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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Voyage Out, by Virginia Woolf
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Voyage Out
+
+Author: Virginia Woolf
+
+Release Date: July, 1994 [eBook #144]
+[Most recently updated: June 7, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VOYAGE OUT ***
+
+
+
+
+The Voyage Out
+
+by Virginia Woolf
+
+
+Contents
+
+ CHAPTER I.
+ CHAPTER II.
+ CHAPTER III.
+ CHAPTER IV.
+ CHAPTER V.
+ CHAPTER VI.
+ CHAPTER VII.
+ CHAPTER VIII.
+ CHAPTER IX.
+ CHAPTER X.
+ CHAPTER XI.
+ CHAPTER XII.
+ CHAPTER XIII.
+ CHAPTER XIV.
+ CHAPTER XV.
+ CHAPTER XVI.
+ CHAPTER XVII.
+ CHAPTER XVIII.
+ CHAPTER XIX.
+ CHAPTER XX.
+ CHAPTER XXI.
+ CHAPTER XXII.
+ CHAPTER XXIII.
+ CHAPTER XXIV.
+ CHAPTER XXV.
+ CHAPTER XXVI.
+ CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+
+
+
+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 case 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
+off 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:
+
+πολλὰ τὰ δεινά, κοὐδὲν ἀν-
+θρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.
+τοῦτο καὶ πολιοῦ πέραν
+πόντου χειμερίῳ νότῳ
+χωρεῖ, περιβρυχίοισι
+περῶν ὑπ᾽ οἴδμασι.
+
+
+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 Chamberlain 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 about
+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 round 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 so 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 your 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 had
+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
+self-consciousness. 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 pug 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 wheezing for some minutes like an old man
+preparing to cough, now struck nine. The sound slightly disturbed
+certain somnolent merchants, government officials, and men of
+independent means who were lying back in their chairs, chatting,
+smoking, ruminating about their affairs, with their eyes half shut;
+they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and then closed them
+again. They had the appearance of crocodiles so fully gorged by their
+last meal that the future of the world gives them no anxiety whatever.
+The only disturbance in the placid bright room was caused by a large
+moth which shot from light to light, whizzing over elaborate heads of
+hair, and causing several young women to raise their hands nervously
+and exclaim, “Some one ought to kill it!”
+
+Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not spoken for a
+long time.
+
+When the clock struck, Hirst said:
+
+“Ah, the creatures begin to stir. . . .” He watched them raise
+themselves, look about them, and settle down again. “What I abhor most
+of all,” he concluded, “is the female breast. Imagine being Venning and
+having to get into bed with Susan! But the really repulsive thing is
+that they feel nothing at all—about what I do when I have a hot bath.
+They’re gross, they’re absurd, they’re utterly intolerable!”
+
+So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded to think about
+himself, about science, about Cambridge, about the Bar, about Helen and
+what she thought of him, until, being very tired, he was nodding off to
+sleep.
+
+Suddenly Hewet woke him up.
+
+“How d’you know what you feel, Hirst?”
+
+“Are you in love?” asked Hirst. He put in his eyeglass.
+
+“Don’t be a fool,” said Hewet.
+
+“Well, I’ll sit down and think about it,” said Hirst. “One really ought
+to. If these people would only think about things, the world would be a
+far better place for us all to live in. Are you trying to think?”
+
+That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour, but
+he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.
+
+“I shall go for a walk,” he said.
+
+“Remember we weren’t in bed last night,” said Hirst with a prodigious
+yawn.
+
+Hewet rose and stretched himself.
+
+“I want to go and get a breath of air,” he said.
+
+An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and
+forbidding him to settle into any one train of thought. It was
+precisely as if he had been in the middle of a talk which interested
+him profoundly when some one came up and interrupted him. He could not
+finish the talk, and the longer he sat there the more he wanted to
+finish it. As the talk that had been interrupted was a talk with
+Rachel, he had to ask himself why he felt this, and why he wanted to go
+on talking to her. Hirst would merely say that he was in love with her.
+But he was not in love with her. Did love begin in that way, with the
+wish to go on talking? No. It always began in his case with definite
+physical sensations, and these were now absent, he did not even find
+her physically attractive. There was something, of course, unusual
+about her—she was young, inexperienced, and inquisitive, they had been
+more open with each other than was usually possible. He always found
+girls interesting to talk to, and surely these were good reasons why he
+should wish to go on talking to her; and last night, what with the
+crowd and the confusion, he had only been able to begin to talk to her.
+What was she doing now? Lying on a sofa and looking at the ceiling,
+perhaps. He could imagine her doing that, and Helen in an arm-chair,
+with her hands on the arm of it, so—looking ahead of her, with her
+great big eyes—oh no, they’d be talking, of course, about the dance.
+But suppose Rachel was going away in a day or two, suppose this was the
+end of her visit, and her father had arrived in one of the steamers
+anchored in the bay,—it was intolerable to know so little. Therefore he
+exclaimed, “How d’you know what you feel, Hirst?” to stop himself from
+thinking.
+
+But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their aimless
+movements and their unknown lives were disturbing, so that he longed
+for the empty darkness. The first thing he looked for when he stepped
+out of the hall door was the light of the Ambroses’ villa. When he had
+definitely decided that a certain light apart from the others higher up
+the hill was their light, he was considerably reassured. There seemed
+to be at once a little stability in all this incoherence. Without any
+definite plan in his head, he took the turning to the right and walked
+through the town and came to the wall by the meeting of the roads,
+where he stopped. The booming of the sea was audible. The dark-blue
+mass of the mountains rose against the paler blue of the sky. There was
+no moon, but myriads of stars, and lights were anchored up and down in
+the dark waves of earth all round him. He had meant to go back, but the
+single light of the Ambroses’ villa had now become three separate
+lights, and he was tempted to go on. He might as well make sure that
+Rachel was still there. Walking fast, he soon stood by the iron gate of
+their garden, and pushed it open; the outline of the house suddenly
+appeared sharply before his eyes, and the thin column of the verandah
+cutting across the palely lit gravel of the terrace. He hesitated. At
+the back of the house some one was rattling cans. He approached the
+front; the light on the terrace showed him that the sitting-rooms were
+on that side. He stood as near the light as he could by the corner of
+the house, the leaves of a creeper brushing his face. After a moment he
+could hear a voice. The voice went on steadily; it was not talking, but
+from the continuity of the sound it was a voice reading aloud. He crept
+a little closer; he crumpled the leaves together so as to stop their
+rustling about his ears. It might be Rachel’s voice. He left the shadow
+and stepped into the radius of the light, and then heard a sentence
+spoken quite distinctly.
+
+“And there we lived from the year 1860 to 1895, the happiest years of
+my parents’ lives, and there in 1862 my brother Maurice was born, to
+the delight of his parents, as he was destined to be the delight of all
+who knew him.”
+
+The voice quickened, and the tone became conclusive rising slightly in
+pitch, as if these words were at the end of the chapter. Hewet drew
+back again into the shadow. There was a long silence. He could just
+hear chairs being moved inside. He had almost decided to go back, when
+suddenly two figures appeared at the window, not six feet from him.
+
+“It was Maurice Fielding, of course, that your mother was engaged to,”
+said Helen’s voice. She spoke reflectively, looking out into the dark
+garden, and thinking evidently as much of the look of the night as of
+what she was saying.
+
+“Mother?” said Rachel. Hewet’s heart leapt, and he noticed the fact.
+Her voice, though low, was full of surprise.
+
+“You didn’t know that?” said Helen.
+
+“I never knew there’d been any one else,” said Rachel. She was clearly
+surprised, but all they said was said low and inexpressively, because
+they were speaking out into the cool dark night.
+
+“More people were in love with her than with any one I’ve ever known,”
+Helen stated. “She had that power—she enjoyed things. She wasn’t
+beautiful, but—I was thinking of her last night at the dance. She got
+on with every kind of person, and then she made it all so
+amazingly—funny.”
+
+It appeared that Helen was going back into the past, choosing her words
+deliberately, comparing Theresa with the people she had known since
+Theresa died.
+
+“I don’t know how she did it,” she continued, and ceased, and there was
+a long pause, in which a little owl called first here, then there, as
+it moved from tree to tree in the garden.
+
+“That’s so like Aunt Lucy and Aunt Katie,” said Rachel at last. “They
+always make out that she was very sad and very good.”
+
+“Then why, for goodness’ sake, did they do nothing but criticize her
+when she was alive?” said Helen. Very gentle their voices sounded, as
+if they fell through the waves of the sea.
+
+“If I were to die to-morrow . . .” she began.
+
+The broken sentences had an extraordinary beauty and detachment in
+Hewet’s ears, and a kind of mystery too, as though they were spoken by
+people in their sleep.
+
+“No, Rachel,” Helen’s voice continued, “I’m not going to walk in the
+garden; it’s damp—it’s sure to be damp; besides, I see at least a dozen
+toads.”
+
+“Toads? Those are stones, Helen. Come out. It’s nicer out. The flowers
+smell,” Rachel replied.
+
+Hewet drew still farther back. His heart was beating very quickly.
+Apparently Rachel tried to pull Helen out on to the terrace, and Helen
+resisted. There was a certain amount of scuffling, entreating,
+resisting, and laughter from both of them. Then a man’s form appeared.
+Hewet could not hear what they were all saying. In a minute they had
+gone in; he could hear bolts grating then; there was dead silence, and
+all the lights went out.
+
+He turned away, still crumpling and uncrumpling a handful of leaves
+which he had torn from the wall. An exquisite sense of pleasure and
+relief possessed him; it was all so solid and peaceful after the ball
+at the hotel, whether he was in love with them or not, and he was not
+in love with them; no, but it was good that they should be alive.
+
+After standing still for a minute or two he turned and began to walk
+towards the gate. With the movement of his body, the excitement, the
+romance and the richness of life crowded into his brain. He shouted out
+a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he stumbled among
+lines and fragments of lines which had no meaning at all except for the
+beauty of the words. He shut the gate, and ran swinging from side to
+side down the hill, shouting any nonsense that came into his head.
+“Here am I,” he cried rhythmically, as his feet pounded to the left and
+to the right, “plunging along, like an elephant in the jungle,
+stripping the branches as I go (he snatched at the twigs of a bush at
+the roadside), roaring innumerable words, lovely words about
+innumerable things, running downhill and talking nonsense aloud to
+myself about roads and leaves and lights and women coming out into the
+darkness—about women—about Rachel, about Rachel.” He stopped and drew a
+deep breath. The night seemed immense and hospitable, and although so
+dark there seemed to be things moving down there in the harbour and
+movement out at sea. He gazed until the darkness numbed him, and then
+he walked on quickly, still murmuring to himself. “And I ought to be in
+bed, snoring and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. Dreams and realities,
+dreams and realities, dreams and realities,” he repeated all the way up
+the avenue, scarcely knowing what he said, until he reached the front
+door. Here he paused for a second, and collected himself before he
+opened the door.
+
+His eyes were dazed, his hands very cold, and his brain excited and yet
+half asleep. Inside the door everything was as he had left it except
+that the hall was now empty. There were the chairs turning in towards
+each other where people had sat talking, and the empty glasses on
+little tables, and the newspapers scattered on the floor. As he shut
+the door he felt as if he were enclosed in a square box, and instantly
+shrivelled up. It was all very bright and very small. He stopped for a
+minute by the long table to find a paper which he had meant to read,
+but he was still too much under the influence of the dark and the fresh
+air to consider carefully which paper it was or where he had seen it.
+
+As he fumbled vaguely among the papers he saw a figure cross the tail
+of his eye, coming downstairs. He heard the swishing sound of skirts,
+and to his great surprise, Evelyn M. came up to him, laid her hand on
+the table as if to prevent him from taking up a paper, and said:
+
+“You’re just the person I wanted to talk to.” Her voice was a little
+unpleasant and metallic, her eyes were very bright, and she kept them
+fixed upon him.
+
+“To talk to me?” he repeated. “But I’m half asleep.”
+
+“But I think you understand better than most people,” she answered, and
+sat down on a little chair placed beside a big leather chair so that
+Hewet had to sit down beside her.
+
+“Well?” he said. He yawned openly, and lit a cigarette. He could not
+believe that this was really happening to him. “What is it?”
+
+“Are you really sympathetic, or is it just a pose?” she demanded.
+
+“It’s for you to say,” he replied. “I’m interested, I think.” He still
+felt numb all over and as if she was much too close to him.
+
+“Any one can be interested!” she cried impatiently. “Your friend Mr.
+Hirst’s interested, I daresay however, I do believe in you. You look as
+if you’d got a nice sister, somehow.” She paused, picking at some
+sequins on her knees, and then, as if she had made up her mind, she
+started off, “Anyhow, I’m going to ask your advice. D’you ever get into
+a state where you don’t know your own mind? That’s the state I’m in
+now. You see, last night at the dance Raymond Oliver,—he’s the tall
+dark boy who looks as if he had Indian blood in him, but he says he’s
+not really,—well, we were sitting out together, and he told me all
+about himself, how unhappy he is at home, and how he hates being out
+here. They’ve put him into some beastly mining business. He says it’s
+beastly—I should like it, I know, but that’s neither here nor there.
+And I felt awfully sorry for him, one couldn’t help being sorry for
+him, and when he asked me to let him kiss me, I did. I don’t see any
+harm in that, do you? And then this morning he said he’d thought I
+meant something more, and I wasn’t the sort to let any one kiss me. And
+we talked and talked. I daresay I was very silly, but one can’t help
+liking people when one’s sorry for them. I do like him most awfully—”
+She paused. “So I gave him half a promise, and then, you see, there’s
+Alfred Perrott.”
+
+“Oh, Perrott,” said Hewet.
+
+“We got to know each other on that picnic the other day,” she
+continued. “He seemed so lonely, especially as Arthur had gone off with
+Susan, and one couldn’t help guessing what was in his mind. So we had
+quite a long talk when you were looking at the ruins, and he told me
+all about his life, and his struggles, and how fearfully hard it had
+been. D’you know, he was a boy in a grocer’s shop and took parcels to
+people’s houses in a basket? That interested me awfully, because I
+always say it doesn’t matter how you’re born if you’ve got the right
+stuff in you. And he told me about his sister who’s paralysed, poor
+girl, and one can see she’s a great trial, though he’s evidently very
+devoted to her. I must say I do admire people like that! I don’t expect
+you do because you’re so clever. Well, last night we sat out in the
+garden together, and I couldn’t help seeing what he wanted to say, and
+comforting him a little, and telling him I did care—I really do—only,
+then, there’s Raymond Oliver. What I want you to tell me is, can one be
+in love with two people at once, or can’t one?”
+
+She became silent, and sat with her chin on her hands, looking very
+intent, as if she were facing a real problem which had to be discussed
+between them.
+
+“I think it depends what sort of person you are,” said Hewet. He looked
+at her. She was small and pretty, aged perhaps twenty-eight or
+twenty-nine, but though dashing and sharply cut, her features expressed
+nothing very clearly, except a great deal of spirit and good health.
+
+“Who are you, what are you; you see, I know nothing about you,” he
+continued.
+
+“Well, I was coming to that,” said Evelyn M. She continued to rest her
+chin on her hands and to look intently ahead of her. “I’m the daughter
+of a mother and no father, if that interests you,” she said. “It’s not
+a very nice thing to be. It’s what often happens in the country. She
+was a farmer’s daughter, and he was rather a swell—the young man up at
+the great house. He never made things straight—never married her—though
+he allowed us quite a lot of money. His people wouldn’t let him. Poor
+father! I can’t help liking him. Mother wasn’t the sort of woman who
+could keep him straight, anyhow. He was killed in the war. I believe
+his men worshipped him. They say great big troopers broke down and
+cried over his body on the battlefield. I wish I’d known him. Mother
+had all the life crushed out of her. The world—” She clenched her fist.
+“Oh, people can be horrid to a woman like that!” She turned upon Hewet.
+
+“Well,” she said, “d’you want to know any more about me?”
+
+“But you?” he asked, “Who looked after you?”
+
+“I’ve looked after myself mostly,” she laughed. “I’ve had splendid
+friends. I do like people! That’s the trouble. What would you do if you
+liked two people, both of them tremendously, and you couldn’t tell
+which most?”
+
+“I should go on liking them—I should wait and see. Why not?”
+
+“But one has to make up one’s mind,” said Evelyn. “Or are you one of
+the people who doesn’t believe in marriages and all that? Look
+here—this isn’t fair, I do all the telling, and you tell nothing.
+Perhaps you’re the same as your friend”—she looked at him suspiciously;
+“perhaps you don’t like me?”
+
+“I don’t know you,” said Hewet.
+
+“I know when I like a person directly I see them! I knew I liked you
+the very first night at dinner. Oh dear,” she continued impatiently,
+“what a lot of bother would be saved if only people would say the
+things they think straight out! I’m made like that. I can’t help it.”
+
+“But don’t you find it leads to difficulties?” Hewet asked.
+
+“That’s men’s fault,” she answered. “They always drag it in—love, I
+mean.”
+
+“And so you’ve gone on having one proposal after another,” said Hewet.
+
+“I don’t suppose I’ve had more proposals than most women,” said Evelyn,
+but she spoke without conviction.
+
+“Five, six, ten?” Hewet ventured.
+
+Evelyn seemed to intimate that perhaps ten was the right figure, but
+that it really was not a high one.
+
+“I believe you’re thinking me a heartless flirt,” she protested. “But I
+don’t care if you are. I don’t care what any one thinks of me. Just
+because one’s interested and likes to be friends with men, and talk to
+them as one talks to women, one’s called a flirt.”
+
+“But Miss Murgatroyd—”
+
+“I wish you’d call me Evelyn,” she interrupted.
+
+“After ten proposals do you honestly think that men are the same as
+women?”
+
+“Honestly, honestly,—how I hate that word! It’s always used by prigs,”
+cried Evelyn. “Honestly I think they ought to be. That’s what’s so
+disappointing. Every time one thinks it’s not going to happen, and
+every time it does.”
+
+“The pursuit of Friendship,” said Hewet. “The title of a comedy.”
+
+“You’re horrid,” she cried. “You don’t care a bit really. You might be
+Mr. Hirst.”
+
+“Well,” said Hewet, “let’s consider. Let us consider—” He paused,
+because for the moment he could not remember what it was that they had
+to consider. He was far more interested in her than in her story, for
+as she went on speaking his numbness had disappeared, and he was
+conscious of a mixture of liking, pity, and distrust. “You’ve promised
+to marry both Oliver and Perrott?” he concluded.
+
+“Not exactly promised,” said Evelyn. “I can’t make up my mind which I
+really like best. Oh how I detest modern life!” she flung off. “It must
+have been so much easier for the Elizabethans! I thought the other day
+on that mountain how I’d have liked to be one of those colonists, to
+cut down trees and make laws and all that, instead of fooling about
+with all these people who think one’s just a pretty young lady. Though
+I’m not. I really might _do_ something.” She reflected in silence for a
+minute. Then she said:
+
+“I’m afraid right down in my heart that Alfred Perrot _won’t_ do. He’s
+not strong, is he?”
+
+“Perhaps he couldn’t cut down a tree,” said Hewet. “Have you never
+cared for anybody?” he asked.
+
+“I’ve cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them,” she said. “I
+suppose I’m too fastidious. All my life I’ve wanted somebody I could
+look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are so
+small.”
+
+“What d’you mean by splendid?” Hewet asked. “People are—nothing more.”
+
+Evelyn was puzzled.
+
+“We don’t care for people because of their qualities,” he tried to
+explain. “It’s just them that we care for,”—he struck a match—“just
+that,” he said, pointing to the flames.
+
+“I see what you mean,” she said, “but I don’t agree. I do know why I
+care for people, and I think I’m hardly ever wrong. I see at once what
+they’ve got in them. Now I think you must be rather splendid; but not
+Mr. Hirst.”
+
+Hewlet shook his head.
+
+“He’s not nearly so unselfish, or so sympathetic, or so big, or so
+understanding,” Evelyn continued.
+
+Hewet sat silent, smoking his cigarette.
+
+“I should hate cutting down trees,” he remarked.
+
+“I’m not trying to flirt with you, though I suppose you think I am!”
+Evelyn shot out. “I’d never have come to you if I’d thought you’d
+merely think odious things of me!” The tears came into her eyes.
+
+“Do you never flirt?” he asked.
+
+“Of course I don’t,” she protested. “Haven’t I told you? I want
+friendship; I want to care for some one greater and nobler than I am,
+and if they fall in love with me it isn’t my fault; I don’t want it; I
+positively hate it.”
+
+Hewet could see that there was very little use in going on with the
+conversation, for it was obvious that Evelyn did not wish to say
+anything in particular, but to impress upon him an image of herself,
+being, for some reason which she would not reveal, unhappy, or
+insecure. He was very tired, and a pale waiter kept walking
+ostentatiously into the middle of the room and looking at them
+meaningly.
+
+“They want to shut up,” he said. “My advice is that you should tell
+Oliver and Perrott to-morrow that you’ve made up your mind that you
+don’t mean to marry either of them. I’m certain you don’t. If you
+change your mind you can always tell them so. They’re both sensible
+men; they’ll understand. And then all this bother will be over.” He got
+up.
+
+But Evelyn did not move. She sat looking up at him with her bright
+eager eyes, in the depths of which he thought he detected some
+disappointment, or dissatisfaction.
+
+“Good-night,” he said.
+
+“There are heaps of things I want to say to you still,” she said. “And
+I’m going to, some time. I suppose you must go to bed now?”
+
+“Yes,” said Hewet. “I’m half asleep.” He left her still sitting by
+herself in the empty hall.
+
+“Why is it that they _won’t_ be honest?” he muttered to himself as he
+went upstairs. Why was it that relations between different people were
+so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous
+that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an
+instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed? What had Evelyn
+really wished to say to him? What was she feeling left alone in the
+empty hall? The mystery of life and the unreality even of one’s own
+sensations overcame him as he walked down the corridor which led to his
+room. It was dimly lighted, but sufficiently for him to see a figure in
+a bright dressing-gown pass swiftly in front of him, the figure of a
+woman crossing from one room to another.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually
+meeting in a hotel at midnight, they possess one advantage at least
+over the bonds which unite the elderly, who have lived together once
+and so must live for ever. Slight they may be, but vivid and genuine,
+merely because the power to break them is within the grasp of each, and
+there is no reason for continuance except a true desire that continue
+they shall. When two people have been married for years they seem to
+become unconscious of each other’s bodily presence so that they move as
+if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered,
+and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without
+its loneliness. The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this
+stage of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to
+recall with an effort whether a thing had been said or only thought,
+shared or dreamt in private. At four o’clock in the afternoon two or
+three days later Mrs. Ambrose was standing brushing her hair, while her
+husband was in the dressing-room which opened out of her room, and
+occasionally, through the cascade of water—he was washing his face—she
+caught exclamations, “So it goes on year after year; I wish, I wish, I
+wish I could make an end of it,” to which she paid no attention.
+
+“It’s white? Or only brown?” Thus she herself murmured, examining a
+hair which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. She pulled it out and
+laid it on the dressing-table. She was criticising her own appearance,
+or rather approving of it, standing a little way back from the glass
+and looking at her own face with superb pride and melancholy, when her
+husband appeared in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half
+obscured by a towel.
+
+“You often tell me I don’t notice things,” he remarked.
+
+“Tell me if this is a white hair, then?” she replied. She laid the hair
+on his hand.
+
+“There’s not a white hair on your head,” he exclaimed.
+
+“Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt,” she sighed; and bowed her head under
+his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced only a
+kiss where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife then proceeded
+to move about the room, casually murmuring.
+
+“What was that you were saying?” Helen remarked, after an interval of
+conversation which no third person could have understood.
+
+“Rachel—you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel,” he observed
+significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked
+at him. His observations were apt to be true.
+
+“Young gentlemen don’t interest themselves in young women’s education
+without a motive,” he remarked.
+
+“Oh, Hirst,” said Helen.
+
+“Hirst and Hewet, they’re all the same to me—all covered with spots,”
+he replied. “He advises her to read Gibbon. Did you know that?”
+
+Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior to
+her husband in powers of observation. She merely said:
+
+“Nothing would surprise me. Even that dreadful flying man we met at the
+dance—even Mr. Dalloway—even—”
+
+“I advise you to be circumspect,” said Ridley. “There’s Willoughby,
+remember—Willoughby”; he pointed at a letter.
+
+Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her
+dressing-table. Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive,
+perpetually jocular, robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring
+after his daughter’s manners and morals—hoping she wasn’t a bore, and
+bidding them pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she
+were—and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion, and
+then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little natives
+who went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he roared
+English oaths at them, “popping my head out of the window just as I
+was, in my shirt sleeves. The beggars had the sense to scatter.”
+
+“If Theresa married Willoughby,” she remarked, turning the page with a
+hairpin, “one doesn’t see what’s to prevent Rachel—”
+
+But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with the
+washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of
+Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and
+yet Ridley couldn’t simply point at the door and tell him to go. The
+truth of it was, they saw too many people. And so on and so on, more
+conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both
+ready to go down to tea.
+
+The first thing that caught Helen’s eye as she came downstairs was a
+carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding on the
+tops of hats. She had only time to gain the drawing-room before two
+names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thornbury
+came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.
+
+“Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing,” said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand.
+“A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry.”
+
+Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically. She was a woman of forty
+perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust, though not as
+tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.
+
+She looked Helen straight in the face and said, “You have a charmin’
+house.”
+
+She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you, and
+though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous at the
+same time. Mrs. Thornbury acted as interpreter, making things smooth
+all round by a series of charming commonplace remarks.
+
+“I’ve taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose,” she said, “to promise that
+you will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the benefit of your
+experience. I’m sure no one here knows the country as well as you do.
+No one takes such wonderful long walks. No one, I’m sure, has your
+encyclopaedic knowledge upon every subject. Mr. Wilfrid Flushing is a
+collector. He has discovered really beautiful things already. I had no
+notion that the peasants were so artistic—though of course in the
+past—”
+
+“Not old things—new things,” interrupted Mrs. Flushing curtly. “That
+is, if he takes my advice.”
+
+The Ambroses had not lived for many years in London without knowing
+something of a good many people, by name at least, and Helen remembered
+hearing of the Flushings. Mr. Flushing was a man who kept an old
+furniture shop; he had always said he would not marry because most
+women have red cheeks, and would not take a house because most houses
+have narrow staircases, and would not eat meat because most animals
+bleed when they are killed; and then he had married an eccentric
+aristocratic lady, who certainly was not pale, who looked as if she ate
+meat, who had forced him to do all the things he most disliked—and this
+then was the lady. Helen looked at her with interest. They had moved
+out into the garden, where the tea was laid under a tree, and Mrs.
+Flushing was helping herself to cherry jam. She had a peculiar jerking
+movement of the body when she spoke, which caused the canary-coloured
+plume on her hat to jerk too. Her small but finely-cut and vigorous
+features, together with the deep red of lips and cheeks, pointed to
+many generations of well-trained and well-nourished ancestors behind
+her.
+
+“Nothin’ that’s more than twenty years old interests me,” she
+continued. “Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they stick ’em in
+museums when they’re only fit for burnin’.”
+
+“I quite agree,” Helen laughed. “But my husband spends his life in
+digging up manuscripts which nobody wants.” She was amused by Ridley’s
+expression of startled disapproval.
+
+“There’s a clever man in London called John who paints ever so much
+better than the old masters,” Mrs. Flushing continued. “His pictures
+excite me—nothin’ that’s old excites me.”
+
+“But even his pictures will become old,” Mrs. Thornbury intervened.
+
+“Then I’ll have ’em burnt, or I’ll put it in my will,” said Mrs.
+Flushing.
+
+“And Mrs. Flushing lived in one of the most beautiful old houses in
+England—Chillingley,” Mrs. Thornbury explained to the rest of them.
+
+“If I’d my way I’d burn that to-morrow,” Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had
+a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless.
+
+“What does any sane person want with those great big houses?” she
+demanded. “If you go downstairs after dark you’re covered with black
+beetles, and the electric lights always goin’ out. What would you do if
+spiders came out of the tap when you turned on the hot water?” she
+demanded, fixing her eye on Helen.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose shrugged her shoulders with a smile.
+
+“This is what I like,” said Mrs. Flushing. She jerked her head at the
+Villa. “A little house in a garden. I had one once in Ireland. One
+could lie in bed in the mornin’ and pick roses outside the window with
+one’s toes.”
+
+“And the gardeners, weren’t they surprised?” Mrs. Thornbury enquired.
+
+“There were no gardeners,” Mrs. Flushing chuckled. “Nobody but me and
+an old woman without any teeth. You know the poor in Ireland lose their
+teeth after they’re twenty. But you wouldn’t expect a politician to
+understand that—Arthur Balfour wouldn’t understand that.”
+
+Ridley sighed that he never expected any one to understand anything,
+least of all politicians.
+
+“However,” he concluded, “there’s one advantage I find in extreme old
+age—nothing matters a hang except one’s food and one’s digestion. All I
+ask is to be left alone to moulder away in solitude. It’s obvious that
+the world’s going as fast as it can to—the Nethermost Pit, and all I
+can do is to sit still and consume as much of my own smoke as
+possible.” He groaned, and with a melancholy glance laid the jam on his
+bread, for he felt the atmosphere of this abrupt lady distinctly
+unsympathetic.
+
+“I always contradict my husband when he says that,” said Mrs. Thornbury
+sweetly. “You men! Where would you be if it weren’t for the women!”
+
+“Read the _Symposium_,” said Ridley grimly.
+
+“_Symposium_?” cried Mrs. Flushing. “That’s Latin or Greek? Tell me, is
+there a good translation?”
+
+“No,” said Ridley. “You will have to learn Greek.”
+
+Mrs. Flushing cried, “Ah, ah, ah! I’d rather break stones in the road.
+I always envy the men who break stones and sit on those nice little
+heaps all day wearin’ spectacles. I’d infinitely rather break stones
+than clean out poultry runs, or feed the cows, or—”
+
+Here Rachel came up from the lower garden with a book in her hand.
+
+“What’s that book?” said Ridley, when she had shaken hands.
+
+“It’s Gibbon,” said Rachel as she sat down.
+
+“_The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_?” said Mrs. Thornbury. “A
+very wonderful book, I know. My dear father was always quoting it at
+us, with the result that we resolved never to read a line.”
+
+“Gibbon the historian?” enquired Mrs. Flushing. “I connect him with
+some of the happiest hours of my life. We used to lie in bed and read
+Gibbon—about the massacres of the Christians, I remember—when we were
+supposed to be asleep. It’s no joke, I can tell you, readin’ a great
+big book, in double columns, by a night-light, and the light that comes
+through a chink in the door. Then there were the moths—tiger moths,
+yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. Louisa, my sister, would have the
+window open. I wanted it shut. We fought every night of our lives over
+that window. Have you ever seen a moth dyin’ in a night-light?” she
+enquired.
+
+Again there was an interruption. Hewet and Hirst appeared at the
+drawing-room window and came up to the tea-table.
+
+Rachel’s heart beat hard. She was conscious of an extraordinary
+intensity in everything, as though their presence stripped some cover
+off the surface of things; but the greetings were remarkably
+commonplace.
+
+“Excuse me,” said Hirst, rising from his chair directly he had sat
+down. He went into the drawing-room, and returned with a cushion which
+he placed carefully upon his seat.
+
+“Rheumatism,” he remarked, as he sat down for the second time.
+
+“The result of the dance?” Helen enquired.
+
+“Whenever I get at all run down I tend to be rheumatic,” Hirst stated.
+He bent his wrist back sharply. “I hear little pieces of chalk grinding
+together!”
+
+Rachel looked at him. She was amused, and yet she was respectful; if
+such a thing could be, the upper part of her face seemed to laugh, and
+the lower part to check its laughter.
+
+Hewet picked up the book that lay on the ground.
+
+“You like this?” he asked in an undertone.
+
+“No, I don’t like it,” she replied. She had indeed been trying all the
+afternoon to read it, and for some reason the glory which she had
+perceived at first had faded, and, read as she would, she could not
+grasp the meaning with her mind.
+
+“It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth,” she hazarded.
+Evidently she meant Hewet alone to hear her words, but Hirst demanded,
+“What d’you mean?”
+
+She was instantly ashamed of her figure of speech, for she could not
+explain it in words of sober criticism.
+
+“Surely it’s the most perfect style, so far as style goes, that’s ever
+been invented,” he continued. “Every sentence is practically perfect,
+and the wit—”
+
+“Ugly in body, repulsive in mind,” she thought, instead of thinking
+about Gibbon’s style. “Yes, but strong, searching, unyielding in mind.”
+She looked at his big head, a disproportionate part of which was
+occupied by the forehead, and at the direct, severe eyes.
+
+“I give you up in despair,” he said. He meant it lightly, but she took
+it seriously, and believed that her value as a human being was lessened
+because she did not happen to admire the style of Gibbon. The others
+were talking now in a group about the native villages which Mrs.
+Flushing ought to visit.
+
+“I despair too,” she said impetuously. “How are you going to judge
+people merely by their minds?”
+
+“You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect,” said St. John in his
+jaunty manner, which was always irritating because it made the person
+he talked to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest. “‘Be good, sweet
+maid’—I thought Mr. Kingsley and my Aunt were now obsolete.”
+
+“One can be very nice without having read a book,” she asserted. Very
+silly and simple her words sounded, and laid her open to derision.
+
+“Did I ever deny it?” Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.
+
+Most unexpectedly Mrs. Thornbury here intervened, either because it was
+her mission to keep things smooth or because she had long wished to
+speak to Mr. Hirst, feeling as she did that young men were her sons.
+
+“I have lived all my life with people like your Aunt, Mr. Hirst,” she
+said, leaning forward in her chair. Her brown squirrel-like eyes became
+even brighter than usual. “They have never heard of Gibbon. They only
+care for their pheasants and their peasants. They are great big men who
+look so fine on horseback, as people must have done, I think, in the
+days of the great wars. Say what you like against them—they are animal,
+they are unintellectual; they don’t read themselves, and they don’t
+want others to read, but they are some of the finest and the kindest
+human beings on the face of the earth! You would be surprised at some
+of the stories I could tell. You have never guessed, perhaps, at all
+the romances that go on in the heart of the country. There are the
+people, I feel, among whom Shakespeare will be born if he is ever born
+again. In those old houses, up among the Downs—”
+
+“My Aunt,” Hirst interrupted, “spends her life in East Lambeth among
+the degraded poor. I only quoted my Aunt because she is inclined to
+persecute people she calls ‘intellectual,’ which is what I suspect Miss
+Vinrace of doing. It’s all the fashion now. If you’re clever it’s
+always taken for granted that you’re completely without sympathy,
+understanding, affection—all the things that really matter. Oh, you
+Christians! You’re the most conceited, patronising, hypocritical set of
+old humbugs in the kingdom! Of course,” he continued, “I’m the first to
+allow your country gentlemen great merits. For one thing, they’re
+probably quite frank about their passions, which we are not. My father,
+who is a clergyman in Norfolk, says that there is hardly a squire in
+the country who does not—”
+
+“But about Gibbon?” Hewet interrupted. The look of nervous tension
+which had come over every face was relaxed by the interruption.
+
+“You find him monotonous, I suppose. But you know—” He opened the book,
+and began searching for passages to read aloud, and in a little time he
+found a good one which he considered suitable. But there was nothing in
+the world that bored Ridley more than being read aloud to, and he was
+besides scrupulously fastidious as to the dress and behaviour of
+ladies. In the space of fifteen minutes he had decided against Mrs.
+Flushing on the ground that her orange plume did not suit her
+complexion, that she spoke too loud, that she crossed her legs, and
+finally, when he saw her accept a cigarette that Hewet offered her, he
+jumped up, exclaiming something about “bar parlours,” and left them.
+Mrs. Flushing was evidently relieved by his departure. She puffed her
+cigarette, stuck her legs out, and examined Helen closely as to the
+character and reputation of their common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry. By
+a series of little strategems she drove her to define Mrs. Parry as
+somewhat elderly, by no means beautiful, very much made up—an insolent
+old harridan, in short, whose parties were amusing because one met odd
+people; but Helen herself always pitied poor Mr. Parry, who was
+understood to be shut up downstairs with cases full of gems, while his
+wife enjoyed herself in the drawing-room. “Not that I believe what
+people say against her—although she hints, of course—” Upon which Mrs.
+Flushing cried out with delight:
+
+“She’s my first cousin! Go on—go on!”
+
+When Mrs. Flushing rose to go she was obviously delighted with her new
+acquaintances. She made three or four different plans for meeting or
+going on an expedition, or showing Helen the things they had bought, on
+her way to the carriage. She included them all in a vague but
+magnificent invitation.
+
+As Helen returned to the garden again, Ridley’s words of warning came
+into her head, and she hesitated a moment and looked at Rachel sitting
+between Hirst and Hewet. But she could draw no conclusions, for Hewet
+was still reading Gibbon aloud, and Rachel, for all the expression she
+had, might have been a shell, and his words water rubbing against her
+ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge of a rock.
+
+Hewet’s voice was very pleasant. When he reached the end of the period
+Hewet stopped, and no one volunteered any criticism.
+
+“I do adore the aristocracy!” Hirst exclaimed after a moment’s pause.
+“They’re so amazingly unscrupulous. None of us would dare to behave as
+that woman behaves.”
+
+“What I like about them,” said Helen as she sat down, “is that they’re
+so well put together. Naked, Mrs. Flushing would be superb. Dressed as
+she dresses, it’s absurd, of course.”
+
+“Yes,” said Hirst. A shade of depression crossed his face. “I’ve never
+weighed more than ten stone in my life,” he said, “which is ridiculous,
+considering my height, and I’ve actually gone down in weight since we
+came here. I daresay that accounts for the rheumatism.” Again he jerked
+his wrist back sharply, so that Helen might hear the grinding of the
+chalk stones. She could not help smiling.
+
+“It’s no laughing matter for me, I assure you,” he protested. “My
+mother’s a chronic invalid, and I’m always expecting to be told that
+I’ve got heart disease myself. Rheumatism always goes to the heart in
+the end.”
+
+“For goodness’ sake, Hirst,” Hewet protested; “one might think you were
+an old cripple of eighty. If it comes to that, I had an aunt who died
+of cancer myself, but I put a bold face on it—” He rose and began
+tilting his chair backwards and forwards on its hind legs. “Is any one
+here inclined for a walk?” he said. “There’s a magnificent walk, up
+behind the house. You come out on to a cliff and look right down into
+the sea. The rocks are all red; you can see them through the water. The
+other day I saw a sight that fairly took my breath away—about twenty
+jelly-fish, semi-transparent, pink, with long streamers, floating on
+the top of the waves.”
+
+“Sure they weren’t mermaids?” said Hirst. “It’s much too hot to climb
+uphill.” He looked at Helen, who showed no signs of moving.
+
+“Yes, it’s too hot,” Helen decided.
+
+There was a short silence.
+
+“I’d like to come,” said Rachel.
+
+“But she might have said that anyhow,” Helen thought to herself as
+Hewet and Rachel went away together, and Helen was left alone with St.
+John, to St. John’s obvious satisfaction.
+
+He may have been satisfied, but his usual difficulty in deciding that
+one subject was more deserving of notice than another prevented him
+from speaking for some time. He sat staring intently at the head of a
+dead match, while Helen considered—so it seemed from the expression of
+her eyes—something not closely connected with the present moment.
+
+At last St. John exclaimed, “Damn! Damn everything! Damn everybody!” he
+added. “At Cambridge there are people to talk to.”
+
+“At Cambridge there are people to talk to,” Helen echoed him,
+rhythmically and absent-mindedly. Then she woke up. “By the way, have
+you settled what you’re going to do—is it to be Cambridge or the Bar?”
+
+He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for Helen was still
+slightly inattentive. She had been thinking about Rachel and which of
+the two young men she was likely to fall in love with, and now sitting
+opposite to Hirst she thought, “He’s ugly. It’s a pity they’re so
+ugly.”
+
+She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking of the
+clever, honest, interesting young men she knew, of whom Hirst was a
+good example, and wondering whether it was necessary that thought and
+scholarship should thus maltreat their bodies, and should thus elevate
+their minds to a very high tower from which the human race appeared to
+them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.
+
+“And the future?” she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men
+becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming more
+and more like Rachel. “Oh no,” she concluded, glancing at him, “one
+wouldn’t marry you. Well, then, the future of the race is in the hands
+of Susan and Arthur; no—that’s dreadful. Of farm labourers; no—not of
+the English at all, but of Russians and Chinese.” This train of thought
+did not satisfy her, and was interrupted by St. John, who began again:
+
+“I wish you knew Bennett. He’s the greatest man in the world.”
+
+“Bennett?” she enquired. Becoming more at ease, St. John dropped the
+concentrated abruptness of his manner, and explained that Bennett was a
+man who lived in an old windmill six miles out of Cambridge. He lived
+the perfect life, according to St. John, very lonely, very simple,
+caring only for the truth of things, always ready to talk, and
+extraordinarily modest, though his mind was of the greatest.
+
+“Don’t you think,” said St. John, when he had done describing him,
+“that kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather flimsy? Did you
+notice at tea how poor old Hewet had to change the conversation? How
+they were all ready to pounce upon me because they thought I was going
+to say something improper? It wasn’t anything, really. If Bennett had
+been there he’d have said exactly what he meant to say, or he’d have
+got up and gone. But there’s something rather bad for the character in
+that—I mean if one hasn’t got Bennett’s character. It’s inclined to
+make one bitter. Should you say that I was bitter?”
+
+Helen did not answer, and he continued:
+
+“Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it’s a beastly thing to be.
+But the worst of me is that I’m so envious. I envy every one. I can’t
+endure people who do things better than I do—perfectly absurd things
+too—waiters balancing piles of plates—even Arthur, because Susan’s in
+love with him. I want people to like me, and they don’t. It’s partly my
+appearance, I expect,” he continued, “though it’s an absolute lie to
+say I’ve Jewish blood in me—as a matter of fact we’ve been in Norfolk,
+Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall, for three centuries at least. It must be
+awfully soothing to be like you—every one liking one at once.”
+
+“I assure you they don’t,” Helen laughed.
+
+“They do,” said Hirst with conviction. “In the first place, you’re the
+most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen; in the second, you have an
+exceptionally nice nature.”
+
+If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his teacup he
+would have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure, partly with an
+impulse of affection towards the young man who had seemed, and would
+seem again, so ugly and so limited. She pitied him, for she suspected
+that he suffered, and she was interested in him, for many of the things
+he said seemed to her true; she admired the morality of youth, and yet
+she felt imprisoned. As if her instinct were to escape to something
+brightly coloured and impersonal, which she could hold in her hands,
+she went into the house and returned with her embroidery. But he was
+not interested in her embroidery; he did not even look at it.
+
+“About Miss Vinrace,” he began,—“oh, look here, do let’s be St. John
+and Helen, and Rachel and Terence—what’s she like? Does she reason,
+does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool?”
+
+“Oh no,” said Helen, with great decision. From her observations at tea
+she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to educate
+Rachel. She had gradually come to be interested in her niece, and fond
+of her; she disliked some things about her very much, she was amused by
+others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being,
+experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with
+powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling. Somewhere in the
+depths of her, too, she was bound to Rachel by the indestructible if
+inexplicable ties of sex. “She seems vague, but she’s a will of her
+own,” she said, as if in the interval she had run through her
+qualities.
+
+The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being
+difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses into
+the dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in her skeins of silk, or,
+with head a little drawn back and eyes narrowed, considered the effect
+of the whole. Thus she merely said, “Um-m-m” to St. John’s next remark,
+“I shall ask her to go for a walk with me.”
+
+Perhaps he resented this division of attention. He sat silent watching
+Helen closely.
+
+“You’re absolutely happy,” he proclaimed at last.
+
+“Yes?” Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.
+
+“Marriage, I suppose,” said St. John.
+
+“Yes,” said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.
+
+“Children?” St. John enquired.
+
+“Yes,” said Helen, sticking her needle in again. “I don’t know why I’m
+happy,” she suddenly laughed, looking him full in the face. There was a
+considerable pause.
+
+“There’s an abyss between us,” said St. John. His voice sounded as if
+it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks. “You’re infinitely
+simpler than I am. Women always are, of course. That’s the difficulty.
+One never knows how a woman gets there. Supposing all the time you’re
+thinking, ‘Oh, what a morbid young man!’”
+
+Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand. From her
+position she saw his head in front of the dark pyramid of a
+magnolia-tree. With one foot raised on the rung of a chair, and her
+elbow out in the attitude for sewing, her own figure possessed the
+sublimity of a woman’s of the early world, spinning the thread of
+fate—the sublimity possessed by many women of the present day who fall
+into the attitude required by scrubbing or sewing. St. John looked at
+her.
+
+“I suppose you’ve never paid any a compliment in the course of your
+life,” he said irrelevantly.
+
+“I spoil Ridley rather,” Helen considered.
+
+“I’m going to ask you point blank—do you like me?”
+
+After a certain pause, she replied, “Yes, certainly.”
+
+“Thank God!” he exclaimed. “That’s one mercy. You see,” he continued
+with emotion, “I’d rather you liked me than any one I’ve ever met.”
+
+“What about the five philosophers?” said Helen, with a laugh, stitching
+firmly and swiftly at her canvas. “I wish you’d describe them.”
+
+Hirst had no particular wish to describe them, but when he began to
+consider them he found himself soothed and strengthened. Far away on
+the other side of the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey
+medieval courts, they appeared remarkable figures, free-spoken men with
+whom one could be at ease; incomparably more subtle in emotion than the
+people here. They gave him, certainly, what no woman could give him,
+not Helen even. Warming at the thought of them, he went on to lay his
+case before Mrs. Ambrose. Should he stay on at Cambridge or should he
+go to the Bar? One day he thought one thing, another day another. Helen
+listened attentively. At last, without any preface, she pronounced her
+decision.
+
+“Leave Cambridge and go to the Bar,” she said. He pressed her for her
+reasons.
+
+“I think you’d enjoy London more,” she said. It did not seem a very
+subtle reason, but she appeared to think it sufficient. She looked at
+him against the background of flowering magnolia. There was something
+curious in the sight. Perhaps it was that the heavy wax-like flowers
+were so smooth and inarticulate, and his face—he had thrown his hat
+away, his hair was rumpled, he held his eye-glasses in his hand, so
+that a red mark appeared on either side of his nose—was so worried and
+garrulous. It was a beautiful bush, spreading very widely, and all the
+time she had sat there talking she had been noticing the patches of
+shade and the shape of the leaves, and the way the great white flowers
+sat in the midst of the green. She had noticed it half-consciously,
+nevertheless the pattern had become part of their talk. She laid down
+her sewing, and began to walk up and down the garden, and Hirst rose
+too and paced by her side. He was rather disturbed, uncomfortable, and
+full of thought. Neither of them spoke.
+
+The sun was beginning to go down, and a change had come over the
+mountains, as if they were robbed of their earthly substance, and
+composed merely of intense blue mist. Long thin clouds of flamingo red,
+with edges like the edges of curled ostrich feathers, lay up and down
+the sky at different altitudes. The roofs of the town seemed to have
+sunk lower than usual; the cypresses appeared very black between the
+roofs, and the roofs themselves were brown and white. As usual in the
+evening, single cries and single bells became audible rising from
+beneath.
+
+St. John stopped suddenly.
+
+“Well, you must take the responsibility,” he said. “I’ve made up my
+mind; I shall go to the Bar.”
+
+His words were very serious, almost emotional; they recalled Helen
+after a second’s hesitation.
+
+“I’m sure you’re right,” she said warmly, and shook the hand he held
+out. “You’ll be a great man, I’m certain.”
+
+Then, as if to make him look at the scene, she swept her hand round the
+immense circumference of the view. From the sea, over the roofs of the
+town, across the crests of the mountains, over the river and the plain,
+and again across the crests of the mountains it swept until it reached
+the villa, the garden, the magnolia-tree, and the figures of Hirst and
+herself standing together, when it dropped to her side.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Hewet and Rachel had long ago reached the particular place on the edge
+of the cliff where, looking down into the sea, you might chance on
+jelly-fish and dolphins. Looking the other way, the vast expanse of
+land gave them a sensation which is given by no view, however extended,
+in England; the villages and the hills there having names, and the
+farthest horizon of hills as often as not dipping and showing a line of
+mist which is the sea; here the view was one of infinite sun-dried
+earth, earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers, earth
+widening and spreading away and away like the immense floor of the sea,
+earth chequered by day and by night, and partitioned into different
+lands, where famous cities were founded, and the races of men changed
+from dark savages to white civilised men, and back to dark savages
+again. Perhaps their English blood made this prospect uncomfortably
+impersonal and hostile to them, for having once turned their faces that
+way they next turned them to the sea, and for the rest of the time sat
+looking at the sea. The sea, though it was a thin and sparkling water
+here, which seemed incapable of surge or anger, eventually narrowed
+itself, clouded its pure tint with grey, and swirled through narrow
+channels and dashed in a shiver of broken waters against massive
+granite rocks. It was this sea that flowed up to the mouth of the
+Thames; and the Thames washed the roots of the city of London.
+
+Hewet’s thoughts had followed some such course as this, for the first
+thing he said as they stood on the edge of the cliff was—
+
+“I’d like to be in England!”
+
+Rachel lay down on her elbow, and parted the tall grasses which grew on
+the edge, so that she might have a clear view. The water was very calm;
+rocking up and down at the base of the cliff, and so clear that one
+could see the red of the stones at the bottom of it. So it had been at
+the birth of the world, and so it had remained ever since. Probably no
+human being had ever broken that water with boat or with body. Obeying
+some impulse, she determined to mar that eternity of peace, and threw
+the largest pebble she could find. It struck the water, and the ripples
+spread out and out. Hewet looked down too.
+
+“It’s wonderful,” he said, as they widened and ceased. The freshness
+and the newness seemed to him wonderful. He threw a pebble next. There
+was scarcely any sound.
+
+“But England,” Rachel murmured in the absorbed tone of one whose eyes
+are concentrated upon some sight. “What d’you want with England?”
+
+“My friends chiefly,” he said, “and all the things one does.”
+
+He could look at Rachel without her noticing it. She was still absorbed
+in the water and the exquisitely pleasant sensations which a little
+depth of the sea washing over rocks suggests. He noticed that she was
+wearing a dress of deep blue colour, made of a soft thin cotton stuff,
+which clung to the shape of her body. It was a body with the angles and
+hollows of a young woman’s body not yet developed, but in no way
+distorted, and thus interesting and even lovable. Raising his eyes
+Hewet observed her head; she had taken her hat off, and the face rested
+on her hand. As she looked down into the sea, her lips were slightly
+parted. The expression was one of childlike intentness, as if she were
+watching for a fish to swim past over the clear red rocks. Nevertheless
+her twenty-four years of life had given her a look of reserve. Her
+hand, which lay on the ground, the fingers curling slightly in, was
+well shaped and competent; the square-tipped and nervous fingers were
+the fingers of a musician. With something like anguish Hewet realised
+that, far from being unattractive, her body was very attractive to him.
+She looked up suddenly. Her eyes were full of eagerness and interest.
+
+“You write novels?” she asked.
+
+For the moment he could not think what he was saying. He was overcome
+with the desire to hold her in his arms.
+
+“Oh yes,” he said. “That is, I want to write them.”
+
+She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.
+
+“Novels,” she repeated. “Why do you write novels? You ought to write
+music. Music, you see”—she shifted her eyes, and became less desirable
+as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain change upon her
+face—“music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at
+once. With writing it seems to me there’s so much”—she paused for an
+expression, and rubbed her fingers in the earth—“scratching on the
+matchbox. Most of the time when I was reading Gibbon this afternoon I
+was horribly, oh infernally, damnably bored!” She gave a shake of
+laughter, looking at Hewet, who laughed too.
+
+“_I_ shan’t lend you books,” he remarked.
+
+“Why is it,” Rachel continued, “that I can laugh at Mr. Hirst to you,
+but not to his face? At tea I was completely overwhelmed, not by his
+ugliness—by his mind.” She enclosed a circle in the air with her hands.
+She realised with a great sense of comfort how easily she could talk to
+Hewet, those thorns or ragged corners which tear the surface of some
+relationships being smoothed away.
+
+“So I observed,” said Hewet. “That’s a thing that never ceases to amaze
+me.” He had recovered his composure to such an extent that he could
+light and smoke a cigarette, and feeling her ease, became happy and
+easy himself.
+
+“The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for
+men,” he went on. “I believe we must have the sort of power over you
+that we’re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as
+we are or they’d never obey us. For that very reason, I’m inclined to
+doubt that you’ll ever do anything even when you have the vote.” He
+looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and
+young. “It’ll take at least six generations before you’re sufficiently
+thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what
+a bully the ordinary man is,” he continued, “the ordinary hard-working,
+rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up
+and a certain position to maintain. And then, of course, the daughters
+have to give way to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have
+to bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes
+over again. And meanwhile there are the women in the background. . . .
+Do you really think that the vote will do you any good?”
+
+“The vote?” Rachel repeated. She had to visualise it as a little bit of
+paper which she dropped into a box before she understood his question,
+and looking at each other they smiled at something absurd in the
+question.
+
+“Not to me,” she said. “But I play the piano. . . . Are men really like
+that?” she asked, returning to the question that interested her. “I’m
+not afraid of you.” She looked at him easily.
+
+“Oh, I’m different,” Hewet replied. “I’ve got between six and seven
+hundred a year of my own. And then no one takes a novelist seriously,
+thank heavens. There’s no doubt it helps to make up for the drudgery of
+a profession if a man’s taken very, very seriously by every one—if he
+gets appointments, and has offices and a title, and lots of letters
+after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees. I don’t grudge it ’em,
+though sometimes it comes over me—what an amazing concoction! What a
+miracle the masculine conception of life is—judges, civil servants,
+army, navy, Houses of Parliament, lord mayors—what a world we’ve made
+of it! Look at Hirst now. I assure you,” he said, “not a day’s passed
+since we came here without a discussion as to whether he’s to stay on
+at Cambridge or to go to the Bar. It’s his career—his sacred career.
+And if I’ve heard it twenty times, I’m sure his mother and sister have
+heard it five hundred times. Can’t you imagine the family conclaves,
+and the sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St. John
+must have the school-room to himself—‘St. John’s working,’ ‘St. John
+wants his tea brought to him.’ Don’t you know the kind of thing? No
+wonder that St. John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. It
+is too. He has to earn his living. But St. John’s sister—” Hewet puffed
+in silence. “No one takes her seriously, poor dear. She feeds the
+rabbits.”
+
+“Yes,” said Rachel. “I’ve fed rabbits for twenty-four years; it seems
+odd now.” She looked meditative, and Hewet, who had been talking much
+at random and instinctively adopting the feminine point of view, saw
+that she would now talk about herself, which was what he wanted, for so
+they might come to know each other.
+
+She looked back meditatively upon her past life.
+
+“How do you spend your day?” he asked.
+
+She meditated still. When she thought of their day it seemed to her it
+was cut into four pieces by their meals. These divisions were
+absolutely rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate
+themselves within the four rigid bars. Looking back at her life, that
+was what she saw.
+
+“Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight,” she said.
+
+“Well,” said Hewet, “what d’you do in the morning?”
+
+“I need to play the piano for hours and hours.”
+
+“And after luncheon?”
+
+“Then I went shopping with one of my aunts. Or we went to see some one,
+or we took a message; or we did something that had to be done—the taps
+might be leaking. They visit the poor a good deal—old char-women with
+bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. Or I used to walk in
+the park by myself. And after tea people sometimes called; or in summer
+we sat in the garden or played croquet; in winter I read aloud, while
+they worked; after dinner I played the piano and they wrote letters. If
+father was at home we had friends of his to dinner, and about once a
+month we went up to the play. Every now and then we dined out;
+sometimes I went to a dance in London, but that was difficult because
+of getting back. The people we saw were old family friends, and
+relations, but we didn’t see many people. There was the clergyman, Mr.
+Pepper, and the Hunts. Father generally wanted to be quiet when he came
+home, because he works very hard at Hull. Also my aunts aren’t very
+strong. A house takes up a lot of time if you do it properly. Our
+servants were always bad, and so Aunt Lucy used to do a good deal in
+the kitchen, and Aunt Clara, I think, spent most of the morning dusting
+the drawing-room and going through the linen and silver. Then there
+were the dogs. They had to be exercised, besides being washed and
+brushed. Now Sandy’s dead, but Aunt Clara has a very old cockatoo that
+came from India. Everything in our house,” she exclaimed, “comes from
+somewhere! It’s full of old furniture, not really old, Victorian,
+things mother’s family had or father’s family had, which they didn’t
+like to get rid of, I suppose, though we’ve really no room for them.
+It’s rather a nice house,” she continued, “except that it’s a little
+dingy—dull I should say.” She called up before her eyes a vision of the
+drawing-room at home; it was a large oblong room, with a square window
+opening on the garden. Green plush chairs stood against the wall; there
+was a heavy carved book-case, with glass doors, and a general
+impression of faded sofa covers, large spaces of pale green, and
+baskets with pieces of wool-work dropping out of them. Photographs from
+old Italian masterpieces hung on the walls, and views of Venetian
+bridges and Swedish waterfalls which members of the family had seen
+years ago. There were also one or two portraits of fathers and
+grandmothers, and an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after the picture
+by Watts. It was a room without definite character, being neither
+typically and openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor really
+comfortable. Rachel roused herself from the contemplation of this
+familiar picture.
+
+“But this isn’t very interesting for you,” she said, looking up.
+
+“Good Lord!” Hewet exclaimed. “I’ve never been so much interested in my
+life.” She then realised that while she had been thinking of Richmond,
+his eyes had never left her face. The knowledge of this excited her.
+
+“Go on, please go on,” he urged. “Let’s imagine it’s a Wednesday.
+You’re all at luncheon. You sit there, and Aunt Lucy there, and Aunt
+Clara here”; he arranged three pebbles on the grass between them.
+
+“Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb,” Rachel continued. She fixed her
+gaze upon the pebbles. “There’s a very ugly yellow china stand in front
+of me, called a dumb waiter, on which are three dishes, one for
+biscuits, one for butter, and one for cheese. There’s a pot of ferns.
+Then there’s Blanche the maid, who snuffles because of her nose. We
+talk—oh yes, it’s Aunt Lucy’s afternoon at Walworth, so we’re rather
+quick over luncheon. She goes off. She has a purple bag, and a black
+notebook. Aunt Clara has what they call a G.F.S. meeting in the
+drawing-room on Wednesday, so I take the dogs out. I go up Richmond
+Hill, along the terrace, into the park. It’s the 18th of April—the same
+day as it is here. It’s spring in England. The ground is rather damp.
+However, I cross the road and get on to the grass and we walk along,
+and I sing as I always do when I’m alone, until we come to the open
+place where you can see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day.
+Hampstead Church spire there, Westminster Cathedral over there, and
+factory chimneys about here. There’s generally a haze over the low
+parts of London; but it’s often blue over the park when London’s in a
+mist. It’s the open place that the balloons cross going over to
+Hurlingham. They’re pale yellow. Well, then, it smells very good,
+particularly if they happen to be burning wood in the keeper’s lodge
+which is there. I could tell you now how to get from place to place,
+and exactly what trees you’d pass, and where you’d cross the roads. You
+see, I played there when I was small. Spring is good, but it’s best in
+the autumn when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky, and I go back
+through the streets, and you can’t see people properly; they come past
+very quick, you just see their faces and then they’re gone—that’s what
+I like—and no one knows in the least what you’re doing—”
+
+“But you have to be back for tea, I suppose?” Hewet checked her.
+
+“Tea? Oh yes. Five o’clock. Then I say what I’ve done, and my aunts say
+what they’ve done, and perhaps some one comes in: Mrs. Hunt, let’s
+suppose. She’s an old lady with a lame leg. She has or she once had
+eight children; so we ask after them. They’re all over the world; so we
+ask where they are, and sometimes they’re ill, or they’re stationed in
+a cholera district, or in some place where it only rains once in five
+months. Mrs. Hunt,” she said with a smile, “had a son who was hugged to
+death by a bear.”
+
+Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused by
+the same things that amused her. She was reassured. But she thought it
+necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.
+
+“You can’t conceive how it interests me,” he said. Indeed, his
+cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another.
+
+“Why does it interest you?” she asked.
+
+“Partly because you’re a woman,” he replied. When he said this, Rachel,
+who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a childlike
+state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became
+self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under
+observation, as she felt with St. John Hirst. She was about to launch
+into an argument which would have made them both feel bitterly against
+each other, and to define sensations which had no such importance as
+words were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a
+different direction.
+
+“I’ve often walked along the streets where people live all in a row,
+and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth
+the women were doing inside,” he said. “Just consider: it’s the
+beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman
+had ever come out by herself and said things at all. There it was going
+on in the background, for all those thousands of years, this curious
+silent unrepresented life. Of course we’re always writing about
+women—abusing them, or jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it’s
+never come from women themselves. I believe we still don’t know in the
+least how they live, or what they feel, or what they do precisely. If
+one’s a man, the only confidences one gets are from young women about
+their love affairs. But the lives of women of forty, of unmarried
+women, of working women, of women who keep shops and bring up children,
+of women like your aunts or Mrs. Thornbury or Miss Allan—one knows
+nothing whatever about them. They won’t tell you. Either they’re
+afraid, or they’ve got a way of treating men. It’s the man’s view
+that’s represented, you see. Think of a railway train: fifteen
+carriages for men who want to smoke. Doesn’t it make your blood boil?
+If I were a woman I’d blow some one’s brains out. Don’t you laugh at us
+a great deal? Don’t you think it all a great humbug? You, I mean—how
+does it all strike you?”
+
+His determination to know, while it gave meaning to their talk,
+hampered her; he seemed to press further and further, and made it
+appear so important. She took some time to answer, and during that time
+she went over and over the course of her twenty-four years, lighting
+now on one point, now on another—on her aunts, her mother, her father,
+and at last her mind fixed upon her aunts and her father, and she tried
+to describe them as at this distance they appeared to her.
+
+They were very much afraid of her father. He was a great dim force in
+the house, by means of which they held on to the great world which is
+represented every morning in the _Times_. But the real life of the
+house was something quite different from this. It went on independently
+of Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself from him. He was
+good-humoured towards them, but contemptuous. She had always taken it
+for granted that his point of view was just, and founded upon an ideal
+scale of things where the life of one person was absolutely more
+important than the life of another, and that in that scale they were of
+much less importance than he was. But did she really believe that?
+Hewet’s words made her think. She always submitted to her father, just
+as they did, but it was her aunts who influenced her really; her aunts
+who built up the fine, closely woven substance of their life at home.
+They were less splendid but more natural than her father was. All her
+rages had been against them; it was their world with its four meals,
+its punctuality, and servants on the stairs at half-past ten, that she
+examined so closely and wanted so vehemently to smash to atoms.
+Following these thoughts she looked up and said:
+
+“And there’s a sort of beauty in it—there they are at Richmond at this
+very moment building things up. They’re all wrong, perhaps, but there’s
+a sort of beauty in it,” she repeated. “It’s so unconscious, so modest.
+And yet they feel things. They do mind if people die. Old spinsters are
+always doing things. I don’t quite know what they do. Only that was
+what I felt when I lived with them. It was very real.”
+
+She reviewed their little journeys to and fro, to Walworth, to
+charwomen with bad legs, to meetings for this and that, their minute
+acts of charity and unselfishness which flowered punctually from a
+definite view of what they ought to do, their friendships, their tastes
+and habits; she saw all these things like grains of sand falling,
+falling through innumerable days, making an atmosphere and building up
+a solid mass, a background. Hewet observed her as she considered this.
+
+“Were you happy?” he demanded.
+
+Again she had become absorbed in something else, and he called her back
+to an unusually vivid consciousness of herself.
+
+“I was both,” she replied. “I was happy and I was miserable. You’ve no
+conception what it’s like—to be a young woman.” She looked straight at
+him. “There are terrors and agonies,” she said, keeping her eye on him
+as if to detect the slightest hint of laughter.
+
+“I can believe it,” he said. He returned her look with perfect
+sincerity.
+
+“Women one sees in the streets,” she said.
+
+“Prostitutes?”
+
+“Men kissing one.”
+
+He nodded his head.
+
+“You were never told?”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“And then,” she began and stopped. Here came in the great space of life
+into which no one had ever penetrated. All that she had been saying
+about her father and her aunts and walks in Richmond Park, and what
+they did from hour to hour, was merely on the surface. Hewet was
+watching her. Did he demand that she should describe that also? Why did
+he sit so near and keep his eye on her? Why did they not have done with
+this searching and agony? Why did they not kiss each other simply? She
+wished to kiss him. But all the time she went on spinning out words.
+
+“A girl is more lonely than a boy. No one cares in the least what she
+does. Nothing’s expected of her. Unless one’s very pretty people don’t
+listen to what you say. . . . And that is what I like,” she added
+energetically, as if the memory were very happy. “I like walking in
+Richmond Park and singing to myself and knowing it doesn’t matter a
+damn to anybody. I like seeing things go on—as we saw you that night
+when you didn’t see us—I love the freedom of it—it’s like being the
+wind or the sea.” She turned with a curious fling of her hands and
+looked at the sea. It was still very blue, dancing away as far as the
+eye could reach, but the light on it was yellower, and the clouds were
+turning flamingo red.
+
+A feeling of intense depression crossed Hewet’s mind as she spoke. It
+seemed plain that she would never care for one person rather than
+another; she was evidently quite indifferent to him; they seemed to
+come very near, and then they were as far apart as ever again; and her
+gesture as she turned away had been oddly beautiful.
+
+“Nonsense,” he said abruptly. “You like people. You like admiration.
+Your real grudge against Hirst is that he doesn’t admire you.”
+
+She made no answer for some time. Then she said:
+
+“That’s probably true. Of course I like people—I like almost every one
+I’ve ever met.”
+
+She turned her back on the sea and regarded Hewet with friendly if
+critical eyes. He was good-looking in the sense that he had always had
+a sufficiency of beef to eat and fresh air to breathe. His head was
+big; the eyes were also large; though generally vague they could be
+forcible; and the lips were sensitive. One might account him a man of
+considerable passion and fitful energy, likely to be at the mercy of
+moods which had little relation to facts; at once tolerant and
+fastidious. The breadth of his forehead showed capacity for thought.
+The interest with which Rachel looked at him was heard in her voice.
+
+“What novels do you write?” she asked.
+
+“I want to write a novel about Silence,” he said; “the things people
+don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.” He sighed. “However, you
+don’t care,” he continued. He looked at her almost severely. “Nobody
+cares. All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the
+writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he’s put in. As
+for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one’s seen the
+thing, felt about it, make it stand in relation to other things, not
+one in a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether
+there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other
+people,” he indicated the hotel, “are always wanting something they
+can’t get. But there’s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even
+in the attempt to write. What you said just now is true: one doesn’t
+want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.”
+
+Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he
+gazed out to sea.
+
+It was Rachel’s turn now to feel depressed. As he talked of writing he
+had become suddenly impersonal. He might never care for any one; all
+that desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt pressing on
+her almost painfully, had completely vanished.
+
+“Are you a good writer?” she asked.
+
+“Yes,” he said. “I’m not first-rate, of course; I’m good second-rate;
+about as good as Thackeray, I should say.”
+
+Rachel was amazed. For one thing it amazed her to hear Thackeray called
+second-rate; and then she could not widen her point of view to believe
+that there could be great writers in existence at the present day, or
+if there were, that any one she knew could be a great writer, and his
+self-confidence astounded her, and he became more and more remote.
+
+“My other novel,” Hewet continued, “is about a young man who is
+obsessed by an idea—the idea of being a gentleman. He manages to exist
+at Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year. He has a coat; it was once a
+very good coat. But the trousers—they’re not so good. Well, he goes up
+to London, gets into good society, owing to an early-morning adventure
+on the banks of the Serpentine. He is led into telling lies—my idea,
+you see, is to show the gradual corruption of the soul—calls himself
+the son of some great landed proprietor in Devonshire. Meanwhile the
+coat becomes older and older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers.
+Can’t you imagine the wretched man, after some splendid evening of
+debauchery, contemplating these garments—hanging them over the end of
+the bed, arranging them now in full light, now in shade, and wondering
+whether they will survive him, or he will survive them? Thoughts of
+suicide cross his mind. He has a friend, too, a man who somehow
+subsists upon selling small birds, for which he sets traps in the
+fields near Uxbridge. They’re scholars, both of them. I know one or two
+wretched starving creatures like that who quote Aristotle at you over a
+fried herring and a pint of porter. Fashionable life, too, I have to
+represent at some length, in order to show my hero under all
+circumstances. Lady Theo Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the
+good fortune to stop, is the daughter of a very fine old Tory peer. I’m
+going to describe the kind of parties I once went to—the fashionable
+intellectuals, you know, who like to have the latest book on their
+tables. They give parties, river parties, parties where you play games.
+There’s no difficulty in conceiving incidents; the difficulty is to put
+them into shape—not to get run away with, as Lady Theo was. It ended
+disastrously for her, poor woman, for the book, as I planned it, was
+going to end in profound and sordid respectability. Disowned by her
+father, she marries my hero, and they live in a snug little villa
+outside Croydon, in which town he is set up as a house agent. He never
+succeeds in becoming a real gentleman after all. That’s the interesting
+part of it. Does it seem to you the kind of book you’d like to read?”
+he enquired; “or perhaps you’d like my Stuart tragedy better,” he
+continued, without waiting for her to answer him. “My idea is that
+there’s a certain quality of beauty in the past, which the ordinary
+historical novelist completely ruins by his absurd conventions. The
+moon becomes the Regent of the Skies. People clap spurs to their
+horses, and so on. I’m going to treat people as though they were
+exactly the same as we are. The advantage is that, detached from modern
+conditions, one can make them more intense and more abstract than
+people who live as we do.”
+
+Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a certain
+amount of bewilderment. They both sat thinking their own thoughts.
+
+“I’m not like Hirst,” said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke meditatively;
+“I don’t see circles of chalk between people’s feet. I sometimes wish I
+did. It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused. One can’t
+come to any decision at all; one’s less and less capable of making
+judgments. D’you find that? And then one never knows what any one
+feels. We’re all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine
+anything more ludicrous than one person’s opinion of another person?
+One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn’t know.”
+
+As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and rearranging
+in the grass the stones which had represented Rachel and her aunts at
+luncheon. He was speaking as much to himself as to Rachel. He was
+reasoning against the desire, which had returned with intensity, to
+take her in his arms; to have done with indirectness; to explain
+exactly what he felt. What he said was against his belief; all the
+things that were important about her he knew; he felt them in the air
+around them; but he said nothing; he went on arranging the stones.
+
+“I like you; d’you like me?” Rachel suddenly observed.
+
+“I like you immensely,” Hewet replied, speaking with the relief of a
+person who is unexpectedly given an opportunity of saying what he wants
+to say. He stopped moving the pebbles.
+
+“Mightn’t we call each other Rachel and Terence?” he asked.
+
+“Terence,” Rachel repeated. “Terence—that’s like the cry of an owl.”
+
+She looked up with a sudden rush of delight, and in looking at Terence
+with eyes widened by pleasure she was struck by the change that had
+come over the sky behind them. The substantial blue day had faded to a
+paler and more ethereal blue; the clouds were pink, far away and
+closely packed together; and the peace of evening had replaced the heat
+of the southern afternoon, in which they had started on their walk.
+
+“It must be late!” she exclaimed.
+
+It was nearly eight o’clock.
+
+“But eight o’clock doesn’t count here, does it?” Terence asked, as they
+got up and turned inland again. They began to walk rather quickly down
+the hill on a little path between the olive trees.
+
+They felt more intimate because they shared the knowledge of what eight
+o’clock in Richmond meant. Terence walked in front, for there was not
+room for them side by side.
+
+“What I want to do in writing novels is very much what you want to do
+when you play the piano, I expect,” he began, turning and speaking over
+his shoulder. “We want to find out what’s behind things, don’t we?—Look
+at the lights down there,” he continued, “scattered about anyhow.
+Things I feel come to me like lights. . . . I want to combine them. . .
+. Have you ever seen fireworks that make figures? . . . I want to make
+figures. . . . Is that what you want to do?”
+
+Now they were out on the road and could walk side by side.
+
+“When I play the piano? Music is different. . . . But I see what you
+mean.” They tried to invent theories and to make their theories agree.
+As Hewet had no knowledge of music, Rachel took his stick and drew
+figures in the thin white dust to explain how Bach wrote his fugues.
+
+“My musical gift was ruined,” he explained, as they walked on after one
+of these demonstrations, “by the village organist at home, who had
+invented a system of notation which he tried to teach me, with the
+result that I never got to the tune-playing at all. My mother thought
+music wasn’t manly for boys; she wanted me to kill rats and
+birds—that’s the worst of living in the country. We live in Devonshire.
+It’s the loveliest place in the world. Only—it’s always difficult at
+home when one’s grown up. I’d like you to know one of my sisters. . . .
+Oh, here’s your gate—” He pushed it open. They paused for a moment. She
+could not ask him to come in. She could not say that she hoped they
+would meet again; there was nothing to be said, and so without a word
+she went through the gate, and was soon invisible. Directly Hewet lost
+sight of her, he felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly
+than before. Their talk had been interrupted in the middle, just as he
+was beginning to say the things he wanted to say. After all, what had
+they been able to say? He ran his mind over the things they had said,
+the random, unnecessary things which had eddied round and round and
+used up all the time, and drawn them so close together and flung them
+so far apart, and left him in the end unsatisfied, ignorant still of
+what she felt and of what she was like. What was the use of talking,
+talking, merely talking?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came from
+England left a few people on the shores of Santa Marina who drove up to
+the hotel. The fact that the Ambroses had a house where one could
+escape momentarily from the slightly inhuman atmosphere of an hotel was
+a source of genuine pleasure not only to Hirst and Hewet, but to the
+Elliots, the Thornburys, the Flushings, Miss Allan, Evelyn M., together
+with other people whose identity was so little developed that the
+Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names. By degrees there
+was established a kind of correspondence between the two houses, the
+big and the small, so that at most hours of the day one house could
+guess what was going on in the other, and the words “the villa” and
+“the hotel” called up the idea of two separate systems of life.
