly done it," he said;
"it remains to consolidate."

"And these people don't see it!"  Clarissa exclaimed.

"It takes all sorts to make a world," said her husband. "There would
never be a government if there weren't an opposition."

"Dick, you're better than I am," said Clarissa. "You see round,
where I only see _there_."  She pressed a point on the back of
his hand.

"That's my business, as I tried to explain at dinner."

"What I like about you, Dick," she continued, "is that you're
always the same, and I'm a creature of moods."

"You're a pretty creature, anyhow," he said, gazing at her with
deeper eyes.

"You think so, do you? Then kiss me."

He kissed her passionately, so that her half-written letter slid
to the ground. Picking it up, he read it without asking leave.

"Where's your pen?" he said; and added in his little masculine hand:

R.D. _loquitur_: Clarice has omitted to tell you that she looked
exceedingly pretty at dinner, and made a conquest by which she
has bound herself to learn the Greek alphabet. I will take this
occasion of adding that we are both enjoying ourselves in these
outlandish parts, and only wish for the presence of our friends
(yourself and John, to wit) to make the trip perfectly enjoyable
as it promises to be instructive. . . .

Voices were heard at the end of the corridor. Mrs. Ambrose
was speaking low; William Pepper was remarking in his definite
and rather acid voice, "That is the type of lady with whom
I find myself distinctly out of sympathy. She--"

But neither Richard nor Clarissa profited by the verdict, for directly
it seemed likely that they would overhear, Richard crackled a sheet
of paper.

"I often wonder," Clarissa mused in bed, over the little white volume
of Pascal which went with her everywhere, "whether it is really
good for a woman to live with a man who is morally her superior,
as Richard is mine. It makes one so dependent. I suppose I feel
for him what my mother and women of her generation felt for Christ.
It just shows that one can't do without _something_."  She then fell
into a sleep, which was as usual extremely sound and refreshing,
but visited by fantastic dreams of great Greek letters stalking
round the room, when she woke up and laughed to herself,
remembering where she was and that the Greek letters were real people,
lying asleep not many yards away. Then, thinking of the black
sea outside tossing beneath the moon, she shuddered, and thought
of her husband and the others as companions on the voyage.
The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from one
brain to another. They all dreamt of each other that night,
as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them,
and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each
other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each other's faces,
and hear whatever they chanced to say.

Chapter IV

Next morning Clarissa was up before anyone else. She dressed,
and was out on deck, breathing the fresh air of a calm morning,
and, making the circuit of the ship for the second time,
she ran straight into the lean person of Mr. Grice, the steward.
She apologised, and at the same time asked him to enlighten her:
what were those shiny brass stands for, half glass on the top?
She had been wondering, and could not guess. When he had done explaining,
she cried enthusiastically:

"I do think that to be a sailor must be the finest thing in the world!"

"And what d'you know about it?" said Mr. Grice, kindling in a
strange manner. "Pardon me. What does any man or woman brought
up in England know about the sea? They profess to know; but they don't."

The bitterness with which he spoke was ominous of what was to come.
He led her off to his own quarters, and, sitting on the edge
of a brass-bound table, looking uncommonly like a sea-gull,
with her white tapering body and thin alert face, Mrs. Dalloway
had to listen to the tirade of a fanatical man. Did she realise,
to begin with, what a very small part of the world the land was?
How peaceful, how beautiful, how benignant in comparison the sea?
The deep waters could sustain Europe unaided if every earthly animal
died of the plague to-morrow. Mr. Grice recalled dreadful sights
which he had seen in the richest city of the world--men and women
standing in line hour after hour to receive a mug of greasy soup.
"And I thought of the good flesh down here waiting and asking to
be caught. I'm not exactly a Protestant, and I'm not a Catholic,
but I could almost pray for the days of popery to come again--
because of the fasts."

As he talked he kept opening drawers and moving little glass jars.
Here were the treasures which the great ocean had bestowed upon him--
pale fish in greenish liquids, blobs of jelly with streaming tresses,
fish with lights in their heads, they lived so deep.

"They have swum about among bones," Clarissa sighed.

"You're thinking of Shakespeare," said Mr. Grice, and taking down
a copy from a shelf well lined with books, recited in an emphatic
nasal voice:

Full fathom five thy father lies,

"A grand fellow, Shakespeare," he said, replacing the volume.

Clarissa was so glad to hear him say so.

"Which is your favourite play? I wonder if it's the same as mine?"

"_Henry the Fifth_," said Mr. Grice.

"Joy!" cried Clarissa. "It is!"

_Hamlet_ was what you might call too introspective for Mr. Grice,
the sonnets too passionate; Henry the Fifth was to him the model
of an English gentleman. But his favourite reading was Huxley,
Herbert Spencer, and Henry George; while Emerson and Thomas Hardy
he read for relaxation. He was giving Mrs. Dalloway his views
upon the present state of England when the breakfast bell rung
so imperiously that she had to tear herself away, promising to come
back and be shown his sea-weeds.

The party, which had seemed so odd to her the night before,
was already gathered round the table, still under the influence
of sleep, and therefore uncommunicative, but her entrance sent
a little flutter like a breath of air through them all.

"I've had the most interesting talk of my life!" she exclaimed,
taking her seat beside Willoughby. "D'you realise that one of your
men is a philosopher and a poet?"

"A very interesting fellow--that's what I always say," said Willoughby,
distinguishing Mr. Grice. "Though Rachel finds him a bore."

"He's a bore when he talks about currents," said Rachel. Her eyes
were full of sleep, but Mrs. Dalloway still seemed to her wonderful.

"I've never met a bore yet!" said Clarissa.

"And I should say the world was full of them!" exclaimed Helen.
But her beauty, which was radiant in the morning light, took the
contrariness from her words.

"I agree that it's the worst one can possibly say of any one,"
said Clarissa. "How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!"
she added, with her usual air of saying something profound.
"One can fancy liking a murderer. It's the same with dogs.
Some dogs are awful bores, poor dears."

It happened that Richard was sitting next to Rachel. She was curiously
conscious of his presence and appearance--his well-cut clothes,
his crackling shirt-front, his cuffs with blue rings round them,
and the square-tipped, very clean fingers with the red stone on
the little finger of the left hand.

"We had a dog who was a bore and knew it," he said, addressing her
in cool, easy tones. "He was a Skye terrier, one of those
long chaps, with little feet poking out from their hair like--
like caterpillars--no, like sofas I should say. Well, we had another
dog at the same time, a black brisk animal--a Schipperke, I think,
you call them. You can't imagine a greater contrast. The Skye
so slow and deliberate, looking up at you like some old gentleman
in the club, as much as to say, "You don't really mean it, do you?"
and the Schipperke as quick as a knife. I liked the Skye best,
I must confess. There was something pathetic about him."

The story seemed to have no climax.

"What happened to him?"  Rachel asked.

"That's a very sad story," said Richard, lowering his voice
and peeling an apple. "He followed my wife in the car one day
and got run over by a brute of a cyclist."

"Was he killed?" asked Rachel.

But Clarissa at her end of the table had overheard.

"Don't talk of it!" she cried. "It's a thing I can't bear to think
of to this day."

Surely the tears stood in her eyes?

"That's the painful thing about pets," said Mr. Dalloway; "they die.
The first sorrow I can remember was for the death of a dormouse.
I regret to say that I sat upon it. Still, that didn't make one any
the less sorry. Here lies the duck that Samuel Johnson sat on, eh?
I was big for my age."

"Then we had canaries," he continued, "a pair of ring-doves, a lemur,
and at one time a martin."

"Did you live in the country?"  Rachel asked him.

"We lived in the country for six months of the year. When I say
'we' I mean four sisters, a brother, and myself. There's nothing
like coming of a large family. Sisters particularly are delightful."

"Dick, you were horribly spoilt!" cried Clarissa across the table.

"No, no. Appreciated," said Richard.

Rachel had other questions on the tip of her tongue; or rather one
enormous question, which she did not in the least know how to put
into words. The talk appeared too airy to admit of it.

"Please tell me--everything."  That was what she wanted to say.
He had drawn apart one little chink and showed astonishing treasures.
It seemed to her incredible that a man like that should be willing to
talk to her. He had sisters and pets, and once lived in the country.
She stirred her tea round and round; the bubbles which swam and
clustered in the cup seemed to her like the union of their minds.

The talk meanwhile raced past her, and when Richard suddenly stated
in a jocular tone of voice, "I'm sure Miss Vinrace, now, has secret
leanings towards Catholicism," she had no idea what to answer,
and Helen could not help laughing at the start she gave.

However, breakfast was over and Mrs. Dalloway was rising.
"I always think religion's like collecting beetles," she said,
summing up the discussion as she went up the stairs with Helen.
"One person has a passion for black beetles; another hasn't; it's no
good arguing about it. What's _your_ black beetle now?"

"I suppose it's my children," said Helen.

"Ah--that's different," Clarissa breathed. "Do tell me.
You have a boy, haven't you? Isn't it detestable, leaving them?"

It was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool.
Their eyes became deeper, and their voices more cordial.
Instead of joining them as they began to pace the deck, Rachel was
indignant with the prosperous matrons, who made her feel outside
their world and motherless, and turning back, she left them abruptly.
She slammed the door of her room, and pulled out her music.
It was all old music--Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Purcell--
the pages yellow, the engraving rough to the finger. In three
minutes she was deep in a very difficult, very classical fugue in A,
and over her face came a queer remote impersonal expression of
complete absorption and anxious satisfaction. Now she stumbled;
now she faltered and had to play the same bar twice over; but an
invisible line seemed to string the notes together, from which
rose a shape, a building. She was so far absorbed in this work,
for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds should
stand together, and drew upon the whole of her faculties, that she
never heard a knock at the door. It was burst impulsively open,
and Mrs. Dalloway stood in the room leaving the door open, so that
a strip of the white deck and of the blue sea appeared through
the opening. The shape of the Bach fugue crashed to the ground.

"Don't let me interrupt," Clarissa implored. "I heard you playing,
and I couldn't resist. I adore Bach!"

Rachel flushed and fumbled her fingers in her lap. She stood
up awkwardly.

"It's too difficult," she said.

"But you were playing quite splendidly! I ought to have stayed outside."

"No," said Rachel.

She slid _Cowper's_ _Letters_ and _Wuthering_ _Heights_ out
of the arm-chair, so that Clarissa was invited to sit there.

"What a dear little room!" she said, looking round.
"Oh, _Cowper's_ _Letters>!" I've never read them. Are they nice?"

"Rather dull," said Rachel.

"He wrote awfully well, didn't he?" said Clarissa; "--if one
likes that kind of thing--finished his sentences and all that.
_Wuthering_ _Heights_! Ah--that's more in my line. I really couldn't
exist without the Brontes! Don't you love them? Still, on the whole,
I'd rather live without them than without Jane Austen."

Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed
an extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.

"Jane Austen? I don't like Jane Austen," said Rachel.

"You monster!"  Clarissa exclaimed. "I can only just forgive you.
Tell me why?"

"She's so--so--well, so like a tight plait," Rachel floundered.
"Ah--I see what you mean. But I don't agree. And you won't when
you're older. At your age I only liked Shelley. I can remember
sobbing over him in the garden.

        He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
        Envy and calumny and hate and pain-- you remember?

        Can touch him not and torture not again
        From the contagion of the world's slow stain.

How divine!--and yet what nonsense!"  She looked lightly round the room.
"I always think it's _living_, not dying, that counts. I really
respect some snuffy old stockbroker who's gone on adding up column
after column all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton
with some old pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting
at the end of the table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight--
I assure you I know heaps like that--well, they seem to me _really_
nobler than poets whom every one worships, just because they're
geniuses and die young. But I don't expect _you_ to agree with me!"

She pressed Rachel's shoulder.

"Um-m-m--" she went on quoting--

Unrest which men miscall delight--

"when you're my age you'll see that the world is _crammed_ with
delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about that--
not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness
is the only thing that counts. I don't know you well enough to say,
but I should guess you might be a little inclined to--when one's young
and attractive--I'm going to say it!--_every_thing's at one's feet."
She glanced round as much as to say, "not only a few stuffy books
and Bach."

"I long to ask questions," she continued. "You interest me so much.
If I'm impertinent, you must just box my ears."

"And I--I want to ask questions," said Rachel with such earnestness
that Mrs. Dalloway had to check her smile.

"D'you mind if we walk?" she said. "The air's so delicious."

She snuffed it like a racehorse as they shut the door and stood
on deck.

"Isn't it good to be alive?" she exclaimed, and drew Rachel's arm
within hers.

"Look, look! How exquisite!"

The shores of Portugal were beginning to lose their substance;
but the land was still the land, though at a great distance.
They could distinguish the little towns that were sprinkled in
the folds of the hills, and the smoke rising faintly. The towns
appeared to be very small in comparison with the great purple
mountains behind them.

"Honestly, though," said Clarissa, having looked, "I don't like views.
They're too inhuman."  They walked on.

"How odd it is!" she continued impulsively. "This time yesterday
we'd never met. I was packing in a stuffy little room in the hotel.
We know absolutely nothing about each other--and yet--I feel as if I
_did_ know you!"

"You have children--your husband was in Parliament?"

"You've never been to school, and you live--?"

"With my aunts at Richmond."

"Richmond?"

"You see, my aunts like the Park. They like the quiet."

"And you don't! I understand!"  Clarissa laughed.

"I like walking in the Park alone; but not--with the dogs,"
she finished.

"No; and some people _are_ dogs; aren't they?" said Clarissa,
as if she had guessed a secret. "But not every one--oh no,
not every one."

"Not every one," said Rachel, and stopped.

"I can quite imagine you walking alone," said Clarissa: "and thinking--
in a little world of your own. But how you will enjoy it--
some day!"

"I shall enjoy walking with a man--is that what you mean?" said Rachel,
regarding Mrs. Dalloway with her large enquiring eyes.

"I wasn't thinking of a man particularly," said Clarissa.
"But you will."

"No. I shall never marry," Rachel determined.

"I shouldn't be so sure of that," said Clarissa. Her sidelong
glance told Rachel that she found her attractive although she
was inexplicably amused.

"Why do people marry?"  Rachel asked.

"That's what you're going to find out," Clarissa laughed.

Rachel followed her eyes and found that they rested for a second,
on the robust figure of Richard Dalloway, who was engaged in striking
a match on the sole of his boot; while Willoughby expounded something,
which seemed to be of great interest to them both.

"There's nothing like it," she concluded. "Do tell me about
the Ambroses. Or am I asking too many questions?"

"I find you easy to talk to," said Rachel.

The short sketch of the Ambroses was, however, somewhat perfunctory,
and contained little but the fact that Mr. Ambrose was her uncle.

"Your mother's brother?"

When a name has dropped out of use, the lightest touch upon it tells.
Mrs. Dalloway went on:

"Are you like your mother?"

"No; she was different," said Rachel.

She was overcome by an intense desire to tell Mrs. Dalloway things
she had never told any one--things she had not realised herself
until this moment.

"I am lonely," she began. "I want--" She did not know what she wanted,
so that she could not finish the sentence; but her lip quivered.

But it seemed that Mrs. Dalloway was able to understand without words.

"I know," she said, actually putting one arm round Rachel's shoulder.
"When I was your age I wanted too. No one understood until I
met Richard. He gave me all I wanted. He's man and woman as well."
Her eyes rested upon Mr. Dalloway, leaning upon the rail,
still talking. "Don't think I say that because I'm his wife--
I see his faults more clearly than I see any one else's. What
one wants in the person one lives with is that they should keep
one at one's best. I often wonder what I've done to be so happy!"
she exclaimed, and a tear slid down her cheek. She wiped it away,
squeezed Rachel's hand, and exclaimed:

"How good life is!"  At that moment, standing out in the fresh breeze,
with the sun upon the waves, and Mrs. Dalloway's hand upon her arm,
it seemed indeed as if life which had been unnamed before was
infinitely wonderful, and too good to be true.

Here Helen passed them, and seeing Rachel arm-in-arm with a
comparative stranger, looking excited, was amused, but at the same time
slightly irritated. But they were immediately joined by Richard, who had
enjoyed a very interesting talk with Willoughby and was in a sociable mood.

"Observe my Panama," he said, touching the brim of his hat.
"Are you aware, Miss Vinrace, how much can be done to induce fine
weather by appropriate headdress? I have determined that it is a hot
summer day; I warn you that nothing you can say will shake me.
Therefore I am going to sit down. I advise you to follow my example."
Three chairs in a row invited them to be seated.

Leaning back, Richard surveyed the waves.

"That's a very pretty blue," he said. "But there's a little too
much of it. Variety is essential to a view. Thus, if you have
hills you ought to have a river; if a river, hills. The best view
in the world in my opinion is that from Boars Hill on a fine day--
it must be a fine day, mark you--A rug?--Oh, thank you, my dear.
. . . in that case you have also the advantage of associations--
the Past."

"D'you want to talk, Dick, or shall I read aloud?"

Clarissa had fetched a book with the rugs.

"_Persuasion_," announced Richard, examining the volume.

"That's for Miss Vinrace," said Clarissa. "She can't bear our
beloved Jane."

"That--if I may say so--is because you have not read her," said Richard.
"She is incomparably the greatest female writer we possess."

"She is the greatest," he continued, "and for this reason:
she does not attempt to write like a man. Every other woman does;
on that account, I don't read 'em."

"Produce your instances, Miss Vinrace," he went on, joining his
finger-tips. "I'm ready to be converted."

He waited, while Rachel vainly tried to vindicate her sex from
the slight he put upon it.

"I'm afraid he's right," said Clarissa. "He generally is--
the wretch!"

"I brought _Persuasion_," she went on, "because I thought it was
a little less threadbare than the others--though, Dick, it's no
good _your_ pretending to know Jane by heart, considering that she
always sends you to sleep!"

"After the labours of legislation, I deserve sleep," said Richard.

"You're not to think about those guns," said Clarissa, seeing that
his eye, passing over the waves, still sought the land meditatively,
"or about navies, or empires, or anything."  So saying she opened
the book and began to read:

"'Sir Walter Elliott, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who,
for his own amusement, never took up any book but the _Baronetage_'--
don't you know Sir Walter?--'There he found occupation for an idle hour,
and consolation in a distressed one.'  She does write well,
doesn't she? 'There--'" She read on in a light humorous voice.
She was determined that Sir Walter should take her husband's
mind off the guns of Britain, and divert him in an exquisite,
quaint, sprightly, and slightly ridiculous world. After a time it
appeared that the sun was sinking in that world, and the points
becoming softer. Rachel looked up to see what caused the change.
Richard's eyelids were closing and opening; opening and closing.
A loud nasal breath announced that he no longer considered appearances,
that he was sound asleep.

"Triumph!"  Clarissa whispered at the end of a sentence. Suddenly she
raised her hand in protest. A sailor hesitated; she gave the book
to Rachel, and stepped lightly to take the message--"Mr. Grice
wished to know if it was convenient," etc. She followed him.
Ridley, who had prowled unheeded, started forward, stopped, and,
with a gesture of disgust, strode off to his study. The sleeping
politician was left in Rachel's charge. She read a sentence,
and took a look at him. In sleep he looked like a coat hanging
at the end of a bed; there were all the wrinkles, and the sleeves
and trousers kept their shape though no longer filled out by legs
and arms. You can then best judge the age and state of the coat.
She looked him all over until it seemed to her that he must protest.

He was a man of forty perhaps; and here there were lines round
his eyes, and there curious clefts in his cheeks. Slightly battered
he appeared, but dogged and in the prime of life.

"Sisters and a dormouse and some canaries," Rachel murmured,
never taking her eyes off him. "I wonder, I wonder" she ceased,
her chin upon her hand, still looking at him. A bell chimed behind them,
and Richard raised his head. Then he opened his eyes which wore for
a second the queer look of a shortsighted person's whose spectacles
are lost. It took him a moment to recover from the impropriety
of having snored, and possibly grunted, before a young lady. To wake
and find oneself left alone with one was also slightly disconcerting.

"I suppose I've been dozing," he said. "What's happened
to everyone? Clarissa?"

"Mrs. Dalloway has gone to look at Mr. Grice's fish," Rachel replied.

"I might have guessed," said Richard. "It's a common occurrence.
And how have you improved the shining hour? Have you become
a convert?"

"I don't think I've read a line," said Rachel.

"That's what I always find. There are too many things to look at.
I find nature very stimulating myself. My best ideas have come to me
out of doors."

"When you were walking?"

"Walking--riding--yachting--I suppose the most momentous conversations
of my life took place while perambulating the great court at Trinity.
I was at both universities. It was a fad of my father's. He thought
it broadening to the mind. I think I agree with him. I can remember--
what an age ago it seems!--settling the basis of a future state with
the present Secretary for India. We thought ourselves very wise.
I'm not sure we weren't. We were happy, Miss Vinrace, and we were young--
gifts which make for wisdom."

"Have you done what you said you'd do?" she asked.

"A searching question! I answer--Yes and No. If on the one hand I
have not accomplished what I set out to accomplish--which of us does!--
on the other I can fairly say this: I have not lowered my ideal."

He looked resolutely at a sea-gull, as though his ideal flew
on the wings of the bird.

"But," said Rachel, "what _is_ your ideal?"

"There you ask too much, Miss Vinrace," said Richard playfully.

She could only say that she wanted to know, and Richard was
sufficiently amused to answer.

"Well, how shall I reply? In one word--Unity. Unity of aim,
of dominion, of progress. The dispersion of the best ideas over
the greatest area."

"The English?"

"I grant that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most men,
their records cleaner. But, good Lord, don't run away with the idea
that I don't see the drawbacks--horrors--unmentionable things done
in our very midst! I'm under no illusions. Few people, I suppose,
have fewer illusions than I have. Have you ever been in a factory,
Miss Vinrace!--No, I suppose not--I may say I hope not.

As for Rachel, she had scarcely walked through a poor street,
and always under the escort of father, maid, or aunts.

"I was going to say that if you'd ever seen the kind of thing
that's going on round you, you'd understand what it is that makes
me and men like me politicians. You asked me a moment ago whether
I'd done what I set out to do. Well, when I consider my life,
there is one fact I admit that I'm proud of; owing to me some thousands
of girls in Lancashire--and many thousands to come after them--
can spend an hour every day in the open air which their mothers
had to spend over their looms. I'm prouder of that, I own,
than I should be of writing Keats and Shelley into the bargain!"

It became painful to Rachel to be one of those who write Keats
and Shelley. She liked Richard Dalloway, and warmed as he warmed.
He seemed to mean what he said.

"I know nothing!" she exclaimed.

"It's far better that you should know nothing," he said paternally,
"and you wrong yourself, I'm sure. You play very nicely, I'm told,
and I've no doubt you've read heaps of learned books."

Elderly banter would no longer check her.

"You talk of unity," she said. "You ought to make me understand."

"I never allow my wife to talk politics," he said seriously.
"For this reason. It is impossible for human beings, constituted as
they are, both to fight and to have ideals. If I have preserved mine,
as I am thankful to say that in great measure I have, it is due
to the fact that I have been able to come home to my wife in
the evening and to find that she has spent her day in calling,
music, play with the children, domestic duties--what you will;
her illusions have not been destroyed. She gives me courage to go on.
The strain of public life is very great," he added.

This made him appear a battered martyr, parting every day with some
of the finest gold, in the service of mankind.

"I can't think," Rachel exclaimed, "how any one does it!"

"Explain, Miss Vinrace," said Richard. "This is a matter I want
to clear up."

His kindness was genuine, and she determined to take the chance he
gave her, although to talk to a man of such worth and authority
made her heart beat.

"It seems to me like this," she began, doing her best first
to recollect and then to expose her shivering private visions.

"There's an old widow in her room, somewhere, let us suppose
in the suburbs of Leeds."

Richard bent his head to show that he accepted the widow.

"In London you're spending your life, talking, writing things,
getting bills through, missing what seems natural. The result of it
all is that she goes to her cupboard and finds a little more tea,
a few lumps of sugar, or a little less tea and a newspaper.
Widows all over the country I admit do this. Still, there's the mind
of the widow--the affections; those you leave untouched. But you
waste you own."

"If the widow goes to her cupboard and finds it bare," Richard answered,
"her spiritual outlook we may admit will be affected. If I may
pick holes in your philosophy, Miss Vinrace, which has its merits,
I would point out that a human being is not a set of compartments,
but an organism. Imagination, Miss Vinrace; use your imagination;
that's where you young Liberals fail. Conceive the world as a whole.
Now for your second point; when you assert that in trying to set
the house in order for the benefit of the young generation I am
wasting my higher capabilities, I totally disagree with you.
I can conceive no more exalted aim--to be the citizen of the Empire.
Look at it in this way, Miss Vinrace; conceive the state as a
complicated machine; we citizens are parts of that machine;
some fulfil more important duties; others (perhaps I am one of them)
serve only to connect some obscure parts of the mechanism, concealed
from the public eye. Yet if the meanest screw fails in its task,
the proper working of the whole is imperilled."

It was impossible to combine the image of a lean black widow, gazing out
of her window, and longing for some one to talk to, with the image
of a vast machine, such as one sees at South Kensington, thumping,
thumping, thumping. The attempt at communication had been a failure.

"We don't seem to understand each other," she said.

"Shall I say something that will make you very angry?" he replied.

"It won't," said Rachel.

"Well, then; no woman has what I may call the political instinct.
You have very great virtues; I am the first, I hope, to admit that;
but I have never met a woman who even saw what is meant
by statesmanship. I am going to make you still more angry.
I hope that I never shall meet such a woman. Now, Miss Vinrace,
are we enemies for life?"

Vanity, irritation, and a thrusting desire to be understood,
urged her to make another attempt.

"Under the streets, in the sewers, in the wires, in the telephones,
there is something alive; is that what you mean? In things like
dust-carts, and men mending roads? You feel that all the time when
you walk about London, and when you turn on a tap and the water comes?"

"Certainly," said Richard. "I understand you to mean that
the whole of modern society is based upon cooperative effort.
If only more people would realise that, Miss Vinrace, there would
be fewer of your old widows in solitary lodgings!"

Rachel considered.

"Are you a Liberal or are you a Conservative?" she asked.

"I call myself a Conservative for
convenience sake," said Richard, smiling. "But
there is more in common between the two parties than people generally allow."

There was a pause, which did not come on Rachel's side from any lack
of things to say; as usual she could not say them, and was further
confused by the fact that the time for talking probably ran short.
She was haunted by absurd jumbled ideas--how, if one went back
far enough, everything perhaps was intelligible; everything was
in common; for the mammoths who pastured in the fields of Richmond
High Street had turned into paving stones and boxes full of ribbon,
and her aunts.

"Did you say you lived in the country when you were a child?"
she asked.

Crude as her manners seemed to him, Richard was flattered.
There could be no doubt that her interest was genuine.

"I did," he smiled.

"And what happened?" she asked. "Or do I ask too many questions?"

"I'm flattered, I assure you. But--let me see--what happened?
Well, riding, lessons, sisters. There was an enchanted rubbish heap,
I remember, where all kinds of queer things happened. Odd, what things
impress children! I can remember the look of the place to this day.
It's a fallacy to think that children are happy. They're not;
they're unhappy. I've never suffered so much as I did when I was
a child."

"Why?" she asked.

"I didn't get on well with my father," said Richard shortly.
"He was a very able man, but hard. Well--it makes one determined
not to sin in that way oneself. Children never forget injustice.
They forgive heaps of things grown-up people mind; but that sin is
the unpardonable sin. Mind you--I daresay I was a difficult child
to manage; but when I think what I was ready to give! No, I was
more sinned against than sinning. And then I went to school,
where I did very fairly well; and and then, as I say, my father
sent me to both universities. . . . D'you know, Miss Vinrace,
you've made me think? How little, after all, one can tell anybody
about one's life! Here I sit; there you sit; both, I doubt not,
chock-full of the most interesting experiences, ideas, emotions;
yet how communicate? I've told you what every second person you meet
might tell you."