+Acquaintances showed signs of developing into friends, for that one tie
+to Mrs. Parry’s drawing-room had inevitably split into many other ties
+attached to different parts of England, and sometimes these alliances
+seemed cynically fragile, and sometimes painfully acute, lacking as
+they did the supporting background of organised English life. One night
+when the moon was round between the trees, Evelyn M. told Helen the
+story of her life, and claimed her everlasting friendship; on another
+occasion, merely because of a sigh, or a pause, or a word thoughtlessly
+dropped, poor Mrs. Elliot left the villa half in tears, vowing never
+again to meet the cold and scornful woman who had insulted her, and in
+truth, meet again they never did. It did not seem worth while to piece
+together so slight a friendship.
+
+Hewet, indeed, might have found excellent material at this time up at
+the villa for some chapters in the novel which was to be called
+“Silence, or the Things People don’t say.” Helen and Rachel had become
+very silent. Having detected, as she thought, a secret, and judging
+that Rachel meant to keep it from her, Mrs. Ambrose respected it
+carefully, but from that cause, though unintentionally, a curious
+atmosphere of reserve grew up between them. Instead of sharing their
+views upon all subjects, and plunging after an idea wherever it might
+lead, they spoke chiefly in comment upon the people they saw, and the
+secret between them made itself felt in what they said even of
+Thornburys and Elliots. Always calm and unemotional in her judgments,
+Mrs. Ambrose was now inclined to be definitely pessimistic. She was not
+severe upon individuals so much as incredulous of the kindness of
+destiny, fate, what happens in the long run, and apt to insist that
+this was generally adverse to people in proportion as they deserved
+well. Even this theory she was ready to discard in favour of one which
+made chaos triumphant, things happening for no reason at all, and every
+one groping about in illusion and ignorance. With a certain pleasure
+she developed these views to her niece, taking a letter from home as
+her test: which gave good news, but might just as well have given bad.
+How did she know that at this very moment both her children were not
+lying dead, crushed by motor omnibuses? “It’s happening to somebody:
+why shouldn’t it happen to me?” she would argue, her face taking on the
+stoical expression of anticipated sorrow. However sincere these views
+may have been, they were undoubtedly called forth by the irrational
+state of her niece’s mind. It was so fluctuating, and went so quickly
+from joy to despair, that it seemed necessary to confront it with some
+stable opinion which naturally became dark as well as stable. Perhaps
+Mrs. Ambrose had some idea that in leading the talk into these quarters
+she might discover what was in Rachel’s mind, but it was difficult to
+judge, for sometimes she would agree with the gloomiest thing that was
+said, at other times she refused to listen, and rammed Helen’s theories
+down her throat with laughter, chatter, ridicule of the wildest, and
+fierce bursts of anger even at what she called the “croaking of a raven
+in the mud.”
+
+“It’s hard enough without that,” she asserted.
+
+“What’s hard?” Helen demanded.
+
+“Life,” she replied, and then they both became silent.
+
+Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why
+an hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid that
+the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating to a
+spectator. True to her creed, she did not attempt to interfere,
+although there were enough of those weak moments of depression to make
+it perfectly easy for a less scrupulous person to press through and
+know all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did not choose. All
+these moods ran themselves into one general effect, which Helen
+compared to the sliding of a river, quick, quicker, quicker still, as
+it races to a waterfall. Her instinct was to cry out Stop! but even had
+there been any use in crying Stop! she would have refrained, thinking
+it best that things should take their way, the water racing because the
+earth was shaped to make it race.
+
+It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was watched, or
+that there was anything in her manner likely to draw attention to her.
+What had happened to her she did not know. Her mind was very much in
+the condition of the racing water to which Helen compared it. She
+wanted to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to see him when he
+was not there; it was an agony to miss seeing him; agonies were strewn
+all about her day on account of him, but she never asked herself what
+this force driving through her life arose from. She thought of no
+result any more than a tree perpetually pressed downwards by the wind
+considers the result of being pressed downwards by the wind.
+
+During the two or three weeks which had passed since their walk, half a
+dozen notes from him had accumulated in her drawer. She would read
+them, and spend the whole morning in a daze of happiness; the sunny
+land outside the window being no less capable of analysing its own
+colour and heat than she was of analysing hers. In these moods she
+found it impossible to read or play the piano, even to move being
+beyond her inclination. The time passed without her noticing it. When
+it was dark she was drawn to the window by the lights of the hotel. A
+light that went in and out was the light in Terence’s window: there he
+sat, reading perhaps, or now he was walking up and down pulling out one
+book after another; and now he was seated in his chair again, and she
+tried to imagine what he was thinking about. The steady lights marked
+the rooms where Terence sat with people moving round him. Every one who
+stayed in the hotel had a peculiar romance and interest about them.
+They were not ordinary people. She would attribute wisdom to Mrs.
+Elliot, beauty to Susan Warrington, a splendid vitality to Evelyn M.,
+because Terence spoke to them. As unreflecting and pervasive were the
+moods of depression. Her mind was as the landscape outside when dark
+beneath clouds and straitly lashed by wind and hail. Again she would
+sit passive in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen’s fantastical or
+gloomy words were like so many darts goading her to cry out against the
+hardness of life. Best of all were the moods when for no reason again
+this stress of feeling slackened, and life went on as usual, only with
+a joy and colour in its events that was unknown before; they had a
+significance like that which she had seen in the tree: the nights were
+black bars separating her from the days; she would have liked to run
+all the days into one long continuity of sensation. Although these
+moods were directly or indirectly caused by the presence of Terence or
+the thought of him, she never said to herself that she was in love with
+him, or considered what was to happen if she continued to feel such
+things, so that Helen’s image of the river sliding on to the waterfall
+had a great likeness to the facts, and the alarm which Helen sometimes
+felt was justified.
+
+In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was incapable of
+making a plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind. She
+abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day,
+meeting him the next, receiving his letters always with a start of
+surprise. Any woman experienced in the progress of courtship would have
+come by certain opinions from all this which would have given her at
+least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever been in love with
+Rachel, and she had never been in love with any one. Moreover, none of
+the books she read, from _Wuthering Heights_ to _Man and Superman_, and
+the plays of Ibsen, suggested from their analysis of love that what
+their heroines felt was what she was feeling now. It seemed to her that
+her sensations had no name.
+
+She met Terence frequently. When they did not meet, he was apt to send
+a note with a book or about a book, for he had not been able after all
+to neglect that approach to intimacy. But sometimes he did not come or
+did not write for several days at a time. Again when they met their
+meeting might be one of inspiriting joy or of harassing despair. Over
+all their partings hung the sense of interruption, leaving them both
+unsatisfied, though ignorant that the other shared the feeling.
+
+If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even more
+completely ignorant of his. At first he moved as a god; as she came to
+know him better he was still the centre of light, but combined with
+this beauty a wonderful power of making her daring and confident of
+herself. She was conscious of emotions and powers which she had never
+suspected in herself, and of a depth in the world hitherto unknown.
+When she thought of their relationship she saw rather than reasoned,
+representing her view of what Terence felt by a picture of him drawn
+across the room to stand by her side. This passage across the room
+amounted to a physical sensation, but what it meant she did not know.
+
+Thus the time went on, wearing a calm, bright look upon its surface.
+Letters came from England, letters came from Willoughby, and the days
+accumulated their small events which shaped the year. Superficially,
+three odes of Pindar were mended, Helen covered about five inches of
+her embroidery, and St. John completed the first two acts of a play. He
+and Rachel being now very good friends, he read them aloud to her, and
+she was so genuinely impressed by the skill of his rhythms and the
+variety of his adjectives, as well as by the fact that he was Terence’s
+friend, that he began to wonder whether he was not intended for
+literature rather than for law. It was a time of profound thought and
+sudden revelations for more than one couple, and several single people.
+
+A Sunday came, which no one in the villa with the exception of Rachel
+and the Spanish maid proposed to recognise. Rachel still went to
+church, because she had never, according to Helen, taken the trouble to
+think about it. Since they had celebrated the service at the hotel she
+went there expecting to get some pleasure from her passage across the
+garden and through the hall of the hotel, although it was very doubtful
+whether she would see Terence, or at any rate have the chance of
+speaking to him.
+
+As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English, there was
+almost as much difference between Sunday and Wednesday as there is in
+England, and Sunday appeared here as there, the mute black ghost or
+penitent spirit of the busy weekday. The English could not pale the
+sunshine, but they could in some miraculous way slow down the hours,
+dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and make even the servants and
+page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. The best clothes which
+every one put on helped the general effect; it seemed that no lady
+could sit down without bending a clean starched petticoat, and no
+gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle from a stiff
+shirt-front. As the hands of the clock neared eleven, on this
+particular Sunday, various people tended to draw together in the hall,
+clasping little red-leaved books in their hands. The clock marked a few
+minutes to the hour when a stout black figure passed through the hall
+with a preoccupied expression, as though he would rather not recognise
+salutations, although aware of them, and disappeared down the corridor
+which led from it.
+
+“Mr. Bax,” Mrs. Thornbury whispered.
+
+The little group of people then began to move off in the same direction
+as the stout black figure. Looked at in an odd way by people who made
+no effort to join them, they moved with one exception slowly and
+consciously towards the stairs. Mrs. Flushing was the exception. She
+came running downstairs, strode across the hall, joined the procession
+much out of breath, demanding of Mrs. Thornbury in an agitated whisper,
+“Where, where?”
+
+“We are all going,” said Mrs. Thornbury gently, and soon they were
+descending the stairs two by two. Rachel was among the first to
+descend. She did not see that Terence and Hirst came in at the rear
+possessed of no black volume, but of one thin book bound in light-blue
+cloth, which St. John carried under his arm.
+
+The chapel was the old chapel of the monks. It was a profound cool
+place where they had said Mass for hundreds of years, and done penance
+in the cold moonlight, and worshipped old brown pictures and carved
+saints which stood with upraised hands of blessing in the hollows in
+the walls. The transition from Catholic to Protestant worship had been
+bridged by a time of disuse, when there were no services, and the place
+was used for storing jars of oil, liqueur, and deck-chairs; the hotel
+flourishing, some religious body had taken the place in hand, and it
+was now fitted out with a number of glazed yellow benches,
+claret-coloured footstools; it had a small pulpit, and a brass eagle
+carrying the Bible on its back, while the piety of different women had
+supplied ugly squares of carpet, and long strips of embroidery heavily
+wrought with monograms in gold.
+
+As the congregation entered they were met by mild sweet chords issuing
+from a harmonium, where Miss Willett, concealed from view by a baize
+curtain, struck emphatic chords with uncertain fingers. The sound
+spread through the chapel as the rings of water spread from a fallen
+stone. The twenty or twenty-five people who composed the congregation
+first bowed their heads and then sat up and looked about them. It was
+very quiet, and the light down here seemed paler than the light above.
+The usual bows and smiles were dispensed with, but they recognised each
+other. The Lord’s Prayer was read over them. As the childlike battle of
+voices rose, the congregation, many of whom had only met on the
+staircase, felt themselves pathetically united and well-disposed
+towards each other. As if the prayer were a torch applied to fuel, a
+smoke seemed to rise automatically and fill the place with the ghosts
+of innumerable services on innumerable Sunday mornings at home. Susan
+Warrington in particular was conscious of the sweetest sense of
+sisterhood, as she covered her face with her hands and saw slips of
+bent backs through the chinks between her fingers. Her emotions rose
+calmly and evenly, approving of herself and of life at the same time.
+It was all so quiet and so good. But having created this peaceful
+atmosphere Mr. Bax suddenly turned the page and read a psalm. Though he
+read it with no change of voice the mood was broken.
+
+“Be merciful unto me, O God,” he read, “for man goeth about to devour
+me: he is daily fighting and troubling me. . . . They daily mistake my
+words: all that they imagine is to do me evil. They hold all together
+and keep themselves close. . . . Break their teeth, O God, in their
+mouths; smite the jaw-bones of the lions, O Lord: let them fall away
+like water that runneth apace; and when they shoot their arrows let
+them be rooted out.”
+
+Nothing in Susan’s experience at all corresponded with this, and as she
+had no love of language she had long ceased to attend to such remarks,
+although she followed them with the same kind of mechanical respect
+with which she heard many of Lear’s speeches read aloud. Her mind was
+still serene and really occupied with praise of her own nature and
+praise of God, that is of the solemn and satisfactory order of the
+world.
+
+But it could be seen from a glance at their faces that most of the
+others, the men in particular, felt the inconvenience of the sudden
+intrusion of this old savage. They looked more secular and critical as
+they listened to the ravings of the old black man with a cloth round
+his loins cursing with vehement gesture by a camp-fire in the desert.
+After that there was a general sound of pages being turned as if they
+were in class, and then they read a little bit of the Old Testament
+about making a well, very much as school boys translate an easy passage
+from the _Anabasis_ when they have shut up their French grammar. Then
+they returned to the New Testament and the sad and beautiful figure of
+Christ. While Christ spoke they made another effort to fit his
+interpretation of life upon the lives they lived, but as they were all
+very different, some practical, some ambitious, some stupid, some wild
+and experimental, some in love, and others long past any feeling except
+a feeling of comfort, they did very different things with the words of
+Christ.
+
+From their faces it seemed that for the most part they made no effort
+at all, and, recumbent as it were, accepted the ideas the words gave as
+representing goodness, in the same way, no doubt, as one of those
+industrious needlewomen had accepted the bright ugly pattern on her mat
+as beauty.
+
+Whatever the reason might be, for the first time in her life, instead
+of slipping at once into some curious pleasant cloud of emotion, too
+familiar to be considered, Rachel listened critically to what was being
+said. By the time they had swung in an irregular way from prayer to
+psalm, from psalm to history, from history to poetry, and Mr. Bax was
+giving out his text, she was in a state of acute discomfort. Such was
+the discomfort she felt when forced to sit through an unsatisfactory
+piece of music badly played. Tantalised, enraged by the clumsy
+insensitiveness of the conductor, who put the stress on the wrong
+places, and annoyed by the vast flock of the audience tamely praising
+and acquiescing without knowing or caring, so she was now tantalised
+and enraged, only here, with eyes half-shut and lips pursed together,
+the atmosphere of forced solemnity increased her anger. All round her
+were people pretending to feel what they did not feel, while somewhere
+above her floated the idea which they could none of them grasp, which
+they pretended to grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful
+idea, an idea like a butterfly. One after another, vast and hard and
+cold, appeared to her the churches all over the world where this
+blundering effort and misunderstanding were perpetually going on, great
+buildings, filled with innumerable men and women, not seeing clearly,
+who finally gave up the effort to see, and relapsed tamely into praise
+and acquiescence, half-shutting their eyes and pursing up their lips.
+The thought had the same sort of physical discomfort as is caused by a
+film of mist always coming between the eyes and the printed page. She
+did her best to brush away the film and to conceive something to be
+worshipped as the service went on, but failed, always misled by the
+voice of Mr. Bax saying things which misrepresented the idea, and by
+the patter of baaing inexpressive human voices falling round her like
+damp leaves. The effort was tiring and dispiriting. She ceased to
+listen, and fixed her eyes on the face of a woman near her, a hospital
+nurse, whose expression of devout attention seemed to prove that she
+was at any rate receiving satisfaction. But looking at her carefully
+she came to the conclusion that the hospital nurse was only slavishly
+acquiescent, and that the look of satisfaction was produced by no
+splendid conception of God within her. How, indeed, could she conceive
+anything far outside her own experience, a woman with a commonplace
+face like hers, a little round red face, upon which trivial duties and
+trivial spites had drawn lines, whose weak blue eyes saw without
+intensity or individuality, whose features were blurred, insensitive,
+and callous? She was adoring something shallow and smug, clinging to
+it, so the obstinate mouth witnessed, with the assiduity of a limpet;
+nothing would tear her from her demure belief in her own virtue and the
+virtues of her religion. She was a limpet, with the sensitive side of
+her stuck to a rock, for ever dead to the rush of fresh and beautiful
+things past her. The face of this single worshipper became printed on
+Rachel’s mind with an impression of keen horror, and she had it
+suddenly revealed to her what Helen meant and St. John meant when they
+proclaimed their hatred of Christianity. With the violence that now
+marked her feelings, she rejected all that she had implicitly believed.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Bax was half-way through the second lesson. She looked at
+him. He was a man of the world with supple lips and an agreeable
+manner, he was indeed a man of much kindliness and simplicity, though
+by no means clever, but she was not in the mood to give any one credit
+for such qualities, and examined him as though he were an epitome of
+all the vices of his service.
+
+Right at the back of the chapel Mrs. Flushing, Hirst, and Hewet sat in
+a row in a very different frame of mind. Hewet was staring at the roof
+with his legs stuck out in front of him, for as he had never tried to
+make the service fit any feeling or idea of his, he was able to enjoy
+the beauty of the language without hindrance. His mind was occupied
+first with accidental things, such as the women’s hair in front of him,
+the light on the faces, then with the words which seemed to him
+magnificent, and then more vaguely with the characters of the other
+worshippers. But when he suddenly perceived Rachel, all these thoughts
+were driven out of his head, and he thought only of her. The psalms,
+the prayers, the Litany, and the sermon were all reduced to one
+chanting sound which paused, and then renewed itself, a little higher
+or a little lower. He stared alternately at Rachel and at the ceiling,
+but his expression was now produced not by what he saw but by something
+in his mind. He was almost as painfully disturbed by his thoughts as
+she was by hers.
+
+Early in the service Mrs. Flushing had discovered that she had taken up
+a Bible instead of a prayer-book, and, as she was sitting next to
+Hirst, she stole a glance over his shoulder. He was reading steadily in
+the thin pale-blue volume. Unable to understand, she peered closer,
+upon which Hirst politely laid the book before her, pointing to the
+first line of a Greek poem and then to the translation opposite.
+
+“What’s that?” she whispered inquisitively.
+
+“Sappho,” he replied. “The one Swinburne did—the best thing that’s ever
+been written.”
+
+Mrs. Flushing could not resist such an opportunity. She gulped down the
+Ode to Aphrodite during the Litany, keeping herself with difficulty
+from asking when Sappho lived, and what else she wrote worth reading,
+and contriving to come in punctually at the end with “the forgiveness
+of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlastin’. Amen.”
+
+Meanwhile Hirst took out an envelope and began scribbling on the back
+of it. When Mr. Bax mounted the pulpit he shut up Sappho with his
+envelope between the pages, settled his spectacles, and fixed his gaze
+intently upon the clergyman. Standing in the pulpit he looked very
+large and fat; the light coming through the greenish unstained
+window-glass made his face appear smooth and white like a very large
+egg.
+
+He looked round at all the faces looking mildly up at him, although
+some of them were the faces of men and women old enough to be his
+grandparents, and gave out his text with weighty significance. The
+argument of the sermon was that visitors to this beautiful land,
+although they were on a holiday, owed a duty to the natives. It did
+not, in truth, differ very much from a leading article upon topics of
+general interest in the weekly newspapers. It rambled with a kind of
+amiable verbosity from one heading to another, suggesting that all
+human beings are very much the same under their skins, illustrating
+this by the resemblance of the games which little Spanish boys play to
+the games little boys in London streets play, observing that very small
+things do influence people, particularly natives; in fact, a very dear
+friend of Mr. Bax’s had told him that the success of our rule in India,
+that vast country, largely depended upon the strict code of politeness
+which the English adopted towards the natives, which led to the remark
+that small things were not necessarily small, and that somehow to the
+virtue of sympathy, which was a virtue never more needed than to-day,
+when we lived in a time of experiment and upheaval—witness the
+aeroplane and wireless telegraph, and there were other problems which
+hardly presented themselves to our fathers, but which no man who called
+himself a man could leave unsettled. Here Mr. Bax became more
+definitely clerical, if it were possible, he seemed to speak with a
+certain innocent craftiness, as he pointed out that all this laid a
+special duty upon earnest Christians. What men were inclined to say now
+was, “Oh, that fellow—he’s a parson.” What we want them to say is,
+“He’s a good fellow”—in other words, “He is my brother.” He exhorted
+them to keep in touch with men of the modern type; they must sympathise
+with their multifarious interests in order to keep before their eyes
+that whatever discoveries were made there was one discovery which could
+not be superseded, which was indeed as much of a necessity to the most
+successful and most brilliant of them all as it had been to their
+fathers. The humblest could help; the least important things had an
+influence (here his manner became definitely priestly and his remarks
+seemed to be directed to women, for indeed Mr. Bax’s congregations were
+mainly composed of women, and he was used to assigning them their
+duties in his innocent clerical campaigns). Leaving more definite
+instruction, he passed on, and his theme broadened into a peroration
+for which he drew a long breath and stood very upright,—“As a drop of
+water, detached, alone, separate from others, falling from the cloud
+and entering the great ocean, alters, so scientists tell us, not only
+the immediate spot in the ocean where it falls, but all the myriad
+drops which together compose the great universe of waters, and by this
+means alters the configuration of the globe and the lives of millions
+of sea creatures, and finally the lives of the men and women who seek
+their living upon the shores—as all this is within the compass of a
+single drop of water, such as any rain shower sends in millions to lose
+themselves in the earth, to lose themselves we say, but we know very
+well that the fruits of the earth could not flourish without them—so is
+a marvel comparable to this within the reach of each one of us, who
+dropping a little word or a little deed into the great universe alters
+it; yea, it is a solemn thought, _alters_ it, for good or for evil, not
+for one instant, or in one vicinity, but throughout the entire race,
+and for all eternity.” Whipping round as though to avoid applause, he
+continued with the same breath, but in a different tone of voice,—“And
+now to God the Father . . .”
+
+He gave his blessing, and then, while the solemn chords again issued
+from the harmonium behind the curtain, the different people began
+scraping and fumbling and moving very awkwardly and consciously towards
+the door. Half-way upstairs, at a point where the light and sounds of
+the upper world conflicted with the dimness and the dying hymn-tune of
+the under, Rachel felt a hand drop upon her shoulder.
+
+“Miss Vinrace,” Mrs. Flushing whispered peremptorily, “stay to
+luncheon. It’s such a dismal day. They don’t even give one beef for
+luncheon. Please stay.”
+
+Here they came out into the hall, where once more the little band was
+greeted with curious respectful glances by the people who had not gone
+to church, although their clothing made it clear that they approved of
+Sunday to the very verge of going to church. Rachel felt unable to
+stand any more of this particular atmosphere, and was about to say she
+must go back, when Terence passed them, drawn along in talk with Evelyn
+M. Rachel thereupon contented herself with saying that the people
+looked very respectable, which negative remark Mrs. Flushing
+interpreted to mean that she would stay.
+
+“English people abroad!” she returned with a vivid flash of malice.
+“Ain’t they awful! But we won’t stay here,” she continued, plucking at
+Rachel’s arm. “Come up to my room.”
+
+She bore her past Hewet and Evelyn and the Thornburys and the Elliots.
+Hewet stepped forward.
+
+“Luncheon—” he began.
+
+“Miss Vinrace has promised to lunch with me,” said Mrs. Flushing, and
+began to pound energetically up the staircase, as though the middle
+classes of England were in pursuit. She did not stop until she had
+slammed her bedroom door behind them.
+
+“Well, what did you think of it?” she demanded, panting slightly.
+
+All the disgust and horror which Rachel had been accumulating burst
+forth beyond her control.
+
+“I thought it the most loathsome exhibition I’d ever seen!” she broke
+out. “How can they—how dare they—what do you mean by it—Mr. Bax,
+hospital nurses, old men, prostitutes, disgusting—”
+
+She hit off the points she remembered as fast as she could, but she was
+too indignant to stop to analyse her feelings. Mrs. Flushing watched
+her with keen gusto as she stood ejaculating with emphatic movements of
+her head and hands in the middle of the room.
+
+“Go on, go on, do go on,” she laughed, clapping her hands. “It’s
+delightful to hear you!”
+
+“But why do you go?” Rachel demanded.
+
+“I’ve been every Sunday of my life ever since I can remember,” Mrs.
+Flushing chuckled, as though that were a reason by itself.
+
+Rachel turned abruptly to the window. She did not know what it was that
+had put her into such a passion; the sight of Terence in the hall had
+confused her thoughts, leaving her merely indignant. She looked
+straight at their own villa, half-way up the side of the mountain. The
+most familiar view seen framed through glass has a certain unfamiliar
+distinction, and she grew calm as she gazed. Then she remembered that
+she was in the presence of some one she did not know well, and she
+turned and looked at Mrs. Flushing. Mrs. Flushing was still sitting on
+the edge of the bed, looking up, with her lips parted, so that her
+strong white teeth showed in two rows.
+
+“Tell me,” she said, “which d’you like best, Mr. Hewet or Mr. Hirst?”
+
+“Mr. Hewet,” Rachel replied, but her voice did not sound natural.
+
+“Which is the one who reads Greek in church?” Mrs. Flushing demanded.
+
+It might have been either of them and while Mrs. Flushing proceeded to
+describe them both, and to say that both frightened her, but one
+frightened her more than the other, Rachel looked for a chair. The
+room, of course, was one of the largest and most luxurious in the
+hotel. There were a great many arm-chairs and settees covered in brown
+holland, but each of these was occupied by a large square piece of
+yellow cardboard, and all the pieces of cardboard were dotted or lined
+with spots or dashes of bright oil paint.
+
+“But you’re not to look at those,” said Mrs. Flushing as she saw
+Rachel’s eye wander. She jumped up, and turned as many as she could,
+face downwards, upon the floor. Rachel, however, managed to possess
+herself of one of them, and, with the vanity of an artist, Mrs.
+Flushing demanded anxiously, “Well, well?”
+
+“It’s a hill,” Rachel replied. There could be no doubt that Mrs.
+Flushing had represented the vigorous and abrupt fling of the earth up
+into the air; you could almost see the clods flying as it whirled.
+
+Rachel passed from one to another. They were all marked by something of
+the jerk and decision of their maker; they were all perfectly untrained
+onslaughts of the brush upon some half-realised idea suggested by hill
+or tree; and they were all in some way characteristic of Mrs. Flushing.
+
+“I see things movin’,” Mrs. Flushing explained. “So”—she swept her hand
+through a yard of the air. She then took up one of the cardboards which
+Rachel had laid aside, seated herself on a stool, and began to flourish
+a stump of charcoal. While she occupied herself in strokes which seemed
+to serve her as speech serves others, Rachel, who was very restless,
+looked about her.
+
+“Open the wardrobe,” said Mrs. Flushing after a pause, speaking
+indistinctly because of a paint-brush in her mouth, “and look at the
+things.”
+
+As Rachel hesitated, Mrs. Flushing came forward, still with a
+paint-brush in her mouth, flung open the wings of her wardrobe, and
+tossed a quantity of shawls, stuffs, cloaks, embroideries, on to the
+bed. Rachel began to finger them. Mrs. Flushing came up once more, and
+dropped a quantity of beads, brooches, earrings, bracelets, tassels,
+and combs among the draperies. Then she went back to her stool and
+began to paint in silence. The stuffs were coloured and dark and pale;
+they made a curious swarm of lines and colours upon the counterpane,
+with the reddish lumps of stone and peacocks’ feathers and clear pale
+tortoise-shell combs lying among them.
+
+“The women wore them hundreds of years ago, they wear ’em still,” Mrs.
+Flushing remarked. “My husband rides about and finds ’em; they don’t
+know what they’re worth, so we get ’em cheap. And we shall sell ’em to
+smart women in London,” she chuckled, as though the thought of these
+ladies and their absurd appearance amused her. After painting for some
+minutes, she suddenly laid down her brush and fixed her eyes upon
+Rachel.
+
+“I tell you what I want to do,” she said. “I want to go up there and
+see things for myself. It’s silly stayin’ here with a pack of old maids
+as though we were at the seaside in England. I want to go up the river
+and see the natives in their camps. It’s only a matter of ten days
+under canvas. My husband’s done it. One would lie out under the trees
+at night and be towed down the river by day, and if we saw anythin’
+nice we’d shout out and tell ’em to stop.” She rose and began piercing
+the bed again and again with a long golden pin, as she watched to see
+what effect her suggestion had upon Rachel.
+
+“We must make up a party,” she went on. “Ten people could hire a
+launch. Now you’ll come, and Mrs. Ambrose’ll come, and will Mr. Hirst
+and t’other gentleman come? Where’s a pencil?”
+
+She became more and more determined and excited as she evolved her
+plan. She sat on the edge of the bed and wrote down a list of surnames,
+which she invariably spelt wrong. Rachel was enthusiastic, for indeed
+the idea was immeasurably delightful to her. She had always had a great
+desire to see the river, and the name of Terence threw a lustre over
+the prospect, which made it almost too good to come true. She did what
+she could to help Mrs. Flushing by suggesting names, helping her to
+spell them, and counting up the days of the week upon her fingers. As
+Mrs. Flushing wanted to know all she could tell her about the birth and
+pursuits of every person she suggested, and threw in wild stories of
+her own as to the temperaments and habits of artists, and people of the
+same name who used to come to Chillingley in the old days, but were
+doubtless not the same, though they too were very clever men interested
+in Egyptology, the business took some time.
+
+At last Mrs. Flushing sought her diary for help, the method of
+reckoning dates on the fingers proving unsatisfactory. She opened and
+shut every drawer in her writing-table, and then cried furiously,
+“Yarmouth! Yarmouth! Drat the woman! She’s always out of the way when
+she’s wanted!”
+
+At this moment the luncheon gong began to work itself into its midday
+frenzy. Mrs. Flushing rang her bell violently. The door was opened by a
+handsome maid who was almost as upright as her mistress.
+
+“Oh, Yarmouth,” said Mrs. Flushing, “just find my diary and see where
+ten days from now would bring us to, and ask the hall porter how many
+men ’ud be wanted to row eight people up the river for a week, and what
+it ’ud cost, and put it on a slip of paper and leave it on my
+dressing-table. Now—” she pointed at the door with a superb forefinger
+so that Rachel had to lead the way.
+
+“Oh, and Yarmouth,” Mrs. Flushing called back over her shoulder. “Put
+those things away and hang ’em in their right places, there’s a good
+girl, or it fusses Mr. Flushin’.”
+
+To all of which Yarmouth merely replied, “Yes, ma’am.”
+
+As they entered the long dining-room it was obvious that the day was
+still Sunday, although the mood was slightly abating. The Flushings’
+table was set by the side in the window, so that Mrs. Flushing could
+scrutinise each figure as it entered, and her curiosity seemed to be
+intense.
+
+“Old Mrs. Paley,” she whispered as the wheeled chair slowly made its
+way through the door, Arthur pushing behind. “Thornburys” came next.
+“That nice woman,” she nudged Rachel to look at Miss Allan. “What’s her
+name?” The painted lady who always came in late, tripping into the room
+with a prepared smile as though she came out upon a stage, might well
+have quailed before Mrs. Flushing’s stare, which expressed her steely
+hostility to the whole tribe of painted ladies. Next came the two young
+men whom Mrs. Flushing called collectively the Hirsts. They sat down
+opposite, across the gangway.
+
+Mr. Flushing treated his wife with a mixture of admiration and
+indulgence, making up by the suavity and fluency of his speech for the
+abruptness of hers. While she darted and ejaculated he gave Rachel a
+sketch of the history of South American art. He would deal with one of
+his wife’s exclamations, and then return as smoothly as ever to his
+theme. He knew very well how to make a luncheon pass agreeably, without
+being dull or intimate. He had formed the opinion, so he told Rachel,
+that wonderful treasures lay hid in the depths of the land; the things
+Rachel had seen were merely trifles picked up in the course of one
+short journey. He thought there might be giant gods hewn out of stone
+in the mountain-side; and colossal figures standing by themselves in
+the middle of vast green pasture lands, where none but natives had ever
+trod. Before the dawn of European art he believed that the primitive
+huntsmen and priests had built temples of massive stone slabs, had
+formed out of the dark rocks and the great cedar trees majestic figures
+of gods and of beasts, and symbols of the great forces, water, air, and
+forest among which they lived. There might be prehistoric towns, like
+those in Greece and Asia, standing in open places among the trees,
+filled with the works of this early race. Nobody had been there;
+scarcely anything was known. Thus talking and displaying the most
+picturesque of his theories, Rachel’s attention was fixed upon him.
+
+She did not see that Hewet kept looking at her across the gangway,
+between the figures of waiters hurrying past with plates. He was
+inattentive, and Hirst was finding him also very cross and
+disagreeable. They had touched upon all the usual topics—upon politics
+and literature, gossip and Christianity. They had quarrelled over the
+service, which was every bit as fine as Sappho, according to Hewet; so
+that Hirst’s paganism was mere ostentation. Why go to church, he
+demanded, merely in order to read Sappho? Hirst observed that he had
+listened to every word of the sermon, as he could prove if Hewet would
+like a repetition of it; and he went to church in order to realise the
+nature of his Creator, which he had done very vividly that morning,
+thanks to Mr. Bax, who had inspired him to write three of the most
+superb lines in English literature, an invocation to the Deity.
+
+“I wrote ’em on the back of the envelope of my aunt’s last letter,” he
+said, and pulled it from between the pages of Sappho.
+
+“Well, let’s hear them,” said Hewet, slightly mollified by the prospect
+of a literary discussion.
+
+“My dear Hewet, do you wish us both to be flung out of the hotel by an
+enraged mob of Thornburys and Elliots?” Hirst enquired. “The merest
+whisper would be sufficient to incriminate me for ever. God!” he broke
+out, “what’s the use of attempting to write when the world’s peopled by
+such damned fools? Seriously, Hewet, I advise you to give up
+literature. What’s the good of it? There’s your audience.”
+
+He nodded his head at the tables where a very miscellaneous collection
+of Europeans were now engaged in eating, in some cases in gnawing, the
+stringy foreign fowls. Hewet looked, and grew more out of temper than
+ever. Hirst looked too. His eyes fell upon Rachel, and he bowed to her.
+
+“I rather think Rachel’s in love with me,” he remarked, as his eyes
+returned to his plate. “That’s the worst of friendships with young
+women—they tend to fall in love with one.”
+
+To that Hewet made no answer whatever, and sat singularly still. Hirst
+did not seem to mind getting no answer, for he returned to Mr. Bax
+again, quoting the peroration about the drop of water; and when Hewet
+scarcely replied to these remarks either, he merely pursed his lips,
+chose a fig, and relapsed quite contentedly into his own thoughts, of
+which he always had a very large supply. When luncheon was over they
+separated, taking their cups of coffee to different parts of the hall.
+
+From his chair beneath the palm-tree Hewet saw Rachel come out of the
+dining-room with the Flushings; he saw them look round for chairs, and
+choose three in a corner where they could go on talking in private. Mr.
+Flushing was now in the full tide of his discourse. He produced a sheet
+of paper upon which he made drawings as he went on with his talk. He
+saw Rachel lean over and look, pointing to this and that with her
+finger. Hewet unkindly compared Mr. Flushing, who was extremely well
+dressed for a hot climate, and rather elaborate in his manner, to a
+very persuasive shop-keeper. Meanwhile, as he sat looking at them, he
+was entangled in the Thornburys and Miss Allan, who, after hovering
+about for a minute or two, settled in chairs round him, holding their
+cups in their hands. They wanted to know whether he could tell them
+anything about Mr. Bax. Mr. Thornbury as usual sat saying nothing,
+looking vaguely ahead of him, occasionally raising his eye-glasses, as
+if to put them on, but always thinking better of it at the last moment,
+and letting them fall again. After some discussion, the ladies put it
+beyond a doubt that Mr. Bax was not the son of Mr. William Bax. There
+was a pause. Then Mrs. Thornbury remarked that she was still in the
+habit of saying Queen instead of King in the National Anthem. There was
+another pause. Then Miss Allan observed reflectively that going to
+church abroad always made her feel as if she had been to a sailor’s
+funeral.
+
+There was then a very long pause, which threatened to be final, when,
+mercifully, a bird about the size of a magpie, but of a metallic blue
+colour, appeared on the section of the terrace that could be seen from
+where they sat. Mrs. Thornbury was led to enquire whether we should
+like it if all our rooks were blue—“What do _you_ think, William?” she
+asked, touching her husband on the knee.
+
+“If all our rooks were blue,” he said,—he raised his glasses; he
+actually placed them on his nose—“they would not live long in
+Wiltshire,” he concluded; he dropped his glasses to his side again. The
+three elderly people now gazed meditatively at the bird, which was so
+obliging as to stay in the middle of the view for a considerable space
+of time, thus making it unnecessary for them to speak again. Hewet
+began to wonder whether he might not cross over to the Flushings’
+corner, when Hirst appeared from the background, slipped into a chair
+by Rachel’s side, and began to talk to her with every appearance of
+familiarity. Hewet could stand it no longer. He rose, took his hat and
+dashed out of doors.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Everything he saw was distasteful to him. He hated the blue and white,
+the intensity and definiteness, the hum and heat of the south; the
+landscape seemed to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard
+background on the stage, and the mountain but a wooden screen against a
+sheet painted blue. He walked fast in spite of the heat of the sun.
+
+Two roads led out of the town on the eastern side; one branched off
+towards the Ambroses’ villa, the other struck into the country,
+eventually reaching a village on the plain, but many footpaths, which
+had been stamped in the earth when it was wet, led off from it, across
+great dry fields, to scattered farm-houses, and the villas of rich
+natives. Hewet stepped off the road on to one of these, in order to
+avoid the hardness and heat of the main road, the dust of which was
+always being raised in small clouds by carts and ramshackle flies which
+carried parties of festive peasants, or turkeys swelling unevenly like
+a bundle of air balls beneath a net, or the brass bedstead and black
+wooden boxes of some newly wedded pair.
+
+The exercise indeed served to clear away the superficial irritations of
+the morning, but he remained miserable. It seemed proved beyond a doubt
+that Rachel was indifferent to him, for she had scarcely looked at him,
+and she had talked to Mr. Flushing with just the same interest with
+which she talked to him. Finally, Hirst’s odious words flicked his mind
+like a whip, and he remembered that he had left her talking to Hirst.
+She was at this moment talking to him, and it might be true, as he
+said, that she was in love with him. He went over all the evidence for
+this supposition—her sudden interest in Hirst’s writing, her way of
+quoting his opinions respectfully, or with only half a laugh; her very
+nickname for him, “the great Man,” might have some serious meaning in
+it. Supposing that there were an understanding between them, what would
+it mean to him?
+
+“Damn it all!” he demanded, “am I in love with her?” To that he could
+only return himself one answer. He certainly was in love with her, if
+he knew what love meant. Ever since he had first seen her he had been
+interested and attracted, more and more interested and attracted, until
+he was scarcely able to think of anything except Rachel. But just as he
+was sliding into one of the long feasts of meditation about them both,
+he checked himself by asking whether he wanted to marry her? That was
+the real problem, for these miseries and agonies could not be endured,
+and it was necessary that he should make up his mind. He instantly
+decided that he did not want to marry any one. Partly because he was
+irritated by Rachel the idea of marriage irritated him. It immediately
+suggested the picture of two people sitting alone over the fire; the
+man was reading, the woman sewing. There was a second picture. He saw a
+man jump up, say good-night, leave the company and hasten away with the
+quiet secret look of one who is stealing to certain happiness. Both
+these pictures were very unpleasant, and even more so was a third
+picture, of husband and wife and friend; and the married people
+glancing at each other as though they were content to let something
+pass unquestioned, being themselves possessed of the deeper truth.
+Other pictures—he was walking very fast in his irritation, and they
+came before him without any conscious effort, like pictures on a
+sheet—succeeded these. Here were the worn husband and wife sitting with
+their children round them, very patient, tolerant, and wise. But that
+too, was an unpleasant picture. He tried all sorts of pictures, taking
+them from the lives of friends of his, for he knew many different
+married couples; but he saw them always, walled up in a warm firelit
+room. When, on the other hand, he began to think of unmarried people,
+he saw them active in an unlimited world; above all, standing on the
+same ground as the rest, without shelter or advantage. All the most
+individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and spinsters;
+indeed he was surprised to find that the women he most admired and knew
+best were unmarried women. Marriage seemed to be worse for them than it
+was for men. Leaving these general pictures he considered the people
+whom he had been observing lately at the hotel. He had often revolved
+these questions in his mind, as he watched Susan and Arthur, or Mr. and
+Mrs. Thornbury, or Mr. and Mrs. Elliot. He had observed how the shy
+happiness and surprise of the engaged couple had gradually been
+replaced by a comfortable, tolerant state of mind, as if they had
+already done with the adventure of intimacy and were taking up their
+parts. Susan used to pursue Arthur about with a sweater, because he had
+one day let slip that a brother of his had died of pneumonia. The sight
+amused him, but was not pleasant if you substituted Terence and Rachel
+for Arthur and Susan; and Arthur was far less eager to get you in a
+corner and talk about flying and the mechanics of aeroplanes. They
+would settle down. He then looked at the couples who had been married
+for several years. It was true that Mrs. Thornbury had a husband, and
+that for the most part she was wonderfully successful in bringing him
+into the conversation, but one could not imagine what they said to each
+other when they were alone. There was the same difficulty with regard
+to the Elliots, except that they probably bickered openly in private.
+They sometimes bickered in public, though these disagreements were
+painfully covered over by little insincerities on the part of the wife,
+who was afraid of public opinion, because she was much stupider than
+her husband, and had to make efforts to keep hold of him. There could
+be no doubt, he decided, that it would have been far better for the
+world if these couples had separated. Even the Ambroses, whom he
+admired and respected profoundly—in spite of all the love between them,
+was not their marriage too a compromise? She gave way to him; she
+spoilt him; she arranged things for him; she who was all truth to
+others was not true to her husband, was not true to her friends if they
+came in conflict with her husband. It was a strange and piteous flaw in
+her nature. Perhaps Rachel had been right, then, when she said that
+night in the garden, “We bring out what’s worst in each other—we should
+live separate.”
+
+No, Rachel had been utterly wrong! Every argument seemed to be against
+undertaking the burden of marriage until he came to Rachel’s argument,
+which was manifestly absurd. From having been the pursued, he turned
+and became the pursuer. Allowing the case against marriage to lapse, he
+began to consider the peculiarities of character which had led to her
+saying that. Had she meant it? Surely one ought to know the character
+of the person with whom one might spend all one’s life; being a
+novelist, let him try to discover what sort of person she was. When he
+was with her he could not analyse her qualities, because he seemed to
+know them instinctively, but when he was away from her it sometimes
+seemed to him that he did not know her at all. She was young, but she
+was also old; she had little self-confidence, and yet she was a good
+judge of people. She was happy; but what made her happy? If they were
+alone and the excitement had worn off, and they had to deal with the
+ordinary facts of the day, what would happen? Casting his eye upon his
+own character, two things appeared to him: that he was very unpunctual,
+and that he disliked answering notes. As far as he knew Rachel was
+inclined to be punctual, but he could not remember that he had ever
+seen her with a pen in her hand. Let him next imagine a dinner-party,
+say at the Crooms, and Wilson, who had taken her down, talking about
+the state of the Liberal party. She would say—of course she was
+absolutely ignorant of politics. Nevertheless she was intelligent
+certainly, and honest too. Her temper was uncertain—that he had
+noticed—and she was not domestic, and she was not easy, and she was not
+quiet, or beautiful, except in some dresses in some lights. But the
+great gift she had was that she understood what was said to her; there
+had never been any one like her for talking to. You could say
+anything—you could say everything, and yet she was never servile. Here
+he pulled himself up, for it seemed to him suddenly that he knew less
+about her than about any one. All these thoughts had occurred to him
+many times already; often had he tried to argue and reason; and again
+he had reached the old state of doubt. He did not know her, and he did
+not know what she felt, or whether they could live together, or whether
+he wanted to marry her, and yet he was in love with her.
+
+Supposing he went to her and said (he slackened his pace and began to
+speak aloud, as if he were speaking to Rachel):
+
+“I worship you, but I loathe marriage, I hate its smugness, its safety,
+its compromise, and the thought of you interfering in my work,
+hindering me; what would you answer?”
+
+He stopped, leant against the trunk of a tree, and gazed without seeing
+them at some stones scattered on the bank of the dry river-bed. He saw
+Rachel’s face distinctly, the grey eyes, the hair, the mouth; the face
+that could look so many things—plain, vacant, almost insignificant, or
+wild, passionate, almost beautiful, yet in his eyes was always the same
+because of the extraordinary freedom with which she looked at him, and
+spoke as she felt. What would she answer? What did she feel? Did she
+love him, or did she feel nothing at all for him or for any other man,
+being, as she had said that afternoon, free, like the wind or the sea?
+
+“Oh, you’re free!” he exclaimed, in exultation at the thought of her,
+“and I’d keep you free. We’d be free together. We’d share everything
+together. No happiness would be like ours. No lives would compare with
+ours.” He opened his arms wide as if to hold her and the world in one
+embrace.
+
+No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what her nature
+was, or how it would be if they lived together, he dropped to the
+ground and sat absorbed in the thought of her, and soon tormented by
+the desire to be in her presence again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that Hirst
+was still talking to Rachel. The party very soon broke up, the
+Flushings going in one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel
+remaining in the hall, pulling the illustrated papers about, turning
+from one to another, her movements expressing the unformed restless
+desire in her mind. She did not know whether to go or to stay, though
+Mrs. Flushing had commanded her to appear at tea. The hall was empty,
+save for Miss Willett who was playing scales with her fingers upon a
+sheet of sacred music, and the Carters, an opulent couple who disliked
+the girl, because her shoe laces were untied, and she did not look
+sufficiently cheery, which by some indirect process of thought led them
+to think that she would not like them. Rachel certainly would not have
+liked them, if she had seen them, for the excellent reason that Mr.
+Carter waxed his moustache, and Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they
+were evidently the kind of people who would not like her; but she was
+too much absorbed by her own restlessness to think or to look.
+
+She was turning over the slippery pages of an American magazine, when
+the hall door swung, a wedge of light fell upon the floor, and a small
+white figure upon whom the light seemed focussed, made straight across
+the room to her.
+
+“What! You here?” Evelyn exclaimed. “Just caught a glimpse of you at
+lunch; but you wouldn’t condescend to look at _me_.”
+
+It was part of Evelyn’s character that in spite of many snubs which she
+received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit of people she
+wanted to know, and in the long run generally succeeded in knowing them
+and even in making them like her.
+
+She looked round her. “I hate this place. I hate these people,” she
+said. “I wish you’d come up to my room with me. I do want to talk to
+you.”
+
+As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evelyn took her by the wrist
+and drew her out of the hall and up the stairs. As they went upstairs
+two steps at a time, Evelyn, who still kept hold of Rachel’s hand,
+ejaculated broken sentences about not caring a hang what people said.
+“Why should one, if one knows one’s right? And let ’em all go to
+blazes! Them’s my opinions!”
+
+She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms
+were twitching nervously. It was evident that she was only waiting for
+the door to shut to tell Rachel all about it. Indeed, directly they
+were inside her room, she sat on the end of the bed and said, “I
+suppose you think I’m mad?”
+
+Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about any one’s state of
+mind. She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever occurred
+to her without fear of the consequences.
+
+“Somebody’s proposed to you,” she remarked.
+
+“How on earth did you guess that?” Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure
+mingling with her surprise. “Do as I look as if I’d just had a
+proposal?”
+
+“You look as if you had them every day,” Rachel replied.
+
+“But I don’t suppose I’ve had more than you’ve had,” Evelyn laughed
+rather insincerely.
+
+“I’ve never had one.”
+
+“But you will—lots—it’s the easiest thing in the world—But that’s not
+what’s happened this afternoon exactly. It’s—Oh, it’s a muddle, a
+detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!”
+
+She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold
+water; for they were burning hot. Still sponging them and trembling
+slightly she turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous
+excitement: “Alfred Perrott says I’ve promised to marry him, and I say
+I never did. Sinclair says he’ll shoot himself if I don’t marry him,
+and I say, ‘Well, shoot yourself!’ But of course he doesn’t—they never
+do. And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me
+to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott, and
+told me I’d no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities of
+pleasant things like that. So at last I said to him, ‘Well, Sinclair,
+you’ve said enough now. You can just let me go.’ And then he caught me
+and kissed me—the disgusting brute—I can still feel his nasty hairy
+face just there—as if he’d any right to, after what he’d said!”
+
+She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.
+
+“I’ve never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!” she cried;
+“they’ve no dignity, they’ve no courage, they’ve nothing but their
+beastly passions and their brute strength! Would any woman have behaved
+like that—if a man had said he didn’t want her? We’ve too much
+self-respect; we’re infinitely finer than they are.”
+
+She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. Tears
+were now running down with the drops of cold water.
+
+“It makes me angry,” she explained, drying her eyes.
+
+Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evelyn’s position; she
+only thought that the world was full of people in torment.
+
+“There’s only one man here I really like,” Evelyn continued; “Terence
+Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him.”
+
+At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart seemed
+to be pressed together by cold hands.
+
+“Why?” she asked. “Why can you trust him?”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Evelyn. “Don’t you have feelings about people?
+Feelings you’re absolutely certain are right? I had a long talk with
+Terence the other night. I felt we were really friends after that.
+There’s something of a woman in him—” She paused as though she were
+thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her, so at least
+Rachel interpreted her gaze.
+
+She tried to force herself to say, “Has he proposed to you?” but the
+question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn was saying
+that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler than men—for
+example, one couldn’t imagine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a
+mean thing or having anything base about her.
+
+“How I’d like you to know her!” she exclaimed.
+
+She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her
+eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she
+seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. “Lillah
+runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,” she continued.
+“She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it’s
+now the biggest of its kind in England. You can’t think what those
+women are like—and their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of
+the day and night. I’ve often been with her. . . . That’s what’s the
+matter with us. . . . We don’t _do_ things. What do you _do_?” she
+demanded, looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile. Rachel had
+scarcely listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and
+unhappy. She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her
+work in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love
+affairs.
+
+“I play,” she said with an affection of stolid composure.
+
+“That’s about it!” Evelyn laughed. “We none of us do anything but play.
+And that’s why women like Lillah Harrison, who’s worth twenty of you
+and me, have to work themselves to the bone. But I’m tired of playing,”
+she went on, lying flat on the bed, and raising her arms above her
+head. Thus stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.
+
+“I’m going to do something. I’ve got a splendid idea. Look here, you
+must join. I’m sure you’ve got any amount of stuff in you, though you
+look—well, as if you’d lived all your life in a garden.” She sat up,
+and began to explain with animation. “I belong to a club in London. It
+meets every Saturday, so it’s called the Saturday Club. We’re supposed
+to talk about art, but I’m sick of talking about art—what’s the good of
+it? With all kinds of real things going on round one? It isn’t as if
+they’d got anything to say about art, either. So what I’m going to tell
+’em is that we’ve talked enough about art, and we’d better talk about
+life for a change. Questions that really matter to people’s lives, the
+White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And
+when we’ve made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves
+into a society for doing it. . . . I’m certain that if people like
+ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to
+policemen and magistrates, we could put a stop to—prostitution”—she
+lowered her voice at the ugly word—“in six months. My idea is that men
+and women ought to join in these matters. We ought to go into
+Piccadilly and stop one of these poor wretches and say: ‘Now, look
+here, I’m no better than you are, and I don’t pretend to be any better,
+but you’re doing what you know to be beastly, and I won’t have you
+doing beastly things, because we’re all the same under our skins, and
+if you do a beastly thing it does matter to me.’ That’s what Mr. Bax
+was saying this morning, and it’s true, though you clever people—you’re
+clever too, aren’t you?—don’t believe it.”
+
+When Evelyn began talking—it was a fact she often regretted—her
+thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen to other
+people’s thoughts. She continued without more pause than was needed for
+taking breath.
+
+“I don’t see why the Saturday club people shouldn’t do a really great
+work in that way,” she went on. “Of course it would want organisation,
+some one to give their life to it, but I’m ready to do that. My
+notion’s to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas
+take care of themselves. What’s wrong with Lillah—if there is anything
+wrong—is that she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards.
+Now there’s one thing I’ll say to my credit,” she continued; “I’m not
+intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort, but I’m jolly
+human.” She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor, looking up at
+Rachel. She searched up into her face as if she were trying to read
+what kind of character was concealed behind the face. She put her hand
+on Rachel’s knee.
+
+“It _is_ being human that counts, isn’t it?” she continued. “Being
+real, whatever Mr. Hirst may say. Are you real?”
+
+Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close to her,
+and that there was something exciting in this closeness, although it
+was also disagreeable. She was spared the need of finding an answer to
+the question, for Evelyn proceeded, “Do you _believe_ in anything?”
+
+In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes, and
+to relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back her chair
+and exclaimed, “In everything!” and began to finger different objects,
+the books on the table, the photographs, the freshly leaved plant with
+the stiff bristles, which stood in a large earthenware pot in the
+window.
+
+“I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony,
+in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing,” she remarked, still speaking recklessly,
+with something at the back of her mind forcing her to say the things
+that one usually does not say. “But I don’t believe in God, I don’t
+believe in Mr. Bax, I don’t believe in the hospital nurse. I don’t
+believe—” She took up a photograph and, looking at it, did not finish
+her sentence.
+
+“That’s my mother,” said Evelyn, who remained sitting on the floor
+binding her knees together with her arms, and watching Rachel
+curiously.
+
+Rachel considered the portrait. “Well, I don’t much believe in her,”
+she remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.
+
+Mrs. Murgatroyd looked indeed as if the life had been crushed out of
+her; she knelt on a chair, gazing piteously from behind the body of a
+Pomeranian dog which she clasped to her cheek, as if for protection.
+
+“And that’s my dad,” said Evelyn, for there were two photographs in one
+frame. The second photograph represented a handsome soldier with high
+regular features and a heavy black moustache; his hand rested on the
+hilt of his sword; there was a decided likeness between him and Evelyn.
+
+“And it’s because of them,” said Evelyn, “that I’m going to help the
+other women. You’ve heard about me, I suppose? They weren’t married,
+you see; I’m not anybody in particular. I’m not a bit ashamed of it.
+They loved each other anyhow, and that’s more than most people can say
+of their parents.”
+
+Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her hands, and
+compared them—the man and the woman who had, so Evelyn said, loved each
+other. That fact interested her more than the campaign on behalf of
+unfortunate women which Evelyn was once more beginning to describe. She
+looked again from one to the other.
+
+“What d’you think it’s like,” she asked, as Evelyn paused for a minute,
+“being in love?”
+
+“Have you never been in love?” Evelyn asked. “Oh no—one’s only got to
+look at you to see that,” she added. She considered. “I really was in
+love once,” she said. She fell into reflection, her eyes losing their
+bright vitality and approaching something like an expression of
+tenderness. “It was heavenly!—while it lasted. The worst of it is it
+don’t last, not with me. That’s the bother.”
+
+She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sinclair about
+which she had pretended to ask Rachel’s advice. But she did not want
+advice; she wanted intimacy. When she looked at Rachel, who was still
+looking at the photographs on the bed, she could not help seeing that
+Rachel was not thinking about her. What was she thinking about, then?
+Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of life in her which was
+always trying to work through to other people, and was always being
+rebuffed. Falling silent she looked at her visitor, her shoes, her
+stockings, the combs in her hair, all the details of her dress in
+short, as though by seizing every detail she might get closer to the
+life within.
+
+Rachel at last put down the photographs, walked to the window and
+remarked, “It’s odd. People talk as much about love as they do about
+religion.”
+
+“I wish you’d sit down and talk,” said Evelyn impatiently.
+
+Instead Rachel opened the window, which was made in two long panes, and
+looked down into the garden below.
+
+“That’s where we got lost the first night,” she said. “It must have
+been in those bushes.”
+
+“They kill hens down there,” said Evelyn. “They cut their heads off
+with a knife—disgusting! But tell me—what—”
+
+“I’d like to explore the hotel,” Rachel interrupted. She drew her head
+in and looked at Evelyn, who still sat on the floor.
+
+“It’s just like other hotels,” said Evelyn.
+
+That might be, although every room and passage and chair in the place
+had a character of its own in Rachel’s eyes; but she could not bring
+herself to stay in one place any longer. She moved slowly towards the
+door.
+
+“What is it you want?” said Evelyn. “You make me feel as if you were
+always thinking of something you don’t say. . . . Do say it!”
+
+But Rachel made no response to this invitation either. She stopped with
+her fingers on the handle of the door, as if she remembered that some
+sort of pronouncement was due from her.
+
+“I suppose you’ll marry one of them,” she said, and then turned the
+handle and shut the door behind her. She walked slowly down the
+passage, running her hand along the wall beside her. She did not think
+which way she was going, and therefore walked down a passage which only
+led to a window and a balcony. She looked down at the kitchen premises,
+the wrong side of the hotel life, which was cut off from the right side
+by a maze of small bushes. The ground was bare, old tins were scattered
+about, and the bushes wore towels and aprons upon their heads to dry.
+Every now and then a waiter came out in a white apron and threw rubbish
+on to a heap. Two large women in cotton dresses were sitting on a bench
+with blood-smeared tin trays in front of them and yellow bodies across
+their knees. They were plucking the birds, and talking as they plucked.
+Suddenly a chicken came floundering, half flying, half running into the
+space, pursued by a third woman whose age could hardly be under eighty.
+Although wizened and unsteady on her legs she kept up the chase, egged
+on by the laughter of the others; her face was expressive of furious
+rage, and as she ran she swore in Spanish. Frightened by hand-clapping
+here, a napkin there, the bird ran this way and that in sharp angles,
+and finally fluttered straight at the old woman, who opened her scanty
+grey skirts to enclose it, dropped upon it in a bundle, and then
+holding it out cut its head off with an expression of vindictive energy
+and triumph combined. The blood and the ugly wriggling fascinated
+Rachel, so that although she knew that some one had come up behind and
+was standing beside her, she did not turn round until the old woman had
+settled down on the bench beside the others. Then she looked up
+sharply, because of the ugliness of what she had seen. It was Miss
+Allan who stood beside her.
+
+“Not a pretty sight,” said Miss Allan, “although I daresay it’s really
+more humane than our method. . . . I don’t believe you’ve ever been in
+my room,” she added, and turned away as if she meant Rachel to follow
+her. Rachel followed, for it seemed possible that each new person might
+remove the mystery which burdened her.
+
+The bedrooms at the hotel were all on the same pattern, save that some
+were larger and some smaller; they had a floor of dark red tiles; they
+had a high bed, draped in mosquito curtains; they had each a
+writing-table and a dressing-table, and a couple of arm-chairs. But
+directly a box was unpacked the rooms became very different, so that
+Miss Allan’s room was very unlike Evelyn’s room. There were no
+variously coloured hatpins on her dressing-table; no scent-bottles; no
+narrow curved pairs of scissors; no great variety of shoes and boots;
+no silk petticoats lying on the chairs. The room was extremely neat.
+There seemed to be two pairs of everything. The writing-table, however,
+was piled with manuscript, and a table was drawn out to stand by the
+arm-chair on which were two separate heaps of dark library books, in
+which there were many slips of paper sticking out at different degrees
+of thickness. Miss Allan had asked Rachel to come in out of kindness,
+thinking that she was waiting about with nothing to do. Moreover, she
+liked young women, for she had taught many of them, and having received
+so much hospitality from the Ambroses she was glad to be able to repay
+a minute part of it. She looked about accordingly for something to show
+her. The room did not provide much entertainment. She touched her
+manuscript. “Age of Chaucer; Age of Elizabeth; Age of Dryden,” she
+reflected; “I’m glad there aren’t many more ages. I’m still in the
+middle of the eighteenth century. Won’t you sit down, Miss Vinrace? The
+chair, though small, is firm. . . . Euphues. The germ of the English
+novel,” she continued, glancing at another page. “Is that the kind of
+thing that interests you?”
+
+She looked at Rachel with great kindness and simplicity, as though she
+would do her utmost to provide anything she wished to have. This
+expression had a remarkable charm in a face otherwise much lined with
+care and thought.
+
+“Oh no, it’s music with you, isn’t it?” she continued, recollecting,
+“and I generally find that they don’t go together. Sometimes of course
+we have prodigies—” She was looking about her for something and now saw
+a jar on the mantelpiece which she reached down and gave to Rachel. “If
+you put your finger into this jar you may be able to extract a piece of
+preserved ginger. Are you a prodigy?”
+
+But the ginger was deep and could not be reached.
+
+“Don’t bother,” she said, as Miss Allan looked about for some other
+implement. “I daresay I shouldn’t like preserved ginger.”
+
+“You’ve never tried?” enquired Miss Allan. “Then I consider that it is
+your duty to try now. Why, you may add a new pleasure to life, and as
+you are still young—” She wondered whether a button-hook would do. “I
+make it a rule to try everything,” she said. “Don’t you think it would
+be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first time on your
+death-bed, and found you never liked anything so much? I should be so
+exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on that account
+alone.”
+
+She was now successful, and a lump of ginger emerged on the end of the
+button-hook. While she went to wipe the button-hook, Rachel bit the
+ginger and at once cried, “I must spit it out!”
+
+“Are you sure you have really tasted it?” Miss Allan demanded.
+
+For answer Rachel threw it out of the window.
+
+“An experience anyhow,” said Miss Allan calmly. “Let me see—I have
+nothing else to offer you, unless you would like to taste this.” A
+small cupboard hung above her bed, and she took out of it a slim
+elegant jar filled with a bright green fluid.
+
+“Crême de Menthe,” she said. “Liqueur, you know. It looks as if I
+drank, doesn’t it? As a matter of fact it goes to prove what an
+exceptionally abstemious person I am. I’ve had that jar for
+six-and-twenty years,” she added, looking at it with pride, as she
+tipped it over, and from the height of the liquid it could be seen that
+the bottle was still untouched.
+
+“Twenty-six years?” Rachel exclaimed.
+
+Miss Allan was gratified, for she had meant Rachel to be surprised.
+
+“When I went to Dresden six-and-twenty years ago,” she said, “a certain
+friend of mine announced her intention of making me a present. She
+thought that in the event of shipwreck or accident a stimulant might be
+useful. However, as I had no occasion for it, I gave it back on my
+return. On the eve of any foreign journey the same bottle always makes
+its appearance, with the same note; on my return in safety it is always
+handed back. I consider it a kind of charm against accidents. Though I
+was once detained twenty-four hours by an accident to the train in
+front of me, I have never met with any accident myself. Yes,” she
+continued, now addressing the bottle, “we have seen many climes and
+cupboards together, have we not? I intend one of these days to have a
+silver label made with an inscription. It is a gentleman, as you may
+observe, and his name is Oliver. . . . I do not think I could forgive
+you, Miss Vinrace, if you broke my Oliver,” she said, firmly taking the
+bottle out of Rachel’s hands and replacing it in the cupboard.
+
+Rachel was swinging the bottle by the neck. She was interested by Miss
+Allan to the point of forgetting the bottle.
+
+“Well,” she exclaimed, “I do think that odd; to have had a friend for
+twenty-six years, and a bottle, and—to have made all those journeys.”
+
+“Not at all; I call it the reverse of odd,” Miss Allan replied. “I
+always consider myself the most ordinary person I know. It’s rather
+distinguished to be as ordinary as I am. I forget—are you a prodigy, or
+did you say you were not a prodigy?”
+
+She smiled at Rachel very kindly. She seemed to have known and
+experienced so much, as she moved cumbrously about the room, that
+surely there must be balm for all anguish in her words, could one
+induce her to have recourse to them. But Miss Allan, who was now
+locking the cupboard door, showed no signs of breaking the reticence
+which had snowed her under for years. An uncomfortable sensation kept
+Rachel silent; on the one hand, she wished to whirl high and strike a
+spark out of the cool pink flesh; on the other she perceived there was
+nothing to be done but to drift past each other in silence.
+
+“I’m not a prodigy. I find it very difficult to say what I mean—” she
+observed at length.
+
+“It’s a matter of temperament, I believe,” Miss Allan helped her.
+“There are some people who have no difficulty; for myself I find there
+are a great many things I simply cannot say. But then I consider myself
+very slow. One of my colleagues now, knows whether she likes you or
+not—let me see, how does she do it?—by the way you say good-morning at
+breakfast. It is sometimes a matter of years before I can make up my
+mind. But most young people seem to find it easy?”
+
+“Oh no,” said Rachel. “It’s hard!”
+
+Miss Allan looked at Rachel quietly, saying nothing; she suspected that
+there were difficulties of some kind. Then she put her hand to the back
+of her head, and discovered that one of the grey coils of hair had come
+loose.
+
+“I must ask you to be so kind as to excuse me,” she said, rising, “if I
+do my hair. I have never yet found a satisfactory type of hairpin. I
+must change my dress, too, for the matter of that; and I should be
+particularly glad of your assistance, because there is a tiresome set
+of hooks which I _can_ fasten for myself, but it takes from ten to
+fifteen minutes; whereas with your help—”
+
+She slipped off her coat and skirt and blouse, and stood doing her hair
+before the glass, a massive homely figure, her petticoat being so short
+that she stood on a pair of thick slate-grey legs.
+
+“People say youth is pleasant; I myself find middle age far
+pleasanter,” she remarked, removing hair pins and combs, and taking up
+her brush. When it fell loose her hair only came down to her neck.
+
+“When one was young,” she continued, “things could seem so very serious
+if one was made that way. . . . And now my dress.”
+
+In a wonderfully short space of time her hair had been reformed in its
+usual loops. The upper half of her body now became dark green with
+black stripes on it; the skirt, however, needed hooking at various
+angles, and Rachel had to kneel on the floor, fitting the eyes to the
+hooks.
+
+“Our Miss Johnson used to find life very unsatisfactory, I remember,”
+Miss Allan continued. She turned her back to the light. “And then she
+took to breeding guinea-pigs for their spots, and became absorbed in
+that. I have just heard that the yellow guinea-pig has had a black
+baby. We had a bet of sixpence on about it. She will be very
+triumphant.”
+
+The skirt was fastened. She looked at herself in the glass with the
+curious stiffening of her face generally caused by looking in the
+glass.
+
+“Am I in a fit state to encounter my fellow-beings?” she asked. “I
+forget which way it is—but they find black animals very rarely have
+coloured babies—it may be the other way round. I have had it so often
+explained to me that it is very stupid of me to have forgotten again.”
+
+She moved about the room acquiring small objects with quiet force, and
+fixing them about her—a locket, a watch and chain, a heavy gold
+bracelet, and the parti-coloured button of a suffrage society. Finally,
+completely equipped for Sunday tea, she stood before Rachel, and smiled
+at her kindly. She was not an impulsive woman, and her life had
+schooled her to restrain her tongue. At the same time, she was
+possessed of an amount of good-will towards others, and in particular
+towards the young, which often made her regret that speech was so
+difficult.
+
+“Shall we descend?” she said.
+
+She put one hand upon Rachel’s shoulder, and stooping, picked up a pair
+of walking-shoes with the other, and placed them neatly side by side
+outside her door. As they walked down the passage they passed many
+pairs of boots and shoes, some black and some brown, all side by side,
+and all different, even to the way in which they lay together.
+
+“I always think that people are so like their boots,” said Miss Allan.
+“That is Mrs. Paley’s—” but as she spoke the door opened, and Mrs.
+Paley rolled out in her chair, equipped also for tea.
+
+She greeted Miss Allan and Rachel.
+
+“I was just saying that people are so like their boots,” said Miss
+Allan. Mrs. Paley did not hear. She repeated it more loudly still. Mrs.
+Paley did not hear. She repeated it a third time. Mrs. Paley heard, but
+she did not understand. She was apparently about to repeat it for the
+fourth time, when Rachel suddenly said something inarticulate, and
+disappeared down the corridor. This misunderstanding, which involved a
+complete block in the passage, seemed to her unbearable. She walked
+quickly and blindly in the opposite direction, and found herself at the
+end of a _cul de sac_. There was a window, and a table and a chair in
+the window, and upon the table stood a rusty inkstand, an ashtray, an
+old copy of a French newspaper, and a pen with a broken nib. Rachel sat
+down, as if to study the French newspaper, but a tear fell on the
+blurred French print, raising a soft blot. She lifted her head sharply,
+exclaiming aloud, “It’s intolerable!” Looking out of the window with
+eyes that would have seen nothing even had they not been dazed by
+tears, she indulged herself at last in violent abuse of the entire day.
+It had been miserable from start to finish; first, the service in the
+chapel; then luncheon; then Evelyn; then Miss Allan; then old Mrs.
+Paley blocking up the passage. All day long she had been tantalized and
+put off. She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of some
+crisis, from which the world is finally displayed in its true
+proportions. She disliked the look of it immensely—churches,
+politicians, misfits, and huge impostures—men like Mr. Dalloway, men
+like Mr. Bax, Evelyn and her chatter, Mrs. Paley blocking up the
+passage. Meanwhile the steady beat of her own pulse represented the hot
+current of feeling that ran down beneath; beating, struggling,
+fretting. For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in
+the world, which tried to burst forth here—there—and was repressed now
+by Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous
+stupidity, the weight of the entire world. Thus tormented, she would
+twist her hands together, for all things were wrong, all people stupid.
+Vaguely seeing that there were people down in the garden beneath she
+represented them as aimless masses of matter, floating hither and
+thither, without aim except to impede her. What were they doing, those
+other people in the world?
+
+“Nobody knows,” she said. The force of her rage was beginning to spend
+itself, and the vision of the world which had been so vivid became dim.
+
+“It’s a dream,” she murmured. She considered the rusty inkstand, the
+pen, the ash-tray, and the old French newspaper. These small and
+worthless objects seemed to her to represent human lives.
+
+“We’re asleep and dreaming,” she repeated. But the possibility which
+now suggested itself that one of the shapes might be the shape of
+Terence roused her from her melancholy lethargy. She became as restless
+as she had been before she sat down. She was no longer able to see the
+world as a town laid out beneath her. It was covered instead by a haze
+of feverish red mist. She had returned to the state in which she had
+been all day. Thinking was no escape. Physical movement was the only
+refuge, in and out of rooms, in and out of people’s minds, seeking she
+knew not what. Therefore she rose, pushed back the table, and went
+downstairs. She went out of the hall door, and, turning the corner of
+the hotel, found herself among the people whom she had seen from the
+window. But owing to the broad sunshine after shaded passages, and to
+the substance of living people after dreams, the group appeared with
+startling intensity, as though the dusty surface had been peeled off
+everything, leaving only the reality and the instant. It had the look
+of a vision printed on the dark at night. White and grey and purple
+figures were scattered on the green, round wicker tables, in the middle
+the flame of the tea-urn made the air waver like a faulty sheet of
+glass, a massive green tree stood over them as if it were a moving
+force held at rest. As she approached, she could hear Evelyn’s voice
+repeating monotonously, “Here then—here—good doggie, come here”; for a
+moment nothing seemed to happen; it all stood still, and then she
+realised that one of the figures was Helen Ambrose; and the dust again
+began to settle.
+
+The group indeed had come together in a miscellaneous way; one
+tea-table joining to another tea-table, and deck-chairs serving to
+connect two groups. But even at a distance it could be seen that Mrs.
+Flushing, upright and imperious, dominated the party. She was talking
+vehemently to Helen across the table.
+
+“Ten days under canvas,” she was saying. “No comforts. If you want
+comforts, don’t come. But I may tell you, if you don’t come you’ll
+regret it all your life. You say yes?”
+
+At this moment Mrs. Flushing caught sight of Rachel.
+
+“Ah, there’s your niece. She’s promised. You’re coming, aren’t you?”
+Having adopted the plan, she pursued it with the energy of a child.
+
+Rachel took her part with eagerness.
+
+“Of course I’m coming. So are you, Helen. And Mr. Pepper too.” As she
+sat she realised that she was surrounded by people she knew, but that
+Terence was not among them. From various angles people began saying
+what they thought of the proposed expedition. According to some it
+would be hot, but the nights would be cold; according to others, the
+difficulties would lie rather in getting a boat, and in speaking the
+language. Mrs. Flushing disposed of all objections, whether due to man
+or due to nature, by announcing that her husband would settle all that.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Flushing quietly explained to Helen that the expedition
+was really a simple matter; it took five days at the outside; and the
+place—a native village—was certainly well worth seeing before she
+returned to England. Helen murmured ambiguously, and did not commit
+herself to one answer rather than to another.
+
+The tea-party, however, included too many different kinds of people for
+general conversation to flourish; and from Rachel’s point of view
+possessed the great advantage that it was quite unnecessary for her to
+talk. Over there Susan and Arthur were explaining to Mrs. Paley that an
+expedition had been proposed; and Mrs. Paley having grasped the fact,
+gave the advice of an old traveller that they should take nice canned
+vegetables, fur cloaks, and insect powder. She leant over to Mrs.
+Flushing and whispered something which from the twinkle in her eyes
+probably had reference to bugs. Then Helen was reciting “Toll for the
+Brave” to St. John Hirst, in order apparently to win a sixpence which
+lay upon the table; while Mr. Hughling Elliot imposed silence upon his
+section of the audience by his fascinating anecdote of Lord Curzon and
+the undergraduate’s bicycle. Mrs. Thornbury was trying to remember the
+name of a man who might have been another Garibaldi, and had written a
+book which they ought to read; and Mr. Thornbury recollected that he
+had a pair of binoculars at anybody’s service. Miss Allan meanwhile
+murmured with the curious intimacy which a spinster often achieves with
+dogs, to the fox-terrier which Evelyn had at last induced to come over
+to them. Little particles of dust or blossom fell on the plates now and
+then when the branches sighed above. Rachel seemed to see and hear a
+little of everything, much as a river feels the twigs that fall into it
+and sees the sky above, but her eyes were too vague for Evelyn’s
+liking. She came across, and sat on the ground at Rachel’s feet.
+
+“Well?” she asked suddenly. “What are you thinking about?”
+
+“Miss Warrington,” Rachel replied rashly, because she had to say
+something. She did indeed see Susan murmuring to Mrs. Elliot, while
+Arthur stared at her with complete confidence in his own love. Both
+Rachel and Evelyn then began to listen to what Susan was saying.
+
+“There’s the ordering and the dogs and the garden, and the children
+coming to be taught,” her voice proceeded rhythmically as if checking
+the list, “and my tennis, and the village, and letters to write for
+father, and a thousand little things that don’t sound much; but I never
+have a moment to myself, and when I go to bed, I’m so sleepy I’m off
+before my head touches the pillow. Besides I like to be a great deal
+with my Aunts—I’m a great bore, aren’t I, Aunt Emma?” (she smiled at
+old Mrs. Paley, who with head slightly drooped was regarding the cake
+with speculative affection), “and father has to be very careful about
+chills in winter which means a great deal of running about, because he
+won’t look after himself, any more than you will, Arthur! So it all
+mounts up!”