"I don't think so," she said. "It's the way of saying things,
isn't it, not the things?"

"True," said Richard. "Perfectly true."  He paused. "When I
look back over my life--I'm forty-two--what are the great facts
that stand out? What were the revelations, if I may call them so?
The misery of the poor and--" (he hesitated and pitched over) "love!"

Upon that word he lowered his voice; it was a word that seemed
to unveil the skies for Rachel.

"It's an odd thing to say to a young lady," he continued.
"But have you any idea what--what I mean by that? No, of course not.
I don't use the word in a conventional sense. I use it as
young men use it. Girls are kept very ignorant, aren't they?
Perhaps it's wise--perhaps--You _don't_ know?"

He spoke as if he had lost consciousness of what he was saying.

"No; I don't," she said, scarcely speaking above her breath.

"Warships, Dick! Over there! Look!"  Clarissa, released from Mr. Grice,
appreciative of all his seaweeds, skimmed towards them, gesticulating.

She had sighted two sinister grey vessels, low in the water,
and bald as bone, one closely following the other with the look
of eyeless beasts seeking their prey. Consciousness returned
to Richard instantly.

"By George!" he exclaimed, and stood shielding his eyes.

"Ours, Dick?" said Clarissa.

"The Mediterranean Fleet," he answered.

"The _Euphrosyne_ was slowly dipping her flag. Richard raised his hat.
Convulsively Clarissa squeezed Rachel's hand.

"Aren't you glad to be English!" she said.

The warships drew past, casting a curious effect of discipline
and sadness upon the waters, and it was not until they were again
invisible that people spoke to each other naturally. At lunch
the talk was all of valour and death, and the magnificent qualities of
British admirals. Clarissa quoted one poet, Willoughby quoted another.
Life on board a man-of-war was splendid, so they agreed, and sailors,
whenever one met them, were quite especially nice and simple.

This being so, no one liked it when Helen remarked that it seemed
to her as wrong to keep sailors as to keep a Zoo, and that as for
dying on a battle-field, surely it was time we ceased to praise
courage--"or to write bad poetry about it," snarled Pepper.

But Helen was really wondering why Rachel, sitting silent,
looked so queer and flushed.

Chapter V

She was not able to follow up her observations, however, or to come
to any conclusion, for by one of those accidents which are liable
to happen at sea, the whole course of their lives was now put
out of order.

Even at tea the floor rose beneath their feet and pitched too
low again, and at dinner the ship seemed to groan and strain
as though a lash were descending. She who had been a broad-backed
dray-horse, upon whose hind-quarters pierrots might waltz,
became a colt in a field. The plates slanted away from the knives,
and Mrs. Dalloway's face blanched for a second as she helped herself
and saw the potatoes roll this way and that. Willoughby, of course,
extolled the virtues of his ship, and quoted what had been said
of her by experts and distinguished passengers, for he loved his
own possessions. Still, dinner was uneasy, and directly the ladies
were alone Clarissa owned that she would be better off in bed,
and went, smiling bravely.

Next morning the storm was on them, and no politeness could ignore it.
Mrs. Dalloway stayed in her room. Richard faced three meals,
eating valiantly at each; but at the third, certain glazed asparagus
swimming in oil finally conquered him.

"That beats me," he said, and withdrew.

"Now we are alone once more," remarked William Pepper, looking round
the table; but no one was ready to engage him in talk, and the meal
ended in silence.

On the following day they met--but as flying leaves meet in the air.
Sick they were not; but the wind propelled them hastily into rooms,
violently downstairs. They passed each other gasping on deck; they shouted
across tables. They wore fur coats; and Helen was never seen without
a bandanna on her head. For comfort they retreated to their cabins,
where with tightly wedged feet they let the ship bounce and tumble.
Their sensations were the sensations of potatoes in a sack on a
galloping horse. The world outside was merely a violent grey tumult.
For two days they had a perfect rest from their old emotions.
Rachel had just enough consciousness to suppose herself a donkey on
the summit of a moor in a hail-storm, with its coat blown into furrows;
then she became a wizened tree, perpetually driven back by the salt
Atlantic gale.

Helen, on the other hand, staggered to Mrs. Dalloway's door, knocked,
could not be heard for the slamming of doors and the battering
of wind, and entered.

There were basins, of course. Mrs. Dalloway lay half-raised on
a pillow, and did not open her eyes. Then she murmured, "Oh, Dick,
is that you?"

Helen shouted--for she was thrown against the washstand--"How
are you?"

Clarissa opened one eye. It gave her an incredibly dissipated appearance.
"Awful!" she gasped. Her lips were white inside.

Planting her feet wide, Helen contrived to pour champagne into
a tumbler with a tooth-brush in it.

"Champagne," she said.

"There's a tooth-brush in it," murmured Clarissa, and smiled;
it might have been the contortion of one weeping. She drank.

"Disgusting," she whispered, indicating the basins. Relics of
humour still played over her face like moonshine.

"Want more?"  Helen shouted. Speech was again beyond Clarissa's reach.
The wind laid the ship shivering on her side. Pale agonies crossed
Mrs. Dalloway in waves. When the curtains flapped, grey lights
puffed across her. Between the spasms of the storm, Helen made
the curtain fast, shook the pillows, stretched the bed-clothes,
and smoothed the hot nostrils and forehead with cold scent.

"You _are_ good!"  Clarissa gasped. "Horrid mess!"

She was trying to apologise for white underclothes fallen and
scattered on the floor. For one second she opened a single eye,
and saw that the room was tidy.

"That's nice," she gasped.

Helen left her; far, far away she knew that she felt a kind of liking
for Mrs. Dalloway. She could not help respecting her spirit and
her desire, even in the throes of sickness, for a tidy bedroom.
Her petticoats, however, rose above her knees.

Quite suddenly the storm relaxed its grasp. It happened at tea;
the expected paroxysm of the blast gave out just as it reached
its climax and dwindled away, and the ship instead of taking
the usual plunge went steadily. The monotonous order of plunging
and rising, roaring and relaxing, was interfered with, and every
one at table looked up and felt something loosen within them.
The strain was slackened and human feelings began to peep again,
as they do when daylight shows at the end of a tunnel.

"Try a turn with me," Ridley called across to Rachel."

"Foolish!" cried Helen, but they went stumbling up the ladder.
Choked by the wind their spirits rose with a rush, for on the skirts
of all the grey tumult was a misty spot of gold. Instantly the world
dropped into shape; they were no longer atoms flying in the void,
but people riding a triumphant ship on the back of the sea.
Wind and space were banished; the world floated like an apple in a tub,
and the mind of man, which had been unmoored also, once more attached
itself to the old beliefs.

Having scrambled twice round the ship and received many sound cuffs
from the wind, they saw a sailor's face positively shine golden.
They looked, and beheld a complete yellow circle of sun; next minute it
was traversed by sailing stands of cloud, and then completely hidden.
By breakfast the next morning, however, the sky was swept clean,
the waves, although steep, were blue, and after their view of the
strange under-world, inhabited by phantoms, people began to live
among tea-pots and loaves of bread with greater zest than ever.

Richard and Clarissa, however, still remained on the borderland.
She did not attempt to sit up; her husband stood on his feet,
contemplated his waistcoat and trousers, shook his head, and then lay
down again. The inside of his brain was still rising and falling
like the sea on the stage. At four o'clock he woke from sleep and
saw the sunlight make a vivid angle across the red plush curtains
and the grey tweed trousers. The ordinary world outside slid
into his mind, and by the time he was dressed he was an English
gentleman again.

He stood beside his wife. She pulled him down to her by the lapel
of his coat, kissed him, and held him fast for a minute.

"Go and get a breath of air, Dick," she said. "You look quite washed out.
. . . How nice you smell! . . . And be polite to that woman.
She was so kind to me."

Thereupon Mrs. Dalloway turned to the cool side of her pillow,
terribly flattened but still invincible.

Richard found Helen talking to her brother-in-law, over two dishes
of yellow cake and smooth bread and butter.

"You look very ill!" she exclaimed on seeing him. "Come and have
some tea."

He remarked that the hands that moved about the cups were beautiful.

"I hear you've been very good to my wife," he said. "She's had
an awful time of it. You came in and fed her with champagne.
Were you among the saved yourself?"

"I? Oh, I haven't been sick for twenty years--sea-sick, I mean."

"There are three stages of convalescence, I always say,"
broke in the hearty voice of Willoughby. "The milk stage,
the bread-and-butter stage, and the roast-beef stage. I should
say you were at the bread-and-butter stage."  He handed him the plate.

"Now, I should advise a hearty tea, then a brisk walk on deck;
and by dinner-time you'll be clamouring for beef, eh?"  He went
off laughing, excusing himself on the score of business.

"What a splendid fellow he is!" said Richard. "Always keen
on something."

"Yes," said Helen, "he's always been like that."

"This is a great undertaking of his," Richard continued.
"It's a business that won't stop with ships, I should say.
We shall see him in Parliament, or I'm much mistaken. He's the kind
of man we want in Parliament--the man who has done things."

But Helen was not much interested in her brother-in-law.

"I expect your head's aching, isn't it?" she asked, pouring a fresh cup.

"Well, it is," said Richard. "It's humiliating to find what a slave
one is to one's body in this world. D'you know, I can never work
without a kettle on the hob. As often as not I don't drink tea,
but I must feel that I can if I want to."

"That's very bad for you," said Helen.

"It shortens one's life; but I'm afraid, Mrs. Ambrose, we politicians
must make up our minds to that at the outset. We've got to burn
the candle at both ends, or--"

"You've cooked your goose!" said Helen brightly.

"We can't make you take us seriously, Mrs. Ambrose," he protested.
"May I ask how you've spent your time? Reading--philosophy?"  (He saw
the black book.) "Metaphysics and fishing!" he exclaimed. "If I had
to live again I believe I should devote myself to one or the other."
He began turning the pages.

"'Good, then, is indefinable,'" he read out. "How jolly to think that's
going on still! 'So far as I know there is only one ethical writer,
Professor Henry Sidgwick, who has clearly recognised and stated
this fact.'  That's just the kind of thing we used to talk about
when we were boys. I can remember arguing until five in the morning
with Duffy--now Secretary for India--pacing round and round those
cloisters until we decided it was too late to go to bed, and we
went for a ride instead. Whether we ever came to any conclusion--
that's another matter. Still, it's the arguing that counts.
It's things like that that stand out in life. Nothing's been
quite so vivid since. It's the philosophers, it's the scholars,"
he continued, "they're the people who pass the torch, who keep
the light burning by which we live. Being a politician doesn't
necessarily blind one to that, Mrs. Ambrose."

"No. Why should it?" said Helen. "But can you remember if your
wife takes sugar?"

She lifted the tray and went off with it to Mrs. Dalloway.

Richard twisted a muffler twice round his throat and struggled up
on deck. His body, which had grown white and tender in a dark room,
tingled all over in the fresh air. He felt himself a man undoubtedly
in the prime of life. Pride glowed in his eye as he let the wind
buffet him and stood firm. With his head slightly lowered he
sheered round corners, strode uphill, and met the blast. There was
a collision. For a second he could not see what the body was he
had run into. "Sorry."  "Sorry."  It was Rachel who apologised.
They both laughed, too much blown about to speak. She drove open
the door of her room and stepped into its calm. In order to speak
to her, it was necessary that Richard should follow. They stood
in a whirlpool of wind; papers began flying round in circles,
the door crashed to, and they tumbled, laughing, into chairs.
Richard sat upon Bach.

"My word! What a tempest!" he exclaimed.

"Fine, isn't it?" said Rachel. Certainly the struggle and wind
had given her a decision she lacked; red was in her cheeks,
and her hair was down.

"Oh, what fun!" he cried. "What am I sitting on? Is this your room?
How jolly!"  "There--sit there," she commanded. Cowper slid
once more.

"How jolly to meet again," said Richard. "It seems an age.
_Cowper's_ _Letters>? . . . Bach? . . . _Wuthering_ _Heights_?
. . . Is this where you meditate on the world, and then come
out and pose poor politicians with questions? In the intervals
of sea-sickness I've thought a lot of our talk. I assure you,
you made me think."

"I made you think! But why?"

"What solitary icebergs we are, Miss Vinrace! How little we
can communicate! There are lots of things I should like to tell
you about--to hear your opinion of. Have you ever read Burke?"

"Burke?" she repeated. "Who was Burke?"

"No? Well, then I shall make a point of sending you a copy.
_The_ _Speech_ _on_ _the_ _French_ _Revolution_--_The_
_American_ _Rebellion_? Which shall it be, I wonder?"  He noted
something in his pocket-book. "And then you must write and tell me
what you think of it. This reticence--this isolation--that's what's
the matter with modern life! Now, tell me about yourself.
What are your interests and occupations? I should imagine that you
were a person with very strong interests. Of course you are!
Good God! When I think of the age we live in, with its opportunities
and possibilities, the mass of things to be done and enjoyed--
why haven't we ten lives instead of one? But about yourself?"

"You see, I'm a woman," said Rachel.

"I know--I know," said Richard, throwing his head back, and drawing
his fingers across his eyes.

"How strange to be a woman! A young and beautiful woman,"
he continued sententiously, "has the whole world at her feet.
That's true, Miss Vinrace. You have an inestimable power--for good
or for evil. What couldn't you do--" he broke off.

"What?" asked Rachel.

"You have beauty," he said. The ship lurched. Rachel fell
slightly forward. Richard took her in his arms and kissed her.
Holding her tight, he kissed her passionately, so that she felt
the hardness of his body and the roughness of his cheek printed
upon hers. She fell back in her chair, with tremendous beats
of the heart, each of which sent black waves across her eyes.
He clasped his forehead in his hands.

"You tempt me," he said. The tone of his voice was terrifying.
He seemed choked in fright. They were both trembling.
Rachel stood up and went. Her head was cold, her knees shaking,
and the physical pain of the emotion was so great that she could
only keep herself moving above the great leaps of her heart.
She leant upon the rail of the ship, and gradually ceased to feel,
for a chill of body and mind crept over her. Far out between the waves
little black and white sea-birds were riding. Rising and falling
with smooth and graceful movements in the hollows of the waves they
seemed singularly detached and unconcerned.

"You're peaceful," she said. She became peaceful too, at the same time
possessed with a strange exultation. Life seemed to hold infinite
possibilities she had never guessed at. She leant upon the rail
and looked over the troubled grey waters, where the sunlight was
fitfully scattered upon the crests of the waves, until she was cold
and absolutely calm again. Nevertheless something wonderful had happened.

At dinner, however, she did not feel exalted, but merely uncomfortable,
as if she and Richard had seen something together which is hidden
in ordinary life, so that they did not like to look at each other.
Richard slid his eyes over her uneasily once, and never looked
at her again. Formal platitudes were manufactured with effort,
but Willoughby was kindled.

"Beef for Mr. Dalloway!" he shouted. "Come now--after that walk
you're at the beef stage, Dalloway!"

Wonderful masculine stories followed about Bright and Disraeli
and coalition governments, wonderful stories which made the people
at the dinner-table seem featureless and small. After dinner,
sitting alone with Rachel under the great swinging lamp, Helen was
struck by her pallor. It once more occurred to her that there
was something strange in the girl's behaviour.

"You look tired. Are you tired?" she asked.

"Not tired," said Rachel. "Oh, yes, I suppose I am tired."

Helen advised bed, and she went, not seeing Richard again.
She must have been very tired for she fell asleep at once,
but after an hour or two of dreamless sleep, she dreamt. She dreamt
that she was walking down a long tunnel, which grew so narrow
by degrees that she could touch the damp bricks on either side.
At length the tunnel opened and became a vault; she found
herself trapped in it, bricks meeting her wherever she turned,
alone with a little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering,
with long nails. His face was pitted and like the face of an animal.
The wall behind him oozed with damp, which collected into drops
and slid down. Still and cold as death she lay, not daring to move,
until she broke the agony by tossing herself across the bed,
and woke crying "Oh!"

Light showed her the familiar things: her clothes, fallen off
the chair; the water jug gleaming white; but the horror did not go
at once. She felt herself pursued, so that she got up and actually
locked her door. A voice moaned for her; eyes desired her.
All night long barbarian men harassed the ship; they came scuffling
down the passages, and stopped to snuffle at her door. She could
not sleep again.

Chapter VI

"That's the tragedy of life--as I always say!" said Mrs. Dalloway.
"Beginning things and having to end them. Still, I'm not going
to let _this_ end, if you're willing."  It was the morning,
the sea was calm, and the ship once again was anchored not far from
another shore.

She was dressed in her long fur cloak, with the veils wound around
her head, and once more the rich boxes stood on top of each other
so that the scene of a few days back seemed to be repeated.

"D'you suppose we shall ever meet in London?" said Ridley ironically.
"You'll have forgotten all about me by the time you step out there."

He pointed to the shore of the little bay, where they could now see
the separate trees with moving branches.

"How horrid you are!" she laughed. "Rachel's coming to see me anyhow--
the instant you get back," she said, pressing Rachel's arm.
"Now--you've no excuse!"

With a silver pencil she wrote her name and address on the flyleaf
of _Persuasion_, and gave the book to Rachel. Sailors were
shouldering the luggage, and people were beginning to congregate.
There were Captain Cobbold, Mr. Grice, Willoughby, Helen, and an
obscure grateful man in a blue jersey.

"Oh, it's time," said Clarissa. "Well, good-bye. I _do_ like you,"
she murmured as she kissed Rachel. People in the way made it
unnecessary for Richard to shake Rachel by the hand; he managed
to look at her very stiffly for a second before he followed his wife
down the ship's side.

The boat separating from the vessel made off towards the land,
and for some minutes Helen, Ridley, and Rachel leant over
the rail, watching. Once Mrs. Dalloway turned and waved;
but the boat steadily grew smaller and smaller until it ceased
to rise and fall, and nothing could be seen save two resolute backs.

"Well, that's over," said Ridley after a long silence. "We shall
never see _them_ again," he added, turning to go to his books.
A feeling of emptiness and melancholy came over them; they knew
in their hearts that it was over, and that they had parted for ever,
and the knowledge filled them with far greater depression than
the length of their acquaintance seemed to justify. Even as the boat
pulled away they could feel other sights and sounds beginning to
take the place of the Dalloways, and the feeling was so unpleasant
that they tried to resist it. For so, too, would they be forgotten.

In much the same way as Mrs. Chailey downstairs was sweeping
the withered rose-leaves off the dressing-table, so Helen was
anxious to make things straight again after the visitors had gone.
Rachel's obvious languor and listlessness made her an easy prey,
and indeed Helen had devised a kind of trap. That something had
happened she now felt pretty certain; moreover, she had come to
think that they had been strangers long enough; she wished to know
what the girl was like, partly of course because Rachel showed
no disposition to be known. So, as they turned from the rail,
she said:

"Come and talk to me instead of practising," and led the way to
the sheltered side where the deck-chairs were stretched in the sun.
Rachel followed her indifferently. Her mind was absorbed by Richard;
by the extreme strangeness of what had happened, and by a
thousand feelings of which she had not been conscious before.
She made scarcely any attempt to listen to what Helen was saying,
as Helen indulged in commonplaces to begin with. While Mrs. Ambrose
arranged her embroidery, sucked her silk, and threaded her needle,
she lay back gazing at the horizon.

"Did you like those people?"  Helen asked her casually.

"Yes," she replied blankly.

"You talked to him, didn't you?"

She said nothing for a minute.

"He kissed me," she said without any change of tone.

Helen started, looked at her, but could not make out what she felt.

"M-m-m'yes," she said, after a pause. "I thought he was that kind
of man."

"What kind of man?" said Rachel.

"Pompous and sentimental."

"I like him," said Rachel.

"So you really didn't mind?"

For the first time since Helen had known her Rachel's eyes lit
up brightly.

"I did mind," she said vehemently. "I dreamt. I couldn't sleep."

"Tell me what happened," said Helen. She had to keep her lips
from twitching as she listened to Rachel's story. It was poured
out abruptly with great seriousness and no sense of humour.

"We talked about politics. He told me what he had done for the
poor somewhere. I asked him all sorts of questions. He told me
about his own life. The day before yesterday, after the storm,
he came in to see me. It happened then, quite suddenly.
He kissed me. I don't know why."  As she spoke she grew flushed.
"I was a good deal excited," she continued. "But I didn't mind
till afterwards; when--" she paused, and saw the figure of the bloated
little man again--"I became terrified."

From the look in her eyes it was evident she was again terrified.
Helen was really at a loss what to say. From the little she knew
of Rachel's upbringing she supposed that she had been kept entirely
ignorant as to the relations of men with women. With a shyness
which she felt with women and not with men she did not like to
explain simply what these are. Therefore she took the other course
and belittled the whole affair.

"Oh, well," she said, "He was a silly creature, and if I were you,
I'd think no more about it."

"No," said Rachel, sitting bolt upright, "I shan't do that.
I shall think about it all day and all night until I find out exactly
what it does mean."

"Don't you ever read?"  Helen asked tentatively.

"_Cowper's_ _Letters_--that kind of thing. Father gets them for me
or my Aunts."

Helen could hardly restrain herself from saying out loud what she
thought of a man who brought up his daughter so that at the age
of twenty-four she scarcely knew that men desired women and was
terrified by a kiss. She had good reason to fear that Rachel
had made herself incredibly ridiculous.

"You don't know many men?" she asked.

"Mr. Pepper," said Rachel ironically.

"So no one's ever wanted to marry you?"

"No," she answered ingenuously.

Helen reflected that as, from what she had said, Rachel certainly
would think these things out, it might be as well to help her.

"You oughtn't to be frightened," she said. "It's the most natural
thing in the world. Men will want to kiss you, just as they'll
want to marry you. The pity is to get things out of proportion.
It's like noticing the noises people make when they eat, or men
spitting; or, in short, any small thing that gets on one's nerves."

Rachel seemed to be inattentive to these remarks.

"Tell me," she said suddenly, "what are those women in Piccadilly?"

"In Picadilly? They are prostituted," said Helen.

"It _is_ terrifying--it _is_ disgusting," Rachel asserted, as if she
included Helen in the hatred.

"It is," said Helen. "But--"

"I did like him," Rachel mused, as if speaking to herself.
"I wanted to talk to him; I wanted to know what he'd done.
The women in Lancashire--"

It seemed to her as she recalled their talk that there was something
lovable about Richard, good in their attempted friendship,
and strangely piteous in the way they had parted.

The softening of her mood was apparent to Helen.

"You see," she said, "you must take things as they are; and if you want
friendship with men you must run risks. Personally," she continued,
breaking into a smile, "I think it's worth it; I don't mind
being kissed; I'm rather jealous, I believe, that Mr. Dalloway kissed
you and didn't kiss me. Though," she added, "he bored me considerably."

But Rachel did not return the smile or dismiss the whole affair,
as Helen meant her to. Her mind was working very quickly,
inconsistently and painfully. Helen's words hewed down great blocks
which had stood there always, and the light which came in was cold.
After sitting for a time with fixed eyes, she burst out:

"So that's why I can't walk alone!"

By this new light she saw her life for the first time a creeping
hedged-in thing, driven cautiously between high walls,
here turned aside, there plunged in darkness, made dull and
crippled for ever--her life that was the only chance she had--
a thousand words and actions became plain to her.

"Because men are brutes! I hate men!" she exclaimed.

"I thought you said you liked him?" said Helen.

"I liked him, and I liked being kissed," she answered, as if that
only added more difficulties to her problem.

Helen was surprised to see how genuine both shock and problem were,
but she could think of no way of easing the difficulty except by going
on talking. She wanted to make her niece talk, and so to understand
why this rather dull, kindly, plausible politician had made so deep
an impression on her, for surely at the age of twenty-four this
was not natural.

"And did you like Mrs. Dalloway too?" she asked.

As she spoke she saw Rachel redden; for she remembered silly things
she had said, and also, it occurred to her that she treated this
exquisite woman rather badly, for Mrs. Dalloway had said that she
loved her husband.

"She was quite nice, but a thimble-pated creature," Helen continued.
"I never heard such nonsense! Chitter-chatter-chitter-chatter--
fish and the Greek alphabet--never listened to a word any one said--
chock-full of idiotic theories about the way to bring up children--
I'd far rather talk to him any day. He was pompous, but he did at
least understand what was said to him."

The glamour insensibly faded a little both from Richard and Clarissa.
They had not been so wonderful after all, then, in the eyes of a
mature person.

"It's very difficult to know what people are like," Rachel remarked,
and Helen saw with pleasure that she spoke more naturally.
"I suppose I was taken in."

There was little doubt about that according to Helen, but she
restrained herself and said aloud:

"One has to make experiments."

"And they _were_ nice," said Rachel. "They were extraordinarily
interesting."  She tried to recall the image of the world as a
live thing that Richard had given her, with drains like nerves,
and bad houses like patches of diseased skin. She recalled
his watch-words--Unity--Imagination, and saw again the bubbles
meeting in her tea-cup as he spoke of sisters and canaries,
boyhood and his father, her small world becoming wonderfully enlarged.

"But all people don't seem to you equally interesting, do they?"
asked Mrs. Ambrose.

Rachel explained that most people had hitherto been symbols;
but that when they talked to one they ceased to be symbols,
and became--"I could listen to them for ever!" she exclaimed.
She then jumped up, disappeared downstairs for a minute, and came back
with a fat red book.

"_Who's_ _Who_," she said, laying it upon Helen's knee and turning
the pages. "It gives short lives of people--for instance:
'Sir Roland Beal; born 1852; parents from Moffatt; educated at Rugby;
passed first into R.E.; married 1878 the daughter of T. Fishwick;
served in the Bechuanaland Expedition 1884-85 (honourably mentioned). Clubs:
United Service, Naval and Military. Recreations: an enthusiastic curler.'"

Sitting on the deck at Helen's feet she went on turning the
pages and reading biographies of bankers, writers, clergymen,
sailors, surgeons, judges, professors, statesmen, editors,
philanthropists, merchants, and actresses; what clubs they belonged
to, where they lived, what games they played, and how many acres they owned.

She became absorbed in the book.

Helen meanwhile stitched at her embroidery and thought over the things
they had said. Her conclusion was that she would very much like to
show her niece, if it were possible, how to live, or as she put it,
how to be a reasonable person. She thought that there must be something
wrong in this confusion between politics and kissing politicians,
and that an elder person ought to be able to help.

"I quite agree," she said, "that people are very interesting;
only--" Rachel, putting her finger between the pages, looked up enquiringly.

"Only I think you ought to discriminate," she ended. "It's a pity
to be intimate with people who are--well, rather second-rate,
like the Dalloways, and to find it out later."

"But how does one know?"  Rachel asked.

"I really can't tell you," replied Helen candidly, after a
moment's thought. "You'll have to find out for yourself. But try and--
Why don't you call me Helen?" she added. "'Aunt's' a horrid name.
I never liked my Aunts."

"I should like to call you Helen," Rachel answered.

"D'you think me very unsympathetic?"

Rachel reviewed the points which Helen had certainly failed
to understand; they arose chiefly from the difference of nearly
twenty years in age between them, which made Mrs. Ambrose appear
too humorous and cool in a matter of such moment.

"No," she said. "Some things you don't understand, of course."

"Of course," Helen agreed. "So now you can go ahead and be a person
on your own account," she added.

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting
thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea
or the wind, flashed into Rachel's mind, and she became profoundly
excited at the thought of living.

"I can by m-m-myself," she stammered, "in spite of you, in spite
of the Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my Aunts, in spite
of these?"  She swept her hand across a whole page of statesmen
and soldiers.

"In spite of them all," said Helen gravely. She then put down her needle,
and explained a plan which had come into her head as they talked.
Instead of wandering on down the Amazons until she reached some
sulphurous tropical port, where one had to lie within doors all day
beating off insects with a fan, the sensible thing to do surely
was to spend the season with them in their villa by the seaside,
where among other advantages Mrs. Ambrose herself would be at hand to--

"After all, Rachel," she broke off, "it's silly to pretend that
because there's twenty years' difference between us we therefore
can't talk to each other like human beings."

"No; because we like each other," said Rachel.

"Yes," Mrs. Ambrose agreed.

That fact, together with other facts, had been made clear by their
twenty minutes' talk, although how they had come to these conclusions
they could not have said.

However they were come by, they were sufficiently serious to send
Mrs. Ambrose a day or two later in search of her brother-in-law. She
found him sitting in his room working, applying a stout blue pencil
authoritatively to bundles of filmy paper. Papers lay to left and
to right of him, there were great envelopes so gorged with papers
that they spilt papers on to the table. Above him hung a photograph
of a woman's head. The need of sitting absolutely still before
a Cockney photographer had given her lips a queer little pucker,
and her eyes for the same reason looked as though she thought
the whole situation ridiculous. Nevertheless it was the head
of an individual and interesting woman, who would no doubt have
turned and laughed at Willoughby if she could have caught his eye;
but when he looked up at her he sighed profoundly. In his mind
this work of his, the great factories at Hull which showed like
mountains at night, the ships that crossed the ocean punctually,
the schemes for combining this and that and building up a solid
mass of industry, was all an offering to her; he laid his success
at her feet; and was always thinking how to educate his daughter
so that Theresa might be glad. He was a very ambitious man;
and although he had not been particularly kind to her while she lived,
as Helen thought, he now believed that she watched him from Heaven,
and inspired what was good in him.

Mrs. Ambrose apologised for the interruption, and asked whether
she might speak to him about a plan of hers. Would he consent
to leave his daughter with them when they landed, instead of taking
her on up the Amazons?

"We would take great care of her," she added, "and we should really
like it."

Willoughby looked very grave and carefully laid aside his papers.

"She's a good girl," he said at length. "There is a likeness?"--
he nodded his head at the photograph of Theresa and sighed. Helen looked
at Theresa pursing up her lips before the Cockney photographer.
It suggested her in an absurd human way, and she felt an intense
desire to share some joke.

"She's the only thing that's left to me," sighed Willoughby.
"We go on year after year without talking about these things--"
He broke off. "But it's better so. Only life's very hard."

Helen was sorry for him, and patted him on the shoulder, but she
felt uncomfortable when her brother-in-law expressed his feelings,
and took refuge in praising Rachel, and explaining why she thought
her plan might be a good one.

"True," said Willoughby when she had done. "The social conditions
are bound to be primitive. I should be out a good deal. I agreed
because she wished it. And of course I have complete confidence
in you. . . . You see, Helen," he continued, becoming confidential,
"I want to bring her up as her mother would have wished. I don't
hold with these modern views--any more than you do, eh? She's a nice
quiet girl, devoted to her music--a little less of _that_ would
do no harm. Still, it's kept her happy, and we lead a very quiet
life at Richmond. I should like her to begin to see more people.
I want to take her about with me when I get home. I've half a mind
to rent a house in London, leaving my sisters at Richmond, and take
her to see one or two people who'd be kind to her for my sake.
I'm beginning to realise," he continued, stretching himself out,
"that all this is tending to Parliament, Helen. It's the only way
to get things done as one wants them done. I talked to Dalloway
about it. In that case, of course, I should want Rachel to be able
to take more part in things. A certain amount of entertaining would
be necessary--dinners, an occasional evening party. One's constituents
like to be fed, I believe. In all these ways Rachel could be
of great help to me. So," he wound up, "I should be very glad,
if we arrange this visit (which must be upon a business footing,
mind), if you could see your way to helping my girl, bringing her out--
she's a little shy now,--making a woman of her, the kind of woman
her mother would have liked her to be," he ended, jerking his head at
the photograph.

Willoughby's selfishness, though consistent as Helen saw with real
affection for his daughter, made her determined to have the girl
to stay with her, even if she had to promise a complete course
of instruction in the feminine graces. She could not help laughing
at the notion of it--Rachel a Tory hostess!--and marvelling as she
left him at the astonishing ignorance of a father.

Rachel, when consulted, showed less enthusiasm than Helen could
have wished. One moment she was eager, the next doubtful. Visions of
a great river, now blue, now yellow in the tropical sun and crossed
by bright birds, now white in the moon, now deep in shade with moving
trees and canoes sliding out from the tangled banks, beset her.
Helen promised a river. Then she did not want to leave her father.
That feeling seemed genuine too, but in the end Helen prevailed,
although when she had won her case she was beset by doubts,
and more than once regretted the impulse which had entangled her
with the fortunes of another human being.

Chapter VII

From a distance the _Euphrosyne_ looked very small. Glasses were
turned upon her from the decks of great liners, and she was pronounced
a tramp, a cargo-boat, or one of those wretched little passenger
steamers where people rolled about among the cattle on deck.
The insect-like figures of Dalloways, Ambroses, and Vinraces were
also derided, both from the extreme smallness of their persons
and the doubt which only strong glasses could dispel as to whether
they were really live creatures or only lumps on the rigging.
Mr. Pepper with all his learning had been mistaken for a cormorant,
and then, as unjustly, transformed into a cow. At night,
indeed, when the waltzes were swinging in the saloon, and gifted
passengers reciting, the little ship--shrunk to a few beads of light
out among the dark waves, and one high in air upon the mast-head--
seemed something mysterious and impressive to heated partners
resting from the dance. She became a ship passing in the night--
an emblem of the loneliness of human life, an occasion for queer
confidences and sudden appeals for sympathy.

On and on she went, by day and by night, following her path, until one
morning broke and showed the land. Losing its shadow-like appearance
it became first cleft and mountainous, next coloured grey and purple,
next scattered with white blocks which gradually separated themselves,
and then, as the progress of the ship acted upon the view like a
field-glass of increasing power, became streets of houses. By nine
o'clock the _Euphrosyne_ had taken up her position in the middle
of a great bay; she dropped her anchor; immediately, as if she were
a recumbent giant requiring examination, small boats came swarming
about her. She rang with cries; men jumped on to her; her deck
was thumped by feet. The lonely little island was invaded from all
quarters at once, and after four weeks of silence it was bewildering
to hear human speech. Mrs. Ambrose alone heeded none of this stir.
She was pale with suspense while the boat with mail bags was making
towards them. Absorbed in her letters she did not notice that she
had left the _Euphrosyne_, and felt no sadness when the ship lifted
up her voice and bellowed thrice like a cow separated from its calf.

"The children are well!" she exclaimed. Mr. Pepper, who sat opposite with
a great mound of bag and rug upon his knees, said, "Gratifying."  Rachel,
to whom the end of the voyage meant a complete change of perspective,
was too much bewildered by the approach of the shore to realise
what children were well or why it was gratifying. Helen went on reading.

Moving very slowly, and rearing absurdly high over each wave,
the little boat was now approaching a white crescent of sand.
Behind this was a deep green valley, with distinct hills on either side.
On the slope of the right-hand hill white houses with brown roofs
were settled, like nesting sea-birds, and at intervals cypresses
striped the hill with black bars. Mountains whose sides were
flushed with red, but whose crowns were bald, rose as a pinnacle,
half-concealing another pinnacle behind it. The hour being
still early, the whole view was exquisitely light and airy;
the blues and greens of sky and tree were intense but not sultry.
As they drew nearer and could distinguish details, the effect of
the earth with its minute objects and colours and different forms
of life was overwhelming after four weeks of the sea, and kept
them silent.

"Three hundred years odd," said Mr. Pepper meditatively at length.

As nobody said, "What?" he merely extracted a bottle and swallowed
a pill. The piece of information that died within him was to the effect
that three hundred years ago five Elizabethan barques had anchored
where the _Euphrosyne_ now floated. Half-drawn up upon the beach
lay an equal number of Spanish galleons, unmanned, for the country
was still a virgin land behind a veil. Slipping across the water,
the English sailors bore away bars of silver, bales of linen,
timbers of cedar wood, golden crucifixes knobbed with emeralds.
When the Spaniards came down from their drinking, a fight ensued,
the two parties churning up the sand, and driving each other into
the surf. The Spaniards, bloated with fine living upon the fruits
of the miraculous land, fell in heaps; but the hardy Englishmen,
tawny with sea-voyaging, hairy for lack of razors, with muscles
like wire, fangs greedy for flesh, and fingers itching for gold,
despatched the wounded, drove the dying into the sea, and soon
reduced the natives to a state of superstitious wonderment.
Here a settlement was made; women were imported; children grew.
All seemed to favour the expansion of the British Empire, and had
there been men like Richard Dalloway in the time of Charles the First,
the map would undoubtedly be red where it is now an odious green.
But it must be supposed that the political mind of that age lacked
imagination, and, merely for want of a few thousand pounds and a few
thousand men, the spark died that should have been a conflagration.
From the interior came Indians with subtle poisons, naked bodies,
and painted idols; from the sea came vengeful Spaniards and rapacious
Portuguese; exposed to all these enemies (though the climate proved
wonderfully kind and the earth abundant) the English dwindled away
and all but disappeared. Somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth
century a single sloop watched its season and slipped out by night,
bearing within it all that was left of the great British colony,
a few men, a few women, and perhaps a dozen dusky children.
English history then denies all knowledge of the place. Owing to
one cause and another civilisation shifted its centre to a spot
some four or five hundred miles to the south, and to-day Santa
Marina is not much larger than it was three hundred years ago.
In population it is a happy compromise, for Portuguese fathers wed
Indian mothers, and their children intermarry with the Spanish.
Although they get their ploughs from Manchester, they make their
coats from their own sheep, their silk from their own worms,
and their furniture from their own cedar trees, so that in arts
and industries the place is still much where it was in Elizabethan
days.

The reasons which had drawn the English across the sea to found
a small colony within the last ten years are not so easily described,
and will never perhaps be recorded in history books. Granted facility
of travel, peace, good trade, and so on, there was besides a kind
of dissatisfaction among the English with the older countries
and the enormous accumulations of carved stone, stained glass,
and rich brown painting which they offered to the tourist.
The movement in search of something new was of course infinitely small,
affecting only a handful of well-to-do people. It began by a few
schoolmasters serving their passage out to South America as the pursers
of tramp steamers. They returned in time for the summer term,
when their stories of the splendours and hardships of life at sea,
the humours of sea-captains, the wonders of night and dawn, and the
marvels of the place delighted outsiders, and sometimes found their way
into print. The country itself taxed all their powers of description,
for they said it was much bigger than Italy, and really nobler
than Greece. Again, they declared that the natives were strangely
beautiful, very big in stature, dark, passionate, and quick to seize
the knife. The place seemed new and full of new forms of beauty,
in proof of which they showed handkerchiefs which the women had worn
round their heads, and primitive carvings coloured bright greens
and blues. Somehow or other, as fashions do, the fashion spread;
an old monastery was quickly turned into a hotel, while a famous
line of steamships altered its route for the convenience of passengers.

Oddly enough it happened that the least satisfactory of Helen
Ambrose's brothers had been sent out years before to make his fortune,
at any rate to keep clear of race-horses, in the very spot
which had now become so popular. Often, leaning upon the column
in the verandah, he had watched the English ships with English
schoolmasters for pursers steaming into the bay. Having at length
earned enough to take a holiday, and being sick of the place,
he proposed to put his villa, on the slope of the mountain,
at his sister's disposal. She, too, had been a little stirred by
the talk of a new world, where there was always sun and never a fog,
which went on around her, and the chance, when they were planning
where to spend the winter out of England, seemed too good to be missed.
For these reasons she determined to accept Willoughby's offer
of free passages on his ship, to place the children with their
grand-parents, and to do the thing thoroughly while she was about it.

Taking seats in a carriage drawn by long-tailed horses with pheasants'
feathers erect between their ears, the Ambroses, Mr. Pepper,
and Rachel rattled out of the harbour. The day increased in heat
as they drove up the hill. The road passed through the town,
where men seemed to be beating brass and crying "Water," where
the passage was blocked by mules and cleared by whips and curses,
where the women walked barefoot, their heads balancing baskets,
and cripples hastily displayed mutilated members; it issued among
steep green fields, not so green but that the earth showed through.
Great trees now shaded all but the centre of the road, and a
mountain stream, so shallow and so swift that it plaited itself
into strands as it ran, raced along the edge. Higher they went,
until Ridley and Rachel walked behind; next they turned along
a lane scattered with stones, where Mr. Pepper raised his stick and
silently indicated a shrub, bearing among sparse leaves a voluminous
purple blossom; and at a rickety canter the last stage of the way
was accomplished.

The villa was a roomy white house, which, as is the case with most
continental houses, looked to an English eye frail, ramshackle,
and absurdly frivolous, more like a pagoda in a tea-garden than a
place where one slept. The garden called urgently for the services
of gardener. Bushes waved their branches across the paths,
and the blades of grass, with spaces of earth between them,
could be counted. In the circular piece of ground in front of
the verandah were two cracked vases, from which red flowers drooped,
with a stone fountain between them, now parched in the sun.
The circular garden led to a long garden, where the gardener's
shears had scarcely been, unless now and then, when he cut a bough
of blossom for his beloved. A few tall trees shaded it, and round
bushes with wax-like flowers mobbed their heads together in a row.
A garden smoothly laid with turf, divided by thick hedges, with raised
beds of bright flowers, such as we keep within walls in England,
would have been out of place upon the side of this bare hill.
There was no ugliness to shut out, and the villa looked straight
across the shoulder of a slope, ribbed with olive trees, to the sea.

The indecency of the whole place struck Mrs. Chailey forcibly.
There were no blinds to shut out the sun, nor was there any furniture
to speak of for the sun to spoil. Standing in the bare stone hall,
and surveying a staircase of superb breadth, but cracked and carpetless,
she further ventured the opinion that there were rats, as large
as terriers at home, and that if one put one's foot down with any
force one would come through the floor. As for hot water--at this
point her investigations left her speechless.

"Poor creature!" she murmured to the sallow Spanish servant-girl
who came out with the pigs and hens to receive them, "no wonder you
hardly look like a human being!"  Maria accepted the compliment
with an exquisite Spanish grace. In Chailey's opinion they would
have done better to stay on board an English ship, but none knew
better than she that her duty commanded her to stay.

When they were settled in, and in train to find daily occupation,
there was some speculation as to the reasons which induced
Mr. Pepper to stay, taking up his lodging in the Ambroses' house.
Efforts had been made for some days before landing to impress
upon him the advantages of the Amazons.

"That great stream!"  Helen would begin, gazing as if she saw
a visionary cascade, "I've a good mind to go with you myself,
Willoughby--only I can't. Think of the sunsets and the moonrises--
I believe the colours are unimaginable."

"There are wild peacocks," Rachel hazarded.

"And marvellous creatures in the water," Helen asserted.

"One might discover a new reptile," Rachel continued.

"There's certain to be a revolution, I'm told," Helen urged.

The effect of these subterfuges was a little dashed by Ridley, who,
after regarding Pepper for some moments, sighed aloud, "Poor fellow!"
and inwardly speculated upon the unkindness of women.

He stayed, however, in apparent contentment for six days,
playing with a microscope and a notebook in one of the many sparsely
furnished sitting-rooms, but on the evening of the seventh day,
as they sat at dinner, he appeared more restless than usual.
The dinner-table was set between two long windows which were left
uncurtained by Helen's orders. Darkness fell as sharply as a knife
in this climate, and the town then sprang out in circles and lines
of bright dots beneath them. Buildings which never showed by day
showed by night, and the sea flowed right over the land judging
by the moving lights of the steamers. The sight fulfilled the same
purpose as an orchestra in a London restaurant, and silence
had its setting. William Pepper observed it for some time;
he put on his spectacles to contemplate the scene.

"I've identified the big block to the left," he observed, and pointed
with his fork at a square formed by several rows of lights.

"One should infer that they can cook vegetables," he added.

"An hotel?" said Helen.

"Once a monastery," said Mr. Pepper.

Nothing more was said then, but, the day after, Mr. Pepper returned
from a midday walk, and stood silently before Helen who was reading
in the verandah.

"I've taken a room over there," he said.

"You're not going?" she exclaimed.

"On the whole--yes," he remarked. "No private cook _can_ cook vegetables."

Knowing his dislike of questions, which she to some extent shared,
Helen asked no more. Still, an uneasy suspicion lurked in her mind
that William was hiding a wound. She flushed to think that her words,
or her husband's, or Rachel's had penetrated and stung. She was
half-moved to cry, "Stop, William; explain!" and would have returned
to the subject at luncheon if William had not shown himself inscrutable
and chill, lifting fragments of salad on the point of his fork,
with the gesture of a man pronging seaweed, detecting gravel,
suspecting germs.

"If you all die of typhoid I won't be responsible!" he snapped.

"If you die of dulness, neither will I," Helen echoed in her heart.

She reflected that she had never yet asked him whether he had been
in love. They had got further and further from that subject instead
of drawing nearer to it, and she could not help feeling it a relief
when William Pepper, with all his knowledge, his microscope,
his note-books, his genuine kindliness and good sense, but a certain
dryness of soul, took his departure. Also she could not help
feeling it sad that friendships should end thus, although in this
case to have the room empty was something of a comfort, and she
tried to console herself with the reflection that one never knows
how far other people feel the things they might be supposed to feel.

Chapter VIII

The next few months passed away, as many years can pass away,
without definite events, and yet, if suddenly disturbed, it would
be seen that such months or years had a character unlike others.
The three months which had passed had brought them to the beginning
of March. The climate had kept its promise, and the change
of season from winter to spring had made very little difference,
so that Helen, who was sitting in the drawing-room with a pen in
her hand, could keep the windows open though a great fire of logs
burnt on one side of her. Below, the sea was still blue and the
roofs still brown and white, though the day was fading rapidly.
It was dusk in the room, which, large and empty at all times,
now appeared larger and emptier than usual. Her own figure, as she
sat writing with a pad on her knee, shared the general effect of size
and lack of detail, for the flames which ran along the branches,
suddenly devouring little green tufts, burnt intermittently and sent
irregular illuminations across her face and the plaster walls.
There were no pictures on the walls but here and there boughs
laden with heavy-petalled flowers spread widely against them.
Of the books fallen on the bare floor and heaped upon the large table,
it was only possible in this light to trace the outline.

Mrs. Ambrose was writing a very long letter. Beginning "Dear Bernard,"
it went on to describe what had been happening in the Villa San
Gervasio during the past three months, as, for instance, that they
had had the British Consul to dinner, and had been taken over a Spanish
man-of-war, and had seen a great many processions and religious festivals,
which were so beautiful that Mrs. Ambrose couldn't conceive why,
if people must have a religion, they didn't all become Roman Catholics.
They had made several expeditions though none of any length. It was
worth coming if only for the sake of the flowering trees which grew
wild quite near the house, and the amazing colours of sea and earth.
The earth, instead of being brown, was red, purple, green. "You won't
believe me," she added, "there is no colour like it in England."
She adopted, indeed, a condescending tone towards that poor island,
which was now advancing chilly crocuses and nipped violets in nooks,
in copses, in cosy corners, tended by rosy old gardeners in mufflers,
who were always touching their hats and bobbing obsequiously.
She went on to deride the islanders themselves. Rumours of London all
in a ferment over a General Election had reached them even out here.
"It seems incredible," she went on, "that people should care whether
Asquith is in or Austen Chamberlin out, and while you scream yourselves
hoarse about politics you let the only people who are trying for
something good starve or simply laugh at them. When have you ever
encouraged a living artist? Or bought his best work? Why are you
all so ugly and so servile? Here the servants are human beings.
They talk to one as if they were equals. As far as I can tell there
are no aristocrats."

Perhaps it was the mention of aristocrats that reminded her of
Richard Dalloway and Rachel, for she ran on with the same penful
to describe her niece.

"It's an odd fate that has put me in charge of a girl," she wrote,
"considering that I have never got on well with women, or had much
to do with them. However, I must retract some of the things that I
have said against them. If they were properly educated I don't see
why they shouldn't be much the same as men--as satisfactory I mean;
though, of course, very different. The question is, how should
one educate them. The present method seems to me abominable.
This girl, though twenty-four, had never heard that men desired women,
and, until I explained it, did not know how children were born.
Her ignorance upon other matters as important" (here Mrs. Ambrose's
letter may not be quoted) . . ."was complete. It seems to me not
merely foolish but criminal to bring people up like that. Let alone
the suffering to them, it explains why women are what they are--
the wonder is they're no worse. I have taken it upon myself
to enlighten her, and now, though still a good deal prejudiced and
liable to exaggerate, she is more or less a reasonable human being.
Keeping them ignorant, of course, defeats its own object, and when
they begin to understand they take it all much too seriously.
My brother-in-law really deserved a catastrophe--which he won't get.
I now pray for a young man to come to my help; some one, I mean,
who would talk to her openly, and prove how absurd most of her ideas
about life are. Unluckily such men seem almost as rare as the women.
The English colony certainly doesn't provide one; artists, merchants,
cultivated people--they are stupid, conventional, and flirtatious.
. . ." She ceased, and with her pen in her hand sat looking into
the fire, making the logs into caves and mountains, for it had grown
too dark to go on writing. Moreover, the house began to stir as
the hour of dinner approached; she could hear the plates being chinked
in the dining-room next door, and Chailey instructing the Spanish
girl where to put things down in vigorous English. The bell rang;
she rose, met Ridley and Rachel outside, and they all went in
to dinner.

Three months had made but little difference in the appearance either
of Ridley or Rachel; yet a keen observer might have thought that the girl
was more definite and self-confident in her manner than before.
Her skin was brown, her eyes certainly brighter, and she attended
to what was said as though she might be going to contradict it.
The meal began with the comfortable silence of people who are quite
at their ease together. Then Ridley, leaning on his elbow and looking
out of the window, observed that it was a lovely night.

"Yes," said Helen. She added, "The season's begun," looking at
the lights beneath them. She asked Maria in Spanish whether the hotel
was not filling up with visitors. Maria informed her with pride
that there would come a time when it was positively difficult
to buy eggs--the shopkeepers would not mind what prices they asked;
they would get them, at any rate, from the English.

"That's an English steamer in the bay," said Rachel, looking at
a triangle of lights below. "She came in early this morning."

"Then we may hope for some letters and send ours back," said Helen.

For some reason the mention of letters always made Ridley groan,
and the rest of the meal passed in a brisk argument between husband
and wife as to whether he was or was not wholly ignored by the entire
civilised world.

"Considering the last batch," said Helen, "you deserve beating.
You were asked to lecture, you were offered a degree, and some silly
woman praised not only your books but your beauty--she said he was what
Shelley would have been if Shelley had lived to fifty-five and grown
a beard. Really, Ridley, I think you're the vainest man I know,"
she ended, rising from the table, "which I may tell you is saying
a good deal."

Finding her letter lying before the fire she added a few lines to it,
and then announced that she was going to take the letters now--
Ridley must bring his--and Rachel?

"I hope you've written to your Aunts? It's high time."

The women put on cloaks and hats, and after inviting Ridley to come
with them, which he emphatically refused to do, exclaiming that
Rachel he expected to be a fool, but Helen surely knew better,
they turned to go. He stood over the fire gazing into the depths
of the looking-glass, and compressing his face into the likeness
of a commander surveying a field of battle, or a martyr watching
the flames lick his toes, rather than that of a secluded Professor.

Helen laid hold of his beard.

"Am I a fool?" she said.

"Let me go, Helen."

"Am I a fool?" she repeated.

"Vile woman!" he exclaimed, and kissed her.

"We'll leave you to your vanities," she called back as they went
out of the door.

It was a beautiful evening, still light enough to see a long way
down the road, though the stars were coming out. The pillar-box
was let into a high yellow wall where the lane met the road,
and having dropped the letters into it, Helen was for turning back.

"No, no," said Rachel, taking her by the wrist. "We're going
to see life. You promised."

"Seeing life" was the phrase they used for their habit of strolling
through the town after dark. The social life of Santa Marina
was carried on almost entirely by lamp-light, which the warmth of
the nights and the scents culled from flowers made pleasant enough.
The young women, with their hair magnificently swept in coils,
a red flower behind the ear, sat on the doorsteps, or issued out
on to balconies, while the young men ranged up and down beneath,
shouting up a greeting from time to time and stopping here and there
to enter into amorous talk. At the open windows merchants could
be seen making up the day's account, and older women lifting jars
from shelf to shelf. The streets were full of people, men for the
most part, who interchanged their views of the world as they walked,
or gathered round the wine-tables at the street corner, where an old
cripple was twanging his guitar strings, while a poor girl cried
her passionate song in the gutter. The two Englishwomen excited
some friendly curiosity, but no one molested them.

Helen sauntered on, observing the different people in their shabby
clothes, who seemed so careless and so natural, with satisfaction.

"Just think of the Mall to-night!" she exclaimed at length.
"It's the fifteenth of March. Perhaps there's a Court."
She thought of the crowd waiting in the cold spring air to see
the grand carriages go by. "It's very cold, if it's not raining,"
she said. "First there are men selling picture postcards; then there
are wretched little shop-girls with round bandboxes; then there
are bank clerks in tail coats; and then--any number of dressmakers.
People from South Kensington drive up in a hired fly; officials have
a pair of bays; earls, on the other hand, are allowed one footman
to stand up behind; dukes have two, royal dukes--so I was told--
have three; the king, I suppose, can have as many as he likes.
And the people believe in it!"

Out here it seemed as though the people of England must be
shaped in the body like the kings and queens, knights and pawns
of the chessboard, so strange were their differences, so marked
and so implicitly believed in.

They had to part in order to circumvent a crowd.

"They believe in God," said Rachel as they regained each other.
She meant that the people in the crowd believed in Him; for she
remembered the crosses with bleeding plaster figures that stood
where foot-paths joined, and the inexplicable mystery of a service
in a Roman Catholic church.

"We shall never understand!" she sighed.

They had walked some way and it was now night, but they could see
a large iron gate a little way farther down the road on their left.

"Do you mean to go right up to the hotel?"  Helen asked.

Rachel gave the gate a push; it swung open, and, seeing no one
about and judging that nothing was private in this country,
they walked straight on. An avenue of trees ran along the road,
which was completely straight. The trees suddenly came to an end;
the road turned a corner, and they found themselves confronted by
a large square building. They had come out upon the broad terrace
which ran round the hotel and were only a few feet distant from
the windows. A row of long windows opened almost to the ground.
They were all of them uncurtained, and all brilliantly lighted,
so that they could see everything inside. Each window revealed
a different section of the life of the hotel. They drew into one
of the broad columns of shadow which separated the windows and
gazed in. They found themselves just outside the dining-room. It
was being swept; a waiter was eating a bunch of grapes with his leg
across the corner of a table. Next door was the kitchen, where they
were washing up; white cooks were dipping their arms into cauldrons,
while the waiters made their meal voraciously off broken meats,
sopping up the gravy with bits of crumb. Moving on, they became lost
in a plantation of bushes, and then suddenly found themselves outside
the drawing-room, where the ladies and gentlemen, having dined well,
lay back in deep arm-chairs, occasionally speaking or turning over
the pages of magazines. A thin woman was flourishing up and down
the piano.

"What is a dahabeeyah, Charles?" the distinct voice of a widow,
seated in an arm-chair by the window, asked her son.

It was the end of the piece, and his answer was lost in the general
clearing of throats and tapping of knees.

"They're all old in this room," Rachel whispered.

Creeping on, they found that the next window revealed two men
in shirt-sleeves playing billiards with two young ladies.

"He pinched my arm!" the plump young woman cried, as she missed
her stroke.

"Now you two--no ragging," the young man with the red face
reproved them, who was marking.

"Take care or we shall be seen," whispered Helen, plucking Rachel
by the arm. Incautiously her head had risen to the middle of the window.