+
+Her voice mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life
+and her own nature. Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan,
+ignoring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. She
+appeared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the
+kind blue eyes now shallow and watery, the bloom of the cheeks
+congealed to a network of dry red canals.
+
+Helen turned to her. “Did you go to church?” she asked. She had won her
+sixpence and seemed making ready to go.
+
+“Yes,” said Rachel. “For the last time,” she added.
+
+In preparing to put on her gloves, Helen dropped one.
+
+“You’re not going?” Evelyn asked, taking hold of one glove as if to
+keep them.
+
+“It’s high time we went,” said Helen. “Don’t you see how silent every
+one’s getting—?”
+
+A silence had fallen upon them all, caused partly by one of the
+accidents of talk, and partly because they saw some one approaching.
+Helen could not see who it was, but keeping her eyes fixed upon Rachel
+observed something which made her say to herself, “So it’s Hewet.” She
+drew on her gloves with a curious sense of the significance of the
+moment. Then she rose, for Mrs. Flushing had seen Hewet too, and was
+demanding information about rivers and boats which showed that the
+whole conversation would now come over again.
+
+Rachel followed her, and they walked in silence down the avenue. In
+spite of what Helen had seen and understood, the feeling that was
+uppermost in her mind was now curiously perverse; if she went on this
+expedition, she would not be able to have a bath, the effort appeared
+to her to be great and disagreeable.
+
+“It’s so unpleasant, being cooped up with people one hardly knows,” she
+remarked. “People who mind being seen naked.”
+
+“You don’t mean to go?” Rachel asked.
+
+The intensity with which this was spoken irritated Mrs. Ambrose.
+
+“I don’t mean to go, and I don’t mean not to go,” she replied. She
+became more and more casual and indifferent.
+
+“After all, I daresay we’ve seen all there is to be seen; and there’s
+the bother of getting there, and whatever they may say it’s bound to be
+vilely uncomfortable.”
+
+For some time Rachel made no reply; but every sentence Helen spoke
+increased her bitterness. At last she broke out—
+
+“Thank God, Helen, I’m not like you! I sometimes think you don’t think
+or feel or care to do anything but exist! You’re like Mr. Hirst. You
+see that things are bad, and you pride yourself on saying so. It’s what
+you call being honest; as a matter of fact it’s being lazy, being dull,
+being nothing. You don’t help; you put an end to things.”
+
+Helen smiled as if she rather enjoyed the attack.
+
+“Well?” she enquired.
+
+“It seems to me bad—that’s all,” Rachel replied.
+
+“Quite likely,” said Helen.
+
+At any other time Rachel would probably have been silenced by her
+Aunt’s candour; but this afternoon she was not in the mood to be
+silenced by any one. A quarrel would be welcome.
+
+“You’re only half alive,” she continued.
+
+“Is that because I didn’t accept Mr. Flushing’s invitation?” Helen
+asked, “or do you always think that?”
+
+At the moment it appeared to Rachel that she had always seen the same
+faults in Helen, from the very first night on board the _Euphrosyne_,
+in spite of her beauty, in spite of her magnanimity and their love.
+
+“Oh, it’s only what’s the matter with every one!” she exclaimed. “No
+one feels—no one does anything but hurt. I tell you, Helen, the world’s
+bad. It’s an agony, living, wanting—”
+
+Here she tore a handful of leaves from a bush and crushed them to
+control herself.
+
+“The lives of these people,” she tried to explain, “the aimlessness,
+the way they live. One goes from one to another, and it’s all the same.
+One never gets what one wants out of any of them.”
+
+Her emotional state and her confusion would have made her an easy prey
+if Helen had wished to argue or had wished to draw confidences. But
+instead of talking she fell into a profound silence as they walked on.
+Aimless, trivial, meaningless, oh no—what she had seen at tea made it
+impossible for her to believe that. The little jokes, the chatter, the
+inanities of the afternoon had shrivelled up before her eyes.
+Underneath the likings and spites, the comings together and partings,
+great things were happening—terrible things, because they were so
+great. Her sense of safety was shaken, as if beneath twigs and dead
+leaves she had seen the movement of a snake. It seemed to her that a
+moment’s respite was allowed, a moment’s make-believe, and then again
+the profound and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to
+its liking, making and destroying.
+
+She looked at Rachel walking beside her, still crushing the leaves in
+her fingers and absorbed in her own thoughts. She was in love, and she
+pitied her profoundly. But she roused herself from these thoughts and
+apologised. “I’m very sorry,” she said, “but if I’m dull, it’s my
+nature, and it can’t be helped.” If it was a natural defect, however,
+she found an easy remedy, for she went on to say that she thought Mr.
+Flushing’s scheme a very good one, only needing a little consideration,
+which it appeared she had given it by the time they reached home. By
+that time they had settled that if anything more was said, they would
+accept the invitation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+When considered in detail by Mr. Flushing and Mrs. Ambrose the
+expedition proved neither dangerous nor difficult. They found also that
+it was not even unusual. Every year at this season English people made
+parties which steamed a short way up the river, landed, and looked at
+the native village, bought a certain number of things from the natives,
+and returned again without damage done to mind or body. When it was
+discovered that six people really wished the same thing the
+arrangements were soon carried out.
+
+Since the time of Elizabeth very few people had seen the river, and
+nothing has been done to change its appearance from what it was to the
+eyes of the Elizabethan voyagers. The time of Elizabeth was only
+distant from the present time by a moment of space compared with the
+ages which had passed since the water had run between those banks, and
+the green thickets swarmed there, and the small trees had grown to huge
+wrinkled trees in solitude. Changing only with the change of the sun
+and the clouds, the waving green mass had stood there for century after
+century, and the water had run between its banks ceaselessly, sometimes
+washing away earth and sometimes the branches of trees, while in other
+parts of the world one town had risen upon the ruins of another town,
+and the men in the towns had become more and more articulate and unlike
+each other. A few miles of this river were visible from the top of the
+mountain where some weeks before the party from the hotel had
+picnicked. Susan and Arthur had seen it as they kissed each other, and
+Terence and Rachel as they sat talking about Richmond, and Evelyn and
+Perrott as they strolled about, imagining that they were great captains
+sent to colonise the world. They had seen the broad blue mark across
+the sand where it flowed into the sea, and the green cloud of trees
+mass themselves about it farther up, and finally hide its waters
+altogether from sight. At intervals for the first twenty miles or so
+houses were scattered on the bank; by degrees the houses became huts,
+and, later still, there was neither hut nor house, but trees and grass,
+which were seen only by hunters, explorers, or merchants, marching or
+sailing, but making no settlement.
+
+By leaving Santa Marina early in the morning, driving twenty miles and
+riding eight, the party, which was composed finally of six English
+people, reached the river-side as the night fell. They came cantering
+through the trees—Mr. and Mrs. Flushing, Helen Ambrose, Rachel,
+Terence, and St. John. The tired little horses then stopped
+automatically, and the English dismounted. Mrs. Flushing strode to the
+river-bank in high spirits. The day had been long and hot, but she had
+enjoyed the speed and the open air; she had left the hotel which she
+hated, and she found the company to her liking. The river was swirling
+past in the darkness; they could just distinguish the smooth moving
+surface of the water, and the air was full of the sound of it. They
+stood in an empty space in the midst of great tree-trunks, and out
+there a little green light moving slightly up and down showed them
+where the steamer lay in which they were to embark.
+
+When they all stood upon its deck they found that it was a very small
+boat which throbbed gently beneath them for a few minutes, and then
+shoved smoothly through the water. They seemed to be driving into the
+heart of the night, for the trees closed in front of them, and they
+could hear all round them the rustling of leaves. The great darkness
+had the usual effect of taking away all desire for communication by
+making their words sound thin and small; and, after walking round the
+deck three or four times, they clustered together, yawning deeply, and
+looking at the same spot of deep gloom on the banks. Murmuring very low
+in the rhythmical tone of one oppressed by the air, Mrs. Flushing began
+to wonder where they were to sleep, for they could not sleep
+downstairs, they could not sleep in a doghole smelling of oil, they
+could not sleep on deck, they could not sleep—She yawned profoundly. It
+was as Helen had foreseen; the question of nakedness had risen already,
+although they were half asleep, and almost invisible to each other.
+With St. John’s help she stretched an awning, and persuaded Mrs.
+Flushing that she could take off her clothes behind this, and that no
+one would notice if by chance some part of her which had been concealed
+for forty-five years was laid bare to the human eye. Mattresses were
+thrown down, rugs provided, and the three women lay near each other in
+the soft open air.
+
+The gentlemen, having smoked a certain number of cigarettes, dropped
+the glowing ends into the river, and looked for a time at the ripples
+wrinkling the black water beneath them, undressed too, and lay down at
+the other end of the boat. They were very tired, and curtained from
+each other by the darkness. The light from one lantern fell upon a few
+ropes, a few planks of the deck, and the rail of the boat, but beyond
+that there was unbroken darkness, no light reached their faces, or the
+trees which were massed on the sides of the river.
+
+Soon Wilfrid Flushing slept, and Hirst slept. Hewet alone lay awake
+looking straight up into the sky. The gentle motion and the black
+shapes that were drawn ceaselessly across his eyes had the effect of
+making it impossible for him to think. Rachel’s presence so near him
+lulled thought asleep. Being so near him, only a few paces off at the
+other end of the boat, she made it as impossible for him to think about
+her as it would have been impossible to see her if she had stood quite
+close to him, her forehead against his forehead. In some strange way
+the boat became identified with himself, and just as it would have been
+useless for him to get up and steer the boat, so was it useless for him
+to struggle any longer with the irresistible force of his own feelings.
+He was drawn on and on away from all he knew, slipping over barriers
+and past landmarks into unknown waters as the boat glided over the
+smooth surface of the river. In profound peace, enveloped in deeper
+unconsciousness than had been his for many nights, he lay on deck
+watching the tree-tops change their position slightly against the sky,
+and arch themselves, and sink and tower huge, until he passed from
+seeing them into dreams where he lay beneath the shadow of the vast
+trees, looking up into the sky.
+
+When they woke next morning they had gone a considerable way up the
+river; on the right was a high yellow bank of sand tufted with trees,
+on the left a swamp quivering with long reeds and tall bamboos on the
+top of which, swaying slightly, perched vivid green and yellow birds.
+The morning was hot and still. After breakfast they drew chairs
+together and sat in an irregular semicircle in the bow. An awning above
+their heads protected them from the heat of the sun, and the breeze
+which the boat made aired them softly. Mrs. Flushing was already
+dotting and striping her canvas, her head jerking this way and that
+with the action of a bird nervously picking up grain; the others had
+books or pieces of paper or embroidery on their knees, at which they
+looked fitfully and again looked at the river ahead. At one point Hewet
+read part of a poem aloud, but the number of moving things entirely
+vanquished his words. He ceased to read, and no one spoke. They moved
+on under the shelter of the trees. There was now a covey of red birds
+feeding on one of the little islets to the left, or again a blue-green
+parrot flew shrieking from tree to tree. As they moved on the country
+grew wilder and wilder. The trees and the undergrowth seemed to be
+strangling each other near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle; while
+here and there a splendid tree towered high above the swarm, shaking
+its thin green umbrellas lightly in the upper air. Hewet looked at his
+books again. The morning was peaceful as the night had been, only it
+was very strange because he could see it was light, and he could see
+Rachel and hear her voice and be near to her. He felt as if he were
+waiting, as if somehow he were stationary among things that passed over
+him and around him, voices, people’s bodies, birds, only Rachel too was
+waiting with him. He looked at her sometimes as if she must know that
+they were waiting together, and being drawn on together, without being
+able to offer any resistance. Again he read from his book:
+
+Whoever you are holding me now in your hand,
+Without one thing all will be useless.
+
+
+A bird gave a wild laugh, a monkey chuckled a malicious question, and,
+as fire fades in the hot sunshine, his words flickered and went out.
+
+By degrees as the river narrowed, and the high sandbanks fell to level
+ground thickly grown with trees, the sounds of the forest could be
+heard. It echoed like a hall. There were sudden cries; and then long
+spaces of silence, such as there are in a cathedral when a boy’s voice
+has ceased and the echo of it still seems to haunt about the remote
+places of the roof. Once Mr. Flushing rose and spoke to a sailor, and
+even announced that some time after luncheon the steamer would stop,
+and they could walk a little way through the forest.
+
+“There are tracks all through the trees there,” he explained. “We’re no
+distance from civilisation yet.”
+
+He scrutinised his wife’s painting. Too polite to praise it openly, he
+contented himself with cutting off one half of the picture with one
+hand, and giving a flourish in the air with the other.
+
+“God!” Hirst exclaimed, staring straight ahead. “Don’t you think it’s
+amazingly beautiful?”
+
+“Beautiful?” Helen enquired. It seemed a strange little word, and Hirst
+and herself both so small that she forgot to answer him.
+
+Hewet felt that he must speak.
+
+“That’s where the Elizabethans got their style,” he mused, staring into
+the profusion of leaves and blossoms and prodigious fruits.
+
+“Shakespeare? I hate Shakespeare!” Mrs. Flushing exclaimed; and Wilfrid
+returned admiringly, “I believe you’re the only person who dares to say
+that, Alice.” But Mrs. Flushing went on painting. She did not appear to
+attach much value to her husband’s compliment, and painted steadily,
+sometimes muttering a half-audible word or groan.
+
+The morning was now very hot.
+
+“Look at Hirst!” Mr. Flushing whispered. His sheet of paper had slipped
+on to the deck, his head lay back, and he drew a long snoring breath.
+
+Terence picked up the sheet of paper and spread it out before Rachel.
+It was a continuation of the poem on God which he had begun in the
+chapel, and it was so indecent that Rachel did not understand half of
+it although she saw that it was indecent. Hewet began to fill in words
+where Hirst had left spaces, but he soon ceased; his pencil rolled on
+deck. Gradually they approached nearer and nearer to the bank on the
+right-hand side, so that the light which covered them became definitely
+green, falling through a shade of green leaves, and Mrs. Flushing set
+aside her sketch and stared ahead of her in silence. Hirst woke up;
+they were then called to luncheon, and while they ate it, the steamer
+came to a standstill a little way out from the bank. The boat which was
+towed behind them was brought to the side, and the ladies were helped
+into it.
+
+For protection against boredom, Helen put a book of memoirs beneath her
+arm, and Mrs. Flushing her paint-box, and, thus equipped, they allowed
+themselves to be set on shore on the verge of the forest.
+
+They had not strolled more than a few hundred yards along the track
+which ran parallel with the river before Helen professed to find it was
+unbearably hot. The river breeze had ceased, and a hot steamy
+atmosphere, thick with scents, came from the forest.
+
+“I shall sit down here,” she announced, pointing to the trunk of a tree
+which had fallen long ago and was now laced across and across by
+creepers and thong-like brambles. She seated herself, opened her
+parasol, and looked at the river which was barred by the stems of
+trees. She turned her back to the trees which disappeared in black
+shadow behind her.
+
+“I quite agree,” said Mrs. Flushing, and proceeded to undo her
+paint-box. Her husband strolled about to select an interesting point of
+view for her. Hirst cleared a space on the ground by Helen’s side, and
+seated himself with great deliberation, as if he did not mean to move
+until he had talked to her for a long time. Terence and Rachel were
+left standing by themselves without occupation. Terence saw that the
+time had come as it was fated to come, but although he realised this he
+was completely calm and master of himself. He chose to stand for a few
+moments talking to Helen, and persuading her to leave her seat. Rachel
+joined him too in advising her to come with them.
+
+“Of all the people I’ve ever met,” he said, “you’re the least
+adventurous. You might be sitting on green chairs in Hyde Park. Are you
+going to sit there the whole afternoon? Aren’t you going to walk?”
+
+“Oh, no,” said Helen, “one’s only got to use one’s eye. There’s
+everything here—everything,” she repeated in a drowsy tone of voice.
+“What will you gain by walking?”
+
+“You’ll be hot and disagreeable by tea-time, we shall be cool and
+sweet,” put in Hirst. Into his eyes as he looked up at them had come
+yellow and green reflections from the sky and the branches, robbing
+them of their intentness, and he seemed to think what he did not say.
+It was thus taken for granted by them both that Terence and Rachel
+proposed to walk into the woods together; with one look at each other
+they turned away.
+
+“Good-bye!” cried Rachel.
+
+“Good-by. Beware of snakes,” Hirst replied. He settled himself still
+more comfortably under the shade of the fallen tree and Helen’s figure.
+As they went, Mr. Flushing called after them, “We must start in an
+hour. Hewet, please remember that. An hour.”
+
+Whether made by man, or for some reason preserved by nature, there was
+a wide pathway striking through the forest at right angles to the
+river. It resembled a drive in an English forest, save that tropical
+bushes with their sword-like leaves grew at the side, and the ground
+was covered with an unmarked springy moss instead of grass, starred
+with little yellow flowers. As they passed into the depths of the
+forest the light grew dimmer, and the noises of the ordinary world were
+replaced by those creaking and sighing sounds which suggest to the
+traveller in a forest that he is walking at the bottom of the sea. The
+path narrowed and turned; it was hedged in by dense creepers which
+knotted tree to tree, and burst here and there into star-shaped crimson
+blossoms. The sighing and creaking up above were broken every now and
+then by the jarring cry of some startled animal. The atmosphere was
+close and the air came at them in languid puffs of scent. The vast
+green light was broken here and there by a round of pure yellow
+sunlight which fell through some gap in the immense umbrella of green
+above, and in these yellow spaces crimson and black butterflies were
+circling and settling. Terence and Rachel hardly spoke.
+
+Not only did the silence weigh upon them, but they were both unable to
+frame any thoughts. There was something between them which had to be
+spoken of. One of them had to begin, but which of them was it to be?
+Then Hewet picked up a red fruit and threw it as high as he could. When
+it dropped, he would speak. They heard the flapping of great wings;
+they heard the fruit go pattering through the leaves and eventually
+fall with a thud. The silence was again profound.
+
+“Does this frighten you?” Terence asked when the sound of the fruit
+falling had completely died away.
+
+“No,” she answered. “I like it.”
+
+She repeated “I like it.” She was walking fast, and holding herself
+more erect than usual. There was another pause.
+
+“You like being with me?” Terence asked.
+
+“Yes, with you,” she replied.
+
+He was silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen upon the
+world.
+
+“That is what I have felt ever since I knew you,” he replied. “We are
+happy together.” He did not seem to be speaking, or she to be hearing.
+
+“Very happy,” she answered.
+
+They continued to walk for some time in silence. Their steps
+unconsciously quickened.
+
+“We love each other,” Terence said.
+
+“We love each other,” she repeated.
+
+The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of
+strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words. Faster and faster they
+walked; simultaneously they stopped, clasped each other in their arms,
+then releasing themselves, dropped to the earth. They sat side by side.
+Sounds stood out from the background making a bridge across their
+silence; they heard the swish of the trees and some beast croaking in a
+remote world.
+
+“We love each other,” Terence repeated, searching into her face. Their
+faces were both very pale and quiet, and they said nothing. He was
+afraid to kiss her again. By degrees she drew close to him, and rested
+against him. In this position they sat for some time. She said
+“Terence” once; he answered “Rachel.”
+
+“Terrible—terrible,” she murmured after another pause, but in saying
+this she was thinking as much of the persistent churning of the water
+as of her own feeling. On and on it went in the distance, the senseless
+and cruel churning of the water. She observed that the tears were
+running down Terence’s cheeks.
+
+The next movement was on his part. A very long time seemed to have
+passed. He took out his watch.
+
+“Flushing said an hour. We’ve been gone more than half an hour.”
+
+“And it takes that to get back,” said Rachel. She raised herself very
+slowly. When she was standing up she stretched her arms and drew a deep
+breath, half a sigh, half a yawn. She appeared to be very tired. Her
+cheeks were white. “Which way?” she asked.
+
+“There,” said Terence.
+
+They began to walk back down the mossy path again. The sighing and
+creaking continued far overhead, and the jarring cries of animals. The
+butterflies were circling still in the patches of yellow sunlight. At
+first Terence was certain of his way, but as they walked he became
+doubtful. They had to stop to consider, and then to return and start
+once more, for although he was certain of the direction of the river he
+was not certain of striking the point where they had left the others.
+Rachel followed him, stopping where he stopped, turning where he
+turned, ignorant of the way, ignorant why he stopped or why he turned.
+
+“I don’t want to be late,” he said, “because—” He put a flower into her
+hand and her fingers closed upon it quietly. “We’re so late—so late—so
+horribly late,” he repeated as if he were talking in his sleep.
+“Ah—this is right. We turn here.”
+
+They found themselves again in the broad path, like the drive in the
+English forest, where they had started when they left the others. They
+walked on in silence as people walking in their sleep, and were oddly
+conscious now and again of the mass of their bodies. Then Rachel
+exclaimed suddenly, “Helen!”
+
+In the sunny space at the edge of the forest they saw Helen still
+sitting on the tree-trunk, her dress showing very white in the sun,
+with Hirst still propped on his elbow by her side. They stopped
+instinctively. At the sight of other people they could not go on. They
+stood hand in hand for a minute or two in silence. They could not bear
+to face other people.
+
+“But we must go on,” Rachel insisted at last, in the curious dull tone
+of voice in which they had both been speaking, and with a great effort
+they forced themselves to cover the short distance which lay between
+them and the pair sitting on the tree-trunk.
+
+As they approached, Helen turned round and looked at them. She looked
+at them for some time without speaking, and when they were close to her
+she said quietly:
+
+“Did you meet Mr. Flushing? He has gone to find you. He thought you
+must be lost, though I told him you weren’t lost.”
+
+Hirst half turned round and threw his head back so that he looked at
+the branches crossing themselves in the air above him.
+
+“Well, was it worth the effort?” he enquired dreamily.
+
+Hewet sat down on the grass by his side and began to fan himself.
+
+Rachel had balanced herself near Helen on the end of the tree trunk.
+
+“Very hot,” she said.
+
+“You look exhausted anyhow,” said Hirst.
+
+“It’s fearfully close in those trees,” Helen remarked, picking up her
+book and shaking it free from the dried blades of grass which had
+fallen between the leaves. Then they were all silent, looking at the
+river swirling past in front of them between the trunks of the trees
+until Mr. Flushing interrupted them. He broke out of the trees a
+hundred yards to the left, exclaiming sharply:
+
+“Ah, so you found the way after all. But it’s late—much later than we
+arranged, Hewet.”
+
+He was slightly annoyed, and in his capacity as leader of the
+expedition, inclined to be dictatorial. He spoke quickly, using
+curiously sharp, meaningless words.
+
+“Being late wouldn’t matter normally, of course,” he said, “but when
+it’s a question of keeping the men up to time—”
+
+He gathered them together and made them come down to the river-bank,
+where the boat was waiting to row them out to the steamer.
+
+The heat of the day was going down, and over their cups of tea the
+Flushings tended to become communicative. It seemed to Terence as he
+listened to them talking, that existence now went on in two different
+layers. Here were the Flushings talking, talking somewhere high up in
+the air above him, and he and Rachel had dropped to the bottom of the
+world together. But with something of a child’s directness, Mrs.
+Flushing had also the instinct which leads a child to suspect what its
+elders wish to keep hidden. She fixed Terence with her vivid blue eyes
+and addressed herself to him in particular. What would he do, she
+wanted to know, if the boat ran upon a rock and sank.
+
+“Would you care for anythin’ but savin’ yourself? Should I? No, no,”
+she laughed, “not one scrap—don’t tell me. There’s only two creatures
+the ordinary woman cares about,” she continued, “her child and her dog;
+and I don’t believe it’s even two with men. One reads a lot about
+love—that’s why poetry’s so dull. But what happens in real life, eh? It
+ain’t love!” she cried.
+
+Terence murmured something unintelligible. Mr. Flushing, however, had
+recovered his urbanity. He was smoking a cigarette, and he now answered
+his wife.
+
+“You must always remember, Alice,” he said, “that your upbringing was
+very unnatural—unusual, I should say. They had no mother,” he
+explained, dropping something of the formality of his tone; “and a
+father—he was a very delightful man, I’ve no doubt, but he cared only
+for racehorses and Greek statues. Tell them about the bath, Alice.”
+
+“In the stable-yard,” said Mrs. Flushing. “Covered with ice in winter.
+We had to get in; if we didn’t, we were whipped. The strong ones
+lived—the others died. What you call survival of the fittest—a most
+excellent plan, I daresay, if you’ve thirteen children!”
+
+“And all this going on in the heart of England, in the nineteenth
+century!” Mr. Flushing exclaimed, turning to Helen.
+
+“I’d treat my children just the same if I had any,” said Mrs. Flushing.
+
+Every word sounded quite distinctly in Terence’s ears; but what were
+they saying, and who were they talking to, and who were they, these
+fantastic people, detached somewhere high up in the air? Now that they
+had drunk their tea, they rose and leant over the bow of the boat. The
+sun was going down, and the water was dark and crimson. The river had
+widened again, and they were passing a little island set like a dark
+wedge in the middle of the stream. Two great white birds with red
+lights on them stood there on stilt-like legs, and the beach of the
+island was unmarked, save by the skeleton print of birds’ feet. The
+branches of the trees on the bank looked more twisted and angular than
+ever, and the green of the leaves was lurid and splashed with gold.
+Then Hirst began to talk, leaning over the bow.
+
+“It makes one awfully queer, don’t you find?” he complained. “These
+trees get on one’s nerves—it’s all so crazy. God’s undoubtedly mad.
+What sane person could have conceived a wilderness like this, and
+peopled it with apes and alligators? I should go mad if I lived
+here—raving mad.”
+
+Terence attempted to answer him, but Mrs. Ambrose replied instead. She
+bade him look at the way things massed themselves—look at the amazing
+colours, look at the shapes of the trees. She seemed to be protecting
+Terence from the approach of the others.
+
+“Yes,” said Mr. Flushing. “And in my opinion,” he continued, “the
+absence of population to which Hirst objects is precisely the
+significant touch. You must admit, Hirst, that a little Italian town
+even would vulgarise the whole scene, would detract from the
+vastness—the sense of elemental grandeur.” He swept his hands towards
+the forest, and paused for a moment, looking at the great green mass,
+which was now falling silent. “I own it makes us seem pretty small—us,
+not them.” He nodded his head at a sailor who leant over the side
+spitting into the river. “And that, I think, is what my wife feels, the
+essential superiority of the peasant—” Under cover of Mr. Flushing’s
+words, which continued now gently reasoning with St. John and
+persuading him, Terence drew Rachel to the side, pointing ostensibly to
+a great gnarled tree-trunk which had fallen and lay half in the water.
+He wished, at any rate, to be near her, but he found that he could say
+nothing. They could hear Mr. Flushing flowing on, now about his wife,
+now about art, now about the future of the country, little meaningless
+words floating high in air. As it was becoming cold he began to pace
+the deck with Hirst. Fragments of their talk came out distinctly as
+they passed—art, emotion, truth, reality.
+
+“Is it true, or is it a dream?” Rachel murmured, when they had passed.
+
+“It’s true, it’s true,” he replied.
+
+But the breeze freshened, and there was a general desire for movement.
+When the party rearranged themselves under cover of rugs and cloaks,
+Terence and Rachel were at opposite ends of the circle, and could not
+speak to each other. But as the dark descended, the words of the others
+seemed to curl up and vanish as the ashes of burnt paper, and left them
+sitting perfectly silent at the bottom of the world. Occasional starts
+of exquisite joy ran through them, and then they were peaceful again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Thanks to Mr. Flushing’s discipline, the right stages of the river were
+reached at the right hours, and when next morning after breakfast the
+chairs were again drawn out in a semicircle in the bow, the launch was
+within a few miles of the native camp which was the limit of the
+journey. Mr. Flushing, as he sat down, advised them to keep their eyes
+fixed on the left bank, where they would soon pass a clearing, and in
+that clearing, was a hut where Mackenzie, the famous explorer, had died
+of fever some ten years ago, almost within reach of
+civilisation—Mackenzie, he repeated, the man who went farther inland
+than any one’s been yet. Their eyes turned that way obediently. The
+eyes of Rachel saw nothing. Yellow and green shapes did, it is true,
+pass before them, but she only knew that one was large and another
+small; she did not know that they were trees. These directions to look
+here and there irritated her, as interruptions irritate a person
+absorbed in thought, although she was not thinking of anything. She was
+annoyed with all that was said, and with the aimless movements of
+people’s bodies, because they seemed to interfere with her and to
+prevent her from speaking to Terence. Very soon Helen saw her staring
+moodily at a coil of rope, and making no effort to listen. Mr. Flushing
+and St. John were engaged in more or less continuous conversation about
+the future of the country from a political point of view, and the
+degree to which it had been explored; the others, with their legs
+stretched out, or chins poised on the hands, gazed in silence.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose looked and listened obediently enough, but inwardly she
+was prey to an uneasy mood not readily to be ascribed to any one cause.
+Looking on shore as Mr. Flushing bade her, she thought the country very
+beautiful, but also sultry and alarming. She did not like to feel
+herself the victim of unclassified emotions, and certainly as the
+launch slipped on and on, in the hot morning sun, she felt herself
+unreasonably moved. Whether the unfamiliarity of the forest was the
+cause of it, or something less definite, she could not determine. Her
+mind left the scene and occupied itself with anxieties for Ridley, for
+her children, for far-off things, such as old age and poverty and
+death. Hirst, too, was depressed. He had been looking forward to this
+expedition as to a holiday, for, once away from the hotel, surely
+wonderful things would happen, instead of which nothing happened, and
+here they were as uncomfortable, as restrained, as self-conscious as
+ever. That, of course, was what came of looking forward to anything;
+one was always disappointed. He blamed Wilfrid Flushing, who was so
+well dressed and so formal; he blamed Hewet and Rachel. Why didn’t they
+talk? He looked at them sitting silent and self-absorbed, and the sight
+annoyed him. He supposed that they were engaged, or about to become
+engaged, but instead of being in the least romantic or exciting, that
+was as dull as everything else; it annoyed him, too, to think that they
+were in love. He drew close to Helen and began to tell her how
+uncomfortable his night had been, lying on the deck, sometimes too hot,
+sometimes too cold, and the stars so bright that he couldn’t get to
+sleep. He had lain awake all night thinking, and when it was light
+enough to see, he had written twenty lines of his poem on God, and the
+awful thing was that he’d practically proved the fact that God did not
+exist. He did not see that he was teasing her, and he went on to wonder
+what would happen if God did exist—“an old gentleman in a beard and a
+long blue dressing gown, extremely testy and disagreeable as he’s bound
+to be? Can you suggest a rhyme? God, rod, sod—all used; any others?”
+
+Although he spoke much as usual, Helen could have seen, had she looked,
+that he was also impatient and disturbed. But she was not called upon
+to answer, for Mr. Flushing now exclaimed “There!” They looked at the
+hut on the bank, a desolate place with a large rent in the roof, and
+the ground round it yellow, scarred with fires and scattered with rusty
+open tins.
+
+“Did they find his dead body there?” Mrs. Flushing exclaimed, leaning
+forward in her eagerness to see the spot where the explorer had died.
+
+“They found his body and his skins and a notebook,” her husband
+replied. But the boat had soon carried them on and left the place
+behind.
+
+It was so hot that they scarcely moved, except now to change a foot,
+or, again, to strike a match. Their eyes, concentrated upon the bank,
+were full of the same green reflections, and their lips were slightly
+pressed together as though the sights they were passing gave rise to
+thoughts, save that Hirst’s lips moved intermittently as half
+consciously he sought rhymes for God. Whatever the thoughts of the
+others, no one said anything for a considerable space. They had grown
+so accustomed to the wall of trees on either side that they looked up
+with a start when the light suddenly widened out and the trees came to
+an end.
+
+“It almost reminds one of an English park,” said Mr. Flushing.
+
+Indeed no change could have been greater. On both banks of the river
+lay an open lawn-like space, grass covered and planted, for the
+gentleness and order of the place suggested human care, with graceful
+trees on the top of little mounds. As far as they could gaze, this lawn
+rose and sank with the undulating motion of an old English park. The
+change of scene naturally suggested a change of position, grateful to
+most of them. They rose and leant over the rail.
+
+“It might be Arundel or Windsor,” Mr. Flushing continued, “if you cut
+down that bush with the yellow flowers; and, by Jove, look!”
+
+Rows of brown backs paused for a moment and then leapt with a motion as
+if they were springing over waves out of sight. For a moment no one of
+them could believe that they had really seen live animals in the open—a
+herd of wild deer, and the sight aroused a childlike excitement in
+them, dissipating their gloom.
+
+“I’ve never in my life seen anything bigger than a hare!” Hirst
+exclaimed with genuine excitement. “What an ass I was not to bring my
+Kodak!”
+
+Soon afterwards the launch came gradually to a standstill, and the
+captain explained to Mr. Flushing that it would be pleasant for the
+passengers if they now went for a stroll on shore; if they chose to
+return within an hour, he would take them on to the village; if they
+chose to walk—it was only a mile or two farther on—he would meet them
+at the landing-place.
+
+The matter being settled, they were once more put on shore: the
+sailors, producing raisins and tobacco, leant upon the rail and watched
+the six English, whose coats and dresses looked so strange upon the
+green, wander off. A joke that was by no means proper set them all
+laughing, and then they turned round and lay at their ease upon the
+deck.
+
+Directly they landed, Terence and Rachel drew together slightly in
+advance of the others.
+
+“Thank God!” Terence exclaimed, drawing a long breath. “At last we’re
+alone.”
+
+“And if we keep ahead we can talk,” said Rachel.
+
+Nevertheless, although their position some yards in advance of the
+others made it possible for them to say anything they chose, they were
+both silent.
+
+“You love me?” Terence asked at length, breaking the silence painfully.
+To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they were
+silent they were keenly conscious of each other’s presence, and yet
+words were either too trivial or too large.
+
+She murmured inarticulately, ending, “And you?”
+
+“Yes, yes,” he replied; but there were so many things to be said, and
+now that they were alone it seemed necessary to bring themselves still
+more near, and to surmount a barrier which had grown up since they had
+last spoken. It was difficult, frightening even, oddly embarrassing. At
+one moment he was clear-sighted, and, at the next, confused.
+
+“Now I’m going to begin at the beginning,” he said resolutely. “I’m
+going to tell you what I ought to have told you before. In the first
+place, I’ve never been in love with other women, but I’ve had other
+women. Then I’ve great faults. I’m very lazy, I’m moody—” He persisted,
+in spite of her exclamation, “You’ve got to know the worst of me. I’m
+lustful. I’m overcome by a sense of futility—incompetence. I ought
+never to have asked you to marry me, I expect. I’m a bit of a snob; I’m
+ambitious—”
+
+“Oh, our faults!” she cried. “What do they matter?” Then she demanded,
+“Am I in love—is this being in love—are we to marry each other?”
+
+Overcome by the charm of her voice and her presence, he exclaimed, “Oh,
+you’re free, Rachel. To you, time will make no difference, or marriage
+or—”
+
+The voices of the others behind them kept floating, now farther, now
+nearer, and Mrs. Flushing’s laugh rose clearly by itself.
+
+“Marriage?” Rachel repeated.
+
+The shouts were renewed behind, warning them that they were bearing too
+far to the left. Improving their course, he continued, “Yes, marriage.”
+The feeling that they could not be united until she knew all about him
+made him again endeavour to explain.
+
+“All that’s been bad in me, the things I’ve put up with—the second
+best—”
+
+She murmured, considered her own life, but could not describe how it
+looked to her now.
+
+“And the loneliness!” he continued. A vision of walking with her
+through the streets of London came before his eyes. “We will go for
+walks together,” he said. The simplicity of the idea relieved them, and
+for the first time they laughed. They would have liked had they dared
+to take each other by the hand, but the consciousness of eyes fixed on
+them from behind had not yet deserted them.
+
+“Books, people, sights—Mrs. Nutt, Greeley, Hutchinson,” Hewet murmured.
+
+With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them seem
+unreal to each other, since the previous afternoon melted a little
+further, and their contact became more and more natural. Up through the
+sultry southern landscape they saw the world they knew appear clearer
+and more vividly than it had ever appeared before. As upon that
+occasion at the hotel when she had sat in the window, the world once
+more arranged itself beneath her gaze very vividly and in its true
+proportions. She glanced curiously at Terence from time to time,
+observing his grey coat and his purple tie; observing the man with whom
+she was to spend the rest of her life.
+
+After one of these glances she murmured, “Yes, I’m in love. There’s no
+doubt; I’m in love with you.”
+
+Nevertheless, they remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so close
+together, as she spoke, that there seemed no division between them, and
+the next moment separate and far away again. Feeling this painfully,
+she exclaimed, “It will be a fight.”
+
+But as she looked at him she perceived from the shape of his eyes, the
+lines about his mouth, and other peculiarities that he pleased her, and
+she added:
+
+“Where I want to fight, you have compassion. You’re finer than I am;
+you’re much finer.”
+
+He returned her glance and smiled, perceiving, much as she had done,
+the very small individual things about her which made her delightful to
+him. She was his for ever. This barrier being surmounted, innumerable
+delights lay before them both.
+
+“I’m not finer,” he answered. “I’m only older, lazier; a man, not a
+woman.”
+
+“A man,” she repeated, and a curious sense of possession coming over
+her, it struck her that she might now touch him; she put out her hand
+and lightly touched his cheek. His fingers followed where hers had
+been, and the touch of his hand upon his face brought back the
+overpowering sense of unreality. This body of his was unreal; the whole
+world was unreal.
+
+“What’s happened?” he began. “Why did I ask you to marry me? How did it
+happen?”
+
+“Did you ask me to marry you?” she wondered. They faded far away from
+each other, and neither of them could remember what had been said.
+
+“We sat upon the ground,” he recollected.
+
+“We sat upon the ground,” she confirmed him. The recollection of
+sitting upon the ground, such as it was, seemed to unite them again,
+and they walked on in silence, their minds sometimes working with
+difficulty and sometimes ceasing to work, their eyes alone perceiving
+the things round them. Now he would attempt again to tell her his
+faults, and why he loved her; and she would describe what she had felt
+at this time or at that time, and together they would interpret her
+feeling. So beautiful was the sound of their voices that by degrees
+they scarcely listened to the words they framed. Long silences came
+between their words, which were no longer silences of struggle and
+confusion but refreshing silences, in which trivial thoughts moved
+easily. They began to speak naturally of ordinary things, of the
+flowers and the trees, how they grew there so red, like garden flowers
+at home, and there bent and crooked like the arm of a twisted old man.
+
+Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing in her
+veins, or the water of the stream running over stones, Rachel became
+conscious of a new feeling within her. She wondered for a moment what
+it was, and then said to herself, with a little surprise at recognising
+in her own person so famous a thing:
+
+“This is happiness, I suppose.” And aloud to Terence she spoke, “This
+is happiness.”
+
+On the heels of her words he answered, “This is happiness,” upon which
+they guessed that the feeling had sprung in both of them the same time.
+They began therefore to describe how this felt and that felt, how like
+it was and yet how different; for they were very different.
+
+Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which
+they were now sunk. The repetition of Hewet’s name in short, dissevered
+syllables was to them the crack of a dry branch or the laughter of a
+bird. The grasses and breezes sounding and murmuring all round them,
+they never noticed that the swishing of the grasses grew louder and
+louder, and did not cease with the lapse of the breeze. A hand dropped
+abrupt as iron on Rachel’s shoulder; it might have been a bolt from
+heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass whipped across her eyes and
+filled her mouth and ears. Through the waving stems she saw a figure,
+large and shapeless against the sky. Helen was upon her. Rolled this
+way and that, now seeing only forests of green, and now the high blue
+heaven; she was speechless and almost without sense. At last she lay
+still, all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting.
+Over her loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman, of
+Terence and Helen.
+
+Both were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving; they came
+together and kissed in the air above her. Broken fragments of speech
+came down to her on the ground. She thought she heard them speak of
+love and then of marriage. Raising herself and sitting up, she too
+realised Helen’s soft body, the strong and hospitable arms, and
+happiness swelling and breaking in one vast wave. When this fell away,
+and the grasses once more lay low, and the sky became horizontal, and
+the earth rolled out flat on each side, and the trees stood upright,
+she was the first to perceive a little row of human figures standing
+patiently in the distance. For the moment she could not remember who
+they were.
+
+“Who are they?” she asked, and then recollected.
+
+Falling into line behind Mr. Flushing, they were careful to leave at
+least three yards’ distance between the toe of his boot and the rim of
+her skirt.
+
+He led them across a stretch of green by the river-bank and then
+through a grove of trees, and bade them remark the signs of human
+habitation, the blackened grass, the charred tree-stumps, and there,
+through the trees, strange wooden nests, drawn together in an arch
+where the trees drew apart, the village which was the goal of their
+journey.
+
+Stepping cautiously, they observed the women, who were squatting on the
+ground in triangular shapes, moving their hands, either plaiting straw
+or in kneading something in bowls. But when they had looked for a
+moment undiscovered, they were seen, and Mr. Flushing, advancing into
+the centre of the clearing, was engaged in talk with a lean majestic
+man, whose bones and hollows at once made the shapes of the
+Englishman’s body appear ugly and unnatural. The women took no notice
+of the strangers, except that their hands paused for a moment and their
+long narrow eyes slid round and fixed upon them with the motionless
+inexpressive gaze of those removed from each other far far beyond the
+plunge of speech. Their hands moved again, but the stare continued. It
+followed them as they walked, as they peered into the huts where they
+could distinguish guns leaning in the corner, and bowls upon the floor,
+and stacks of rushes; in the dusk the solemn eyes of babies regarded
+them, and old women stared out too. As they sauntered about, the stare
+followed them, passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads,
+curiously not without hostility, like the crawl of a winter fly. As she
+drew apart her shawl and uncovered her breast to the lips of her baby,
+the eyes of a woman never left their faces, although they moved
+uneasily under her stare, and finally turned away, rather than stand
+there looking at her any longer. When sweetmeats were offered them,
+they put out great red hands to take them, and felt themselves treading
+cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers among these soft instinctive
+people. But soon the life of the village took no notice of them; they
+had become absorbed in it. The women’s hands became busy again with the
+straw; their eyes dropped. If they moved, it was to fetch something
+from the hut, or to catch a straying child, or to cross the space with
+a jar balanced on their heads; if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh
+unintelligible cry. Voices rose when a child was beaten, and fell
+again; voices rose in song, which slid up a little way and down a
+little way, and settled again upon the same low and melancholy note.
+Seeking each other, Terence and Rachel drew together under a tree.
+Peaceful, and even beautiful at first, the sight of the women, who had
+given up looking at them, made them now feel very cold and melancholy.
+
+“Well,” Terence sighed at length, “it makes us seem insignificant,
+doesn’t it?”
+
+Rachel agreed. So it would go on for ever and ever, she said, those
+women sitting under the trees, the trees and the river. They turned
+away and began to walk through the trees, leaning, without fear of
+discovery, upon each other’s arms. They had not gone far before they
+began to assure each other once more that they were in love, were
+happy, were content; but why was it so painful being in love, why was
+there so much pain in happiness?
+
+The sight of the village indeed affected them all curiously though all
+differently. St. John had left the others and was walking slowly down
+to the river, absorbed in his own thoughts, which were bitter and
+unhappy, for he felt himself alone; and Helen, standing by herself in
+the sunny space among the native women, was exposed to presentiments of
+disaster. The cries of the senseless beasts rang in her ears high and
+low in the air, as they ran from tree-trunk to tree-top. How small the
+little figures looked wandering through the trees! She became acutely
+conscious of the little limbs, the thin veins, the delicate flesh of
+men and women, which breaks so easily and lets the life escape compared
+with these great trees and deep waters. A falling branch, a foot that
+slips, and the earth has crushed them or the water drowned them. Thus
+thinking, she kept her eyes anxiously fixed upon the lovers, as if by
+doing so she could protect them from their fate. Turning, she found the
+Flushings by her side.
+
+They were talking about the things they had bought and arguing whether
+they were really old, and whether there were not signs here and there
+of European influence. Helen was appealed to. She was made to look at a
+brooch, and then at a pair of ear-rings. But all the time she blamed
+them for having come on this expedition, for having ventured too far
+and exposed themselves. Then she roused herself and tried to talk, but
+in a few moments she caught herself seeing a picture of a boat upset on
+the river in England, at midday. It was morbid, she knew, to imagine
+such things; nevertheless she sought out the figures of the others
+between the trees, and whenever she saw them she kept her eyes fixed on
+them, so that she might be able to protect them from disaster.
+
+But when the sun went down and the steamer turned and began to steam
+back towards civilisation, again her fears were calmed. In the
+semi-darkness the chairs on deck and the people sitting in them were
+angular shapes, the mouth being indicated by a tiny burning spot, and
+the arm by the same spot moving up or down as the cigar or cigarette
+was lifted to and from the lips. Words crossed the darkness, but, not
+knowing where they fell, seemed to lack energy and substance. Deep
+sighs proceeded regularly, although with some attempt at suppression,
+from the large white mound which represented the person of Mrs.
+Flushing. The day had been long and very hot, and now that all the
+colours were blotted out the cool night air seemed to press soft
+fingers upon the eyelids, sealing them down. Some philosophical remark
+directed, apparently, at St. John Hirst missed its aim, and hung so
+long suspended in the air until it was engulfed by a yawn, that it was
+considered dead, and this gave the signal for stirring of legs and
+murmurs about sleep. The white mound moved, finally lengthened itself
+and disappeared, and after a few turns and paces St. John and Mr.
+Flushing withdrew, leaving the three chairs still occupied by three
+silent bodies. The light which came from a lamp high on the mast and a
+sky pale with stars left them with shapes but without features; but
+even in this darkness the withdrawal of the others made them feel each
+other very near, for they were all thinking of the same thing. For some
+time no one spoke, then Helen said with a sigh, “So you’re both very
+happy?”
+
+As if washed by the air her voice sounded more spiritual and softer
+than usual. Voices at a little distance answered her, “Yes.”
+
+Through the darkness she was looking at them both, and trying to
+distinguish him. What was there for her to say? Rachel had passed
+beyond her guardianship. A voice might reach her ears, but never again
+would it carry as far as it had carried twenty-four hours ago.
+Nevertheless, speech seemed to be due from her before she went to bed.
+She wished to speak, but she felt strangely old and depressed.
+
+“D’you realise what you’re doing?” she demanded. “She’s young, you’re
+both young; and marriage—” Here she ceased. They begged her, however,
+to continue, with such earnestness in their voices, as if they only
+craved advice, that she was led to add:
+
+“Marriage! well, it’s not easy.”
+
+“That’s what we want to know,” they answered, and she guessed that now
+they were looking at each other.
+
+“It depends on both of you,” she stated. Her face was turned towards
+Terence, and although he could hardly see her, he believed that her
+words really covered a genuine desire to know more about him. He raised
+himself from his semi-recumbent position and proceeded to tell her what
+she wanted to know. He spoke as lightly as he could in order to take
+away her depression.
+
+“I’m twenty-seven, and I’ve about seven hundred a year,” he began. “My
+temper is good on the whole, and health excellent, though Hirst detects
+a gouty tendency. Well, then, I think I’m very intelligent.” He paused
+as if for confirmation.
+
+Helen agreed.
+
+“Though, unfortunately, rather lazy. I intend to allow Rachel to be a
+fool if she wants to, and—Do you find me on the whole satisfactory in
+other respects?” he asked shyly.
+
+“Yes, I like what I know of you,” Helen replied. “But then—one knows so
+little.”
+
+“We shall live in London,” he continued, “and—” With one voice they
+suddenly enquired whether she did not think them the happiest people
+that she had ever known.
+
+“Hush,” she checked them, “Mrs. Flushing, remember. She’s behind us.”
+
+Then they fell silent, and Terence and Rachel felt instinctively that
+their happiness had made her sad, and, while they were anxious to go on
+talking about themselves, they did not like to.
+
+“We’ve talked too much about ourselves,” Terence said. “Tell us—”
+
+“Yes, tell us—” Rachel echoed. They were both in the mood to believe
+that every one was capable of saying something very profound.
+
+“What can I tell you?” Helen reflected, speaking more to herself in a
+rambling style than as a prophetess delivering a message. She forced
+herself to speak.
+
+“After all, though I scold Rachel, I’m not much wiser myself. I’m
+older, of course, I’m half-way through, and you’re just beginning. It’s
+puzzling—sometimes, I think, disappointing; the great things aren’t as
+great, perhaps, as one expects—but it’s interesting—Oh, yes, you’re
+certain to find it interesting—And so it goes on,” they became
+conscious here of the procession of dark trees into which, as far as
+they could see, Helen was now looking, “and there are pleasures where
+one doesn’t expect them (you must write to your father), and you’ll be
+very happy, I’ve no doubt. But I must go to bed, and if you are
+sensible you will follow in ten minutes, and so,” she rose and stood
+before them, almost featureless and very large, “Good-night.” She
+passed behind the curtain.
+
+After sitting in silence for the greater part of the ten minutes she
+allowed them, they rose and hung over the rail. Beneath them the smooth
+black water slipped away very fast and silently. The spark of a
+cigarette vanished behind them. “A beautiful voice,” Terence murmured.
+
+Rachel assented. Helen had a beautiful voice.
+
+After a silence she asked, looking up into the sky, “Are we on the deck
+of a steamer on a river in South America? Am I Rachel, are you
+Terence?”
+
+The great black world lay round them. As they were drawn smoothly along
+it seemed possessed of immense thickness and endurance. They could
+discern pointed tree-tops and blunt rounded tree-tops. Raising their
+eyes above the trees, they fixed them on the stars and the pale border
+of sky above the trees. The little points of frosty light infinitely
+far away drew their eyes and held them fixed, so that it seemed as if
+they stayed a long time and fell a great distance when once more they
+realised their hands grasping the rail and their separate bodies
+standing side by side.
+
+“You’d forgotten completely about me,” Terence reproached her, taking
+her arm and beginning to pace the deck, “and I never forget you.”
+
+“Oh, no,” she whispered, she had not forgotten, only the stars—the
+night—the dark—
+
+“You’re like a bird half asleep in its nest, Rachel. You’re asleep.
+You’re talking in your sleep.”
+
+Half asleep, and murmuring broken words, they stood in the angle made
+by the bow of the boat. It slipped on down the river. Now a bell struck
+on the bridge, and they heard the lapping of water as it rippled away
+on either side, and once a bird startled in its sleep creaked, flew on
+to the next tree, and was silent again. The darkness poured down
+profusely, and left them with scarcely any feeling of life, except that
+they were standing there together in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely over
+the earth and parted them from the strange day in the forest when they
+had been forced to tell each other what they wanted, this wish of
+theirs was revealed to other people, and in the process became slightly
+strange to themselves. Apparently it was not anything unusual that had
+happened; it was that they had become engaged to marry each other. The
+world, which consisted for the most part of the hotel and the villa,
+expressed itself glad on the whole that two people should marry, and
+allowed them to see that they were not expected to take part in the
+work which has to be done in order that the world shall go on, but
+might absent themselves for a time. They were accordingly left alone
+until they felt the silence as if, playing in a vast church, the door
+had been shut on them. They were driven to walk alone, and sit alone,
+to visit secret places where the flowers had never been picked and the
+trees were solitary. In solitude they could express those beautiful but
+too vast desires which were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other
+men and women—desires for a world, such as their own world which
+contained two people seemed to them to be, where people knew each other
+intimately and thus judged each other by what was good, and never
+quarrelled, because that was waste of time.
+
+They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun, or
+sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer
+embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express
+itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a
+twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned;
+the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many
+ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly
+solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was
+not effort but delight.
+
+While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged, as far as
+the occasional writing of a word in pencil testified, in shaping the
+world as it appeared to him now that he and Rachel were going to be
+married. It was different certainly. The book called _Silence_ would
+not now be the same book that it would have been. He would then put
+down his pencil and stare in front of him, and wonder in what respects
+the world was different—it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence,
+more importance, greater depth. Why, even the earth sometimes seemed to
+him very deep; not carved into hills and cities and fields, but heaped
+in great masses. He would look out of the window for ten minutes at a
+time; but no, he did not care for the earth swept of human beings. He
+liked human beings—he liked them, he suspected, better than Rachel did.
+There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful
+of him,—but he liked that quality in her. He liked the impersonality
+which it produced in her. At last, having written down a series of
+little sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them, he
+observed aloud, “‘Women—under the heading Women I’ve written:
+
+“‘Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base of
+most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on
+fact? Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because
+they don’t think.’ What do you say, Rachel?” He paused with his pencil
+in his hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.
+
+Rachel said nothing. Up and up the steep spiral of a very late
+Beethoven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined
+staircase, energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her
+feet with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run
+to begin at the very bottom again.
+
+“‘Again, it’s the fashion now to say that women are more practical and
+less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable organising
+ability but no sense of honour’—query, what is meant by masculine term,
+honour?—what corresponds to it in your sex? Eh?”
+
+Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected this
+opportunity of revealing the secrets of her sex. She had, indeed,
+advanced so far in the pursuit of wisdom that she allowed these secrets
+to rest undisturbed; it seemed to be reserved for a later generation to
+discuss them philosophically.
+
+Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she exclaimed at last,
+swinging round upon him:
+
+“No, Terence, it’s no good; here am I, the best musician in South
+America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can’t play a note
+because of you in the room interrupting me every other second.”
+
+“You don’t seem to realise that that’s what I’ve been aiming at for the
+last half-hour,” he remarked. “I’ve no objection to nice simple
+tunes—indeed, I find them very helpful to my literary composition, but
+that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on
+its hind legs in the rain.”
+
+He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which were
+scattered on the table, conveying the congratulations of their friends.
+
+“‘—all possible wishes for all possible happiness,’” he read; “correct,
+but not very vivid, are they?”
+
+“They’re sheer nonsense!” Rachel exclaimed. “Think of words compared
+with sounds!” she continued. “Think of novels and plays and histories—”
+Perched on the edge of the table, she stirred the red and yellow
+volumes contemptuously. She seemed to herself to be in a position where
+she could despise all human learning. Terence looked at them too.
+
+“God, Rachel, you do read trash!” he exclaimed. “And you’re behind the
+times too, my dear. No one dreams of reading this kind of thing
+now—antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions of life in the
+east end—oh, no, we’ve exploded all that. Read poetry, Rachel, poetry,
+poetry, poetry!”
+
+Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his intention
+being to satirise the short sharp bark of the writer’s English; but she
+paid no attention, and after an interval of meditation exclaimed:
+
+“Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely
+of vast blocks of matter, and that we’re nothing but patches of light—”
+she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the
+wall—“like that?”
+
+“No,” said Terence, “I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my
+chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth. But at Cambridge, I
+can remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states of
+semi-coma about five o’clock in the morning. Hirst does now, I
+expect—oh, no, Hirst wouldn’t.”
+
+Rachel continued, “The day your note came, asking us to go on the
+picnic, I was sitting where you’re sitting now, thinking that; I wonder
+if I could think that again? I wonder if the world’s changed? and if
+so, when it’ll stop changing, and which is the real world?”
+
+“When I first saw you,” he began, “I thought you were like a creature
+who’d lived all its life among pearls and old bones. Your hands were
+wet, d’you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit
+of bread, and then you said, ‘Human Beings!’”
+
+“And I thought you—a prig,” she recollected. “No; that’s not quite it.
+There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St.
+John were like those ants—very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all
+your virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you—”
+
+“You fell in love with me,” he corrected her. “You were in love with me
+all the time, only you didn’t know it.”
+
+“No, I never fell in love with you,” she asserted.
+
+“Rachel—what a lie—didn’t you sit here looking at my window—didn’t you
+wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun—?”
+
+“No,” she repeated, “I never fell in love, if falling in love is what
+people say it is, and it’s the world that tells the lies and I tell the
+truth. Oh, what lies—what lies!”
+
+She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr.
+Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It
+was strange, considering how very different these people were, that
+they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her
+upon her engagement.
+
+That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever
+feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they
+were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had
+done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they
+didn’t feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? The simplicity and
+arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single
+spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence; being engaged had
+not that effect on him; the world was different, but not in that way;
+he still wanted the things he had always wanted, and in particular he
+wanted the companionship of other people more than ever perhaps. He
+took the letters out of her hand, and protested:
+
+“Of course they’re absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just
+because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss
+Allan is; you can’t deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she’s got too
+many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the
+bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees—hasn’t she
+a kind of beauty—of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn’t
+she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river
+going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the
+Carroway Islands—the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t
+it?”
+
+But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of
+the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with
+her own destiny.
+
+“I won’t have eleven children,” she asserted; “I won’t have the eyes of
+an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were
+a horse.”
+
+“We must have a son and we must have a daughter,” said Terence, putting
+down the letters, “because, let alone the inestimable advantage of
+being our children, they’d be so well brought up.” They went on to
+sketch an outline of the ideal education—how their daughter should be
+required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted
+blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too
+practical; and their son—he should be taught to laugh at great men,
+that is, at distinguished successful men, at men who wore ribands and
+rose to the tops of their trees. He should in no way resemble (Rachel
+added) St. John Hirst.
+
+At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst.
+Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them;
+he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. Where
+should we all be without him and his like? Choked in weeds; Christians,
+bigots,—why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs
+to men when they felt drowsy.
+
+“But you’ll never see it!” he exclaimed; “because with all your virtues
+you don’t, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being for
+the pursuit of truth! You’ve no respect for facts, Rachel; you’re
+essentially feminine.” She did not trouble to deny it, nor did she
+think good to produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits
+which Terence admired. St. John Hirst said that she was in love with
+him; she would never forgive that; but the argument was not one to
+appeal to a man.
+
+“But I like him,” she said, and she thought to herself that she also
+pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the
+warm mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we
+ourselves move about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St.
+John Hirst.
+
+She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would not kiss
+him supposing he wished it, which was not likely.
+
+As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then
+bestowed upon him, Terence protested:
+
+“And compared with Hirst I’m a perfect Zany.”
+
+The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.
+
+“We’re wasting the morning—I ought to be writing my book, and you ought
+to be answering these.”
+
+“We’ve only got twenty-one whole mornings left,” said Rachel. “And my
+father’ll be here in a day or two.”
+
+However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write
+laboriously,
+
+“My dear Evelyn—”
+
+Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had written, a
+process which he found essential to the composition of his own. For a
+considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking of the clock
+and the fitful scratch of Rachel’s pen, as she produced phrases which
+bore a considerable likeness to those which she had condemned. She was
+struck by it herself, for she stopped writing and looked up; looked at
+Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked at the different pieces of
+furniture, at her bed in the corner, at the window-pane which showed
+the branches of a tree filled in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and
+was amazed at the gulf which lay between all that and her sheet of
+paper. Would there ever be a time when the world was one and
+indivisible? Even with Terence himself—how far apart they could be, how
+little she knew what was passing in his brain now! She then finished
+her sentence, which was awkward and ugly, and stated that they were
+“both very happy, and going to be married in the autumn probably and
+hope to live in London, where we hope you will come and see us when we
+get back.” Choosing “affectionately,” after some further speculation,
+rather than sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly beginning
+on another when Terence remarked, quoting from his book:
+
+“Listen to this, Rachel. ‘It is probable that Hugh’ (he’s the hero, a
+literary man), ‘had not realised at the time of his marriage, any more
+than the young man of parts and imagination usually does realise, the
+nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the male
+from the needs and desires of the female. . . . At first they had been
+very happy. The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly
+companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them. Betty had
+proved herself the ideal comrade. . . . They had shouted _Love in the
+Valley_ to each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn’ (and
+so on, and so on—I’ll skip the descriptions). . . . ‘But in London,
+after the boy’s birth, all was changed. Betty was an admirable mother;
+but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that
+function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did
+not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and strong, with
+healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise. .
+. .’ (In short she began to give tea-parties.) . . . ‘Coming in late
+from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined
+room, where the two men had each unloosened his soul to the other, with
+the sound of the traffic humming in his ears, and the foggy London sky
+slung tragically across his mind . . . he found women’s hats dotted
+about among his papers. Women’s wraps and absurd little feminine shoes
+and umbrellas were in the hall. . . . Then the bills began to come in.
+. . . He tried to speak frankly to her. He found her lying on the great
+polar-bear skin in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining
+with the Greens in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the
+diamonds wink and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve
+of her breast—a vision of adorable femininity. He forgave her all.’
+(Well, this goes from bad to worse, and finally about fifty pages
+later, Hugh takes a week-end ticket to Swanage and ‘has it out with
+himself on the downs above Corfe.’ . . . Here there’s fifteen pages or
+so which we’ll skip. The conclusion is . . .) ‘They were different.
+Perhaps, in the far future, when generations of men had struggled and
+failed as he must now struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed, what
+she now made a pretence of being—the friend and companion—not the enemy
+and parasite of man.’
+
+“The end of it is, you see, Hugh went back to his wife, poor fellow. It
+was his duty, as a married man. Lord, Rachel,” he concluded, “will it
+be like that when we’re married?”
+
+Instead of answering him she asked,
+
+“Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?”
+
+“Ah, that’s the difficulty!” he sighed, tossing the book away.
+
+“Well, then, what will it be like when we’re married? What are the
+things people do feel?”
+
+She seemed doubtful.
+
+“Sit on the floor and let me look at you,” he commanded. Resting her
+chin on his knee, she looked straight at him.
+
+He examined her curiously.
+
+“You’re not beautiful,” he began, “but I like your face. I like the way
+your hair grows down in a point, and your eyes too—they never see
+anything. Your mouth’s too big, and your cheeks would be better if they
+had more colour in them. But what I like about your face is that it
+makes one wonder what the devil you’re thinking about—it makes me want
+to do that—” He clenched his fist and shook it so near her that she
+started back, “because now you look as if you’d blow my brains out.
+There are moments,” he continued, “when, if we stood on a rock
+together, you’d throw me into the sea.”
+
+Hypnotised by the force of his eyes in hers, she repeated, “If we stood
+on a rock together—”
+
+To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven
+about the roots of the world—the idea was incoherently delightful. She
+sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting aside
+the chairs and tables as if she were indeed striking through the
+waters. He watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a
+passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles which
+would hinder their passage through life.
+
+“It does seem possible!” he exclaimed, “though I’ve always thought it
+the most unlikely thing in the world—I shall be in love with you all my
+life, and our marriage will be the most exciting thing that’s ever been
+done! We’ll never have a moment’s peace—” He caught her in his arms as
+she passed him, and they fought for mastery, imagining a rock, and the
+sea heaving beneath them. At last she was thrown to the floor, where
+she lay gasping, and crying for mercy.
+
+“I’m a mermaid! I can swim,” she cried, “so the game’s up.” Her dress
+was torn across, and peace being established, she fetched a needle and
+thread and began to mend the tear.
+
+“And now,” she said, “be quiet and tell me about the world; tell me
+about everything that’s ever happened, and I’ll tell you—let me see,
+what can I tell you?—I’ll tell you about Miss Montgomerie and the river
+party. She was left, you see, with one foot in the boat, and the other
+on shore.”
+
+They had spent much time already in thus filling out for the other the
+course of their past lives, and the characters of their friends and
+relations, so that very soon Terence knew not only what Rachel’s aunts
+might be expected to say upon every occasion, but also how their
+bedrooms were furnished, and what kind of bonnets they wore. He could
+sustain a conversation between Mrs. Hunt and Rachel, and carry on a
+tea-party including the Rev. William Johnson and Miss Macquoid, the
+Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth. But he had
+known many more people, and was far more highly skilled in the art of
+narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were, for the most part,
+of a curiously childlike and humorous kind, so that it generally fell
+to her lot to listen and ask questions.
+
+He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and
+felt, and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other
+men and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she
+became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people,
+where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them. According
+to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made life reasonable,
+or if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest anyhow, for
+sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they
+did. Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as she believed.
+She should look for vanity—for vanity was a common quality—first in
+herself, and then in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they all had their
+share of it—and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve she
+met; and once linked together by one such tie she would find them not
+separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable, and she
+would come to love them when she found that they were like herself.
+
+If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings were
+as various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes and manes, and
+horns and humps; and so, wrestling over the entire list of their
+acquaintances, and diverging into anecdote and theory and speculation,
+they came to know each other. The hours passed quickly, and seemed to
+them full to leaking-point. After a night’s solitude they were always
+ready to begin again.
+
+The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist in free talk
+between men and women did in truth exist for both of them, although not
+quite in the measure she prescribed. Far more than upon the nature of
+sex they dwelt upon the nature of poetry, but it was true that talk
+which had no boundaries deepened and enlarged the strangely small
+bright view of a girl. In return for what he could tell her she brought
+him such curiosity and sensitiveness of perception, that he was led to
+doubt whether any gift bestowed by much reading and living was quite
+the equal of that for pleasure and pain. What would experience give her
+after all, except a kind of ridiculous formal balance, like that of a
+drilled dog in the street? He looked at her face and wondered how it
+would look in twenty years’ time, when the eyes had dulled, and the
+forehead wore those little persistent wrinkles which seem to show that
+the middle-aged are facing something hard which the young do not see?
+What would the hard thing be for them, he wondered? Then his thoughts
+turned to their life in England.
+
+The thought of England was delightful, for together they would see the
+old things freshly; it would be England in June, and there would be
+June nights in the country; and the nightingales singing in the lanes,
+into which they could steal when the room grew hot; and there would be
+English meadows gleaming with water and set with stolid cows, and
+clouds dipping low and trailing across the green hills. As he sat in
+the room with her, he wished very often to be back again in the thick
+of life, doing things with Rachel.
+
+He crossed to the window and exclaimed, “Lord, how good it is to think
+of lanes, muddy lanes, with brambles and nettles, you know, and real
+grass fields, and farmyards with pigs and cows, and men walking beside
+carts with pitchforks—there’s nothing to compare with that here—look at
+the stony red earth, and the bright blue sea, and the glaring white
+houses—how tired one gets of it! And the air, without a stain or a
+wrinkle. I’d give anything for a sea mist.”
+
+Rachel, too, had been thinking of the English country: the flat land
+rolling away to the sea, and the woods and the long straight roads,
+where one can walk for miles without seeing any one, and the great
+church towers and the curious houses clustered in the valleys, and the
+birds, and the dusk, and the rain falling against the windows.
+
+“But London, London’s the place,” Terence continued. They looked
+together at the carpet, as though London itself were to be seen there
+lying on the floor, with all its spires and pinnacles pricking through
+the smoke.
+
+“On the whole, what I should like best at this moment,” Terence
+pondered, “would be to find myself walking down Kingsway, by those big
+placards, you know, and turning into the Strand. Perhaps I might go and
+look over Waterloo Bridge for a moment. Then I’d go along the Strand
+past the shops with all the new books in them, and through the little
+archway into the Temple. I always like the quiet after the uproar. You
+hear your own footsteps suddenly quite loud. The Temple’s very
+pleasant. I think I should go and see if I could find dear old
+Hodgkin—the man who writes books about Van Eyck, you know. When I left
+England he was very sad about his tame magpie. He suspected that a man
+had poisoned it. And then Russell lives on the next staircase. I think
+you’d like him. He’s a passion for Handel. Well, Rachel,” he concluded,
+dismissing the vision of London, “we shall be doing that together in
+six weeks’ time, and it’ll be the middle of June then—and June in
+London—my God! how pleasant it all is!”
+
+“And we’re certain to have it too,” she said. “It isn’t as if we were
+expecting a great deal—only to walk about and look at things.”
+
+“Only a thousand a year and perfect freedom,” he replied. “How many
+people in London d’you think have that?”
+
+“And now you’ve spoilt it,” she complained. “Now we’ve got to think of
+the horrors.” She looked grudgingly at the novel which had once caused
+her perhaps an hour’s discomfort, so that she had never opened it
+again, but kept it on her table, and looked at it occasionally, as some
+medieval monk kept a skull, or a crucifix to remind him of the frailty
+of the body.
+
+“Is it true, Terence,” she demanded, “that women die with bugs crawling
+across their faces?”
+
+“I think it’s very probable,” he said. “But you must admit, Rachel,
+that we so seldom think of anything but ourselves that an occasional
+twinge is really rather pleasant.”
+
+Accusing him of an affection of cynicism which was just as bad as
+sentimentality itself, she left her position by his side and knelt upon
+the window sill, twisting the curtain tassels between her fingers. A
+vague sense of dissatisfaction filled her.
+
+“What’s so detestable in this country,” she exclaimed, “is the
+blue—always blue sky and blue sea. It’s like a curtain—all the things
+one wants are on the other side of that. I want to know what’s going on
+behind it. I hate these divisions, don’t you, Terence? One person all
+in the dark about another person. Now I liked the Dalloways,” she
+continued, “and they’re gone. I shall never see them again. Just by
+going on a ship we cut ourselves off entirely from the rest of the
+world. I want to see England there—London there—all sorts of people—why
+shouldn’t one? why should one be shut up all by oneself in a room?”
+
+While she spoke thus half to herself and with increasing vagueness,
+because her eye was caught by a ship that had just come into the bay,
+she did not see that Terence had ceased to stare contentedly in front
+of him, and was looking at her keenly and with dissatisfaction. She
+seemed to be able to cut herself adrift from him, and to pass away to
+unknown places where she had no need of him. The thought roused his
+jealousy.
+
+“I sometimes think you’re not in love with me and never will be,” he
+said energetically. She started and turned round at his words.
+
+“I don’t satisfy you in the way you satisfy me,” he continued. “There’s
+something I can’t get hold of in you. You don’t want me as I want
+you—you’re always wanting something else.”
+
+He began pacing up and down the room.
+
+“Perhaps I ask too much,” he went on. “Perhaps it isn’t really possible
+to have what I want. Men and women are too different. You can’t
+understand—you don’t understand—”
+
+He came up to where she stood looking at him in silence.
+
+It seemed to her now that what he was saying was perfectly true, and
+that she wanted many more things than the love of one human being—the
+sea, the sky. She turned again and looked at the distant blue, which
+was so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could not
+possibly want only one human being.
+
+“Or is it only this damnable engagement?” he continued. “Let’s be
+married here, before we go back—or is it too great a risk? Are we sure
+we want to marry each other?”
+
+They began pacing up and down the room, but although they came very
+near each other in their pacing, they took care not to touch each
+other. The hopelessness of their position overcame them both. They were
+impotent; they could never love each other sufficiently to overcome all
+these barriers, and they could never be satisfied with less. Realising
+this with intolerable keenness she stopped in front of him and
+exclaimed:
+
+“Let’s break it off, then.”
+
+The words did more to unite them than any amount of argument. As if
+they stood on the edge of a precipice they clung together. They knew
+that they could not separate; painful and terrible it might be, but
+they were joined for ever. They lapsed into silence, and after a time
+crept together in silence. Merely to be so close soothed them, and
+sitting side by side the divisions disappeared, and it seemed as if the
+world were once more solid and entire, and as if, in some strange way,
+they had grown larger and stronger.
+
+It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great
+reluctance. They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and with
+a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling
+nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. But it chilled
+them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and
+indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the
+glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+But no brush was able to efface completely the expression of happiness,
+so that Mrs. Ambrose could not treat them when they came downstairs as
+if they had spent the morning in a way that could be discussed
+naturally. This being so, she joined in the world’s conspiracy to
+consider them for the time incapacitated from the business of life,
+struck by their intensity of feeling into enmity against life, and
+almost succeeded in dismissing them from her thoughts.
+
+She reflected that she had done all that it was necessary to do in
+practical matters. She had written a great many letters, and had
+obtained Willoughby’s consent. She had dwelt so often upon Mr. Hewet’s
+prospects, his profession, his birth, appearance, and temperament, that
+she had almost forgotten what he was really like. When she refreshed
+herself by a look at him, she used to wonder again what he was like,
+and then, concluding that they were happy at any rate, thought no more
+about it.
+
+She might more profitably consider what would happen in three years’
+time, or what might have happened if Rachel had been left to explore
+the world under her father’s guidance. The result, she was honest
+enough to own, might have been better—who knows? She did not disguise
+from herself that Terence had faults. She was inclined to think him too
+easy and tolerant, just as he was inclined to think her perhaps a
+trifle hard—no, it was rather that she was uncompromising. In some ways
+she found St. John preferable; but then, of course, he would never have
+suited Rachel. Her friendship with St. John was established, for
+although she fluctuated between irritation and interest in a way that
+did credit to the candour of her disposition, she liked his company on
+the whole. He took her outside this little world of love and emotion.
+He had a grasp of facts. Supposing, for instance, that England made a
+sudden move towards some unknown port on the coast of Morocco, St. John
+knew what was at the back of it, and to hear him engaged with her
+husband in argument about finance and the balance of power, gave her an
+odd sense of stability. She respected their arguments without always
+listening to them, much as she respected a solid brick wall, or one of
+those immense municipal buildings which, although they compose the
+greater part of our cities, have been built day after day and year
+after year by unknown hands. She liked to sit and listen, and even felt
+a little elated when the engaged couple, after showing their profound
+lack of interest, slipped from the room, and were seen pulling flowers
+to pieces in the garden. It was not that she was jealous of them, but
+she did undoubtedly envy them their great unknown future that lay
+before them. Slipping from one such thought to another, she was at the
+dining-room with fruit in her hands. Sometimes she stopped to
+straighten a candle stooping with the heat, or disturbed some too rigid
+arrangement of the chairs. She had reason to suspect that Chailey had
+been balancing herself on the top of a ladder with a wet duster during
+their absence, and the room had never been quite like itself since.
+Returning from the dining-room for the third time, she perceived that
+one of the arm-chairs was now occupied by St. John. He lay back in it,
+with his eyes half shut, looking, as he always did, curiously buttoned
+up in a neat grey suit and fenced against the exuberance of a foreign
+climate which might at any moment proceed to take liberties with him.
+Her eyes rested on him gently and then passed on over his head. Finally
+she took the chair opposite.
+
+“I didn’t want to come here,” he said at last, “but I was positively
+driven to it. . . . Evelyn M.,” he groaned.
+
+He sat up, and began to explain with mock solemnity how the detestable
+woman was set upon marrying him.
+
+“She pursues me about the place. This morning she appeared in the
+smoking-room. All I could do was to seize my hat and fly. I didn’t want
+to come, but I couldn’t stay and face another meal with her.”
+
+“Well, we must make the best of it,” Helen replied philosophically. It
+was very hot, and they were indifferent to any amount of silence, so
+that they lay back in their chairs waiting for something to happen. The
+bell rang for luncheon, but there was no sound of movement in the
+house. Was there any news? Helen asked; anything in the papers? St.