Turning the corner they came to the largest room in the hotel,
which was supplied with four windows, and was called the Lounge,
although it was really a hall. Hung with armour and native embroideries,
furnished with divans and screens, which shut off convenient corners,
the room was less formal than the others, and was evidently the haunt
of youth. Signor Rodriguez, whom they knew to be the manager
of the hotel, stood quite near them in the doorway surveying
the scene--the gentlemen lounging in chairs, the couples leaning
over coffee-cups, the game of cards in the centre under profuse
clusters of electric light. He was congratulating himself upon
the enterprise which had turned the refectory, a cold stone room
with pots on trestles, into the most comfortable room in the house.
The hotel was very full, and proved his wisdom in decreeing
that no hotel can flourish without a lounge.

The people were scattered about in couples or parties of four,
and either they were actually better acquainted, or the informal
room made their manners easier. Through the open window came
an uneven humming sound like that which rises from a flock of sheep
pent within hurdles at dusk. The card-party occupied the centre
of the foreground.

Helen and Rachel watched them play for some minutes without being able
to distinguish a word. Helen was observing one of the men intently.
He was a lean, somewhat cadaverous man of about her own age,
whose profile was turned to them, and he was the partner
of a highly-coloured girl, obviously English by birth.

Suddenly, in the strange way in which some words detach themselves
from the rest, they heard him say quite distinctly:--

"All you want is practice, Miss Warrington; courage and practice--
one's no good without the other."

"Hughling Elliot! Of course!"  Helen exclaimed. She ducked
her head immediately, for at the sound of his name he looked up.
The game went on for a few minutes, and was then broken up by
the approach of a wheeled chair, containing a voluminous old lady
who paused by the table and said:--

"Better luck to-night, Susan?"

"All the luck's on our side," said a young man who until now had kept
his back turned to the window. He appeared to be rather stout,
and had a thick crop of hair.

"Luck, Mr. Hewet?" said his partner, a middle-aged lady with spectacles.
"I assure you, Mrs. Paley, our success is due solely to our brilliant play."

"Unless I go to bed early I get practically no sleep at all,"
Mrs. Paley was heard to explain, as if to justify her seizure of Susan,
who got up and proceeded to wheel the chair to the door.

"They'll get some one else to take my place," she said cheerfully.
But she was wrong. No attempt was made to find another player,
and after the young man had built three stories of a card-house,
which fell down, the players strolled off in different directions.

Mr. Hewet turned his full face towards the window. They could
see that he had large eyes obscured by glasses; his complexion
was rosy, his lips clean-shaven; and, seen among ordinary people,
it appeared to be an interesting face. He came straight towards them,
but his eyes were fixed not upon the eavesdroppers but upon a spot
where the curtain hung in folds.

"Asleep?" he said.

Helen and Rachel started to think that some one had been sitting near
to them unobserved all the time. There were legs in the shadow.
A melancholy voice issued from above them.

"Two women," it said.

A scuffling was heard on the gravel. The women had fled. They did
not stop running until they felt certain that no eye could penetrate
the darkness and the hotel was only a square shadow in the distance,
with red holes regularly cut in it.

Chapter IX

An hour passed, and the downstairs rooms at the hotel grew dim
and were almost deserted, while the little box-like squares above
them were brilliantly irradiated. Some forty or fifty people
were going to bed. The thump of jugs set down on the floor above
could be heard and the clink of china, for there was not as thick
a partition between the rooms as one might wish, so Miss Allan,
the elderly lady who had been playing bridge, determined, giving
the wall a smart rap with her knuckles. It was only matchboard,
she decided, run up to make many little rooms of one large one.
Her grey petticoats slipped to the ground, and, stooping, she folded
her clothes with neat, if not loving fingers, screwed her hair into
a plait, wound her father's great gold watch, and opened the complete
works of Wordsworth. She was reading the "Prelude," partly because she
always read the "Prelude" abroad, and partly because she was engaged
in writing a short _Primer_ _of_ _English_ _Literature_--_Beowulf_
_to_ _Swinburne_--which would have a paragraph on Wordsworth.
She was deep in the fifth book, stopping indeed to pencil a note,
when a pair of boots dropped, one after another, on the floor
above her. She looked up and speculated. Whose boots were they,
she wondered. She then became aware of a swishing sound next door--
a woman, clearly, putting away her dress. It was succeeded by a gentle
tapping sound, such as that which accompanies hair-dressing. It
was very difficult to keep her attention fixed upon the "Prelude."
Was it Susan Warrington tapping? She forced herself, however, to read
to the end of the book, when she placed a mark between the pages,
sighed contentedly, and then turned out the light.

Very different was the room through the wall, though as like in
shape as one egg-box is like another. As Miss Allan read her book,
Susan Warrington was brushing her hair. Ages have consecrated
this hour, and the most majestic of all domestic actions, to talk
of love between women; but Miss Warrington being alone could not talk;
she could only look with extreme solicitude at her own face in
the glass. She turned her head from side to side, tossing heavy
locks now this way now that; and then withdrew a pace or two,
and considered herself seriously.

"I'm nice-looking," she determined. "Not pretty--possibly," she drew
herself up a little. "Yes--most people would say I was handsome."

She was really wondering what Arthur Venning would say she was.
Her feeling about him was decidedly queer. She would not admit to
herself that she was in love with him or that she wanted to marry him,
yet she spent every minute when she was alone in wondering what he
thought of her, and in comparing what they had done to-day with
what they had done the day before.

"He didn't ask me to play, but he certainly followed me into the hall,"
she meditated, summing up the evening. She was thirty years of age,
and owing to the number of her sisters and the seclusion of life
in a country parsonage had as yet had no proposal of marriage.
The hour of confidences was often a sad one, and she had been known
to jump into bed, treating her hair unkindly, feeling herself overlooked
by life in comparison with others. She was a big, well-made woman,
the red lying upon her cheeks in patches that were too well defined,
but her serious anxiety gave her a kind of beauty.

She was just about to pull back the bed-clothes when she exclaimed,
"Oh, but I'm forgetting," and went to her writing-table. A
brown volume lay there stamped with the figure of the year.
She proceeded to write in the square ugly hand of a mature child,
as she wrote daily year after year, keeping the diaries, though she
seldom looked at them.

"A.M.--Talked to Mrs. H. Elliot about country neighbours. She knows
the Manns; also the Selby-Carroways. How small the world is!
Like her. Read a chapter of _Miss_ _Appleby's_ _Adventure_ to Aunt
E. P.M.--Played lawn-tennis with Mr. Perrott and Evelyn M. Don't
_like_ Mr. P. Have a feeling that he is not 'quite,' though
clever certainly. Beat them. Day splendid, view wonderful.
One gets used to no trees, though much too bare at first.
Cards after dinner. Aunt E. cheerful, though twingy, she says.
Mem.: _ask_ _about_ _damp_ _sheets_."

She knelt in prayer, and then lay down in bed, tucking the blankets
comfortably about her, and in a few minutes her breathing showed that she
was asleep. With its profoundly peaceful sighs and hesitations it resembled
that of a cow standing up to its knees all night through in the long grass.

A glance into the next room revealed little more than a nose,
prominent above the sheets. Growing accustomed to the darkness,
for the windows were open and showed grey squares with splinters
of starlight, one could distinguish a lean form, terribly like
the body of a dead person, the body indeed of William Pepper,
asleep too. Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight--here were three
Portuguese men of business, asleep presumably, since a snore came
with the regularity of a great ticking clock. Thirty-nine was a
corner room, at the end of the passage, but late though it was--"One"
struck gently downstairs--a line of light under the door showed
that some one was still awake.

"How late you are, Hugh!" a woman, lying in bed, said in a peevish
but solicitous voice. Her husband was brushing his teeth,
and for some moments did not answer.

"You should have gone to sleep," he replied. "I was talking
to Thornbury."

"But you know that I never can sleep when I'm waiting for you,"
she said.

To that he made no answer, but only remarked, "Well then, we'll turn
out the light."  They were silent.

The faint but penetrating pulse of an electric bell could now be heard
in the corridor. Old Mrs. Paley, having woken hungry but without
her spectacles, was summoning her maid to find the biscuit-box. The
maid having answered the bell, drearily respectful even at this hour
though muffled in a mackintosh, the passage was left in silence.
Downstairs all was empty and dark; but on the upper floor a light still
burnt in the room where the boots had dropped so heavily above Miss
Allan's head. Here was the gentleman who, a few hours previously,
in the shade of the curtain, had seemed to consist entirely of legs.
Deep in an arm-chair he was reading the third volume of Gibbon's
_History_ _of_ _the_ _Decline_ _and_ _Fall_ _of_ _Rome_ by candle-light.
As he read he knocked the ash automatically, now and again,
from his cigarette and turned the page, while a whole procession
of splendid sentences entered his capacious brow and went marching
through his brain in order. It seemed likely that this process
might continue for an hour or more, until the entire regiment had
shifted its quarters, had not the door opened, and the young man,
who was inclined to be stout, come in with large naked feet.

"Oh, Hirst, what I forgot to say was--"

"Two minutes," said Hirst, raising his finger.

He safely stowed away the last words of the paragraph.

"What was it you forgot to say?" he asked.

"D'you think you _do_ make enough allowance for feelings?"
asked Mr. Hewet. He had again forgotten what he had meant to say.

After intense contemplation of the immaculate Gibbon Mr. Hirst
smiled at the question of his friend. He laid aside his book
and considered.

"I should call yours a singularly untidy mind," he observed.
"Feelings? Aren't they just what we do allow for? We put love
up there, and all the rest somewhere down below."  With his left
hand he indicated the top of a pyramid, and with his right the base.

"But you didn't get out of bed to tell me that," he added severely.

"I got out of bed," said Hewet vaguely, "merely to talk I suppose."

"Meanwhile I shall undress," said Hirst. When naked of all but
his shirt, and bent over the basin, Mr. Hirst no longer impressed
one with the majesty of his intellect, but with the pathos of his
young yet ugly body, for he stooped, and he was so thin that there
were dark lines between the different bones of his neck and shoulders.

"Women interest me," said Hewet, who, sitting on the bed with his
chin resting on his knees, paid no attention to the undressing
of Mr. Hirst.

"They're so stupid," said Hirst. "You're sitting on my pyjamas."

"I suppose they _are_ stupid?"  Hewet wondered.

"There can't be two opinions about that, I imagine," said Hirst,
hopping briskly across the room, "unless you're in love--that fat
woman Warrington?" he enquired.

"Not one fat woman--all fat women," Hewet sighed.

"The women I saw to-night were not fat," said Hirst, who was taking
advantage of Hewet's company to cut his toe-nails.

"Describe them," said Hewet.

"You know I can't describe things!" said Hirst. "They were much
like other women, I should think. They always are."

"No; that's where we differ," said Hewet. "I say everything's different.
No two people are in the least the same. Take you and me now."

"So I used to think once," said Hirst. "But now they're all types.
Don't take us,--take this hotel. You could draw circles round
the whole lot of them, and they'd never stray outside."

("You can kill a hen by doing that"), Hewet murmured.

"Mr. Hughling Elliot, Mrs. Hughling Elliot, Miss Allan, Mr. and
Mrs. Thornbury--one circle," Hirst continued. "Miss Warrington,
Mr. Arthur Venning, Mr. Perrott, Evelyn M. another circle;
then there are a whole lot of natives; finally ourselves."

"Are we all alone in our circle?" asked Hewet.

"Quite alone," said Hirst. "You try to get out, but you can't.
You only make a mess of things by trying."

"I'm not a hen in a circle," said Hewet. "I'm a dove on a tree-top."

"I wonder if this is what they call an ingrowing toe-nail?"
said Hirst, examining the big toe on his left foot.

"I flit from branch to branch," continued Hewet. "The world
is profoundly pleasant."  He lay back on the bed, upon his arms.

"I wonder if it's really nice to be as vague as you are?" asked Hirst,
looking at him. "It's the lack of continuity--that's what's
so odd bout you," he went on. "At the age of twenty-seven,
which is nearly thirty, you seem to have drawn no conclusions.
A party of old women excites you still as though you were three."

Hewet contemplated the angular young man who was neatly brushing
the rims of his toe-nails into the fire-place in silence for a moment.

"I respect you, Hirst," he remarked.

"I envy you--some things," said Hirst. "One: your capacity
for not thinking; two: people like you better than they like me.
Women like you, I suppose."

"I wonder whether that isn't really what matters most?" said Hewet.
Lying now flat on the bed he waved his hand in vague circles
above him.

"Of course it is," said Hirst. "But that's not the difficulty.
The difficulty is, isn't it, to find an appropriate object?"

"There are no female hens in your circle?" asked Hewet.

"Not the ghost of one," said Hirst.

Although they had known each other for three years Hirst had never
yet heard the true story of Hewet's loves. In general conversation
it was taken for granted that they were many, but in private
the subject was allowed to lapse. The fact that he had money enough
to do no work, and that he had left Cambridge after two terms
owing to a difference with the authorities, and had then travelled
and drifted, made his life strange at many points where his friends'
lives were much of a piece.

"I don't see your circles--I don't see them," Hewet continued.
"I see a thing like a teetotum spinning in and out--knocking into things--
dashing from side to side--collecting numbers--more and more and more,
till the whole place is thick with them. Round and round they go--
out there, over the rim--out of sight."

His fingers showed that the waltzing teetotums had spun over the edge
of the counterpane and fallen off the bed into infinity.

"Could you contemplate three weeks alone in this hotel?" asked Hirst,
after a moment's pause.

Hewet proceeded to think.

"The truth of it is that one never is alone, and one never is
in company," he concluded.

"Meaning?" said Hirst.

"Meaning? Oh, something about bubbles--auras--what d'you call 'em?
You can't see my bubble; I can't see yours; all we see of each
other is a speck, like the wick in the middle of that flame.
The flame goes about with us everywhere; it's not ourselves exactly,
but what we feel; the world is short, or people mainly; all kinds
of people."

"A nice streaky bubble yours must be!" said Hirst.

"And supposing my bubble could run into some one else's bubble--"

"And they both burst?" put in Hirst.

"Then--then--then--" pondered Hewet, as if to himself, "it would be
an e-nor-mous world," he said, stretching his arms to their full width,
as though even so they could hardly clasp the billowy universe,
for when he was with Hirst he always felt unusually sanguine
and vague.

"I don't think you altogether as foolish as I used to, Hewet,"
said Hirst. "You don't know what you mean but you try to say it."

"But aren't you enjoying yourself here?" asked Hewet.

"On the whole--yes," said Hirst. "I like observing people.
I like looking at things. This country is amazingly beautiful.
Did you notice how the top of the mountain turned yellow to-night?
Really we must take our lunch and spend the day out. You're getting
disgustingly fat."  He pointed at the calf of Hewet's bare leg.

"We'll get up an expedition," said Hewet energetically. "We'll ask
the entire hotel. We'll hire donkeys and--"

"Oh, Lord!" said Hirst, "do shut it! I can see Miss Warrington
and Miss Allan and Mrs. Elliot and the rest squatting on the stones
and quacking, 'How jolly!'"

"We'll ask Venning and Perrott and Miss Murgatroyd--every one we can
lay hands on," went on Hewet. "What's the name of the little old
grasshopper with the eyeglasses? Pepper?--Pepper shall lead us."

"Thank God, you'll never get the donkeys," said Hirst.

"I must make a note of that," said Hewet, slowly dropping his feet
to the floor. "Hirst escorts Miss Warrington; Pepper advances alone on
a white ass; provisions equally distributed--or shall we hire a mule?
The matrons--there's Mrs. Paley, by Jove!--share a carriage."

"That's where you'll go wrong," said Hirst. "Putting virgins
among matrons."

"How long should you think that an expedition like that
would take, Hirst?" asked Hewet.

"From twelve to sixteen hours I would say," said Hirst. "The time
usually occupied by a first confinement."

"It will need considerable organisation," said Hewet. He was
now padding softly round the room, and stopped to stir the books
on the table. They lay heaped one upon another.

"We shall want some poets too," he remarked. "Not Gibbon; no;
d'you happen to have _Modern_ _Love_ or _John_ _Donne_? You see,
I contemplate pauses when people get tired of looking at the view,
and then it would be nice to read something rather difficult aloud."

"Mrs. Paley _will_ enjoy herself," said Hirst.

"Mrs. Paley will enjoy it certainly," said Hewet. "It's one of the
saddest things I know--the way elderly ladies cease to read poetry.
And yet how appropriate this is:

        I speak as one who plumbs
           Life's dim profound,
        One who at length can sound
           Clear views and certain.

        But--after love what comes?
           A scene that lours,
        A few sad vacant hours,
           And then, the Curtain.

I daresay Mrs. Paley is the only one of us who can really understand that."

"We'll ask her," said Hirst. "Please, Hewet, if you must go to bed,
draw my curtain. Few things distress me more than the moonlight."

Hewet retreated, pressing the poems of Thomas Hardy beneath his arm,
and in their beds next door to each other both the young men were
soon asleep.

Between the extinction of Hewet's candle and the rising of a dusky
Spanish boy who was the first to survey the desolation of the hotel
in the early morning, a few hours of silence intervened. One could
almost hear a hundred people breathing deeply, and however wakeful
and restless it would have been hard to escape sleep in the middle
of so much sleep. Looking out of the windows, there was only
darkness to be seen. All over the shadowed half of the world
people lay prone, and a few flickering lights in empty streets
marked the places where their cities were built. Red and yellow
omnibuses were crowding each other in Piccadilly; sumptuous women
were rocking at a standstill; but here in the darkness an owl flitted
from tree to tree, and when the breeze lifted the branches the moon
flashed as if it were a torch. Until all people should awake
again the houseless animals were abroad, the tigers and the stags,
and the elephants coming down in the darkness to drink at pools.
The wind at night blowing over the hills and woods was purer
and fresher than the wind by day, and the earth, robbed of detail,
more mysterious than the earth coloured and divided by roads
and fields. For six hours this profound beauty existed, and then
as the east grew whiter and whiter the ground swam to the surface,
the roads were revealed, the smoke rose and the people stirred,
and the sun shone upon the windows of the hotel at Santa Marina until
they were uncurtained, and the gong blaring all through the house
gave notice of breakfast.

Directly breakfast was over, the ladies as usual circled vaguely,
picking up papers and putting them down again, about the hall.

"And what are you going to do to-day?" asked Mrs. Elliot drifting
up against Miss Warrington.

Mrs. Elliot, the wife of Hughling the Oxford Don, was a short woman,
whose expression was habitually plaintive. Her eyes moved from thing
to thing as though they never found anything sufficiently pleasant
to rest upon for any length of time.

"I'm going to try to get Aunt Emma out into the town," said Susan.
"She's not seen a thing yet."

"I call it so spirited of her at her age," said Mrs. Elliot,
"coming all this way from her own fireside."

"Yes, we always tell her she'll die on board ship," Susan replied.
"She was born on one," she added.

"In the old days," said Mrs. Elliot, "a great many people were.
I always pity the poor women so! We've got a lot to complain of!"
She shook her head. Her eyes wandered about the table, and she
remarked irrelevantly, "The poor little Queen of Holland!
Newspaper reporters practically, one may say, at her bedroom door!"

"Were you talking of the Queen of Holland?" said the pleasant voice
of Miss Allan, who was searching for the thick pages of _The_
_Times_ among a litter of thin foreign sheets.

"I always envy any one who lives in such an excessively flat country,"
she remarked.

"How very strange!" said Mrs. Elliot. "I find a flat country
so depressing."

"I'm afraid you can't be very happy here then, Miss Allan,"
said Susan.

"On the contrary," said Miss Allan, "I am exceedingly fond of mountains."
Perceiving _The_ _Times_ at some distance, she moved off to secure it.

"Well, I must find my husband," said Mrs. Elliot, fidgeting away.

"And I must go to my aunt," said Miss Warrington, and taking up
the duties of the day they moved away.

Whether the flimsiness of foreign sheets and the coarseness of
their type is any proof of frivolity and ignorance, there is no
doubt that English people scarce consider news read there as news,
any more than a programme bought from a man in the street inspires
confidence in what it says. A very respectable elderly pair,
having inspected the long tables of newspapers, did not think it
worth their while to read more than the headlines.

"The debate on the fifteenth should have reached us by now,"
Mrs. Thornbury murmured. Mr. Thornbury, who was beautifully clean
and had red rubbed into his handsome worn face like traces of paint
on a weather-beaten wooden figure, looked over his glasses and saw
that Miss Allan had _The_ _Times_.

The couple therefore sat themselves down in arm-chairs and waited.

"Ah, there's Mr. Hewet," said Mrs. Thornbury. "Mr. Hewet,"
she continued, "do come and sit by us. I was telling my husband
how much you reminded me of a dear old friend of mine--Mary Umpleby.
She was a most delightful woman, I assure you. She grew roses.
We used to stay with her in the old days."

"No young man likes to have it said that he resembles
an elderly spinster," said Mr. Thornbury.

"On the contrary," said Mr. Hewet, "I always think it a compliment
to remind people of some one else. But Miss Umpleby--why did she
grow roses?"

"Ah, poor thing," said Mrs. Thornbury, "that's a long story.
She had gone through dreadful sorrows. At one time I think she
would have lost her senses if it hadn't been for her garden.
The soil was very much against her--a blessing in disguise;
she had to be up at dawn--out in all weathers. And then there
are creatures that eat roses. But she triumphed. She always did.
She was a brave soul."  She sighed deeply but at the same time
with resignation.

"I did not realise that I was monopolising the paper," said Miss Allan,
coming up to them.

"We were so anxious to read about the debate," said Mrs. Thornbury,
accepting it on behalf of her husband.

"One doesn't realise how interesting a debate can be until one has
sons in the navy. My interests are equally balanced, though; I have
sons in the army too; and one son who makes speeches at the Union--
my baby!"

"Hirst would know him, I expect," said Hewet.

"Mr. Hirst has such an interesting face," said Mrs. Thornbury.
"But I feel one ought to be very clever to talk to him.
Well, William?" she enquired, for Mr. Thornbury grunted.

"They're making a mess of it," said Mr. Thornbury. He had reached
the second column of the report, a spasmodic column, for the Irish
members had been brawling three weeks ago at Westminster over a
question of naval efficiency. After a disturbed paragraph or two,
the column of print once more ran smoothly.

"You have read it?"  Mrs. Thornbury asked Miss Allan.

"No, I am ashamed to say I have only read about the discoveries
in Crete," said Miss Allan.

"Oh, but I would give so much to realise the ancient world!"
cried Mrs. Thornbury. "Now that we old people are alone,--we're on our
second honeymoon,--I am really going to put myself to school again.
After all we are _founded_ on the past, aren't we, Mr. Hewet?
My soldier son says that there is still a great deal to be learnt
from Hannibal. One ought to know so much more than one does.
Somehow when I read the paper, I begin with the debates first, and,
before I've done, the door always opens--we're a very large party
at home--and so one never does think enough about the ancients
and all they've done for us. But _you_ begin at the beginning,
Miss Allan."

"When I think of the Greeks I think of them as naked black men,"
said Miss Allan, "which is quite incorrect, I'm sure."

"And you, Mr. Hirst?" said Mrs. Thornbury, perceiving that the gaunt
young man was near. "I'm sure you read everything."

"I confine myself to cricket and crime," said Hirst. "The worst
of coming from the upper classes," he continued, "is that one's
friends are never killed in railway accidents."

Mr. Thornbury threw down the paper, and emphatically dropped
his eyeglasses. The sheets fell in the middle of the group,
and were eyed by them all.

"It's not gone well?" asked his wife solicitously.

Hewet picked up one sheet and read, "A lady was walking yesterday
in the streets of Westminster when she perceived a cat in the window
of a deserted house. The famished animal--"

"I shall be out of it anyway," Mr. Thornbury interrupted peevishly.

"Cats are often forgotten," Miss Allan remarked.

"Remember, William, the Prime Minister has reserved his answer,"
said Mrs. Thornbury.

"At the age of eighty, Mr. Joshua Harris of Eeles Park, Brondesbury,
has had a son," said Hirst.

". . . The famished animal, which had been noticed by workmen
for some days, was rescued, but--by Jove! it bit the man's hand
to pieces!"

"Wild with hunger, I suppose," commented Miss Allan.

"You're all neglecting the chief advantage of being abroad,"
said Mr. Hughling Elliot, who had joined the group. "You might
read your news in French, which is equivalent to reading no news
at all."

Mr. Elliot had a profound knowledge of Coptic, which he concealed
as far as possible, and quoted French phrases so exquisitely that it
was hard to believe that he could also speak the ordinary tongue.
He had an immense respect for the French.

"Coming?" he asked the two young men. "We ought to start before
it's really hot."

"I beg of you not to walk in the heat, Hugh," his wife pleaded,
giving him an angular parcel enclosing half a chicken and some raisins.

"Hewet will be our barometer," said Mr. Elliot. "He will melt
before I shall."  Indeed, if so much as a drop had melted off his
spare ribs, the bones would have lain bare. The ladies were left
alone now, surrounding _The_ _Times_ which lay upon the floor.
Miss Allan looked at her father's watch.

"Ten minutes to eleven," she observed.

"Work?" asked Mrs. Thornbury.

"Work," replied Miss Allan.

"What a fine creature she is!" murmured Mrs. Thornbury, as the square
figure in its manly coat withdrew.

"And I'm sure she has a hard life," sighed Mrs. Elliot.

"Oh, it _is_ a hard life," said Mrs. Thornbury. "Unmarried women--
earning their livings--it's the hardest life of all."

"Yet she seems pretty cheerful," said Mrs. Elliot.

"It must be very interesting," said Mrs. Thornbury. "I envy her
her knowledge."

"But that isn't what women want," said Mrs. Elliot.

"I'm afraid it's all a great many can hope to have," sighed
Mrs. Thornbury. "I believe that there are more of us than ever now.
Sir Harley Lethbridge was telling me only the other day how difficult
it is to find boys for the navy--partly because of their teeth,
it is true. And I have heard young women talk quite openly of--"

"Dreadful, dreadful!" exclaimed Mrs. Elliot. "The crown, as one may
call it, of a woman's life. I, who know what it is to be childless--"
she sighed and ceased.

"But we must not be hard," said Mrs. Thornbury. "The conditions
are so much changed since I was a young woman."

"Surely _maternity_ does not change," said Mrs. Elliot.

"In some ways we can learn a great deal from the young,"
said Mrs. Thornbury. "I learn so much from my own daughters."

"I believe that Hughling really doesn't mind," said Mrs. Elliot.
"But then he has his work."

"Women without children can do so much for the children of others,"
observed Mrs. Thornbury gently.

"I sketch a great deal," said Mrs. Elliot, "but that isn't really
an occupation. It's so disconcerting to find girls just beginning
doing better than one does oneself! And nature's difficult--
very difficult!"

"Are there not institutions--clubs--that you could help?"
asked Mrs. Thornbury.

"They are so exhausting," said Mrs. Elliot. "I look strong,
because of my colour; but I'm not; the youngest of eleven never is."

"If the mother is careful before," said Mrs. Thornbury judicially,
"there is no reason why the size of the family should make
any difference. And there is no training like the training
that brothers and sisters give each other. I am sure of that.
I have seen it with my own children. My eldest boy Ralph, for instance--"

But Mrs. Elliot was inattentive to the elder lady's experience,
and her eyes wandered about the hall.

"My mother had two miscarriages, I know," she said suddenly.
"The first because she met one of those great dancing bears--
they shouldn't be allowed; the other--it was a horrid story--our cook
had a child and there was a dinner party. So I put my dyspepsia
down to that."

"And a miscarriage is so much worse than a confinement,"
Mrs. Thornbury murmured absentmindedly, adjusting her spectacles
and picking up _The_ _Times_. Mrs. Elliot rose and fluttered away.

When she had heard what one of the million voices speaking in
the paper had to say, and noticed that a cousin of hers had married
a clergyman at Minehead--ignoring the drunken women, the golden
animals of Crete, the movements of battalions, the dinners,
the reforms, the fires, the indignant, the learned and benevolent,
Mrs. Thornbury went upstairs to write a letter for the mail.