+John shook his head. O yes, he had a letter from home, a letter from
+his mother, describing the suicide of the parlour-maid. She was called
+Susan Jane, and she came into the kitchen one afternoon, and said that
+she wanted cook to keep her money for her; she had twenty pounds in
+gold. Then she went out to buy herself a hat. She came in at half-past
+five and said that she had taken poison. They had only just time to get
+her into bed and call a doctor before she died.
+
+“Well?” Helen enquired.
+
+“There’ll have to be an inquest,” said St. John.
+
+Why had she done it? He shrugged his shoulders. Why do people kill
+themselves? Why do the lower orders do any of the things they do do?
+Nobody knows. They sat in silence.
+
+“The bell’s run fifteen minutes and they’re not down,” said Helen at
+length.
+
+When they appeared, St. John explained why it had been necessary for
+him to come to luncheon. He imitated Evelyn’s enthusiastic tone as she
+confronted him in the smoking-room. “She thinks there can be nothing
+_quite_ so thrilling as mathematics, so I’ve lent her a large work in
+two volumes. It’ll be interesting to see what she makes of it.”
+
+Rachel could now afford to laugh at him. She reminded him of Gibbon;
+she had the first volume somewhere still; if he were undertaking the
+education of Evelyn, that surely was the test; or she had heard that
+Burke, upon the American Rebellion—Evelyn ought to read them both
+simultaneously. When St. John had disposed of her argument and had
+satisfied his hunger, he proceeded to tell them that the hotel was
+seething with scandals, some of the most appalling kind, which had
+happened in their absence; he was indeed much given to the study of his
+kind.
+
+“Evelyn M., for example—but that was told me in confidence.”
+
+“Nonsense!” Terence interposed.
+
+“You’ve heard about poor Sinclair, too?”
+
+“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about Sinclair. He’s retired to his mine with a
+revolver. He writes to Evelyn daily that he’s thinking of committing
+suicide. I’ve assured her that he’s never been so happy in his life,
+and, on the whole, she’s inclined to agree with me.”
+
+“But then she’s entangled herself with Perrott,” St. John continued;
+“and I have reason to think, from something I saw in the passage, that
+everything isn’t as it should be between Arthur and Susan. There’s a
+young female lately arrived from Manchester. A very good thing if it
+were broken off, in my opinion. Their married life is something too
+horrible to contemplate. Oh, and I distinctly heard old Mrs. Paley
+rapping out the most fearful oaths as I passed her bedroom door. It’s
+supposed that she tortures her maid in private—it’s practically certain
+she does. One can tell it from the look in her eyes.”
+
+“When you’re eighty and the gout tweezes you, you’ll be swearing like a
+trooper,” Terence remarked. “You’ll be very fat, very testy, very
+disagreeable. Can’t you imagine him—bald as a coot, with a pair of
+sponge-bag trousers, a little spotted tie, and a corporation?”
+
+After a pause Hirst remarked that the worst infamy had still to be
+told. He addressed himself to Helen.
+
+“They’ve hoofed out the prostitute. One night while we were away that
+old numskull Thornbury was doddering about the passages very late.
+(Nobody seems to have asked him what _he_ was up to.) He saw the
+Signora Lola Mendoza, as she calls herself, cross the passage in her
+nightgown. He communicated his suspicions next morning to Elliot, with
+the result that Rodriguez went to the woman and gave her twenty-four
+hours in which to clear out of the place. No one seems to have enquired
+into the truth of the story, or to have asked Thornbury and Elliot what
+business it was of theirs; they had it entirely their own way. I
+propose that we should all sign a Round Robin, go to Rodriguez in a
+body, and insist upon a full enquiry. Something’s got to be done, don’t
+you agree?”
+
+Hewet remarked that there could be no doubt as to the lady’s
+profession.
+
+“Still,” he added, “it’s a great shame, poor woman; only I don’t see
+what’s to be done—”
+
+“I quite agree with you, St. John,” Helen burst out. “It’s monstrous.
+The hypocritical smugness of the English makes my blood boil. A man
+who’s made a fortune in trade as Mr. Thornbury has is bound to be twice
+as bad as any prostitute.”
+
+She respected St. John’s morality, which she took far more seriously
+than any one else did, and now entered into a discussion with him as to
+the steps that were to be taken to enforce their peculiar view of what
+was right. The argument led to some profoundly gloomy statements of a
+general nature. Who were they, after all—what authority had they—what
+power against the mass of superstition and ignorance? It was the
+English, of course; there must be something wrong in the English blood.
+Directly you met an English person, of the middle classes, you were
+conscious of an indefinable sensation of loathing; directly you saw the
+brown crescent of houses above Dover, the same thing came over you. But
+unfortunately St. John added, you couldn’t trust these foreigners—
+
+They were interrupted by sounds of strife at the further end of the
+table. Rachel appealed to her aunt.
+
+“Terence says we must go to tea with Mrs. Thornbury because she’s been
+so kind, but I don’t see it; in fact, I’d rather have my right hand
+sawn in pieces—just imagine! the eyes of all those women!”
+
+“Fiddlesticks, Rachel,” Terence replied. “Who wants to look at you?
+You’re consumed with vanity! You’re a monster of conceit! Surely,
+Helen, you ought to have taught her by this time that she’s a person of
+no conceivable importance whatever—not beautiful, or well dressed, or
+conspicuous for elegance or intellect, or deportment. A more ordinary
+sight than you are,” he concluded, “except for the tear across your
+dress has never been seen. However, stay at home if you want to. I’m
+going.”
+
+She appealed again to her aunt. It wasn’t the being looked at, she
+explained, but the things people were sure to say. The women in
+particular. She liked women, but where emotion was concerned they were
+as flies on a lump of sugar. They would be certain to ask her
+questions. Evelyn M. would say: “Are you in love? Is it nice being in
+love?” And Mrs. Thornbury—her eyes would go up and down, up and
+down—she shuddered at the thought of it. Indeed, the retirement of
+their life since their engagement had made her so sensitive, that she
+was not exaggerating her case.
+
+She found an ally in Helen, who proceeded to expound her views of the
+human race, as she regarded with complacency the pyramid of variegated
+fruits in the centre of the table. It wasn’t that they were cruel, or
+meant to hurt, or even stupid exactly; but she had always found that
+the ordinary person had so little emotion in his own life that the
+scent of it in the lives of others was like the scent of blood in the
+nostrils of a bloodhound. Warming to the theme, she continued:
+
+“Directly anything happens—it may be a marriage, or a birth, or a
+death—on the whole they prefer it to be a death—every one wants to see
+you. They insist upon seeing you. They’ve got nothing to say; they
+don’t care a rap for you; but you’ve got to go to lunch or to tea or to
+dinner, and if you don’t you’re damned. It’s the smell of blood,” she
+continued; “I don’t blame ’em; only they shan’t have mine if I know
+it!”
+
+She looked about her as if she had called up a legion of human beings,
+all hostile and all disagreeable, who encircled the table, with mouths
+gaping for blood, and made it appear a little island of neutral country
+in the midst of the enemy’s country.
+
+Her words roused her husband, who had been muttering rhythmically to
+himself, surveying his guests and his food and his wife with eyes that
+were now melancholy and now fierce, according to the fortunes of the
+lady in his ballad. He cut Helen short with a protest. He hated even
+the semblance of cynicism in women. “Nonsense, nonsense,” he remarked
+abruptly.
+
+Terence and Rachel glanced at each other across the table, which meant
+that when they were married they would not behave like that. The
+entrance of Ridley into the conversation had a strange effect. It
+became at once more formal and more polite. It would have been
+impossible to talk quite easily of anything that came into their heads,
+and to say the word prostitute as simply as any other word. The talk
+now turned upon literature and politics, and Ridley told stories of the
+distinguished people he had known in his youth. Such talk was of the
+nature of an art, and the personalities and informalities of the young
+were silenced. As they rose to go, Helen stopped for a moment, leaning
+her elbows on the table.
+
+“You’ve all been sitting here,” she said, “for almost an hour, and you
+haven’t noticed my figs, or my flowers, or the way the light comes
+through, or anything. I haven’t been listening, because I’ve been
+looking at you. You looked very beautiful; I wish you’d go on sitting
+for ever.”
+
+She led the way to the drawing-room, where she took up her embroidery,
+and began again to dissuade Terence from walking down to the hotel in
+this heat. But the more she dissuaded, the more he was determined to
+go. He became irritated and obstinate. There were moments when they
+almost disliked each other. He wanted other people; he wanted Rachel,
+to see them with him. He suspected that Mrs. Ambrose would now try to
+dissuade her from going. He was annoyed by all this space and shade and
+beauty, and Hirst, recumbent, drooping a magazine from his wrist.
+
+“I’m going,” he repeated. “Rachel needn’t come unless she wants to.”
+
+“If you go, Hewet, I wish you’d make enquiries about the prostitute,”
+said Hirst. “Look here,” he added, “I’ll walk half the way with you.”
+
+Greatly to their surprise he raised himself, looked at his watch, and
+remarked that, as it was now half an hour since luncheon, the gastric
+juices had had sufficient time to secrete; he was trying a system, he
+explained, which involved short spells of exercise interspaced by
+longer intervals of rest.
+
+“I shall be back at four,” he remarked to Helen, “when I shall lie down
+on the sofa and relax all my muscles completely.”
+
+“So you’re going, Rachel?” Helen asked. “You won’t stay with me?”
+
+She smiled, but she might have been sad.
+
+Was she sad, or was she really laughing? Rachel could not tell, and she
+felt for the moment very uncomfortable between Helen and Terence. Then
+she turned away, saying merely that she would go with Terence, on
+condition that he did all the talking.
+
+A narrow border of shadow ran along the road, which was broad enough
+for two, but not broad enough for three. St. John therefore dropped a
+little behind the pair, and the distance between them increased by
+degrees. Walking with a view to digestion, and with one eye upon his
+watch, he looked from time to time at the pair in front of him. They
+seemed to be so happy, so intimate, although they were walking side by
+side much as other people walk. They turned slightly toward each other
+now and then, and said something which he thought must be something
+very private. They were really disputing about Helen’s character, and
+Terence was trying to explain why it was that she annoyed him so much
+sometimes. But St. John thought that they were saying things which they
+did not want him to hear, and was led to think of his own isolation.
+These people were happy, and in some ways he despised them for being
+made happy so simply, and in other ways he envied them. He was much
+more remarkable than they were, but he was not happy. People never
+liked him; he doubted sometimes whether even Helen liked him. To be
+simple, to be able to say simply what one felt, without the terrific
+self-consciousness which possessed him, and showed him his own face and
+words perpetually in a mirror, that would be worth almost any other
+gift, for it made one happy. Happiness, happiness, what was happiness?
+He was never happy. He saw too clearly the little vices and deceits and
+flaws of life, and, seeing them, it seemed to him honest to take notice
+of them. That was the reason, no doubt, why people generally disliked
+him, and complained that he was heartless and bitter. Certainly they
+never told him the things he wanted to be told, that he was nice and
+kind, and that they liked him. But it was true that half the sharp
+things that he said about them were said because he was unhappy or hurt
+himself. But he admitted that he had very seldom told any one that he
+cared for them, and when he had been demonstrative, he had generally
+regretted it afterwards. His feelings about Terence and Rachel were so
+complicated that he had never yet been able to bring himself to say
+that he was glad that they were going to be married. He saw their
+faults so clearly, and the inferior nature of a great deal of their
+feeling for each other, and he expected that their love would not last.
+He looked at them again, and, very strangely, for he was so used to
+thinking that he seldom saw anything, the look of them filled him with
+a simple emotion of affection in which there were some traces of pity
+also. What, after all, did people’s faults matter in comparison with
+what was good in them? He resolved that he would now tell them what he
+felt. He quickened his pace and came up with them just as they reached
+the corner where the lane joined the main road. They stood still and
+began to laugh at him, and to ask him whether the gastric juices—but he
+stopped them and began to speak very quickly and stiffly.
+
+“D’you remember the morning after the dance?” he demanded. “It was here
+we sat, and you talked nonsense, and Rachel made little heaps of
+stones. I, on the other hand, had the whole meaning of life revealed to
+me in a flash.” He paused for a second, and drew his lips together in a
+tight little purse. “Love,” he said. “It seems to me to explain
+everything. So, on the whole, I’m very glad that you two are going to
+be married.” He then turned round abruptly, without looking at them,
+and walked back to the villa. He felt both exalted and ashamed of
+himself for having thus said what he felt. Probably they were laughing
+at him, probably they thought him a fool, and, after all, had he really
+said what he felt?
+
+It was true that they laughed when he was gone; but the dispute about
+Helen which had become rather sharp, ceased, and they became peaceful
+and friendly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+They reached the hotel rather early in the afternoon, so that most
+people were still lying down, or sitting speechless in their bedrooms,
+and Mrs. Thornbury, although she had asked them to tea, was nowhere to
+be seen. They sat down, therefore, in the shady hall, which was almost
+empty, and full of the light swishing sounds of air going to and fro in
+a large empty space. Yes, this arm-chair was the same arm-chair in
+which Rachel had sat that afternoon when Evelyn came up, and this was
+the magazine she had been looking at, and this the very picture, a
+picture of New York by lamplight. How odd it seemed—nothing had
+changed.
+
+By degrees a certain number of people began to come down the stairs and
+to pass through the hall, and in this dim light their figures possessed
+a sort of grace and beauty, although they were all unknown people.
+Sometimes they went straight through and out into the garden by the
+swing door, sometimes they stopped for a few minutes and bent over the
+tables and began turning over the newspapers. Terence and Rachel sat
+watching them through their half-closed eyelids—the Johnsons, the
+Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons’, the Lees, the Morleys, the
+Campbells, the Gardiners. Some were dressed in white flannels and were
+carrying racquets under their arms, some were short, some tall, some
+were only children, and some perhaps were servants, but they all had
+their standing, their reason for following each other through the hall,
+their money, their position, whatever it might be. Terence soon gave up
+looking at them, for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he fell half
+asleep in his chair. Rachel watched the people for some time longer;
+she was fascinated by the certainty and the grace of their movements,
+and by the inevitable way in which they seemed to follow each other,
+and loiter and pass on and disappear. But after a time her thoughts
+wandered, and she began to think of the dance, which had been held in
+this room, only then the room itself looked quite different. Glancing
+round, she could hardly believe that it was the same room. It had
+looked so bare and so bright and formal on that night when they came
+into it out of the darkness; it had been filled, too, with little red,
+excited faces, always moving, and people so brightly dressed and so
+animated that they did not seem in the least like real people, nor did
+you feel that you could talk to them. And now the room was dim and
+quiet, and beautiful silent people passed through it, to whom you could
+go and say anything you liked. She felt herself amazingly secure as she
+sat in her arm-chair, and able to review not only the night of the
+dance, but the entire past, tenderly and humorously, as if she had been
+turning in a fog for a long time, and could now see exactly where she
+had turned. For the methods by which she had reached her present
+position, seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about
+them was that she had not known where they were leading her. That was
+the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what
+one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always
+unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another
+and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one
+reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this
+process that people called living. Perhaps, then, every one really knew
+as she knew now where they were going; and things formed themselves
+into a pattern not only for her, but for them, and in that pattern lay
+satisfaction and meaning. When she looked back she could see that a
+meaning of some kind was apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the
+brief visit of the Dalloways whom she would never see again, and in the
+life of her father.
+
+The sound of Terence, breathing deep in his slumber, confirmed her in
+her calm. She was not sleepy although she did not see anything very
+distinctly, but although the figures passing through the hall became
+vaguer and vaguer, she believed that they all knew exactly where they
+were going, and the sense of their certainty filled her with comfort.
+For the moment she was as detached and disinterested as if she had no
+longer any lot in life, and she thought that she could now accept
+anything that came to her without being perplexed by the form in which
+it appeared. What was there to frighten or to perplex in the prospect
+of life? Why should this insight ever again desert her? The world was
+in truth so large, so hospitable, and after all it was so simple.
+“Love,” St. John had said, “that seems to explain it all.” Yes, but it
+was not the love of man for woman, of Terence for Rachel. Although they
+sat so close together, they had ceased to be little separate bodies;
+they had ceased to struggle and desire one another. There seemed to be
+peace between them. It might be love, but it was not the love of man
+for woman.
+
+Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying back in his
+chair, and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth was, and his chin so
+small, and his nose curved like a switchback with a knob at the end.
+Naturally, looking like that he was lazy, and ambitious, and full of
+moods and faults. She remembered their quarrels, and in particular how
+they had been quarreling about Helen that very afternoon, and she
+thought how often they would quarrel in the thirty, or forty, or fifty
+years in which they would be living in the same house together,
+catching trains together, and getting annoyed because they were so
+different. But all this was superficial, and had nothing to do with the
+life that went on beneath the eyes and the mouth and the chin, for that
+life was independent of her, and independent of everything else. So
+too, although she was going to marry him and to live with him for
+thirty, or forty, or fifty years, and to quarrel, and to be so close to
+him, she was independent of him; she was independent of everything
+else. Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love that made her
+understand this, for she had never felt this independence, this calm,
+and this certainty until she fell in love with him, and perhaps this
+too was love. She wanted nothing else.
+
+For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little
+distance looking at the couple lying back so peacefully in their
+arm-chairs. She could not make up her mind whether to disturb them or
+not, and then, seeming to recollect something, she came across the
+hall. The sound of her approach woke Terence, who sat up and rubbed his
+eyes. He heard Miss Allan talking to Rachel.
+
+“Well,” she was saying, “this is very nice. It is very nice indeed.
+Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion. It cannot often happen
+that two couples who have never seen each other before meet in the same
+hotel and decide to get married.” Then she paused and smiled, and
+seemed to have nothing more to say, so that Terence rose and asked her
+whether it was true that she had finished her book. Some one had said
+that she had really finished it. Her face lit up; she turned to him
+with a livelier expression than usual.
+
+“Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it,” she said. “That is,
+omitting Swinburne—Beowulf to Browning—I rather like the two B’s
+myself. Beowulf to Browning,” she repeated, “I think that is the kind
+of title which might catch one’s eye on a railway book-stall.”
+
+She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book, for no one
+knew what an amount of determination had gone to the making of it. Also
+she thought that it was a good piece of work, and, considering what
+anxiety she had been in about her brother while she wrote it, she could
+not resist telling them a little more about it.
+
+“I must confess,” she continued, “that if I had known how many classics
+there are in English literature, and how verbose the best of them
+contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work. They only
+allow one seventy thousand words, you see.”
+
+“Only seventy thousand words!” Terence exclaimed.
+
+“Yes, and one has to say something about everybody,” Miss Allan added.
+“That is what I find so difficult, saying something different about
+everybody.” Then she thought that she had said enough about herself,
+and she asked whether they had come down to join the tennis tournament.
+“The young people are very keen about it. It begins again in half an
+hour.”
+
+Her gaze rested benevolently upon them both, and, after a momentary
+pause, she remarked, looking at Rachel as if she had remembered
+something that would serve to keep her distinct from other people.
+
+“You’re the remarkable person who doesn’t like ginger.” But the
+kindness of the smile in her rather worn and courageous face made them
+feel that although she would scarcely remember them as individuals, she
+had laid upon them the burden of the new generation.
+
+“And in that I quite agree with her,” said a voice behind; Mrs.
+Thornbury had overheard the last few words about not liking ginger.
+“It’s associated in my mind with a horrid old aunt of ours (poor thing,
+she suffered dreadfully, so it isn’t fair to call her horrid) who used
+to give it to us when we were small, and we never had the courage to
+tell her we didn’t like it. We just had to put it out in the
+shrubbery—she had a big house near Bath.”
+
+They began moving slowly across the hall, when they were stopped by the
+impact of Evelyn, who dashed into them, as though in running downstairs
+to catch them her legs had got beyond her control.
+
+“Well,” she exclaimed, with her usual enthusiasm, seizing Rachel by the
+arm, “I call this splendid! I guessed it was going to happen from the
+very beginning! I saw you two were made for each other. Now you’ve just
+got to tell me all about it—when’s it to be, where are you going to
+live—are you both tremendously happy?”
+
+But the attention of the group was diverted to Mrs. Elliot, who was
+passing them with her eager but uncertain movement, carrying in her
+hands a plate and an empty hot-water bottle. She would have passed
+them, but Mrs. Thornbury went up and stopped her.
+
+“Thank you, Hughling’s better,” she replied, in answer to Mrs.
+Thornbury’s enquiry, “but he’s not an easy patient. He wants to know
+what his temperature is, and if I tell him he gets anxious, and if I
+don’t tell him he suspects. You know what men are when they’re ill! And
+of course there are none of the proper appliances, and, though he seems
+very willing and anxious to help” (here she lowered her voice
+mysteriously), “one can’t feel that Dr. Rodriguez is the same as a
+proper doctor. If you would come and see him, Mr. Hewet,” she added, “I
+know it would cheer him up—lying there in bed all day—and the flies—But
+I must go and find Angelo—the food here—of course, with an invalid, one
+wants things particularly nice.” And she hurried past them in search of
+the head waiter. The worry of nursing her husband had fixed a plaintive
+frown upon her forehead; she was pale and looked unhappy and more than
+usually inefficient, and her eyes wandered more vaguely than ever from
+point to point.
+
+“Poor thing!” Mrs. Thornbury exclaimed. She told them that for some
+days Hughling Elliot had been ill, and the only doctor available was
+the brother of the proprietor, or so the proprietor said, whose right
+to the title of doctor was not above suspicion.
+
+“I know how wretched it is to be ill in a hotel,” Mrs. Thornbury
+remarked, once more leading the way with Rachel to the garden. “I spent
+six weeks on my honeymoon in having typhoid at Venice,” she continued.
+“But even so, I look back upon them as some of the happiest weeks in my
+life. Ah, yes,” she said, taking Rachel’s arm, “you think yourself
+happy now, but it’s nothing to the happiness that comes afterwards. And
+I assure you I could find it in my heart to envy you young people!
+You’ve a much better time than we had, I may tell you. When I look back
+upon it, I can hardly believe how things have changed. When we were
+engaged I wasn’t allowed to go for walks with William alone—some one
+had always to be in the room with us—I really believe I had to show my
+parents all his letters!—though they were very fond of him too. Indeed,
+I may say they looked upon him as their own son. It amuses me,” she
+continued, “to think how strict they were to us, when I see how they
+spoil their grand-children!”
+
+The table was laid under the tree again, and taking her place before
+the teacups, Mrs. Thornbury beckoned and nodded until she had collected
+quite a number of people, Susan and Arthur and Mr. Pepper, who were
+strolling about, waiting for the tournament to begin. A murmuring tree,
+a river brimming in the moonlight, Terence’s words came back to Rachel
+as she sat drinking the tea and listening to the words which flowed on
+so lightly, so kindly, and with such silvery smoothness. This long life
+and all these children had left her very smooth; they seemed to have
+rubbed away the marks of individuality, and to have left only what was
+old and maternal.
+
+“And the things you young people are going to see!” Mrs. Thornbury
+continued. She included them all in her forecast, she included them all
+in her maternity, although the party comprised William Pepper and Miss
+Allan, both of whom might have been supposed to have seen a fair share
+of the panorama. “When I see how the world has changed in my lifetime,”
+she went on, “I can set no limit to what may happen in the next fifty
+years. Ah, no, Mr. Pepper, I don’t agree with you in the least,” she
+laughed, interrupting his gloomy remark about things going steadily
+from bad to worse. “I know I ought to feel that, but I don’t, I’m
+afraid. They’re going to be much better people than we were. Surely
+everything goes to prove that. All round me I see women, young women,
+women with household cares of every sort, going out and doing things
+that we should not have thought it possible to do.”
+
+Mr. Pepper thought her sentimental and irrational like all old women,
+but her manner of treating him as if he were a cross old baby baffled
+him and charmed him, and he could only reply to her with a curious
+grimace which was more a smile than a frown.
+
+“And they remain women,” Mrs. Thornbury added. “They give a great deal
+to their children.”
+
+As she said this she smiled slightly in the direction of Susan and
+Rachel. They did not like to be included in the same lot, but they both
+smiled a little self-consciously, and Arthur and Terence glanced at
+each other too. She made them feel that they were all in the same boat
+together, and they looked at the women they were going to marry and
+compared them. It was inexplicable how any one could wish to marry
+Rachel, incredible that any one should be ready to spend his life with
+Susan; but singular though the other’s taste must be, they bore each
+other no ill-will on account of it; indeed, they liked each other
+rather the better for the eccentricity of their choice.
+
+“I really must congratulate you,” Susan remarked, as she leant across
+the table for the jam.
+
+There seemed to be no foundation for St. John’s gossip about Arthur and
+Susan. Sunburnt and vigorous they sat side by side, with their racquets
+across their knees, not saying much but smiling slightly all the time.
+Through the thin white clothes which they wore, it was possible to see
+the lines of their bodies and legs, the beautiful curves of their
+muscles, his leanness and her flesh, and it was natural to think of the
+firm-fleshed sturdy children that would be theirs. Their faces had too
+little shape in them to be beautiful, but they had clear eyes and an
+appearance of great health and power of endurance, for it seemed as if
+the blood would never cease to run in his veins, or to lie deeply and
+calmly in her cheeks. Their eyes at the present moment were brighter
+than usual, and wore the peculiar expression of pleasure and
+self-confidence which is seen in the eyes of athletes, for they had
+been playing tennis, and they were both first-rate at the game.
+
+Evelyn had not spoken, but she had been looking from Susan to Rachel.
+Well—they had both made up their minds very easily, they had done in a
+very few weeks what it sometimes seemed to her that she would never be
+able to do. Although they were so different, she thought that she could
+see in each the same look of satisfaction and completion, the same
+calmness of manner, and the same slowness of movement. It was that
+slowness, that confidence, that content which she hated, she thought to
+herself. They moved so slowly because they were not single but double,
+and Susan was attached to Arthur, and Rachel to Terence, and for the
+sake of this one man they had renounced all other men, and movement,
+and the real things of life. Love was all very well, and those snug
+domestic houses, with the kitchen below and the nursery above, which
+were so secluded and self-contained, like little islands in the
+torrents of the world; but the real things were surely the things that
+happened, the causes, the wars, the ideals, which happened in the great
+world outside, and went so independently of these women, turning so
+quietly and beautifully towards the men. She looked at them sharply. Of
+course they were happy and content, but there must be better things
+than that. Surely one could get nearer to life, one could get more out
+of life, one could enjoy more and feel more than they would ever do.
+Rachel in particular looked so young—what could she know of life? She
+became restless, and getting up, crossed over to sit beside Rachel. She
+reminded her that she had promised to join her club.
+
+“The bother is,” she went on, “that I mayn’t be able to start work
+seriously till October. I’ve just had a letter from a friend of mine
+whose brother is in business in Moscow. They want me to stay with them,
+and as they’re in the thick of all the conspiracies and anarchists,
+I’ve a good mind to stop on my way home. It sounds too thrilling.” She
+wanted to make Rachel see how thrilling it was. “My friend knows a girl
+of fifteen who’s been sent to Siberia for life merely because they
+caught her addressing a letter to an anarchist. And the letter wasn’t
+from her, either. I’d give all I have in the world to help on a
+revolution against the Russian government, and it’s bound to come.”
+
+She looked from Rachel to Terence. They were both a little touched by
+the sight of her remembering how lately they had been listening to evil
+words about her, and Terence asked her what her scheme was, and she
+explained that she was going to found a club—a club for doing things,
+really doing them. She became very animated, as she talked on and on,
+for she professed herself certain that if once twenty people—no, ten
+would be enough if they were keen—set about doing things instead of
+talking about doing them, they could abolish almost every evil that
+exists. It was brains that were needed. If only people with brains—of
+course they would want a room, a nice room, in Bloomsbury preferably,
+where they could meet once a week. . . .
+
+As she talked Terence could see the traces of fading youth in her face,
+the lines that were being drawn by talk and excitement round her mouth
+and eyes, but he did not pity her; looking into those bright, rather
+hard, and very courageous eyes, he saw that she did not pity herself,
+or feel any desire to exchange her own life for the more refined and
+orderly lives of people like himself and St. John, although, as the
+years went by, the fight would become harder and harder. Perhaps,
+though, she would settle down; perhaps, after all, she would marry
+Perrott. While his mind was half occupied with what she was saying, he
+thought of her probable destiny, the light clouds of tobacco smoke
+serving to obscure his face from her eyes.
+
+Terence smoked and Arthur smoked and Evelyn smoked, so that the air was
+full of the mist and fragrance of good tobacco. In the intervals when
+no one spoke, they heard far off the low murmur of the sea, as the
+waves quietly broke and spread the beach with a film of water, and
+withdrew to break again. The cool green light fell through the leaves
+of the tree, and there were soft crescents and diamonds of sunshine
+upon the plates and the tablecloth. Mrs. Thornbury, after watching them
+all for a time in silence, began to ask Rachel kindly questions—When
+did they all go back? Oh, they expected her father. She must want to
+see her father—there would be a great deal to tell him, and (she looked
+sympathetically at Terence) he would be so happy, she felt sure. Years
+ago, she continued, it might have been ten or twenty years ago, she
+remembered meeting Mr. Vinrace at a party, and, being so much struck by
+his face, which was so unlike the ordinary face one sees at a party,
+that she had asked who he was, and she was told that it was Mr.
+Vinrace, and she had always remembered the name,—an uncommon name,—and
+he had a lady with him, a very sweet-looking woman, but it was one of
+those dreadful London crushes, where you don’t talk,—you only look at
+each other,—and although she had shaken hands with Mr. Vinrace, she
+didn’t think they had said anything. She sighed very slightly,
+remembering the past.
+
+Then she turned to Mr. Pepper, who had become very dependent on her, so
+that he always chose a seat near her, and attended to what she was
+saying, although he did not often make any remark of his own.
+
+“You who know everything, Mr. Pepper,” she said, “tell us how did those
+wonderful French ladies manage their salons? Did we ever do anything of
+the same kind in England, or do you think that there is some reason why
+we cannot do it in England?”
+
+Mr. Pepper was pleased to explain very accurately why there has never
+been an English salon. There were three reasons, and they were very
+good ones, he said. As for himself, when he went to a party, as one was
+sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence—his niece, for
+example, had been married the other day—he walked into the middle of
+the room, said “Ha! ha!” as loud as ever he could, considered that he
+had done his duty, and walked away again. Mrs. Thornbury protested. She
+was going to give a party directly she got back, and they were all to
+be invited, and she should set people to watch Mr. Pepper, and if she
+heard that he had been caught saying “Ha! ha!” she would—she would do
+something very dreadful indeed to him. Arthur Venning suggested that
+what she must do was to rig up something in the nature of a surprise—a
+portrait, for example, of a nice old lady in a lace cap, concealing a
+bath of cold water, which at a signal could be sprung on Pepper’s head;
+or they’d have a chair which shot him twenty feet high directly he sat
+on it.
+
+Susan laughed. She had done her tea; she was feeling very well
+contented, partly because she had been playing tennis brilliantly, and
+then every one was so nice; she was beginning to find it so much easier
+to talk, and to hold her own even with quite clever people, for somehow
+clever people did not frighten her any more. Even Mr. Hirst, whom she
+had disliked when she first met him, really wasn’t disagreeable; and,
+poor man, he always looked so ill; perhaps he was in love; perhaps he
+had been in love with Rachel—she really shouldn’t wonder; or perhaps it
+was Evelyn—she was of course very attractive to men. Leaning forward,
+she went on with the conversation. She said that she thought that the
+reason why parties were so dull was mainly because gentlemen will not
+dress: even in London, she stated, it struck her very much how people
+don’t think it necessary to dress in the evening, and of course if they
+don’t dress in London they won’t dress in the country. It was really
+quite a treat at Christmas-time when there were the Hunt balls, and the
+gentlemen wore nice red coats, but Arthur didn’t care for dancing, so
+she supposed that they wouldn’t go even to the ball in their little
+country town. She didn’t think that people who were fond of one sport
+often care for another, although her father was an exception. But then
+he was an exception in every way—such a gardener, and he knew all about
+birds and animals, and of course he was simply adored by all the old
+women in the village, and at the same time what he really liked best
+was a book. You always knew where to find him if he were wanted; he
+would be in his study with a book. Very likely it would be an old, old
+book, some fusty old thing that no one else would dream of reading. She
+used to tell him that he would have made a first-rate old bookworm if
+only he hadn’t had a family of six to support, and six children, she
+added, charmingly confident of universal sympathy, didn’t leave one
+much time for being a bookworm.
+
+Still talking about her father, of whom she was very proud, she rose,
+for Arthur upon looking at his watch found that it was time they went
+back again to the tennis court. The others did not move.
+
+“They’re very happy!” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking benignantly after
+them. Rachel agreed; they seemed to be so certain of themselves; they
+seemed to know exactly what they wanted.
+
+“D’you think they _are_ happy?” Evelyn murmured to Terence in an
+undertone, and she hoped that he would say that he did not think them
+happy; but, instead, he said that they must go too—go home, for they
+were always being late for meals, and Mrs. Ambrose, who was very stern
+and particular, didn’t like that. Evelyn laid hold of Rachel’s skirt
+and protested. Why should they go? It was still early, and she had so
+many things to say to them. “No,” said Terence, “we must go, because we
+walk so slowly. We stop and look at things, and we talk.”
+
+“What d’you talk about?” Evelyn enquired, upon which he laughed and
+said that they talked about everything.
+
+Mrs. Thornbury went with them to the gate, trailing very slowly and
+gracefully across the grass and the gravel, and talking all the time
+about flowers and birds. She told them that she had taken up the study
+of botany since her daughter married, and it was wonderful what a
+number of flowers there were which she had never seen, although she had
+lived in the country all her life and she was now seventy-two. It was a
+good thing to have some occupation which was quite independent of other
+people, she said, when one got old. But the odd thing was that one
+never felt old. She always felt that she was twenty-five, not a day
+more or a day less, but, of course, one couldn’t expect other people to
+agree to that.
+
+“It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to imagine
+that you’re twenty-five,” she said, looking from one to the other with
+her smooth, bright glance. “It must be very wonderful, very wonderful
+indeed.” She stood talking to them at the gate for a long time; she
+seemed reluctant that they should go.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on
+the shore sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature,
+and even on the terrace under an awning the bricks were hot, and the
+air danced perpetually over the short dry grass. The red flowers in the
+stone basins were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which
+had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now dry, and
+their edges were curled and yellow. Only the stiff and hostile plants
+of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be grown upon spines, still
+remained standing upright and defied the sun to beat them down. It was
+too hot to talk, and it was not easy to find any book that would
+withstand the power of the sun. Many books had been tried and then let
+fall, and now Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the
+words of Milton had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary
+to understand what he was saying; one could merely listen to his words;
+one could almost handle them.
+
+There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,
+
+
+he read,
+
+That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.
+Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;
+Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,
+That had the sceptre from his father Brute.
+
+
+The words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be laden with
+meaning, and perhaps it was for this reason that it was painful to
+listen to them; they sounded strange; they meant different things from
+what they usually meant. Rachel at any rate could not keep her
+attention fixed upon them, but went off upon curious trains of thought
+suggested by words such as “curb” and “Locrine” and “Brute,” which
+brought unpleasant sights before her eyes, independently of their
+meaning. Owing to the heat and the dancing air the garden too looked
+strange—the trees were either too near or too far, and her head almost
+certainly ached. She was not quite certain, and therefore she did not
+know, whether to tell Terence now, or to let him go on reading. She
+decided that she would wait until he came to the end of a stanza, and
+if by that time she had turned her head this way and that, and it ached
+in every position undoubtedly, she would say very calmly that her head
+ached.
+
+Sabrina fair,
+    Listen where thou art sitting
+Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
+    In twisted braids of lilies knitting
+The loose train of thy amber dropping hair,
+Listen for dear honour’s sake,
+    Goddess of the silver lake,
+    Listen and save!
+
+
+But her head ached; it ached whichever way she turned it.
+
+She sat up and said as she had determined, “My head aches so that I
+shall go indoors.” He was half-way through the next verse, but he
+dropped the book instantly.
+
+“Your head aches?” he repeated.
+
+For a few moments they sat looking at one another in silence, holding
+each other’s hands. During this time his sense of dismay and
+catastrophe were almost physically painful; all round him he seemed to
+hear the shiver of broken glass which, as it fell to earth, left him
+sitting in the open air. But at the end of two minutes, noticing that
+she was not sharing his dismay, but was only rather more languid and
+heavy-eyed than usual, he recovered, fetched Helen, and asked her to
+tell him what they had better do, for Rachel had a headache.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose was not discomposed, but advised that she should go to
+bed, and added that she must expect her head to ache if she sat up to
+all hours and went out in the heat, but a few hours in bed would cure
+it completely. Terence was unreasonably reassured by her words, as he
+had been unreasonably depressed the moment before. Helen’s sense seemed
+to have much in common with the ruthless good sense of nature, which
+avenged rashness by a headache, and, like nature’s good sense, might be
+depended upon.
+
+Rachel went to bed; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her, for a very
+long time, but at length, waking from a transparent kind of sleep, she
+saw the windows white in front of her, and recollected that some time
+before she had gone to bed with a headache, and that Helen had said it
+would be gone when she woke. She supposed, therefore, that she was now
+quite well again. At the same time the wall of her room was painfully
+white, and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat. Turning
+her eyes to the window, she was not reassured by what she saw there.
+The movement of the blind as it filled with air and blew slowly out,
+drawing the cord with a little trailing sound along the floor, seemed
+to her terrifying, as if it were the movement of an animal in the room.
+She shut her eyes, and the pulse in her head beat so strongly that each
+thump seemed to tread upon a nerve, piercing her forehead with a little
+stab of pain. It might not be the same headache, but she certainly had
+a headache. She turned from side to side, in the hope that the coolness
+of the sheets would cure her, and that when she next opened her eyes to
+look the room would be as usual. After a considerable number of vain
+experiments, she resolved to put the matter beyond a doubt. She got out
+of bed and stood upright, holding on to the brass ball at the end of
+the bedstead. Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of
+her hand, and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of
+the floor proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and
+walk than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change
+was refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great as the
+discomfort of standing up. She accepted the idea that she would have to
+stay in bed all day long, and as she laid her head on the pillow,
+relinquished the happiness of the day.
+
+When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped her cheerful
+words, looked startled for a second and then unnaturally calm, the fact
+that she was ill was put beyond a doubt. It was confirmed when the
+whole household knew of it, when the song that some one was singing in
+the garden stopped suddenly, and when Maria, as she brought water,
+slipped past the bed with averted eyes. There was all the morning to
+get through, and then all the afternoon, and at intervals she made an
+effort to cross over into the ordinary world, but she found that her
+heat and discomfort had put a gulf between her world and the ordinary
+world which she could not bridge. At one point the door opened, and
+Helen came in with a little dark man who had—it was the chief thing she
+noticed about him—very hairy hands. She was drowsy and intolerably hot,
+and as he seemed shy and obsequious she scarcely troubled to answer
+him, although she understood that he was a doctor. At another point the
+door opened and Terence came in very gently, smiling too steadily, as
+she realised, for it to be natural. He sat down and talked to her,
+stroking her hands until it became irksome to her to lie any more in
+the same position and she turned round, and when she looked up again
+Helen was beside her and Terence had gone. It did not matter; she would
+see him to-morrow when things would be ordinary again. Her chief
+occupation during the day was to try to remember how the lines went:
+
+Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
+In twisted braids of lilies knitting
+The loose train of thy amber dropping hair;
+
+
+and the effort worried her because the adjectives persisted in getting
+into the wrong places.
+
+The second day did not differ very much from the first day, except that
+her bed had become very important, and the world outside, when she
+tried to think of it, appeared distinctly further off. The glassy,
+cool, translucent wave was almost visible before her, curling up at the
+end of the bed, and as it was refreshingly cool she tried to keep her
+mind fixed upon it. Helen was here, and Helen was there all day long;
+sometimes she said that it was lunchtime, and sometimes that it was
+teatime; but by the next day all landmarks were obliterated, and the
+outer world was so far away that the different sounds, such as the
+sounds of people moving overhead, could only be ascribed to their cause
+by a great effort of memory. The recollection of what she had felt, or
+of what she had been doing and thinking three days before, had faded
+entirely. On the other hand, every object in the room, and the bed
+itself, and her own body with its various limbs and their different
+sensations were more and more important each day. She was completely
+cut off, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated
+alone with her body.
+
+Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through
+the morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to
+the depths of the night. One evening when the room appeared very dim,
+either because it was evening or because the blinds were drawn, Helen
+said to her, “Some one is going to sit here to-night. You won’t mind?”
+
+Opening her eyes, Rachel saw not only Helen but a nurse in spectacles,
+whose face vaguely recalled something that she had once seen. She had
+seen her in the chapel. “Nurse McInnis,” said Helen, and the nurse
+smiled steadily as they all did, and said that she did not find many
+people who were frightened of her. After waiting for a moment they both
+disappeared, and having turned on her pillow Rachel woke to find
+herself in the midst of one of those interminable nights which do not
+end at twelve, but go on into the double figures—thirteen, fourteen,
+and so on until they reach the twenties, and then the thirties, and
+then the forties. She realised that there is nothing to prevent nights
+from doing this if they choose. At a great distance an elderly woman
+sat with her head bent down; Rachel raised herself slightly and saw
+with dismay that she was playing cards by the light of a candle which
+stood in the hollow of a newspaper. The sight had something
+inexplicably sinister about it, and she was terrified and cried out,
+upon which the woman laid down her cards and came across the room,
+shading the candle with her hands. Coming nearer and nearer across the
+great space of the room, she stood at last above Rachel’s head and
+said, “Not asleep? Let me make you comfortable.”
+
+She put down the candle and began to arrange the bedclothes. It struck
+Rachel that a woman who sat playing cards in a cavern all night long
+would have very cold hands, and she shrunk from the touch of them.
+
+“Why, there’s a toe all the way down there!” the woman said, proceeding
+to tuck in the bedclothes. Rachel did not realise that the toe was
+hers.
+
+“You must try and lie still,” she proceeded, “because if you lie still
+you will be less hot, and if you toss about you will make yourself more
+hot, and we don’t want you to be any hotter than you are.” She stood
+looking down upon Rachel for an enormous length of time.
+
+“And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well,” she repeated.
+
+Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling, and
+all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should
+move. But the shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed above
+her. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again several more hours
+had passed, but the night still lasted interminably. The woman was
+still playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel under a river, and
+the light stood in a little archway in the wall above her. She cried
+“Terence!” and the peaked shadow again moved across the ceiling, as the
+woman with an enormous slow movement rose, and they both stood still
+above her.
+
+“It’s just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep Mr.
+Forrest in bed,” the woman said, “and he was such a tall gentleman.”
+
+In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again shut
+her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames,
+where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing
+cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp,
+which collected into drops and slid down the wall. But the little old
+women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time, standing in the
+window together whispering, whispering incessantly.
+
+Meanwhile outside her room the sounds, the movements, and the lives of
+the other people in the house went on in the ordinary light of the sun,
+throughout the usual succession of hours. When, on the first day of her
+illness, it became clear that she would not be absolutely well, for her
+temperature was very high, until Friday, that day being Tuesday,
+Terence was filled with resentment, not against her, but against the
+force outside them which was separating them. He counted up the number
+of days that would almost certainly be spoilt for them. He realised,
+with an odd mixture of pleasure and annoyance, that, for the first time
+in his life, he was so dependent upon another person that his happiness
+was in her keeping. The days were completely wasted upon trifling,
+immaterial things, for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity
+all the usual occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point.
+The least intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel’s
+illness, and to discuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this
+subject was exhausted, to discuss illness of all kinds, and what caused
+them, and what cured them.
+
+Twice every day he went in to sit with Rachel, and twice every day the
+same thing happened. On going into her room, which was not very dark,
+where the music was lying about as usual, and her books and letters,
+his spirits rose instantly. When he saw her he felt completely
+reassured. She did not look very ill. Sitting by her side he would tell
+her what he had been doing, using his natural voice to speak to her,
+only a few tones lower down than usual; but by the time he had sat
+there for five minutes he was plunged into the deepest gloom. She was
+not the same; he could not bring them back to their old relationship;
+but although he knew that it was foolish he could not prevent himself
+from endeavouring to bring her back, to make her remember, and when
+this failed he was in despair. He always concluded as he left her room
+that it was worse to see her than not to see her, but by degrees, as
+the day wore on, the desire to see her returned and became almost too
+great to be borne.
+
+On Thursday morning when Terence went into her room he felt the usual
+increase of confidence. She turned round and made an effort to remember
+certain facts from the world that was so many millions of miles away.
+
+“You have come up from the hotel?” she asked.
+
+“No; I’m staying here for the present,” he said. “We’ve just had
+luncheon,” he continued, “and the mail has come in. There’s a bundle of
+letters for you—letters from England.”
+
+Instead of saying, as he meant her to say, that she wished to see them,
+she said nothing for some time.
+
+“You see, there they go, rolling off the edge of the hill,” she said
+suddenly.
+
+“Rolling, Rachel? What do you see rolling? There’s nothing rolling.”
+
+“The old woman with the knife,” she replied, not speaking to Terence in
+particular, and looking past him. As she appeared to be looking at a
+vase on the shelf opposite, he rose and took it down.
+
+“Now they can’t roll any more,” he said cheerfully. Nevertheless she
+lay gazing at the same spot, and paid him no further attention although
+he spoke to her. He became so profoundly wretched that he could not
+endure to sit with her, but wandered about until he found St. John, who
+was reading _The Times_ in the verandah. He laid it aside patiently,
+and heard all that Terence had to say about delirium. He was very
+patient with Terence. He treated him like a child.
+
+By Friday it could not be denied that the illness was no longer an
+attack that would pass off in a day or two; it was a real illness that
+required a good deal of organisation, and engrossed the attention of at
+least five people, but there was no reason to be anxious. Instead of
+lasting five days it was going to last ten days. Rodriguez was
+understood to say that there were well-known varieties of this illness.
+Rodriguez appeared to think that they were treating the illness with
+undue anxiety. His visits were always marked by the same show of
+confidence, and in his interviews with Terence he always waved aside
+his anxious and minute questions with a kind of flourish which seemed
+to indicate that they were all taking it much too seriously. He seemed
+curiously unwilling to sit down.
+
+“A high temperature,” he said, looking furtively about the room, and
+appearing to be more interested in the furniture and in Helen’s
+embroidery than in anything else. “In this climate you must expect a
+high temperature. You need not be alarmed by that. It is the pulse we
+go by” (he tapped his own hairy wrist), “and the pulse continues
+excellent.”
+
+Thereupon he bowed and slipped out. The interview was conducted
+laboriously upon both sides in French, and this, together with the fact
+that he was optimistic, and that Terence respected the medical
+profession from hearsay, made him less critical than he would have been
+had he encountered the doctor in any other capacity. Unconsciously he
+took Rodriguez’ side against Helen, who seemed to have taken an
+unreasonable prejudice against him.
+
+When Saturday came it was evident that the hours of the day must be
+more strictly organised than they had been. St. John offered his
+services; he said that he had nothing to do, and that he might as well
+spend the day at the villa if he could be of use. As if they were
+starting on a difficult expedition together, they parcelled out their
+duties between them, writing out an elaborate scheme of hours upon a
+large sheet of paper which was pinned to the drawing-room door. Their
+distance from the town, and the difficulty of procuring rare things
+with unknown names from the most unexpected places, made it necessary
+to think very carefully, and they found it unexpectedly difficult to do
+the simple but practical things that were required of them, as if they,
+being very tall, were asked to stoop down and arrange minute grains of
+sand in a pattern on the ground.
+
+It was St. John’s duty to fetch what was needed from the town, so that
+Terence would sit all through the long hot hours alone in the
+drawing-room, near the open door, listening for any movement upstairs,
+or call from Helen. He always forgot to pull down the blinds, so that
+he sat in bright sunshine, which worried him without his knowing what
+was the cause of it. The room was terribly stiff and uncomfortable.
+There were hats in the chairs, and medicine bottles among the books. He
+tried to read, but good books were too good, and bad books were too
+bad, and the only thing he could tolerate was the newspaper, which with
+its news of London, and the movements of real people who were giving
+dinner-parties and making speeches, seemed to give a little background
+of reality to what was otherwise mere nightmare. Then, just as his
+attention was fixed on the print, a soft call would come from Helen, or
+Mrs. Chailey would bring in something which was wanted upstairs, and he
+would run up very quietly in his socks, and put the jug on the little
+table which stood crowded with jugs and cups outside the bedroom door;
+or if he could catch Helen for a moment he would ask, “How is she?”
+
+“Rather restless. . . . On the whole, quieter, I think.”
+
+The answer would be one or the other.
+
+As usual she seemed to reserve something which she did not say, and
+Terence was conscious that they disagreed, and, without saying it
+aloud, were arguing against each other. But she was too hurried and
+pre-occupied to talk.
+
+The strain of listening and the effort of making practical arrangements
+and seeing that things worked smoothly, absorbed all Terence’s power.
+Involved in this long dreary nightmare, he did not attempt to think
+what it amounted to. Rachel was ill; that was all; he must see that
+there was medicine and milk, and that things were ready when they were
+wanted. Thought had ceased; life itself had come to a standstill.
+Sunday was rather worse than Saturday had been, simply because the
+strain was a little greater every day, although nothing else had
+changed. The separate feelings of pleasure, interest, and pain, which
+combine to make up the ordinary day, were merged in one long-drawn
+sensation of sordid misery and profound boredom. He had never been so
+bored since he was shut up in the nursery alone as a child. The vision
+of Rachel as she was now, confused and heedless, had almost obliterated
+the vision of her as she had been once long ago; he could hardly
+believe that they had ever been happy, or engaged to be married, for
+what were feelings, what was there to be felt? Confusion covered every
+sight and person, and he seemed to see St. John, Ridley, and the stray
+people who came up now and then from the hotel to enquire, through a
+mist; the only people who were not hidden in this mist were Helen and
+Rodriguez, because they could tell him something definite about Rachel.
+
+Nevertheless the day followed the usual forms. At certain hours they
+went into the dining-room, and when they sat round the table they
+talked about indifferent things. St. John usually made it his business
+to start the talk and to keep it from dying out.
+
+“I’ve discovered the way to get Sancho past the white house,” said St.
+John on Sunday at luncheon. “You crackle a piece of paper in his ear,
+then he bolts for about a hundred yards, but he goes on quite well
+after that.”
+
+“Yes, but he wants corn. You should see that he has corn.”
+
+“I don’t think much of the stuff they give him; and Angelo seems a
+dirty little rascal.”
+
+There was then a long silence. Ridley murmured a few lines of poetry
+under his breath, and remarked, as if to conceal the fact that he had
+done so, “Very hot to-day.”
+
+“Two degrees higher than it was yesterday,” said St. John. “I wonder
+where these nuts come from,” he observed, taking a nut out of the
+plate, turning it over in his fingers, and looking at it curiously.
+
+“London, I should think,” said Terence, looking at the nut too.
+
+“A competent man of business could make a fortune here in no time,” St.
+John continued. “I suppose the heat does something funny to people’s
+brains. Even the English go a little queer. Anyhow they’re hopeless
+people to deal with. They kept me three-quarters of an hour waiting at
+the chemist’s this morning, for no reason whatever.”
+
+There was another long pause. Then Ridley enquired, “Rodriguez seems
+satisfied?”
+
+“Quite,” said Terence with decision. “It’s just got to run its course.”
+Whereupon Ridley heaved a deep sigh. He was genuinely sorry for every
+one, but at the same time he missed Helen considerably, and was a
+little aggrieved by the constant presence of the two young men.
+
+They moved back into the drawing-room.
+
+“Look here, Hirst,” said Terence, “there’s nothing to be done for two
+hours.” He consulted the sheet pinned to the door. “You go and lie
+down. I’ll wait here. Chailey sits with Rachel while Helen has her
+luncheon.”
+
+It was asking a good deal of Hirst to tell him to go without waiting
+for a sight of Helen. These little glimpses of Helen were the only
+respites from strain and boredom, and very often they seemed to make up
+for the discomfort of the day, although she might not have anything to
+tell them. However, as they were on an expedition together, he had made
+up his mind to obey.
+
+Helen was very late in coming down. She looked like a person who has
+been sitting for a long time in the dark. She was pale and thinner, and
+the expression of her eyes was harassed but determined. She ate her
+luncheon quickly, and seemed indifferent to what she was doing. She
+brushed aside Terence’s enquiries, and at last, as if he had not
+spoken, she looked at him with a slight frown and said:
+
+“We can’t go on like this, Terence. Either you’ve got to find another
+doctor, or you must tell Rodriguez to stop coming, and I’ll manage for
+myself. It’s no use for him to say that Rachel’s better; she’s not
+better; she’s worse.”
+
+Terence suffered a terrific shock, like that which he had suffered when
+Rachel said, “My head aches.” He stilled it by reflecting that Helen
+was overwrought, and he was upheld in this opinion by his obstinate
+sense that she was opposed to him in the argument.
+
+“Do you think she’s in danger?” he asked.
+
+“No one can go on being as ill as that day after day—” Helen replied.
+She looked at him, and spoke as if she felt some indignation with
+somebody.
+
+“Very well, I’ll talk to Rodriguez this afternoon,” he replied.
+
+Helen went upstairs at once.
+
+Nothing now could assuage Terence’s anxiety. He could not read, nor
+could he sit still, and his sense of security was shaken, in spite of
+the fact that he was determined that Helen was exaggerating, and that
+Rachel was not very ill. But he wanted a third person to confirm him in
+his belief.
+
+Directly Rodriguez came down he demanded, “Well, how is she? Do you
+think her worse?”
+
+“There is no reason for anxiety, I tell you—none,” Rodriguez replied in
+his execrable French, smiling uneasily, and making little movements all
+the time as if to get away.
+
+Hewet stood firmly between him and the door. He was determined to see
+for himself what kind of man he was. His confidence in the man vanished
+as he looked at him and saw his insignificance, his dirty appearance,
+his shiftiness, and his unintelligent, hairy face. It was strange that
+he had never seen this before.
+
+“You won’t object, of course, if we ask you to consult another doctor?”
+he continued.
+
+At this the little man became openly incensed.
+
+“Ah!” he cried. “You have not confidence in me? You object to my
+treatment? You wish me to give up the case?”
+
+“Not at all,” Terence replied, “but in serious illness of this kind—”
+
+Rodriguez shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“It is not serious, I assure you. You are overanxious. The young lady
+is not seriously ill, and I am a doctor. The lady of course is
+frightened,” he sneered. “I understand that perfectly.”
+
+“The name and address of the doctor is—?” Terence continued.
+
+“There is no other doctor,” Rodriguez replied sullenly. “Every one has
+confidence in me. Look! I will show you.”
+
+He took out a packet of old letters and began turning them over as if
+in search of one that would confute Terence’s suspicions. As he
+searched, he began to tell a story about an English lord who had
+trusted him—a great English lord, whose name he had, unfortunately,
+forgotten.
+
+“There is no other doctor in the place,” he concluded, still turning
+over the letters.
+
+“Never mind,” said Terence shortly. “I will make enquiries for myself.”
+Rodriguez put the letters back in his pocket.
+
+“Very well,” he remarked. “I have no objection.”
+
+He lifted his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, as if to repeat that
+they took the illness much too seriously and that there was no other
+doctor, and slipped out, leaving behind him an impression that he was
+conscious that he was distrusted, and that his malice was aroused.
+
+After this Terence could no longer stay downstairs. He went up, knocked
+at Rachel’s door, and asked Helen whether he might see her for a few
+minutes. He had not seen her yesterday. She made no objection, and went
+and sat at a table in the window.
+
+Terence sat down by the bedside. Rachel’s face was changed. She looked
+as though she were entirely concentrated upon the effort of keeping
+alive. Her lips were drawn, and her cheeks were sunken and flushed,
+though without colour. Her eyes were not entirely shut, the lower half
+of the white part showing, not as if she saw, but as if they remained
+open because she was too much exhausted to close them. She opened them
+completely when he kissed her. But she only saw an old woman slicing a
+man’s head off with a knife.
+
+“There it falls!” she murmured. She then turned to Terence and asked
+him anxiously some question about a man with mules, which he could not
+understand. “Why doesn’t he come? Why doesn’t he come?” she repeated.
+He was appalled to think of the dirty little man downstairs in
+connection with illness like this, and turned instinctively to Helen,
+but she was doing something at a table in the window, and did not seem
+to realise how great the shock to him must be. He rose to go, for he
+could not endure to listen any longer; his heart beat quickly and
+painfully with anger and misery. As he passed Helen she asked him in
+the same weary, unnatural, but determined voice to fetch her more ice,
+and to have the jug outside filled with fresh milk.
+
+When he had done these errands he went to find Hirst. Exhausted and
+very hot, St. John had fallen asleep on a bed, but Terence woke him
+without scruple.
+
+“Helen thinks she’s worse,” he said. “There’s no doubt she’s
+frightfully ill. Rodriguez is useless. We must get another doctor.”
+
+“But there is no other doctor,” said Hirst drowsily, sitting up and
+rubbing his eyes.
+
+“Don’t be a damned fool!” Terence exclaimed. “Of course there’s another
+doctor, and, if there isn’t, you’ve got to find one. It ought to have
+been done days ago. I’m going down to saddle the horse.” He could not
+stay still in one place.
+
+In less than ten minutes St. John was riding to the town in the
+scorching heat in search of a doctor, his orders being to find one and
+bring him back if he had to be fetched in a special train.
+
+“We ought to have done it days ago,” Hewet repeated angrily.
+
+When he went back into the drawing-room he found that Mrs. Flushing was
+there, standing very erect in the middle of the room, having arrived,
+as people did in these days, by the kitchen or through the garden
+unannounced.
+
+“She’s better?” Mrs. Flushing enquired abruptly; they did not attempt
+to shake hands.
+
+“No,” said Terence. “If anything, they think she’s worse.”
+
+Mrs. Flushing seemed to consider for a moment or two, looking straight
+at Terence all the time.
+
+“Let me tell you,” she said, speaking in nervous jerks, “it’s always
+about the seventh day one begins to get anxious. I daresay you’ve been
+sittin’ here worryin’ by yourself. You think she’s bad, but any one
+comin’ with a fresh eye would see she was better. Mr. Elliot’s had
+fever; he’s all right now,” she threw out. “It wasn’t anythin’ she
+caught on the expedition. What’s it matter—a few days’ fever? My
+brother had fever for twenty-six days once. And in a week or two he was
+up and about. We gave him nothin’ but milk and arrowroot—”
+
+Here Mrs. Chailey came in with a message.
+
+“I’m wanted upstairs,” said Terence.
+
+“You see—she’ll be better,” Mrs. Flushing jerked out as he left the
+room. Her anxiety to persuade Terence was very great, and when he left
+her without saying anything she felt dissatisfied and restless; she did
+not like to stay, but she could not bear to go. She wandered from room
+to room looking for some one to talk to, but all the rooms were empty.
+
+Terence went upstairs, stood inside the door to take Helen’s
+directions, looked over at Rachel, but did not attempt to speak to her.
+She appeared vaguely conscious of his presence, but it seemed to
+disturb her, and she turned, so that she lay with her back to him.
+
+For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside,
+because it needed all her attention to follow the hot, red, quick
+sights which passed incessantly before her eyes. She knew that it was
+of enormous importance that she should attend to these sights and grasp
+their meaning, but she was always being just too late to hear or see
+something which would explain it all. For this reason, the
+faces,—Helen’s face, the nurse’s, Terence’s, the doctor’s,—which
+occasionally forced themselves very close to her, were worrying because
+they distracted her attention and she might miss the clue. However, on
+the fourth afternoon she was suddenly unable to keep Helen’s face
+distinct from the sights themselves; her lips widened as she bent down
+over the bed, and she began to gabble unintelligibly like the rest. The
+sights were all concerned in some plot, some adventure, some escape.
+The nature of what they were doing changed incessantly, although there
+was always a reason behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp. Now
+they were among trees and savages, now they were on the sea, now they
+were on the tops of high towers; now they jumped; now they flew. But
+just as the crisis was about to happen, something invariably slipped in
+her brain, so that the whole effort had to begin over again. The heat
+was suffocating. At last the faces went further away; she fell into a
+deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She
+saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the
+sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors
+thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the
+bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes
+light, while every now and then some one turned her over at the bottom
+of the sea.
+
+After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun wrangling
+with evasive and very garrulous natives, he extracted the information
+that there was a doctor, a French doctor, who was at present away on a
+holiday in the hills. It was quite impossible, so they said, to find
+him. With his experience of the country, St. John thought it unlikely
+that a telegram would either be sent or received; but having reduced
+the distance of the hill town, in which he was staying, from a hundred
+miles to thirty miles, and having hired a carriage and horses, he
+started at once to fetch the doctor himself. He succeeded in finding
+him, and eventually forced the unwilling man to leave his young wife
+and return forthwith. They reached the villa at midday on Tuesday.
+
+Terence came out to receive them, and St. John was struck by the fact
+that he had grown perceptibly thinner in the interval; he was white
+too; his eyes looked strange. But the curt speech and the sulky
+masterful manner of Dr. Lesage impressed them both favourably, although
+at the same time it was obvious that he was very much annoyed at the
+whole affair. Coming downstairs he gave his directions emphatically,
+but it never occurred to him to give an opinion either because of the
+presence of Rodriguez who was now obsequious as well as malicious, or
+because he took it for granted that they knew already what was to be
+known.
+
+“Of course,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, when Terence asked
+him, “Is she very ill?”
+
+They were both conscious of a certain sense of relief when Dr. Lesage
+was gone, leaving explicit directions, and promising another visit in a
+few hours’ time; but, unfortunately, the rise of their spirits led them
+to talk more than usual, and in talking they quarrelled. They
+quarrelled about a road, the Portsmouth Road. St. John said that it is
+macadamised where it passes Hindhead, and Terence knew as well as he
+knew his own name that it is not macadamised at that point. In the
+course of the argument they said some very sharp things to each other,
+and the rest of the dinner was eaten in silence, save for an occasional
+half-stifled reflection from Ridley.
+
+When it grew dark and the lamps were brought in, Terence felt unable to
+control his irritation any longer. St. John went to bed in a state of
+complete exhaustion, bidding Terence good-night with rather more
+affection than usual because of their quarrel, and Ridley retired to
+his books. Left alone, Terence walked up and down the room; he stood at
+the open window.
+
+The lights were coming out one after another in the town beneath, and
+it was very peaceful and cool in the garden, so that he stepped out on
+to the terrace. As he stood there in the darkness, able only to see the
+shapes of trees through the fine grey light, he was overcome by a
+desire to escape, to have done with this suffering, to forget that
+Rachel was ill. He allowed himself to lapse into forgetfulness of
+everything. As if a wind that had been raging incessantly suddenly fell
+asleep, the fret and strain and anxiety which had been pressing on him
+passed away. He seemed to stand in an unvexed space of air, on a little
+island by himself; he was free and immune from pain. It did not matter
+whether Rachel was well or ill; it did not matter whether they were
+apart or together; nothing mattered—nothing mattered. The waves beat on
+the shore far away, and the soft wind passed through the branches of
+the trees, seeming to encircle him with peace and security, with dark
+and nothingness. Surely the world of strife and fret and anxiety was
+not the real world, but this was the real world, the world that lay
+beneath the superficial world, so that, whatever happened, one was
+secure. The quiet and peace seemed to lap his body in a fine cool
+sheet, soothing every nerve; his mind seemed once more to expand, and
+become natural.
+
+But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house roused him;
+he turned instinctively and went into the drawing-room. The sight of
+the lamp-lit room brought back so abruptly all that he had forgotten
+that he stood for a moment unable to move. He remembered everything,
+the hour, the minute even, what point they had reached, and what was to
+come. He cursed himself for making believe for a minute that things
+were different from what they are. The night was now harder to face
+than ever.
+
+Unable to stay in the empty drawing-room, he wandered out and sat on
+the stairs half-way up to Rachel’s room. He longed for some one to talk
+to, but Hirst was asleep, and Ridley was asleep; there was no sound in
+Rachel’s room. The only sound in the house was the sound of Chailey
+moving in the kitchen. At last there was a rustling on the stairs
+overhead, and Nurse McInnis came down fastening the links in her cuffs,
+in preparation for the night’s watch. Terence rose and stopped her. He
+had scarcely spoken to her, but it was possible that she might confirm
+him in the belief which still persisted in his own mind that Rachel was
+not seriously ill. He told her in a whisper that Dr. Lesage had been
+and what he had said.
+
+“Now, Nurse,” he whispered, “please tell me your opinion. Do you
+consider that she is very seriously ill? Is she in any danger?”
+
+“The doctor has said—” she began.
+
+“Yes, but I want your opinion. You have had experience of many cases
+like this?”
+
+“I could not tell you more than Dr. Lesage, Mr. Hewet,” she replied
+cautiously, as though her words might be used against her. “The case is
+serious, but you may feel quite certain that we are doing all we can
+for Miss Vinrace.” She spoke with some professional self-approbation.
+But she realised perhaps that she did not satisfy the young man, who
+still blocked her way, for she shifted her feet slightly upon the stair
+and looked out of the window where they could see the moon over the
+sea.
+
+“If you ask me,” she began in a curiously stealthy tone, “I never like
+May for my patients.”
+
+“May?” Terence repeated.
+
+“It may be a fancy, but I don’t like to see anybody fall ill in May,”
+she continued. “Things seem to go wrong in May. Perhaps it’s the moon.
+They say the moon affects the brain, don’t they, Sir?”
+
+He looked at her but he could not answer her; like all the others, when
+one looked at her she seemed to shrivel beneath one’s eyes and become
+worthless, malicious, and untrustworthy.
+
+She slipped past him and disappeared.
+
+Though he went to his room he was unable even to take his clothes off.
+For a long time he paced up and down, and then leaning out of the
+window gazed at the earth which lay so dark against the paler blue of
+the sky. With a mixture of fear and loathing he looked at the slim
+black cypress trees which were still visible in the garden, and heard
+the unfamiliar creaking and grating sounds which show that the earth is
+still hot. All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and full of
+hostility and foreboding; together with the natives and the nurse and
+the doctor and the terrible force of the illness itself they seemed to
+be in conspiracy against him. They seemed to join together in their
+effort to extract the greatest possible amount of suffering from him.
+He could not get used to his pain, it was a revelation to him. He had
+never realised before that underneath every action, underneath the life
+of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to
+be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the
+edges of all action, eating away the lives of men and women. He thought
+for the first time with understanding of words which had before seemed
+to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness of life. Now he knew
+for himself that life is hard and full of suffering. He looked at the
+scattered lights in the town beneath, and thought of Arthur and Susan,
+or Evelyn and Perrott venturing out unwittingly, and by their happiness
+laying themselves open to suffering such as this. How did they dare to
+love each other, he wondered; how had he himself dared to live as he
+had lived, rapidly and carelessly, passing from one thing to another,
+loving Rachel as he had loved her? Never again would he feel secure; he
+would never believe in the stability of life, or forget what depths of
+pain lie beneath small happiness and feelings of content and safety. It
+seemed to him as he looked back that their happiness had never been so
+great as his pain was now. There had always been something imperfect in
+their happiness, something they had wanted and had not been able to
+get. It had been fragmentary and incomplete, because they were so young
+and had not known what they were doing.
+
+The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree outside the
+window, and as the branch swayed in the darkness there came before his
+mind a picture of all the world that lay outside his window; he thought
+of the immense river and the immense forest, the vast stretches of dry
+earth and the plains of the sea that encircled the earth; from the sea
+the sky rose steep and enormous, and the air washed profoundly between
+the sky and the sea. How vast and dark it must be tonight, lying
+exposed to the wind; and in all this great space it was curious to
+think how few the towns were, and how small little rings of light, or
+single glow-worms he figured them, scattered here and there, among the
+swelling uncultivated folds of the world. And in those towns were
+little men and women, tiny men and women. Oh, it was absurd, when one
+thought of it, to sit here in a little room suffering and caring. What
+did anything matter? Rachel, a tiny creature, lay ill beneath him, and
+here in his little room he suffered on her account. The nearness of
+their bodies in this vast universe, and the minuteness of their bodies,
+seemed to him absurd and laughable. Nothing mattered, he repeated; they
+had no power, no hope. He leant on the window-sill, thinking, until he
+almost forgot the time and the place. Nevertheless, although he was
+convinced that it was absurd and laughable, and that they were small
+and hopeless, he never lost the sense that these thoughts somehow
+formed part of a life which he and Rachel would live together.
+
+Owing perhaps to the change of doctor, Rachel appeared to be rather
+better next day. Terribly pale and worn though Helen looked, there was
+a slight lifting of the cloud which had hung all these days in her
+eyes.
+
+“She talked to me,” she said voluntarily. “She asked me what day of the
+week it was, like herself.”
+
+Then suddenly, without any warning or any apparent reason, the tears
+formed in her eyes and rolled steadily down her cheeks. She cried with
+scarcely any attempt at movement of her features, and without any
+attempt to stop herself, as if she did not know that she was crying. In
+spite of the relief which her words gave him, Terence was dismayed by
+the sight; had everything given way? Were there no limits to the power
+of this illness? Would everything go down before it? Helen had always
+seemed to him strong and determined, and now she was like a child. He
+took her in his arms, and she clung to him like a child, crying softly
+and quietly upon his shoulder. Then she roused herself and wiped her
+tears away; it was silly to behave like that, she said; very silly, she
+repeated, when there could be no doubt that Rachel was better. She
+asked Terence to forgive her for her folly. She stopped at the door and
+came back and kissed him without saying anything.
+
+On this day indeed Rachel was conscious of what went on round her. She
+had come to the surface of the dark, sticky pool, and a wave seemed to
+bear her up and down with it; she had ceased to have any will of her
+own; she lay on the top of the wave conscious of some pain, but chiefly
+of weakness. The wave was replaced by the side of a mountain. Her body
+became a drift of melting snow, above which her knees rose in huge
+peaked mountains of bare bone. It was true that she saw Helen and saw
+her room, but everything had become very pale and semi-transparent.
+Sometimes she could see through the wall in front of her. Sometimes
+when Helen went away she seemed to go so far that Rachel’s eyes could
+hardly follow her. The room also had an odd power of expanding, and
+though she pushed her voice out as far as possible until sometimes it
+became a bird and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever
+reached the person she was talking to. There were immense intervals or
+chasms, for things still had the power to appear visibly before her,
+between one moment and the next; it sometimes took an hour for Helen to
+raise her arm, pausing long between each jerky movement, and pour out
+medicine. Helen’s form stooping to raise her in bed appeared of
+gigantic size, and came down upon her like the ceiling falling. But for
+long spaces of time she would merely lie conscious of her body floating
+on the top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote corner of her
+body, or escaped and gone flitting round the room. All sights were
+something of an effort, but the sight of Terence was the greatest
+effort, because he forced her to join mind to body in the desire to
+remember something. She did not wish to remember; it troubled her when
+people tried to disturb her loneliness; she wished to be alone. She
+wished for nothing else in the world.
+
+Although she had cried, Terence observed Helen’s greater hopefulness
+with something like triumph; in the argument between them she had made
+the first sign of admitting herself in the wrong. He waited for Dr.
+Lesage to come down that afternoon with considerable anxiety, but with
+the same certainty at the back of his mind that he would in time force
+them all to admit that they were in the wrong.
+
+As usual, Dr. Lesage was sulky in his manner and very short in his
+answers. To Terence’s demand, “She seems to be better?” he replied,
+looking at him in an odd way, “She has a chance of life.”
+
+The door shut and Terence walked across to the window. He leant his
+forehead against the pane.
+
+“Rachel,” he repeated to himself. “She has a chance of life. Rachel.”
+
+How could they say these things of Rachel? Had any one yesterday
+seriously believed that Rachel was dying? They had been engaged for
+four weeks. A fortnight ago she had been perfectly well. What could
+fourteen days have done to bring her from that state to this? To
+realise what they meant by saying that she had a chance of life was
+beyond him, knowing as he did that they were engaged. He turned, still
+enveloped in the same dreary mist, and walked towards the door.
+Suddenly he saw it all. He saw the room and the garden, and the trees
+moving in the air, they could go on without her; she could die. For the
+first time since she fell ill he remembered exactly what she looked
+like and the way in which they cared for each other. The immense
+happiness of feeling her close to him mingled with a more intense
+anxiety than he had felt yet. He could not let her die; he could not
+live without her. But after a momentary struggle, the curtain fell
+again, and he saw nothing and felt nothing clearly. It was all going
+on—going on still, in the same way as before. Save for a physical pain
+when his heart beat, and the fact that his fingers were icy cold, he
+did not realise that he was anxious about anything. Within his mind he
+seemed to feel nothing about Rachel or about any one or anything in the
+world. He went on giving orders, arranging with Mrs. Chailey, writing
+out lists, and every now and then he went upstairs and put something
+quietly on the table outside Rachel’s door. That night Dr. Lesage
+seemed to be less sulky than usual. He stayed voluntarily for a few
+moments, and, addressing St. John and Terence equally, as if he did not
+remember which of them was engaged to the young lady, said, “I consider
+that her condition to-night is very grave.”
+
+Neither of them went to bed or suggested that the other should go to
+bed. They sat in the drawing-room playing picquet with the door open.
+St. John made up a bed upon the sofa, and when it was ready insisted
+that Terence should lie upon it. They began to quarrel as to who should
+lie on the sofa and who should lie upon a couple of chairs covered with
+rugs. St. John forced Terence at last to lie down upon the sofa.
+
+“Don’t be a fool, Terence,” he said. “You’ll only get ill if you don’t
+sleep.”
+
+“Old fellow,” he began, as Terence still refused, and stopped abruptly,
+fearing sentimentality; he found that he was on the verge of tears.
+
+He began to say what he had long been wanting to say, that he was sorry
+for Terence, that he cared for him, that he cared for Rachel. Did she
+know how much he cared for her—had she said anything, asked perhaps? He
+was very anxious to say this, but he refrained, thinking that it was a
+selfish question after all, and what was the use of bothering Terence
+to talk about such things? He was already half asleep. But St. John
+could not sleep at once. If only, he thought to himself, as he lay in
+the darkness, something would happen—if only this strain would come to
+an end. He did not mind what happened, so long as the succession of
+these hard and dreary days was broken; he did not mind if she died. He
+felt himself disloyal in not minding it, but it seemed to him that he
+had no feelings left.