The paper lay directly beneath the clock, the two together seeming
to represent stability in a changing world. Mr. Perrott passed through;
Mr. Venning poised for a second on the edge of a table. Mrs. Paley
was wheeled past. Susan followed. Mr. Venning strolled after her.
Portuguese military families, their clothes suggesting late rising
in untidy bedrooms, trailed across, attended by confidential nurses
carrying noisy children. As midday drew on, and the sun beat straight
upon the roof, an eddy of great flies droned in a circle; iced drinks
were served under the palms; the long blinds were pulled down with
a shriek, turning all the light yellow. The clock now had a silent
hall to tick in, and an audience of four or five somnolent merchants.
By degrees white figures with shady hats came in at the door,
admitting a wedge of the hot summer day, and shutting it out again.
After resting in the dimness for a minute, they went upstairs.
Simultaneously, the clock wheezed one, and the gong sounded,
beginning softly, working itself into a frenzy, and ceasing.
There was a pause. Then all those who had gone upstairs came down;
cripples came, planting both feet on the same step lest they
should slip; prim little girls came, holding the nurse's finger;
fat old men came still buttoning waistcoats. The gong had been
sounded in the garden, and by degrees recumbent figures rose and
strolled in to eat, since the time had come for them to feed again.
There were pools and bars of shade in the garden even at midday,
where two or three visitors could lie working or talking at
their ease.

Owing to the heat of the day, luncheon was generally a silent meal,
when people observed their neighbors and took stock of any new faces
there might be, hazarding guesses as to who they were and what they did.
Mrs. Paley, although well over seventy and crippled in the legs,
enjoyed her food and the peculiarities of her fellow-beings. She
was seated at a small table with Susan.

"I shouldn't like to say what _she_ is!" she chuckled, surveying a tall woman
dressed conspicuously in white, with paint in the hollows of her cheeks,
who was always late, and always attended by a shabby female follower,
at which remark Susan blushed, and wondered why her aunt said such things.

Lunch went on methodically, until each of the seven courses was left
in fragments and the fruit was merely a toy, to be peeled and sliced
as a child destroys a daisy, petal by petal. The food served as an
extinguisher upon any faint flame of the human spirit that might
survive the midday heat, but Susan sat in her room afterwards,
turning over and over the delightful fact that Mr. Venning had come
to her in the garden, and had sat there quite half an hour while she
read aloud to her aunt. Men and women sought different corners
where they could lie unobserved, and from two to four it might be
said without exaggeration that the hotel was inhabited by bodies
without souls. Disastrous would have been the result if a fire
or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature,
but tragedies come in the hungry hours. Towards four o'clock
the human spirit again began to lick the body, as a flame licks
a black promontory of coal. Mrs. Paley felt it unseemly to open her
toothless jaw so widely, though there was no one near, and Mrs. Elliot
surveyed her found flushed face anxiously in the looking-glass.

Half an hour later, having removed the traces of sleep, they met
each other in the hall, and Mrs. Paley observed that she was going
to have her tea.

"You like your tea too, don't you?" she said, and invited Mrs. Elliot,
whose husband was still out, to join her at a special table which
she had placed for her under a tree.

"A little silver goes a long way in this country," she chuckled.

She sent Susan back to fetch another cup.

"They have such excellent biscuits here," she said, contemplating
a plateful. "Not sweet biscuits, which I don't like--dry biscuits
. . . Have you been sketching?"

"Oh, I've done two or three little daubs," said Mrs. Elliot, speaking
rather louder than usual. "But it's so difficult after Oxfordshire,
where there are so many trees. The light's so strong here.
Some people admire it, I know, but I find it very fatiguing."

"I really don't need cooking, Susan," said Mrs. Paley, when her
niece returned. "I must trouble you to move me."  Everything had
to be moved. Finally the old lady was placed so that the light
wavered over her, as though she were a fish in a net. Susan poured
out tea, and was just remarking that they were having hot weather
in Wiltshire too, when Mr. Venning asked whether he might join them.

"It's so nice to find a young man who doesn't despise tea,"
said Mrs. Paley, regaining her good humour. "One of my nephews
the other day asked for a glass of sherry--at five o'clock! I
told him he could get it at the public house round the corner,
but not in my drawing room."

"I'd rather go without lunch than tea," said Mr. Venning.
"That's not strictly true. I want both."

Mr. Venning was a dark young man, about thirty-two years of age,
very slapdash and confident in his manner, although at this moment
obviously a little excited. His friend Mr. Perrott was a barrister,
and as Mr. Perrott refused to go anywhere without Mr. Venning it
was necessary, when Mr. Perrott came to Santa Marina about a Company,
for Mr. Venning to come too. He was a barrister also, but he
loathed a profession which kept him indoors over books, and directly
his widowed mother died he was going, so he confided to Susan,
to take up flying seriously, and become partner in a large business
for making aeroplanes. The talk rambled on. It dealt, of course,
with the beauties and singularities of the place, the streets,
the people, and the quantities of unowned yellow dogs.

"Don't you think it dreadfully cruel the way they treat dogs
in this country?" asked Mrs. Paley.

"I'd have 'em all shot," said Mr. Venning.

"Oh, but the darling puppies," said Susan.

"Jolly little chaps," said Mr. Venning. "Look here, you've got
nothing to eat."  A great wedge of cake was handed Susan on the point
of a trembling knife. Her hand trembled too as she took it.

"I have such a dear dog at home," said Mrs. Elliot.

"My parrot can't stand dogs," said Mrs. Paley, with the air
of one making a confidence. "I always suspect that he (or she)
was teased by a dog when I was abroad."

"You didn't get far this morning, Miss Warrington," said Mr. Venning.

"It was hot," she answered. Their conversation became private,
owing to Mrs. Paley's deafness and the long sad history
which Mrs. Elliot had embarked upon of a wire-haired terrier,
white with just one black spot, belonging to an uncle of hers,
which had committed suicide. "Animals do commit suicide,"
she sighed, as if she asserted a painful fact.

"Couldn't we explore the town this evening?"  Mr. Venning suggested.

"My aunt--" Susan began.

"You deserve a holiday," he said. "You're always doing things
for other people."

"But that's my life," she said, under cover of refilling the teapot.

"That's no one's life," he returned, "no young person's. You'll come?"

"I should like to come," she murmured.

At this moment Mrs. Elliot looked up and exclaimed, "Oh, Hugh!
He's bringing some one," she added.

"He would like some tea," said Mrs. Paley. "Susan, run and get
some cups--there are the two young men."

"We're thirsting for tea," said Mr. Elliot. "You know
Mr. Ambrose, Hilda? We met on the hill."

"He dragged me in," said Ridley, "or I should have been ashamed.
I'm dusty and dirty and disagreeable."  He pointed to his boots
which were white with dust, while a dejected flower drooping in
his buttonhole, like an exhausted animal over a gate, added to the
effect of length and untidiness. He was introduced to the others.
Mr. Hewet and Mr. Hirst brought chairs, and tea began again,
Susan pouring cascades of water from pot to pot, always cheerfully,
and with the competence of long use.

"My wife's brother," Ridley explained to Hilda, whom he
failed to remember, "has a house here, which he has lent us.
I was sitting on a rock thinking of nothing at all when Elliot
started up like a fairy in a pantomime."

"Our chicken got into the salt," Hewet said dolefully to Susan.
"Nor is it true that bananas include moisture as well as sustenance.

Hirst was already drinking.

"We've been cursing you," said Ridley in answer to Mrs. Elliot's
kind enquiries about his wife. "You tourists eat up all the eggs,
Helen tells me. That's an eye-sore too"--he nodded his head
at the hotel. "Disgusting luxury, I call it. We live with pigs
in the drawing-room."

"The food is not at all what it ought to be, considering the price,"
said Mrs. Paley seriously. "But unless one goes to a hotel where is
one to go to?"

"Stay at home," said Ridley. "I often wish I had! Everyone ought
to stay at home. But, of course, they won't."

Mrs. Paley conceived a certain grudge against Ridley, who seemed
to be criticising her habits after an acquaintance of five minutes.

"I believe in foreign travel myself," she stated, "if one knows one's
native land, which I think I can honestly say I do. I should not
allow any one to travel until they had visited Kent and Dorsetshire--
Kent for the hops, and Dorsetshire for its old stone cottages.
There is nothing to compare with them here."

"Yes--I always think that some people like the flat and other people
like the downs," said Mrs. Elliot rather vaguely.

Hirst, who had been eating and drinking without interruption,
now lit a cigarette, and observed, "Oh, but we're all agreed
by this time that nature's a mistake. She's either very ugly,
appallingly uncomfortable, or absolutely terrifying. I don't know which
alarms me most--a cow or a tree. I once met a cow in a field by night.
The creature looked at me. I assure you it turned my hair grey.
It's a disgrace that the animals should be allowed to go at large."

"And what did the cow think of _him_?"  Venning mumbled to Susan,
who immediately decided in her own mind that Mr. Hirst was a dreadful
young man, and that although he had such an air of being clever he
probably wasn't as clever as Arthur, in the ways that really matter.

"Wasn't it Wilde who discovered the fact that nature makes no
allowance for hip-bones?" enquired Hughling Elliot. He knew by this
time exactly what scholarships and distinction Hirst enjoyed,
and had formed a very high opinion of his capacities.

But Hirst merely drew his lips together very tightly and made
no reply.

Ridley conjectured that it was now permissible for him to take
his leave. Politeness required him to thank Mrs. Elliot for his tea,
and to add, with a wave of his hand, "You must come up and see us."

The wave included both Hirst and Hewet, and Hewet answered,
"I should like it immensely."

The party broke up, and Susan, who had never felt so happy in her life,
was just about to start for her walk in the town with Arthur,
when Mrs. Paley beckoned her back. She could not understand
from the book how Double Demon patience is played; and suggested
that if they sat down and worked it out together it would fill
up the time nicely before dinner.

Chapter X

Among the promises which Mrs. Ambrose had made her niece should she
stay was a room cut off from the rest of the house, large, private--
a room in which she could play, read, think, defy the world, a fortress
as well as a sanctuary. Rooms, she knew, became more like worlds
than rooms at the age of twenty-four. Her judgment was correct,
and when she shut the door Rachel entered an enchanted place,
where the poets sang and things fell into their right proportions.
Some days after the vision of the hotel by night she was sitting alone,
sunk in an arm-chair, reading a brightly-covered red volume lettered
on the back _Works_ _of_ _Henrik_ _Ibsen_. Music was open on
the piano, and books of music rose in two jagged pillars on the floor;
but for the moment music was deserted.

Far from looking bored or absent-minded, her eyes were concentrated
almost sternly upon the page, and from her breathing, which was slow
but repressed, it could be seen that her whole body was constrained
by the working of her mind. At last she shut the book sharply,
lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always
marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

"What I want to know," she said aloud, "is this: What is the truth?
What's the truth of it all?"  She was speaking partly as herself,
and partly as the heroine of the play she had just read.
The landscape outside, because she had seen nothing but print
for the space of two hours, now appeared amazingly solid and clear,
but although there were men on the hill washing the trunks of olive
trees with a white liquid, for the moment she herself was the most
vivid thing in it--an heroic statue in the middle of the foreground,
dominating the view. Ibsen's plays always left her in that condition.
She acted them for days at a time, greatly to Helen's amusement;
and then it would be Meredith's turn and she became Diana of
the Crossways. But Helen was aware that it was not all acting,
and that some sort of change was taking place in the human being.
When Rachel became tired of the rigidity of her pose on the back
of the chair, she turned round, slid comfortably down into it,
and gazed out over the furniture through the window opposite which
opened on the garden. (Her mind wandered away from Nora, but she
went on thinking of things that the book suggested to her, of women
and life.)

During the three months she had been here she had made up considerably,
as Helen meant she should, for time spent in interminable walks
round sheltered gardens, and the household gossip of her aunts.
But Mrs. Ambrose would have been the first to disclaim any influence,
or indeed any belief that to influence was within her power.
She saw her less shy, and less serious, which was all to the good,
and the violent leaps and the interminable mazes which had led
to that result were usually not even guessed at by her. Talk was
the medicine she trusted to, talk about everything, talk that
was free, unguarded, and as candid as a habit of talking with men
made natural in her own case. Nor did she encourage those habits
of unselfishness and amiability founded upon insincerity which are
put at so high a value in mixed households of men and women.
She desired that Rachel should think, and for this reason offered
books and discouraged too entire a dependence upon Bach and Beethoven
and Wagner. But when Mrs. Ambrose would have suggested Defoe,
Maupassant, or some spacious chronicle of family life, Rachel chose
modern books, books in shiny yellow covers, books with a great deal
of gilding on the back, which were tokens in her aunt's eyes of harsh
wrangling and disputes about facts which had no such importance
as the moderns claimed for them. But she did not interfere.
Rachel read what she chose, reading with the curious literalness
of one to whom written sentences are unfamiliar, and handling words
as though they were made of wood, separately of great importance,
and possessed of shapes like tables or chairs. In this way
she came to conclusions, which had to be remodelled according
to the adventures of the day, and were indeed recast as liberally
as any one could desire, leaving always a small grain of belief
behind them.

Ibsen was succeeded by a novel such as Mrs. Ambrose detested,
whose purpose was to distribute the guilt of a woman's downfall
upon the right shoulders; a purpose which was achieved, if the
reader's discomfort were any proof of it. She threw the book down,
looked out of the window, turned away from the window, and relapsed
into an arm-chair.

The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind
contracting and expanding like the main-spring of a clock,
and the small noises of midday, which one can ascribe to no
definite cause, in a regular rhythm. It was all very real, very big,
very impersonal, and after a moment or two she began to raise her
first finger and to let it fall on the arm of her chair so as to
bring back to herself some consciousness of her own existence.
She was next overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the fact
that she should be sitting in an arm-chair, in the morning,
in the middle of the world. Who were the people moving in the house--
moving things from one place to another? And life, what was that?
It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing,
as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the room
would remain. Her dissolution became so complete that she
could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still,
listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger
and stranger. She was overcome with awe that things should exist
at all. . . . She forgot that she had any fingers to raise.
. . . The things that existed were so immense and so desolate.
. . . She continued to be conscious of these vast masses of substance
for a long stretch of time, the clock still ticking in the midst
of the universal silence.

"Come in," she said mechanically, for a string in her brain seemed
to be pulled by a persistent knocking at the door. With great
slowness the door opened and a tall human being came towards her,
holding out her arm and saying:

"What am I to say to this?"

The utter absurdity of a woman coming into a room with a piece
of paper in her hand amazed Rachel.

"I don't know what to answer, or who Terence Hewet is," Helen continued,
in the toneless voice of a ghost. She put a paper before Rachel
on which were written the incredible words:

DEAR MRS. AMBROSE--I am getting up a picnic for next Friday,
when we propose to start at eleven-thirty if the weather is fine,
and to make the ascent of Monte Rosa. It will take some time,
but the view should be magnificent. It would give me great pleasure
if you and Miss Vinrace would consent to be of the party.--

Yours sincerely, TERENCE HEWET

Rachel read the words aloud to make herself believe in them.
For the same reason she put her hand on Helen's shoulder.

"Books--books--books," said Helen, in her absent-minded way.
"More new books--I wonder what you find in them. . . ."

For the second time Rachel read the letter, but to herself.
This time, instead of seeming vague as ghosts, each word was
astonishingly prominent; they came out as the tops of mountains
come through a mist. _Friday_--_eleven-thirty_--_Miss_ _Vinrace_.
The blood began to run in her veins; she felt her eyes brighten.

"We must go," she said, rather surprising Helen by her decision.
"We must certainly go"--such was the relief of finding that things
still happened, and indeed they appeared the brighter for the mist
surrounding them.

"Monte Rosa--that's the mountain over there, isn't it?" said Helen;
"but Hewet--who's he? One of the young men Ridley met, I suppose.
Shall I say yes, then? It may be dreadfully dull."

She took the letter back and went, for the messenger was waiting
for her answer.

The party which had been suggested a few nights ago in Mr. Hirst's
bedroom had taken shape and was the source of great satisfaction
to Mr. Hewet, who had seldom used his practical abilities, and was
pleased to find them equal to the strain. His invitations had been
universally accepted, which was the more encouraging as they had
been issued against Hirst's advice to people who were very dull,
not at all suited to each other, and sure not to come.

"Undoubtedly," he said, as he twirled and untwirled a note signed
Helen Ambrose, "the gifts needed to make a great commander have
been absurdly overrated. About half the intellectual effort
which is needed to review a book of modern poetry has enabled
me to get together seven or eight people, of opposite sexes,
at the same spot at the same hour on the same day. What else
is generalship, Hirst? What more did Wellington do on the field
of Waterloo? It's like counting the number of pebbles of a path,
tedious but not difficult."

He was sitting in his bedroom, one leg over the arm of the chair,
and Hirst was writing a letter opposite. Hirst was quick to point
out that all the difficulties remained.

"For instance, here are two women you've never seen. Suppose one
of them suffers from mountain-sickness, as my sister does,
and the other--"

"Oh, the women are for you," Hewet interrupted. "I asked them solely
for your benefit. What you want, Hirst, you know, is the society of
young women of your own age. You don't know how to get on with women,
which is a great defect, considering that half the world consists of women."

Hirst groaned that he was quite aware of that.

But Hewet's complacency was a little chilled as he walked with
Hirst to the place where a general meeting had been appointed.
He wondered why on earth he had asked these people, and what one
really expected to get from bunching human beings up together.

"Cows," he reflected, "draw together in a field; ships in a calm;
and we're just the same when we've nothing else to do. But why do we
do it?--is it to prevent ourselves from seeing to the bottom of things"
(he stopped by a stream and began stirring it with his walking-stick
and clouding the water with mud), "making cities and mountains
and whole universes out of nothing, or do we really love each other,
or do we, on the other hand, live in a state of perpetual uncertainty,
knowing nothing, leaping from moment to moment as from world to world?--
which is, on the whole, the view _I_ incline to."

He jumped over the stream; Hirst went round and joined him,
remarking that he had long ceased to look for the reason of any
human action.

Half a mile further, they came to a group of plane trees and the
salmon-pink farmhouse standing by the stream which had been chosen
as meeting-place. It was a shady spot, lying conveniently just where
the hill sprung out from the flat. Between the thin stems of the plane
trees the young men could see little knots of donkeys pasturing,
and a tall woman rubbing the nose of one of them, while another
woman was kneeling by the stream lapping water out of her palms.

As they entered the shady place, Helen looked up and then held
out her hand.

"I must introduce myself," she said. "I am Mrs. Ambrose."

Having shaken hands, she said, "That's my niece."

Rachel approached awkwardly. She held out her hand, but withdrew it.
"It's all wet," she said.

Scarcely had they spoken, when the first carriage drew up.

The donkeys were quickly jerked into attention, and the second
carriage arrived. By degrees the grove filled with people--
the Elliots, the Thornburys, Mr. Venning and Susan, Miss Allan,
Evelyn Murgatroyd, and Mr. Perrott. Mr. Hirst acted the part of
hoarse energetic sheep-dog. By means of a few words of caustic Latin
he had the animals marshalled, and by inclining a sharp shoulder he
lifted the ladies. "What Hewet fails to understand," he remarked,
"is that we must break the back of the ascent before midday."
He was assisting a young lady, by name Evelyn Murgatroyd, as he spoke.
She rose light as a bubble to her seat. With a feather drooping
from a broad-brimmed hat, in white from top to toe, she looked like
a gallant lady of the time of Charles the First leading royalist
troops into action.

"Ride with me," she commanded; and, as soon as Hirst had swung
himself across a mule, the two started, leading the cavalcade.

"You're not to call me Miss Murgatroyd. I hate it," she said.
"My name's Evelyn. What's yours?"

"St. John," he said.

"I like that," said Evelyn. "And what's your friend's name?"

"His initials being R. S. T., we call him Monk," said Hirst.

"Oh, you're all too clever," she said. "Which way?"  Pick me a branch.
Let's canter."

She gave her donkey a sharp cut with a switch and started forward.
The full and romantic career of Evelyn Murgatroyd is best hit off
by her own words, "Call me Evelyn and I'll call you St. John."
She said that on very slight provocation--her surname was enough--
but although a great many young men had answered her already
with considerable spirit she went on saying it and making choice
of none. But her donkey stumbled to a jog-trot, and she had to
ride in advance alone, for the path when it began to ascend one
of the spines of the hill became narrow and scattered with stones.
The cavalcade wound on like a jointed caterpillar, tufted with the
white parasols of the ladies, and the panama hats of the gentlemen.
At one point where the ground rose sharply, Evelyn M. jumped off,
threw her reins to the native boy, and adjured St. John Hirst to
dismount too. Their example was followed by those who felt the need
of stretching.

"I don't see any need to get off," said Miss Allan to Mrs. Elliot
just behind her, "considering the difficulty I had getting on."

"These little donkeys stand anything, _n'est-ce_ _pas_?"
Mrs. Elliot addressed the guide, who obligingly bowed his head.

"Flowers," said Helen, stooping to pick the lovely little bright
flowers which grew separately here and there. "You pinch their leaves
and then they smell," she said, laying one on Miss Allan's knee.

"Haven't we met before?" asked Miss Allan, looking at her.

"I was taking it for granted," Helen laughed, for in the confusion
of meeting they had not been introduced.

"How sensible!" chirped Mrs. Elliot. "That's just what one would
always like--only unfortunately it's not possible."  "Not possible?"
said Helen. "Everything's possible. Who knows what mayn't happen
before night-fall?" she continued, mocking the poor lady's timidity,
who depended implicitly upon one thing following another that the mere
glimpse of a world where dinner could be disregarded, or the table
moved one inch from its accustomed place, filled her with fears
for her own stability.

Higher and higher they went, becoming separated from the world.
The world, when they turned to look back, flattened itself out,
and was marked with squares of thin green and grey.

"Towns are very small," Rachel remarked, obscuring the whole
of Santa Marina and its suburbs with one hand. The sea filled
in all the angles of the coast smoothly, breaking in a white frill,
and here and there ships were set firmly in the blue. The sea
was stained with purple and green blots, and there was a glittering
line upon the rim where it met the sky. The air was very clear and
silent save for the sharp noise of grasshoppers and the hum of bees,
which sounded loud in the ear as they shot past and vanished.
The party halted and sat for a time in a quarry on the hillside.

"Amazingly clear," exclaimed St. John, identifying one cleft
in the land after another.

Evelyn M. sat beside him, propping her chin on her hand.
She surveyed the view with a certain look of triumph.

"D'you think Garibaldi was ever up here?" she asked Mr. Hirst.
Oh, if she had been his bride! If, instead of a picnic party,
this was a party of patriots, and she, red-shirted like the rest,
had lain among grim men, flat on the turf, aiming her gun at the white
turrets beneath them, screening her eyes to pierce through the smoke!
So thinking, her foot stirred restlessly, and she exclaimed:

"I don't call this _life_, do you?"

"What do you call life?" said St. John.

"Fighting--revolution," she said, still gazing at the doomed city.
"You only care for books, I know."

"You're quite wrong," said St. John.

"Explain," she urged, for there were no guns to be aimed at bodies,
and she turned to another kind of warfare.

"What do I care for? People," he said.

"Well, I _am_ surprised!" she exclaimed. "You look so awfully serious.
Do let's be friends and tell each other what we're like. I hate
being cautious, don't you?"

But St. John was decidedly cautious, as she could see by the sudden
constriction of his lips, and had no intention of revealing his
soul to a young lady. "The ass is eating my hat," he remarked,
and stretched out for it instead of answering her. Evelyn blushed
very slightly and then turned with some impetuosity upon Mr. Perrott,
and when they mounted again it was Mr. Perrott who lifted her to
her seat.

"When one has laid the eggs one eats
the omelette," said Hughling Elliot, exquisitely
in French, a hint to the rest of them that it was time to ride on again.

The midday sun which Hirst had foretold was beginning to beat
down hotly. The higher they got the more of the sky appeared,
until the mountain was only a small tent of earth against an enormous
blue background. The English fell silent; the natives who walked
beside the donkeys broke into queer wavering songs and tossed jokes
from one to the other. The way grew very steep, and each rider kept
his eyes fixed on the hobbling curved form of the rider and donkey
directly in front of him. Rather more strain was being put upon
their bodies than is quite legitimate in a party of pleasure,
and Hewet overheard one or two slightly grumbling remarks.

"Expeditions in such heat are perhaps a little unwise," Mrs. Elliot
murmured to Miss Allan.

But Miss Allan returned, "I always like to get to the top";
and it was true, although she was a big woman, stiff in the joints,
and unused to donkey-riding, but as her holidays were few she made
the most of them.

The vivacious white figure rode well in front; she had somehow possessed
herself of a leafy branch and wore it round her hat like a garland.
They went on for a few minutes in silence.

"The view will be wonderful," Hewet assured them, turning round
in his saddle and smiling encouragement. Rachel caught his eye and
smiled too. They struggled on for some time longer, nothing being
heard but the clatter of hooves striving on the loose stones.
Then they saw that Evelyn was off her ass, and that Mr. Perrott
was standing in the attitude of a statesman in Parliament Square,
stretching an arm of stone towards the view. A little to the left
of them was a low ruined wall, the stump of an Elizabethan watch-tower.

"I couldn't have stood it much longer," Mrs. Elliot confided to
Mrs. Thornbury, but the excitement of being at the top in another
moment and seeing the view prevented any one from answering her.
One after another they came out on the flat space at the top and stood
overcome with wonder. Before them they beheld an immense space--
grey sands running into forest, and forest merging in mountains,
and mountains washed by air, the infinite distances of South America.
A river ran across the plain, as flat as the land, and appearing
quite as stationary. The effect of so much space was at first
rather chilling. They felt themselves very small, and for some
time no one said anything. Then Evelyn exclaimed, "Splendid!"
She took hold of the hand that was next her; it chanced to be Miss
Allan's hand.

"North--South--East--West," said Miss Allan, jerking her head
slightly towards the points of the compass.

Hewet, who had gone a little in front, looked up at his guests
as if to justify himself for having brought them. He observed
how strangely the people standing in a row with their figures bent
slightly forward and their clothes plastered by the wind to the shape
of their bodies resembled naked statues. On their pedestal of earth
they looked unfamiliar and noble, but in another moment they had
broken their rank, and he had to see to the laying out of food.
Hirst came to his help, and they handed packets of chicken and bread
from one to another.

As St. John gave Helen her packet she looked him full in the face
and said:

"Do you remember--two women?"

He looked at her sharply.

"I do," he answered.

"So you're the two women!"  Hewet exclaimed, looking from Helen
to Rachel.

"Your lights tempted us," said Helen. "We watched you playing cards,
but we never knew that we were being watched."

"It was like a thing in a play," Rachel added.

"And Hirst couldn't describe you," said Hewet.

It was certainly odd to have seen Helen and to find nothing to say
about her.

Hughling Elliot put up his eyeglass and grasped the situation.

"I don't know of anything more dreadful," he said, pulling at the joint
of a chicken's leg, "than being seen when one isn't conscious of it.
One feels sure one has been caught doing something ridiculous--
looking at one's tongue in a hansom, for instance."

Now the others ceased to look at the view, and drawing together
sat down in a circle round the baskets.

"And yet those little looking-glasses in hansoms have a
fascination of their own," said Mrs. Thornbury. "One's features
look so different when one can only see a bit of them."

"There will soon be very few hansom cabs left," said Mrs. Elliot.
"And four-wheeled cabs--I assure you even at Oxford it's almost
impossible to get a four-wheeled cab."

"I wonder what happens to the horses," said Susan.

"Veal pie," said Arthur.

"It's high time that horses should become extinct anyhow," said Hirst.
"They're distressingly ugly, besides being vicious."

But Susan, who had been brought up to understand that the horse
is the noblest of God's creatures, could not agree, and Venning
thought Hirst an unspeakable ass, but was too polite not to continue
the conversation.

"When they see us falling out of aeroplanes they get some of their
own back, I expect," he remarked.

"You fly?" said old Mr. Thornbury, putting on his spectacles to look
at him.

"I hope to, some day," said Arthur.

Here flying was discussed at length, and Mrs. Thornbury delivered
an opinion which was almost a speech to the effect that it would
be quite necessary in time of war, and in England we were terribly
behind-hand. "If I were a young fellow," she concluded, "I should
certainly qualify."  It was odd to look at the little elderly lady,
in her grey coat and skirt, with a sandwich in her hand, her eyes lighting
up with zeal as she imagined herself a young man in an aeroplane.
For some reason, however, the talk did not run easily after this,
and all they said was about drink and salt and the view.
Suddenly Miss Allan, who was seated with her back to the ruined wall,
put down her sandwich, picked something off her neck, and remarked,
"I'm covered with little creatures."  It was true, and the discovery
was very welcome. The ants were pouring down a glacier of loose
earth heaped between the stones of the ruin--large brown ants
with polished bodies. She held out one on the back of her hand
for Helen to look at.

"Suppose they sting?" said Helen.

"They will not sting, but they may infest the victuals," said Miss Allan,
and measures were taken at once to divert the ants from their course.
At Hewet's suggestion it was decided to adopt the methods of modern
warfare against an invading army. The table-cloth represented
the invaded country, and round it they built barricades of baskets,
set up the wine bottles in a rampart, made fortifications of bread
and dug fosses of salt. When an ant got through it was exposed to
a fire of bread-crumbs, until Susan pronounced that that was cruel,
and rewarded those brave spirits with spoil in the shape of tongue.
Playing this game they lost their stiffness, and even became
unusually daring, for Mr. Perrott, who was very shy, said, "Permit me,"
and removed an ant from Evelyn's neck.

"It would be no laughing matter really," said Mrs. Elliot confidentially
to Mrs. Thornbury, "if an ant did get between the vest and the skin."

The noise grew suddenly more clamorous, for it was discovered that
a long line of ants had found their way on to the table-cloth by a
back entrance, and if success could be gauged by noise, Hewet had
every reason to think his party a success. Nevertheless he became,
for no reason at all, profoundly depressed.

"They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble," he thought, surveying his
guests from a little distance, where he was gathering together the plates.
He glanced at them all, stooping and swaying and gesticulating round
the table-cloth. Amiable and modest, respectable in many ways,
lovable even in their contentment and desire to be kind, how mediocre
they all were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one another!
There was Mrs. Thornbury, sweet but trivial in her maternal egoism;
Mrs. Elliot, perpetually complaining of her lot; her husband a mere
pea in a pod; and Susan--she had no self, and counted neither one way
nor the other; Venning was as honest and as brutal as a schoolboy;
poor old Thornbury merely trod his round like a horse in a mill;
and the less one examined into Evelyn's character the better,
he suspected. Yet these were the people with money, and to them
rather than to others was given the management of the world.
Put among them some one more vital, who cared for life or for beauty,
and what an agony, what a waste would they inflict on him if he tried
to share with them and not to scourge!

"There's Hirst," he concluded, coming to the figure of his friend;
with his usual little frown of concentration upon his forehead he
was peeling the skin off a banana. "And he's as ugly as sin."
For the ugliness of St. John Hirst, and the limitations that went
with it, he made the rest in some way responsible. It was their
fault that he had to live alone. Then he came to Helen, attracted to
her by the sound of her laugh. She was laughing at Miss Allan.
"You wear combinations in this heat?" she said in a voice which
was meant to be private. He liked the look of her immensely,
not so much her beauty, but her largeness and simplicity,
which made her stand out from the rest like a great stone woman,
and he passed on in a gentler mood. His eye fell upon Rachel.
She was lying back rather behind the others resting on one elbow;
she might have been thinking precisely the same thoughts as Hewet himself.
Her eyes were fixed rather sadly but not intently upon the row
of people opposite her. Hewet crawled up to her on his knees,
with a piece of bread in his hand.

"What are you looking at?" he asked.

She was a little startled, but answered directly, "Human beings."

Chapter XI

One after another they rose and stretched themselves, and in a few
minutes divided more or less into two separate parties. One of these
parties was dominated by Hughling Elliot and Mrs. Thornbury, who,
having both read the same books and considered the same questions,
were now anxious to name the places beneath them and to hang upon them
stores of information about navies and armies, political parties,
natives and mineral products--all of which combined, they said,
to prove that South America was the country of the future.

Evelyn M. listened with her bright blue eyes fixed upon the oracles.

"How it makes one long to be a man!" she exclaimed.

Mr. Perrott answered, surveying the plain, that a country with
a future was a very fine thing.

"If I were you," said Evelyn, turning to him and drawing her glove
vehemently through her fingers, "I'd raise a troop and conquer some
great territory and make it splendid. You'd want women for that.
I'd love to start life from the very beginning as it ought to be--
nothing squalid--but great halls and gardens and splendid men and women.
But you--you only like Law Courts!"

"And would you really be content without pretty frocks and sweets
and all the things young ladies like?" asked Mr. Perrott,
concealing a certain amount of pain beneath his ironical manner.

"I'm not a young lady," Evelyn flashed; she bit her underlip.
"Just because I like splendid things you laugh at me. Why are there
no men like Garibaldi now?" she demanded.

"Look here," said Mr. Perrott, "you don't give me a chance.
You think we ought to begin things fresh. Good. But I don't
see precisely--conquer a territory? They're all conquered already,
aren't they?"

"It's not any territory in particular," Evelyn explained.
"It's the idea, don't you see? We lead such tame lives. And I
feel sure you've got splendid things in you."

Hewet saw the scars and hollows in Mr. Perrott's sagacious face
relax pathetically. He could imagine the calculations which even
then went on within his mind, as to whether he would be justified
in asking a woman to marry him, considering that he made no more
than five hundred a year at the Bar, owned no private means,
and had an invalid sister to support. Mr. Perrott again knew
that he was not "quite," as Susan stated in her diary; not quite
a gentleman she meant, for he was the son of a grocer in Leeds,
had started life with a basket on his back, and now, though practically
indistinguishable from a born gentleman, showed his origin to keen
eyes in an impeccable neatness of dress, lack of freedom in manner,
extreme cleanliness of person, and a certain indescribable timidity
and precision with his knife and fork which might be the relic of days
when meat was rare, and the way of handling it by no means gingerly.

The two parties who were strolling about and losing their unity
now came together, and joined each other in a long stare over
the yellow and green patches of the heated landscape below.
The hot air danced across it, making it impossible to see the roofs
of a village on the plain distinctly. Even on the top of the mountain
where a breeze played lightly, it was very hot, and the heat, the food,
the immense space, and perhaps some less well-defined cause produced
a comfortable drowsiness and a sense of happy relaxation in them.
They did not say much, but felt no constraint in being silent.

"Suppose we go and see what's to be seen over there?" said Arthur
to Susan, and the pair walked off together, their departure certainly
sending some thrill of emotion through the rest.

"An odd lot, aren't they?" said Arthur. "I thought we should
never get 'em all to the top. But I'm glad we came, by Jove!
I wouldn't have missed this for something."

"I don't _like_ Mr. Hirst," said Susan inconsequently. "I suppose
he's very clever, but why should clever people be so--I expect
he's awfully nice, really," she added, instinctively qualifying
what might have seemed an unkind remark.

"Hirst? Oh, he's one of these learned chaps," said Arthur indifferently.
"He don't look as if he enjoyed it. You should hear him talking
to Elliot. It's as much as I can do to follow 'em at all.
. . . I was never good at my books."

With these sentences and the pauses that came between them they
reached a little hillock, on the top of which grew several slim trees.

"D'you mind if we sit down here?" said Arthur, looking about him.
"It's jolly in the shade--and the view--" They sat down, and looked
straight ahead of them in silence for some time.

"But I do envy those clever chaps sometimes," Arthur remarked.
"I don't suppose they ever . . ." He did not finish his sentence.

"I can't see why you should envy them," said Susan, with great sincerity.

"Odd things happen to one," said Arthur. "One goes along smoothly enough,
one thing following another, and it's all very jolly and plain sailing,
and you think you know all about it, and suddenly one doesn't know
where one is a bit, and everything seems different from what it
used to seem. Now to-day, coming up that path, riding behind you,
I seemed to see everything as if--" he paused and plucked a piece
of grass up by the roots. He scattered the little lumps of earth
which were sticking to the roots--"As if it had a kind of meaning.
You've made the difference to me," he jerked out, "I don't see
why I shouldn't tell you. I've felt it ever since I knew you.
. . . It's because I love you."

Even while they had been saying commonplace things Susan had been
conscious of the excitement of intimacy, which seemed not only to lay
bare something in her, but in the trees and the sky, and the progress
of his speech which seemed inevitable was positively painful to her,
for no human being had ever come so close to her before.

She was struck motionless as his speech went on, and her heart gave
great separate leaps at the last words. She sat with her fingers
curled round a stone, looking straight in front of her down the
mountain over the plain. So then, it had actually happened to her,
a proposal of marriage.

Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted. She was
drawing her breath with such difficulty that she could hardly answer.

"You might have known."  He seized her in his arms; again and again
and again they clasped each other, murmuring inarticulately.

"Well," sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, "that's the most
wonderful thing that's ever happened to me."  He looked as if he
were trying to put things seen in a dream beside real things.

There was a long silence.

"It's the most perfect thing in the world," Susan stated, very gently
and with great conviction. It was no longer merely a proposal
of marriage, but of marriage with Arthur, with whom she was in love.

In the silence that followed, holding his hand tightly in hers,
she prayed to God that she might make him a good wife.

"And what will Mr. Perrott say?" she asked at the end of it.

"Dear old fellow," said Arthur who, now that the first shock was over,
was relaxing into an enormous sense of pleasure and contentment.
"We must be very nice to him, Susan."

He told her how hard Perrott's life had been, and how absurdly
devoted he was to Arthur himself. He went on to tell her about
his mother, a widow lady, of strong character. In return Susan
sketched the portraits of her own family--Edith in particular,
her youngest sister, whom she loved better than any one else,
"except you, Arthur. . . . Arthur," she continued, "what was it
that you first liked me for?"

"It was a buckle you wore one night at sea," said Arthur,
after due consideration. "I remember noticing--it's an absurd
thing to notice!--that you didn't take peas, because I don't either."

From this they went on to compare their more serious tastes, or rather
Susan ascertained what Arthur cared about, and professed herself
very fond of the same thing. They would live in London, perhaps have
a cottage in the country near Susan's family, for they would find
it strange without her at first. Her mind, stunned to begin with,
now flew to the various changes that her engagement would make--
how delightful it would be to join the ranks of the married women--
no longer to hang on to groups of girls much younger than herself--
to escape the long solitude of an old maid's life. Now and then her
amazing good fortune overcame her, and she turned to Arthur with an
exclamation of love.

They lay in each other's arms and had no notion that they were observed.
Yet two figures suddenly appeared among the trees above them.
"Here's shade," began Hewet, when Rachel suddenly stopped dead.
They saw a man and woman lying on the ground beneath them, rolling
slightly this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened.
The man then sat upright and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan
Warrington, lay back upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed
look upon her face, as though she were not altogether conscious.
Nor could you tell from her expression whether she was happy, or had
suffered something. When Arthur again turned to her, butting her
as a lamb butts a ewe, Hewet and Rachel retreated without a word.
Hewet felt uncomfortably shy.

"I don't like that," said Rachel after a moment.

"I can remember not liking it either," said Hewet. "I can remember--"
but he changed his mind and continued in an ordinary tone of voice,
"Well, we may take it for granted that they're engaged. D'you think
he'll ever fly, or will she put a stop to that?"

But Rachel was still agitated; she could not get away from the sight
they had just seen. Instead of answering Hewet she persisted.

"Love's an odd thing, isn't it, making one's heart beat."

"It's so enormously important, you see," Hewet replied.
"Their lives are now changed for ever."

"And it makes one sorry for them too," Rachel continued, as though
she were tracing the course of her feelings. "I don't know either
of them, but I could almost burst into tears. That's silly,
isn't it?"

"Just because they're in love," said Hewet. "Yes," he added after
a moment's consideration, "there's something horribly pathetic
about it, I agree."

And now, as they had walked some way from the grove of trees,
and had come to a rounded hollow very tempting to the back,
they proceeded to sit down, and the impression of the lovers
lost some of its force, though a certain intensity of vision,
which was probably the result of the sight, remained with them.
As a day upon which any emotion has been repressed is different
from other days, so this day was now different, merely because they
had seen other people at a crisis of their lives.

"A great encampment of tents they might be," said Hewet, looking in
front of him at the mountains. "Isn't it like a water-colour too--
you know the way water-colours dry in ridges all across the paper--
I've been wondering what they looked like."

His eyes became dreamy, as though he were matching things,
and reminded Rachel in their colour of the green flesh of a snail.
She sat beside him looking at the mountains too. When it became
painful to look any longer, the great size of the view seeming to
enlarge her eyes beyond their natural limit, she looked at the ground;
it pleased her to scrutinise this inch of the soil of South
America so minutely that she noticed every grain of earth and made
it into a world where she was endowed with the supreme power.
She bent a blade of grass, and set an insect on the utmost tassel
of it, and wondered if the insect realised his strange adventure,
and thought how strange it was that she should have bent that tassel
rather than any other of the million tassels.

"You've never told me you name," said Hewet suddenly.
"Miss Somebody Vinrace. . . . I like to know people's Christian names."

"Rachel," she replied.

"Rachel," he repeated. "I have an aunt called Rachel, who put
the life of Father Damien into verse. She is a religious fanatic--
the result of the way she was brought up, down in Northamptonshire,
never seeing a soul. Have you any aunts?"

"I live with them," said Rachel.

"And I wonder what they're doing now?"  Hewet enquired.

"They are probably buying wool," Rachel determined. She tried
to describe them. "They are small, rather pale women," she began,
"very clean. We live in Richmond. They have an old dog, too,
who will only eat the marrow out of bones. . . . They are
always going to church. They tidy their drawers a good deal."
But here she was overcome by the difficulty of describing people.

"It's impossible to believe that it's all going on still!"
she exclaimed.

The sun was behind them and two long shadows suddenly lay upon the
ground in front of them, one waving because it was made by a skirt,
and the other stationary, because thrown by a pair of legs in trousers.

"You look very comfortable!" said Helen's voice above them.

"Hirst," said Hewet, pointing at the scissorlike shadow; he then
rolled round to look up at them.

"There's room for us all here," he said.

When Hirst had seated himself comfortably, he said:

"Did you congratulate the young couple?"

It appeared that, coming to the same spot a few minutes after Hewet
and Rachel, Helen and Hirst had seen precisely the same thing.

"No, we didn't congratulate them," said Hewet. "They seemed
very happy."

"Well," said Hirst, pursing up his lips, "so long as I needn't
marry either of them--"

"We were very much moved," said Hewet.

"I thought you would be," said Hirst. "Which was it, Monk?
The thought of the immortal passions, or the thought of new-born
males to keep the Roman Catholics out? I assure you," he said
to Helen, "he's capable of being moved by either."

Rachel was a good deal stung by his banter, which she felt to be
directed equally against them both, but she could think of no repartee.

"Nothing moves Hirst," Hewet laughed; he did not seem to be stung
at all. "Unless it were a transfinite number falling in love with
a finite one--I suppose such things do happen, even in mathematics."

"On the contrary," said Hirst with a touch of annoyance,
"I consider myself a person of very strong passions."
It was clear from the way he spoke that he meant it seriously;
he spoke of course for the benefit of the ladies.

"By the way, Hirst," said Hewet, after a pause, "I have a terrible
confession to make. Your book--the poems of Wordsworth, which if
you remember I took off your table just as we were starting,
and certainly put in my pocket here--"

"Is lost," Hirst finished for him.

"I consider that there is still a chance," Hewet urged, slapping
himself to right and left, "that I never did take it after all."

"No," said Hirst. "It is here."  He pointed to his breast.

"Thank God," Hewet exclaimed. "I need no longer feel as though
I'd murdered a child!"

"I should think you were always losing things," Helen remarked,
looking at him meditatively.

"I don't lose things," said Hewet. "I mislay them. That was the
reason why Hirst refused to share a cabin with me on the voyage out."

"You came out together?"  Helen enquired.

"I propose that each member of this party now gives a short biographical
sketch of himself or herself," said Hirst, sitting upright.
"Miss Vinrace, you come first; begin."

Rachel stated that she was twenty-four years of age, the daughter
of a ship-owner, that she had never been properly educated;
played the piano, had no brothers or sisters, and lived at Richmond
with aunts, her mother being dead.

"Next," said Hirst, having taken in these facts; he pointed at Hewet.
"I am the son of an English gentleman. I am twenty-seven,"
Hewet began. "My father was a fox-hunting squire. He died when I
was ten in the hunting field. I can remember his body coming home,
on a shutter I suppose, just as I was going down to tea,
and noticing that there was jam for tea, and wondering whether I
should be allowed--"

"Yes; but keep to the facts," Hirst put in.

"I was educated at Winchester and Cambridge, which I had to leave
after a time. I have done a good many things since--"

"Profession?"

"None--at least--"

"Tastes?"

"Literary. I'm writing a novel."

"Brothers and sisters?"

"Three sisters, no brother, and a mother."

"Is that all we're to hear about you?" said Helen. She stated
that she was very old--forty last October, and her father had been
a solicitor in the city who had gone bankrupt, for which reason she
had never had much education--they lived in one place after another--
but an elder brother used to lend her books.

"If I were to tell you everything--" she stopped and smiled.
"It would take too long," she concluded. "I married when I was thirty,
and I have two children. My husband is a scholar. And now--
it's your turn," she nodded at Hirst.

"You've left out a great deal," he reproved her. "My name is
St. John Alaric Hirst," he began in a jaunty tone of voice.
"I'm twenty-four years old. I'm the son of the Reverend
Sidney Hirst, vicar of Great Wappyng in Norfolk. Oh, I got
scholarships everywhere--Westminster--King's. I'm now a fellow
of King's. Don't it sound dreary? Parents both alive (alas).
Two brothers and one sister. I'm a very distinguished young man," he added.

"One of the three, or is it five, most distinguished men in England,"
Hewet remarked.

"Quite correct," said Hirst.

"That's all very interesting," said Helen after a pause.
"But of course we've left out the only questions that matter.
For instance, are we Christians?"

"I am not," "I am not," both the young men replied.

"I am," Rachel stated.

"You believe in a personal God?"  Hirst demanded, turning round
and fixing her with his eyeglasses.

"I believe--I believe," Rachel stammered, "I believe there are
things we don't know about, and the world might change in a minute
and anything appear."

At this Helen laughed outright. "Nonsense," she said. "You're not
a Christian. You've never thought what you are.--And there are
lots of other questions," she continued, "though perhaps we can't
ask them yet."  Although they had talked so freely they were all
uncomfortably conscious that they really knew nothing about each other.

"The important questions," Hewet pondered, "the really interesting ones.
I doubt that one ever does ask them."

Rachel, who was slow to accept the fact that only a very few things
can be said even by people who know each other well, insisted on
knowing what he meant.

"Whether we've ever been in love?" she enquired. "Is that the kind
of question you mean?"

Again Helen laughed at her, benignantly strewing her with handfuls
of the long tasselled grass, for she was so brave and so foolish.

"Oh, Rachel," she cried. "It's like having a puppy in the house
having you with one--a puppy that brings one's underclothes down
into the hall."

But again the sunny earth in front of them was crossed by fantastic
wavering figures, the shadows of men and women.

"There they are!" exclaimed Mrs. Elliot. There was a touch of
peevishness in her voice. "And we've had _such_ a hunt to find you.
Do you know what the time is?"

Mrs. Elliot and Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury now confronted them; Mrs. Elliot
was holding out her watch, and playfully tapping it upon the face.
Hewet was recalled to the fact that this was a party for which he
was responsible, and he immediately led them back to the watch-tower,
where they were to have tea before starting home again. A bright
crimson scarf fluttered from the top of the wall, which Mr. Perrott
and Evelyn were tying to a stone as the others came up. The heat
had changed just so far that instead of sitting in the shadow they
sat in the sun, which was still hot enough to paint their faces red
and yellow, and to colour great sections of the earth beneath them.

"There's nothing half so nice as tea!" said Mrs. Thornbury,
taking her cup.

"Nothing," said Helen. "Can't you remember as a child chopping
up hay--" she spoke much more quickly than usual, and kept her eye
fixed upon Mrs. Thornbury, "and pretending it was tea, and getting
scolded by the nurses--why I can't imagine, except that nurses
are such brutes, won't allow pepper instead of salt though there's
no earthly harm in it. Weren't your nurses just the same?"

During this speech Susan came into the group, and sat down by
Helen's side. A few minutes later Mr. Venning strolled up from
the opposite direction. He was a little flushed, and in the mood
to answer hilariously whatever was said to him.

"What have you been doing to that old chap's grave?" he asked,
pointing to the red flag which floated from the top of the stones.

"We have tried to make him forget his misfortune in having died
three hundred years ago," said Mr. Perrott.

"It would be awful--to be dead!" ejaculated Evelyn M.

"To be dead?" said Hewet. "I don't think it would be awful.
It's quite easy to imagine. When you go to bed to-night fold your
hands so--breathe slower and slower--" He lay back with his hands
clasped upon his breast, and his eyes shut, "Now," he murmured in an
even monotonous voice, "I shall never, never, never move again."
His body, lying flat among them, did for a moment suggest death.

"This is a horrible exhibition, Mr. Hewet!" cried Mrs. Thornbury.

"More cake for us!" said Arthur.

"I assure you there's nothing horrible about it," said Hewet,
sitting up and laying hands upon the cake.

"It's so natural," he repeated. "People with children should make
them do that exercise every night. . . . Not that I look forward
to being dead."

"And when you allude to a grave," said Mr. Thornbury, who spoke almost
for the first time, "have you any authority for calling that ruin a grave?
I am quite with you in refusing to accept the common interpretation
which declares it to be the remains of an Elizabethan watch-tower--
any more than I believe that the circular mounds or barrows
which we find on the top of our English downs were camps.
The antiquaries call everything a camp. I am always asking them,
Well then, where do you think our ancestors kept their cattle?
Half the camps in England are merely the ancient pound or barton
as we call it in my part of the world. The argument that no one
would keep his cattle in such exposed and inaccessible spots has
no weight at all, if you reflect that in those days a man's cattle
were his capital, his stock-in-trade, his daughter's dowries.
Without cattle he was a serf, another man's man. . . ." His eyes
slowly lost their intensity, and he muttered a few concluding words
under his breath, looking curiously old and forlorn.

Hughling Elliot, who might have been expected to engage the old
gentleman in argument, was absent at the moment. He now came up
holding out a large square of cotton upon which a fine design was
printed in pleasant bright colours that made his hand look pale.

"A bargain," he announced, laying it down on the cloth. "I've just
bought it from the big man with the ear-rings. Fine, isn't it?
It wouldn't suit every one, of course, but it's just the thing--
isn't it, Hilda?--for Mrs. Raymond Parry."

"Mrs. Raymond Parry!" cried Helen and Mrs. Thornbury at the same moment.

They looked at each other as though a mist hitherto obscuring
their faces had been blown away.

"Ah--you have been to those wonderful parties too?"  Mrs. Elliot
asked with interest.

Mrs. Parry's drawing-room, though thousands of miles away,
behind a vast curve of water on a tiny piece of earth, came before
their eyes. They who had had no solidity or anchorage before seemed
to be attached to it somehow, and at once grown more substantial.
Perhaps they had been in the drawing-room at the same moment;
perhaps they had passed each other on the stairs; at any rate they
knew some of the same people. They looked one another up and down
with new interest. But they could do no more than look at each other,
for there was no time to enjoy the fruits of the discovery.
The donkeys were advancing, and it was advisable to begin the
descent immediately, for the night fell so quickly that it would
be dark before they were home again.

Accordingly, remounting in order, they filed off down the hillside.
Scraps of talk came floating back from one to another. There were
jokes to begin with, and laughter; some walked part of the way,
and picked flowers, and sent stones bounding before them.

"Who writes the best Latin verse in your college, Hirst?"  Mr. Elliot
called back incongruously, and Mr. Hirst returned that he had no idea.

The dusk fell as suddenly as the natives had warned them, the hollows
of the mountain on either side filling up with darkness and the path
becoming so dim that it was surprising to hear the donkeys' hooves still
striking on hard rock. Silence fell upon one, and then upon another,
until they were all silent, their minds spilling out into the deep
blue air. The way seemed shorter in the dark than in the day;
and soon the lights of the town were seen on the flat far beneath them.

Suddenly some one cried, "Ah!"

In a moment the slow yellow drop rose again from the plain below;
it rose, paused, opened like a flower, and fell in a shower of drops.

"Fireworks," they cried.

Another went up more quickly; and then another; they could almost
hear it twist and roar.

"Some Saint's day, I suppose," said a voice. The rush and embrace
of the rockets as they soared up into the air seemed like the fiery
way in which lovers suddenly rose and united, leaving the crowd
gazing up at them with strained white faces. But Susan and Arthur,
riding down the hill, never said a word to each other, and kept
accurately apart.

Then the fireworks became erratic, and soon they ceased altogether,
and the rest of the journey was made almost in darkness,
the mountain being a great shadow behind them, and bushes and trees
little shadows which threw darkness across the road. Among the
plane-trees they separated, bundling into carriages and driving off,
without saying good-night, or saying it only in a half-muffled way.

It was so late that there was no time for normal conversation
between their arrival at the hotel and their retirement to bed.
But Hirst wandered into Hewet's room with a collar in his hand.

"Well, Hewet," he remarked, on the crest of a gigantic yawn,
"that was a great success, I consider."  He yawned. "But take care
you're not landed with that young woman. . . . I don't really
like young women. . . ."

Hewet was too much drugged by hours in the open air to make any reply.
In fact every one of the party was sound asleep within ten minutes
or so of each other, with the exception of Susan Warrington.
She lay for a considerable time looking blankly at the wall opposite,
her hands clasped above her heart, and her light burning by her side.
All articulate thought had long ago deserted her; her heart seemed
to have grown to the size of a sun, and to illuminate her entire body,
shedding like the sun a steady tide of warmth.

"I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy," she repeated. "I love every one.
I'm happy."

Chapter XII

When Susan's engagement had been approved at home, and made public
to any one who took an interest in it at the hotel--and by this time
the society at the hotel was divided so as to point to invisible
chalk-marks such as Mr. Hirst had described, the news was felt to
justify some celebration--an expedition? That had been done already.
A dance then. The advantage of a dance was that it abolished one
of those long evenings which were apt to become tedious and lead
to absurdly early hours in spite of bridge.

Two or three people standing under the erect body of the stuffed
leopard in the hall very soon had the matter decided. Evelyn slid
a pace or two this way and that, and pronounced that the floor
was excellent. Signor Rodriguez informed them of an old Spaniard
who fiddled at weddings--fiddled so as to make a tortoise waltz;
and his daughter, although endowed with eyes as black as
coal-scuttles, had the same power over the piano. If there
were any so sick or so surly as to prefer sedentary occupations
on the night in question to spinning and watching others spin,
the drawing-room and billiard-room were theirs. Hewet made it
his business to conciliate the outsiders as much as possible.
To Hirst's theory of the invisible chalk-marks he would pay no
attention whatever. He was treated to a snub or two, but, in reward,
found obscure lonely gentlemen delighted to have this opportunity
of talking to their kind, and the lady of doubtful character showed
every symptom of confiding her case to him in the near future.
Indeed it was made quite obvious to him that the two or three hours
between dinner and bed contained an amount of unhappiness, which was
really pitiable, so many people had not succeeded in making friends.