+
+All night long there was no call or movement, except the opening and
+shutting of the bedroom door once. By degrees the light returned into
+the untidy room. At six the servants began to move; at seven they crept
+downstairs into the kitchen; and half an hour later the day began
+again.
+
+Nevertheless it was not the same as the days that had gone before,
+although it would have been hard to say in what the difference
+consisted. Perhaps it was that they seemed to be waiting for something.
+There were certainly fewer things to be done than usual. People drifted
+through the drawing-room—Mr. Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury. They
+spoke very apologetically in low tones, refusing to sit down, but
+remaining for a considerable time standing up, although the only thing
+they had to say was, “Is there anything we can do?” and there was
+nothing they could do.
+
+Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how Helen had
+said that whenever anything happened to you this was how people
+behaved. Was she right, or was she wrong? He was too little interested
+to frame an opinion of his own. He put things away in his mind, as if
+one of these days he would think about them, but not now. The mist of
+unreality had deepened and deepened until it had produced a feeling of
+numbness all over his body. Was it his body? Were those really his own
+hands?
+
+This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossible to sit
+alone in his room. He was very uncomfortable downstairs, and, as he did
+not know what was going on, constantly in the way; but he would not
+leave the drawing-room. Too restless to read, and having nothing to do,
+he began to pace up and down reciting poetry in an undertone. Occupied
+in various ways—now in undoing parcels, now in uncorking bottles, now
+in writing directions, the sound of Ridley’s song and the beat of his
+pacing worked into the minds of Terence and St. John all the morning as
+a half comprehended refrain.
+
+They wrestled up, they wrestled down,
+    They wrestled sore and still:
+The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,
+    That night he had his will.
+
+Like stags full spent, among the bent
+    They dropped awhile to rest—
+
+
+“Oh, it’s intolerable!” Hirst exclaimed, and then checked himself, as
+if it were a breach of their agreement. Again and again Terence would
+creep half-way up the stairs in case he might be able to glean news of
+Rachel. But the only news now was of a very fragmentary kind; she had
+drunk something; she had slept a little; she seemed quieter. In the
+same way, Dr. Lesage confined himself to talking about details, save
+once when he volunteered the information that he had just been called
+in to ascertain, by severing a vein in the wrist, that an old lady of
+eighty-five was really dead. She had a horror of being buried alive.
+
+“It is a horror,” he remarked, “that we generally find in the very old,
+and seldom in the young.” They both expressed their interest in what he
+told them; it seemed to them very strange. Another strange thing about
+the day was that the luncheon was forgotten by all of them until it was
+late in the afternoon, and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them, and looked
+strange too, because she wore a stiff print dress, and her sleeves were
+rolled up above her elbows. She seemed as oblivious of her appearance,
+however, as if she had been called out of her bed by a midnight alarm
+of fire, and she had forgotten, too, her reserve and her composure; she
+talked to them quite familiarly as if she had nursed them and held them
+naked on her knee. She assured them over and over again that it was
+their duty to eat.
+
+The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly than they
+expected. Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but on seeing them shut
+it again quickly; once Helen came down to fetch something, but she
+stopped as she left the room to look at a letter addressed to her. She
+stood for a moment turning it over, and the extraordinary and mournful
+beauty of her attitude struck Terence in the way things struck him
+now—as something to be put away in his mind and to be thought about
+afterwards. They scarcely spoke, the argument between them seeming to
+be suspended or forgotten.
+
+Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house, Ridley
+paced up and down the terrace repeating stanzas of a long poem, in a
+subdued but suddenly sonorous voice. Fragments of the poem were wafted
+in at the open window as he passed and repassed.
+
+Peor and Baalim
+Forsake their Temples dim,
+    With that twice batter’d God of Palestine
+And mooned Astaroth—
+
+
+The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to both the young
+men, but they had to be borne. As the evening drew on and the red light
+of the sunset glittered far away on the sea, the same sense of
+desperation attacked both Terence and St. John at the thought that the
+day was nearly over, and that another night was at hand. The appearance
+of one light after another in the town beneath them produced in Hirst a
+repetition of his terrible and disgusting desire to break down and sob.
+Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey. She explained that Maria, in
+opening a bottle, had been so foolish as to cut her arm badly, but she
+had bound it up; it was unfortunate when there was so much work to be
+done. Chailey herself limped because of the rheumatism in her feet, but
+it appeared to her mere waste of time to take any notice of the unruly
+flesh of servants. The evening went on. Dr. Lesage arrived
+unexpectedly, and stayed upstairs a very long time. He came down once
+and drank a cup of coffee.
+
+“She is very ill,” he said in answer to Ridley’s question. All the
+annoyance had by this time left his manner, he was grave and formal,
+but at the same time it was full of consideration, which had not marked
+it before. He went upstairs again. The three men sat together in the
+drawing-room. Ridley was quite quiet now, and his attention seemed to
+be thoroughly awakened. Save for little half-voluntary movements and
+exclamations that were stifled at once, they waited in complete
+silence. It seemed as if they were at last brought together face to
+face with something definite.
+
+It was nearly eleven o’clock when Dr. Lesage again appeared in the
+room. He approached them very slowly, and did not speak at once. He
+looked first at St. John and then at Terence, and said to Terence, “Mr.
+Hewet, I think you should go upstairs now.”
+
+Terence rose immediately, leaving the others seated with Dr. Lesage
+standing motionless between them.
+
+Chailey was in the passage outside, repeating over and over again,
+“It’s wicked—it’s wicked.”
+
+Terence paid her no attention; he heard what she was saying, but it
+conveyed no meaning to his mind. All the way upstairs he kept saying to
+himself, “This has not happened to me. It is not possible that this has
+happened to me.”
+
+He looked curiously at his own hand on the banisters. The stairs were
+very steep, and it seemed to take him a long time to surmount them.
+Instead of feeling keenly, as he knew that he ought to feel, he felt
+nothing at all. When he opened the door he saw Helen sitting by the
+bedside. There were shaded lights on the table, and the room, though it
+seemed to be full of a great many things, was very tidy. There was a
+faint and not unpleasant smell of disinfectants. Helen rose and gave up
+her chair to him in silence. As they passed each other their eyes met
+in a peculiar level glance, he wondered at the extraordinary clearness
+of his eyes, and at the deep calm and sadness that dwelt in them. He
+sat down by the bedside, and a moment afterwards heard the door shut
+gently behind her. He was alone with Rachel, and a faint reflection of
+the sense of relief that they used to feel when they were left alone
+possessed him. He looked at her. He expected to find some terrible
+change in her, but there was none. She looked indeed very thin, and, as
+far as he could see, very tired, but she was the same as she had always
+been. Moreover, she saw him and knew him. She smiled at him and said,
+“Hullo, Terence.”
+
+The curtain which had been drawn between them for so long vanished
+immediately.
+
+“Well, Rachel,” he replied in his usual voice, upon which she opened
+her eyes quite widely and smiled with her familiar smile. He kissed her
+and took her hand.
+
+“It’s been wretched without you,” he said.
+
+She still looked at him and smiled, but soon a slight look of fatigue
+or perplexity came into her eyes and she shut them again.
+
+“But when we’re together we’re perfectly happy,” he said. He continued
+to hold her hand.
+
+The light being dim, it was impossible to see any change in her face.
+An immense feeling of peace came over Terence, so that he had no wish
+to move or to speak. The terrible torture and unreality of the last
+days were over, and he had come out now into perfect certainty and
+peace. His mind began to work naturally again and with great ease. The
+longer he sat there the more profoundly was he conscious of the peace
+invading every corner of his soul. Once he held his breath and listened
+acutely; she was still breathing; he went on thinking for some time;
+they seemed to be thinking together; he seemed to be Rachel as well as
+himself; and then he listened again; no, she had ceased to breathe. So
+much the better—this was death. It was nothing; it was to cease to
+breathe. It was happiness, it was perfect happiness. They had now what
+they had always wanted to have, the union which had been impossible
+while they lived. Unconscious whether he thought the words or spoke
+them aloud, he said, “No two people have ever been so happy as we have
+been. No one has ever loved as we have loved.”
+
+It seemed to him that their complete union and happiness filled the
+room with rings eddying more and more widely. He had no wish in the
+world left unfulfilled. They possessed what could never be taken from
+them.
+
+He was not conscious that any one had come into the room, but later,
+moments later, or hours later perhaps, he felt an arm behind him. The
+arms were round him. He did not want to have arms round him, and the
+mysterious whispering voices annoyed him. He laid Rachel’s hand, which
+was now cold, upon the counterpane, and rose from his chair, and walked
+across to the window. The windows were uncurtained, and showed the
+moon, and a long silver pathway upon the surface of the waves.
+
+“Why,” he said, in his ordinary tone of voice, “look at the moon.
+There’s a halo round the moon. We shall have rain to-morrow.”
+
+The arms, whether they were the arms of man or of woman, were round him
+again; they were pushing him gently towards the door. He turned of his
+own accord and walked steadily in advance of the arms, conscious of a
+little amusement at the strange way in which people behaved merely
+because some one was dead. He would go if they wished it, but nothing
+they could do would disturb his happiness.
+
+As he saw the passage outside the room, and the table with the cups and
+the plates, it suddenly came over him that here was a world in which he
+would never see Rachel again.
+
+“Rachel! Rachel!” he shrieked, trying to rush back to her. But they
+prevented him, and pushed him down the passage and into a bedroom far
+from her room. Downstairs they could hear the thud of his feet on the
+floor, as he struggled to break free; and twice they heard him shout,
+“Rachel, Rachel!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+For two or three hours longer the moon poured its light through the
+empty air. Unbroken by clouds it fell straightly, and lay almost like a
+chill white frost over the sea and the earth. During these hours the
+silence was not broken, and the only movement was caused by the
+movement of trees and branches which stirred slightly, and then the
+shadows that lay across the white spaces of the land moved too. In this
+profound silence one sound only was audible, the sound of a slight but
+continuous breathing which never ceased, although it never rose and
+never fell. It continued after the birds had begun to flutter from
+branch to branch, and could be heard behind the first thin notes of
+their voices. It continued all through the hours when the east
+whitened, and grew red, and a faint blue tinged the sky, but when the
+sun rose it ceased, and gave place to other sounds.
+
+The first sounds that were heard were little inarticulate cries, the
+cries, it seemed, of children or of the very poor, of people who were
+very weak or in pain. But when the sun was above the horizon, the air
+which had been thin and pale grew every moment richer and warmer, and
+the sounds of life became bolder and more full of courage and
+authority. By degrees the smoke began to ascend in wavering breaths
+over the houses, and these slowly thickened, until they were as round
+and straight as columns, and instead of striking upon pale white
+blinds, the sun shone upon dark windows, beyond which there was depth
+and space.
+
+The sun had been up for many hours, and the great dome of air was
+warmed through and glittering with thin gold threads of sunlight,
+before any one moved in the hotel. White and massive it stood in the
+early light, half asleep with its blinds down.
+
+At about half-past nine Miss Allan came very slowly into the hall, and
+walked very slowly to the table where the morning papers were laid, but
+she did not put out her hand to take one; she stood still, thinking,
+with her head a little sunk upon her shoulders. She looked curiously
+old, and from the way in which she stood, a little hunched together and
+very massive, you could see what she would be like when she was really
+old, how she would sit day after day in her chair looking placidly in
+front of her. Other people began to come into the room, and to pass
+her, but she did not speak to any of them or even look at them, and at
+last, as if it were necessary to do something, she sat down in a chair,
+and looked quietly and fixedly in front of her. She felt very old this
+morning, and useless too, as if her life had been a failure, as if it
+had been hard and laborious to no purpose. She did not want to go on
+living, and yet she knew that she would. She was so strong that she
+would live to be a very old woman. She would probably live to be
+eighty, and as she was now fifty, that left thirty years more for her
+to live. She turned her hands over and over in her lap and looked at
+them curiously; her old hands, that had done so much work for her.
+There did not seem to be much point in it all; one went on, of course
+one went on. . . . She looked up to see Mrs. Thornbury standing beside
+her, with lines drawn upon her forehead, and her lips parted as if she
+were about to ask a question.
+
+Miss Allan anticipated her.
+
+“Yes,” she said. “She died this morning, very early, about three
+o’clock.”
+
+Mrs. Thornbury made a little exclamation, drew her lips together, and
+the tears rose in her eyes. Through them she looked at the hall which
+was now laid with great breadths of sunlight, and at the careless,
+casual groups of people who were standing beside the solid arm-chairs
+and tables. They looked to her unreal, or as people look who remain
+unconscious that some great explosion is about to take place beside
+them. But there was no explosion, and they went on standing by the
+chairs and the tables. Mrs. Thornbury no longer saw them, but,
+penetrating through them as though they were without substance, she saw
+the house, the people in the house, the room, the bed in the room, and
+the figure of the dead lying still in the dark beneath the sheets. She
+could almost see the dead. She could almost hear the voices of the
+mourners.
+
+“They expected it?” she asked at length.
+
+Miss Allan could only shake her head.
+
+“I know nothing,” she replied, “except what Mrs. Flushing’s maid told
+me. She died early this morning.”
+
+The two women looked at each other with a quiet significant gaze, and
+then, feeling oddly dazed, and seeking she did not know exactly what,
+Mrs. Thornbury went slowly upstairs and walked quietly along the
+passages, touching the wall with her fingers as if to guide herself.
+Housemaids were passing briskly from room to room, but Mrs. Thornbury
+avoided them; she hardly saw them; they seemed to her to be in another
+world. She did not even look up directly when Evelyn stopped her. It
+was evident that Evelyn had been lately in tears, and when she looked
+at Mrs. Thornbury she began to cry again. Together they drew into the
+hollow of a window, and stood there in silence. Broken words formed
+themselves at last among Evelyn’s sobs. “It was wicked,” she sobbed,
+“it was cruel—they were so happy.”
+
+Mrs. Thornbury patted her on the shoulder.
+
+“It seems hard—very hard,” she said. She paused and looked out over the
+slope of the hill at the Ambroses’ villa; the windows were blazing in
+the sun, and she thought how the soul of the dead had passed from those
+windows. Something had passed from the world. It seemed to her
+strangely empty.
+
+“And yet the older one grows,” she continued, her eyes regaining more
+than their usual brightness, “the more certain one becomes that there
+is a reason. How could one go on if there were no reason?” she asked.
+
+She asked the question of some one, but she did not ask it of Evelyn.
+Evelyn’s sobs were becoming quieter. “There must be a reason,” she
+said. “It can’t only be an accident. For it was an accident—it need
+never have happened.”
+
+Mrs. Thornbury sighed deeply.
+
+“But we must not let ourselves think of that,” she added, “and let us
+hope that they don’t either. Whatever they had done it might have been
+the same. These terrible illnesses—”
+
+“There’s no reason—I don’t believe there’s any reason at all!” Evelyn
+broke out, pulling the blind down and letting it fly back with a little
+snap.
+
+“Why should these things happen? Why should people suffer? I honestly
+believe,” she went on, lowering her voice slightly, “that Rachel’s in
+Heaven, but Terence. . . .”
+
+“What’s the good of it all?” she demanded.
+
+Mrs. Thornbury shook her head slightly but made no reply, and pressing
+Evelyn’s hand she went on down the passage. Impelled by a strong desire
+to hear something, although she did not know exactly what there was to
+hear, she was making her way to the Flushings’ room. As she opened
+their door she felt that she had interrupted some argument between
+husband and wife. Mrs. Flushing was sitting with her back to the light,
+and Mr. Flushing was standing near her, arguing and trying to persuade
+her of something.
+
+“Ah, here is Mrs. Thornbury,” he began with some relief in his voice.
+“You have heard, of course. My wife feels that she was in some way
+responsible. She urged poor Miss Vinrace to come on the expedition. I’m
+sure you will agree with me that it is most unreasonable to feel that.
+We don’t even know—in fact I think it most unlikely—that she caught her
+illness there. These diseases—Besides, she was set on going. She would
+have gone whether you asked her or not, Alice.”
+
+“Don’t, Wilfrid,” said Mrs. Flushing, neither moving nor taking her
+eyes off the spot on the floor upon which they rested. “What’s the use
+of talking? What’s the use—?” She ceased.
+
+“I was coming to ask you,” said Mrs. Thornbury, addressing Wilfrid, for
+it was useless to speak to his wife. “Is there anything you think that
+one could do? Has the father arrived? Could one go and see?”
+
+The strongest wish in her being at this moment was to be able to do
+something for the unhappy people—to see them—to assure them—to help
+them. It was dreadful to be so far away from them. But Mr. Flushing
+shook his head; he did not think that now—later perhaps one might be
+able to help. Here Mrs. Flushing rose stiffly, turned her back to them,
+and walked to the dressing-room opposite. As she walked, they could see
+her breast slowly rise and slowly fall. But her grief was silent. She
+shut the door behind her.
+
+When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists together, and
+began beating the back of a chair with them. She was like a wounded
+animal. She hated death; she was furious, outraged, indignant with
+death, as if it were a living creature. She refused to relinquish her
+friends to death. She would not submit to dark and nothingness. She
+began to pace up and down, clenching her hands, and making no attempt
+to stop the quick tears which raced down her cheeks. She sat still at
+last, but she did not submit. She looked stubborn and strong when she
+had ceased to cry.
+
+In the next room, meanwhile, Wilfrid was talking to Mrs. Thornbury with
+greater freedom now that his wife was not sitting there.
+
+“That’s the worst of these places,” he said. “People will behave as
+though they were in England, and they’re not. I’ve no doubt myself that
+Miss Vinrace caught the infection up at the villa itself. She probably
+ran risks a dozen times a day that might have given her the illness.
+It’s absurd to say she caught it with us.”
+
+If he had not been sincerely sorry for them he would have been annoyed.
+“Pepper tells me,” he continued, “that he left the house because he
+thought them so careless. He says they never washed their vegetables
+properly. Poor people! It’s a fearful price to pay. But it’s only what
+I’ve seen over and over again—people seem to forget that these things
+happen, and then they do happen, and they’re surprised.”
+
+Mrs. Thornbury agreed with him that they had been very careless, and
+that there was no reason whatever to think that she had caught the
+fever on the expedition; and after talking about other things for a
+short time, she left him and went sadly along the passage to her own
+room. There must be some reason why such things happen, she thought to
+herself, as she shut the door. Only at first it was not easy to
+understand what it was. It seemed so strange—so unbelievable. Why, only
+three weeks ago—only a fortnight ago, she had seen Rachel; when she
+shut her eyes she could almost see her now, the quiet, shy girl who was
+going to be married. She thought of all that she would have missed had
+she died at Rachel’s age, the children, the married life, the
+unimaginable depths and miracles that seemed to her, as she looked
+back, to have lain about her, day after day, and year after year. The
+stunned feeling, which had been making it difficult for her to think,
+gradually gave way to a feeling of the opposite nature; she thought
+very quickly and very clearly, and, looking back over all her
+experiences, tried to fit them into a kind of order. There was
+undoubtedly much suffering, much struggling, but, on the whole, surely
+there was a balance of happiness—surely order did prevail. Nor were the
+deaths of young people really the saddest things in life—they were
+saved so much; they kept so much. The dead—she called to mind those who
+had died early, accidentally—were beautiful; she often dreamt of the
+dead. And in time Terence himself would come to feel—She got up and
+began to wander restlessly about the room.
+
+For an old woman of her age she was very restless, and for one of her
+clear, quick mind she was unusually perplexed. She could not settle to
+anything, so that she was relieved when the door opened. She went up to
+her husband, took him in her arms, and kissed him with unusual
+intensity, and then as they sat down together she began to pat him and
+question him as if he were a baby, an old, tired, querulous baby. She
+did not tell him about Miss Vinrace’s death, for that would only
+disturb him, and he was put out already. She tried to discover why he
+was uneasy. Politics again? What were those horrid people doing? She
+spent the whole morning in discussing politics with her husband, and by
+degrees she became deeply interested in what they were saying. But
+every now and then what she was saying seemed to her oddly empty of
+meaning.
+
+At luncheon it was remarked by several people that the visitors at the
+hotel were beginning to leave; there were fewer every day. There were
+only forty people at luncheon, instead of the sixty that there had
+been. So old Mrs. Paley computed, gazing about her with her faded eyes,
+as she took her seat at her own table in the window. Her party
+generally consisted of Mr. Perrott as well as Arthur and Susan, and
+to-day Evelyn was lunching with them also.
+
+She was unusually subdued. Having noticed that her eyes were red, and
+guessing the reason, the others took pains to keep up an elaborate
+conversation between themselves. She suffered it to go on for a few
+minutes, leaning both elbows on the table, and leaving her soup
+untouched, when she exclaimed suddenly, “I don’t know how you feel, but
+I can simply think of nothing else!”
+
+The gentlemen murmured sympathetically, and looked grave.
+
+Susan replied, “Yes—isn’t it perfectly awful? When you think what a
+nice girl she was—only just engaged, and this need never have
+happened—it seems too tragic.” She looked at Arthur as though he might
+be able to help her with something more suitable.
+
+“Hard lines,” said Arthur briefly. “But it was a foolish thing to do—to
+go up that river.” He shook his head. “They should have known better.
+You can’t expect Englishwomen to stand roughing it as the natives do
+who’ve been acclimatised. I’d half a mind to warn them at tea that day
+when it was being discussed. But it’s no good saying these sort of
+things—it only puts people’s backs up—it never makes any difference.”
+
+Old Mrs. Paley, hitherto contented with her soup, here intimated, by
+raising one hand to her ear, that she wished to know what was being
+said.
+
+“You heard, Aunt Emma, that poor Miss Vinrace has died of the fever,”
+Susan informed her gently. She could not speak of death loudly or even
+in her usual voice, so that Mrs. Paley did not catch a word. Arthur
+came to the rescue.
+
+“Miss Vinrace is dead,” he said very distinctly.
+
+Mrs. Paley merely bent a little towards him and asked, “Eh?”
+
+“Miss Vinrace is dead,” he repeated. It was only by stiffening all the
+muscles round his mouth that he could prevent himself from bursting
+into laughter, and forced himself to repeat for the third time, “Miss
+Vinrace. . . . She’s dead.”
+
+Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that were
+outside her daily experience took some time to reach Mrs. Paley’s
+consciousness. A weight seemed to rest upon her brain, impeding, though
+not damaging its action. She sat vague-eyed for at least a minute
+before she realised what Arthur meant.
+
+“Dead?” she said vaguely. “Miss Vinrace dead? Dear me . . . that’s very
+sad. But I don’t at the moment remember which she was. We seem to have
+made so many new acquaintances here.” She looked at Susan for help. “A
+tall dark girl, who just missed being handsome, with a high colour?”
+
+“No,” Susan interposed. “She was—” then she gave it up in despair.
+There was no use in explaining that Mrs. Paley was thinking of the
+wrong person.
+
+“She ought not to have died,” Mrs. Paley continued. “She looked so
+strong. But people will drink the water. I can never make out why. It
+seems such a simple thing to tell them to put a bottle of Seltzer water
+in your bedroom. That’s all the precaution I’ve ever taken, and I’ve
+been in every part of the world, I may say—Italy a dozen times over. .
+. . But young people always think they know better, and then they pay
+the penalty. Poor thing—I am very sorry for her.” But the difficulty of
+peering into a dish of potatoes and helping herself engrossed her
+attention.
+
+Arthur and Susan both secretly hoped that the subject was now disposed
+of, for there seemed to them something unpleasant in this discussion.
+But Evelyn was not ready to let it drop. Why would people never talk
+about the things that mattered?
+
+“I don’t believe you care a bit!” she said, turning savagely upon Mr.
+Perrott, who had sat all this time in silence.
+
+“I? Oh, yes, I do,” he answered awkwardly, but with obvious sincerity.
+Evelyn’s questions made him too feel uncomfortable.
+
+“It seems so inexplicable,” Evelyn continued. “Death, I mean. Why
+should she be dead, and not you or I? It was only a fortnight ago that
+she was here with the rest of us. What d’you believe?” she demanded of
+Mr. Perrott. “D’you believe that things go on, that she’s still
+somewhere—or d’you think it’s simply a game—we crumble up to nothing
+when we die? I’m positive Rachel’s not dead.”
+
+Mr. Perrott would have said almost anything that Evelyn wanted him to
+say, but to assert that he believed in the immortality of the soul was
+not in his power. He sat silent, more deeply wrinkled than usual,
+crumbling his bread.
+
+Lest Evelyn should next ask him what he believed, Arthur, after making
+a pause equivalent to a full stop, started a completely different
+topic.
+
+“Supposing,” he said, “a man were to write and tell you that he wanted
+five pounds because he had known your grandfather, what would you do?
+It was this way. My grandfather—”
+
+“Invented a stove,” said Evelyn. “I know all about that. We had one in
+the conservatory to keep the plants warm.”
+
+“Didn’t know I was so famous,” said Arthur. “Well,” he continued,
+determined at all costs to spin his story out at length, “the old chap,
+being about the second best inventor of his day, and a capable lawyer
+too, died, as they always do, without making a will. Now Fielding, his
+clerk, with how much justice I don’t know, always claimed that he meant
+to do something for him. The poor old boy’s come down in the world
+through trying inventions on his own account, lives in Penge over a
+tobacconist’s shop. I’ve been to see him there. The question is—must I
+stump up or not? What does the abstract spirit of justice require,
+Perrott? Remember, I didn’t benefit under my grandfather’s will, and
+I’ve no way of testing the truth of the story.”
+
+“I don’t know much about the abstract spirit of justice,” said Susan,
+smiling complacently at the others, “but I’m certain of one thing—he’ll
+get his five pounds!”
+
+As Mr. Perrott proceeded to deliver an opinion, and Evelyn insisted
+that he was much too stingy, like all lawyers, thinking of the letter
+and not of the spirit, while Mrs. Paley required to be kept informed
+between the courses as to what they were all saying, the luncheon
+passed with no interval of silence, and Arthur congratulated himself
+upon the tact with which the discussion had been smoothed over.
+
+As they left the room it happened that Mrs. Paley’s wheeled chair ran
+into the Elliots, who were coming through the door, as she was going
+out. Brought thus to a standstill for a moment, Arthur and Susan
+congratulated Hughling Elliot upon his convalescence,—he was down,
+cadaverous enough, for the first time,—and Mr. Perrott took occasion to
+say a few words in private to Evelyn.
+
+“Would there be any chance of seeing you this afternoon, about
+three-thirty say? I shall be in the garden, by the fountain.”
+
+The block dissolved before Evelyn answered. But as she left them in the
+hall, she looked at him brightly and said, “Half-past three, did you
+say? That’ll suit me.”
+
+She ran upstairs with the feeling of spiritual exaltation and quickened
+life which the prospect of an emotional scene always aroused in her.
+That Mr. Perrott was again about to propose to her, she had no doubt,
+and she was aware that on this occasion she ought to be prepared with a
+definite answer, for she was going away in three days’ time. But she
+could not bring her mind to bear upon the question. To come to a
+decision was very difficult to her, because she had a natural dislike
+of anything final and done with; she liked to go on and on—always on
+and on. She was leaving, and, therefore, she occupied herself in laying
+her clothes out side by side upon the bed. She observed that some were
+very shabby. She took the photograph of her father and mother, and,
+before she laid it away in her box, she held it for a minute in her
+hand. Rachel had looked at it. Suddenly the keen feeling of some one’s
+personality, which things that they have owned or handled sometimes
+preserves, overcame her; she felt Rachel in the room with her; it was
+as if she were on a ship at sea, and the life of the day was as unreal
+as the land in the distance. But by degrees the feeling of Rachel’s
+presence passed away, and she could no longer realise her, for she had
+scarcely known her. But this momentary sensation left her depressed and
+fatigued. What had she done with her life? What future was there before
+her? What was make-believe, and what was real? Were these proposals and
+intimacies and adventures real, or was the contentment which she had
+seen on the faces of Susan and Rachel more real than anything she had
+ever felt?
+
+She made herself ready to go downstairs, absentmindedly, but her
+fingers were so well trained that they did the work of preparing her
+almost of their own accord. When she was actually on the way
+downstairs, the blood began to circle through her body of its own
+accord too, for her mind felt very dull.
+
+Mr. Perrott was waiting for her. Indeed, he had gone straight into the
+garden after luncheon, and had been walking up and down the path for
+more than half an hour, in a state of acute suspense.
+
+“I’m late as usual!” she exclaimed, as she caught sight of him. “Well,
+you must forgive me; I had to pack up. . . . My word! It looks stormy!
+And that’s a new steamer in the bay, isn’t it?”
+
+She looked at the bay, in which a steamer was just dropping anchor, the
+smoke still hanging about it, while a swift black shudder ran through
+the waves. “One’s quite forgotten what rain looks like,” she added.
+
+But Mr. Perrott paid no attention to the steamer or to the weather.
+
+“Miss Murgatroyd,” he began with his usual formality, “I asked you to
+come here from a very selfish motive, I fear. I do not think you need
+to be assured once more of my feelings; but, as you are leaving so
+soon, I felt that I could not let you go without asking you to tell
+me—have I any reason to hope that you will ever come to care for me?”
+
+He was very pale, and seemed unable to say any more.
+
+The little gush of vitality which had come into Evelyn as she ran
+downstairs had left her, and she felt herself impotent. There was
+nothing for her to say; she felt nothing. Now that he was actually
+asking her, in his elderly gentle words, to marry him, she felt less
+for him than she had ever felt before.
+
+“Let’s sit down and talk it over,” she said rather unsteadily.
+
+Mr. Perrott followed her to a curved green seat under a tree. They
+looked at the fountain in front of them, which had long ceased to play.
+Evelyn kept looking at the fountain instead of thinking of what she was
+saying; the fountain without any water seemed to be the type of her own
+being.
+
+“Of course I care for you,” she began, rushing her words out in a
+hurry; “I should be a brute if I didn’t. I think you’re quite one of
+the nicest people I’ve ever known, and one of the finest too. But I
+wish . . . I wish you didn’t care for me in that way. Are you sure you
+do?” For the moment she honestly desired that he should say no.
+
+“Quite sure,” said Mr. Perrott.
+
+“You see, I’m not as simple as most women,” Evelyn continued. “I think
+I want more. I don’t know exactly what I feel.”
+
+He sat by her, watching her and refraining from speech.
+
+“I sometimes think I haven’t got it in me to care very much for one
+person only. Some one else would make you a better wife. I can imagine
+you very happy with some one else.”
+
+“If you think that there is any chance that you will come to care for
+me, I am quite content to wait,” said Mr. Perrott.
+
+“Well—there’s no hurry, is there?” said Evelyn. “Suppose I thought it
+over and wrote and told you when I get back? I’m going to Moscow; I’ll
+write from Moscow.”
+
+But Mr. Perrott persisted.
+
+“You cannot give me any kind of idea. I do not ask for a date . . .
+that would be most unreasonable.” He paused, looking down at the gravel
+path.
+
+As she did not immediately answer, he went on.
+
+“I know very well that I am not—that I have not much to offer you
+either in myself or in my circumstances. And I forget; it cannot seem
+the miracle to you that it does to me. Until I met you I had gone on in
+my own quiet way—we are both very quiet people, my sister and I—quite
+content with my lot. My friendship with Arthur was the most important
+thing in my life. Now that I know you, all that has changed. You seem
+to put such a spirit into everything. Life seems to hold so many
+possibilities that I had never dreamt of.”
+
+“That’s splendid!” Evelyn exclaimed, grasping his hand. “Now you’ll go
+back and start all kinds of things and make a great name in the world;
+and we’ll go on being friends, whatever happens . . . we’ll be great
+friends, won’t we?”
+
+“Evelyn!” he moaned suddenly, and took her in his arms, and kissed her.
+She did not resent it, although it made little impression on her.
+
+As she sat upright again, she said, “I never see why one shouldn’t go
+on being friends—though some people do. And friendships do make a
+difference, don’t they? They are the kind of things that matter in
+one’s life?”
+
+He looked at her with a bewildered expression as if he did not really
+understand what she was saying. With a considerable effort he collected
+himself, stood up, and said, “Now I think I have told you what I feel,
+and I will only add that I can wait as long as ever you wish.”
+
+Left alone, Evelyn walked up and down the path. What did matter then?
+What was the meaning of it all?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+All that evening the clouds gathered, until they closed entirely over
+the blue of the sky. They seemed to narrow the space between earth and
+heaven, so that there was no room for the air to move in freely; and
+the waves, too, lay flat, and yet rigid, as if they were restrained.
+The leaves on the bushes and trees in the garden hung closely together,
+and the feeling of pressure and restraint was increased by the short
+chirping sounds which came from birds and insects.
+
+So strange were the lights and the silence that the busy hum of voices
+which usually filled the dining-room at meal times had distinct gaps in
+it, and during these silences the clatter of the knives upon plates
+became audible. The first roll of thunder and the first heavy drop
+striking the pane caused a little stir.
+
+“It’s coming!” was said simultaneously in many different languages.
+
+There was then a profound silence, as if the thunder had withdrawn into
+itself. People had just begun to eat again, when a gust of cold air
+came through the open windows, lifting tablecloths and skirts, a light
+flashed, and was instantly followed by a clap of thunder right over the
+hotel. The rain swished with it, and immediately there were all those
+sounds of windows being shut and doors slamming violently which
+accompany a storm.
+
+The room grew suddenly several degrees darker, for the wind seemed to
+be driving waves of darkness across the earth. No one attempted to eat
+for a time, but sat looking out at the garden, with their forks in the
+air. The flashes now came frequently, lighting up faces as if they were
+going to be photographed, surprising them in tense and unnatural
+expressions. The clap followed close and violently upon them. Several
+women half rose from their chairs and then sat down again, but dinner
+was continued uneasily with eyes upon the garden. The bushes outside
+were ruffled and whitened, and the wind pressed upon them so that they
+seemed to stoop to the ground. The waiters had to press dishes upon the
+diners’ notice; and the diners had to draw the attention of waiters,
+for they were all absorbed in looking at the storm. As the thunder
+showed no signs of withdrawing, but seemed massed right overhead, while
+the lightning aimed straight at the garden every time, an uneasy gloom
+replaced the first excitement.
+
+Finishing the meal very quickly, people congregated in the hall, where
+they felt more secure than in any other place because they could
+retreat far from the windows, and although they heard the thunder, they
+could not see anything. A little boy was carried away sobbing in the
+arms of his mother.
+
+While the storm continued, no one seemed inclined to sit down, but they
+collected in little groups under the central skylight, where they stood
+in a yellow atmosphere, looking upwards. Now and again their faces
+became white, as the lightning flashed, and finally a terrific crash
+came, making the panes of the skylight lift at the joints.
+
+“Ah!” several voices exclaimed at the same moment.
+
+“Something struck,” said a man’s voice.
+
+The rain rushed down. The rain seemed now to extinguish the lightning
+and the thunder, and the hall became almost dark.
+
+After a minute or two, when nothing was heard but the rattle of water
+upon the glass, there was a perceptible slackening of the sound, and
+then the atmosphere became lighter.
+
+“It’s over,” said another voice.
+
+At a touch, all the electric lights were turned on, and revealed a
+crowd of people all standing, all looking with rather strained faces up
+at the skylight, but when they saw each other in the artificial light
+they turned at once and began to move away. For some minutes the rain
+continued to rattle upon the skylight, and the thunder gave another
+shake or two; but it was evident from the clearing of the darkness and
+the light drumming of the rain upon the roof, that the great confused
+ocean of air was travelling away from them, and passing high over head
+with its clouds and its rods of fire, out to sea. The building, which
+had seemed so small in the tumult of the storm, now became as square
+and spacious as usual.
+
+As the storm drew away, the people in the hall of the hotel sat down;
+and with a comfortable sense of relief, began to tell each other
+stories about great storms, and produced in many cases their
+occupations for the evening. The chess-board was brought out, and Mr.
+Elliot, who wore a stock instead of a collar as a sign of
+convalescence, but was otherwise much as usual, challenged Mr. Pepper
+to a final contest. Round them gathered a group of ladies with pieces
+of needlework, or in default of needlework, with novels, to superintend
+the game, much as if they were in charge of two small boys playing
+marbles. Every now and then they looked at the board and made some
+encouraging remark to the gentlemen.
+
+Mrs. Paley just round the corner had her cards arranged in long ladders
+before her, with Susan sitting near to sympathise but not to correct,
+and the merchants and the miscellaneous people who had never been
+discovered to possess names were stretched in their arm-chairs with
+their newspapers on their knees. The conversation in these
+circumstances was very gentle, fragmentary, and intermittent, but the
+room was full of the indescribable stir of life. Every now and then the
+moth, which was now grey of wing and shiny of thorax, whizzed over
+their heads, and hit the lamps with a thud.
+
+A young woman put down her needlework and exclaimed, “Poor creature! it
+would be kinder to kill it.” But nobody seemed disposed to rouse
+himself in order to kill the moth. They watched it dash from lamp to
+lamp, because they were comfortable, and had nothing to do.
+
+On the sofa, beside the chess-players, Mrs. Elliot was imparting a new
+stitch in knitting to Mrs. Thornbury, so that their heads came very
+near together, and were only to be distinguished by the old lace cap
+which Mrs. Thornbury wore in the evening. Mrs. Elliot was an expert at
+knitting, and disclaimed a compliment to that effect with evident
+pride.
+
+“I suppose we’re all proud of something,” she said, “and I’m proud of
+my knitting. I think things like that run in families. We all knit
+well. I had an uncle who knitted his own socks to the day of his
+death—and he did it better than any of his daughters, dear old
+gentleman. Now I wonder that you, Miss Allan, who use your eyes so
+much, don’t take up knitting in the evenings. You’d find it such a
+relief, I should say—such a rest to the eyes—and the bazaars are so
+glad of things.” Her voice dropped into the smooth half-conscious tone
+of the expert knitter; the words came gently one after another. “As
+much as I do I can always dispose of, which is a comfort, for then I
+feel that I am not wasting my time—”
+
+Miss Allan, being thus addressed, shut her novel and observed the
+others placidly for a time. At last she said, “It is surely not natural
+to leave your wife because she happens to be in love with you. But
+that—as far as I can make out—is what the gentleman in my story does.”
+
+“Tut, tut, that doesn’t sound good—no, that doesn’t sound at all
+natural,” murmured the knitters in their absorbed voices.
+
+“Still, it’s the kind of book people call very clever,” Miss Allan
+added.
+
+“_Maternity_—by Michael Jessop—I presume,” Mr. Elliot put in, for he
+could never resist the temptation of talking while he played chess.
+
+“D’you know,” said Mrs. Elliot, after a moment, “I don’t think people
+_do_ write good novels now—not as good as they used to, anyhow.”
+
+No one took the trouble to agree with her or to disagree with her.
+Arthur Venning who was strolling about, sometimes looking at the game,
+sometimes reading a page of a magazine, looked at Miss Allan, who was
+half asleep, and said humorously, “A penny for your thoughts, Miss
+Allan.”
+
+The others looked up. They were glad that he had not spoken to them.
+But Miss Allan replied without any hesitation, “I was thinking of my
+imaginary uncle. Hasn’t every one got an imaginary uncle?” she
+continued. “I have one—a most delightful old gentleman. He’s always
+giving me things. Sometimes it’s a gold watch; sometimes it’s a
+carriage and pair; sometimes it’s a beautiful little cottage in the New
+Forest; sometimes it’s a ticket to the place I most want to see.”
+
+She set them all thinking vaguely of the things they wanted. Mrs.
+Elliot knew exactly what she wanted; she wanted a child; and the usual
+little pucker deepened on her brow.
+
+“We’re such lucky people,” she said, looking at her husband. “We really
+have no wants.” She was apt to say this, partly in order to convince
+herself, and partly in order to convince other people. But she was
+prevented from wondering how far she carried conviction by the entrance
+of Mr. and Mrs. Flushing, who came through the hall and stopped by the
+chess-board. Mrs. Flushing looked wilder than ever. A great strand of
+black hair looped down across her brow, her cheeks were whipped a dark
+blood red, and drops of rain made wet marks upon them.
+
+Mr. Flushing explained that they had been on the roof watching the
+storm.
+
+“It was a wonderful sight,” he said. “The lightning went right out over
+the sea, and lit up the waves and the ships far away. You can’t think
+how wonderful the mountains looked too, with the lights on them, and
+the great masses of shadow. It’s all over now.”
+
+He slid down into a chair, becoming interested in the final struggle of
+the game.
+
+“And you go back to-morrow?” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at Mrs.
+Flushing.
+
+“Yes,” she replied.
+
+“And indeed one is not sorry to go back,” said Mrs. Elliot, assuming an
+air of mournful anxiety, “after all this illness.”
+
+“Are you afraid of dyin’?” Mrs. Flushing demanded scornfully.
+
+“I think we are all afraid of that,” said Mrs. Elliot with dignity.
+
+“I suppose we’re all cowards when it comes to the point,” said Mrs.
+Flushing, rubbing her cheek against the back of the chair. “I’m sure I
+am.”
+
+“Not a bit of it!” said Mr. Flushing, turning round, for Mr. Pepper
+took a very long time to consider his move. “It’s not cowardly to wish
+to live, Alice. It’s the very reverse of cowardly. Personally, I’d like
+to go on for a hundred years—granted, of course, that I had the full
+use of my faculties. Think of all the things that are bound to happen!”
+
+“That is what I feel,” Mrs. Thornbury rejoined. “The changes, the
+improvements, the inventions—and beauty. D’you know I feel sometimes
+that I couldn’t bear to die and cease to see beautiful things about
+me?”
+
+“It would certainly be very dull to die before they have discovered
+whether there is life in Mars,” Miss Allan added.
+
+“Do you really believe there’s life in Mars?” asked Mrs. Flushing,
+turning to her for the first time with keen interest. “Who tells you
+that? Some one who knows? D’you know a man called—?”
+
+Here Mrs. Thornbury laid down her knitting, and a look of extreme
+solicitude came into her eyes.
+
+“There is Mr. Hirst,” she said quietly.
+
+St. John had just come through the swing door. He was rather blown
+about by the wind, and his cheeks looked terribly pale, unshorn, and
+cavernous. After taking off his coat he was going to pass straight
+through the hall and up to his room, but he could not ignore the
+presence of so many people he knew, especially as Mrs. Thornbury rose
+and went up to him, holding out her hand. But the shock of the warm
+lamp-lit room, together with the sight of so many cheerful human beings
+sitting together at their ease, after the dark walk in the rain, and
+the long days of strain and horror, overcame him completely. He looked
+at Mrs. Thornbury and could not speak.
+
+Every one was silent. Mr. Pepper’s hand stayed upon his Knight. Mrs.
+Thornbury somehow moved him to a chair, sat herself beside him, and
+with tears in her own eyes said gently, “You have done everything for
+your friend.”
+
+Her action set them all talking again as if they had never stopped, and
+Mr. Pepper finished the move with his Knight.
+
+“There was nothing to be done,” said St. John. He spoke very slowly.
+“It seems impossible—”
+
+He drew his hand across his eyes as if some dream came between him and
+the others and prevented him from seeing where he was.
+
+“And that poor fellow,” said Mrs. Thornbury, the tears falling again
+down her cheeks.
+
+“Impossible,” St. John repeated.
+
+“Did he have the consolation of knowing—?” Mrs. Thornbury began very
+tentatively.
+
+But St. John made no reply. He lay back in his chair, half-seeing the
+others, half-hearing what they said. He was terribly tired, and the
+light and warmth, the movements of the hands, and the soft
+communicative voices soothed him; they gave him a strange sense of
+quiet and relief. As he sat there, motionless, this feeling of relief
+became a feeling of profound happiness. Without any sense of disloyalty
+to Terence and Rachel he ceased to think about either of them. The
+movements and the voices seemed to draw together from different parts
+of the room, and to combine themselves into a pattern before his eyes;
+he was content to sit silently watching the pattern build itself up,
+looking at what he hardly saw.
+
+The game was really a good one, and Mr. Pepper and Mr. Elliot were
+becoming more and more set upon the struggle. Mrs. Thornbury, seeing
+that St. John did not wish to talk, resumed her knitting.
+
+“Lightning again!” Mrs. Flushing suddenly exclaimed. A yellow light
+flashed across the blue window, and for a second they saw the green
+trees outside. She strode to the door, pushed it open, and stood half
+out in the open air.
+
+But the light was only the reflection of the storm which was over. The
+rain had ceased, the heavy clouds were blown away, and the air was thin
+and clear, although vapourish mists were being driven swiftly across
+the moon. The sky was once more a deep and solemn blue, and the shape
+of the earth was visible at the bottom of the air, enormous, dark, and
+solid, rising into the tapering mass of the mountain, and pricked here
+and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of villas. The driving air,
+the drone of the trees, and the flashing light which now and again
+spread a broad illumination over the earth filled Mrs. Flushing with
+exultation. Her breasts rose and fell.
+
+“Splendid! Splendid!” she muttered to herself. Then she turned back
+into the hall and exclaimed in a peremptory voice, “Come outside and
+see, Wilfrid; it’s wonderful.”
+
+Some half-stirred; some rose; some dropped their balls of wool and
+began to stoop to look for them.
+
+“To bed—to bed,” said Miss Allan.
+
+“It was the move with your Queen that gave it away, Pepper,” exclaimed
+Mr. Elliot triumphantly, sweeping the pieces together and standing up.
+He had won the game.
+
+“What? Pepper beaten at last? I congratulate you!” said Arthur Venning,
+who was wheeling old Mrs. Paley to bed.
+
+All these voices sounded gratefully in St. John’s ears as he lay
+half-asleep, and yet vividly conscious of everything around him. Across
+his eyes passed a procession of objects, black and indistinct, the
+figures of people picking up their books, their cards, their balls of
+wool, their work-baskets, and passing him one after another on their
+way to bed.
+
+
+
+
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Voyage Out, by Virginia Woolf</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The Voyage Out</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Virginia Woolf</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: July, 1994 [eBook #144]<br />
+[Most recently updated: June 7, 2021]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Judith Boss and David Widger</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VOYAGE OUT ***</div>
+
+<h1>The Voyage Out</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Virginia Woolf</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">CHAPTER I.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">CHAPTER II.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">CHAPTER III.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">CHAPTER IV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">CHAPTER V.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06">CHAPTER VI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07">CHAPTER VII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08">CHAPTER VIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09">CHAPTER IX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10">CHAPTER X.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11">CHAPTER XI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12">CHAPTER XII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap13">CHAPTER XIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap14">CHAPTER XIV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap15">CHAPTER XV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap16">CHAPTER XVI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap17">CHAPTER XVII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap18">CHAPTER XVIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap19">CHAPTER XIX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap20">CHAPTER XX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap21">CHAPTER XXI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap22">CHAPTER XXII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap23">CHAPTER XXIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap24">CHAPTER XXIV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap25">CHAPTER XXV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap26">CHAPTER XXVI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap27">CHAPTER XXVII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;for in
+comparison with this couple most people looked small&mdash;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&rsquo;s height and upon Mrs.
+Ambrose&rsquo;s cloak. But some enchantment had put both man and woman beyond
+the reach of malice and unpopularity. In his case 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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;Bluebeard!&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;Bluebeard!&rdquo; in
+chorus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Lars Porsena of Clusium<br />
+By the nine Gods he swore&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+and then more faintly, as if the speaker had passed her on his walk&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+That the Great House of Tarquin<br />
+Should suffer wrong no more.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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,
+&ldquo;Dearest.&rdquo; His voice was supplicating. But she shut her face away
+from him, as much as to say, &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t possibly understand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I would rather walk,&rdquo; she said, her husband having hailed a cab
+already occupied by two city men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A fine rain now made her still more dismal; vans with the odd names of those
+engaged in odd industries&mdash;Sprules, Manufacturer of Saw-dust; Grabb, to
+whom no piece of waste paper comes amiss&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ridley, shall we drive? Shall we drive, Ridley?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Ambrose had to speak sharply; by this time he was far away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lord, how gloomy it is!&rdquo; her husband groaned. &ldquo;Poor
+creatures!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What with the misery for her children, the poor, and the rain, her mind was
+like a wound exposed to dry in the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s avenue of bricks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They want bridges now,&rdquo; 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&mdash;<i>Euphrosyne</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Down in the saloon of her father&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;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&rsquo;s voice saying gloomily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On a dark night one would fall down these stairs head foremost,&rdquo;
+to which a woman&rsquo;s voice added, &ldquo;And be killed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Rachel, how d&rsquo;you do,&rdquo; she said, shaking hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How are you, dear,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell Mr. Pepper,&rdquo; Rachel bade the servant. Husband and wife then
+sat down on one side of the table, with their niece opposite to them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My father told me to begin,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;He is very busy
+with the men. . . . You know Mr. Pepper?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Draughts,&rdquo; he said, erecting the collar of his coat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are still rheumatic?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Once rheumatic, always rheumatic, I fear,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;To
+some extent it depends on the weather, though not so much as people are apt to
+think.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One does not die of it, at any rate,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As a general rule&mdash;no,&rdquo; said Mr. Pepper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Soup, Uncle Ridley?&rdquo; asked Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank you, dear,&rdquo; he said, and, as he held his plate out, sighed
+audibly, &ldquo;Ah! she&rsquo;s not like her mother.&rdquo; Helen was just too
+late in thumping her tumbler on the table to prevent Rachel from hearing, and
+from blushing scarlet with embarrassment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The way servants treat flowers!&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You knew Jenkinson, didn&rsquo;t you, Ambrose?&rdquo; asked Mr. Pepper
+across the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Jenkinson of Peterhouse?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s dead,&rdquo; said Mr. Pepper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, dear!&mdash;I knew him&mdash;ages ago,&rdquo; said Ridley. &ldquo;He
+was the hero of the punt accident, you remember? A queer card. Married a young
+woman out of a tobacconist&rsquo;s, and lived in the Fens&mdash;never heard
+what became of him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Drink&mdash;drugs,&rdquo; said Mr. Pepper with sinister conciseness.
+&ldquo;He left a commentary. Hopeless muddle, I&rsquo;m told.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The man had really great abilities,&rdquo; said Ridley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His introduction to Jellaby holds its own still,&rdquo; went on Mr.
+Pepper, &ldquo;which is surprising, seeing how text-books change.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There was a theory about the planets, wasn&rsquo;t there?&rdquo; asked
+Ridley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A screw loose somewhere, no doubt of it,&rdquo; said Mr. Pepper, shaking
+his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now a tremor ran through the table, and a light outside swerved. At the same
+time an electric bell rang sharply again and again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;re off,&rdquo; said Ridley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;re off!&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Jenkinson of Cats&mdash;d&rsquo;you still keep up with him?&rdquo; asked
+Ambrose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As much as one ever does,&rdquo; said Mr. Pepper. &ldquo;We meet
+annually. This year he has had the misfortune to lose his wife, which made it
+painful, of course.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very painful,&rdquo; Ridley agreed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s an unmarried daughter who keeps house for him, I believe,
+but it&rsquo;s never the same, not at his age.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both gentlemen nodded sagely as they carved their apples.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There was a book, wasn&rsquo;t there?&rdquo; Ridley enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There <i>was</i> a book, but there never <i>will</i> be a book,&rdquo;
+said Mr. Pepper with such fierceness that both ladies looked up at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There never will be a book, because some one else has written it for
+him,&rdquo; said Mr. Pepper with considerable acidity. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what
+comes of putting things off, and collecting fossils, and sticking Norman arches
+on one&rsquo;s pigsties.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I confess I sympathise,&rdquo; said Ridley with a melancholy sigh.
+&ldquo;I have a weakness for people who can&rsquo;t begin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;. . . The accumulations of a lifetime wasted,&rdquo; continued Mr.
+pepper. &ldquo;He had accumulations enough to fill a barn.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a vice that some of us escape,&rdquo; said Ridley. &ldquo;Our
+friend Miles has another work out to-day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pepper gave an acid little laugh. &ldquo;According to my
+calculations,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;he has produced two volumes and a half
+annually, which, allowing for time spent in the cradle and so forth, shows a
+commendable industry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, the old Master&rsquo;s saying of him has been pretty well
+realised,&rdquo; said Ridley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A way they had,&rdquo; said Mr. Pepper. &ldquo;You know the Bruce
+collection?&mdash;not for publication, of course.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should suppose not,&rdquo; said Ridley significantly. &ldquo;For a
+Divine he was&mdash;remarkably free.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Pump in Neville&rsquo;s Row, for example?&rdquo; enquired Mr.
+Pepper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said Ambrose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly trained in
+promoting men&rsquo;s talk without listening to it, could think&mdash;about the
+education of children, about the use of fog sirens in an opera&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps&mdash;?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, one could tell strange stories of the old days,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leaning over the rail, side by side, Helen said, &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you be
+cold?&rdquo; Rachel replied, &ldquo;No. . . . How beautiful!&rdquo; she added a
+moment later. Very little was visible&mdash;a few masts, a shadow of land here,
+a line of brilliant windows there. They tried to make head against the wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It blows&mdash;it blows!&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re old friends,&rdquo; said Helen, smiling at the sight.
+&ldquo;Now, is there a room for us to sit in?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel opened a door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s more like a landing than a room,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s love, when the time
+hung heavy in the southern seas, was quaint rather than ugly. Twisted shells
+with red lips like unicorn&rsquo;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 &ldquo;The Coliseum&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s hands at a grate
+full of gilt shavings; a great lamp swung above the table&mdash;the kind of
+lamp which makes the light of civilisation across dark fields to one walking in
+the country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s odd that every one should be an old friend of Mr.
+Pepper&rsquo;s,&rdquo; Rachel started nervously, for the situation was
+difficult, the room cold, and Helen curiously silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you take him for granted?&rdquo; said her aunt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s like this,&rdquo; said Rachel, lighting on a fossilised fish
+in a basin, and displaying it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I expect you&rsquo;re too severe,&rdquo; Helen remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel immediately tried to qualify what she had said against her belief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t really know him,&rdquo; 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&mdash;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&mdash;one other
+thing&mdash;oh yes, she thought it was vehicular traffic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got all his pamphlets,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Little
+pamphlets. Little yellow books.&rdquo; It did not appear that she had read
+them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Has he ever been in love?&rdquo; asked Helen, who had chosen a seat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was unexpectedly to the point.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His heart&rsquo;s a piece of old shoe leather,&rdquo; Rachel declared,
+dropping the fish. But when questioned she had to own that she had never asked
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall ask him,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The last time I saw you, you were buying a piano,&rdquo; she continued.
+&ldquo;Do you remember&mdash;the piano, the room in the attic, and the great
+plants with the prickles?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, and my aunts said the piano would come through the floor, but at
+their age one wouldn&rsquo;t mind being killed in the night?&rdquo; she
+enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I heard from Aunt Bessie not long ago,&rdquo; Helen stated. &ldquo;She
+is afraid that you will spoil your arms if you insist upon so much
+practising.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The muscles of the forearm&mdash;and then one won&rsquo;t marry?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She didn&rsquo;t put it quite like that,&rdquo; replied Mrs. Ambrose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no&mdash;of course she wouldn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Rachel with a
+sigh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory.
+Did Willoughby say three weeks, or did he say four? She tried to remember.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this point, however, the door opened and a tall burly man entered the room,
+came forward and shook Helen&rsquo;s hand with an emotional kind of heartiness,
+Willoughby himself, Rachel&rsquo;s father, Helen&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a great pleasure that you have come,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;for
+both of us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel murmured in obedience to her father&rsquo;s glance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley. We think it
+an honour to have charge of him. Pepper&rsquo;ll have some one to contradict
+him&mdash;which I daren&rsquo;t do. You find this child grown, don&rsquo;t you?
+A young woman, eh?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still holding Helen&rsquo;s hand he drew his arm round Rachel&rsquo;s shoulder,
+thus making them come uncomfortably close, but Helen forbore to look.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You think she does us credit?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because we expect great things of her,&rdquo; he continued, squeezing
+his daughter&rsquo;s arm and releasing her. &ldquo;But about you now.&rdquo;
+They sat down side by side on the little sofa. &ldquo;Did you leave the
+children well? They&rsquo;ll be ready for school, I suppose. Do they take after
+you or Ambrose? They&rsquo;ve got good heads on their shoulders, I&rsquo;ll be
+bound?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;merely for the fun of the
+thing, a feeling which she could understand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you had to show the young rascal that these tricks wouldn&rsquo;t
+do, eh?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A child of six? I don&rsquo;t think they matter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m an old-fashioned father.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense, Willoughby; Rachel knows better.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s comfort&mdash;a table placed
+where he couldn&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Leave it to me&mdash;leave it to me!&rdquo; said Willoughby, obviously
+intending to do much more than she asked of him. But Ridley and Mr. Pepper were
+heard fumbling at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How are you, Vinrace?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Willoughby preserved his heartiness, tempered by respect. For the moment
+nothing was said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We looked in and saw you laughing,&rdquo; Helen remarked. &ldquo;Mr.
+Pepper had just told a very good story.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pish. None of the stories were good,&rdquo; said her husband peevishly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Still a severe judge, Ridley?&rdquo; enquired Mr. Vinrace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We bored you so that you left,&rdquo; said Ridley, speaking directly to
+his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As this was quite true Helen did not attempt to deny it, and her next remark,
+&ldquo;But didn&rsquo;t they improve after we&rsquo;d gone?&rdquo; was
+unfortunate, for her husband answered with a droop of his shoulders, &ldquo;If
+possible they got worse.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; laughed Willoughby, &ldquo;the monsters of the earth are
+too many for me!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel was heard to sigh, &ldquo;Poor little goats!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If it weren&rsquo;t for the goats there&rsquo;d be no music, my dear;
+music depends upon goats,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;You see, I don&rsquo;t get on with my
+father.&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s face, and remarked with her slight stammer, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+going out to t-t-triumph in the wind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Ambrose&rsquo;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,
+&ldquo;Damn!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;And she
+married you, and she was happy, I suppose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course, one sees all that,&rdquo; 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; &ldquo;but&mdash;&rdquo; here she slipped into a fine analysis of
+him which is best represented by one word, &ldquo;sentimental,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&mdash;was it?&mdash;appeared at the University Press.
+&ldquo;And Rachel,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;She really might be six years
+old,&rdquo; was all she said, however, this judgment referring to the smooth
+unmarked outline of the girl&rsquo;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&rsquo;s day is like the vivid flushed
+face that hangs over it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;No&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now you&rsquo;ve chewed something thirty-seven times, I
+suppose?&rdquo; she thought, but said politely aloud, &ldquo;Are your legs
+troubling you to-day, Mr. Pepper?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My shoulder blades?&rdquo; he asked, shifting them painfully.
+&ldquo;Beauty has no effect upon uric acid that I&rsquo;m aware of,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s plate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pebbles!&rdquo; he concluded, viciously dropping another bread pellet
+upon the heap. &ldquo;The roads of England are mended with pebbles! &lsquo;With
+the first heavy rainfall,&rsquo; I&rsquo;ve told &rsquo;em, &lsquo;your road
+will be a swamp.&rsquo; Again and again my words have proved true. But
+d&rsquo;you suppose they listen to me when I tell &rsquo;em so, when I point
+out the consequences, the consequences to the public purse, when I recommend
+&rsquo;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!&rdquo;
+The little man fixed her with a glance of ferocious energy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have had servants,&rdquo; said Mrs. Ambrose, concentrating her gaze.
+&ldquo;At this moment I have a nurse. She&rsquo;s a good woman as they go, but
+she&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+turned&mdash;Ridley,&rdquo; she demanded, swinging round upon her husband,
+&ldquo;what shall we do if we find them saying the Lord&rsquo;s Prayer when we
+get home again?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ridley made the sound which is represented by &ldquo;Tush.&rdquo; But
+Willoughby, whose discomfort as he listened was manifested by a slight movement
+rocking of his body, said awkwardly, &ldquo;Oh, surely, Helen, a little
+religion hurts nobody.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I would rather my children told lies,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;Oh, look! We&rsquo;re out at sea!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Down she looked into the depth of the sea. While it was slightly disturbed on
+the surface by the passage of the <i>Euphrosyne</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&mdash;&ldquo;And, Rachel, if any one wants me, I&rsquo;m busy till one,&rdquo;
+said her father, enforcing his words as he often did, when he spoke to his
+daughter, by a smart blow upon the shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Until one,&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;And you&rsquo;ll find yourself
+some employment, eh? Scales, French, a little German, eh? There&rsquo;s Mr.
+Pepper who knows more about separable verbs than any man in Europe, eh?&rdquo;
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How ever we&rsquo;re to get through this voyage, Miss Rachel, I really
+can&rsquo;t tell,&rdquo; she began with a shake of her head.
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s only just sheets enough to go round, and the
+master&rsquo;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 <i>not</i> be mended;
+they&rsquo;re only fit for dust sheets. Why, if one sewed one&rsquo;s finger to
+the bone, one would have one&rsquo;s work undone the next time they went to the
+laundry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her voice in its indignation wavered as if tears were near.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly Mrs. Chailey, turning from the subject of sheets, dismissing them
+entirely, clenched her fists on the top of them, and proclaimed, &ldquo;And you
+couldn&rsquo;t ask a living creature to sit where I sit!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;go,&rdquo; she complained, putting her hand above it, which was a state
+of things that Mrs. Vinrace, Rachel&rsquo;s mother, would never have dreamt of
+inflicting&mdash;Mrs. Vinrace, who knew every sheet in her house, and expected
+of every one the best they could do, but no more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lies! Lies! Lies!&rdquo; exclaimed the mistress indignantly, as she ran
+up on to the deck. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the use of telling me lies?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;china pugs,
+tea-sets in miniature, cups stamped floridly with the arms of the city of
+Bristol, hair-pin boxes crusted with shamrock, antelopes&rsquo; 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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This picture of her mistress is given to Emma Chailey by Willoughby
+Vinrace in gratitude for thirty years of devoted service.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tears obliterated the words and the head of the nail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So long as I can do something for your family,&rdquo; she was saying, as
+she hammered at it, when a voice called melodiously in the passage:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Chailey! Mrs. Chailey!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chailey instantly tidied her dress, composed her face, and opened the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m in a fix,&rdquo; said Mrs. Ambrose, who was flushed and out of
+breath. &ldquo;You know what gentlemen are. The chairs too high&mdash;the
+tables too low&mdash;there&rsquo;s six inches between the floor and the door.
+What I want&rsquo;s a hammer, an old quilt, and have you such a thing as a
+kitchen table? Anyhow, between us&rdquo;&mdash;she now flung open the door of
+her husband&rsquo;s sitting room, and revealed Ridley pacing up and down, his
+forehead all wrinkled, and the collar of his coat turned up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s as though they&rsquo;d taken pains to torment me!&rdquo; he
+cried, stopping dead. &ldquo;Did I come on this voyage in order to catch
+rheumatism and pneumonia? Really one might have credited Vinrace with more
+sense. My dear,&rdquo; Helen was on her knees under a table, &ldquo;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&mdash;I feel already worse than I did
+yesterday, but we&rsquo;ve only ourselves to thank, and the children
+happily&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Move! Move! Move!&rdquo; cried Helen, chasing him from corner to corner
+with a chair as though he were an errant hen. &ldquo;Out of the way, Ridley,
+and in half an hour you&rsquo;ll find it ready.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned him out of the room, and they could hear him groaning and swearing
+as he went along the passage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I daresay he isn&rsquo;t very strong,&rdquo; said Mrs. Chailey, looking
+at Mrs. Ambrose compassionately, as she helped to shift and carry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s books,&rdquo; sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes
+from the floor to the shelf. &ldquo;Greek from morning to night. If ever Miss
+Rachel marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who doesn&rsquo;t know
+his ABC.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;Was there ever such a day as
+this?&rdquo; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s you,&rdquo; the young men whispered; &ldquo;Oh,
+it&rsquo;s you,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;Think of the ships to-night,&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;Thank Heaven, I&rsquo;m not the man in the lighthouse!&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;he had never found quarters
+more to his liking; Willoughby at his documents, for he used a voyage to work
+off arrears of business; and Rachel&mdash;Helen, between her sentences of
+philosophy, wondered sometimes what Rachel <i>did</i> 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&mdash;much better, Helen thought, than she ought to&mdash;and was as
+ready to let Helen alone as Helen was to let her alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;as at this
+moment&mdash;absolutely nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;Richmond being an
+awkward place to reach,&mdash;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&rsquo;s cross, a topic only fitfully interesting
+to one whose mind reached other stages at other times.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<i>Tristan</i>:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+In shrinking trepidation<br />
+His shame he seems to hide<br />
+While to the king his relation<br />
+He brings the corpse-like Bride.<br />
+Seems it so senseless what I say?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She cried that it did, and threw down the book. Next she had picked up
+<i>Cowper&rsquo;s Letters</i>, 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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aunt Lucy,&rdquo; she volunteered, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like the smell
+of broom; it reminds me of funerals.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense, Rachel,&rdquo; Aunt Lucy replied; &ldquo;don&rsquo;t say such
+foolish things, dear. I always think it a particularly cheerful plant.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,
+&ldquo;And, of course, at half-past ten in the morning one expects to find the
+housemaid brushing the stairs.&rdquo; 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,
+&ldquo;Are you f-f-fond of Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Lucy?&rdquo; to which her aunt
+replied, with her nervous hen-like twitter of a laugh, &ldquo;My dear child,
+what questions you do ask!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How fond? Very fond!&rdquo; Rachel pursued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t say I&rsquo;ve ever thought &lsquo;how,&rsquo;&rdquo; said
+Miss Vinrace. &ldquo;If one cares one doesn&rsquo;t think &lsquo;how,&rsquo;
+Rachel,&rdquo; which was aimed at the niece who had never yet
+&ldquo;come&rdquo; to her aunts as cordially as they wished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you know I care for you, don&rsquo;t you, dear, because you&rsquo;re
+your mother&rsquo;s daughter, if for no other reason, and there <i>are</i>
+plenty of other reasons&rdquo;&mdash;and she leant over and kissed her with
+some emotion, and the argument was spilt irretrievably about the place like a
+bucket of milk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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&mdash;her aunts, the Hunts, Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the
+rest&mdash;be symbols,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<p>
+Early next morning there was a sound as of chains being drawn roughly overhead;
+the steady heart of the <i>Euphrosyne</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As soon as breakfast was done, Willoughby disappeared over the vessel&rsquo;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&rsquo;clock that afternoon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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&mdash;and O Lord, little Jackson had confessed to a confounded piece of
+weakness&mdash;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, &ldquo;Mr. and Mrs. Richard Dalloway, 23 Browne
+Street, Mayfair.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Richard Dalloway,&rdquo; continued Vinrace, &ldquo;seems to be a
+gentleman who thinks that because he was once a member of Parliament, and his
+wife&rsquo;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&mdash;produced a letter from Lord Glenaway, asking me as a personal
+favour&mdash;overruled any objections Jackson made (I don&rsquo;t believe they
+came to much), and so there&rsquo;s nothing for it but to submit, I
+suppose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was evident that for some reason or other Willoughby was quite pleased
+to submit, although he made a show of growling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Expect to hear of me next in Petersburg or Teheran,&rdquo; he had said,
+turning to wave farewell from the steps of the Travellers&rsquo;. 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 &ldquo;unique interest.&rdquo; Richard had audiences with
+ministers, and foretold a crisis at no distant date, &ldquo;the foundations of
+government being incurably corrupt. Yet how blame, etc.&rdquo;; while Clarissa
+inspected the royal stables, and took several snapshots showing men now exiled
+and windows now broken. Among other things she photographed Fielding&rsquo;s
+grave, and let loose a small bird which some ruffian had trapped,
+&ldquo;because one hates to think of anything in a cage where English people
+lie buried,&rdquo; the diary stated. Their tour was thoroughly unconventional,
+and followed no meditated plan. The foreign correspondents of the <i>Times</i>
+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 <i>Euphrosyne</i>, 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. &ldquo;By special arrangement,&rdquo; 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 <i>Euphrosyne</i>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s so like Whistler!&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If one can give men a room to themselves where they will sit, it&rsquo;s
+all to the good. Arm-chairs are <i>the</i> important things&mdash;&rdquo; She
+began wheeling them about. &ldquo;Now, does it still look like a bar at a
+railway station?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She whipped a plush cover off a table. The appearance of the place was
+marvellously improved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+However, punctuality had been impressed on her, and whatever face she had, she
+must go in to dinner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s my brother-in-law, Ambrose, the scholar (I daresay
+you&rsquo;ve heard his name), his wife, my old friend Pepper, a very quiet
+fellow, but knows everything, I&rsquo;m told. And that&rsquo;s all. We&rsquo;re
+a very small party. I&rsquo;m dropping them on the coast.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Dalloway, with her head a little on one side, did her best to recollect
+Ambrose&mdash;was it a surname?&mdash;but failed. She was made slightly uneasy
+by what she had heard. She knew that scholars married any one&mdash;girls they
+met in farms on reading parties; or little suburban women who said
+disagreeably, &ldquo;Of course I know it&rsquo;s my husband you want; not
+<i>me</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But after all,&rdquo; Clarissa thought to herself as she followed
+Vinrace in to dinner, &ldquo;<i>every one&rsquo;s</i> interesting
+really.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But somewhat dangerous to navigation,&rdquo; boomed Richard, in the
+bass, like the bassoon to the flourish of his wife&rsquo;s violin. &ldquo;Why,
+weeds can be bad enough, can&rsquo;t they, Vinrace? I remember crossing in the
+<i>Mauretania</i> once, and saying to the Captain&mdash;Richards&mdash;did you
+know him?&mdash;&lsquo;Now tell me what perils you really dread most for your
+ship, Captain Richards?&rsquo; expecting him to say icebergs, or derelicts, or
+fog, or something of that sort. Not a bit of it. I&rsquo;ve always remembered
+his answer. &lsquo;<i>Sedgius aquatici</i>,&rsquo; he said, which I take to be
+a kind of duck-weed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pepper looked up sharply, and was about to put a question when Willoughby
+continued:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;ve an awful time of it&mdash;those captains! Three thousand
+souls on board!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, indeed,&rdquo; said Clarissa. She turned to Helen with an air of
+profundity. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m convinced people are wrong when they say
+it&rsquo;s work that wears one; it&rsquo;s responsibility. That&rsquo;s why one
+pays one&rsquo;s cook more than one&rsquo;s housemaid, I suppose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;According to that, one ought to pay one&rsquo;s nurse double; but one
+doesn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; but think what a joy to have to do with babies, instead of
+saucepans!&rdquo; said Mrs. Dalloway, looking with more interest at Helen, a
+probable mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d much rather be a cook than a nurse,&rdquo; said Helen.
+&ldquo;Nothing would induce me to take charge of children.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mothers always exaggerate,&rdquo; said Ridley. &ldquo;A well-bred child
+is no responsibility. I&rsquo;ve travelled all over Europe with mine. You just
+wrap &rsquo;em up warm and put &rsquo;em in the rack.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen laughed at that. Mrs. Dalloway exclaimed, looking at Ridley:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How like a father! My husband&rsquo;s just the same. And then one talks
+of the equality of the sexes!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Does one?&rdquo; said Mr. Pepper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, some do!&rdquo; cried Clarissa. &ldquo;My husband had to pass an
+irate lady every afternoon last session who said nothing else, I
+imagine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She sat outside the house; it was very awkward,&rdquo; said Dalloway.
+&ldquo;At last I plucked up courage and said to her, &lsquo;My good creature,
+you&rsquo;re only in the way where you are. You&rsquo;re hindering me, and
+you&rsquo;re doing no good to yourself.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And then she caught him by the coat, and would have scratched his eyes
+out&mdash;&rdquo; Mrs. Dalloway put in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pooh&mdash;that&rsquo;s been exaggerated,&rdquo; said Richard.
+&ldquo;No, I pity them, I confess. The discomfort of sitting on those steps
+must be awful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Serve them right,&rdquo; said Willoughby curtly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m entirely with you there,&rdquo; said Dalloway.
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;s all I say.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The solemnity of her husband&rsquo;s assertion made Clarissa grave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s unthinkable,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me
+you&rsquo;re a suffragist?&rdquo; she turned to Ridley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care a fig one way or t&rsquo;other,&rdquo; said Ambrose.
+&ldquo;If any creature is so deluded as to think that a vote does him or her
+any good, let him have it. He&rsquo;ll soon learn better.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not a politician, I see,&rdquo; she smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Goodness, no,&rdquo; said Ridley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid your husband won&rsquo;t approve of me,&rdquo; said
+Dalloway aside, to Mrs. Ambrose. She suddenly recollected that he had been in
+Parliament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you ever find it rather dull?&rdquo; she asked, not knowing
+exactly what to say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard spread his hands before him, as if inscriptions were to be read in the
+palms of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you ask me whether I ever find it rather dull,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;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, &lsquo;The Politician&rsquo;s.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Bar or politics, I agree,&rdquo; said Willoughby. &ldquo;You get
+more run for your money.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All one&rsquo;s faculties have their play,&rdquo; said Richard. &ldquo;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&rsquo;t be beaten&mdash;granted;
+but off your own lines&mdash;puff&mdash;one has to make allowances. Now, I
+shouldn&rsquo;t like to think that any one had to make allowances for
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t quite agree, Richard,&rdquo; said Mrs. Dalloway.
+&ldquo;Think of Shelley. I feel that there&rsquo;s almost everything one wants
+in &lsquo;Adonais.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Read &lsquo;Adonais&rsquo; by all means,&rdquo; Richard conceded.
+&ldquo;But whenever I hear of Shelley I repeat to myself the words of Matthew
+Arnold, &lsquo;What a set! What a set!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This roused Ridley&rsquo;s attention. &ldquo;Matthew Arnold? A detestable
+prig!&rdquo; he snapped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A prig&mdash;granted,&rdquo; said Richard; &ldquo;but, I think a man of
+the world. That&rsquo;s where my point comes in. We politicians doubtless seem
+to you&rdquo; (he grasped somehow that Helen was the representative of the
+arts) &ldquo;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
+<i>find</i> things in a mess, shrug their shoulders, turn aside to their
+visions&mdash;which I grant may be very beautiful&mdash;and <i>leave</i> things
+in a mess. Now that seems to me evading one&rsquo;s responsibilities. Besides,
+we aren&rsquo;t all born with the artistic faculty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s dreadful,&rdquo; said Mrs. Dalloway, who, while her husband
+spoke, had been thinking. &ldquo;When I&rsquo;m with artists I feel so
+intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one&rsquo;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, &lsquo;No, I <i>can&rsquo;t</i> shut myself
+up&mdash;I <i>won&rsquo;t</i> 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.&rsquo; Don&rsquo;t you feel,&rdquo; she wound up, addressing Helen,
+&ldquo;that life&rsquo;s a perpetual conflict?&rdquo; Helen considered for a
+moment. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I own,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that I shall never forget the
+<i>Antigone</i>. I saw it at Cambridge years ago, and it&rsquo;s haunted me
+ever since. Don&rsquo;t you think it&rsquo;s quite the most modern thing you
+ever saw?&rdquo; she asked Ridley. &ldquo;It seemed to me I&rsquo;d known
+twenty Clytemnestras. Old Lady Ditchling for one. I don&rsquo;t know a word of
+Greek, but I could listen to it for ever&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here Mr. Pepper struck up:
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+&#960;&#959;&#955;&#955;&#8048; &#964;&#8048; &#948;&#949;&#953;&#957;&#940;,
+&#954;&#959;&#8016;&#948;&#8050;&#957; &#7936;&#957;-<br />
+&#952;&#961;&#974;&#960;&#959;&#965;
+&#948;&#949;&#953;&#957;&#972;&#964;&#949;&#961;&#959;&#957;
+&#960;&#941;&#955;&#949;&#953;.<br />
+&#964;&#959;&#8166;&#964;&#959; &#954;&#945;&#8054;
+&#960;&#959;&#955;&#953;&#959;&#8166; &#960;&#941;&#961;&#945;&#957;<br />
+&#960;&#972;&#957;&#964;&#959;&#965;
+&#967;&#949;&#953;&#956;&#949;&#961;&#943;&#8179;
+&#957;&#972;&#964;&#8179;<br />
+&#967;&#969;&#961;&#949;&#8150;,
+&#960;&#949;&#961;&#953;&#946;&#961;&#965;&#967;&#943;&#959;&#953;&#963;&#953;<br />
+&#960;&#949;&#961;&#8182;&#957; &#8017;&#960;&#8125;
+&#959;&#7988;&#948;&#956;&#945;&#963;&#953;.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Dalloway looked at him with compressed lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d give ten years of my life to know Greek,&rdquo; she said, when
+he had done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I could teach you the alphabet in half an hour,&rdquo; said Ridley,
+&ldquo;and you&rsquo;d read Homer in a month. I should think it an honour to
+instruct you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ridley engaged her to come to-morrow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If only your ship is going to treat us kindly!&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m dreadfully bad; and my husband&rsquo;s not very good,&rdquo;
+sighed Clarissa.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am never sick,&rdquo; Richard explained. &ldquo;At least, I have only
+been actually sick once,&rdquo; he corrected himself. &ldquo;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, &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t&rsquo;; you take a mouthful, and
+Lord knows how you&rsquo;re going to swallow it; but persevere, and you often
+settle the attack for good. My wife&rsquo;s a coward.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were pushing back their chairs. The ladies were hesitating at the doorway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d better show the way,&rdquo; said Helen, advancing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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, &ldquo;She said we lived in a world of our own. It&rsquo;s true.
+We&rsquo;re perfectly absurd.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We sit in here,&rdquo; said Helen, opening the door of the saloon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You play?&rdquo; said Mrs. Dalloway to Mrs. Ambrose, taking up the score
+of <i>Tristan</i> which lay on the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My niece does,&rdquo; said Helen, laying her hand on Rachel&rsquo;s
+shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, how I envy you!&rdquo; Clarissa addressed Rachel for the first time.
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you remember this? Isn&rsquo;t it divine?&rdquo; She played a
+bar or two with ringed fingers upon the page.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And then Tristan goes like this, and Isolde&mdash;oh!&mdash;it&rsquo;s
+all too thrilling! Have you been to Bayreuth?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I haven&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then that&rsquo;s still to come. I shall never forget my first
+<i>Parsifal</i>&mdash;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&rsquo;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&rdquo; (she touched her throat). &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like nothing else in
+the world! But where&rsquo;s your piano?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s in another room,&rdquo; Rachel explained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you will play to us?&rdquo; Clarissa entreated. &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t
+imagine anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to
+music&mdash;only that sounds too like a schoolgirl! You know,&rdquo; she said,
+turning to Helen, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think music&rsquo;s altogether good for
+people&mdash;I&rsquo;m afraid not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too great a strain?&rdquo; asked Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too emotional, somehow,&rdquo; said Clarissa. &ldquo;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&rsquo;t you hate the kind of attitudes people
+go into over Wagner&mdash;like this&mdash;&rdquo; She cast her eyes to the
+ceiling, clasped her hands, and assumed a look of intensity. &ldquo;It really
+doesn&rsquo;t mean that they appreciate him; in fact, I always think it&rsquo;s
+the other way round. The people who really care about an art are always the
+least affected. D&rsquo;you know Henry Philips, the painter?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have seen him,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To look at, one might think he was a successful stockbroker, and not one
+of the greatest painters of the age. That&rsquo;s what I like.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are a great many successful stockbrokers, if you like looking at
+them,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel wished vehemently that her aunt would not be so perverse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When you see a musician with long hair, don&rsquo;t you know
+instinctively that he&rsquo;s bad?&rdquo; Clarissa asked, turning to Rachel.
+&ldquo;Watts and Joachim&mdash;they looked just like you and me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And how much nicer they&rsquo;d have looked with curls!&rdquo; said
+Helen. &ldquo;The question is, are you going to aim at beauty or are you
+not?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cleanliness!&rdquo; said Clarissa, &ldquo;I do want a man to look
+clean!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By cleanliness you really mean well-cut clothes,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s something one knows a gentleman by,&rdquo; said Clarissa,
+&ldquo;but one can&rsquo;t say what it is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take my husband now, does he look like a gentleman?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The question seemed to Clarissa in extraordinarily bad taste. &ldquo;One of the
+things that can&rsquo;t be said,&rdquo; she would have put it. She could find
+no answer, but a laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, anyhow,&rdquo; she said, turning to Rachel, &ldquo;I shall insist
+upon your playing to me to-morrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was that in her manner that made Rachel love her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Dalloway hid a tiny yawn, a mere dilation of the nostrils.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you know,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m extraordinarily
+sleepy. It&rsquo;s the sea air. I think I shall escape.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man&rsquo;s voice, which she took to be that of Mr. Pepper, strident in
+discussion, and advancing upon the saloon, gave her the alarm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-night&mdash;good-night!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Oh, I know my
+way&mdash;do pray for calm! Good-night!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Picture us, my dear, afloat in the very oddest ship you can imagine. It&rsquo;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&rsquo;s the manager of the
+line&mdash;called Vinrace&mdash;a nice big Englishman, doesn&rsquo;t say
+much&mdash;you know the sort. As for the rest&mdash;they might have come
+trailing out of an old number of <i>Punch</i>. They&rsquo;re like people
+playing croquet in the &rsquo;sixties. How long they&rsquo;ve all been shut up
+in this ship I don&rsquo;t know&mdash;years and years I should say&mdash;but
+one feels as though one had boarded a little separate world, and they&rsquo;d
+never been on shore, or done ordinary things in their lives. It&rsquo;s what
+I&rsquo;ve always said about literary people&mdash;they&rsquo;re far the
+hardest of any to get on with. The worst of it is, these people&mdash;a man and
+his wife and a niece&mdash;might have been, one feels, just like everybody
+else, if they hadn&rsquo;t got swallowed up by Oxford or Cambridge or some such
+place, and been made cranks of. The man&rsquo;s really delightful (if
+he&rsquo;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&rsquo;s. They talk about art, and think us such poops for dressing in
+the evening. However, I can&rsquo;t help that; I&rsquo;d rather die than come
+in to dinner without changing&mdash;wouldn&rsquo;t you? It matters ever so much
+more than the soup. (It&rsquo;s odd how things like that <i>do</i> matter so
+much more than what&rsquo;s generally supposed to matter. I&rsquo;d rather have
+my head cut off than wear flannel next the skin.) Then there&rsquo;s a nice shy
+girl&mdash;poor thing&mdash;I wish one could rake her out before it&rsquo;s too
+late. She has quite nice eyes and hair, only, of course, she&rsquo;ll get funny
+too. We ought to start a society for broadening the minds of the
+young&mdash;much more useful than missionaries, Hester! Oh, I&rsquo;d forgotten
+there&rsquo;s a dreadful little thing called Pepper. He&rsquo;s just like his
+name. He&rsquo;s indescribably insignificant, and rather queer in his temper,
+poor dear. It&rsquo;s like sitting down to dinner with an ill-conditioned
+fox-terrier, only one can&rsquo;t comb him out, and sprinkle him with powder,
+as one would one&rsquo;s dog. It&rsquo;s a pity, sometimes, one can&rsquo;t
+treat people like dogs! The great comfort is that we&rsquo;re away from
+newspapers, so that Richard will have a real holiday this time. Spain
+wasn&rsquo;t a holiday. . . .
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;You coward!&rdquo; said Richard, almost filling the room with his sturdy
+figure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did my duty at dinner!&rdquo; cried Clarissa.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve let yourself in for the Greek alphabet, anyhow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, my dear! Who <i>is</i> Ambrose?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I gather that he was a Cambridge don; lives in London now, and edits
+classics.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you ever see such a set of cranks? The woman asked me if I thought
+her husband looked like a gentleman!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was hard to keep the ball rolling at dinner, certainly,&rdquo; said
+Richard. &ldquo;Why is it that the women, in that class, are so much queerer
+than the men?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re not half bad-looking,
+really&mdash;only&mdash;they&rsquo;re so odd!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They both laughed, thinking of the same things, so that there was no need to
+compare their impressions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I see I shall have quite a lot to say to Vinrace,&rdquo; said Richard.
+&ldquo;He knows Sutton and all that set. He can tell me a good deal about the
+conditions of ship-building in the North.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m glad. The men always <i>are</i> so much better than the
+women.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One always has something to say to a man certainly,&rdquo; said Richard.
+&ldquo;But I&rsquo;ve no doubt you&rsquo;ll chatter away fast enough about the
+babies, Clarice.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Has she got children? She doesn&rsquo;t look like it somehow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two. A boy and girl.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A pang of envy shot through Mrs. Dalloway&rsquo;s heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We <i>must</i> have a son, Dick,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good Lord, what opportunities there are now for young men!&rdquo; said
+Dalloway, for his talk had set him thinking. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t suppose
+there&rsquo;s been so good an opening since the days of Pitt.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it&rsquo;s yours!&rdquo; said Clarissa.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To be a leader of men,&rdquo; Richard soliloquised. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a
+fine career. My God&mdash;what a career!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The chest slowly curved beneath his waistcoat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you know, Dick, I can&rsquo;t help thinking of England,&rdquo;
+said his wife meditatively, leaning her head against his chest. &ldquo;Being on
+this ship seems to make it so much more vivid&mdash;what it really means to be
+English. One thinks of all we&rsquo;ve done, and our navies, and the people in
+India and Africa, and how we&rsquo;ve gone on century after century, sending
+out boys from little country villages&mdash;and of men like you, Dick, and it
+makes one feel as if one couldn&rsquo;t bear <i>not</i> 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&rsquo;s what one means by London.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the continuity,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s taken a long time, but we&rsquo;ve pretty nearly done
+it,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;it remains to consolidate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And these people don&rsquo;t see it!&rdquo; Clarissa exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It takes all sorts to make a world,&rdquo; said her husband.
+&ldquo;There would never be a government if there weren&rsquo;t an
+opposition.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dick, you&rsquo;re better than I am,&rdquo; said Clarissa. &ldquo;You
+see round, where I only see <i>there</i>.&rdquo; She pressed a point on the
+back of his hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s my business, as I tried to explain at dinner.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What I like about you, Dick,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;is that
+you&rsquo;re always the same, and I&rsquo;m a creature of moods.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re a pretty creature, anyhow,&rdquo; he said, gazing at her
+with deeper eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You think so, do you? Then kiss me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He kissed her passionately, so that her half-written letter slid to the ground.
+Picking it up, he read it without asking leave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s your pen?&rdquo; he said; and added in his little
+masculine hand:
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+R.D. <i>loquitur</i>: 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. . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;That
+is the type of lady with whom I find myself distinctly out of sympathy.
+She&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But neither Richard nor Clarissa profited by the verdict, for directly it
+seemed likely that they would overhear, Richard crackled a sheet of paper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I often wonder,&rdquo; Clarissa mused in bed, over the little white
+volume of Pascal which went with her everywhere, &ldquo;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&rsquo;t do
+without <i>something</i>.&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s faces, and hear whatever
+they chanced to say.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap04"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do think that to be a sailor must be the finest thing in the
+world!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what d&rsquo;you know about it?&rdquo; said Mr. Grice, kindling in a
+strange manner. &ldquo;Pardon me. What does any man or woman brought up in
+England know about the sea? They profess to know; but they don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;men and women standing in line hour after hour to
+receive a mug of greasy soup. &ldquo;And I thought of the good flesh down here
+waiting and asking to be caught. I&rsquo;m not exactly a Protestant, and
+I&rsquo;m not a Catholic, but I could almost pray for the days of popery to
+come again&mdash;because of the fasts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he talked he kept opening drawers and moving little glass jars. Here were
+the treasures which the great ocean had bestowed upon him&mdash;pale fish in
+greenish liquids, blobs of jelly with streaming tresses, fish with lights in
+their heads, they lived so deep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They have swum about among bones,&rdquo; Clarissa sighed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re thinking of Shakespeare,&rdquo; said Mr. Grice, and taking
+down a copy from a shelf well lined with books, recited in an emphatic nasal
+voice:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Full fathom five thy father lies,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A grand fellow, Shakespeare,&rdquo; he said, replacing the volume.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clarissa was so glad to hear him say so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which is your favourite play? I wonder if it&rsquo;s the same as
+mine?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Henry the Fifth</i>,&rdquo; said Mr. Grice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Joy!&rdquo; cried Clarissa. &ldquo;It is!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Hamlet</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve had the most interesting talk of my life!&rdquo; she
+exclaimed, taking her seat beside Willoughby. &ldquo;D&rsquo;you realise that
+one of your men is a philosopher and a poet?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A very interesting fellow&mdash;that&rsquo;s what I always say,&rdquo;
+said Willoughby, distinguishing Mr. Grice. &ldquo;Though Rachel finds him a
+bore.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a bore when he talks about currents,&rdquo; said Rachel. Her
+eyes were full of sleep, but Mrs. Dalloway still seemed to her wonderful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never met a bore yet!&rdquo; said Clarissa.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I should say the world was full of them!&rdquo; exclaimed Helen. But
+her beauty, which was radiant in the morning light, took the contrariness from
+her words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I agree that it&rsquo;s the worst one can possibly say of any
+one,&rdquo; said Clarissa. &ldquo;How much rather one would be a murderer than
+a bore!&rdquo; she added, with her usual air of saying something profound.
+&ldquo;One can fancy liking a murderer. It&rsquo;s the same with dogs. Some
+dogs are awful bores, poor dears.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It happened that Richard was sitting next to Rachel. She was curiously
+conscious of his presence and appearance&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We had a dog who was a bore and knew it,&rdquo; he said, addressing her
+in cool, easy tones. &ldquo;He was a Skye terrier, one of those long chaps,
+with little feet poking out from their hair like&mdash;like
+caterpillars&mdash;no, like sofas I should say. Well, we had another dog at the
+same time, a black brisk animal&mdash;a Schipperke, I think, you call them. You
+can&rsquo;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,
+&lsquo;You don&rsquo;t really mean it, do you?&rsquo; and the Schipperke as
+quick as a knife. I liked the Skye best, I must confess. There was something
+pathetic about him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The story seemed to have no climax.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What happened to him?&rdquo; Rachel asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a very sad story,&rdquo; said Richard, lowering his voice
+and peeling an apple. &ldquo;He followed my wife in the car one day and got run
+over by a brute of a cyclist.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Was he killed?&rdquo; asked Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Clarissa at her end of the table had overheard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t talk of it!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a thing I
+can&rsquo;t bear to think of to this day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Surely the tears stood in her eyes?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the painful thing about pets,&rdquo; said Mr. Dalloway;
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;t make one
+any the less sorry. Here lies the duck that Samuel Johnson sat on, eh? I was
+big for my age.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then we had canaries,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;a pair of ring-doves,
+a lemur, and at one time a martin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you live in the country?&rdquo; Rachel asked him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We lived in the country for six months of the year. When I say
+&lsquo;we&rsquo; I mean four sisters, a brother, and myself. There&rsquo;s
+nothing like coming of a large family. Sisters particularly are
+delightful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dick, you were horribly spoilt!&rdquo; cried Clarissa across the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no. Appreciated,&rdquo; said Richard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Please tell me&mdash;everything.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The talk meanwhile raced past her, and when Richard suddenly stated in a
+jocular tone of voice, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure Miss Vinrace, now, has secret
+leanings towards Catholicism,&rdquo; she had no idea what to answer, and Helen
+could not help laughing at the start she gave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+However, breakfast was over and Mrs. Dalloway was rising. &ldquo;I always think
+religion&rsquo;s like collecting beetles,&rdquo; she said, summing up the
+discussion as she went up the stairs with Helen. &ldquo;One person has a
+passion for black beetles; another hasn&rsquo;t; it&rsquo;s no good arguing
+about it. What&rsquo;s <i>your</i> black beetle now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose it&rsquo;s my children,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah&mdash;that&rsquo;s different,&rdquo; Clarissa breathed. &ldquo;Do
+tell me. You have a boy, haven&rsquo;t you? Isn&rsquo;t it detestable, leaving
+them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Purcell&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let me interrupt,&rdquo; Clarissa implored. &ldquo;I heard
+you playing, and I couldn&rsquo;t resist. I adore Bach!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel flushed and fumbled her fingers in her lap. She stood up awkwardly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too difficult,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you were playing quite splendidly! I ought to have stayed
+outside.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She slid <i>Cowper&rsquo;s Letters</i> and <i>Wuthering Heights</i> out of the
+arm-chair, so that Clarissa was invited to sit there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What a dear little room!&rdquo; she said, looking round. &ldquo;Oh,
+<i>Cowper&rsquo;s Letters</i>! I&rsquo;ve never read them. Are they
+nice?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rather dull,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He wrote awfully well, didn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo; said Clarissa;
+&ldquo;&mdash;if one likes that kind of thing&mdash;finished his sentences and
+all that. <i>Wuthering Heights</i>! Ah&mdash;that&rsquo;s more in my line. I
+really couldn&rsquo;t exist without the Brontes! Don&rsquo;t you love them?
+Still, on the whole, I&rsquo;d rather live without them than without Jane
+Austen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed an extraordinary
+degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Jane Austen? I don&rsquo;t like Jane Austen,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You monster!&rdquo; Clarissa exclaimed. &ldquo;I can only just forgive
+you. Tell me why?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s so&mdash;so&mdash;well, so like a tight plait,&rdquo; Rachel
+floundered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah&mdash;I see what you mean. But I don&rsquo;t agree. And you
+won&rsquo;t when you&rsquo;re older. At your age I only liked Shelley. I can
+remember sobbing over him in the garden.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+He has outsoared the shadow of our night,<br />
+Envy and calumny and hate and pain&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+you remember?
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Can touch him not and torture not again<br />
+From the contagion of the world&rsquo;s slow stain.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+How divine!&mdash;and yet what nonsense!&rdquo; She looked lightly round the
+room. &ldquo;I always think it&rsquo;s <i>living</i>, not dying, that counts. I
+really respect some snuffy old stockbroker who&rsquo;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&mdash;I assure you I know heaps
+like that&mdash;well, they seem to me <i>really</i> nobler than poets whom
+every one worships, just because they&rsquo;re geniuses and die young. But I
+don&rsquo;t expect <i>you</i> to agree with me!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She pressed Rachel&rsquo;s shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Um-m-m&mdash;&rdquo; she went on quoting&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Unrest which men miscall delight&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+&ldquo;when you&rsquo;re my age you&rsquo;ll see that the world is
+<i>crammed</i> with delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake
+about that&mdash;not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that
+happiness is the only thing that counts. I don&rsquo;t know you well enough to
+say, but I should guess you might be a little inclined to&mdash;when
+one&rsquo;s young and attractive&mdash;I&rsquo;m going to say
+it!&mdash;<i>every</i>thing&rsquo;s at one&rsquo;s feet.&rdquo; She glanced
+round as much as to say, &ldquo;not only a few stuffy books and Bach.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I long to ask questions,&rdquo; she continued. &ldquo;You interest me so
+much. If I&rsquo;m impertinent, you must just box my ears.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I&mdash;I want to ask questions,&rdquo; said Rachel with such
+earnestness that Mrs. Dalloway had to check her smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you mind if we walk?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The air&rsquo;s so
+delicious.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She snuffed it like a racehorse as they shut the door and stood on deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it good to be alive?&rdquo; she exclaimed, and drew
+Rachel&rsquo;s arm within hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look, look! How exquisite!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Honestly, though,&rdquo; said Clarissa, having looked, &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t like views. They&rsquo;re too inhuman.&rdquo; They walked on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How odd it is!&rdquo; she continued impulsively. &ldquo;This time
+yesterday we&rsquo;d never met. I was packing in a stuffy little room in the
+hotel. We know absolutely nothing about each other&mdash;and yet&mdash;I feel
+as if I <i>did</i> know you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have children&mdash;your husband was in Parliament?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve never been to school, and you live&mdash;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;With my aunts at Richmond.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Richmond?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see, my aunts like the Park. They like the quiet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you don&rsquo;t! I understand!&rdquo; Clarissa laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I like walking in the Park alone; but not&mdash;with the dogs,&rdquo;
+she finished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; and some people <i>are</i> dogs; aren&rsquo;t they?&rdquo; said
+Clarissa, as if she had guessed a secret. &ldquo;But not every one&mdash;oh no,
+not every one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not every one,&rdquo; said Rachel, and stopped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can quite imagine you walking alone,&rdquo; said Clarissa: &ldquo;and
+thinking&mdash;in a little world of your own. But how you will enjoy
+it&mdash;some day!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall enjoy walking with a man&mdash;is that what you mean?&rdquo;
+said Rachel, regarding Mrs. Dalloway with her large enquiring eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wasn&rsquo;t thinking of a man particularly,&rdquo; said Clarissa.
+&ldquo;But you will.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. I shall never marry,&rdquo; Rachel determined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t be so sure of that,&rdquo; said Clarissa. Her sidelong
+glance told Rachel that she found her attractive although she was inexplicably
+amused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why do people marry?&rdquo; Rachel asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what you&rsquo;re going to find out,&rdquo; Clarissa
+laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing like it,&rdquo; she concluded. &ldquo;Do tell me
+about the Ambroses. Or am I asking too many questions?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I find you easy to talk to,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The short sketch of the Ambroses was, however, somewhat perfunctory, and
+contained little but the fact that Mr. Ambrose was her uncle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your mother&rsquo;s brother?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When a name has dropped out of use, the lightest touch upon it tells. Mrs.
+Dalloway went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you like your mother?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; she was different,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was overcome by an intense desire to tell Mrs. Dalloway things she had
+never told any one&mdash;things she had not realised herself until this moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am lonely,&rdquo; she began. &ldquo;I want&mdash;&rdquo; She did not
+know what she wanted, so that she could not finish the sentence; but her lip
+quivered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it seemed that Mrs. Dalloway was able to understand without words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know,&rdquo; she said, actually putting one arm round Rachel&rsquo;s
+shoulder. &ldquo;When I was your age I wanted too. No one understood until I
+met Richard. He gave me all I wanted. He&rsquo;s man and woman as well.&rdquo;
+Her eyes rested upon Mr. Dalloway, leaning upon the rail, still talking.
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t think I say that because I&rsquo;m his wife&mdash;I see his
+faults more clearly than I see any one else&rsquo;s. What one wants in the
+person one lives with is that they should keep one at one&rsquo;s best. I often
+wonder what I&rsquo;ve done to be so happy!&rdquo; she exclaimed, and a tear
+slid down her cheek. She wiped it away, squeezed Rachel&rsquo;s hand, and
+exclaimed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How good life is!&rdquo; At that moment, standing out in the fresh
+breeze, with the sun upon the waves, and Mrs. Dalloway&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Observe my Panama,&rdquo; he said, touching the brim of his hat.
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; Three chairs in a row invited them to
+be seated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leaning back, Richard surveyed the waves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a very pretty blue,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But
+there&rsquo;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&mdash;it must be
+a fine day, mark you&mdash;A rug?&mdash;Oh, thank you, my dear . . . in that
+case you have also the advantage of associations&mdash;the Past.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you want to talk, Dick, or shall I read aloud?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clarissa had fetched a book with the rugs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Persuasion</i>,&rdquo; announced Richard, examining the volume.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s for Miss Vinrace,&rdquo; said Clarissa. &ldquo;She
+can&rsquo;t bear our beloved Jane.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&mdash;if I may say so&mdash;is because you have not read
+her,&rdquo; said Richard. &ldquo;She is incomparably the greatest female writer
+we possess.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She is the greatest,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;and for this reason:
+she does not attempt to write like a man. Every other woman does; on that
+account, I don&rsquo;t read &rsquo;em.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Produce your instances, Miss Vinrace,&rdquo; he went on, joining his
+finger-tips. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m ready to be converted.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He waited, while Rachel vainly tried to vindicate her sex from the slight he
+put upon it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid he&rsquo;s right,&rdquo; said Clarissa. &ldquo;He
+generally is&mdash;the wretch!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I brought <i>Persuasion</i>,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;because I
+thought it was a little less threadbare than the others&mdash;though, Dick,
+it&rsquo;s no good <i>your</i> pretending to know Jane by heart, considering
+that she always sends you to sleep!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After the labours of legislation, I deserve sleep,&rdquo; said Richard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not to think about those guns,&rdquo; said Clarissa, seeing
+that his eye, passing over the waves, still sought the land meditatively,
+&ldquo;or about navies, or empires, or anything.&rdquo; So saying she opened
+the book and began to read:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Sir Walter Elliott, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man
+who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the
+<i>Baronetage</i>&rsquo;&mdash;don&rsquo;t you know Sir
+Walter?&mdash;&lsquo;There he found occupation for an idle hour, and
+consolation in a distressed one.&rsquo; She does write well, doesn&rsquo;t she?
+&lsquo;There&mdash;&rsquo;&rdquo; She read on in a light humorous voice. She
+was determined that Sir Walter should take her husband&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Triumph!&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;Mr. Grice wished
+to know if it was convenient,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sisters and a dormouse and some canaries,&rdquo; Rachel murmured, never
+taking her eyes off him. &ldquo;I wonder, I wonder.&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose I&rsquo;ve been dozing,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s
+happened to everyone? Clarissa?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Dalloway has gone to look at Mr. Grice&rsquo;s fish,&rdquo; Rachel
+replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I might have guessed,&rdquo; said Richard. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a common
+occurrence. And how have you improved the shining hour? Have you become a
+convert?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;ve read a line,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When you were walking?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Walking&mdash;riding&mdash;yachting&mdash;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&rsquo;s. He
+thought it broadening to the mind. I think I agree with him. I can
+remember&mdash;what an age ago it seems!&mdash;settling the basis of a future
+state with the present Secretary for India. We thought ourselves very wise.
+I&rsquo;m not sure we weren&rsquo;t. We were happy, Miss Vinrace, and we were
+young&mdash;gifts which make for wisdom.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you done what you said you&rsquo;d do?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A searching question! I answer&mdash;Yes and No. If on the one hand I
+have not accomplished what I set out to accomplish&mdash;which of us
+does!&mdash;on the other I can fairly say this: I have not lowered my
+ideal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked resolutely at a sea-gull, as though his ideal flew on the wings of
+the bird.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But,&rdquo; said Rachel, &ldquo;what <i>is</i> your ideal?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There you ask too much, Miss Vinrace,&rdquo; said Richard playfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She could only say that she wanted to know, and Richard was sufficiently amused
+to answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, how shall I reply? In one word&mdash;Unity. Unity of aim, of
+dominion, of progress. The dispersion of the best ideas over the greatest
+area.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The English?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I grant that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most men, their
+records cleaner. But, good Lord, don&rsquo;t run away with the idea that I
+don&rsquo;t see the drawbacks&mdash;horrors&mdash;unmentionable things done in
+our very midst! I&rsquo;m under no illusions. Few people, I suppose, have fewer
+illusions than I have. Have you ever been in a factory, Miss Vinrace!&mdash;No,
+I suppose not&mdash;I may say I hope not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for Rachel, she had scarcely walked through a poor street, and always under
+the escort of father, maid, or aunts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was going to say that if you&rsquo;d ever seen the kind of thing
+that&rsquo;s going on round you, you&rsquo;d understand what it is that makes
+me and men like me politicians. You asked me a moment ago whether I&rsquo;d
+done what I set out to do. Well, when I consider my life, there is one fact I
+admit that I&rsquo;m proud of; owing to me some thousands of girls in
+Lancashire&mdash;and many thousands to come after them&mdash;can spend an hour
+every day in the open air which their mothers had to spend over their looms.
+I&rsquo;m prouder of that, I own, than I should be of writing Keats and Shelley
+into the bargain!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know nothing!&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s far better that you should know nothing,&rdquo; he said
+paternally, &ldquo;and you wrong yourself, I&rsquo;m sure. You play very
+nicely, I&rsquo;m told, and I&rsquo;ve no doubt you&rsquo;ve read heaps of
+learned books.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Elderly banter would no longer check her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You talk of unity,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You ought to make me
+understand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never allow my wife to talk politics,&rdquo; he said seriously.
+&ldquo;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&mdash;what
+you will; her illusions have not been destroyed. She gives me courage to go on.
+The strain of public life is very great,&rdquo; he added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This made him appear a battered martyr, parting every day with some of the
+finest gold, in the service of mankind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t think,&rdquo; Rachel exclaimed, &ldquo;how any one does
+it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Explain, Miss Vinrace,&rdquo; said Richard. &ldquo;This is a matter I
+want to clear up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It seems to me like this,&rdquo; she began, doing her best first to
+recollect and then to expose her shivering private visions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s an old widow in her room, somewhere, let us suppose in the
+suburbs of Leeds.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard bent his head to show that he accepted the widow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In London you&rsquo;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&rsquo;s the mind of the widow&mdash;the affections; those you
+leave untouched. But you waste you own.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If the widow goes to her cupboard and finds it bare,&rdquo; Richard
+answered, &ldquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We don&rsquo;t seem to understand each other,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shall I say something that will make you very angry?&rdquo; he replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vanity, irritation, and a thrusting desire to be understood, urged her to make
+another attempt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; said Richard. &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel considered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you a Liberal or are you a Conservative?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I call myself a Conservative for convenience sake,&rdquo; said Richard,
+smiling. &ldquo;But there is more in common between the two parties than people
+generally allow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a pause, which did not come on Rachel&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you say you lived in the country when you were a child?&rdquo; she
+asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Crude as her manners seemed to him, Richard was flattered. There could be no
+doubt that her interest was genuine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did,&rdquo; he smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what happened?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;Or do I ask too many
+questions?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m flattered, I assure you. But&mdash;let me see&mdash;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&rsquo;s a
+fallacy to think that children are happy. They&rsquo;re not; they&rsquo;re
+unhappy. I&rsquo;ve never suffered so much as I did when I was a child.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t get on well with my father,&rdquo; said Richard shortly.
+&ldquo;He was a very able man, but hard. Well&mdash;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&mdash;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&rsquo;you know, Miss Vinrace, you&rsquo;ve
+made me think? How little, after all, one can tell anybody about one&rsquo;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&rsquo;ve told
+you what every second person you meet might tell you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think so,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the way of
+saying things, isn&rsquo;t it, not the things?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True,&rdquo; said Richard. &ldquo;Perfectly true.&rdquo; He paused.
+&ldquo;When I look back over my life&mdash;I&rsquo;m forty-two&mdash;what are
+the great facts that stand out? What were the revelations, if I may call them
+so? The misery of the poor and&mdash;&rdquo; (he hesitated and pitched over)
+&ldquo;love!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon that word he lowered his voice; it was a word that seemed to unveil the
+skies for Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s an odd thing to say to a young lady,&rdquo; he continued.
+&ldquo;But have you any idea what&mdash;what I mean by that? No, of course not.
+I don&rsquo;t use the word in a conventional sense. I use it as young men use
+it. Girls are kept very ignorant, aren&rsquo;t they? Perhaps it&rsquo;s
+wise&mdash;perhaps&mdash;You <i>don&rsquo;t</i> know?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spoke as if he had lost consciousness of what he was saying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; I don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she said, scarcely speaking above her breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Warships, Dick! Over there! Look!&rdquo; Clarissa, released from Mr.
+Grice, appreciative of all his seaweeds, skimmed towards them, gesticulating.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By George!&rdquo; he exclaimed, and stood shielding his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ours, Dick?&rdquo; said Clarissa.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Mediterranean Fleet,&rdquo; he answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Euphrosyne</i> was slowly dipping her flag. Richard raised his hat.
+Convulsively Clarissa squeezed Rachel&rsquo;s hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you glad to be English!&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;or to
+write bad poetry about it,&rdquo; snarled Pepper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Helen was really wondering why Rachel, sitting silent, looked so queer and
+flushed.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap05"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That beats me,&rdquo; he said, and withdrew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now we are alone once more,&rdquo; remarked William Pepper, looking
+round the table; but no one was ready to engage him in talk, and the meal ended
+in silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the following day they met&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen, on the other hand, staggered to Mrs. Dalloway&rsquo;s door, knocked,
+could not be heard for the slamming of doors and the battering of wind, and
+entered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were basins, of course. Mrs. Dalloway lay half-raised on a pillow, and
+did not open her eyes. Then she murmured, &ldquo;Oh, Dick, is that you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen shouted&mdash;for she was thrown against the washstand&mdash;&ldquo;How
+are you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clarissa opened one eye. It gave her an incredibly dissipated appearance.
+&ldquo;Awful!&rdquo; she gasped. Her lips were white inside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Planting her feet wide, Helen contrived to pour champagne into a tumbler with a
+tooth-brush in it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Champagne,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s a tooth-brush in it,&rdquo; murmured Clarissa, and smiled;
+it might have been the contortion of one weeping. She drank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Disgusting,&rdquo; she whispered, indicating the basins. Relics of
+humour still played over her face like moonshine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Want more?&rdquo; Helen shouted. Speech was again beyond
+Clarissa&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You <i>are</i> good!&rdquo; Clarissa gasped. &ldquo;Horrid mess!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s nice,&rdquo; she gasped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Try a turn with me,&rdquo; Ridley called across to Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Foolish!&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having scrambled twice round the ship and received many sound cuffs from the
+wind, they saw a sailor&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go and get a breath of air, Dick,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You look quite
+washed out. . . . How nice you smell! . . . And be polite to that woman. She
+was so kind to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thereupon Mrs. Dalloway turned to the cool side of her pillow, terribly
+flattened but still invincible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard found Helen talking to her brother-in-law, over two dishes of yellow
+cake and smooth bread and butter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You look very ill!&rdquo; she exclaimed on seeing him. &ldquo;Come and
+have some tea.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He remarked that the hands that moved about the cups were beautiful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hear you&rsquo;ve been very good to my wife,&rdquo; he said.
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s had an awful time of it. You came in and fed her with
+champagne. Were you among the saved yourself?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I? Oh, I haven&rsquo;t been sick for twenty years&mdash;sea-sick, I
+mean.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are three stages of convalescence, I always say,&rdquo; broke in
+the hearty voice of Willoughby. &ldquo;The milk stage, the bread-and-butter
+stage, and the roast-beef stage. I should say you were at the bread-and-butter
+stage.&rdquo; He handed him the plate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, I should advise a hearty tea, then a brisk walk on deck; and by
+dinner-time you&rsquo;ll be clamouring for beef, eh?&rdquo; He went off
+laughing, excusing himself on the score of business.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What a splendid fellow he is!&rdquo; said Richard. &ldquo;Always keen on
+something.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Helen, &ldquo;he&rsquo;s always been like that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is a great undertaking of his,&rdquo; Richard continued.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a business that won&rsquo;t stop with ships, I should say. We
+shall see him in Parliament, or I&rsquo;m much mistaken. He&rsquo;s the kind of
+man we want in Parliament&mdash;the man who has done things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Helen was not much interested in her brother-in-law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I expect your head&rsquo;s aching, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; she asked,
+pouring a fresh cup.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, it is,&rdquo; said Richard. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s humiliating to find
+what a slave one is to one&rsquo;s body in this world. D&rsquo;you know, I can
+never work without a kettle on the hob. As often as not I don&rsquo;t drink
+tea, but I must feel that I can if I want to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s very bad for you,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It shortens one&rsquo;s life; but I&rsquo;m afraid, Mrs. Ambrose, we
+politicians must make up our minds to that at the outset. We&rsquo;ve got to
+burn the candle at both ends, or&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve cooked your goose!&rdquo; said Helen brightly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We can&rsquo;t make you take us seriously, Mrs. Ambrose,&rdquo; he
+protested. &ldquo;May I ask how you&rsquo;ve spent your time?
+Reading&mdash;philosophy?&rdquo; (He saw the black book.) &ldquo;Metaphysics
+and fishing!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;If I had to live again I believe I
+should devote myself to one or the other.&rdquo; He began turning the pages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Good, then, is indefinable,&rsquo;&rdquo; he read out. &ldquo;How
+jolly to think that&rsquo;s going on still! &lsquo;So far as I know there is
+only one ethical writer, Professor Henry Sidgwick, who has clearly recognised
+and stated this fact.&rsquo; That&rsquo;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&mdash;now Secretary for India&mdash;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&mdash;that&rsquo;s another
+matter. Still, it&rsquo;s the arguing that counts. It&rsquo;s things like that
+that stand out in life. Nothing&rsquo;s been quite so vivid since. It&rsquo;s
+the philosophers, it&rsquo;s the scholars,&rdquo; he continued,
+&ldquo;they&rsquo;re the people who pass the torch, who keep the light burning
+by which we live. Being a politician doesn&rsquo;t necessarily blind one to
+that, Mrs. Ambrose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. Why should it?&rdquo; said Helen. &ldquo;But can you remember if
+your wife takes sugar?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She lifted the tray and went off with it to Mrs. Dalloway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+&ldquo;Sorry.&rdquo; &ldquo;Sorry.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My word! What a tempest!&rdquo; he exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fine, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; said Rachel. Certainly the struggle and
+wind had given her a decision she lacked; red was in her cheeks, and her hair
+was down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, what fun!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;What am I sitting on? Is this your
+room? How jolly!&rdquo; &ldquo;There&mdash;sit there,&rdquo; she commanded.
+Cowper slid once more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How jolly to meet again,&rdquo; said Richard. &ldquo;It seems an age.
+<i>Cowper&rsquo;s Letters</i>? . . . Bach? . . . <i>Wuthering Heights</i>? . .
+. 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&rsquo;ve thought
+a lot of our talk. I assure you, you made me think.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I made you think! But why?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What solitary icebergs we are, Miss Vinrace! How little we can
+communicate! There are lots of things I should like to tell you about&mdash;to
+hear your opinion of. Have you ever read Burke?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Burke?&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;Who was Burke?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No? Well, then I shall make a point of sending you a copy. <i>The Speech
+on the French Revolution</i>&mdash;<i>The American Rebellion</i>? Which shall
+it be, I wonder?&rdquo; He noted something in his pocket-book. &ldquo;And then
+you must write and tell me what you think of it. This reticence&mdash;this
+isolation&mdash;that&rsquo;s what&rsquo;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&mdash;why
+haven&rsquo;t we ten lives instead of one? But about yourself?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see, I&rsquo;m a woman,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know&mdash;I know,&rdquo; said Richard, throwing his head back, and
+drawing his fingers across his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How strange to be a woman! A young and beautiful woman,&rdquo; he
+continued sententiously, &ldquo;has the whole world at her feet. That&rsquo;s
+true, Miss Vinrace. You have an inestimable power&mdash;for good or for evil.
+What couldn&rsquo;t you do&mdash;&rdquo; he broke off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What?&rdquo; asked Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have beauty,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You tempt me,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re peaceful,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Beef for Mr. Dalloway!&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;Come now&mdash;after
+that walk you&rsquo;re at the beef stage, Dalloway!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s behaviour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You look tired. Are you tired?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not tired,&rdquo; said Rachel. &ldquo;Oh, yes, I suppose I am
+tired.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap06"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the tragedy of life&mdash;as I always say!&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Dalloway. &ldquo;Beginning things and having to end them. Still, I&rsquo;m not
+going to let <i>this</i> end, if you&rsquo;re willing.&rdquo; It was the
+morning, the sea was calm, and the ship once again was anchored not far from
+another shore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you suppose we shall ever meet in London?&rdquo; said Ridley
+ironically. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have forgotten all about me by the time you
+step out there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pointed to the shore of the little bay, where they could now see the
+separate trees with moving branches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How horrid you are!&rdquo; she laughed. &ldquo;Rachel&rsquo;s coming to
+see me anyhow&mdash;the instant you get back,&rdquo; she said, pressing
+Rachel&rsquo;s arm. &ldquo;Now&mdash;you&rsquo;ve no excuse!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a silver pencil she wrote her name and address on the flyleaf of
+<i>Persuasion</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, it&rsquo;s time,&rdquo; said Clarissa. &ldquo;Well, good-bye. I
+<i>do</i> like you,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, that&rsquo;s over,&rdquo; said Ridley after a long silence.
+&ldquo;We shall never see <i>them</i> again,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come and talk to me instead of practising,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you like those people?&rdquo; Helen asked her casually.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she replied blankly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You talked to him, didn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said nothing for a minute.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He kissed me,&rdquo; she said without any change of tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen started, looked at her, but could not make out what she felt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;M-m-m&rsquo;yes,&rdquo; she said, after a pause. &ldquo;I thought he was
+that kind of man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What kind of man?&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pompous and sentimental.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I like him,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So you really didn&rsquo;t mind?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the first time since Helen had known her Rachel&rsquo;s eyes lit up
+brightly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did mind,&rdquo; she said vehemently. &ldquo;I dreamt. I
+couldn&rsquo;t sleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell me what happened,&rdquo; said Helen. She had to keep her lips from
+twitching as she listened to Rachel&rsquo;s story. It was poured out abruptly
+with great seriousness and no sense of humour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;t know why.&rdquo; As she spoke
+she grew flushed. &ldquo;I was a good deal excited,&rdquo; she continued.
+&ldquo;But I didn&rsquo;t mind till afterwards; when&mdash;&rdquo; she paused,
+and saw the figure of the bloated little man again&mdash;&ldquo;I became
+terrified.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, well,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;He was a silly creature, and if I were
+you, I&rsquo;d think no more about it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Rachel, sitting bolt upright, &ldquo;I shan&rsquo;t do
+that. I shall think about it all day and all night until I find out exactly
+what it does mean.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you ever read?&rdquo; Helen asked tentatively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Cowper&rsquo;s Letters</i>&mdash;that kind of thing. Father gets them
+for me or my Aunts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know many men?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Pepper,&rdquo; said Rachel ironically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So no one&rsquo;s ever wanted to marry you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she answered ingenuously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen reflected that as, from what she had said, Rachel certainly would think
+these things out, it might be as well to help her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You oughtn&rsquo;t to be frightened,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+the most natural thing in the world. Men will want to kiss you, just as
+they&rsquo;ll want to marry you. The pity is to get things out of proportion.
+It&rsquo;s like noticing the noises people make when they eat, or men spitting;
+or, in short, any small thing that gets on one&rsquo;s nerves.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel seemed to be inattentive to these remarks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; she said suddenly, &ldquo;what are those women in
+Piccadilly?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In Picadilly? They are prostituted,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It <i>is</i> terrifying&mdash;it <i>is</i> disgusting,&rdquo; Rachel
+asserted, as if she included Helen in the hatred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is,&rdquo; said Helen. &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did like him,&rdquo; Rachel mused, as if speaking to herself. &ldquo;I
+wanted to talk to him; I wanted to know what he&rsquo;d done. The women in
+Lancashire&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The softening of her mood was apparent to Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you must take things as they are; and
+if you want friendship with men you must run risks. Personally,&rdquo; she
+continued, breaking into a smile, &ldquo;I think it&rsquo;s worth it; I
+don&rsquo;t mind being kissed; I&rsquo;m rather jealous, I believe, that Mr.
+Dalloway kissed you and didn&rsquo;t kiss me. Though,&rdquo; she added,
+&ldquo;he bored me considerably.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So that&rsquo;s why I can&rsquo;t walk alone!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;her life that was the only
+chance she had&mdash;a thousand words and actions became plain to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because men are brutes! I hate men!&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought you said you liked him?&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I liked him, and I liked being kissed,&rdquo; she answered, as if that
+only added more difficulties to her problem.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And did you like Mrs. Dalloway too?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She was quite nice, but a thimble-pated creature,&rdquo; Helen
+continued. &ldquo;I never heard such nonsense!
+Chitter-chatter-chitter-chatter&mdash;fish and the Greek alphabet&mdash;never
+listened to a word any one said&mdash;chock-full of idiotic theories about the
+way to bring up children&mdash;I&rsquo;d far rather talk to him any day. He was
+pompous, but he did at least understand what was said to him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s very difficult to know what people are like,&rdquo; Rachel
+remarked, and Helen saw with pleasure that she spoke more naturally. &ldquo;I
+suppose I was taken in.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was little doubt about that according to Helen, but she restrained
+herself and said aloud:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One has to make experiments.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And they <i>were</i> nice,&rdquo; said Rachel. &ldquo;They were
+extraordinarily interesting.&rdquo; 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&mdash;Unity&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But all people don&rsquo;t seem to you equally interesting, do
+they?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Ambrose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel explained that most people had hitherto been symbols; but that when they
+talked to one they ceased to be symbols, and became&mdash;&ldquo;I could listen
+to them for ever!&rdquo; she exclaimed. She then jumped up, disappeared
+downstairs for a minute, and came back with a fat red book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Who&rsquo;s Who</i>,&rdquo; she said, laying it upon Helen&rsquo;s
+knee and turning the pages. &ldquo;It gives short lives of people&mdash;for
+instance: &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sitting on the deck at Helen&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She became absorbed in the book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I quite agree,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that people are very interesting;
+only&mdash;&rdquo; Rachel, putting her finger between the pages, looked up
+enquiringly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only I think you ought to discriminate,&rdquo; she ended.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a pity to be intimate with people who are&mdash;well, rather
+second-rate, like the Dalloways, and to find it out later.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But how does one know?&rdquo; Rachel asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I really can&rsquo;t tell you,&rdquo; replied Helen candidly, after a
+moment&rsquo;s thought. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have to find out for yourself. But
+try and&mdash;Why don&rsquo;t you call me Helen?&rdquo; she added.
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Aunt&rsquo;s&rsquo; a horrid name. I never liked my Aunts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should like to call you Helen,&rdquo; Rachel answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you think me very unsympathetic?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Some things you don&rsquo;t understand, of
+course.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; Helen agreed. &ldquo;So now you can go ahead and be a
+person on your own account,&rdquo; she added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of
+living.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can by m-m-myself,&rdquo; she stammered, &ldquo;in spite of you, in
+spite of the Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my Aunts, in spite of
+these?&rdquo; She swept her hand across a whole page of statesmen and soldiers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In spite of them all,&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;After all, Rachel,&rdquo; she broke
+off, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s silly to pretend that because there&rsquo;s twenty
+years&rsquo; difference between us we therefore can&rsquo;t talk to each other
+like human beings.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; because we like each other,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Mrs. Ambrose agreed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That fact, together with other facts, had been made clear by their twenty
+minutes&rsquo; talk, although how they had come to these conclusions they could
+not have said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We would take great care of her,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;and we should
+really like it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Willoughby looked very grave and carefully laid aside his papers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s a good girl,&rdquo; he said at length. &ldquo;There is a
+likeness?&rdquo;&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s the only thing that&rsquo;s left to me,&rdquo; sighed
+Willoughby. &ldquo;We go on year after year without talking about these
+things&mdash;&rdquo; He broke off. &ldquo;But it&rsquo;s better so. Only
+life&rsquo;s very hard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True,&rdquo; said Willoughby when she had done. &ldquo;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,&rdquo; he continued, becoming confidential, &ldquo;I want to
+bring her up as her mother would have wished. I don&rsquo;t hold with these
+modern views&mdash;any more than you do, eh? She&rsquo;s a nice quiet girl,
+devoted to her music&mdash;a little less of <i>that</i> would do no harm.
+Still, it&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;d be kind
+to her for my sake. I&rsquo;m beginning to realise,&rdquo; he continued,
+stretching himself out, &ldquo;that all this is tending to Parliament, Helen.
+It&rsquo;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&mdash;dinners, an occasional evening party. One&rsquo;s constituents
+like to be fed, I believe. In all these ways Rachel could be of great help to
+me. So,&rdquo; he wound up, &ldquo;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&mdash;she&rsquo;s a little shy
+now,&mdash;making a woman of her, the kind of woman her mother would have liked
+her to be,&rdquo; he ended, jerking his head at the photograph.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Willoughby&rsquo;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&mdash;Rachel a
+Tory hostess!&mdash;and marvelling as she left him at the astonishing ignorance
+of a father.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap07"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<p>
+From a distance the <i>Euphrosyne</i> 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&mdash;shrunk to a few beads of light out among the dark waves, and one
+high in air upon the mast-head&mdash;seemed something mysterious and impressive
+to heated partners resting from the dance. She became a ship passing in the
+night&mdash;an emblem of the loneliness of human life, an occasion for queer
+confidences and sudden appeals for sympathy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;clock the <i>Euphrosyne</i> 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 <i>Euphrosyne</i>, and felt no sadness when the ship
+lifted up her voice and bellowed thrice like a cow separated from its calf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The children are well!&rdquo; she exclaimed. Mr. Pepper, who sat
+opposite with a great mound of bag and rug upon his knees, said,
+&ldquo;Gratifying.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three hundred years odd,&rdquo; said Mr. Pepper meditatively at length.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As nobody said, &ldquo;What?&rdquo; 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
+<i>Euphrosyne</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oddly enough it happened that the least satisfactory of Helen Ambrose&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Taking seats in a carriage drawn by long-tailed horses with pheasants&rsquo;
+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
+&ldquo;Water,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s
+foot down with any force one would come through the floor. As for hot
+water&mdash;at this point her investigations left her speechless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Poor creature!&rdquo; she murmured to the sallow Spanish servant-girl
+who came out with the pigs and hens to receive them, &ldquo;no wonder you
+hardly look like a human being!&rdquo; Maria accepted the compliment with an
+exquisite Spanish grace. In Chailey&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo; house. Efforts had been made for some days
+before landing to impress upon him the advantages of the Amazons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That great stream!&rdquo; Helen would begin, gazing as if she saw a
+visionary cascade, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve a good mind to go with you myself,
+Willoughby&mdash;only I can&rsquo;t. Think of the sunsets and the
+moonrises&mdash;I believe the colours are unimaginable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are wild peacocks,&rdquo; Rachel hazarded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And marvellous creatures in the water,&rdquo; Helen asserted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One might discover a new reptile,&rdquo; Rachel continued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s certain to be a revolution, I&rsquo;m told,&rdquo; Helen
+urged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The effect of these subterfuges was a little dashed by Ridley, who, after
+regarding Pepper for some moments, sighed aloud, &ldquo;Poor fellow!&rdquo; and
+inwardly speculated upon the unkindness of women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve identified the big block to the left,&rdquo; he observed, and
+pointed with his fork at a square formed by several rows of lights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One should infer that they can cook vegetables,&rdquo; he added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An hotel?&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Once a monastery,&rdquo; said Mr. Pepper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve taken a room over there,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not going?&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the whole&mdash;yes,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;No private cook
+<i>can</i> cook vegetables.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s, or
+Rachel&rsquo;s had penetrated and stung. She was half-moved to cry,
+&ldquo;Stop, William; explain!&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you all die of typhoid I won&rsquo;t be responsible!&rdquo; he
+snapped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you die of dulness, neither will I,&rdquo; Helen echoed in her heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap08"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Ambrose was writing a very long letter. Beginning &ldquo;Dear
+Bernard,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t conceive why, if people must have a religion,
+they didn&rsquo;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.
+&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t believe me,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;there is no colour
+like it in England.&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;It seems
+incredible,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;that people should care whether Asquith
+is in or Austen Chamberlain 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s an odd fate that has put me in charge of a girl,&rdquo; she
+wrote, &ldquo;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&rsquo;t see why they
+shouldn&rsquo;t be much the same as men&mdash;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&rdquo; (here
+Mrs. Ambrose&rsquo;s letter may not be quoted) . . . &ldquo;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&mdash;the
+wonder is they&rsquo;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&mdash;which he
+won&rsquo;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&rsquo;t provide one; artists, merchants,
+cultivated people&mdash;they are stupid, conventional, and flirtatious. . .
+.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Helen. She added, &ldquo;The season&rsquo;s
+begun,&rdquo; 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&mdash;the shopkeepers would not mind what prices they asked; they would
+get them, at any rate, from the English.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s an English steamer in the bay,&rdquo; said Rachel, looking
+at a triangle of lights below. &ldquo;She came in early this morning.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then we may hope for some letters and send ours back,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Considering the last batch,&rdquo; said Helen, &ldquo;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&mdash;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&rsquo;re the vainest man I know,&rdquo; she ended,
+rising from the table, &ldquo;which I may tell you is saying a good
+deal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;Ridley must bring
+his&mdash;and Rachel?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope you&rsquo;ve written to your Aunts? It&rsquo;s high time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen laid hold of his beard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Am I a fool?&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me go, Helen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Am I a fool?&rdquo; she repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Vile woman!&rdquo; he exclaimed, and kissed her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll leave you to your vanities,&rdquo; she called back as they
+went out of the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; said Rachel, taking her by the wrist. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re
+going to see life. You promised.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Seeing life&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen sauntered on, observing the different people in their shabby clothes, who
+seemed so careless and so natural, with satisfaction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just think of the Mall to-night!&rdquo; she exclaimed at length.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the fifteenth of March. Perhaps there&rsquo;s a Court.&rdquo;
+She thought of the crowd waiting in the cold spring air to see the grand
+carriages go by. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s very cold, if it&rsquo;s not raining,&rdquo;
+she said. &ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;so I was told&mdash;have three; the king, I suppose, can have
+as many as he likes. And the people believe in it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had to part in order to circumvent a crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They believe in God,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We shall never understand!&rdquo; she sighed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you mean to go right up to the hotel?&rdquo; Helen asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is a dahabeeyah, Charles?&rdquo; the distinct voice of a widow,
+seated in an arm-chair by the window, asked her son.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the end of the piece, and his answer was lost in the general clearing of
+throats and tapping of knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re all old in this room,&rdquo; Rachel whispered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Creeping on, they found that the next window revealed two men in shirt-sleeves
+playing billiards with two young ladies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He pinched my arm!&rdquo; the plump young woman cried, as she missed her
+stroke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now you two&mdash;no ragging,&rdquo; the young man with the red face
+reproved them, who was marking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take care or we shall be seen,&rdquo; whispered Helen, plucking Rachel
+by the arm. Incautiously her head had risen to the middle of the window.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly, in the strange way in which some words detach themselves from the
+rest, they heard him say quite distinctly:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All you want is practice, Miss Warrington; courage and
+practice&mdash;one&rsquo;s no good without the other.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hughling Elliot! Of course!&rdquo; 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:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better luck to-night, Susan?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All the luck&rsquo;s on our side,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Luck, Mr. Hewet?&rdquo; said his partner, a middle-aged lady with
+spectacles. &ldquo;I assure you, Mrs. Paley, our success is due solely to our
+brilliant play.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Unless I go to bed early I get practically no sleep at all,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;ll get some one else to take my place,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Asleep?&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two women,&rdquo; it said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap09"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s great gold watch, and
+opened the complete works of Wordsworth. She was reading the
+&ldquo;Prelude,&rdquo; partly because she always read the &ldquo;Prelude&rdquo;
+abroad, and partly because she was engaged in writing a short <i>Primer of
+English Literature</i>&mdash;<i>Beowulf to Swinburne</i>&mdash;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&mdash;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 &ldquo;Prelude.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m nice-looking,&rdquo; she determined. &ldquo;Not
+pretty&mdash;possibly,&rdquo; she drew herself up a little.
+&ldquo;Yes&mdash;most people would say I was handsome.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He didn&rsquo;t ask me to play, but he certainly followed me into the
+hall,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was just about to pull back the bed-clothes when she exclaimed, &ldquo;Oh,
+but I&rsquo;m forgetting,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A.M.&mdash;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 <i>Miss Appleby&rsquo;s Adventure</i> to Aunt E. P.M.&mdash;Played
+lawn-tennis with Mr. Perrott and Evelyn M. Don&rsquo;t <i>like</i> Mr. P. Have
+a feeling that he is not &lsquo;quite,&rsquo; 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.: <i>ask about damp sheets</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;&ldquo;One&rdquo; struck
+gently downstairs&mdash;a line of light under the door showed that some one was
+still awake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How late you are, Hugh!&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You should have gone to sleep,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;I was talking
+to Thornbury.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you know that I never can sleep when I&rsquo;m waiting for
+you,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To that he made no answer, but only remarked, &ldquo;Well then, we&rsquo;ll
+turn out the light.&rdquo; They were silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+<i>History of the Decline and Fall of Rome</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Hirst, what I forgot to say was&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two minutes,&rdquo; said Hirst, raising his finger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He safely stowed away the last words of the paragraph.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What was it you forgot to say?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you think you <i>do</i> make enough allowance for
+feelings?&rdquo; asked Mr. Hewet. He had again forgotten what he had meant to
+say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After intense contemplation of the immaculate Gibbon Mr. Hirst smiled at the
+question of his friend. He laid aside his book and considered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should call yours a singularly untidy mind,&rdquo; he observed.
+&ldquo;Feelings? Aren&rsquo;t they just what we do allow for? We put love up
+there, and all the rest somewhere down below.&rdquo; With his left hand he
+indicated the top of a pyramid, and with his right the base.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you didn&rsquo;t get out of bed to tell me that,&rdquo; he added
+severely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I got out of bed,&rdquo; said Hewet vaguely, &ldquo;merely to talk I
+suppose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Meanwhile I shall undress,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Women interest me,&rdquo; said Hewet, who, sitting on the bed with his
+chin resting on his knees, paid no attention to the undressing of Mr. Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re so stupid,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re sitting
+on my pyjamas.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose they <i>are</i> stupid?&rdquo; Hewet wondered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There can&rsquo;t be two opinions about that, I imagine,&rdquo; said
+Hirst, hopping briskly across the room, &ldquo;unless you&rsquo;re in
+love&mdash;that fat woman Warrington?&rdquo; he enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not one fat woman&mdash;all fat women,&rdquo; Hewet sighed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The women I saw to-night were not fat,&rdquo; said Hirst, who was taking
+advantage of Hewet&rsquo;s company to cut his toe-nails.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Describe them,&rdquo; said Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know I can&rsquo;t describe things!&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;They
+were much like other women, I should think. They always are.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; that&rsquo;s where we differ,&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;I say
+everything&rsquo;s different. No two people are in the least the same. Take you
+and me now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So I used to think once,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;But now they&rsquo;re
+all types. Don&rsquo;t take us,&mdash;take this hotel. You could draw circles
+round the whole lot of them, and they&rsquo;d never stray outside.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(&ldquo;You can kill a hen by doing that&rdquo;), Hewet murmured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Hughling Elliot, Mrs. Hughling Elliot, Miss Allan, Mr. and Mrs.
+Thornbury&mdash;one circle,&rdquo; Hirst continued. &ldquo;Miss Warrington, Mr.
+Arthur Venning, Mr. Perrott, Evelyn M. another circle; then there are a whole
+lot of natives; finally ourselves.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are we all alone in our circle?&rdquo; asked Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite alone,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;You try to get out, but you
+can&rsquo;t. You only make a mess of things by trying.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not a hen in a circle,&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a
+dove on a tree-top.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wonder if this is what they call an ingrowing toe-nail?&rdquo; said
+Hirst, examining the big toe on his left foot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I flit from branch to branch,&rdquo; continued Hewet. &ldquo;The world
+is profoundly pleasant.&rdquo; He lay back on the bed, upon his arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wonder if it&rsquo;s really nice to be as vague as you are?&rdquo;
+asked Hirst, looking at him. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the lack of
+continuity&mdash;that&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s so odd about you,&rdquo; he went on.
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I respect you, Hirst,&rdquo; he remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I envy you&mdash;some things,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;One: your
+capacity for not thinking; two: people like you better than they like me. Women
+like you, I suppose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wonder whether that isn&rsquo;t really what matters most?&rdquo; said
+Hewet. Lying now flat on the bed he waved his hand in vague circles above him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course it is,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;But that&rsquo;s not the
+difficulty. The difficulty is, isn&rsquo;t it, to find an appropriate
+object?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are no female hens in your circle?&rdquo; asked Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not the ghost of one,&rdquo; said Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Although they had known each other for three years Hirst had never yet heard
+the true story of Hewet&rsquo;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&rsquo; lives were much of a piece.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see your circles&mdash;I don&rsquo;t see them,&rdquo;
+Hewet continued. &ldquo;I see a thing like a teetotum spinning in and
+out&mdash;knocking into things&mdash;dashing from side to side&mdash;collecting
+numbers&mdash;more and more and more, till the whole place is thick with them.
+Round and round they go&mdash;out there, over the rim&mdash;out of
+sight.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His fingers showed that the waltzing teetotums had spun over the edge of the
+counterpane and fallen off the bed into infinity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Could you contemplate three weeks alone in this hotel?&rdquo; asked
+Hirst, after a moment&rsquo;s pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet proceeded to think.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The truth of it is that one never is alone, and one never is in
+company,&rdquo; he concluded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Meaning?&rdquo; said Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Meaning? Oh, something about bubbles&mdash;auras&mdash;what d&rsquo;you
+call &rsquo;em? You can&rsquo;t see my bubble; I can&rsquo;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&rsquo;s not ourselves exactly, but what
+we feel; the world is short, or people mainly; all kinds of people.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A nice streaky bubble yours must be!&rdquo; said Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And supposing my bubble could run into some one else&rsquo;s
+bubble&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And they both burst?&rdquo; put in Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then&mdash;then&mdash;then&mdash;&rdquo; pondered Hewet, as if to
+himself, &ldquo;it would be an e-nor-mous world,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think you altogether as foolish as I used to,
+Hewet,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know what you mean but you try
+to say it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But aren&rsquo;t you enjoying yourself here?&rdquo; asked Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the whole&mdash;yes,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;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&rsquo;re getting disgustingly fat.&rdquo;
+He pointed at the calf of Hewet&rsquo;s bare leg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll get up an expedition,&rdquo; said Hewet energetically.
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll ask the entire hotel. We&rsquo;ll hire donkeys
+and&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Lord!&rdquo; said Hirst, &ldquo;do shut it! I can see Miss
+Warrington and Miss Allan and Mrs. Elliot and the rest squatting on the stones
+and quacking, &lsquo;How jolly!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll ask Venning and Perrott and Miss Murgatroyd&mdash;every one
+we can lay hands on,&rdquo; went on Hewet. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the name of the
+little old grasshopper with the eyeglasses? Pepper?&mdash;Pepper shall lead
+us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank God, you&rsquo;ll never get the donkeys,&rdquo; said Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I must make a note of that,&rdquo; said Hewet, slowly dropping his feet
+to the floor. &ldquo;Hirst escorts Miss Warrington; Pepper advances alone on a
+white ass; provisions equally distributed&mdash;or shall we hire a mule? The
+matrons&mdash;there&rsquo;s Mrs. Paley, by Jove!&mdash;share a carriage.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s where you&rsquo;ll go wrong,&rdquo; said Hirst.
+&ldquo;Putting virgins among matrons.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How long should you think that an expedition like that would take,
+Hirst?&rdquo; asked Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From twelve to sixteen hours I would say,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;The
+time usually occupied by a first confinement.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It will need considerable organisation,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We shall want some poets too,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;Not Gibbon; no;
+d&rsquo;you happen to have <i>Modern Love</i> or <i>John Donne</i>? 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Paley <i>will</i> enjoy herself,&rdquo; said Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Paley will enjoy it certainly,&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+one of the saddest things I know&mdash;the way elderly ladies cease to read
+poetry. And yet how appropriate this is:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+I speak as one who plumbs<br />
+    Life&rsquo;s dim profound,<br />
+One who at length can sound<br />
+    Clear views and certain.<br />
+But&mdash;after love what comes?<br />
+    A scene that lours,<br />
+A few sad vacant hours,<br />
+    And then, the Curtain.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+I daresay Mrs. Paley is the only one of us who can really understand
+that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll ask her,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;Please, Hewet, if you
+must go to bed, draw my curtain. Few things distress me more than the
+moonlight.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Between the extinction of Hewet&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Directly breakfast was over, the ladies as usual circled vaguely, picking up
+papers and putting them down again, about the hall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what are you going to do to-day?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Elliot drifting
+up against Miss Warrington.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to try to get Aunt Emma out into the town,&rdquo; said
+Susan. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s not seen a thing yet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I call it so spirited of her at her age,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot,
+&ldquo;coming all this way from her own fireside.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, we always tell her she&rsquo;ll die on board ship,&rdquo; Susan
+replied. &ldquo;She was born on one,&rdquo; she added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the old days,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot, &ldquo;a great many people
+were. I always pity the poor women so! We&rsquo;ve got a lot to complain
+of!&rdquo; She shook her head. Her eyes wandered about the table, and she
+remarked irrelevantly, &ldquo;The poor little Queen of Holland! Newspaper
+reporters practically, one may say, at her bedroom door!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Were you talking of the Queen of Holland?&rdquo; said the pleasant voice
+of Miss Allan, who was searching for the thick pages of <i>The Times</i> among
+a litter of thin foreign sheets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I always envy any one who lives in such an excessively flat
+country,&rdquo; she remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How very strange!&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot. &ldquo;I find a flat country
+so depressing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid you can&rsquo;t be very happy here then, Miss
+Allan,&rdquo; said Susan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the contrary,&rdquo; said Miss Allan, &ldquo;I am exceedingly fond of
+mountains.&rdquo; Perceiving <i>The Times</i> at some distance, she moved off
+to secure it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I must find my husband,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot, fidgeting away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I must go to my aunt,&rdquo; said Miss Warrington, and taking up the
+duties of the day they moved away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The debate on the fifteenth should have reached us by now,&rdquo; 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 <i>The Times</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The couple therefore sat themselves down in arm-chairs and waited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, there&rsquo;s Mr. Hewet,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury. &ldquo;Mr.
+Hewet,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;do come and sit by us. I was telling my
+husband how much you reminded me of a dear old friend of mine&mdash;Mary
+Umpleby. She was a most delightful woman, I assure you. She grew roses. We used
+to stay with her in the old days.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No young man likes to have it said that he resembles an elderly
+spinster,&rdquo; said Mr. Thornbury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the contrary,&rdquo; said Mr. Hewet, &ldquo;I always think it a
+compliment to remind people of some one else. But Miss Umpleby&mdash;why did
+she grow roses?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, poor thing,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury, &ldquo;that&rsquo;s a long
+story. She had gone through dreadful sorrows. At one time I think she would
+have lost her senses if it hadn&rsquo;t been for her garden. The soil was very
+much against her&mdash;a blessing in disguise; she had to be up at
+dawn&mdash;out in all weathers. And then there are creatures that eat roses.
+But she triumphed. She always did. She was a brave soul.&rdquo; She sighed
+deeply but at the same time with resignation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did not realise that I was monopolising the paper,&rdquo; said Miss
+Allan, coming up to them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We were so anxious to read about the debate,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury,
+accepting it on behalf of her husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One doesn&rsquo;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&mdash;my baby!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hirst would know him, I expect,&rdquo; said Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Hirst has such an interesting face,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury.
+&ldquo;But I feel one ought to be very clever to talk to him. Well,
+William?&rdquo; she enquired, for Mr. Thornbury grunted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re making a mess of it,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have read it?&rdquo; Mrs. Thornbury asked Miss Allan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I am ashamed to say I have only read about the discoveries in
+Crete,&rdquo; said Miss Allan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, but I would give so much to realise the ancient world!&rdquo; cried
+Mrs. Thornbury. &ldquo;Now that we old people are alone,&mdash;we&rsquo;re on
+our second honeymoon,&mdash;I am really going to put myself to school again.
+After all we are <i>founded</i> on the past, aren&rsquo;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&rsquo;ve done, the door always
+opens&mdash;we&rsquo;re a very large party at home&mdash;and so one never does
+think enough about the ancients and all they&rsquo;ve done for us. But
+<i>you</i> begin at the beginning, Miss Allan.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When I think of the Greeks I think of them as naked black men,&rdquo;
+said Miss Allan, &ldquo;which is quite incorrect, I&rsquo;m sure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you, Mr. Hirst?&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury, perceiving that the
+gaunt young man was near. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure you read everything.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I confine myself to cricket and crime,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;The
+worst of coming from the upper classes,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;is that
+one&rsquo;s friends are never killed in railway accidents.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not gone well?&rdquo; asked his wife solicitously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet picked up one sheet and read, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall be out of it anyway,&rdquo; Mr. Thornbury interrupted peevishly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cats are often forgotten,&rdquo; Miss Allan remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Remember, William, the Prime Minister has reserved his answer,&rdquo;
+said Mrs. Thornbury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At the age of eighty, Mr. Joshua Harris of Eeles Park, Brondesbury, has
+had a son,&rdquo; said Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;. . . The famished animal, which had been noticed by workmen for some
+days, was rescued, but&mdash;by Jove! it bit the man&rsquo;s hand to
+pieces!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wild with hunger, I suppose,&rdquo; commented Miss Allan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re all neglecting the chief advantage of being abroad,&rdquo;
+said Mr. Hughling Elliot, who had joined the group. &ldquo;You might read your
+news in French, which is equivalent to reading no news at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Coming?&rdquo; he asked the two young men. &ldquo;We ought to start
+before it&rsquo;s really hot.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I beg of you not to walk in the heat, Hugh,&rdquo; his wife pleaded,
+giving him an angular parcel enclosing half a chicken and some raisins.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hewet will be our barometer,&rdquo; said Mr. Elliot. &ldquo;He will melt
+before I shall.&rdquo; 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 <i>The Times</i> which lay upon the floor. Miss Allan looked at her
+father&rsquo;s watch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ten minutes to eleven,&rdquo; she observed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Work?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Thornbury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Work,&rdquo; replied Miss Allan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What a fine creature she is!&rdquo; murmured Mrs. Thornbury, as the
+square figure in its manly coat withdrew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I&rsquo;m sure she has a hard life,&rdquo; sighed Mrs. Elliot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, it <i>is</i> a hard life,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury.
+&ldquo;Unmarried women&mdash;earning their livings&mdash;it&rsquo;s the hardest
+life of all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet she seems pretty cheerful,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It must be very interesting,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury. &ldquo;I envy
+her her knowledge.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that isn&rsquo;t what women want,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid it&rsquo;s all a great many can hope to have,&rdquo;
+sighed Mrs. Thornbury. &ldquo;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&mdash;partly because of their teeth, it is true.
+And I have heard young women talk quite openly of&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dreadful, dreadful!&rdquo; exclaimed Mrs. Elliot. &ldquo;The crown, as
+one may call it, of a woman&rsquo;s life. I, who know what it is to be
+childless&mdash;&rdquo; she sighed and ceased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But we must not be hard,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury. &ldquo;The
+conditions are so much changed since I was a young woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Surely <i>maternity</i> does not change,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In some ways we can learn a great deal from the young,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Thornbury. &ldquo;I learn so much from my own daughters.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I believe that Hughling really doesn&rsquo;t mind,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Elliot. &ldquo;But then he has his work.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Women without children can do so much for the children of others,&rdquo;
+observed Mrs. Thornbury gently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I sketch a great deal,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot, &ldquo;but that
+isn&rsquo;t really an occupation. It&rsquo;s so disconcerting to find girls
+just beginning doing better than one does oneself! And nature&rsquo;s
+difficult&mdash;very difficult!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are there not institutions&mdash;clubs&mdash;that you could help?&rdquo;
+asked Mrs. Thornbury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They are so exhausting,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot. &ldquo;I look strong,
+because of my colour; but I&rsquo;m not; the youngest of eleven never
+is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If the mother is careful before,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury judicially,
+&ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Mrs. Elliot was inattentive to the elder lady&rsquo;s experience, and her
+eyes wandered about the hall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My mother had two miscarriages, I know,&rdquo; she said suddenly.
+&ldquo;The first because she met one of those great dancing bears&mdash;they
+shouldn&rsquo;t be allowed; the other&mdash;it was a horrid story&mdash;our
+cook had a child and there was a dinner party. So I put my dyspepsia down to
+that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And a miscarriage is so much worse than a confinement,&rdquo; Mrs.
+Thornbury murmured absentmindedly, adjusting her spectacles and picking up
+<i>The Times</i>. Mrs. Elliot rose and fluttered away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t like to say what <i>she</i> is!&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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 round
+flushed face anxiously in the looking-glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You like your tea too, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A little silver goes a long way in this country,&rdquo; she chuckled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sent Susan back to fetch another cup.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They have such excellent biscuits here,&rdquo; she said, contemplating a
+plateful. &ldquo;Not sweet biscuits, which I don&rsquo;t like&mdash;dry
+biscuits . . . Have you been sketching?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ve done two or three little daubs,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot,
+speaking rather louder than usual. &ldquo;But it&rsquo;s so difficult after
+Oxfordshire, where there are so many trees. The light&rsquo;s so strong here.
+Some people admire it, I know, but I find it very fatiguing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I really don&rsquo;t need cooking, Susan,&rdquo; said Mrs. Paley, when
+her niece returned. &ldquo;I must trouble you to move me.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s so nice to find a young man who doesn&rsquo;t despise
+tea,&rdquo; said Mrs. Paley, regaining her good humour. &ldquo;One of my
+nephews the other day asked for a glass of sherry&mdash;at five o&rsquo;clock!
+I told him he could get it at the public house round the corner, but not in my
+drawing room.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather go without lunch than tea,&rdquo; said Mr. Venning.