It was settled that the dance was to be on Friday, one week after
the engagement, and at dinner Hewet declared himself satisfied.

"They're all coming!" he told Hirst. "Pepper!" he called,
seeing William Pepper slip past in the wake of the soup with
a pamphlet beneath his arm, "We're counting on you to open the ball."

"You will certainly put sleep out of the question," Pepper returned.

"You are to take the floor with Miss Allan," Hewet continued,
consulting a sheet of pencilled notes.

Pepper stopped and began a discourse upon round dances, country dances,
morris dances, and quadrilles, all of which are entirely superior
to the bastard waltz and spurious polka which have ousted them
most unjustly in contemporary popularity--when the waiters gently
pushed him on to his table in the corner.

The dining-room at this moment had a certain fantastic resemblance
to a farmyard scattered with grain on which bright pigeons
kept descending. Almost all the ladies wore dresses which they
had not yet displayed, and their hair rose in waves and scrolls
so as to appear like carved wood in Gothic churches rather
than hair. The dinner was shorter and less formal than usual,
even the waiters seeming to be affected with the general excitement.
Ten minutes before the clock struck nine the committee made a tour
through the ballroom. The hall, when emptied of its furniture,
brilliantly lit, adorned with flowers whose scent tinged the air,
presented a wonderful appearance of ethereal gaiety.

"It's like a starlit sky on an absolutely cloudless night,"
Hewet murmured, looking about him, at the airy empty room.

"A heavenly floor, anyhow," Evelyn added, taking a run and sliding
two or three feet along.

"What about those curtains?" asked Hirst. The crimson curtains
were drawn across the long windows. "It's a perfect night outside."

"Yes, but curtains inspire confidence," Miss Allan decided.
"When the ball is in full swing it will be time to draw them.
We might even open the windows a little. . . . If we do it now elderly
people will imagine there are draughts.

Her wisdom had come to be recognised, and held in respect.
Meanwhile as they stood talking, the musicians were unwrapping
their instruments, and the violin was repeating again and again
a note struck upon the piano. Everything was ready to begin.

After a few minutes' pause, the father, the daughter, and the
son-in-law who played the horn flourished with one accord.
Like the rats who followed the piper, heads instantly appeared
in the doorway. There was another flourish; and then the trio
dashed spontaneously into the triumphant swing of the waltz.
It was as though the room were instantly flooded with water.
After a moment's hesitation first one couple, then another,
leapt into mid-stream, and went round and round in the eddies.
The rhythmic swish of the dancers sounded like a swirling pool.
By degrees the room grew perceptibly hotter. The smell of kid
gloves mingled with the strong scent of flowers. The eddies
seemed to circle faster and faster, until the music wrought itself
into a crash, ceased, and the circles were smashed into little
separate bits. The couples struck off in different directions,
leaving a thin row of elderly people stuck fast to the walls,
and here and there a piece of trimming or a handkerchief or a
flower lay upon the floor. There was a pause, and then the music
started again, the eddies whirled, the couples circled round in them,
until there was a crash, and the circles were broken up into
separate pieces.

When this had happened about five times, Hirst, who leant against
a window-frame, like some singular gargoyle, perceived that Helen
Ambrose and Rachel stood in the doorway. The crowd was such
that they could not move, but he recognised them by a piece of
Helen's shoulder and a glimpse of Rachel's head turning round.
He made his way to them; they greeted him with relief.

"We are suffering the tortures of the damned," said Helen.

"This is my idea of hell," said Rachel.

Her eyes were bright and she looked bewildered.

Hewet and Miss Allan, who had been waltzing somewhat laboriously,
paused and greeted the newcomers.

"This _is_ nice," said Hewet. "But where is Mr. Ambrose?"

"Pindar," said Helen. "May a married woman who was forty in
October dance? I can't stand still."  She seemed to fade into Hewet,
and they both dissolved in the crowd.

"We must follow suit," said Hirst to Rachel, and he took her
resolutely by the elbow. Rachel, without being expert, danced well,
because of a good ear for rhythm, but Hirst had no taste for music,
and a few dancing lessons at Cambridge had only put him into possession
of the anatomy of a waltz, without imparting any of its spirit.
A single turn proved to them that their methods were incompatible;
instead of fitting into each other their bones seemed to jut out
in angles making smooth turning an impossibility, and cutting,
moreover, into the circular progress of the other dancers.

"Shall we stop?" said Hirst. Rachel gathered from his expression
that he was annoyed.

They staggered to seats in the corner, from which they had a view
of the room. It was still surging, in waves of blue and yellow,
striped by the black evening-clothes of the gentlemen.

"An amazing spectacle," Hirst remarked. "Do you dance much
in London?"  They were both breathing fast, and both a little excited,
though each was determined not to show any excitement at all.

"Scarcely ever. Do you?"

"My people give a dance every Christmas."

"This isn't half a bad floor," Rachel said. Hirst did not attempt
to answer her platitude. He sat quite silent, staring at the dancers.
After three minutes the silence became so intolerable to Rachel
that she was goaded to advance another commonplace about the beauty
of the night. Hirst interrupted her ruthlessly.

"Was that all nonsense what you said the other day about being
a Christian and having no education?" he asked.

"It was practically true," she replied. "But I also play the piano
very well," she said, "better, I expect than any one in this room.
You are the most distinguished man in England, aren't you?"
she asked shyly.

"One of the three," he corrected.

Helen whirling past here tossed a fan into Rachel's lap.

"She is very beautiful," Hirst remarked.

They were again silent. Rachel was wondering whether he thought
her also nice-looking; St. John was considering the immense
difficulty of talking to girls who had no experience of life.
Rachel had obviously never thought or felt or seen anything,
and she might be intelligent or she might be just like all the rest.
But Hewet's taunt rankled in his mind--"you don't know how to get
on with women," and he was determined to profit by this opportunity.
Her evening-clothes bestowed on her just that degree of unreality
and distinction which made it romantic to speak to her, and stirred
a desire to talk, which irritated him because he did not know
how to begin. He glanced at her, and she seemed to him very
remote and inexplicable, very young and chaste. He drew a sigh,
and began.

"About books now. What have you read? Just Shakespeare and the Bible?"

"I haven't read many classics," Rachel stated. She was slightly
annoyed by his jaunty and rather unnatural manner, while his masculine
acquirements induced her to take a very modest view of her own power.

"D'you mean to tell me you've reached the age of twenty-four without
reading Gibbon?" he demanded.

"Yes, I have," she answered.

"Mon Dieu!" he exclaimed, throwing out his hands. "You must begin
to-morrow. I shall send you my copy. What I want to know is--"
he looked at her critically. "You see, the problem is, can one
really talk to you? Have you got a mind, or are you like the rest
of your sex? You seem to me absurdly young compared with men
of your age."

Rachel looked at him but said nothing.

"About Gibbon," he continued. "D'you think you'll be able
to appreciate him? He's the test, of course. It's awfully
difficult to tell about women," he continued, "how much, I mean,
is due to lack of training, and how much is native incapacity.
I don't see myself why you shouldn't understand--only I suppose you've
led an absurd life until now--you've just walked in a crocodile,
I suppose, with your hair down your back."

The music was again beginning. Hirst's eye wandered about the room
in search of Mrs. Ambrose. With the best will in the world he
was conscious that they were not getting on well together.

"I'd like awfully to lend you books," he said, buttoning his gloves,
and rising from his seat. "We shall meet again. "I'm going to leave
you now."

He got up and left her.

Rachel looked round. She felt herself surrounded, like a child at
a party, by the faces of strangers all hostile to her, with hooked
noses and sneering, indifferent eyes. She was by a window,
she pushed it open with a jerk. She stepped out into the garden.
Her eyes swam with tears of rage.

"Damn that man!" she exclaimed, having acquired some of Helen's words.
"Damn his insolence!"

She stood in the middle of the pale square of light which the
window she had opened threw upon the grass. The forms of great
black trees rose massively in front of her. She stood still,
looking at them, shivering slightly with anger and excitement.
She heard the trampling and swinging of the dancers behind her,
and the rhythmic sway of the waltz music.

"There are trees," she said aloud. Would the trees make up
for St. John Hirst? She would be a Persian princess far
from civilisation, riding her horse upon the mountains alone,
and making her women sing to her in the evening, far from all this,
from the strife and men and women--a form came out of the shadow;
a little red light burnt high up in its blackness.

"Miss Vinrace, is it?" said Hewet, peering at her. "You were
dancing with Hirst?"

"He's made me furious!" she cried vehemently. "No one's any right
to be insolent!"

"Insolent?"  Hewet repeated, taking his cigar from his mouth
in surprise. "Hirst--insolent?"

"It's insolent to--" said Rachel, and stopped. She did not know
exactly why she had been made so angry. With a great effort she
pulled herself together.

"Oh, well," she added, the vision of Helen and her mockery before her,
"I dare say I'm a fool."  She made as though she were going back
into the ballroom, but Hewet stopped her.

"Please explain to me," he said. "I feel sure Hirst didn't mean
to hurt you."

When Rachel tried to explain, she found it very difficult.
She could not say that she found the vision of herself walking
in a crocodile with her hair down her back peculiarly unjust
and horrible, nor could she explain why Hirst's assumption of
the superiority of his nature and experience had seemed to her not
only galling but terrible--as if a gate had clanged in her face.
Pacing up and down the terrace beside Hewet she said bitterly:

"It's no good; we should live separate; we cannot understand each other;
we only bring out what's worst."

Hewet brushed aside her generalisation as to the natures of
the two sexes, for such generalisations bored him and seemed
to him generally untrue. But, knowing Hirst, he guessed fairly
accurately what had happened, and, though secretly much amused,
was determined that Rachel should not store the incident
away in her mind to take its place in the view she had of life.

"Now you'll hate him," he said, "which is wrong. Poor old Hirst--
he can't help his method. And really, Miss Vinrace, he was doing his best;
he was paying you a compliment--he was trying--he was trying--"
he could not finish for the laughter that overcame him.

Rachel veered round suddenly and laughed out too. She saw that there
was something ridiculous about Hirst, and perhaps about herself.

"It's his way of making friends, I suppose," she laughed. "Well--I
shall do my part. I shall begin--'Ugly in body, repulsive in mind
as you are, Mr. Hirst--"

"Hear, hear!" cried Hewet. "That's the way to treat him. You see,
Miss Vinrace, you must make allowances for Hirst. He's lived all
his life in front of a looking-glass, so to speak, in a beautiful
panelled room, hung with Japanese prints and lovely old chairs
and tables, just one splash of colour, you know, in the right place,--
between the windows I think it is,--and there he sits hour after
hour with his toes on the fender, talking about philosophy and
God and his liver and his heart and the hearts of his friends.
They're all broken. You can't expect him to be at his best in
a ballroom. He wants a cosy, smoky, masculine place, where he can
stretch his legs out, and only speak when he's got something to say.
For myself, I find it rather dreary. But I do respect it.
They're all so much in earnest. They do take the serious things
very seriously."

The description of Hirst's way of life interested Rachel so much
that she almost forgot her private grudge against him, and her
respect revived.

"They are really very clever then?" she asked.

"Of course they are. So far as brains go I think it's true what he
said the other day; they're the cleverest people in England. But--
you ought to take him in hand," he added. "There's a great deal more
in him than's ever been got at. He wants some one to laugh at him.
. . . The idea of Hirst telling you that you've had no experiences!
Poor old Hirst!"

They had been pacing up and down the terrace while they talked, and now
one by one the dark windows were uncurtained by an invisible hand,
and panes of light fell regularly at equal intervals upon the grass.
They stopped to look in at the drawing-room, and perceived Mr. Pepper
writing alone at a table.

"There's Pepper writing to his aunt," said Hewet. "She must
be a very remarkable old lady, eighty-five he tells me, and he
takes her for walking tours in the New Forest. . . . Pepper!"
he cried, rapping on the window. "Go and do your duty. Miss Allan
expects you."

When they came to the windows of the ballroom, the swing
of the dancers and the lilt of the music was irresistible.

"Shall we?" said Hewet, and they clasped hands and swept off
magnificently into the great swirling pool. Although this was only
the second time they had met, the first time they had seen a man
and woman kissing each other, and the second time Mr. Hewet had found
that a young woman angry is very like a child. So that when they
joined hands in the dance they felt more at their ease than is usual.

It was midnight and the dance was now at its height. Servants were
peeping in at the windows; the garden was sprinkled with the white
shapes of couples sitting out. Mrs. Thornbury and Mrs. Elliot
sat side by side under a palm tree, holding fans, handkerchiefs,
and brooches deposited in their laps by flushed maidens.
Occasionally they exchanged comments.

"Miss Warrington _does_ look happy," said Mrs. Elliot; they both smiled;
they both sighed.

"He has a great deal of character," said Mrs. Thornbury,
alluding to Arthur.

"And character is what one wants," said Mrs. Elliot. "Now that
young man is _clever_ enough," she added, nodding at Hirst,
who came past with Miss Allan on his arm.

"He does not look strong," said Mrs. Thornbury. "His complexion is
not good.--Shall I tear it off?" she asked, for Rachel had stopped,
conscious of a long strip trailing behind her.

"I hope you are enjoying yourselves?"  Hewet asked the ladies.

"This is a very familiar position for me!" smiled Mrs. Thornbury.
"I have brought out five daughters--and they all loved dancing!
You love it too, Miss Vinrace?" she asked, looking at Rachel with
maternal eyes. "I know I did when I was your age. How I used to beg
my mother to let me stay--and now I sympathise with the poor mothers--
but I sympathise with the daughters too!"

She smiled sympathetically, and at the same time rather keenly,
at Rachel.

"They seem to find a great deal to say to each other," said Mrs. Elliot,
looking significantly at the backs of the couple as they turned away.
"Did you notice at the picnic? He was the only person who could
make her utter."

"Her father is a very interesting man," said Mrs. Thornbury.
"He has one of the largest shipping businesses in Hull. He made
a very able reply, you remember, to Mr. Asquith at the last election.
It is so interesting to find that a man of his experience is a
strong Protectionist."

She would have liked to discuss politics, which interested
her more than personalities, but Mrs. Elliot would only talk
about the Empire in a less abstract form.

"I hear there are dreadful accounts from England about the rats,"
she said. "A sister-in-law, who lives at Norwich, tells me it
has been quite unsafe to order poultry. The plague--you see.
It attacks the rats, and through them other creatures."

"And the local authorities are not taking proper steps?"
asked Mrs. Thornbury.

"That she does not say. But she describes the attitude of the
educated people--who should know better--as callous in the extreme.
Of course, my sister-in-law is one of those active modern women,
who always takes things up, you know--the kind of woman one admires,
though one does not feel, at least I do not feel--but then she has
a constitution of iron."

Mrs. Elliot, brought back to the consideration of her own delicacy,
here sighed.

"A very animated face," said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at Evelyn M. who
had stopped near them to pin tight a scarlet flower at her breast.
It would not stay, and, with a spirited gesture of impatience,
she thrust it into her partner's button-hole. He was a tall
melancholy youth, who received the gift as a knight might receive
his lady's token.

"Very trying to the eyes," was Mrs. Eliot's next remark, after watching
the yellow whirl in which so few of the whirlers had either name
or character for her, for a few minutes. Bursting out of the crowd,
Helen approached them, and took a vacant chair.

"May I sit by you?" she said, smiling and breathing fast.
"I suppose I ought to be ashamed of myself," she went on, sitting down,
"at my age."

Her beauty, now that she was flushed and animated, was more expansive
than usual, and both the ladies felt the same desire to touch her.

"I _am_ enjoying myself," she panted. "Movement--isn't it amazing?"

"I have always heard that nothing comes up to dancing if one is
a good dancer," said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at her with a smile.

Helen swayed slightly as if she sat on wires.

"I could dance for ever!" she said. "They ought to let themselves
go more!" she exclaimed. "They ought to leap and swing. Look!
How they mince!"

"Have you seen those wonderful Russian dancers?" began Mrs. Elliot.
But Helen saw her partner coming and rose as the moon rises.
She was half round the room before they took their eyes off her,
for they could not help admiring her, although they thought it a little
odd that a woman of her age should enjoy dancing.

Directly Helen was left alone for a minute she was joined
by St. John Hirst, who had been watching for an opportunity.

"Should you mind sitting out with me?" he asked. "I'm quite
incapable of dancing."  He piloted Helen to a corner which was
supplied with two arm-chairs, and thus enjoyed the advantage
of semi-privacy. They sat down, and for a few minutes Helen
was too much under the influence of dancing to speak.

"Astonishing!" she exclaimed at last. "What sort of shape can
she think her body is?"  This remark was called forth by a lady
who came past them, waddling rather than walking, and leaning
on the arm of a stout man with globular green eyes set in a fat
white face. Some support was necessary, for she was very stout,
and so compressed that the upper part of her body hung considerably
in advance of her feet, which could only trip in tiny steps,
owing to the tightness of the skirt round her ankles.
The dress itself consisted of a small piece of shiny yellow satin,
adorned here and there indiscriminately with round shields of blue
and green beads made to imitate hues of a peacock's breast.
On the summit of a frothy castle of hair a purple plume stood erect,
while her short neck was encircled by a black velvet ribbon knobbed
with gems, and golden bracelets were tightly wedged into the flesh
of her fat gloved arms. She had the face of an impertinent
but jolly little pig, mottled red under a dusting of powder.

St. John could not join in Helen's laughter.

"It makes me sick," he declared. "The whole thing makes me sick.
. . . Consider the minds of those people--their feelings.
Don't you agree?"

"I always make a vow never to go to another party of any description,"
Helen replied, "and I always break it."

She leant back in her chair and looked laughingly at the young man.
She could see that he was genuinely cross, if at the same time
slightly excited.

"However," he said, resuming his jaunty tone, "I suppose one must
just make up one's mind to it."

"To what?"

"There never will be more than five people in the world worth
talking to."

Slowly the flush and sparkle in Helen's face died away, and she
looked as quiet and as observant as usual.

"Five people?" she remarked. "I should say there were more than five."

"You've been very fortunate, then," said Hirst. "Or perhaps I've
been very unfortunate."  He became silent.

"Should you say I was a difficult kind of person to get on with?"
he asked sharply.

"Most clever people are when they're young," Helen replied.

"And of course I am--immensely clever," said Hirst. "I'm infinitely
cleverer than Hewet. It's quite possible," he continued in his
curiously impersonal manner, "that I'm going to be one of the people
who really matter. That's utterly different from being clever,
though one can't expect one's family to see it," he added bitterly.

Helen thought herself justified in asking, "Do you find your family
difficult to get on with?"

"Intolerable. . . . They want me to be a peer and a privy councillor.
I've come out here partly in order to settle the matter. It's got to
be settled. Either I must go to the bar, or I must stay on in Cambridge.
Of course, there are obvious drawbacks to each, but the arguments
certainly do seem to me in favour of Cambridge. This kind of thing!"
he waved his hand at the crowded ballroom. "Repulsive. I'm conscious
of great powers of affection too. I'm not susceptible, of course,
in the way Hewet is. I'm very fond of a few people. I think,
for example, that there's something to be said for my mother,
though she is in many ways so deplorable. . . . At Cambridge,
of course, I should inevitably become the most important man
in the place, but there are other reasons why I dread Cambridge--"
he ceased.

"Are you finding me a dreadful bore?" he asked. He changed curiously
from a friend confiding in a friend to a conventional young man
at a party.

"Not in the least," said Helen. "I like it very much."

"You can't think," he exclaimed, speaking almost with emotion,
"what a difference it makes finding someone to talk to!
Directly I saw you I felt you might possibly understand me.
I'm very fond of Hewet, but he hasn't the remotest idea what I'm like.
You're the only woman I've ever met who seems to have the faintest
conception of what I mean when I say a thing."

The next dance was beginning; it was the Barcarolle out of Hoffman,
which made Helen beat her toe in time to it; but she felt that
after such a compliment it was impossible to get up and go, and,
besides being amused, she was really flattered, and the honesty
of his conceit attracted her. She suspected that he was not happy,
and was sufficiently feminine to wish to receive confidences.

"I'm very old," she sighed.

"The odd thing is that I don't find you old at all," he replied.
"I feel as though we were exactly the same age. Moreover--"
here he hesitated, but took courage from a glance at her face,
"I feel as if I could talk quite plainly to you as one does to a man--
about the relations between the sexes, about . . . and . . ."

In spite of his certainty a slight redness came into his face as he
spoke the last two words.

She reassured him at once by the laugh with which she exclaimed,
"I should hope so!"

He looked at her with real cordiality, and the lines which were
drawn about his nose and lips slackened for the first time.

"Thank God!" he exclaimed. "Now we can behave like civilised
human beings."

Certainly a barrier which usually stands fast had fallen, and it
was possible to speak of matters which are generally only alluded
to between men and women when doctors are present, or the shadow
of death. In five minutes he was telling her the history of his life.
It was long, for it was full of extremely elaborate incidents,
which led on to a discussion of the principles on which morality
is founded, and thus to several very interesting matters,
which even in this ballroom had to be discussed in a whisper,
lest one of the pouter pigeon ladies or resplendent merchants should
overhear them, and proceed to demand that they should leave the place.
When they had come to an end, or, to speak more accurately,
when Helen intimated by a slight slackening of her attention that
they had sat there long enough, Hirst rose, exclaiming, "So there's
no reason whatever for all this mystery!"

"None, except that we are English people," she answered. She took his
arm and they crossed the ball-room, making their way with difficulty
between the spinning couples, who were now perceptibly dishevelled,
and certainly to a critical eye by no means lovely in their shapes.
The excitement of undertaking a friendship and the length of
their talk, made them hungry, and they went in search of food
to the dining-room, which was now full of people eating at little
separate tables. In the doorway they met Rachel, going up to dance
again with Arthur Venning. She was flushed and looked very happy,
and Helen was struck by the fact that in this mood she was
certainly more attractive than the generality of young women.
She had never noticed it so clearly before.

"Enjoying yourself?" she asked, as they stopped for a second.

"Miss Vinrace," Arthur answered for her, "has just made a confession;
she'd no idea that dances could be so delightful."

"Yes!"  Rachel exclaimed. "I've changed my view of life completely!"

"You don't say so!"  Helen mocked. They passed on.

"That's typical of Rachel," she said. "She changes her view of life
about every other day. D'you know, I believe you're just the person
I want," she said, as they sat down, "to help me complete her education?
She's been brought up practically in a nunnery. Her father's too absurd.
I've been doing what I can--but I'm too old, and I'm a woman.
Why shouldn't you talk to her--explain things to her--talk to her,
I mean, as you talk to me?"

"I have made one attempt already this evening," said St. John.
"I rather doubt that it was successful. She seems to me so very young
and inexperienced. I have promised to lend her Gibbon."

"It's not Gibbon exactly," Helen pondered. "It's the facts of life,
I think--d'you see what I mean? What really goes on, what people feel,
although they generally try to hide it? There's nothing to be
frightened of. It's so much more beautiful than the pretences--
always more interesting--always better, I should say, than _that_
kind of thing."

She nodded her head at a table near them, where two girls and two young
men were chaffing each other very loudly, and carrying on an arch
insinuating dialogue, sprinkled with endearments, about, it seemed,
a pair of stockings or a pair of legs. One of the girls was flirting
a fan and pretending to be shocked, and the sight was very unpleasant,
partly because it was obvious that the girls were secretly hostile
to each other.

"In my old age, however," Helen sighed, "I'm coming to think
that it doesn't much matter in the long run what one does:
people always go their own way--nothing will ever influence them."
She nodded her head at the supper party.

But St. John did not agree. He said that he thought one could
really make a great deal of difference by one's point of view,
books and so on, and added that few things at the present time
mattered more than the enlightenment of women. He sometimes thought
that almost everything was due to education.

In the ballroom, meanwhile, the dancers were being formed into
squares for the lancers. Arthur and Rachel, Susan and Hewet,
Miss Allan and Hughling Elliot found themselves together.

Miss Allan looked at her watch.

"Half-past one," she stated. "And I have to despatch Alexander
Pope to-morrow."

"Pope!" snorted Mr. Elliot. "Who reads Pope, I should like to know?
And as for reading about him--No, no, Miss Allan; be persuaded you
will benefit the world much more by dancing than by writing."
It was one of Mr. Elliot's affectations that nothing in the world
could compare with the delights of dancing--nothing in the world
was so tedious as literature. Thus he sought pathetically enough
to ingratiate himself with the young, and to prove to them beyond
a doubt that though married to a ninny of a wife, and rather pale
and bent and careworn by his weight of learning, he was as much alive
as the youngest of them all.

"It's a question of bread and butter," said Miss Allan calmly.
"However, they seem to expect me."  She took up her position and
pointed a square black toe.

"Mr. Hewet, you bow to me."  It was evident at once that Miss Allan
was the only one of them who had a thoroughly sound knowledge
of the figures of the dance.

After the lancers there was a waltz; after the waltz a polka;
and then a terrible thing happened; the music, which had been
sounding regularly with five-minute pauses, stopped suddenly.
The lady with the great dark eyes began to swathe her violin
in silk, and the gentleman placed his horn carefully in its case.
They were surrounded by couples imploring them in English, in French,
in Spanish, of one more dance, one only; it was still early.
But the old man at the piano merely exhibited his watch and shook
his head. He turned up the collar of his coat and produced a red
silk muffler, which completely dashed his festive appearance.
Strange as it seemed, the musicians were pale and heavy-eyed; they looked
bored and prosaic, as if the summit of their desire was cold meat
and beer, succeeded immediately by bed.

Rachel was one of those who had begged them to continue. When they
refused she began turning over the sheets of dance music which lay
upon the piano. The pieces were generally bound in coloured covers,
with pictures on them of romantic scenes--gondoliers astride
on the crescent of the moon, nuns peering through the bars of a
convent window, or young women with their hair down pointing a gun
at the stars. She remembered that the general effect of the music
to which they had danced so gaily was one of passionate regret
for dead love and the innocent years of youth; dreadful sorrows
had always separated the dancers from their past happiness.

"No wonder they get sick of playing stuff like this," she remarked
reading a bar or two; "they're really hymn tunes, played very fast,
with bits out of Wagner and Beethoven."

"Do you play? Would you play? Anything, so long as we can
dance to it!"  From all sides her gift for playing the piano
was insisted upon, and she had to consent. As very soon she
had played the only pieces of dance music she could remember,
she went on to play an air from a sonata by Mozart.

"But that's not a dance," said some one pausing by the piano.

"It is," she replied, emphatically nodding her head. "Invent the steps."
Sure of her melody she marked the rhythm boldly so as to simplify
the way. Helen caught the idea; seized Miss Allan by the arm,
and whirled round the room, now curtseying, now spinning round,
now tripping this way and that like a child skipping through a meadow.

"This is the dance for people who don't know how to dance!"
she cried. The tune changed to a minuet; St. John hopped with
incredible swiftness first on his left leg, then on his right;
the tune flowed melodiously; Hewet, swaying his arms and holding
out the tails of his coat, swam down the room in imitation of the
voluptuous dreamy dance of an Indian maiden dancing before her Rajah.
The tune marched; and Miss Allen advanced with skirts extended
and bowed profoundly to the engaged pair. Once their feet fell
in with the rhythm they showed a complete lack of selfconsciousness.
From Mozart Rachel passed without stopping to old English hunting songs,
carols, and hymn tunes, for, as she had observed, any good tune,
with a little management, became a tune one could dance to.
By degrees every person in the room was tripping and turning in pairs
or alone. Mr. Pepper executed an ingenious pointed step derived
from figure-skating, for which he once held some local championship;
while Mrs. Thornbury tried to recall an old country dance which she
had seen danced by her father's tenants in Dorsetshire in the old days.
As for Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, they gallopaded round and round the room
with such impetuosity that the other dancers shivered at their approach.
Some people were heard to criticise the performance as a romp;
to others it was the most enjoyable part of the evening.