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s not strictly true. I want both.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think it dreadfully cruel the way they treat dogs in
+this country?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Paley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d have &rsquo;em all shot,&rdquo; said Mr. Venning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, but the darling puppies,&rdquo; said Susan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Jolly little chaps,&rdquo; said Mr. Venning. &ldquo;Look here,
+you&rsquo;ve got nothing to eat.&rdquo; A great wedge of cake was handed Susan
+on the point of a trembling knife. Her hand trembled too as she took it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have such a dear dog at home,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My parrot can&rsquo;t stand dogs,&rdquo; said Mrs. Paley, with the air
+of one making a confidence. &ldquo;I always suspect that he (or she) was teased
+by a dog when I was abroad.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t get far this morning, Miss Warrington,&rdquo; said Mr.
+Venning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was hot,&rdquo; she answered. Their conversation became private,
+owing to Mrs. Paley&rsquo;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. &ldquo;Animals do
+commit suicide,&rdquo; she sighed, as if she asserted a painful fact.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t we explore the town this evening?&rdquo; Mr. Venning
+suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My aunt&mdash;&rdquo; Susan began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You deserve a holiday,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re always doing
+things for other people.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that&rsquo;s my life,&rdquo; she said, under cover of refilling the
+teapot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s no one&rsquo;s life,&rdquo; he returned, &ldquo;no young
+person&rsquo;s. You&rsquo;ll come?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should like to come,&rdquo; she murmured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment Mrs. Elliot looked up and exclaimed, &ldquo;Oh, Hugh! He&rsquo;s
+bringing some one,&rdquo; she added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He would like some tea,&rdquo; said Mrs. Paley. &ldquo;Susan, run and
+get some cups&mdash;there are the two young men.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;re thirsting for tea,&rdquo; said Mr. Elliot. &ldquo;You know
+Mr. Ambrose, Hilda? We met on the hill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He dragged me in,&rdquo; said Ridley, &ldquo;or I should have been
+ashamed. I&rsquo;m dusty and dirty and disagreeable.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My wife&rsquo;s brother,&rdquo; Ridley explained to Hilda, whom he
+failed to remember, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Our chicken got into the salt,&rdquo; Hewet said dolefully to Susan.
+&ldquo;Nor is it true that bananas include moisture as well as
+sustenance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hirst was already drinking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve been cursing you,&rdquo; said Ridley in answer to Mrs.
+Elliot&rsquo;s kind enquiries about his wife. &ldquo;You tourists eat up all
+the eggs, Helen tells me. That&rsquo;s an eye-sore too&rdquo;&mdash;he nodded
+his head at the hotel. &ldquo;Disgusting luxury, I call it. We live with pigs
+in the drawing-room.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The food is not at all what it ought to be, considering the
+price,&rdquo; said Mrs. Paley seriously. &ldquo;But unless one goes to a hotel
+where is one to go to?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stay at home,&rdquo; said Ridley. &ldquo;I often wish I had! Everyone
+ought to stay at home. But, of course, they won&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Paley conceived a certain grudge against Ridley, who seemed to be
+criticising her habits after an acquaintance of five minutes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I believe in foreign travel myself,&rdquo; she stated, &ldquo;if one
+knows one&rsquo;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&mdash;Kent for the hops, and Dorsetshire for its old stone
+cottages. There is nothing to compare with them here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes&mdash;I always think that some people like the flat and other people
+like the downs,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot rather vaguely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hirst, who had been eating and drinking without interruption, now lit a
+cigarette, and observed, &ldquo;Oh, but we&rsquo;re all agreed by this time
+that nature&rsquo;s a mistake. She&rsquo;s either very ugly, appallingly
+uncomfortable, or absolutely terrifying. I don&rsquo;t know which alarms me
+most&mdash;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&rsquo;s a disgrace that
+the animals should be allowed to go at large.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what did the cow think of <i>him</i>?&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t as clever as Arthur, in the ways that really matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wasn&rsquo;t it Wilde who discovered the fact that nature makes no
+allowance for hip-bones?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Hirst merely drew his lips together very tightly and made no reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;You must come up and see us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wave included both Hirst and Hewet, and Hewet answered, &ldquo;I should
+like it immensely.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap10"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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 <i>Works of Henrik Ibsen</i>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What I want to know,&rdquo; she said aloud, &ldquo;is this: What is the
+truth? What&rsquo;s the truth of it all?&rdquo; 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&mdash;an heroic statue in the middle of
+the foreground, dominating the view. Ibsen&rsquo;s plays always left her in
+that condition. She acted them for days at a time, greatly to Helen&rsquo;s
+amusement; and then it would be Meredith&rsquo;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.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ibsen was succeeded by a novel such as Mrs. Ambrose detested, whose purpose was
+to distribute the guilt of a woman&rsquo;s downfall upon the right shoulders; a
+purpose which was achieved, if the reader&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come in,&rdquo; 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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What am I to say to this?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The utter absurdity of a woman coming into a room with a piece of paper in her
+hand amazed Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what to answer, or who Terence Hewet is,&rdquo; Helen
+continued, in the toneless voice of a ghost. She put a paper before Rachel on
+which were written the incredible words:
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+D<small>EAR</small> M<small>RS</small>. A<small>MBROSE</small>&mdash;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.&mdash;Yours sincerely,
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+T<small>ERENCE</small> H<small>EWET</small>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel read the words aloud to make herself believe in them. For the same
+reason she put her hand on Helen&rsquo;s shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Books&mdash;books&mdash;books,&rdquo; said Helen, in her absent-minded
+way. &ldquo;More new books&mdash;I wonder what you find in them. . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+<i>Friday</i>&mdash;<i>eleven-thirty</i>&mdash;<i>Miss Vinrace</i>. The blood
+began to run in her veins; she felt her eyes brighten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We must go,&rdquo; she said, rather surprising Helen by her decision.
+&ldquo;We must certainly go&rdquo;&mdash;such was the relief of finding that
+things still happened, and indeed they appeared the brighter for the mist
+surrounding them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Monte Rosa&mdash;that&rsquo;s the mountain over there, isn&rsquo;t
+it?&rdquo; said Helen; &ldquo;but Hewet&mdash;who&rsquo;s he? One of the young
+men Ridley met, I suppose. Shall I say yes, then? It may be dreadfully
+dull.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She took the letter back and went, for the messenger was waiting for her
+answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The party which had been suggested a few nights ago in Mr. Hirst&rsquo;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&rsquo;s advice to people
+who were very dull, not at all suited to each other, and sure not to come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Undoubtedly,&rdquo; he said, as he twirled and untwirled a note signed
+Helen Ambrose, &ldquo;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&rsquo;s like counting the number of pebbles of a path, tedious but
+not difficult.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For instance, here are two women you&rsquo;ve never seen. Suppose one of
+them suffers from mountain-sickness, as my sister does, and the
+other&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, the women are for you,&rdquo; Hewet interrupted. &ldquo;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&rsquo;t know how to get on with women,
+which is a great defect, considering that half the world consists of
+women.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hirst groaned that he was quite aware of that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Hewet&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cows,&rdquo; he reflected, &ldquo;draw together in a field; ships in a
+calm; and we&rsquo;re just the same when we&rsquo;ve nothing else to do. But
+why do we do it?&mdash;is it to prevent ourselves from seeing to the bottom of
+things&rdquo; (he stopped by a stream and began stirring it with his
+walking-stick and clouding the water with mud), &ldquo;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?&mdash;which is,
+on the whole, the view <i>I</i> incline to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they entered the shady place, Helen looked up and then held out her hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I must introduce myself,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I am Mrs.
+Ambrose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having shaken hands, she said, &ldquo;That&rsquo;s my niece.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel approached awkwardly. She held out her hand, but withdrew it.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all wet,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scarcely had they spoken, when the first carriage drew up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The donkeys were quickly jerked into attention, and the second carriage
+arrived. By degrees the grove filled with people&mdash;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. &ldquo;What Hewet fails to
+understand,&rdquo; he remarked, &ldquo;is that we must break the back of the
+ascent before midday.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ride with me,&rdquo; she commanded; and, as soon as Hirst had swung
+himself across a mule, the two started, leading the cavalcade.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not to call me Miss Murgatroyd. I hate it,&rdquo; she said.
+&ldquo;My name&rsquo;s Evelyn. What&rsquo;s yours?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;St. John,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I like that,&rdquo; said Evelyn. &ldquo;And what&rsquo;s your
+friend&rsquo;s name?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His initials being R. S. T., we call him Monk,&rdquo; said Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, you&rsquo;re all too clever,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Which way? Pick
+me a branch. Let&rsquo;s canter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,
+&ldquo;Call me Evelyn and I&rsquo;ll call you St. John.&rdquo; She said that on
+very slight provocation&mdash;her surname was enough&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see any need to get off,&rdquo; said Miss Allan to Mrs.
+Elliot just behind her, &ldquo;considering the difficulty I had getting
+on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;These little donkeys stand anything, <i>n&rsquo;est-ce pas</i>?&rdquo;
+Mrs. Elliot addressed the guide, who obligingly bowed his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Flowers,&rdquo; said Helen, stooping to pick the lovely little bright
+flowers which grew separately here and there. &ldquo;You pinch their leaves and
+then they smell,&rdquo; she said, laying one on Miss Allan&rsquo;s knee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t we met before?&rdquo; asked Miss Allan, looking at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was taking it for granted,&rdquo; Helen laughed, for in the confusion
+of meeting they had not been introduced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How sensible!&rdquo; chirped Mrs. Elliot. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s just what
+one would always like&mdash;only unfortunately it&rsquo;s not possible.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not possible?&rdquo; said Helen. &ldquo;Everything&rsquo;s possible. Who
+knows what mayn&rsquo;t happen before night-fall?&rdquo; she continued, mocking
+the poor lady&rsquo;s timidity, who depended so 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Towns are very small,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Amazingly clear,&rdquo; exclaimed St. John, identifying one cleft in the
+land after another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Evelyn M. sat beside him, propping her chin on her hand. She surveyed the view
+with a certain look of triumph.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you think Garibaldi was ever up here?&rdquo; 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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t call this <i>life</i>, do you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you call life?&rdquo; said St. John.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fighting&mdash;revolution,&rdquo; she said, still gazing at the doomed
+city. &ldquo;You only care for books, I know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re quite wrong,&rdquo; said St. John.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Explain,&rdquo; she urged, for there were no guns to be aimed at bodies,
+and she turned to another kind of warfare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do I care for? People,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I <i>am</i> surprised!&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;You look so
+awfully serious. Do let&rsquo;s be friends and tell each other what we&rsquo;re
+like. I hate being cautious, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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. &ldquo;The ass is eating my hat,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When one has laid the eggs one eats the omelette,&rdquo; said Hughling
+Elliot, exquisitely in French, a hint to the rest of them that it was time to
+ride on again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Expeditions in such heat are perhaps a little unwise,&rdquo; Mrs. Elliot
+murmured to Miss Allan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Miss Allan returned, &ldquo;I always like to get to the top&rdquo;; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The view will be wonderful,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t have stood it much longer,&rdquo; 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&mdash;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, &ldquo;Splendid!&rdquo; She took hold of the
+hand that was next her; it chanced to be Miss Allan&rsquo;s hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;North&mdash;South&mdash;East&mdash;West,&rdquo; said Miss Allan, jerking
+her head slightly towards the points of the compass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As St. John gave Helen her packet she looked him full in the face and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you remember&mdash;two women?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at her sharply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do,&rdquo; he answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So you&rsquo;re the two women!&rdquo; Hewet exclaimed, looking from
+Helen to Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your lights tempted us,&rdquo; said Helen. &ldquo;We watched you playing
+cards, but we never knew that we were being watched.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was like a thing in a play,&rdquo; Rachel added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And Hirst couldn&rsquo;t describe you,&rdquo; said Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was certainly odd to have seen Helen and to find nothing to say about her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hughling Elliot put up his eyeglass and grasped the situation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know of anything more dreadful,&rdquo; he said, pulling at
+the joint of a chicken&rsquo;s leg, &ldquo;than being seen when one isn&rsquo;t
+conscious of it. One feels sure one has been caught doing something
+ridiculous&mdash;looking at one&rsquo;s tongue in a hansom, for
+instance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now the others ceased to look at the view, and drawing together sat down in a
+circle round the baskets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And yet those little looking-glasses in hansoms have a fascination of
+their own,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury. &ldquo;One&rsquo;s features look so
+different when one can only see a bit of them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There will soon be very few hansom cabs left,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot.
+&ldquo;And four-wheeled cabs&mdash;I assure you even at Oxford it&rsquo;s
+almost impossible to get a four-wheeled cab.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wonder what happens to the horses,&rdquo; said Susan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Veal pie,&rdquo; said Arthur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s high time that horses should become extinct anyhow,&rdquo;
+said Hirst. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re distressingly ugly, besides being
+vicious.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Susan, who had been brought up to understand that the horse is the noblest
+of God&rsquo;s creatures, could not agree, and Venning thought Hirst an
+unspeakable ass, but was too polite not to continue the conversation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When they see us falling out of aeroplanes they get some of their own
+back, I expect,&rdquo; he remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You fly?&rdquo; said old Mr. Thornbury, putting on his spectacles to
+look at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope to, some day,&rdquo; said Arthur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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. &ldquo;If I were a
+young fellow,&rdquo; she concluded, &ldquo;I should certainly qualify.&rdquo;
+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, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+covered with little creatures.&rdquo; 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&mdash;large brown ants with polished bodies. She held out
+one on the back of her hand for Helen to look at.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Suppose they sting?&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They will not sting, but they may infest the victuals,&rdquo; said Miss
+Allan, and measures were taken at once to divert the ants from their course. At
+Hewet&rsquo;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, &ldquo;Permit me,&rdquo; and
+removed an ant from Evelyn&rsquo;s neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would be no laughing matter really,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot
+confidentially to Mrs. Thornbury, &ldquo;if an ant did get between the vest and
+the skin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble,&rdquo; 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&mdash;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&rsquo;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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s Hirst,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;And he&rsquo;s as ugly as sin.&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;You wear combinations in this heat?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you looking at?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was a little startled, but answered directly, &ldquo;Human beings.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap11"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;all of which
+combined, they said, to prove that South America was the country of the future.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Evelyn M. listened with her bright blue eyes fixed upon the oracles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How it makes one long to be a man!&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Perrott answered, surveying the plain, that a country with a future was a
+very fine thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I were you,&rdquo; said Evelyn, turning to him and drawing her glove
+vehemently through her fingers, &ldquo;I&rsquo;d raise a troop and conquer some
+great territory and make it splendid. You&rsquo;d want women for that.
+I&rsquo;d love to start life from the very beginning as it ought to
+be&mdash;nothing squalid&mdash;but great halls and gardens and splendid men and
+women. But you&mdash;you only like Law Courts!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And would you really be content without pretty frocks and sweets and all
+the things young ladies like?&rdquo; asked Mr. Perrott, concealing a certain
+amount of pain beneath his ironical manner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not a young lady,&rdquo; Evelyn flashed; she bit her underlip.
+&ldquo;Just because I like splendid things you laugh at me. Why are there no
+men like Garibaldi now?&rdquo; she demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; said Mr. Perrott, &ldquo;you don&rsquo;t give me a
+chance. You think we ought to begin things fresh. Good. But I don&rsquo;t see
+precisely&mdash;conquer a territory? They&rsquo;re all conquered already,
+aren&rsquo;t they?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not any territory in particular,&rdquo; Evelyn explained.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the idea, don&rsquo;t you see? We lead such tame lives. And I
+feel sure you&rsquo;ve got splendid things in you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet saw the scars and hollows in Mr. Perrott&rsquo;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 &ldquo;quite,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Suppose we go and see what&rsquo;s to be seen over there?&rdquo; said
+Arthur to Susan, and the pair walked off together, their departure certainly
+sending some thrill of emotion through the rest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An odd lot, aren&rsquo;t they?&rdquo; said Arthur. &ldquo;I thought we
+should never get &rsquo;em all to the top. But I&rsquo;m glad we came, by Jove!
+I wouldn&rsquo;t have missed this for something.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t <i>like</i> Mr. Hirst,&rdquo; said Susan inconsequently.
+&ldquo;I suppose he&rsquo;s very clever, but why should clever people be
+so&mdash;I expect he&rsquo;s awfully nice, really,&rdquo; she added,
+instinctively qualifying what might have seemed an unkind remark.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hirst? Oh, he&rsquo;s one of these learned chaps,&rdquo; said Arthur
+indifferently. &ldquo;He don&rsquo;t look as if he enjoyed it. You should hear
+him talking to Elliot. It&rsquo;s as much as I can do to follow &rsquo;em at
+all. . . . I was never good at my books.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With these sentences and the pauses that came between them they reached a
+little hillock, on the top of which grew several slim trees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you mind if we sit down here?&rdquo; said Arthur, looking about
+him. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s jolly in the shade&mdash;and the view&mdash;&rdquo; They
+sat down, and looked straight ahead of them in silence for some time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I do envy those clever chaps sometimes,&rdquo; Arthur remarked.
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t suppose they ever . . .&rdquo; He did not finish his
+sentence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t see why you should envy them,&rdquo; said Susan, with
+great sincerity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Odd things happen to one,&rdquo; said Arthur. &ldquo;One goes along
+smoothly enough, one thing following another, and it&rsquo;s all very jolly and
+plain sailing, and you think you know all about it, and suddenly one
+doesn&rsquo;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&mdash;&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;As if it had a kind of meaning. You&rsquo;ve made the
+difference to me,&rdquo; he jerked out, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see why I
+shouldn&rsquo;t tell you. I&rsquo;ve felt it ever since I knew you. . . .
+It&rsquo;s because I love you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted. She was drawing her
+breath with such difficulty that she could hardly answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You might have known.&rdquo; He seized her in his arms; again and again
+and again they clasped each other, murmuring inarticulately.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground,
+&ldquo;that&rsquo;s the most wonderful thing that&rsquo;s ever happened to
+me.&rdquo; He looked as if he were trying to put things seen in a dream beside
+real things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a long silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the most perfect thing in the world,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the silence that followed, holding his hand tightly in hers, she prayed to
+God that she might make him a good wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what will Mr. Perrott say?&rdquo; she asked at the end of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dear old fellow,&rdquo; said Arthur who, now that the first shock was
+over, was relaxing into an enormous sense of pleasure and contentment.
+&ldquo;We must be very nice to him, Susan.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He told her how hard Perrott&rsquo;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&mdash;Edith in particular, her youngest sister, whom she loved better
+than any one else, &ldquo;except you, Arthur. . . . Arthur,&rdquo; she
+continued, &ldquo;what was it that you first liked me for?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was a buckle you wore one night at sea,&rdquo; said Arthur, after due
+consideration. &ldquo;I remember noticing&mdash;it&rsquo;s an absurd thing to
+notice!&mdash;that you didn&rsquo;t take peas, because I don&rsquo;t
+either.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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&mdash;how delightful it would be to join the ranks of the
+married women&mdash;no longer to hang on to groups of girls much younger than
+herself&mdash;to escape the long solitude of an old maid&rsquo;s life. Now and
+then her amazing good fortune overcame her, and she turned to Arthur with an
+exclamation of love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They lay in each other&rsquo;s arms and had no notion that they were observed.
+Yet two figures suddenly appeared among the trees above them.
+&ldquo;Here&rsquo;s shade,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like that,&rdquo; said Rachel after a moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can remember not liking it either,&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;I can
+remember&mdash;&rdquo; but he changed his mind and continued in an ordinary
+tone of voice, &ldquo;Well, we may take it for granted that they&rsquo;re
+engaged. D&rsquo;you think he&rsquo;ll ever fly, or will she put a stop to
+that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Rachel was still agitated; she could not get away from the sight they had
+just seen. Instead of answering Hewet she persisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Love&rsquo;s an odd thing, isn&rsquo;t it, making one&rsquo;s heart
+beat.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s so enormously important, you see,&rdquo; Hewet replied.
+&ldquo;Their lives are now changed for ever.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it makes one sorry for them too,&rdquo; Rachel continued, as though
+she were tracing the course of her feelings. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know either
+of them, but I could almost burst into tears. That&rsquo;s silly, isn&rsquo;t
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just because they&rsquo;re in love,&rdquo; said Hewet.
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he added after a moment&rsquo;s consideration,
+&ldquo;there&rsquo;s something horribly pathetic about it, I agree.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A great encampment of tents they might be,&rdquo; said Hewet, looking in
+front of him at the mountains. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it like a water-colour
+too&mdash;you know the way water-colours dry in ridges all across the
+paper&mdash;I&rsquo;ve been wondering what they looked like.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve never told me your name,&rdquo; said Hewet suddenly.
+&ldquo;Miss Somebody Vinrace. . . . I like to know people&rsquo;s Christian
+names.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rachel,&rdquo; she replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rachel,&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;I have an aunt called Rachel, who put
+the life of Father Damien into verse. She is a religious fanatic&mdash;the
+result of the way she was brought up, down in Northamptonshire, never seeing a
+soul. Have you any aunts?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I live with them,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I wonder what they&rsquo;re doing now?&rdquo; Hewet enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They are probably buying wool,&rdquo; Rachel determined. She tried to
+describe them. &ldquo;They are small, rather pale women,&rdquo; she began,
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; But here she was overcome by the
+difficulty of describing people.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s impossible to believe that it&rsquo;s all going on
+still!&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You look very comfortable!&rdquo; said Helen&rsquo;s voice above them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hirst,&rdquo; said Hewet, pointing at the scissorlike shadow; he then
+rolled round to look up at them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s room for us all here,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Hirst had seated himself comfortably, he said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you congratulate the young couple?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It appeared that, coming to the same spot a few minutes after Hewet and Rachel,
+Helen and Hirst had seen precisely the same thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, we didn&rsquo;t congratulate them,&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;They
+seemed very happy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Hirst, pursing up his lips, &ldquo;so long as I
+needn&rsquo;t marry either of them&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We were very much moved,&rdquo; said Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought you would be,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;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,&rdquo; he said to Helen,
+&ldquo;he&rsquo;s capable of being moved by either.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing moves Hirst,&rdquo; Hewet laughed; he did not seem to be stung
+at all. &ldquo;Unless it were a transfinite number falling in love with a
+finite one&mdash;I suppose such things do happen, even in mathematics.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the contrary,&rdquo; said Hirst with a touch of annoyance, &ldquo;I
+consider myself a person of very strong passions.&rdquo; It was clear from the
+way he spoke that he meant it seriously; he spoke of course for the benefit of
+the ladies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By the way, Hirst,&rdquo; said Hewet, after a pause, &ldquo;I have a
+terrible confession to make. Your book&mdash;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is lost,&rdquo; Hirst finished for him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I consider that there is still a chance,&rdquo; Hewet urged, slapping
+himself to right and left, &ldquo;that I never did take it after all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;It is here.&rdquo; He pointed to his
+breast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank God,&rdquo; Hewet exclaimed. &ldquo;I need no longer feel as
+though I&rsquo;d murdered a child!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should think you were always losing things,&rdquo; Helen remarked,
+looking at him meditatively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t lose things,&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;I mislay them. That
+was the reason why Hirst refused to share a cabin with me on the voyage
+out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You came out together?&rdquo; Helen enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I propose that each member of this party now gives a short biographical
+sketch of himself or herself,&rdquo; said Hirst, sitting upright. &ldquo;Miss
+Vinrace, you come first; begin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Next,&rdquo; said Hirst, having taken in these facts; he pointed at
+Hewet. &ldquo;I am the son of an English gentleman. I am twenty-seven,&rdquo;
+Hewet began. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; but keep to the facts,&rdquo; Hirst put in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was educated at Winchester and Cambridge, which I had to leave after a
+time. I have done a good many things since&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Profession?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;None&mdash;at least&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tastes?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Literary. I&rsquo;m writing a novel.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Brothers and sisters?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three sisters, no brother, and a mother.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is that all we&rsquo;re to hear about you?&rdquo; said Helen. She stated
+that she was very old&mdash;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&mdash;they lived in one place after another&mdash;but an elder
+brother used to lend her books.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I were to tell you everything&mdash;&rdquo; she stopped and smiled.
+&ldquo;It would take too long,&rdquo; she concluded. &ldquo;I married when I
+was thirty, and I have two children. My husband is a scholar. And
+now&mdash;it&rsquo;s your turn,&rdquo; she nodded at Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve left out a great deal,&rdquo; he reproved her. &ldquo;My
+name is St. John Alaric Hirst,&rdquo; he began in a jaunty tone of voice.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m twenty-four years old. I&rsquo;m the son of the Reverend
+Sidney Hirst, vicar of Great Wappyng in Norfolk. Oh, I got scholarships
+everywhere&mdash;Westminster&mdash;King&rsquo;s. I&rsquo;m now a fellow of
+King&rsquo;s. Don&rsquo;t it sound dreary? Parents both alive (alas). Two
+brothers and one sister. I&rsquo;m a very distinguished young man,&rdquo; he
+added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One of the three, or is it five, most distinguished men in
+England,&rdquo; Hewet remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite correct,&rdquo; said Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all very interesting,&rdquo; said Helen after a pause.
+&ldquo;But of course we&rsquo;ve left out the only questions that matter. For
+instance, are we Christians?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am not,&rdquo; &ldquo;I am not,&rdquo; both the young men replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am,&rdquo; Rachel stated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You believe in a personal God?&rdquo; Hirst demanded, turning round and
+fixing her with his eyeglasses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I believe&mdash;I believe,&rdquo; Rachel stammered, &ldquo;I believe
+there are things we don&rsquo;t know about, and the world might change in a
+minute and anything appear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this Helen laughed outright. &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; she said.
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not a Christian. You&rsquo;ve never thought what you
+are.&mdash;And there are lots of other questions,&rdquo; she continued,
+&ldquo;though perhaps we can&rsquo;t ask them yet.&rdquo; Although they had
+talked so freely they were all uncomfortably conscious that they really knew
+nothing about each other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The important questions,&rdquo; Hewet pondered, &ldquo;the really
+interesting ones. I doubt that one ever does ask them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Whether we&rsquo;ve ever been in love?&rdquo; she enquired. &ldquo;Is
+that the kind of question you mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again Helen laughed at her, benignantly strewing her with handfuls of the long
+tasselled grass, for she was so brave and so foolish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Rachel,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like having a puppy in
+the house having you with one&mdash;a puppy that brings one&rsquo;s
+underclothes down into the hall.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But again the sunny earth in front of them was crossed by fantastic wavering
+figures, the shadows of men and women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There they are!&rdquo; exclaimed Mrs. Elliot. There was a touch of
+peevishness in her voice. &ldquo;And we&rsquo;ve had <i>such</i> a hunt to find
+you. Do you know what the time is?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing half so nice as tea!&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury,
+taking her cup.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing,&rdquo; said Helen. &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you remember as a child
+chopping up hay&mdash;&rdquo; she spoke much more quickly than usual, and kept
+her eye fixed upon Mrs. Thornbury, &ldquo;and pretending it was tea, and
+getting scolded by the nurses&mdash;why I can&rsquo;t imagine, except that
+nurses are such brutes, won&rsquo;t allow pepper instead of salt though
+there&rsquo;s no earthly harm in it. Weren&rsquo;t your nurses just the
+same?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During this speech Susan came into the group, and sat down by Helen&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What have you been doing to that old chap&rsquo;s grave?&rdquo; he
+asked, pointing to the red flag which floated from the top of the stones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We have tried to make him forget his misfortune in having died three
+hundred years ago,&rdquo; said Mr. Perrott.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would be awful&mdash;to be dead!&rdquo; ejaculated Evelyn M.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To be dead?&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think it would be
+awful. It&rsquo;s quite easy to imagine. When you go to bed to-night fold your
+hands so&mdash;breathe slower and slower&mdash;&rdquo; He lay back with his
+hands clasped upon his breast, and his eyes shut, &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; he
+murmured in an even monotonous voice, &ldquo;I shall never, never, never move
+again.&rdquo; His body, lying flat among them, did for a moment suggest death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is a horrible exhibition, Mr. Hewet!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Thornbury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;More cake for us!&rdquo; said Arthur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I assure you there&rsquo;s nothing horrible about it,&rdquo; said Hewet,
+sitting up and laying hands upon the cake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s so natural,&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;People with children
+should make them do that exercise every night. . . . Not that I look forward to
+being dead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And when you allude to a grave,&rdquo; said Mr. Thornbury, who spoke
+almost for the first time, &ldquo;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&mdash;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&rsquo;s cattle were his capital, his stock-in-trade,
+his daughter&rsquo;s dowries. Without cattle he was a serf, another man&rsquo;s
+man. . . .&rdquo; His eyes slowly lost their intensity, and he muttered a few
+concluding words under his breath, looking curiously old and forlorn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A bargain,&rdquo; he announced, laying it down on the cloth.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve just bought it from the big man with the ear-rings. Fine,
+isn&rsquo;t it? It wouldn&rsquo;t suit every one, of course, but it&rsquo;s
+just the thing&mdash;isn&rsquo;t it, Hilda?&mdash;for Mrs. Raymond
+Parry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Raymond Parry!&rdquo; cried Helen and Mrs. Thornbury at the same
+moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They looked at each other as though a mist hitherto obscuring their faces had
+been blown away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah&mdash;you have been to those wonderful parties too?&rdquo; Mrs.
+Elliot asked with interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Parry&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who writes the best Latin verse in your college, Hirst?&rdquo; Mr.
+Elliot called back incongruously, and Mr. Hirst returned that he had no idea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly some one cried, &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fireworks,&rdquo; they cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another went up more quickly; and then another; they could almost hear it twist
+and roar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some Saint&rsquo;s day, I suppose,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s room with a collar in his hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Hewet,&rdquo; he remarked, on the crest of a gigantic yawn,
+&ldquo;that was a great success, I consider.&rdquo; He yawned. &ldquo;But take
+care you&rsquo;re not landed with that young woman. . . . I don&rsquo;t really
+like young women. . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m happy, I&rsquo;m happy, I&rsquo;m happy,&rdquo; she repeated.
+&ldquo;I love every one. I&rsquo;m happy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap12"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<p>
+When Susan&rsquo;s engagement had been approved at home, and made public to any
+one who took an interest in it at the hotel&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was settled that the dance was to be on Friday, one week after the
+engagement, and at dinner Hewet declared himself satisfied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re all coming!&rdquo; he told Hirst. &ldquo;Pepper!&rdquo; he
+called, seeing William Pepper slip past in the wake of the soup with a pamphlet
+beneath his arm, &ldquo;We&rsquo;re counting on you to open the ball.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will certainly put sleep out of the question,&rdquo; Pepper
+returned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are to take the floor with Miss Allan,&rdquo; Hewet continued,
+consulting a sheet of pencilled notes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;when the waiters gently pushed him on to his table in the
+corner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s like a starlit sky on an absolutely cloudless night,&rdquo;
+Hewet murmured, looking about him, at the airy empty room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A heavenly floor, anyhow,&rdquo; Evelyn added, taking a run and sliding
+two or three feet along.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What about those curtains?&rdquo; asked Hirst. The crimson curtains were
+drawn across the long windows. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a perfect night
+outside.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, but curtains inspire confidence,&rdquo; Miss Allan decided.
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a few minutes&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s shoulder and a glimpse of
+Rachel&rsquo;s head turning round. He made his way to them; they greeted him
+with relief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We are suffering the tortures of the damned,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is my idea of hell,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes were bright and she looked bewildered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet and Miss Allan, who had been waltzing somewhat laboriously, paused and
+greeted the newcomers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This <i>is</i> nice,&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;But where is Mr.
+Ambrose?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pindar,&rdquo; said Helen. &ldquo;May a married woman who was forty in
+October dance? I can&rsquo;t stand still.&rdquo; She seemed to fade into Hewet,
+and they both dissolved in the crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We must follow suit,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shall we stop?&rdquo; said Hirst. Rachel gathered from his expression
+that he was annoyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An amazing spectacle,&rdquo; Hirst remarked. &ldquo;Do you dance much in
+London?&rdquo; They were both breathing fast, and both a little excited, though
+each was determined not to show any excitement at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Scarcely ever. Do you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My people give a dance every Christmas.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This isn&rsquo;t half a bad floor,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Was that all nonsense what you said the other day about being a
+Christian and having no education?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was practically true,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;But I also play the
+piano very well,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;better, I expect than any one in this
+room. You are the most distinguished man in England, aren&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+she asked shyly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One of the three,&rdquo; he corrected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen whirling past here tossed a fan into Rachel&rsquo;s lap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She is very beautiful,&rdquo; Hirst remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s taunt rankled in his mind&mdash;&ldquo;you
+don&rsquo;t know how to get on with women,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;About books now. What have you read? Just Shakespeare and the
+Bible?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t read many classics,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you mean to tell me you&rsquo;ve reached the age of twenty-four
+without reading Gibbon?&rdquo; he demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I have,&rdquo; she answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mon Dieu!&rdquo; he exclaimed, throwing out his hands. &ldquo;You must
+begin to-morrow. I shall send you my copy. What I want to know is&mdash;&rdquo;
+he looked at her critically. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel looked at him but said nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;About Gibbon,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;D&rsquo;you think you&rsquo;ll
+be able to appreciate him? He&rsquo;s the test, of course. It&rsquo;s awfully
+difficult to tell about women,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;how much, I mean, is
+due to lack of training, and how much is native incapacity. I don&rsquo;t see
+myself why you shouldn&rsquo;t understand&mdash;only I suppose you&rsquo;ve led
+an absurd life until now&mdash;you&rsquo;ve just walked in a crocodile, I
+suppose, with your hair down your back.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The music was again beginning. Hirst&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like awfully to lend you books,&rdquo; he said, buttoning his
+gloves, and rising from his seat. &ldquo;We shall meet again. I&rsquo;m going
+to leave you now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He got up and left her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Damn that man!&rdquo; she exclaimed, having acquired some of
+Helen&rsquo;s words. &ldquo;Damn his insolence!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are trees,&rdquo; 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&mdash;a form came
+out of the shadow; a little red light burnt high up in its blackness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Vinrace, is it?&rdquo; said Hewet, peering at her. &ldquo;You were
+dancing with Hirst?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s made me furious!&rdquo; she cried vehemently. &ldquo;No
+one&rsquo;s any right to be insolent!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Insolent?&rdquo; Hewet repeated, taking his cigar from his mouth in
+surprise. &ldquo;Hirst&mdash;insolent?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s insolent to&mdash;&rdquo; said Rachel, and stopped. She did
+not know exactly why she had been made so angry. With a great effort she pulled
+herself together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, well,&rdquo; she added, the vision of Helen and her mockery before
+her, &ldquo;I dare say I&rsquo;m a fool.&rdquo; She made as though she were
+going back into the ballroom, but Hewet stopped her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Please explain to me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I feel sure Hirst
+didn&rsquo;t mean to hurt you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s assumption of the superiority of his nature and experience had
+seemed to her not only galling but terrible&mdash;as if a gate had clanged in
+her face. Pacing up and down the terrace beside Hewet she said bitterly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no good; we should live separate; we cannot understand each
+other; we only bring out what&rsquo;s worst.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now you&rsquo;ll hate him,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;which is wrong. Poor
+old Hirst&mdash;he can&rsquo;t help his method. And really, Miss Vinrace, he
+was doing his best; he was paying you a compliment&mdash;he was trying&mdash;he
+was trying&mdash;&rdquo; he could not finish for the laughter that overcame
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel veered round suddenly and laughed out too. She saw that there was
+something ridiculous about Hirst, and perhaps about herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s his way of making friends, I suppose,&rdquo; she laughed.
+&ldquo;Well&mdash;I shall do my part. I shall begin&mdash;&lsquo;Ugly in body,
+repulsive in mind as you are, Mr. Hirst&mdash;&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hear, hear!&rdquo; cried Hewet. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the way to treat
+him. You see, Miss Vinrace, you must make allowances for Hirst. He&rsquo;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,&mdash;between the windows I
+think it is,&mdash;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&rsquo;re all broken. You can&rsquo;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&rsquo;s got something to say.
+For myself, I find it rather dreary. But I do respect it. They&rsquo;re all so
+much in earnest. They do take the serious things very seriously.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The description of Hirst&rsquo;s way of life interested Rachel so much that she
+almost forgot her private grudge against him, and her respect revived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They are really very clever then?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course they are. So far as brains go I think it&rsquo;s true what he
+said the other day; they&rsquo;re the cleverest people in England.
+But&mdash;you ought to take him in hand,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s
+a great deal more in him than&rsquo;s ever been got at. He wants some one to
+laugh at him. . . . The idea of Hirst telling you that you&rsquo;ve had no
+experiences! Poor old Hirst!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s Pepper writing to his aunt,&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;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!&rdquo; he cried, rapping on
+the window. &ldquo;Go and do your duty. Miss Allan expects you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When they came to the windows of the ballroom, the swing of the dancers and the
+lilt of the music was irresistible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shall we?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Warrington <i>does</i> look happy,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot; they
+both smiled; they both sighed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He has a great deal of character,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury, alluding
+to Arthur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And character is what one wants,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot. &ldquo;Now
+that young man is <i>clever</i> enough,&rdquo; she added, nodding at Hirst, who
+came past with Miss Allan on his arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He does not look strong,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury. &ldquo;His
+complexion is not good.&mdash;Shall I tear it off?&rdquo; she asked, for Rachel
+had stopped, conscious of a long strip trailing behind her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope you are enjoying yourselves?&rdquo; Hewet asked the ladies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is a very familiar position for me!&rdquo; smiled Mrs. Thornbury.
+&ldquo;I have brought out five daughters&mdash;and they all loved dancing! You
+love it too, Miss Vinrace?&rdquo; she asked, looking at Rachel with maternal
+eyes. &ldquo;I know I did when I was your age. How I used to beg my mother to
+let me stay&mdash;and now I sympathise with the poor mothers&mdash;but I
+sympathise with the daughters too!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She smiled sympathetically, and at the same time rather keenly, at Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They seem to find a great deal to say to each other,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Elliot, looking significantly at the backs of the couple as they turned away.
+&ldquo;Did you notice at the picnic? He was the only person who could make her
+utter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Her father is a very interesting man,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury.
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hear there are dreadful accounts from England about the rats,&rdquo;
+she said. &ldquo;A sister-in-law, who lives at Norwich, tells me it has been
+quite unsafe to order poultry. The plague&mdash;you see. It attacks the rats,
+and through them other creatures.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the local authorities are not taking proper steps?&rdquo; asked Mrs.
+Thornbury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That she does not say. But she describes the attitude of the educated
+people&mdash;who should know better&mdash;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&mdash;the kind of woman one admires, though one does not feel, at
+least I do not feel&mdash;but then she has a constitution of iron.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Elliot, brought back to the consideration of her own delicacy, here
+sighed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A very animated face,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s button-hole. He was a tall melancholy youth, who received the
+gift as a knight might receive his lady&rsquo;s token.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very trying to the eyes,&rdquo; was Mrs. Eliot&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;May I sit by you?&rdquo; she said, smiling and breathing fast. &ldquo;I
+suppose I ought to be ashamed of myself,&rdquo; she went on, sitting down,
+&ldquo;at my age.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I <i>am</i> enjoying myself,&rdquo; she panted.
+&ldquo;Movement&mdash;isn&rsquo;t it amazing?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have always heard that nothing comes up to dancing if one is a good
+dancer,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at her with a smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen swayed slightly as if she sat on wires.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I could dance for ever!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;They ought to let
+themselves go more!&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;They ought to leap and swing.
+Look! How they mince!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you seen those wonderful Russian dancers?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Directly Helen was left alone for a minute she was joined by St. John Hirst,
+who had been watching for an opportunity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Should you mind sitting out with me?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+quite incapable of dancing.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Astonishing!&rdquo; she exclaimed at last. &ldquo;What sort of shape can
+she think her body is?&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+St. John could not join in Helen&rsquo;s laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It makes me sick,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;The whole thing makes me
+sick. . . . Consider the minds of those people&mdash;their feelings.
+Don&rsquo;t you agree?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I always make a vow never to go to another party of any
+description,&rdquo; Helen replied, &ldquo;and I always break it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;However,&rdquo; he said, resuming his jaunty tone, &ldquo;I suppose one
+must just make up one&rsquo;s mind to it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To what?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There never will be more than five people in the world worth talking
+to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slowly the flush and sparkle in Helen&rsquo;s face died away, and she looked as
+quiet and as observant as usual.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Five people?&rdquo; she remarked. &ldquo;I should say there were more
+than five.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve been very fortunate, then,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;Or
+perhaps I&rsquo;ve been very unfortunate.&rdquo; He became silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Should you say I was a difficult kind of person to get on with?&rdquo;
+he asked sharply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Most clever people are when they&rsquo;re young,&rdquo; Helen replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And of course I am&mdash;immensely clever,&rdquo; said Hirst.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m infinitely cleverer than Hewet. It&rsquo;s quite
+possible,&rdquo; he continued in his curiously impersonal manner, &ldquo;that
+I&rsquo;m going to be one of the people who really matter. That&rsquo;s utterly
+different from being clever, though one can&rsquo;t expect one&rsquo;s family
+to see it,&rdquo; he added bitterly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen thought herself justified in asking, &ldquo;Do you find your family
+difficult to get on with?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Intolerable. . . . They want me to be a peer and a privy councillor.
+I&rsquo;ve come out here partly in order to settle the matter. It&rsquo;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!&rdquo; he waved his hand
+at the crowded ballroom. &ldquo;Repulsive. I&rsquo;m conscious of great powers
+of affection too. I&rsquo;m not susceptible, of course, in the way Hewet is.
+I&rsquo;m very fond of a few people. I think, for example, that there&rsquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+he ceased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you finding me a dreadful bore?&rdquo; he asked. He changed
+curiously from a friend confiding in a friend to a conventional young man at a
+party.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not in the least,&rdquo; said Helen. &ldquo;I like it very much.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t think,&rdquo; he exclaimed, speaking almost with
+emotion, &ldquo;what a difference it makes finding someone to talk to! Directly
+I saw you I felt you might possibly understand me. I&rsquo;m very fond of
+Hewet, but he hasn&rsquo;t the remotest idea what I&rsquo;m like. You&rsquo;re
+the only woman I&rsquo;ve ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of
+what I mean when I say a thing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m very old,&rdquo; she sighed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The odd thing is that I don&rsquo;t find you old at all,&rdquo; he
+replied. &ldquo;I feel as though we were exactly the same age.
+Moreover&mdash;&rdquo; here he hesitated, but took courage from a glance at her
+face, &ldquo;I feel as if I could talk quite plainly to you as one does to a
+man&mdash;about the relations between the sexes, about . . . and . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In spite of his certainty a slight redness came into his face as he spoke the
+last two words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She reassured him at once by the laugh with which she exclaimed, &ldquo;I
+should hope so!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at her with real cordiality, and the lines which were drawn about his
+nose and lips slackened for the first time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank God!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Now we can behave like civilised
+human beings.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,
+&ldquo;So there&rsquo;s no reason whatever for all this mystery!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;None, except that we are English people,&rdquo; 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 had 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Enjoying yourself?&rdquo; she asked, as they stopped for a second.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Vinrace,&rdquo; Arthur answered for her, &ldquo;has just made a
+confession; she&rsquo;d no idea that dances could be so delightful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes!&rdquo; Rachel exclaimed. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve changed my view of life
+completely!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t say so!&rdquo; Helen mocked. They passed on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s typical of Rachel,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;She changes her
+view of life about every other day. D&rsquo;you know, I believe you&rsquo;re
+just the person I want,&rdquo; she said, as they sat down, &ldquo;to help me
+complete her education? She&rsquo;s been brought up practically in a nunnery.
+Her father&rsquo;s too absurd. I&rsquo;ve been doing what I can&mdash;but
+I&rsquo;m too old, and I&rsquo;m a woman. Why shouldn&rsquo;t you talk to
+her&mdash;explain things to her&mdash;talk to her, I mean, as you talk to
+me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have made one attempt already this evening,&rdquo; said St. John.
+&ldquo;I rather doubt that it was successful. She seems to me so very young and
+inexperienced. I have promised to lend her Gibbon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not Gibbon exactly,&rdquo; Helen pondered. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+the facts of life, I think&mdash;d&rsquo;you see what I mean? What really goes
+on, what people feel, although they generally try to hide it? There&rsquo;s
+nothing to be frightened of. It&rsquo;s so much more beautiful than the
+pretences&mdash;always more interesting&mdash;always better, I should say, than
+<i>that</i> kind of thing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In my old age, however,&rdquo; Helen sighed, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m coming to
+think that it doesn&rsquo;t much matter in the long run what one does: people
+always go their own way&mdash;nothing will ever influence them.&rdquo; She
+nodded her head at the supper party.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But St. John did not agree. He said that he thought one could really make a
+great deal of difference by one&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Allan looked at her watch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Half-past one,&rdquo; she stated. &ldquo;And I have to despatch
+Alexander Pope to-morrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pope!&rdquo; snorted Mr. Elliot. &ldquo;Who reads Pope, I should like to
+know? And as for reading about him&mdash;No, no, Miss Allan; be persuaded you
+will benefit the world much more by dancing than by writing.&rdquo; It was one
+of Mr. Elliot&rsquo;s affectations that nothing in the world could compare with
+the delights of dancing&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a question of bread and butter,&rdquo; said Miss Allan
+calmly. &ldquo;However, they seem to expect me.&rdquo; She took up her position
+and pointed a square black toe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Hewet, you bow to me.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No wonder they get sick of playing stuff like this,&rdquo; she remarked
+reading a bar or two; &ldquo;they&rsquo;re really hymn tunes, played very fast,
+with bits out of Wagner and Beethoven.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you play? Would you play? Anything, so long as we can dance to
+it!&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that&rsquo;s not a dance,&rdquo; said some one pausing by the piano.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is,&rdquo; she replied, emphatically nodding her head. &ldquo;Invent
+the steps.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is the dance for people who don&rsquo;t know how to dance!&rdquo;
+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 self-consciousness. 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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now for the great round dance!&rdquo; Hewet shouted. Instantly a
+gigantic circle was formed, the dancers holding hands and shouting out,
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you ken John Peel,&rdquo; as they swung faster and faster and
+faster, until the strain was too great, and one link of the chain&mdash;Mrs.
+Thornbury&mdash;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&rsquo;s arms
+as seemed most convenient.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How silly the poor old lights look!&rdquo; said Evelyn M. in a curiously
+subdued tone of voice. &ldquo;And ourselves; it isn&rsquo;t becoming.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Susan rose. &ldquo;I think this has been the happiest night of my life!&rdquo;
+she exclaimed. &ldquo;I do adore music,&rdquo; she said, as she thanked Rachel.
+&ldquo;It just seems to say all the things one can&rsquo;t say oneself.&rdquo;
+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. &ldquo;Every one&rsquo;s been so kind&mdash;so
+very kind,&rdquo; she said. Then she too went to bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you realise that there are no carriages left?&rdquo; said St.
+John, who had been out to look. &ldquo;You must sleep here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; said Helen; &ldquo;we shall walk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;May we come too?&rdquo; Hewet asked. &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t go to bed.
+Imagine lying among bolsters and looking at one&rsquo;s washstand on a morning
+like this&mdash;Is that where you live?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s not a light burning, is it?&rdquo; Helen asked anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the sun,&rdquo; said St. John. The upper windows had each a
+spot of gold on them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was afraid it was my husband, still reading Greek,&rdquo; she said.
+&ldquo;All this time he&rsquo;s been editing <i>Pindar</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve come far enough,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Go back to
+bed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But they seemed unwilling to move.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s sit down a moment,&rdquo; said Hewet. He spread his coat on
+the ground. &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s sit down and consider.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel occupied herself in collecting one grey stone after another and building
+them into a little cairn; she did it very quietly and carefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And so you&rsquo;ve changed your view of life, Rachel?&rdquo; said
+Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel added another stone and yawned. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t remember,&rdquo;
+she said, &ldquo;I feel like a fish at the bottom of the sea.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My brain, on the contrary,&rdquo; said Hirst, &ldquo;is in a condition
+of abnormal activity.&rdquo; He sat in his favourite position with his arms
+binding his legs together and his chin resting on the top of his knees.
+&ldquo;I see through everything&mdash;absolutely everything. Life has no more
+mysteries for me.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And all those people down there going to sleep,&rdquo; Hewet began
+dreamily, &ldquo;thinking such different things,&mdash;Miss Warrington, I
+suppose, is now on her knees; the Elliots are a little startled, it&rsquo;s not
+often <i>they</i> get out of breath, and they want to get to sleep as quickly
+as possible; then there&rsquo;s the poor lean young man who danced all night
+with Evelyn; he&rsquo;s putting his flower in water and asking himself,
+&lsquo;Is this love?&rsquo;&mdash;and poor old Perrott, I daresay, can&rsquo;t
+get to sleep at all, and is reading his favourite Greek book to console
+himself&mdash;and the others&mdash;no, Hirst,&rdquo; he wound up, &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t find it simple at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have a key,&rdquo; said Hirst cryptically. His chin was still upon his
+knees and his eyes fixed in front of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A silence followed. Then Helen rose and bade them good-night.
+&ldquo;But,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;remember that you&rsquo;ve got to come and
+see us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap13"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>Pindar</i>, 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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the morning after the dance, however, Rachel came into her uncle&rsquo;s
+room and hailed him twice, &ldquo;Uncle Ridley,&rdquo; before he paid her any
+attention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length he looked over his spectacles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want a book,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;Gibbon&rsquo;s <i>History of
+the Roman Empire</i>. May I have it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She watched the lines on her uncle&rsquo;s face gradually rearrange themselves
+at her question. It had been smooth as a mask before she spoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Please say that again,&rdquo; said her uncle, either because he had not
+heard or because he had not understood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She repeated the same words and reddened slightly as she did so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gibbon! What on earth d&rsquo;you want him for?&rdquo; he enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Somebody advised me to read it,&rdquo; Rachel stammered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t travel about with a miscellaneous collection of
+eighteenth-century historians!&rdquo; her uncle exclaimed. &ldquo;Gibbon! Ten
+big volumes at least.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel said that she was sorry to interrupt, and was turning to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; 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.
+&ldquo;Plato,&rdquo; he said, laying one finger on the first of a row of small
+dark books, &ldquo;and Jorrocks next door, which is wrong. Sophocles, Swift.
+You don&rsquo;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&rsquo;s the use of reading
+if you don&rsquo;t read Greek? After all, if you read Greek, you need never
+read anything else, pure waste of time&mdash;pure waste of time,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he demanded, &ldquo;which shall it be?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Balzac,&rdquo; said Rachel, &ldquo;or have you the <i>Speech on the
+American Revolution</i>, Uncle Ridley?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>The Speech on the American Revolution</i>?&rdquo; he asked. He looked
+at her very keenly again. &ldquo;Another young man at the dance?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. That was Mr. Dalloway,&rdquo; she confessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good Lord!&rdquo; he flung back his head in recollection of Mr.
+Dalloway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She chose for herself a volume at random, submitted it to her uncle, who,
+seeing that it was <i>La Cousine bette</i>, 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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;t they do it,
+under reasonable conditions? As for himself&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+I send the first volume of Gibbon as I promised. Personally I find little to be
+said for the moderns, but I&rsquo;m going to send you Wedekind when I&rsquo;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s page and read
+that&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never had any words been so vivid and so beautiful&mdash;Arabia
+Felix&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is it to be in love?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap14"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;now a cough, now a horrible wheezing or
+throat-clearing, now a little patter of conversation&mdash;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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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. &ldquo;Evie writes that George
+has gone to Glasgow. &lsquo;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&rsquo;ve seen her since
+the winter. She has put Baby on three bottles now, which I&rsquo;m sure is wise
+(I&rsquo;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
+<i>is</i> going to show her black pug after all.&rsquo; . . . A line from
+Herbert&mdash;so busy, poor fellow! Ah! Margaret says, &lsquo;Poor old Mrs.
+Fairbank died on the eighth, quite suddenly in the conservatory, only a maid in
+the house, who hadn&rsquo;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 . . .&rsquo;&rdquo; While she read her husband kept
+nodding his head very slightly, but very steadily in sign of approval.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We ought to be prepared, though I have no doubt Hubert will be
+more reasonable this time.&rdquo; And then went on in her sensible way to say
+that she was enjoying a very jolly time in the Lakes. &ldquo;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 <i>not</i> good, I think
+privately, but do not like to damp Ellen&rsquo;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 <i>human</i> note one likes in W. W.?&rdquo; she
+concluded, and went on to discuss some questions of English literature which
+Miss Allan had raised in her last letter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s
+letters. The big slashing manuscripts of hockey-playing young women in
+Wiltshire lay on Arthur&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do hope Mr. Hutchinson will like me, Arthur,&rdquo; she said, looking
+up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s your loving Flo?&rdquo; asked Arthur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Flo Graves&mdash;the girl I told you about, who was engaged to that
+dreadful Mr. Vincent,&rdquo; said Susan. &ldquo;Is Mr. Hutchinson
+married?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Already her mind was busy with benevolent plans for her friends, or rather with
+one magnificent plan&mdash;which was simple too&mdash;they were all to get
+married&mdash;at once&mdash;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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s engagement relieved
+her of the one great anxiety of her life&mdash;that her son Christopher should
+&ldquo;entangle himself&rdquo; 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&mdash;it depended upon the under-gardener and Huths&rsquo; bill for
+doing up the drawing-room&mdash;three hundred pounds sterling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s every right to expect a handsome present from me, of
+course,&rdquo; she thought, looking vaguely at the leopard on its hind legs,
+&ldquo;and I&rsquo;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&rsquo;ll be consoled by the will! However, I&rsquo;ve got no reason to
+complain. . . . I can still enjoy myself. I&rsquo;m not a burden to any-one. .
+. . I like a great many things a good deal, in spite of my legs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They ought not to have died,&rdquo; she thought. &ldquo;However, they
+did&mdash;and we selfish old creatures go on.&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t think how people
+come to imagine such things,&rdquo; she would say, taking off her spectacles
+and looking up with the old faded eyes, that were becoming ringed with white.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah yes, old Truefit,&rdquo; said Mr. Elliot. &ldquo;He has a son at
+Oxford. I&rsquo;ve often stayed with them. It&rsquo;s a lovely old Jacobean
+house. Some exquisite Greuzes&mdash;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&mdash;men&rsquo;s shoe-buckles they must be, in use
+between the years 1580 and 1660; the dates mayn&rsquo;t be right, but
+fact&rsquo;s as I say. Your true collector always has some unaccountable fad of
+that kind. On other points he&rsquo;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&mdash;&rdquo; he was interrupted here by the necessity of considering
+his move,&mdash;&ldquo;Lady Maud has a horror of cats and clergymen, and people
+with big front teeth. I&rsquo;ve heard her shout across a table, &lsquo;Keep
+your mouth shut, Miss Smith; they&rsquo;re as yellow as carrots!&rsquo; across
+a table, mind you. To me she&rsquo;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&rsquo;ve been told it&rsquo;s a family feud&mdash;something to
+do with an ancestor in the reign of Charles the First. Yes,&rdquo; he
+continued, suffering check after check, &ldquo;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&rsquo;you think,
+Hilda,&rdquo; he called out to his wife, &ldquo;her ladyship takes a
+bath?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should hardly like to say, Hugh,&rdquo; Mrs. Elliot tittered,
+&ldquo;but wearing puce velvet, as she does even on the hottest August day, it
+somehow doesn&rsquo;t show.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pepper, you have me,&rdquo; said Mr. Elliot. &ldquo;My chess is even
+worse than I remembered.&rdquo; He accepted his defeat with great equanimity,
+because he really wished to talk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drew his chair beside Mr. Wilfrid Flushing, the newcomer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are these at all in your line?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shams, all of them,&rdquo; said Mr. Flushing briefly. &ldquo;This rug,
+now, isn&rsquo;t at all bad.&rdquo; He stopped and picked up a piece of the rug
+at their feet. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clock, which had been wheezing for some minutes like an old man preparing
+to cough, now struck nine. The sound slightly disturbed certain somnolent
+merchants, government officials, and men of independent means who were lying
+back in their chairs, chatting, smoking, ruminating about their affairs, with
+their eyes half shut; they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and
+then closed them again. They had the appearance of crocodiles so fully gorged
+by their last meal that the future of the world gives them no anxiety whatever.
+The only disturbance in the placid bright room was caused by a large moth which
+shot from light to light, whizzing over elaborate heads of hair, and causing
+several young women to raise their hands nervously and exclaim, &ldquo;Some one
+ought to kill it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not spoken for a long time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the clock struck, Hirst said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, the creatures begin to stir. . . .&rdquo; He watched them raise
+themselves, look about them, and settle down again. &ldquo;What I abhor most of
+all,&rdquo; he concluded, &ldquo;is the female breast. Imagine being Venning
+and having to get into bed with Susan! But the really repulsive thing is that
+they feel nothing at all&mdash;about what I do when I have a hot bath.
+They&rsquo;re gross, they&rsquo;re absurd, they&rsquo;re utterly
+intolerable!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded to think about
+himself, about science, about Cambridge, about the Bar, about Helen and what
+she thought of him, until, being very tired, he was nodding off to sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly Hewet woke him up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How d&rsquo;you know what you feel, Hirst?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you in love?&rdquo; asked Hirst. He put in his eyeglass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be a fool,&rdquo; said Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll sit down and think about it,&rdquo; said Hirst.
+&ldquo;One really ought to. If these people would only think about things, the
+world would be a far better place for us all to live in. Are you trying to
+think?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour, but he did
+not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall go for a walk,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Remember we weren&rsquo;t in bed last night,&rdquo; said Hirst with a
+prodigious yawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet rose and stretched himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want to go and get a breath of air,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and forbidding him to
+settle into any one train of thought. It was precisely as if he had been in the
+middle of a talk which interested him profoundly when some one came up and
+interrupted him. He could not finish the talk, and the longer he sat there the
+more he wanted to finish it. As the talk that had been interrupted was a talk
+with Rachel, he had to ask himself why he felt this, and why he wanted to go on
+talking to her. Hirst would merely say that he was in love with her. But he was
+not in love with her. Did love begin in that way, with the wish to go on
+talking? No. It always began in his case with definite physical sensations, and
+these were now absent, he did not even find her physically attractive. There
+was something, of course, unusual about her&mdash;she was young, inexperienced,
+and inquisitive, they had been more open with each other than was usually
+possible. He always found girls interesting to talk to, and surely these were
+good reasons why he should wish to go on talking to her; and last night, what
+with the crowd and the confusion, he had only been able to begin to talk to
+her. What was she doing now? Lying on a sofa and looking at the ceiling,
+perhaps. He could imagine her doing that, and Helen in an arm-chair, with her
+hands on the arm of it, so&mdash;looking ahead of her, with her great big
+eyes&mdash;oh no, they&rsquo;d be talking, of course, about the dance. But
+suppose Rachel was going away in a day or two, suppose this was the end of her
+visit, and her father had arrived in one of the steamers anchored in the
+bay,&mdash;it was intolerable to know so little. Therefore he exclaimed,
+&ldquo;How d&rsquo;you know what you feel, Hirst?&rdquo; to stop himself from
+thinking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their aimless movements
+and their unknown lives were disturbing, so that he longed for the empty
+darkness. The first thing he looked for when he stepped out of the hall door
+was the light of the Ambroses&rsquo; villa. When he had definitely decided that
+a certain light apart from the others higher up the hill was their light, he
+was considerably reassured. There seemed to be at once a little stability in
+all this incoherence. Without any definite plan in his head, he took the
+turning to the right and walked through the town and came to the wall by the
+meeting of the roads, where he stopped. The booming of the sea was audible. The
+dark-blue mass of the mountains rose against the paler blue of the sky. There
+was no moon, but myriads of stars, and lights were anchored up and down in the
+dark waves of earth all round him. He had meant to go back, but the single
+light of the Ambroses&rsquo; villa had now become three separate lights, and he
+was tempted to go on. He might as well make sure that Rachel was still there.
+Walking fast, he soon stood by the iron gate of their garden, and pushed it
+open; the outline of the house suddenly appeared sharply before his eyes, and
+the thin column of the verandah cutting across the palely lit gravel of the
+terrace. He hesitated. At the back of the house some one was rattling cans. He
+approached the front; the light on the terrace showed him that the
+sitting-rooms were on that side. He stood as near the light as he could by the
+corner of the house, the leaves of a creeper brushing his face. After a moment
+he could hear a voice. The voice went on steadily; it was not talking, but from
+the continuity of the sound it was a voice reading aloud. He crept a little
+closer; he crumpled the leaves together so as to stop their rustling about his
+ears. It might be Rachel&rsquo;s voice. He left the shadow and stepped into the
+radius of the light, and then heard a sentence spoken quite distinctly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And there we lived from the year 1860 to 1895, the happiest years of my
+parents&rsquo; lives, and there in 1862 my brother Maurice was born, to the
+delight of his parents, as he was destined to be the delight of all who knew
+him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The voice quickened, and the tone became conclusive rising slightly in pitch,
+as if these words were at the end of the chapter. Hewet drew back again into
+the shadow. There was a long silence. He could just hear chairs being moved
+inside. He had almost decided to go back, when suddenly two figures appeared at
+the window, not six feet from him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was Maurice Fielding, of course, that your mother was engaged
+to,&rdquo; said Helen&rsquo;s voice. She spoke reflectively, looking out into
+the dark garden, and thinking evidently as much of the look of the night as of
+what she was saying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mother?&rdquo; said Rachel. Hewet&rsquo;s heart leapt, and he noticed
+the fact. Her voice, though low, was full of surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t know that?&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never knew there&rsquo;d been any one else,&rdquo; said Rachel. She
+was clearly surprised, but all they said was said low and inexpressively,
+because they were speaking out into the cool dark night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;More people were in love with her than with any one I&rsquo;ve ever
+known,&rdquo; Helen stated. &ldquo;She had that power&mdash;she enjoyed things.
+She wasn&rsquo;t beautiful, but&mdash;I was thinking of her last night at the
+dance. She got on with every kind of person, and then she made it all so
+amazingly&mdash;funny.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It appeared that Helen was going back into the past, choosing her words
+deliberately, comparing Theresa with the people she had known since Theresa
+died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how she did it,&rdquo; she continued, and ceased, and
+there was a long pause, in which a little owl called first here, then there, as
+it moved from tree to tree in the garden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s so like Aunt Lucy and Aunt Katie,&rdquo; said Rachel at
+last. &ldquo;They always make out that she was very sad and very good.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then why, for goodness&rsquo; sake, did they do nothing but criticize
+her when she was alive?&rdquo; said Helen. Very gentle their voices sounded, as
+if they fell through the waves of the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I were to die to-morrow . . .&rdquo; she began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The broken sentences had an extraordinary beauty and detachment in
+Hewet&rsquo;s ears, and a kind of mystery too, as though they were spoken by
+people in their sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, Rachel,&rdquo; Helen&rsquo;s voice continued, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not
+going to walk in the garden; it&rsquo;s damp&mdash;it&rsquo;s sure to be damp;
+besides, I see at least a dozen toads.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Toads? Those are stones, Helen. Come out. It&rsquo;s nicer out. The
+flowers smell,&rdquo; Rachel replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet drew still farther back. His heart was beating very quickly. Apparently
+Rachel tried to pull Helen out on to the terrace, and Helen resisted. There was
+a certain amount of scuffling, entreating, resisting, and laughter from both of
+them. Then a man&rsquo;s form appeared. Hewet could not hear what they were all
+saying. In a minute they had gone in; he could hear bolts grating then; there
+was dead silence, and all the lights went out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned away, still crumpling and uncrumpling a handful of leaves which he
+had torn from the wall. An exquisite sense of pleasure and relief possessed
+him; it was all so solid and peaceful after the ball at the hotel, whether he
+was in love with them or not, and he was not in love with them; no, but it was
+good that they should be alive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After standing still for a minute or two he turned and began to walk towards
+the gate. With the movement of his body, the excitement, the romance and the
+richness of life crowded into his brain. He shouted out a line of poetry, but
+the words escaped him, and he stumbled among lines and fragments of lines which
+had no meaning at all except for the beauty of the words. He shut the gate, and
+ran swinging from side to side down the hill, shouting any nonsense that came
+into his head. &ldquo;Here am I,&rdquo; he cried rhythmically, as his feet
+pounded to the left and to the right, &ldquo;plunging along, like an elephant
+in the jungle, stripping the branches as I go (he snatched at the twigs of a
+bush at the roadside), roaring innumerable words, lovely words about
+innumerable things, running downhill and talking nonsense aloud to myself about
+roads and leaves and lights and women coming out into the darkness&mdash;about
+women&mdash;about Rachel, about Rachel.&rdquo; He stopped and drew a deep
+breath. The night seemed immense and hospitable, and although so dark there
+seemed to be things moving down there in the harbour and movement out at sea.
+He gazed until the darkness numbed him, and then he walked on quickly, still
+murmuring to himself. &ldquo;And I ought to be in bed, snoring and dreaming,
+dreaming, dreaming. Dreams and realities, dreams and realities, dreams and
+realities,&rdquo; he repeated all the way up the avenue, scarcely knowing what
+he said, until he reached the front door. Here he paused for a second, and
+collected himself before he opened the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His eyes were dazed, his hands very cold, and his brain excited and yet half
+asleep. Inside the door everything was as he had left it except that the hall
+was now empty. There were the chairs turning in towards each other where people
+had sat talking, and the empty glasses on little tables, and the newspapers
+scattered on the floor. As he shut the door he felt as if he were enclosed in a
+square box, and instantly shrivelled up. It was all very bright and very small.
+He stopped for a minute by the long table to find a paper which he had meant to
+read, but he was still too much under the influence of the dark and the fresh
+air to consider carefully which paper it was or where he had seen it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he fumbled vaguely among the papers he saw a figure cross the tail of his
+eye, coming downstairs. He heard the swishing sound of skirts, and to his great
+surprise, Evelyn M. came up to him, laid her hand on the table as if to prevent
+him from taking up a paper, and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re just the person I wanted to talk to.&rdquo; Her voice was a
+little unpleasant and metallic, her eyes were very bright, and she kept them
+fixed upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To talk to me?&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;m half
+asleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I think you understand better than most people,&rdquo; she answered,
+and sat down on a little chair placed beside a big leather chair so that Hewet
+had to sit down beside her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he said. He yawned openly, and lit a cigarette. He could
+not believe that this was really happening to him. &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you really sympathetic, or is it just a pose?&rdquo; she demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s for you to say,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+interested, I think.&rdquo; He still felt numb all over and as if she was much
+too close to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Any one can be interested!&rdquo; she cried impatiently. &ldquo;Your
+friend Mr. Hirst&rsquo;s interested, I daresay however, I do believe in you.
+You look as if you&rsquo;d got a nice sister, somehow.&rdquo; She paused,
+picking at some sequins on her knees, and then, as if she had made up her mind,
+she started off, &ldquo;Anyhow, I&rsquo;m going to ask your advice. D&rsquo;you
+ever get into a state where you don&rsquo;t know your own mind? That&rsquo;s
+the state I&rsquo;m in now. You see, last night at the dance Raymond
+Oliver,&mdash;he&rsquo;s the tall dark boy who looks as if he had Indian blood
+in him, but he says he&rsquo;s not really,&mdash;well, we were sitting out
+together, and he told me all about himself, how unhappy he is at home, and how
+he hates being out here. They&rsquo;ve put him into some beastly mining
+business. He says it&rsquo;s beastly&mdash;I should like it, I know, but
+that&rsquo;s neither here nor there. And I felt awfully sorry for him, one
+couldn&rsquo;t help being sorry for him, and when he asked me to let him kiss
+me, I did. I don&rsquo;t see any harm in that, do you? And then this morning he
+said he&rsquo;d thought I meant something more, and I wasn&rsquo;t the sort to
+let any one kiss me. And we talked and talked. I daresay I was very silly, but
+one can&rsquo;t help liking people when one&rsquo;s sorry for them. I do like
+him most awfully&mdash;&rdquo; She paused. &ldquo;So I gave him half a promise,
+and then, you see, there&rsquo;s Alfred Perrott.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Perrott,&rdquo; said Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We got to know each other on that picnic the other day,&rdquo; she
+continued. &ldquo;He seemed so lonely, especially as Arthur had gone off with
+Susan, and one couldn&rsquo;t help guessing what was in his mind. So we had
+quite a long talk when you were looking at the ruins, and he told me all about
+his life, and his struggles, and how fearfully hard it had been. D&rsquo;you
+know, he was a boy in a grocer&rsquo;s shop and took parcels to people&rsquo;s
+houses in a basket? That interested me awfully, because I always say it
+doesn&rsquo;t matter how you&rsquo;re born if you&rsquo;ve got the right stuff
+in you. And he told me about his sister who&rsquo;s paralysed, poor girl, and
+one can see she&rsquo;s a great trial, though he&rsquo;s evidently very devoted
+to her. I must say I do admire people like that! I don&rsquo;t expect you do
+because you&rsquo;re so clever. Well, last night we sat out in the garden
+together, and I couldn&rsquo;t help seeing what he wanted to say, and
+comforting him a little, and telling him I did care&mdash;I really
+do&mdash;only, then, there&rsquo;s Raymond Oliver. What I want you to tell me
+is, can one be in love with two people at once, or can&rsquo;t one?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She became silent, and sat with her chin on her hands, looking very intent, as
+if she were facing a real problem which had to be discussed between them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think it depends what sort of person you are,&rdquo; said Hewet. He
+looked at her. She was small and pretty, aged perhaps twenty-eight or
+twenty-nine, but though dashing and sharply cut, her features expressed nothing
+very clearly, except a great deal of spirit and good health.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who are you, what are you; you see, I know nothing about you,&rdquo; he
+continued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I was coming to that,&rdquo; said Evelyn M. She continued to rest
+her chin on her hands and to look intently ahead of her. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m the
+daughter of a mother and no father, if that interests you,&rdquo; she said.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not a very nice thing to be. It&rsquo;s what often happens in
+the country. She was a farmer&rsquo;s daughter, and he was rather a
+swell&mdash;the young man up at the great house. He never made things
+straight&mdash;never married her&mdash;though he allowed us quite a lot of
+money. His people wouldn&rsquo;t let him. Poor father! I can&rsquo;t help
+liking him. Mother wasn&rsquo;t the sort of woman who could keep him straight,
+anyhow. He was killed in the war. I believe his men worshipped him. They say
+great big troopers broke down and cried over his body on the battlefield. I
+wish I&rsquo;d known him. Mother had all the life crushed out of her. The
+world&mdash;&rdquo; She clenched her fist. &ldquo;Oh, people can be horrid to a
+woman like that!&rdquo; She turned upon Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;d&rsquo;you want to know any more about
+me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you?&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;Who looked after you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve looked after myself mostly,&rdquo; she laughed.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve had splendid friends. I do like people! That&rsquo;s the
+trouble. What would you do if you liked two people, both of them tremendously,
+and you couldn&rsquo;t tell which most?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should go on liking them&mdash;I should wait and see. Why not?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But one has to make up one&rsquo;s mind,&rdquo; said Evelyn. &ldquo;Or
+are you one of the people who doesn&rsquo;t believe in marriages and all that?
+Look here&mdash;this isn&rsquo;t fair, I do all the telling, and you tell
+nothing. Perhaps you&rsquo;re the same as your friend&rdquo;&mdash;she looked
+at him suspiciously; &ldquo;perhaps you don&rsquo;t like me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know you,&rdquo; said Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know when I like a person directly I see them! I knew I liked you the
+very first night at dinner. Oh dear,&rdquo; she continued impatiently,
+&ldquo;what a lot of bother would be saved if only people would say the things
+they think straight out! I&rsquo;m made like that. I can&rsquo;t help
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But don&rsquo;t you find it leads to difficulties?&rdquo; Hewet asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s men&rsquo;s fault,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;They always
+drag it in&mdash;love, I mean.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And so you&rsquo;ve gone on having one proposal after another,&rdquo;
+said Hewet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t suppose I&rsquo;ve had more proposals than most
+women,&rdquo; said Evelyn, but she spoke without conviction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Five, six, ten?&rdquo; Hewet ventured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Evelyn seemed to intimate that perhaps ten was the right figure, but that it
+really was not a high one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I believe you&rsquo;re thinking me a heartless flirt,&rdquo; she
+protested. &ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t care if you are. I don&rsquo;t care what
+any one thinks of me. Just because one&rsquo;s interested and likes to be
+friends with men, and talk to them as one talks to women, one&rsquo;s called a
+flirt.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But Miss Murgatroyd&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish you&rsquo;d call me Evelyn,&rdquo; she interrupted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After ten proposals do you honestly think that men are the same as
+women?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Honestly, honestly,&mdash;how I hate that word! It&rsquo;s always used
+by prigs,&rdquo; cried Evelyn. &ldquo;Honestly I think they ought to be.
+That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s so disappointing. Every time one thinks it&rsquo;s
+not going to happen, and every time it does.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The pursuit of Friendship,&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;The title of a
+comedy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re horrid,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t care a bit
+really. You might be Mr. Hirst.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Hewet, &ldquo;let&rsquo;s consider. Let us
+consider&mdash;&rdquo; He paused, because for the moment he could not remember
+what it was that they had to consider. He was far more interested in her than
+in her story, for as she went on speaking his numbness had disappeared, and he
+was conscious of a mixture of liking, pity, and distrust. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve
+promised to marry both Oliver and Perrott?&rdquo; he concluded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not exactly promised,&rdquo; said Evelyn. &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t make up
+my mind which I really like best. Oh how I detest modern life!&rdquo; she flung
+off. &ldquo;It must have been so much easier for the Elizabethans! I thought
+the other day on that mountain how I&rsquo;d have liked to be one of those
+colonists, to cut down trees and make laws and all that, instead of fooling
+about with all these people who think one&rsquo;s just a pretty young lady.
+Though I&rsquo;m not. I really might <i>do</i> something.&rdquo; She reflected
+in silence for a minute. Then she said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid right down in my heart that Alfred Perrot
+<i>won&rsquo;t</i> do. He&rsquo;s not strong, is he?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps he couldn&rsquo;t cut down a tree,&rdquo; said Hewet.