"Now for the great round dance!"  Hewet shouted. Instantly a gigantic
circle was formed, the dancers holding hands and shouting out,
"D'you ken John Peel," as they swung faster and faster and faster,
until the strain was too great, and one link of the chain--
Mrs. Thornbury--gave way, and the rest went flying across the room
in all directions, to land upon the floor or the chairs or in each
other's arms as seemed most convenient.

Rising from these positions, breathless and unkempt, it struck
them for the first time that the electric lights pricked the air
very vainly, and instinctively a great many eyes turned to
the windows. Yes--there was the dawn. While they had been dancing
the night had passed, and it had come. Outside, the mountains
showed very pure and remote; the dew was sparkling on the grass,
and the sky was flushed with blue, save for the pale yellows
and pinks in the East. The dancers came crowding to the windows,
pushed them open, and here and there ventured a foot upon the grass.

"How silly the poor old lights look!" said Evelyn M. in a curiously
subdued tone of voice. "And ourselves; it isn't becoming."
It was true; the untidy hair, and the green and yellow gems, which had
seemed so festive half an hour ago, now looked cheap and slovenly.
The complexions of the elder ladies suffered terribly, and, as if
conscious that a cold eye had been turned upon them, they began
to say good-night and to make their way up to bed.

Rachel, though robbed of her audience, had gone on playing to herself.
From John Peel she passed to Bach, who was at this time the subject
of her intense enthusiasm, and one by one some of the younger dancers
came in from the garden and sat upon the deserted gilt chairs round
the piano, the room being now so clear that they turned out the lights.
As they sat and listened, their nerves were quieted; the heat and
soreness of their lips, the result of incessant talking and laughing,
was smoothed away. They sat very still as if they saw a building with
spaces and columns succeeding each other rising in the empty space.
Then they began to see themselves and their lives, and the whole
of human life advancing very nobly under the direction of the music.
They felt themselves ennobled, and when Rachel stopped playing they
desired nothing but sleep.

Susan rose. "I think this has been the happiest night of my life!"
she exclaimed. "I do adore music," she said, as she thanked Rachel.
"It just seems to say all the things one can't say oneself."
She gave a nervous little laugh and looked from one to another with
great benignity, as though she would like to say something but could
not find the words in which to express it. "Every one's been so kind--
so very kind," she said. Then she too went to bed.

The party having ended in the very abrupt way in which parties
do end, Helen and Rachel stood by the door with their cloaks on,
looking for a carriage.

"I suppose you realise that there are no carriages left?"
said St. John, who had been out to look. "You must sleep here."

"Oh, no," said Helen; "we shall walk."

"May we come too?"  Hewet asked. "We can't go to bed. Imagine lying
among bolsters and looking at one's washstand on a morning like this--
Is that where you live?"  They had begun to walk down the avenue,
and he turned and pointed at the white and green villa on the hillside,
which seemed to have its eyes shut.

"That's not a light burning, is it?"  Helen asked anxiously.

"It's the sun," said St. John. The upper windows had each a spot
of gold on them.

"I was afraid it was my husband, still reading Greek," she said.
"All this time he's been editing _Pindar_."

They passed through the town and turned up the steep road,
which was perfectly clear, though still unbordered by shadows.
Partly because they were tired, and partly because the early light
subdued them, they scarcely spoke, but breathed in the delicious
fresh air, which seemed to belong to a different state of life
from the air at midday. When they came to the high yellow wall,
where the lane turned off from the road, Helen was for dismissing
the two young men.

"You've come far enough," she said. "Go back to bed."

But they seemed unwilling to move.

"Let's sit down a moment," said Hewet. He spread his coat on
the ground. "Let's sit down and consider."  They sat down and looked
out over the bay; it was very still, the sea was rippling faintly,
and lines of green and blue were beginning to stripe it. There were
no sailing boats as yet, but a steamer was anchored in the bay,
looking very ghostly in the mist; it gave one unearthly cry,
and then all was silent.

Rachel occupied herself in collecting one grey stone after another
and building them into a little cairn; she did it very quietly
and carefully.

"And so you've changed your view of life, Rachel?" said Helen.

Rachel added another stone and yawned. "I don't remember," she said,
"I feel like a fish at the bottom of the sea."  She yawned again.
None of these people possessed any power to frighten her out here in
the dawn, and she felt perfectly familiar even with Mr. Hirst.

"My brain, on the contrary," said Hirst, "is in a condition
of abnormal activity."  He sat in his favourite position with his
arms binding his legs together and his chin resting on the top
of his knees. "I see through everything--absolutely everything.
Life has no more mysteries for me."  He spoke with conviction,
but did not appear to wish for an answer. Near though they sat,
and familiar though they felt, they seemed mere shadows to each other.

"And all those people down there going to sleep," Hewet began dreamily,
"thinking such different things,--Miss Warrington, I suppose,
is now on her knees; the Elliots are a little startled, it's not often
_they_ get out of breath, and they want to get to sleep as quickly
as possible; then there's the poor lean young man who danced all night
with Evelyn; he's putting his flower in water and asking himself,
'Is this love?'--and poor old Perrott, I daresay, can't get to sleep
at all, and is reading his favourite Greek book to console himself--
and the others--no, Hirst," he wound up, "I don't find it simple
at all."

"I have a key," said Hirst cryptically. His chin was still upon
his knees and his eyes fixed in front of him.

A silence followed. Then Helen rose and bade them good-night.
"But," she said, "remember that you've got to come and see us."

They waved good-night and parted, but the two young men did not
go back to the hotel; they went for a walk, during which they
scarcely spoke, and never mentioned the names of the two women,
who were, to a considerable extent, the subject of their thoughts.
They did not wish to share their impressions. They returned to
the hotel in time for breakfast.

Chapter XIII

There were many rooms in the villa, but one room which possessed
a character of its own because the door was always shut, and no
sound of music or laughter issued from it. Every one in the house
was vaguely conscious that something went on behind that door,
and without in the least knowing what it was, were influenced in
their own thoughts by the knowledge that if the passed it the door
would be shut, and if they made a noise Mr. Ambrose inside would
be disturbed. Certain acts therefore possessed merit, and others
were bad, so that life became more harmonious and less disconnected
than it would have been had Mr. Ambrose given up editing _Pindar_,
and taken to a nomad existence, in and out of every room in the house.
As it was, every one was conscious that by observing certain rules,
such as punctuality and quiet, by cooking well, and performing other
small duties, one ode after another was satisfactorily restored
to the world, and they shared the continuity of the scholar's life.
Unfortunately, as age puts one barrier between human beings,
and learning another, and sex a third, Mr. Ambrose in his study
was some thousand miles distant from the nearest human being,
who in this household was inevitably a woman. He sat hour after hour
among white-leaved books, alone like an idol in an empty church,
still except for the passage of his hand from one side of the sheet
to another, silent save for an occasional choke, which drove him
to extend his pipe a moment in the air. As he worked his way
further and further into the heart of the poet, his chair became
more and more deeply encircled by books, which lay open on the floor,
and could only be crossed by a careful process of stepping,
so delicate that his visitors generally stopped and addressed him
from the outskirts.

On the morning after the dance, however, Rachel came into her
uncle's room and hailed him twice, "Uncle Ridley," before he
paid her any attention.

At length he looked over his spectacles.

"Well?" he asked.

"I want a book," she replied. "Gibbon's _History_ _of_ _the_
_Roman_ _Empire_. May I have it?"

She watched the lines on her uncle's face gradually rearrange themselves
at her question. It had been smooth as a mask before she spoke.

"Please say that again," said her uncle, either because he had
not heard or because he had not understood.

She repeated the same words and reddened slightly as she did so.

"Gibbon! What on earth d'you want him for?" he enquired.

"Somebody advised me to read it," Rachel stammered.

"But I don't travel about with a miscellaneous collection
of eighteenth-century historians!" her uncle exclaimed.
"Gibbon! Ten big volumes at least."

Rachel said that she was sorry to interrupt, and was turning to go.

"Stop!" cried her uncle. He put down his pipe, placed his book on one side,
and rose and led her slowly round the room, holding her by the arm.
"Plato," he said, laying one finger on the first of a row of small
dark books, "and Jorrocks next door, which is wrong. Sophocles, Swift.
You don't care for German commentators, I presume. French, then.
You read French? You should read Balzac. Then we come to Wordsworth
and Coleridge, Pope, Johnson, Addison, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats.
One thing leads to another. Why is Marlowe here? Mrs. Chailey,
I presume. But what's the use of reading if you don't read Greek?
After all, if you read Greek, you need never read anything else,
pure waste of time--pure waste of time," thus speaking half to himself,
with quick movements of his hands; they had come round again
to the circle of books on the floor, and their progress was stopped.

"Well," he demanded, "which shall it be?"

"Balzac," said Rachel, "or have you the _Speech_ _on_ _the_
_American_ _Revolution_, Uncle Ridley?"

"_The_ _Speech_ _on_ _the_ _American_ _Revolution_?" he asked.
He looked at her very keenly again. "Another young man at the dance?"

"No. That was Mr. Dalloway," she confessed.

"Good Lord!" he flung back his head in recollection of Mr. Dalloway.

She chose for herself a volume at random, submitted it to
her uncle, who, seeing that it was _La_ _Cousine_ _bette_,
bade her throw it away if she found it too horrible, and was
about to leave him when he demanded whether she had enjoyed her dance?

He then wanted to know what people did at dances, seeing that he had
only been to one thirty-five years ago, when nothing had seemed to him
more meaningless and idiotic. Did they enjoy turning round and round
to the screech of a fiddle? Did they talk, and say pretty things,
and if so, why didn't they do it, under reasonable conditions?
As for himself--he sighed and pointed at the signs of industry
lying all about him, which, in spite of his sigh, filled his face
with such satisfaction that his niece thought good to leave.
On bestowing a kiss she was allowed to go, but not until she had
bound herself to learn at any rate the Greek alphabet, and to return
her French novel when done with, upon which something more suitable
would be found for her.

As the rooms in which people live are apt to give off something
of the same shock as their faces when seen for the first time,
Rachel walked very slowly downstairs, lost in wonder at her uncle,
and his books, and his neglect of dances, and his queer,
utterly inexplicable, but apparently satisfactory view of life,
when her eye was caught by a note with her name on it lying in the hall.
The address was written in a small strong hand unknown to her,
and the note, which had no beginning, ran:--

I send the first volume of Gibbon as I promised. Personally I find
little to be said for the moderns, but I'm going to send you Wedekind
when I've done him. Donne? Have you read Webster and all that set?
I envy you reading them for the first time. Completely exhausted
after last night. And you?

The flourish of initials which she took to be St. J. A. H., wound
up the letter. She was very much flattered that Mr. Hirst should
have remembered her, and fulfilled his promise so quickly.

There was still an hour to luncheon, and with Gibbon in one hand,
and Balzac in the other she strolled out of the gate and down
the little path of beaten mud between the olive trees on the slope
of the hill. It was too hot for climbing hills, but along the valley
there were trees and a grass path running by the river bed.
In this land where the population was centred in the towns it
was possible to lose sight of civilisation in a very short time,
passing only an occasional farmhouse, where the women were handling
red roots in the courtyard; or a little boy lying on his elbows on
the hillside surrounded by a flock of black strong-smelling goats.
Save for a thread of water at the bottom, the river was merely
a deep channel of dry yellow stones. On the bank grew those trees
which Helen had said it was worth the voyage out merely to see.
April had burst their buds, and they bore large blossoms among
their glossy green leaves with petals of a thick wax-like substance
coloured an exquisite cream or pink or deep crimson. But filled with
one of those unreasonable exultations which start generally from an
unknown cause, and sweep whole countries and skies into their embrace,
she walked without seeing. The night was encroaching upon the day.
Her ears hummed with the tunes she had played the night before;
she sang, and the singing made her walk faster and faster.
She did not see distinctly where she was going, the trees and
the landscape appearing only as masses of green and blue, with an
occasional space of differently coloured sky. Faces of people
she had seen last night came before her; she heard their voices;
she stopped singing, and began saying things over again or saying
things differently, or inventing things that might have been said.
The constraint of being among strangers in a long silk dress made it
unusually exciting to stride thus alone. Hewet, Hirst, Mr. Venning,
Miss Allan, the music, the light, the dark trees in the garden,
the dawn,--as she walked they went surging round in her head,
a tumultuous background from which the present moment, with its
opportunity of doing exactly as she liked, sprung more wonderfully
vivid even than the night before.

So she might have walked until she had lost all knowledge of her way,
had it not been for the interruption of a tree, which, although it
did not grow across her path, stopped her as effectively as if
the branches had struck her in the face. It was an ordinary tree,
but to her it appeared so strange that it might have been the only tree
in the world. Dark was the trunk in the middle, and the branches
sprang here and there, leaving jagged intervals of light between them
as distinctly as if it had but that second risen from the ground.
Having seen a sight that would last her for a lifetime, and for
a lifetime would preserve that second, the tree once more sank
into the ordinary ranks of trees, and she was able to seat herself
in its shade and to pick the red flowers with the thin green
leaves which were growing beneath it. She laid them side by side,
flower to flower and stalk to stalk, caressing them for walking alone.
Flowers and even pebbles in the earth had their own life and disposition,
and brought back the feelings of a child to whom they were companions.
Looking up, her eye was caught by the line of the mountains flying
out energetically across the sky like the lash of a curling whip.
She looked at the pale distant sky, and the high bare places on
the mountain-tops lying exposed to the sun. When she sat down she
had dropped her books on to the earth at her feet, and now she
looked down on them lying there, so square in the grass, a tall
stem bending over and tickling the smooth brown cover of Gibbon,
while the mottled blue Balzac lay naked in the sun. With a feeling
that to open and read would certainly be a surprising experience,
she turned the historian's page and read that--

His generals, in the early part of his reign, attempted the reduction
of Aethiopia and Arabia Felix. They marched near a thousand
miles to the south of the tropic; but the heat of the climate
soon repelled the invaders and protected the unwarlike natives
of those sequestered regions. . . . The northern countries
of Europe scarcely deserved the expense and labour of conquest.
The forests and morasses of Germany were filled with a hardy race
of barbarians, who despised life when it was separated from freedom.

Never had any words been so vivid and so beautiful--Arabia Felix--
Aethiopia. But those were not more noble than the others,
hardy barbarians, forests, and morasses. They seemed to drive
roads back to the very beginning of the world, on either side
of which the populations of all times and countries stood
in avenues, and by passing down them all knowledge would be hers,
and the book of the world turned back to the very first page.
Such was her excitement at the possibilities of knowledge now opening
before her that she ceased to read, and a breeze turning the page,
the covers of Gibbon gently ruffled and closed together. She then
rose again and walked on. Slowly her mind became less confused and
sought the origins of her exaltation, which were twofold and could
be limited by an effort to the persons of Mr. Hirst and Mr. Hewet.
Any clear analysis of them was impossible owing to the haze of wonder
in which they were enveloped. She could not reason about them
as about people whose feelings went by the same rule as her own did,
and her mind dwelt on them with a kind of physical pleasure such as
is caused by the contemplation of bright things hanging in the sun.
From them all life seemed to radiate; the very words of books
were steeped in radiance. She then became haunted by a suspicion
which she was so reluctant to face that she welcomed a trip and
stumble over the grass because thus her attention was dispersed,
but in a second it had collected itself again. Unconsciously she had
been walking faster and faster, her body trying to outrun her mind;
but she was now on the summit of a little hillock of earth which rose
above the river and displayed the valley. She was no longer able
to juggle with several ideas, but must deal with the most persistent,
and a kind of melancholy replaced her excitement. She sank down
on to the earth clasping her knees together, and looking blankly
in front of her. For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly,
which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone.

"What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence;
each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into
an unknown sea. Hypnotised by the wings of the butterfly,
and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life,
she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away,
she rose, and with her two books beneath her arm returned home again,
much as a soldier prepared for battle.

Chapter XIV

The sun of that same day going down, dusk was saluted as usual
at the hotel by an instantaneous sparkle of electric lights.
The hours between dinner and bedtime were always difficult enough
to kill, and the night after the dance they were further tarnished
by the peevishness of dissipation. Certainly, in the opinion
of Hirst and Hewet, who lay back in long arm-chairs in the middle
of the hall, with their coffee-cups beside them, and their cigarettes
in their hands, the evening was unusually dull, the women unusually
badly dressed, the men unusually fatuous. Moreover, when the mail
had been distributed half an hour ago there were no letters for
either of the two young men. As every other person, practically,
had received two or three plump letters from England, which they
were now engaged in reading, this seemed hard, and prompted
Hirst to make the caustic remark that the animals had been fed.
Their silence, he said, reminded him of the silence in the lion-house
when each beast holds a lump of raw meat in its paws. He went on,
stimulated by this comparison, to liken some to hippopotamuses,
some to canary birds, some to swine, some to parrots, and some to
loathsome reptiles curled round the half-decayed bodies of sheep.
The intermittent sounds--now a cough, now a horrible wheezing
or throat-clearing, now a little patter of conversation--were just,
he declared, what you hear if you stand in the lion-house when the
bones are being mauled. But these comparisons did not rouse Hewet,
who, after a careless glance round the room, fixed his eyes upon
a thicket of native spears which were so ingeniously arranged
as to run their points at you whichever way you approached them.
He was clearly oblivious of his surroundings; whereupon Hirst,
perceiving that Hewet's mind was a complete blank, fixed his
attention more closely upon his fellow-creatures. He was too far
from them, however, to hear what they were saying, but it pleased him
to construct little theories about them from their gestures and appearance.

Mrs. Thornbury had received a great many letters. She was completely
engrossed in them. When she had finished a page she handed it
to her husband, or gave him the sense of what she was reading in a
series of short quotations linked together by a sound at the back
of her throat. "Evie writes that George has gone to Glasgow.
'He finds Mr. Chadbourne so nice to work with, and we hope to spend
Christmas together, but I should not like to move Betty and Alfred
any great distance (no, quite right), though it is difficult
to imagine cold weather in this heat. . . . Eleanor and Roger
drove over in the new trap. . . . Eleanor certainly looked more
like herself than I've seen her since the winter. She has put Baby
on three bottles now, which I'm sure is wise (I'm sure it is too),
and so gets better nights. . . . My hair still falls out. I find it
on the pillow! But I am cheered by hearing from Tottie Hall Green.
. . . Muriel is in Torquay enjoying herself greatly at dances.
She _is_ going to show her black put after all.'  . . . A line
from Herbert--so busy, poor fellow! Ah! Margaret says, 'Poor old
Mrs. Fairbank died on the eighth, quite suddenly in the conservatory,
only a maid in the house, who hadn't the presence of mind to lift
her up, which they think might have saved her, but the doctor says
it might have come at any moment, and one can only feel thankful
that it was in the house and not in the street (I should think so!).
The pigeons have increased terribly, just as the rabbits did five
years ago . . .'" While she read her husband kept nodding his head
very slightly, but very steadily in sign of approval.

Near by, Miss Allan was reading her letters too. They were not
altogether pleasant, as could be seen from the slight rigidity
which came over her large fine face as she finished reading them
and replaced them neatly in their envelopes. The lines of care
and responsibility on her face made her resemble an elderly man
rather than a woman. The letters brought her news of the failure
of last year's fruit crop in New Zealand, which was a serious matter,
for Hubert, her only brother, made his living on a fruit farm,
and if it failed again, of course, he would throw up his place,
come back to England, and what were they to do with him this time?
The journey out here, which meant the loss of a term's work,
became an extravagance and not the just and wonderful holiday due
to her after fifteen years of punctual lecturing and correcting
essays upon English literature. Emily, her sister, who was a
teacher also, wrote: "We ought to be prepared, though I have no
doubt Hubert will be more reasonable this time."  And then went
on in her sensible way to say that she was enjoying a very jolly
time in the Lakes. "They are looking exceedingly pretty just now.
I have seldom seen the trees so forward at this time of year.
We have taken our lunch out several days. Old Alice is as young as ever,
and asks after every one affectionately. The days pass very quickly,
and term will soon be here. Political prospects _not_ good,
I think privately, but do not like to damp Ellen's enthusiasm.
Lloyd George has taken the Bill up, but so have many before now,
and we are where we are; but trust to find myself mistaken.
Anyhow, we have our work cut out for us. . . . Surely Meredith
lacks the _human_ note one likes in W. W.?" she concluded, and went
on to discuss some questions of English literature which Miss Allan
had raised in her last letter.

At a little distance from Miss Allan, on a seat shaded and made
semi-private by a thick clump of palm trees, Arthur and Susan
were reading each other's letters. The big slashing manuscripts
of hockey-playing young women in Wiltshire lay on Arthur's knee,
while Susan deciphered tight little legal hands which rarely filled
more than a page, and always conveyed the same impression of jocular
and breezy goodwill.

"I do hope Mr. Hutchinson will like me, Arthur," she said, looking up.

"Who's your loving Flo?" asked Arthur.

"Flo Graves--the girl I told you about, who was engaged to that
dreadful Mr. Vincent," said Susan. "Is Mr. Hutchinson married?"
she asked.

Already her mind was busy with benevolent plans for her friends,
or rather with one magnificent plan--which was simple too--
they were all to get married--at once--directly she got back.
Marriage, marriage that was the right thing, the only thing,
the solution required by every one she knew, and a great part of
her meditations was spent in tracing every instance of discomfort,
loneliness, ill-health, unsatisfied ambition, restlessness, eccentricity,
taking things up and dropping them again, public speaking,
and philanthropic activity on the part of men and particularly
on the part of women to the fact that they wanted to marry,
were trying to marry, and had not succeeded in getting married.
If, as she was bound to own, these symptoms sometimes persisted
after marriage, she could only ascribe them to the unhappy law
of nature which decreed that there was only one Arthur Venning,
and only one Susan who could marry him. Her theory, of course,
had the merit of being fully supported by her own case. She had
been vaguely uncomfortable at home for two or three years now,
and a voyage like this with her selfish old aunt, who paid her fare
but treated her as servant and companion in one, was typical of the
kind of thing people expected of her. Directly she became engaged,
Mrs. Paley behaved with instinctive respect, positively protested
when Susan as usual knelt down to lace her shoes, and appeared really
grateful for an hour of Susan's company where she had been used to
exact two or three as her right. She therefore foresaw a life of far
greater comfort than she had been used to, and the change had already
produced a great increase of warmth in her feelings towards other people.

It was close on twenty years now since Mrs. Paley had been able
to lace her own shoes or even to see them, the disappearance of
her feet having coincided more or less accurately with the death
of her husband, a man of business, soon after which event Mrs. Paley
began to grow stout. She was a selfish, independent old woman,
possessed of a considerable income, which she spent upon the upkeep
of a house that needed seven servants and a charwoman in Lancaster
Gate, and another with a garden and carriage-horses in Surrey.
Susan's engagement relieved her of the one great anxiety of her life--
that her son Christopher should "entangle himself" with his cousin.
Now that this familiar source of interest was removed, she felt
a little low and inclined to see more in Susan than she used to.
She had decided to give her a very handsome wedding present, a cheque
for two hundred, two hundred and fifty, or possibly, conceivably--
it depended upon the under-gardener and Huths' bill for doing up
the drawing-room--three hundred pounds sterling.

She was thinking of this very question, revolving the figures,
as she sat in her wheeled chair with a table spread with cards
by her side. The Patience had somehow got into a muddle, and she
did not like to call for Susan to help her, as Susan seemed to be
busy with Arthur.

"She's every right to expect a handsome present from me, of course,"
she thought, looking vaguely at the leopard on its hind legs,
"and I've no doubt she does! Money goes a long way with every one.
The young are very selfish. If I were to die, nobody would miss me
but Dakyns, and she'll be consoled by the will! However, I've got
no reason to complain. . . . I can still enjoy myself. I'm not
a burden to any-one. . . . I like a great many things a good deal,
in spite of my legs."

Being slightly depressed, however, she went on to think of the only
people she had known who had not seemed to her at all selfish
or fond of money, who had seemed to her somehow rather finer than
the general run; people she willingly acknowledged, who were finer
than she was. There were only two of them. One was her brother,
who had been drowned before her eyes, the other was a girl,
her greatest friend, who had died in giving birth to her first child.
These things had happened some fifty years ago.

"They ought not to have died," she thought. "However, they did--
and we selfish old creatures go on."  The tears came to her eyes;
she felt a genuine regret for them, a kind of respect for their youth
and beauty, and a kind of shame for herself; but the tears did not fall;
and she opened one of those innumerable novels which she used
to pronounce good or bad, or pretty middling, or really wonderful.
"I can't think how people come to imagine such things," she would say,
taking off her spectacles and looking up with the old faded eyes,
that were becoming ringed with white.

Just behind the stuffed leopard Mr. Elliot was playing chess with
Mr. Pepper. He was being defeated, naturally, for Mr. Pepper scarcely
took his eyes off the board, and Mr. Elliot kept leaning back in his
chair and throwing out remarks to a gentleman who had only arrived
the night before, a tall handsome man, with a head resembling the head
of an intellectual ram. After a few remarks of a general nature
had passed, they were discovering that they knew some of the same people,
as indeed had been obvious from their appearance directly they saw each other.

"Ah yes, old Truefit," said Mr. Elliot. "He has a son at Oxford.
I've often stayed with them. It's a lovely old Jacobean house.
Some exquisite Greuzes--one or two Dutch pictures which the old
boy kept in the cellars. Then there were stacks upon stacks
of prints. Oh, the dirt in that house! He was a miser, you know.
The boy married a daughter of Lord Pinwells. I know them too.
The collecting mania tends to run in families. This chap collects
buckles--men's shoe-buckles they must be, in use between the years
1580 and 1660; the dates mayn't be right, but fact's as I say.
Your true collector always has some unaccountable fad of that kind.
On other points he's as level-headed as a breeder of shorthorns,
which is what he happens to be. Then the Pinwells, as you probably know,
have their share of eccentricity too. Lady Maud, for instance--"
he was interrupted here by the necessity of considering his
move,--"Lady Maud has a horror of cats and clergymen, and people
with big front teeth. I've heard her shout across a table,
'Keep your mouth shut, Miss Smith; they're as yellow as carrots!'
across a table, mind you. To me she's always been civility itself.
She dabbles in literature, likes to collect a few of us in her
drawing-room, but mention a clergyman, a bishop even, nay,
the Archbishop himself, and she gobbles like a turkey-cock. I've
been told it's a family feud--something to do with an ancestor in
the reign of Charles the First. Yes," he continued, suffering check
after check, "I always like to know something of the grandmothers
of our fashionable young men. In my opinion they preserve all
that we admire in the eighteenth century, with the advantage,
in the majority of cases, that they are personally clean. Not that
one would insult old Lady Barborough by calling her clean. How often
d'you think, Hilda," he called out to his wife, "her ladyship takes
a bath?"

"I should hardly like to say, Hugh," Mrs. Elliot tittered,
"but wearing puce velvet, as she does even on the hottest August day,
it somehow doesn't show."

"Pepper, you have me," said Mr. Elliot. "My chess is even worse
than I remembered."  He accepted his defeat with great equanimity,
because he really wished to talk.

He drew his chair beside Mr. Wilfrid Flushing, the newcomer.

"Are these at all in your line?" he asked, pointing at a case in front
of them, where highly polished crosses, jewels, and bits of embroidery,
the work of the natives, were displayed to tempt visitors.

"Shams, all of them," said Mr. Flushing briefly. "This rug,
now, isn't at all bad."  He stopped and picked up a piece
of the rug at their feet. "Not old, of course, but the design
is quite in the right tradition. Alice, lend me your brooch.
See the difference between the old work and the new."

A lady, who was reading with great concentration, unfastened her brooch
and gave it to her husband without looking at him or acknowledging
the tentative bow which Mr. Elliot was desirous of giving her.
If she had listened, she might have been amused by the reference to old
Lady Barborough, her great-aunt, but, oblivious of her surroundings,
she went on reading.

The clock, which had been wh