+&ldquo;Have you never cared for anybody?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them,&rdquo; she
+said. &ldquo;I suppose I&rsquo;m too fastidious. All my life I&rsquo;ve wanted
+somebody I could look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are
+so small.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What d&rsquo;you mean by splendid?&rdquo; Hewet asked. &ldquo;People
+are&mdash;nothing more.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Evelyn was puzzled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We don&rsquo;t care for people because of their qualities,&rdquo; he
+tried to explain. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just them that we care for,&rdquo;&mdash;he
+struck a match&mdash;&ldquo;just that,&rdquo; he said, pointing to the flames.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I see what you mean,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but I don&rsquo;t agree. I
+do know why I care for people, and I think I&rsquo;m hardly ever wrong. I see
+at once what they&rsquo;ve got in them. Now I think you must be rather
+splendid; but not Mr. Hirst.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewlet shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s not nearly so unselfish, or so sympathetic, or so big, or so
+understanding,&rdquo; Evelyn continued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet sat silent, smoking his cigarette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should hate cutting down trees,&rdquo; he remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not trying to flirt with you, though I suppose you think I
+am!&rdquo; Evelyn shot out. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d never have come to you if
+I&rsquo;d thought you&rsquo;d merely think odious things of me!&rdquo; The
+tears came into her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you never flirt?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course I don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she protested. &ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t I
+told you? I want friendship; I want to care for some one greater and nobler
+than I am, and if they fall in love with me it isn&rsquo;t my fault; I
+don&rsquo;t want it; I positively hate it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet could see that there was very little use in going on with the
+conversation, for it was obvious that Evelyn did not wish to say anything in
+particular, but to impress upon him an image of herself, being, for some reason
+which she would not reveal, unhappy, or insecure. He was very tired, and a pale
+waiter kept walking ostentatiously into the middle of the room and looking at
+them meaningly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They want to shut up,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;My advice is that you
+should tell Oliver and Perrott to-morrow that you&rsquo;ve made up your mind
+that you don&rsquo;t mean to marry either of them. I&rsquo;m certain you
+don&rsquo;t. If you change your mind you can always tell them so. They&rsquo;re
+both sensible men; they&rsquo;ll understand. And then all this bother will be
+over.&rdquo; He got up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Evelyn did not move. She sat looking up at him with her bright eager eyes,
+in the depths of which he thought he detected some disappointment, or
+dissatisfaction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-night,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are heaps of things I want to say to you still,&rdquo; she said.
+&ldquo;And I&rsquo;m going to, some time. I suppose you must go to bed
+now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m half asleep.&rdquo; He left her
+still sitting by herself in the empty hall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why is it that they <i>won&rsquo;t</i> be honest?&rdquo; he muttered to
+himself as he went upstairs. Why was it that relations between different people
+were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous
+that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an instinct to be
+examined carefully and probably crushed? What had Evelyn really wished to say
+to him? What was she feeling left alone in the empty hall? The mystery of life
+and the unreality even of one&rsquo;s own sensations overcame him as he walked
+down the corridor which led to his room. It was dimly lighted, but sufficiently
+for him to see a figure in a bright dressing-gown pass swiftly in front of him,
+the figure of a woman crossing from one room to another.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap15"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<p>
+Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually meeting in a
+hotel at midnight, they possess one advantage at least over the bonds which
+unite the elderly, who have lived together once and so must live for ever.
+Slight they may be, but vivid and genuine, merely because the power to break
+them is within the grasp of each, and there is no reason for continuance except
+a true desire that continue they shall. When two people have been married for
+years they seem to become unconscious of each other&rsquo;s bodily presence so
+that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be
+answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without
+its loneliness. The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this stage
+of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to recall with an
+effort whether a thing had been said or only thought, shared or dreamt in
+private. At four o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon two or three days later Mrs.
+Ambrose was standing brushing her hair, while her husband was in the
+dressing-room which opened out of her room, and occasionally, through the
+cascade of water&mdash;he was washing his face&mdash;she caught exclamations,
+&ldquo;So it goes on year after year; I wish, I wish, I wish I could make an
+end of it,&rdquo; to which she paid no attention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s white? Or only brown?&rdquo; Thus she herself murmured,
+examining a hair which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. She pulled it out
+and laid it on the dressing-table. She was criticising her own appearance, or
+rather approving of it, standing a little way back from the glass and looking
+at her own face with superb pride and melancholy, when her husband appeared in
+the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half obscured by a towel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You often tell me I don&rsquo;t notice things,&rdquo; he remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell me if this is a white hair, then?&rdquo; she replied. She laid the
+hair on his hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s not a white hair on your head,&rdquo; he exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt,&rdquo; she sighed; and bowed her head
+under his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced only a kiss
+where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife then proceeded to move
+about the room, casually murmuring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What was that you were saying?&rdquo; Helen remarked, after an interval
+of conversation which no third person could have understood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rachel&mdash;you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel,&rdquo; he observed
+significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked at him.
+His observations were apt to be true.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Young gentlemen don&rsquo;t interest themselves in young women&rsquo;s
+education without a motive,&rdquo; he remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Hirst,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hirst and Hewet, they&rsquo;re all the same to me&mdash;all covered with
+spots,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;He advises her to read Gibbon. Did you know
+that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior to her
+husband in powers of observation. She merely said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing would surprise me. Even that dreadful flying man we met at the
+dance&mdash;even Mr. Dalloway&mdash;even&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I advise you to be circumspect,&rdquo; said Ridley. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s
+Willoughby, remember&mdash;Willoughby&rdquo;; he pointed at a letter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her dressing-table. Yes,
+there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive, perpetually jocular, robbing a whole
+continent of mystery, enquiring after his daughter&rsquo;s manners and
+morals&mdash;hoping she wasn&rsquo;t a bore, and bidding them pack her off to
+him on board the very next ship if she were&mdash;and then grateful and
+affectionate with suppressed emotion, and then half a page about his own
+triumphs over wretched little natives who went on strike and refused to load
+his ships, until he roared English oaths at them, &ldquo;popping my head out of
+the window just as I was, in my shirt sleeves. The beggars had the sense to
+scatter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If Theresa married Willoughby,&rdquo; she remarked, turning the page
+with a hairpin, &ldquo;one doesn&rsquo;t see what&rsquo;s to prevent
+Rachel&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with the washing of
+his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of Hughling Elliot, who
+was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and yet Ridley couldn&rsquo;t
+simply point at the door and tell him to go. The truth of it was, they saw too
+many people. And so on and so on, more conjugal talk pattering softly and
+unintelligibly, until they were both ready to go down to tea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first thing that caught Helen&rsquo;s eye as she came downstairs was a
+carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding on the tops of
+hats. She had only time to gain the drawing-room before two names were oddly
+mispronounced by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thornbury came in slightly in
+advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her
+hand. &ldquo;A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically. She was a woman of forty perhaps, very
+well set up and erect, splendidly robust, though not as tall as the upright
+carriage of her body made her appear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked Helen straight in the face and said, &ldquo;You have a
+charmin&rsquo; house.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you, and though
+naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous at the same time.
+Mrs. Thornbury acted as interpreter, making things smooth all round by a series
+of charming commonplace remarks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;to
+promise that you will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the benefit of your
+experience. I&rsquo;m sure no one here knows the country as well as you do. No
+one takes such wonderful long walks. No one, I&rsquo;m sure, has your
+encyclopaedic knowledge upon every subject. Mr. Wilfrid Flushing is a
+collector. He has discovered really beautiful things already. I had no notion
+that the peasants were so artistic&mdash;though of course in the
+past&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not old things&mdash;new things,&rdquo; interrupted Mrs. Flushing
+curtly. &ldquo;That is, if he takes my advice.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Ambroses had not lived for many years in London without knowing something
+of a good many people, by name at least, and Helen remembered hearing of the
+Flushings. Mr. Flushing was a man who kept an old furniture shop; he had always
+said he would not marry because most women have red cheeks, and would not take
+a house because most houses have narrow staircases, and would not eat meat
+because most animals bleed when they are killed; and then he had married an
+eccentric aristocratic lady, who certainly was not pale, who looked as if she
+ate meat, who had forced him to do all the things he most disliked&mdash;and
+this then was the lady. Helen looked at her with interest. They had moved out
+into the garden, where the tea was laid under a tree, and Mrs. Flushing was
+helping herself to cherry jam. She had a peculiar jerking movement of the body
+when she spoke, which caused the canary-coloured plume on her hat to jerk too.
+Her small but finely-cut and vigorous features, together with the deep red of
+lips and cheeks, pointed to many generations of well-trained and well-nourished
+ancestors behind her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothin&rsquo; that&rsquo;s more than twenty years old interests
+me,&rdquo; she continued. &ldquo;Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they
+stick &rsquo;em in museums when they&rsquo;re only fit for
+burnin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I quite agree,&rdquo; Helen laughed. &ldquo;But my husband spends his
+life in digging up manuscripts which nobody wants.&rdquo; She was amused by
+Ridley&rsquo;s expression of startled disapproval.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s a clever man in London called John who paints ever so much
+better than the old masters,&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing continued. &ldquo;His
+pictures excite me&mdash;nothin&rsquo; that&rsquo;s old excites me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But even his pictures will become old,&rdquo; Mrs. Thornbury intervened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ll have &rsquo;em burnt, or I&rsquo;ll put it in my
+will,&rdquo; said Mrs. Flushing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And Mrs. Flushing lived in one of the most beautiful old houses in
+England&mdash;Chillingley,&rdquo; Mrs. Thornbury explained to the rest of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I&rsquo;d my way I&rsquo;d burn that to-morrow,&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing
+laughed. She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What does any sane person want with those great big houses?&rdquo; she
+demanded. &ldquo;If you go downstairs after dark you&rsquo;re covered with
+black beetles, and the electric lights always goin&rsquo; out. What would you
+do if spiders came out of the tap when you turned on the hot water?&rdquo; she
+demanded, fixing her eye on Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Ambrose shrugged her shoulders with a smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is what I like,&rdquo; said Mrs. Flushing. She jerked her head at
+the Villa. &ldquo;A little house in a garden. I had one once in Ireland. One
+could lie in bed in the mornin&rsquo; and pick roses outside the window with
+one&rsquo;s toes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the gardeners, weren&rsquo;t they surprised?&rdquo; Mrs. Thornbury
+enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There were no gardeners,&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing chuckled. &ldquo;Nobody
+but me and an old woman without any teeth. You know the poor in Ireland lose
+their teeth after they&rsquo;re twenty. But you wouldn&rsquo;t expect a
+politician to understand that&mdash;Arthur Balfour wouldn&rsquo;t understand
+that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ridley sighed that he never expected any one to understand anything, least of
+all politicians.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;However,&rdquo; he concluded, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s one advantage I find
+in extreme old age&mdash;nothing matters a hang except one&rsquo;s food and
+one&rsquo;s digestion. All I ask is to be left alone to moulder away in
+solitude. It&rsquo;s obvious that the world&rsquo;s going as fast as it can
+to&mdash;the Nethermost Pit, and all I can do is to sit still and consume as
+much of my own smoke as possible.&rdquo; He groaned, and with a melancholy
+glance laid the jam on his bread, for he felt the atmosphere of this abrupt
+lady distinctly unsympathetic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I always contradict my husband when he says that,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Thornbury sweetly. &ldquo;You men! Where would you be if it weren&rsquo;t for
+the women!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Read the <i>Symposium</i>,&rdquo; said Ridley grimly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Symposium</i>?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Flushing. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s Latin
+or Greek? Tell me, is there a good translation?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Ridley. &ldquo;You will have to learn Greek.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Flushing cried, &ldquo;Ah, ah, ah! I&rsquo;d rather break stones in the
+road. I always envy the men who break stones and sit on those nice little heaps
+all day wearin&rsquo; spectacles. I&rsquo;d infinitely rather break stones than
+clean out poultry runs, or feed the cows, or&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here Rachel came up from the lower garden with a book in her hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that book?&rdquo; said Ridley, when she had shaken hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s Gibbon,&rdquo; said Rachel as she sat down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</i>?&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Thornbury. &ldquo;A very wonderful book, I know. My dear father was always
+quoting it at us, with the result that we resolved never to read a line.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gibbon the historian?&rdquo; enquired Mrs. Flushing. &ldquo;I connect
+him with some of the happiest hours of my life. We used to lie in bed and read
+Gibbon&mdash;about the massacres of the Christians, I remember&mdash;when we
+were supposed to be asleep. It&rsquo;s no joke, I can tell you, readin&rsquo; a
+great big book, in double columns, by a night-light, and the light that comes
+through a chink in the door. Then there were the moths&mdash;tiger moths,
+yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. Louisa, my sister, would have the window
+open. I wanted it shut. We fought every night of our lives over that window.
+Have you ever seen a moth dyin&rsquo; in a night-light?&rdquo; she enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again there was an interruption. Hewet and Hirst appeared at the drawing-room
+window and came up to the tea-table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel&rsquo;s heart beat hard. She was conscious of an extraordinary intensity
+in everything, as though their presence stripped some cover off the surface of
+things; but the greetings were remarkably commonplace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Excuse me,&rdquo; said Hirst, rising from his chair directly he had sat
+down. He went into the drawing-room, and returned with a cushion which he
+placed carefully upon his seat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rheumatism,&rdquo; he remarked, as he sat down for the second time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The result of the dance?&rdquo; Helen enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Whenever I get at all run down I tend to be rheumatic,&rdquo; Hirst
+stated. He bent his wrist back sharply. &ldquo;I hear little pieces of chalk
+grinding together!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel looked at him. She was amused, and yet she was respectful; if such a
+thing could be, the upper part of her face seemed to laugh, and the lower part
+to check its laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet picked up the book that lay on the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You like this?&rdquo; he asked in an undertone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I don&rsquo;t like it,&rdquo; she replied. She had indeed been
+trying all the afternoon to read it, and for some reason the glory which she
+had perceived at first had faded, and, read as she would, she could not grasp
+the meaning with her mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth,&rdquo; she
+hazarded. Evidently she meant Hewet alone to hear her words, but Hirst
+demanded, &ldquo;What d&rsquo;you mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was instantly ashamed of her figure of speech, for she could not explain it
+in words of sober criticism.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Surely it&rsquo;s the most perfect style, so far as style goes,
+that&rsquo;s ever been invented,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;Every sentence is
+practically perfect, and the wit&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ugly in body, repulsive in mind,&rdquo; she thought, instead of thinking
+about Gibbon&rsquo;s style. &ldquo;Yes, but strong, searching, unyielding in
+mind.&rdquo; She looked at his big head, a disproportionate part of which was
+occupied by the forehead, and at the direct, severe eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I give you up in despair,&rdquo; he said. He meant it lightly, but she
+took it seriously, and believed that her value as a human being was lessened
+because she did not happen to admire the style of Gibbon. The others were
+talking now in a group about the native villages which Mrs. Flushing ought to
+visit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I despair too,&rdquo; she said impetuously. &ldquo;How are you going to
+judge people merely by their minds?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect,&rdquo; said St. John in his
+jaunty manner, which was always irritating because it made the person he talked
+to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest. &ldquo;&lsquo;Be good, sweet
+maid&rsquo;&mdash;I thought Mr. Kingsley and my Aunt were now obsolete.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One can be very nice without having read a book,&rdquo; she asserted.
+Very silly and simple her words sounded, and laid her open to derision.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did I ever deny it?&rdquo; Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most unexpectedly Mrs. Thornbury here intervened, either because it was her
+mission to keep things smooth or because she had long wished to speak to Mr.
+Hirst, feeling as she did that young men were her sons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have lived all my life with people like your Aunt, Mr. Hirst,&rdquo;
+she said, leaning forward in her chair. Her brown squirrel-like eyes became
+even brighter than usual. &ldquo;They have never heard of Gibbon. They only
+care for their pheasants and their peasants. They are great big men who look so
+fine on horseback, as people must have done, I think, in the days of the great
+wars. Say what you like against them&mdash;they are animal, they are
+unintellectual; they don&rsquo;t read themselves, and they don&rsquo;t want
+others to read, but they are some of the finest and the kindest human beings on
+the face of the earth! You would be surprised at some of the stories I could
+tell. You have never guessed, perhaps, at all the romances that go on in the
+heart of the country. There are the people, I feel, among whom Shakespeare will
+be born if he is ever born again. In those old houses, up among the
+Downs&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My Aunt,&rdquo; Hirst interrupted, &ldquo;spends her life in East
+Lambeth among the degraded poor. I only quoted my Aunt because she is inclined
+to persecute people she calls &lsquo;intellectual,&rsquo; which is what I
+suspect Miss Vinrace of doing. It&rsquo;s all the fashion now. If you&rsquo;re
+clever it&rsquo;s always taken for granted that you&rsquo;re completely without
+sympathy, understanding, affection&mdash;all the things that really matter. Oh,
+you Christians! You&rsquo;re the most conceited, patronising, hypocritical set
+of old humbugs in the kingdom! Of course,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+the first to allow your country gentlemen great merits. For one thing,
+they&rsquo;re probably quite frank about their passions, which we are not. My
+father, who is a clergyman in Norfolk, says that there is hardly a squire in
+the country who does not&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But about Gibbon?&rdquo; Hewet interrupted. The look of nervous tension
+which had come over every face was relaxed by the interruption.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You find him monotonous, I suppose. But you know&mdash;&rdquo; He opened
+the book, and began searching for passages to read aloud, and in a little time
+he found a good one which he considered suitable. But there was nothing in the
+world that bored Ridley more than being read aloud to, and he was besides
+scrupulously fastidious as to the dress and behaviour of ladies. In the space
+of fifteen minutes he had decided against Mrs. Flushing on the ground that her
+orange plume did not suit her complexion, that she spoke too loud, that she
+crossed her legs, and finally, when he saw her accept a cigarette that Hewet
+offered her, he jumped up, exclaiming something about &ldquo;bar
+parlours,&rdquo; and left them. Mrs. Flushing was evidently relieved by his
+departure. She puffed her cigarette, stuck her legs out, and examined Helen
+closely as to the character and reputation of their common friend Mrs. Raymond
+Parry. By a series of little strategems she drove her to define Mrs. Parry as
+somewhat elderly, by no means beautiful, very much made up&mdash;an insolent
+old harridan, in short, whose parties were amusing because one met odd people;
+but Helen herself always pitied poor Mr. Parry, who was understood to be shut
+up downstairs with cases full of gems, while his wife enjoyed herself in the
+drawing-room. &ldquo;Not that I believe what people say against
+her&mdash;although she hints, of course&mdash;&rdquo; Upon which Mrs. Flushing
+cried out with delight:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s my first cousin! Go on&mdash;go on!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Mrs. Flushing rose to go she was obviously delighted with her new
+acquaintances. She made three or four different plans for meeting or going on
+an expedition, or showing Helen the things they had bought, on her way to the
+carriage. She included them all in a vague but magnificent invitation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Helen returned to the garden again, Ridley&rsquo;s words of warning came
+into her head, and she hesitated a moment and looked at Rachel sitting between
+Hirst and Hewet. But she could draw no conclusions, for Hewet was still reading
+Gibbon aloud, and Rachel, for all the expression she had, might have been a
+shell, and his words water rubbing against her ears, as water rubs a shell on
+the edge of a rock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet&rsquo;s voice was very pleasant. When he reached the end of the period
+Hewet stopped, and no one volunteered any criticism.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do adore the aristocracy!&rdquo; Hirst exclaimed after a
+moment&rsquo;s pause. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re so amazingly unscrupulous. None of
+us would dare to behave as that woman behaves.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What I like about them,&rdquo; said Helen as she sat down, &ldquo;is
+that they&rsquo;re so well put together. Naked, Mrs. Flushing would be superb.
+Dressed as she dresses, it&rsquo;s absurd, of course.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Hirst. A shade of depression crossed his face.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never weighed more than ten stone in my life,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;which is ridiculous, considering my height, and I&rsquo;ve actually gone
+down in weight since we came here. I daresay that accounts for the
+rheumatism.&rdquo; Again he jerked his wrist back sharply, so that Helen might
+hear the grinding of the chalk stones. She could not help smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no laughing matter for me, I assure you,&rdquo; he protested.
+&ldquo;My mother&rsquo;s a chronic invalid, and I&rsquo;m always expecting to
+be told that I&rsquo;ve got heart disease myself. Rheumatism always goes to the
+heart in the end.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For goodness&rsquo; sake, Hirst,&rdquo; Hewet protested; &ldquo;one
+might think you were an old cripple of eighty. If it comes to that, I had an
+aunt who died of cancer myself, but I put a bold face on it&mdash;&rdquo; He
+rose and began tilting his chair backwards and forwards on its hind legs.
+&ldquo;Is any one here inclined for a walk?&rdquo; he said.
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s a magnificent walk, up behind the house. You come out on
+to a cliff and look right down into the sea. The rocks are all red; you can see
+them through the water. The other day I saw a sight that fairly took my breath
+away&mdash;about twenty jelly-fish, semi-transparent, pink, with long
+streamers, floating on the top of the waves.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure they weren&rsquo;t mermaids?&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+much too hot to climb uphill.&rdquo; He looked at Helen, who showed no signs of
+moving.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, it&rsquo;s too hot,&rdquo; Helen decided.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a short silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to come,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But she might have said that anyhow,&rdquo; Helen thought to herself as
+Hewet and Rachel went away together, and Helen was left alone with St. John, to
+St. John&rsquo;s obvious satisfaction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He may have been satisfied, but his usual difficulty in deciding that one
+subject was more deserving of notice than another prevented him from speaking
+for some time. He sat staring intently at the head of a dead match, while Helen
+considered&mdash;so it seemed from the expression of her eyes&mdash;something
+not closely connected with the present moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last St. John exclaimed, &ldquo;Damn! Damn everything! Damn
+everybody!&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;At Cambridge there are people to talk
+to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At Cambridge there are people to talk to,&rdquo; Helen echoed him,
+rhythmically and absent-mindedly. Then she woke up. &ldquo;By the way, have you
+settled what you&rsquo;re going to do&mdash;is it to be Cambridge or the
+Bar?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for Helen was still slightly
+inattentive. She had been thinking about Rachel and which of the two young men
+she was likely to fall in love with, and now sitting opposite to Hirst she
+thought, &ldquo;He&rsquo;s ugly. It&rsquo;s a pity they&rsquo;re so
+ugly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking of the clever,
+honest, interesting young men she knew, of whom Hirst was a good example, and
+wondering whether it was necessary that thought and scholarship should thus
+maltreat their bodies, and should thus elevate their minds to a very high tower
+from which the human race appeared to them like rats and mice squirming on the
+flat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the future?&rdquo; she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men
+becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming more and more
+like Rachel. &ldquo;Oh no,&rdquo; she concluded, glancing at him, &ldquo;one
+wouldn&rsquo;t marry you. Well, then, the future of the race is in the hands of
+Susan and Arthur; no&mdash;that&rsquo;s dreadful. Of farm labourers;
+no&mdash;not of the English at all, but of Russians and Chinese.&rdquo; This
+train of thought did not satisfy her, and was interrupted by St. John, who
+began again:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish you knew Bennett. He&rsquo;s the greatest man in the
+world.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bennett?&rdquo; she enquired. Becoming more at ease, St. John dropped
+the concentrated abruptness of his manner, and explained that Bennett was a man
+who lived in an old windmill six miles out of Cambridge. He lived the perfect
+life, according to St. John, very lonely, very simple, caring only for the
+truth of things, always ready to talk, and extraordinarily modest, though his
+mind was of the greatest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think,&rdquo; said St. John, when he had done describing
+him, &ldquo;that kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather flimsy? Did you
+notice at tea how poor old Hewet had to change the conversation? How they were
+all ready to pounce upon me because they thought I was going to say something
+improper? It wasn&rsquo;t anything, really. If Bennett had been there
+he&rsquo;d have said exactly what he meant to say, or he&rsquo;d have got up
+and gone. But there&rsquo;s something rather bad for the character in
+that&mdash;I mean if one hasn&rsquo;t got Bennett&rsquo;s character. It&rsquo;s
+inclined to make one bitter. Should you say that I was bitter?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen did not answer, and he continued:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it&rsquo;s a beastly thing to
+be. But the worst of me is that I&rsquo;m so envious. I envy every one. I
+can&rsquo;t endure people who do things better than I do&mdash;perfectly absurd
+things too&mdash;waiters balancing piles of plates&mdash;even Arthur, because
+Susan&rsquo;s in love with him. I want people to like me, and they don&rsquo;t.
+It&rsquo;s partly my appearance, I expect,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;though
+it&rsquo;s an absolute lie to say I&rsquo;ve Jewish blood in me&mdash;as a
+matter of fact we&rsquo;ve been in Norfolk, Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall, for
+three centuries at least. It must be awfully soothing to be like
+you&mdash;every one liking one at once.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I assure you they don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; Helen laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They do,&rdquo; said Hirst with conviction. &ldquo;In the first place,
+you&rsquo;re the most beautiful woman I&rsquo;ve ever seen; in the second, you
+have an exceptionally nice nature.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his teacup he would
+have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure, partly with an impulse of
+affection towards the young man who had seemed, and would seem again, so ugly
+and so limited. She pitied him, for she suspected that he suffered, and she was
+interested in him, for many of the things he said seemed to her true; she
+admired the morality of youth, and yet she felt imprisoned. As if her instinct
+were to escape to something brightly coloured and impersonal, which she could
+hold in her hands, she went into the house and returned with her embroidery.
+But he was not interested in her embroidery; he did not even look at it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;About Miss Vinrace,&rdquo; he began,&mdash;&ldquo;oh, look here, do
+let&rsquo;s be St. John and Helen, and Rachel and Terence&mdash;what&rsquo;s
+she like? Does she reason, does she feel, or is she merely a kind of
+footstool?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh no,&rdquo; said Helen, with great decision. From her observations at
+tea she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to educate Rachel.
+She had gradually come to be interested in her niece, and fond of her; she
+disliked some things about her very much, she was amused by others; but she
+felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being, experimental, and not
+always fortunate in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a
+capacity for feeling. Somewhere in the depths of her, too, she was bound to
+Rachel by the indestructible if inexplicable ties of sex. &ldquo;She seems
+vague, but she&rsquo;s a will of her own,&rdquo; she said, as if in the
+interval she had run through her qualities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being difficult and
+the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses into the dialogue when she
+seemed to be engrossed in her skeins of silk, or, with head a little drawn back
+and eyes narrowed, considered the effect of the whole. Thus she merely said,
+&ldquo;Um-m-m&rdquo; to St. John&rsquo;s next remark, &ldquo;I shall ask her to
+go for a walk with me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps he resented this division of attention. He sat silent watching Helen
+closely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re absolutely happy,&rdquo; he proclaimed at last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes?&rdquo; Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Marriage, I suppose,&rdquo; said St. John.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Children?&rdquo; St. John enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Helen, sticking her needle in again. &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t know why I&rsquo;m happy,&rdquo; she suddenly laughed, looking him
+full in the face. There was a considerable pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s an abyss between us,&rdquo; said St. John. His voice
+sounded as if it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks.
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re infinitely simpler than I am. Women always are, of course.
+That&rsquo;s the difficulty. One never knows how a woman gets there. Supposing
+all the time you&rsquo;re thinking, &lsquo;Oh, what a morbid young
+man!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand. From her position she
+saw his head in front of the dark pyramid of a magnolia-tree. With one foot
+raised on the rung of a chair, and her elbow out in the attitude for sewing,
+her own figure possessed the sublimity of a woman&rsquo;s of the early world,
+spinning the thread of fate&mdash;the sublimity possessed by many women of the
+present day who fall into the attitude required by scrubbing or sewing. St.
+John looked at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ve never paid any a compliment in the course of your
+life,&rdquo; he said irrelevantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I spoil Ridley rather,&rdquo; Helen considered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to ask you point blank&mdash;do you like me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a certain pause, she replied, &ldquo;Yes, certainly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank God!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s one mercy. You
+see,&rdquo; he continued with emotion, &ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather you liked me
+than any one I&rsquo;ve ever met.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What about the five philosophers?&rdquo; said Helen, with a laugh,
+stitching firmly and swiftly at her canvas. &ldquo;I wish you&rsquo;d describe
+them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hirst had no particular wish to describe them, but when he began to consider
+them he found himself soothed and strengthened. Far away on the other side of
+the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey medieval courts, they appeared
+remarkable figures, free-spoken men with whom one could be at ease;
+incomparably more subtle in emotion than the people here. They gave him,
+certainly, what no woman could give him, not Helen even. Warming at the thought
+of them, he went on to lay his case before Mrs. Ambrose. Should he stay on at
+Cambridge or should he go to the Bar? One day he thought one thing, another day
+another. Helen listened attentively. At last, without any preface, she
+pronounced her decision.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Leave Cambridge and go to the Bar,&rdquo; she said. He pressed her for
+her reasons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think you&rsquo;d enjoy London more,&rdquo; she said. It did not seem
+a very subtle reason, but she appeared to think it sufficient. She looked at
+him against the background of flowering magnolia. There was something curious
+in the sight. Perhaps it was that the heavy wax-like flowers were so smooth and
+inarticulate, and his face&mdash;he had thrown his hat away, his hair was
+rumpled, he held his eye-glasses in his hand, so that a red mark appeared on
+either side of his nose&mdash;was so worried and garrulous. It was a beautiful
+bush, spreading very widely, and all the time she had sat there talking she had
+been noticing the patches of shade and the shape of the leaves, and the way the
+great white flowers sat in the midst of the green. She had noticed it
+half-consciously, nevertheless the pattern had become part of their talk. She
+laid down her sewing, and began to walk up and down the garden, and Hirst rose
+too and paced by her side. He was rather disturbed, uncomfortable, and full of
+thought. Neither of them spoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sun was beginning to go down, and a change had come over the mountains, as
+if they were robbed of their earthly substance, and composed merely of intense
+blue mist. Long thin clouds of flamingo red, with edges like the edges of
+curled ostrich feathers, lay up and down the sky at different altitudes. The
+roofs of the town seemed to have sunk lower than usual; the cypresses appeared
+very black between the roofs, and the roofs themselves were brown and white. As
+usual in the evening, single cries and single bells became audible rising from
+beneath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+St. John stopped suddenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, you must take the responsibility,&rdquo; he said.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve made up my mind; I shall go to the Bar.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His words were very serious, almost emotional; they recalled Helen after a
+second&rsquo;s hesitation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure you&rsquo;re right,&rdquo; she said warmly, and shook the
+hand he held out. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be a great man, I&rsquo;m certain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, as if to make him look at the scene, she swept her hand round the immense
+circumference of the view. From the sea, over the roofs of the town, across the
+crests of the mountains, over the river and the plain, and again across the
+crests of the mountains it swept until it reached the villa, the garden, the
+magnolia-tree, and the figures of Hirst and herself standing together, when it
+dropped to her side.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap16"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<p>
+Hewet and Rachel had long ago reached the particular place on the edge of the
+cliff where, looking down into the sea, you might chance on jelly-fish and
+dolphins. Looking the other way, the vast expanse of land gave them a sensation
+which is given by no view, however extended, in England; the villages and the
+hills there having names, and the farthest horizon of hills as often as not
+dipping and showing a line of mist which is the sea; here the view was one of
+infinite sun-dried earth, earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers,
+earth widening and spreading away and away like the immense floor of the sea,
+earth chequered by day and by night, and partitioned into different lands,
+where famous cities were founded, and the races of men changed from dark
+savages to white civilised men, and back to dark savages again. Perhaps their
+English blood made this prospect uncomfortably impersonal and hostile to them,
+for having once turned their faces that way they next turned them to the sea,
+and for the rest of the time sat looking at the sea. The sea, though it was a
+thin and sparkling water here, which seemed incapable of surge or anger,
+eventually narrowed itself, clouded its pure tint with grey, and swirled
+through narrow channels and dashed in a shiver of broken waters against massive
+granite rocks. It was this sea that flowed up to the mouth of the Thames; and
+the Thames washed the roots of the city of London.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet&rsquo;s thoughts had followed some such course as this, for the first
+thing he said as they stood on the edge of the cliff was&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to be in England!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel lay down on her elbow, and parted the tall grasses which grew on the
+edge, so that she might have a clear view. The water was very calm; rocking up
+and down at the base of the cliff, and so clear that one could see the red of
+the stones at the bottom of it. So it had been at the birth of the world, and
+so it had remained ever since. Probably no human being had ever broken that
+water with boat or with body. Obeying some impulse, she determined to mar that
+eternity of peace, and threw the largest pebble she could find. It struck the
+water, and the ripples spread out and out. Hewet looked down too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s wonderful,&rdquo; he said, as they widened and ceased. The
+freshness and the newness seemed to him wonderful. He threw a pebble next.
+There was scarcely any sound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But England,&rdquo; Rachel murmured in the absorbed tone of one whose
+eyes are concentrated upon some sight. &ldquo;What d&rsquo;you want with
+England?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My friends chiefly,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and all the things one
+does.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He could look at Rachel without her noticing it. She was still absorbed in the
+water and the exquisitely pleasant sensations which a little depth of the sea
+washing over rocks suggests. He noticed that she was wearing a dress of deep
+blue colour, made of a soft thin cotton stuff, which clung to the shape of her
+body. It was a body with the angles and hollows of a young woman&rsquo;s body
+not yet developed, but in no way distorted, and thus interesting and even
+lovable. Raising his eyes Hewet observed her head; she had taken her hat off,
+and the face rested on her hand. As she looked down into the sea, her lips were
+slightly parted. The expression was one of childlike intentness, as if she were
+watching for a fish to swim past over the clear red rocks. Nevertheless her
+twenty-four years of life had given her a look of reserve. Her hand, which lay
+on the ground, the fingers curling slightly in, was well shaped and competent;
+the square-tipped and nervous fingers were the fingers of a musician. With
+something like anguish Hewet realised that, far from being unattractive, her
+body was very attractive to him. She looked up suddenly. Her eyes were full of
+eagerness and interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You write novels?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the moment he could not think what he was saying. He was overcome with the
+desire to hold her in his arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;That is, I want to write them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Novels,&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;Why do you write novels? You ought
+to write music. Music, you see&rdquo;&mdash;she shifted her eyes, and became
+less desirable as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain change upon her
+face&mdash;&ldquo;music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say
+at once. With writing it seems to me there&rsquo;s so much&rdquo;&mdash;she
+paused for an expression, and rubbed her fingers in the
+earth&mdash;&ldquo;scratching on the matchbox. Most of the time when I was
+reading Gibbon this afternoon I was horribly, oh infernally, damnably
+bored!&rdquo; She gave a shake of laughter, looking at Hewet, who laughed too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>I</i> shan&rsquo;t lend you books,&rdquo; he remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why is it,&rdquo; Rachel continued, &ldquo;that I can laugh at Mr. Hirst
+to you, but not to his face? At tea I was completely overwhelmed, not by his
+ugliness&mdash;by his mind.&rdquo; She enclosed a circle in the air with her
+hands. She realised with a great sense of comfort how easily she could talk to
+Hewet, those thorns or ragged corners which tear the surface of some
+relationships being smoothed away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So I observed,&rdquo; said Hewet. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a thing that never
+ceases to amaze me.&rdquo; He had recovered his composure to such an extent
+that he could light and smoke a cigarette, and feeling her ease, became happy
+and easy himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for
+men,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;I believe we must have the sort of power over
+you that we&rsquo;re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big
+as we are or they&rsquo;d never obey us. For that very reason, I&rsquo;m
+inclined to doubt that you&rsquo;ll ever do anything even when you have the
+vote.&rdquo; He looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and
+sensitive and young. &ldquo;It&rsquo;ll take at least six generations before
+you&rsquo;re sufficiently thick-skinned to go into law courts and business
+offices. Consider what a bully the ordinary man is,&rdquo; he continued,
+&ldquo;the ordinary hard-working, rather ambitious solicitor or man of business
+with a family to bring up and a certain position to maintain. And then, of
+course, the daughters have to give way to the sons; the sons have to be
+educated; they have to bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it
+all comes over again. And meanwhile there are the women in the background. . .
+. Do you really think that the vote will do you any good?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The vote?&rdquo; Rachel repeated. She had to visualise it as a little
+bit of paper which she dropped into a box before she understood his question,
+and looking at each other they smiled at something absurd in the question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not to me,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But I play the piano. . . . Are men
+really like that?&rdquo; she asked, returning to the question that interested
+her. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not afraid of you.&rdquo; She looked at him easily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m different,&rdquo; Hewet replied. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got
+between six and seven hundred a year of my own. And then no one takes a
+novelist seriously, thank heavens. There&rsquo;s no doubt it helps to make up
+for the drudgery of a profession if a man&rsquo;s taken very, very seriously by
+every one&mdash;if he gets appointments, and has offices and a title, and lots
+of letters after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees. I don&rsquo;t grudge
+it &rsquo;em, though sometimes it comes over me&mdash;what an amazing
+concoction! What a miracle the masculine conception of life is&mdash;judges,
+civil servants, army, navy, Houses of Parliament, lord mayors&mdash;what a
+world we&rsquo;ve made of it! Look at Hirst now. I assure you,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;not a day&rsquo;s passed since we came here without a discussion as to
+whether he&rsquo;s to stay on at Cambridge or to go to the Bar. It&rsquo;s his
+career&mdash;his sacred career. And if I&rsquo;ve heard it twenty times,
+I&rsquo;m sure his mother and sister have heard it five hundred times.
+Can&rsquo;t you imagine the family conclaves, and the sister told to run out
+and feed the rabbits because St. John must have the school-room to
+himself&mdash;&lsquo;St. John&rsquo;s working,&rsquo; &lsquo;St. John wants his
+tea brought to him.&rsquo; Don&rsquo;t you know the kind of thing? No wonder
+that St. John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. It is too. He has
+to earn his living. But St. John&rsquo;s sister&mdash;&rdquo; Hewet puffed in
+silence. &ldquo;No one takes her seriously, poor dear. She feeds the
+rabbits.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Rachel. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve fed rabbits for twenty-four
+years; it seems odd now.&rdquo; She looked meditative, and Hewet, who had been
+talking much at random and instinctively adopting the feminine point of view,
+saw that she would now talk about herself, which was what he wanted, for so
+they might come to know each other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked back meditatively upon her past life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do you spend your day?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She meditated still. When she thought of their day it seemed to her it was cut
+into four pieces by their meals. These divisions were absolutely rigid, the
+contents of the day having to accommodate themselves within the four rigid
+bars. Looking back at her life, that was what she saw.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Hewet, &ldquo;what d&rsquo;you do in the
+morning?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I need to play the piano for hours and hours.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And after luncheon?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I went shopping with one of my aunts. Or we went to see some one,
+or we took a message; or we did something that had to be done&mdash;the taps
+might be leaking. They visit the poor a good deal&mdash;old char-women with bad
+legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. Or I used to walk in the park by
+myself. And after tea people sometimes called; or in summer we sat in the
+garden or played croquet; in winter I read aloud, while they worked; after
+dinner I played the piano and they wrote letters. If father was at home we had
+friends of his to dinner, and about once a month we went up to the play. Every
+now and then we dined out; sometimes I went to a dance in London, but that was
+difficult because of getting back. The people we saw were old family friends,
+and relations, but we didn&rsquo;t see many people. There was the clergyman,
+Mr. Pepper, and the Hunts. Father generally wanted to be quiet when he came
+home, because he works very hard at Hull. Also my aunts aren&rsquo;t very
+strong. A house takes up a lot of time if you do it properly. Our servants were
+always bad, and so Aunt Lucy used to do a good deal in the kitchen, and Aunt
+Clara, I think, spent most of the morning dusting the drawing-room and going
+through the linen and silver. Then there were the dogs. They had to be
+exercised, besides being washed and brushed. Now Sandy&rsquo;s dead, but Aunt
+Clara has a very old cockatoo that came from India. Everything in our
+house,&rdquo; she exclaimed, &ldquo;comes from somewhere! It&rsquo;s full of
+old furniture, not really old, Victorian, things mother&rsquo;s family had or
+father&rsquo;s family had, which they didn&rsquo;t like to get rid of, I
+suppose, though we&rsquo;ve really no room for them. It&rsquo;s rather a nice
+house,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;except that it&rsquo;s a little
+dingy&mdash;dull I should say.&rdquo; She called up before her eyes a vision of
+the drawing-room at home; it was a large oblong room, with a square window
+opening on the garden. Green plush chairs stood against the wall; there was a
+heavy carved book-case, with glass doors, and a general impression of faded
+sofa covers, large spaces of pale green, and baskets with pieces of wool-work
+dropping out of them. Photographs from old Italian masterpieces hung on the
+walls, and views of Venetian bridges and Swedish waterfalls which members of
+the family had seen years ago. There were also one or two portraits of fathers
+and grandmothers, and an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after the picture by
+Watts. It was a room without definite character, being neither typically and
+openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor really comfortable. Rachel roused
+herself from the contemplation of this familiar picture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But this isn&rsquo;t very interesting for you,&rdquo; she said, looking
+up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good Lord!&rdquo; Hewet exclaimed. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never been so much
+interested in my life.&rdquo; She then realised that while she had been
+thinking of Richmond, his eyes had never left her face. The knowledge of this
+excited her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go on, please go on,&rdquo; he urged. &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s imagine
+it&rsquo;s a Wednesday. You&rsquo;re all at luncheon. You sit there, and Aunt
+Lucy there, and Aunt Clara here&rdquo;; he arranged three pebbles on the grass
+between them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb,&rdquo; Rachel continued. She fixed
+her gaze upon the pebbles. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a very ugly yellow china stand
+in front of me, called a dumb waiter, on which are three dishes, one for
+biscuits, one for butter, and one for cheese. There&rsquo;s a pot of ferns.
+Then there&rsquo;s Blanche the maid, who snuffles because of her nose. We
+talk&mdash;oh yes, it&rsquo;s Aunt Lucy&rsquo;s afternoon at Walworth, so
+we&rsquo;re rather quick over luncheon. She goes off. She has a purple bag, and
+a black notebook. Aunt Clara has what they call a G.F.S. meeting in the
+drawing-room on Wednesday, so I take the dogs out. I go up Richmond Hill, along
+the terrace, into the park. It&rsquo;s the 18th of April&mdash;the same day as
+it is here. It&rsquo;s spring in England. The ground is rather damp. However, I
+cross the road and get on to the grass and we walk along, and I sing as I
+always do when I&rsquo;m alone, until we come to the open place where you can
+see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day. Hampstead Church spire
+there, Westminster Cathedral over there, and factory chimneys about here.
+There&rsquo;s generally a haze over the low parts of London; but it&rsquo;s
+often blue over the park when London&rsquo;s in a mist. It&rsquo;s the open
+place that the balloons cross going over to Hurlingham. They&rsquo;re pale
+yellow. Well, then, it smells very good, particularly if they happen to be
+burning wood in the keeper&rsquo;s lodge which is there. I could tell you now
+how to get from place to place, and exactly what trees you&rsquo;d pass, and
+where you&rsquo;d cross the roads. You see, I played there when I was small.
+Spring is good, but it&rsquo;s best in the autumn when the deer are barking;
+then it gets dusky, and I go back through the streets, and you can&rsquo;t see
+people properly; they come past very quick, you just see their faces and then
+they&rsquo;re gone&mdash;that&rsquo;s what I like&mdash;and no one knows in the
+least what you&rsquo;re doing&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you have to be back for tea, I suppose?&rdquo; Hewet checked her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tea? Oh yes. Five o&rsquo;clock. Then I say what I&rsquo;ve done, and my
+aunts say what they&rsquo;ve done, and perhaps some one comes in: Mrs. Hunt,
+let&rsquo;s suppose. She&rsquo;s an old lady with a lame leg. She has or she
+once had eight children; so we ask after them. They&rsquo;re all over the
+world; so we ask where they are, and sometimes they&rsquo;re ill, or
+they&rsquo;re stationed in a cholera district, or in some place where it only
+rains once in five months. Mrs. Hunt,&rdquo; she said with a smile, &ldquo;had
+a son who was hugged to death by a bear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused by the same
+things that amused her. She was reassured. But she thought it necessary to
+apologise again; she had been talking too much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t conceive how it interests me,&rdquo; he said. Indeed,
+his cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why does it interest you?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Partly because you&rsquo;re a woman,&rdquo; he replied. When he said
+this, Rachel, who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a
+childlike state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became
+self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under observation, as she
+felt with St. John Hirst. She was about to launch into an argument which would
+have made them both feel bitterly against each other, and to define sensations
+which had no such importance as words were bound to give them when Hewet led
+her thoughts in a different direction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve often walked along the streets where people live all in a
+row, and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth
+the women were doing inside,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Just consider: it&rsquo;s
+the beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman had
+ever come out by herself and said things at all. There it was going on in the
+background, for all those thousands of years, this curious silent unrepresented
+life. Of course we&rsquo;re always writing about women&mdash;abusing them, or
+jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it&rsquo;s never come from women
+themselves. I believe we still don&rsquo;t know in the least how they live, or
+what they feel, or what they do precisely. If one&rsquo;s a man, the only
+confidences one gets are from young women about their love affairs. But the
+lives of women of forty, of unmarried women, of working women, of women who
+keep shops and bring up children, of women like your aunts or Mrs. Thornbury or
+Miss Allan&mdash;one knows nothing whatever about them. They won&rsquo;t tell
+you. Either they&rsquo;re afraid, or they&rsquo;ve got a way of treating men.
+It&rsquo;s the man&rsquo;s view that&rsquo;s represented, you see. Think of a
+railway train: fifteen carriages for men who want to smoke. Doesn&rsquo;t it
+make your blood boil? If I were a woman I&rsquo;d blow some one&rsquo;s brains
+out. Don&rsquo;t you laugh at us a great deal? Don&rsquo;t you think it all a
+great humbug? You, I mean&mdash;how does it all strike you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His determination to know, while it gave meaning to their talk, hampered her;
+he seemed to press further and further, and made it appear so important. She
+took some time to answer, and during that time she went over and over the
+course of her twenty-four years, lighting now on one point, now on
+another&mdash;on her aunts, her mother, her father, and at last her mind fixed
+upon her aunts and her father, and she tried to describe them as at this
+distance they appeared to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were very much afraid of her father. He was a great dim force in the
+house, by means of which they held on to the great world which is represented
+every morning in the <i>Times</i>. But the real life of the house was something
+quite different from this. It went on independently of Mr. Vinrace, and tended
+to hide itself from him. He was good-humoured towards them, but contemptuous.
+She had always taken it for granted that his point of view was just, and
+founded upon an ideal scale of things where the life of one person was
+absolutely more important than the life of another, and that in that scale they
+were of much less importance than he was. But did she really believe that?
+Hewet&rsquo;s words made her think. She always submitted to her father, just as
+they did, but it was her aunts who influenced her really; her aunts who built
+up the fine, closely woven substance of their life at home. They were less
+splendid but more natural than her father was. All her rages had been against
+them; it was their world with its four meals, its punctuality, and servants on
+the stairs at half-past ten, that she examined so closely and wanted so
+vehemently to smash to atoms. Following these thoughts she looked up and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And there&rsquo;s a sort of beauty in it&mdash;there they are at
+Richmond at this very moment building things up. They&rsquo;re all wrong,
+perhaps, but there&rsquo;s a sort of beauty in it,&rdquo; she repeated.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s so unconscious, so modest. And yet they feel things. They do
+mind if people die. Old spinsters are always doing things. I don&rsquo;t quite
+know what they do. Only that was what I felt when I lived with them. It was
+very real.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She reviewed their little journeys to and fro, to Walworth, to charwomen with
+bad legs, to meetings for this and that, their minute acts of charity and
+unselfishness which flowered punctually from a definite view of what they ought
+to do, their friendships, their tastes and habits; she saw all these things
+like grains of sand falling, falling through innumerable days, making an
+atmosphere and building up a solid mass, a background. Hewet observed her as
+she considered this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Were you happy?&rdquo; he demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again she had become absorbed in something else, and he called her back to an
+unusually vivid consciousness of herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was both,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;I was happy and I was miserable.
+You&rsquo;ve no conception what it&rsquo;s like&mdash;to be a young
+woman.&rdquo; She looked straight at him. &ldquo;There are terrors and
+agonies,&rdquo; she said, keeping her eye on him as if to detect the slightest
+hint of laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can believe it,&rdquo; he said. He returned her look with perfect
+sincerity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Women one sees in the streets,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Prostitutes?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Men kissing one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You were never told?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And then,&rdquo; she began and stopped. Here came in the great space of
+life into which no one had ever penetrated. All that she had been saying about
+her father and her aunts and walks in Richmond Park, and what they did from
+hour to hour, was merely on the surface. Hewet was watching her. Did he demand
+that she should describe that also? Why did he sit so near and keep his eye on
+her? Why did they not have done with this searching and agony? Why did they not
+kiss each other simply? She wished to kiss him. But all the time she went on
+spinning out words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A girl is more lonely than a boy. No one cares in the least what she
+does. Nothing&rsquo;s expected of her. Unless one&rsquo;s very pretty people
+don&rsquo;t listen to what you say. . . . And that is what I like,&rdquo; she
+added energetically, as if the memory were very happy. &ldquo;I like walking in
+Richmond Park and singing to myself and knowing it doesn&rsquo;t matter a damn
+to anybody. I like seeing things go on&mdash;as we saw you that night when you
+didn&rsquo;t see us&mdash;I love the freedom of it&mdash;it&rsquo;s like being
+the wind or the sea.&rdquo; She turned with a curious fling of her hands and
+looked at the sea. It was still very blue, dancing away as far as the eye could
+reach, but the light on it was yellower, and the clouds were turning flamingo
+red.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A feeling of intense depression crossed Hewet&rsquo;s mind as she spoke. It
+seemed plain that she would never care for one person rather than another; she
+was evidently quite indifferent to him; they seemed to come very near, and then
+they were as far apart as ever again; and her gesture as she turned away had
+been oddly beautiful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; he said abruptly. &ldquo;You like people. You like
+admiration. Your real grudge against Hirst is that he doesn&rsquo;t admire
+you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made no answer for some time. Then she said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s probably true. Of course I like people&mdash;I like almost
+every one I&rsquo;ve ever met.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned her back on the sea and regarded Hewet with friendly if critical
+eyes. He was good-looking in the sense that he had always had a sufficiency of
+beef to eat and fresh air to breathe. His head was big; the eyes were also
+large; though generally vague they could be forcible; and the lips were
+sensitive. One might account him a man of considerable passion and fitful
+energy, likely to be at the mercy of moods which had little relation to facts;
+at once tolerant and fastidious. The breadth of his forehead showed capacity
+for thought. The interest with which Rachel looked at him was heard in her
+voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What novels do you write?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want to write a novel about Silence,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;the things
+people don&rsquo;t say. But the difficulty is immense.&rdquo; He sighed.
+&ldquo;However, you don&rsquo;t care,&rdquo; he continued. He looked at her
+almost severely. &ldquo;Nobody cares. All you read a novel for is to see what
+sort of person the writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends
+he&rsquo;s put in. As for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way
+one&rsquo;s seen the thing, felt about it, make it stand in relation to other
+things, not one in a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether
+there&rsquo;s anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other
+people,&rdquo; he indicated the hotel, &ldquo;are always wanting something they
+can&rsquo;t get. But there&rsquo;s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing,
+even in the attempt to write. What you said just now is true: one doesn&rsquo;t
+want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he gazed out
+to sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Rachel&rsquo;s turn now to feel depressed. As he talked of writing he
+had become suddenly impersonal. He might never care for any one; all that
+desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt pressing on her almost
+painfully, had completely vanished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you a good writer?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not first-rate, of course;
+I&rsquo;m good second-rate; about as good as Thackeray, I should say.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel was amazed. For one thing it amazed her to hear Thackeray called
+second-rate; and then she could not widen her point of view to believe that
+there could be great writers in existence at the present day, or if there were,
+that any one she knew could be a great writer, and his self-confidence
+astounded her, and he became more and more remote.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My other novel,&rdquo; Hewet continued, &ldquo;is about a young man who
+is obsessed by an idea&mdash;the idea of being a gentleman. He manages to exist
+at Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year. He has a coat; it was once a very good
+coat. But the trousers&mdash;they&rsquo;re not so good. Well, he goes up to
+London, gets into good society, owing to an early-morning adventure on the
+banks of the Serpentine. He is led into telling lies&mdash;my idea, you see, is
+to show the gradual corruption of the soul&mdash;calls himself the son of some
+great landed proprietor in Devonshire. Meanwhile the coat becomes older and
+older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers. Can&rsquo;t you imagine the
+wretched man, after some splendid evening of debauchery, contemplating these
+garments&mdash;hanging them over the end of the bed, arranging them now in full
+light, now in shade, and wondering whether they will survive him, or he will
+survive them? Thoughts of suicide cross his mind. He has a friend, too, a man
+who somehow subsists upon selling small birds, for which he sets traps in the
+fields near Uxbridge. They&rsquo;re scholars, both of them. I know one or two
+wretched starving creatures like that who quote Aristotle at you over a fried
+herring and a pint of porter. Fashionable life, too, I have to represent at
+some length, in order to show my hero under all circumstances. Lady Theo
+Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the good fortune to stop, is the
+daughter of a very fine old Tory peer. I&rsquo;m going to describe the kind of
+parties I once went to&mdash;the fashionable intellectuals, you know, who like
+to have the latest book on their tables. They give parties, river parties,
+parties where you play games. There&rsquo;s no difficulty in conceiving
+incidents; the difficulty is to put them into shape&mdash;not to get run away
+with, as Lady Theo was. It ended disastrously for her, poor woman, for the
+book, as I planned it, was going to end in profound and sordid respectability.
+Disowned by her father, she marries my hero, and they live in a snug little
+villa outside Croydon, in which town he is set up as a house agent. He never
+succeeds in becoming a real gentleman after all. That&rsquo;s the interesting
+part of it. Does it seem to you the kind of book you&rsquo;d like to
+read?&rdquo; he enquired; &ldquo;or perhaps you&rsquo;d like my Stuart tragedy
+better,&rdquo; he continued, without waiting for her to answer him. &ldquo;My
+idea is that there&rsquo;s a certain quality of beauty in the past, which the
+ordinary historical novelist completely ruins by his absurd conventions. The
+moon becomes the Regent of the Skies. People clap spurs to their horses, and so
+on. I&rsquo;m going to treat people as though they were exactly the same as we
+are. The advantage is that, detached from modern conditions, one can make them
+more intense and more abstract than people who live as we do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a certain amount of
+bewilderment. They both sat thinking their own thoughts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not like Hirst,&rdquo; said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke
+meditatively; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see circles of chalk between people&rsquo;s
+feet. I sometimes wish I did. It seems to me so tremendously complicated and
+confused. One can&rsquo;t come to any decision at all; one&rsquo;s less and
+less capable of making judgments. D&rsquo;you find that? And then one never
+knows what any one feels. We&rsquo;re all in the dark. We try to find out, but
+can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person&rsquo;s opinion of
+another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn&rsquo;t
+know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and rearranging in the
+grass the stones which had represented Rachel and her aunts at luncheon. He was
+speaking as much to himself as to Rachel. He was reasoning against the desire,
+which had returned with intensity, to take her in his arms; to have done with
+indirectness; to explain exactly what he felt. What he said was against his
+belief; all the things that were important about her he knew; he felt them in
+the air around them; but he said nothing; he went on arranging the stones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I like you; d&rsquo;you like me?&rdquo; Rachel suddenly observed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I like you immensely,&rdquo; Hewet replied, speaking with the relief of
+a person who is unexpectedly given an opportunity of saying what he wants to
+say. He stopped moving the pebbles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mightn&rsquo;t we call each other Rachel and Terence?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Terence,&rdquo; Rachel repeated. &ldquo;Terence&mdash;that&rsquo;s like
+the cry of an owl.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked up with a sudden rush of delight, and in looking at Terence with
+eyes widened by pleasure she was struck by the change that had come over the
+sky behind them. The substantial blue day had faded to a paler and more
+ethereal blue; the clouds were pink, far away and closely packed together; and
+the peace of evening had replaced the heat of the southern afternoon, in which
+they had started on their walk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It must be late!&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was nearly eight o&rsquo;clock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But eight o&rsquo;clock doesn&rsquo;t count here, does it?&rdquo;
+Terence asked, as they got up and turned inland again. They began to walk
+rather quickly down the hill on a little path between the olive trees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They felt more intimate because they shared the knowledge of what eight
+o&rsquo;clock in Richmond meant. Terence walked in front, for there was not
+room for them side by side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What I want to do in writing novels is very much what you want to do
+when you play the piano, I expect,&rdquo; he began, turning and speaking over
+his shoulder. &ldquo;We want to find out what&rsquo;s behind things,
+don&rsquo;t we?&mdash;Look at the lights down there,&rdquo; he continued,
+&ldquo;scattered about anyhow. Things I feel come to me like lights. . . . I
+want to combine them. . . . Have you ever seen fireworks that make figures? . .
+. I want to make figures. . . . Is that what you want to do?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now they were out on the road and could walk side by side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When I play the piano? Music is different. . . . But I see what you
+mean.&rdquo; They tried to invent theories and to make their theories agree. As
+Hewet had no knowledge of music, Rachel took his stick and drew figures in the
+thin white dust to explain how Bach wrote his fugues.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My musical gift was ruined,&rdquo; he explained, as they walked on after
+one of these demonstrations, &ldquo;by the village organist at home, who had
+invented a system of notation which he tried to teach me, with the result that
+I never got to the tune-playing at all. My mother thought music wasn&rsquo;t
+manly for boys; she wanted me to kill rats and birds&mdash;that&rsquo;s the
+worst of living in the country. We live in Devonshire. It&rsquo;s the loveliest
+place in the world. Only&mdash;it&rsquo;s always difficult at home when
+one&rsquo;s grown up. I&rsquo;d like you to know one of my sisters. . . . Oh,
+here&rsquo;s your gate&mdash;&rdquo; He pushed it open. They paused for a
+moment. She could not ask him to come in. She could not say that she hoped they
+would meet again; there was nothing to be said, and so without a word she went
+through the gate, and was soon invisible. Directly Hewet lost sight of her, he
+felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly than before. Their talk had
+been interrupted in the middle, just as he was beginning to say the things he
+wanted to say. After all, what had they been able to say? He ran his mind over
+the things they had said, the random, unnecessary things which had eddied round
+and round and used up all the time, and drawn them so close together and flung
+them so far apart, and left him in the end unsatisfied, ignorant still of what
+she felt and of what she was like. What was the use of talking, talking, merely
+talking?
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap17"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<p>
+It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came from England left
+a few people on the shores of Santa Marina who drove up to the hotel. The fact
+that the Ambroses had a house where one could escape momentarily from the
+slightly inhuman atmosphere of an hotel was a source of genuine pleasure not
+only to Hirst and Hewet, but to the Elliots, the Thornburys, the Flushings,
+Miss Allan, Evelyn M., together with other people whose identity was so little
+developed that the Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names. By
+degrees there was established a kind of correspondence between the two houses,
+the big and the small, so that at most hours of the day one house could guess
+what was going on in the other, and the words &ldquo;the villa&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;the hotel&rdquo; called up the idea of two separate systems of life.
+Acquaintances showed signs of developing into friends, for that one tie to Mrs.
+Parry&rsquo;s drawing-room had inevitably split into many other ties attached
+to different parts of England, and sometimes these alliances seemed cynically
+fragile, and sometimes painfully acute, lacking as they did the supporting
+background of organised English life. One night when the moon was round between
+the trees, Evelyn M. told Helen the story of her life, and claimed her
+everlasting friendship; on another occasion, merely because of a sigh, or a
+pause, or a word thoughtlessly dropped, poor Mrs. Elliot left the villa half in
+tears, vowing never again to meet the cold and scornful woman who had insulted
+her, and in truth, meet again they never did. It did not seem worth while to
+piece together so slight a friendship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet, indeed, might have found excellent material at this time up at the villa
+for some chapters in the novel which was to be called &ldquo;Silence, or the
+Things People don&rsquo;t say.&rdquo; Helen and Rachel had become very silent.
+Having detected, as she thought, a secret, and judging that Rachel meant to
+keep it from her, Mrs. Ambrose respected it carefully, but from that cause,
+though unintentionally, a curious atmosphere of reserve grew up between them.
+Instead of sharing their views upon all subjects, and plunging after an idea
+wherever it might lead, they spoke chiefly in comment upon the people they saw,
+and the secret between them made itself felt in what they said even of
+Thornburys and Elliots. Always calm and unemotional in her judgments, Mrs.
+Ambrose was now inclined to be definitely pessimistic. She was not severe upon
+individuals so much as incredulous of the kindness of destiny, fate, what
+happens in the long run, and apt to insist that this was generally adverse to
+people in proportion as they deserved well. Even this theory she was ready to
+discard in favour of one which made chaos triumphant, things happening for no
+reason at all, and every one groping about in illusion and ignorance. With a
+certain pleasure she developed these views to her niece, taking a letter from
+home as her test: which gave good news, but might just as well have given bad.
+How did she know that at this very moment both her children were not lying
+dead, crushed by motor omnibuses? &ldquo;It&rsquo;s happening to somebody: why
+shouldn&rsquo;t it happen to me?&rdquo; she would argue, her face taking on the
+stoical expression of anticipated sorrow. However sincere these views may have
+been, they were undoubtedly called forth by the irrational state of her
+niece&rsquo;s mind. It was so fluctuating, and went so quickly from joy to
+despair, that it seemed necessary to confront it with some stable opinion which
+naturally became dark as well as stable. Perhaps Mrs. Ambrose had some idea
+that in leading the talk into these quarters she might discover what was in
+Rachel&rsquo;s mind, but it was difficult to judge, for sometimes she would
+agree with the gloomiest thing that was said, at other times she refused to
+listen, and rammed Helen&rsquo;s theories down her throat with laughter,
+chatter, ridicule of the wildest, and fierce bursts of anger even at what she
+called the &ldquo;croaking of a raven in the mud.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s hard enough without that,&rdquo; she asserted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s hard?&rdquo; Helen demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Life,&rdquo; she replied, and then they both became silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why an hour
+later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid that the eyes of
+Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating to a spectator. True to her
+creed, she did not attempt to interfere, although there were enough of those
+weak moments of depression to make it perfectly easy for a less scrupulous
+person to press through and know all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did
+not choose. All these moods ran themselves into one general effect, which Helen
+compared to the sliding of a river, quick, quicker, quicker still, as it races
+to a waterfall. Her instinct was to cry out Stop! but even had there been any
+use in crying Stop! she would have refrained, thinking it best that things
+should take their way, the water racing because the earth was shaped to make it
+race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was watched, or that
+there was anything in her manner likely to draw attention to her. What had
+happened to her she did not know. Her mind was very much in the condition of
+the racing water to which Helen compared it. She wanted to see Terence; she was
+perpetually wishing to see him when he was not there; it was an agony to miss
+seeing him; agonies were strewn all about her day on account of him, but she
+never asked herself what this force driving through her life arose from. She
+thought of no result any more than a tree perpetually pressed downwards by the
+wind considers the result of being pressed downwards by the wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the two or three weeks which had passed since their walk, half a dozen
+notes from him had accumulated in her drawer. She would read them, and spend
+the whole morning in a daze of happiness; the sunny land outside the window
+being no less capable of analysing its own colour and heat than she was of
+analysing hers. In these moods she found it impossible to read or play the
+piano, even to move being beyond her inclination. The time passed without her
+noticing it. When it was dark she was drawn to the window by the lights of the
+hotel. A light that went in and out was the light in Terence&rsquo;s window:
+there he sat, reading perhaps, or now he was walking up and down pulling out
+one book after another; and now he was seated in his chair again, and she tried
+to imagine what he was thinking about. The steady lights marked the rooms where
+Terence sat with people moving round him. Every one who stayed in the hotel had
+a peculiar romance and interest about them. They were not ordinary people. She
+would attribute wisdom to Mrs. Elliot, beauty to Susan Warrington, a splendid
+vitality to Evelyn M., because Terence spoke to them. As unreflecting and
+pervasive were the moods of depression. Her mind was as the landscape outside
+when dark beneath clouds and straitly lashed by wind and hail. Again she would
+sit passive in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen&rsquo;s fantastical or
+gloomy words were like so many darts goading her to cry out against the
+hardness of life. Best of all were the moods when for no reason again this
+stress of feeling slackened, and life went on as usual, only with a joy and
+colour in its events that was unknown before; they had a significance like that
+which she had seen in the tree: the nights were black bars separating her from
+the days; she would have liked to run all the days into one long continuity of
+sensation. Although these moods were directly or indirectly caused by the
+presence of Terence or the thought of him, she never said to herself that she
+was in love with him, or considered what was to happen if she continued to feel
+such things, so that Helen&rsquo;s image of the river sliding on to the
+waterfall had a great likeness to the facts, and the alarm which Helen
+sometimes felt was justified.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was incapable of making a
+plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind. She abandoned herself
+to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day, meeting him the next,
+receiving his letters always with a start of surprise. Any woman experienced in
+the progress of courtship would have come by certain opinions from all this
+which would have given her at least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever
+been in love with Rachel, and she had never been in love with any one.
+Moreover, none of the books she read, from <i>Wuthering Heights</i> to <i>Man
+and Superman</i>, and the plays of Ibsen, suggested from their analysis of love
+that what their heroines felt was what she was feeling now. It seemed to her
+that her sensations had no name.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She met Terence frequently. When they did not meet, he was apt to send a note
+with a book or about a book, for he had not been able after all to neglect that
+approach to intimacy. But sometimes he did not come or did not write for
+several days at a time. Again when they met their meeting might be one of
+inspiriting joy or of harassing despair. Over all their partings hung the sense
+of interruption, leaving them both unsatisfied, though ignorant that the other
+shared the feeling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even more completely
+ignorant of his. At first he moved as a god; as she came to know him better he
+was still the centre of light, but combined with this beauty a wonderful power
+of making her daring and confident of herself. She was conscious of emotions
+and powers which she had never suspected in herself, and of a depth in the
+world hitherto unknown. When she thought of their relationship she saw rather
+than reasoned, representing her view of what Terence felt by a picture of him
+drawn across the room to stand by her side. This passage across the room
+amounted to a physical sensation, but what it meant she did not know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus the time went on, wearing a calm, bright look upon its surface. Letters
+came from England, letters came from Willoughby, and the days accumulated their
+small events which shaped the year. Superficially, three odes of Pindar were
+mended, Helen covered about five inches of her embroidery, and St. John
+completed the first two acts of a play. He and Rachel being now very good
+friends, he read them aloud to her, and she was so genuinely impressed by the
+skill of his rhythms and the variety of his adjectives, as well as by the fact
+that he was Terence&rsquo;s friend, that he began to wonder whether he was not
+intended for literature rather than for law. It was a time of profound thought
+and sudden revelations for more than one couple, and several single people.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A Sunday came, which no one in the villa with the exception of Rachel and the
+Spanish maid proposed to recognise. Rachel still went to church, because she
+had never, according to Helen, taken the trouble to think about it. Since they
+had celebrated the service at the hotel she went there expecting to get some
+pleasure from her passage across the garden and through the hall of the hotel,
+although it was very doubtful whether she would see Terence, or at any rate
+have the chance of speaking to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English, there was almost
+as much difference between Sunday and Wednesday as there is in England, and
+Sunday appeared here as there, the mute black ghost or penitent spirit of the
+busy weekday. The English could not pale the sunshine, but they could in some
+miraculous way slow down the hours, dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and
+make even the servants and page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. The
+best clothes which every one put on helped the general effect; it seemed that
+no lady could sit down without bending a clean starched petticoat, and no
+gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle from a stiff shirt-front. As
+the hands of the clock neared eleven, on this particular Sunday, various people
+tended to draw together in the hall, clasping little red-leaved books in their
+hands. The clock marked a few minutes to the hour when a stout black figure
+passed through the hall with a preoccupied expression, as though he would
+rather not recognise salutations, although aware of them, and disappeared down
+the corridor which led from it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Bax,&rdquo; Mrs. Thornbury whispered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little group of people then began to move off in the same direction as the
+stout black figure. Looked at in an odd way by people who made no effort to
+join them, they moved with one exception slowly and consciously towards the
+stairs. Mrs. Flushing was the exception. She came running downstairs, strode
+across the hall, joined the procession much out of breath, demanding of Mrs.
+Thornbury in an agitated whisper, &ldquo;Where, where?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We are all going,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury gently, and soon they were
+descending the stairs two by two. Rachel was among the first to descend. She
+did not see that Terence and Hirst came in at the rear possessed of no black
+volume, but of one thin book bound in light-blue cloth, which St. John carried
+under his arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The chapel was the old chapel of the monks. It was a profound cool place where
+they had said Mass for hundreds of years, and done penance in the cold
+moonlight, and worshipped old brown pictures and carved saints which stood with
+upraised hands of blessing in the hollows in the walls. The transition from
+Catholic to Protestant worship had been bridged by a time of disuse, when there
+were no services, and the place was used for storing jars of oil, liqueur, and
+deck-chairs; the hotel flourishing, some religious body had taken the place in
+hand, and it was now fitted out with a number of glazed yellow benches,
+claret-coloured footstools; it had a small pulpit, and a brass eagle carrying
+the Bible on its back, while the piety of different women had supplied ugly
+squares of carpet, and long strips of embroidery heavily wrought with monograms
+in gold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the congregation entered they were met by mild sweet chords issuing from a
+harmonium, where Miss Willett, concealed from view by a baize curtain, struck
+emphatic chords with uncertain fingers. The sound spread through the chapel as
+the rings of water spread from a fallen stone. The twenty or twenty-five people
+who composed the congregation first bowed their heads and then sat up and
+looked about them. It was very quiet, and the light down here seemed paler than
+the light above. The usual bows and smiles were dispensed with, but they
+recognised each other. The Lord&rsquo;s Prayer was read over them. As the
+childlike battle of voices rose, the congregation, many of whom had only met on
+the staircase, felt themselves pathetically united and well-disposed towards
+each other. As if the prayer were a torch applied to fuel, a smoke seemed to
+rise automatically and fill the place with the ghosts of innumerable services
+on innumerable Sunday mornings at home. Susan Warrington in particular was
+conscious of the sweetest sense of sisterhood, as she covered her face with her
+hands and saw slips of bent backs through the chinks between her fingers. Her
+emotions rose calmly and evenly, approving of herself and of life at the same
+time. It was all so quiet and so good. But having created this peaceful
+atmosphere Mr. Bax suddenly turned the page and read a psalm. Though he read it
+with no change of voice the mood was broken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Be merciful unto me, O God,&rdquo; he read, &ldquo;for man goeth about
+to devour me: he is daily fighting and troubling me. . . . They daily mistake
+my words: all that they imagine is to do me evil. They hold all together and
+keep themselves close. . . . Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths; smite
+the jaw-bones of the lions, O Lord: let them fall away like water that runneth
+apace; and when they shoot their arrows let them be rooted out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing in Susan&rsquo;s experience at all corresponded with this, and as she
+had no love of language she had long ceased to attend to such remarks, although
+she followed them with the same kind of mechanical respect with which she heard
+many of Lear&rsquo;s speeches read aloud. Her mind was still serene and really
+occupied with praise of her own nature and praise of God, that is of the solemn
+and satisfactory order of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it could be seen from a glance at their faces that most of the others, the
+men in particular, felt the inconvenience of the sudden intrusion of this old
+savage. They looked more secular and critical as they listened to the ravings
+of the old black man with a cloth round his loins cursing with vehement gesture
+by a camp-fire in the desert. After that there was a general sound of pages
+being turned as if they were in class, and then they read a little bit of the
+Old Testament about making a well, very much as school boys translate an easy
+passage from the <i>Anabasis</i> when they have shut up their French grammar.
+Then they returned to the New Testament and the sad and beautiful figure of
+Christ. While Christ spoke they made another effort to fit his interpretation
+of life upon the lives they lived, but as they were all very different, some
+practical, some ambitious, some stupid, some wild and experimental, some in
+love, and others long past any feeling except a feeling of comfort, they did
+very different things with the words of Christ.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From their faces it seemed that for the most part they made no effort at all,
+and, recumbent as it were, accepted the ideas the words gave as representing
+goodness, in the same way, no doubt, as one of those industrious needlewomen
+had accepted the bright ugly pattern on her mat as beauty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whatever the reason might be, for the first time in her life, instead of
+slipping at once into some curious pleasant cloud of emotion, too familiar to
+be considered, Rachel listened critically to what was being said. By the time
+they had swung in an irregular way from prayer to psalm, from psalm to history,
+from history to poetry, and Mr. Bax was giving out his text, she was in a state
+of acute discomfort. Such was the discomfort she felt when forced to sit
+through an unsatisfactory piece of music badly played. Tantalised, enraged by
+the clumsy insensitiveness of the conductor, who put the stress on the wrong
+places, and annoyed by the vast flock of the audience tamely praising and
+acquiescing without knowing or caring, so she was now tantalised and enraged,
+only here, with eyes half-shut and lips pursed together, the atmosphere of
+forced solemnity increased her anger. All round her were people pretending to
+feel what they did not feel, while somewhere above her floated the idea which
+they could none of them grasp, which they pretended to grasp, always escaping
+out of reach, a beautiful idea, an idea like a butterfly. One after another,
+vast and hard and cold, appeared to her the churches all over the world where
+this blundering effort and misunderstanding were perpetually going on, great
+buildings, filled with innumerable men and women, not seeing clearly, who
+finally gave up the effort to see, and relapsed tamely into praise and
+acquiescence, half-shutting their eyes and pursing up their lips. The thought
+had the same sort of physical discomfort as is caused by a film of mist always
+coming between the eyes and the printed page. She did her best to brush away
+the film and to conceive something to be worshipped as the service went on, but
+failed, always misled by the voice of Mr. Bax saying things which
+misrepresented the idea, and by the patter of baaing inexpressive human voices
+falling round her like damp leaves. The effort was tiring and dispiriting. She
+ceased to listen, and fixed her eyes on the face of a woman near her, a
+hospital nurse, whose expression of devout attention seemed to prove that she
+was at any rate receiving satisfaction. But looking at her carefully she came
+to the conclusion that the hospital nurse was only slavishly acquiescent, and
+that the look of satisfaction was produced by no splendid conception of God
+within her. How, indeed, could she conceive anything far outside her own
+experience, a woman with a commonplace face like hers, a little round red face,
+upon which trivial duties and trivial spites had drawn lines, whose weak blue
+eyes saw without intensity or individuality, whose features were blurred,
+insensitive, and callous? She was adoring something shallow and smug, clinging
+to it, so the obstinate mouth witnessed, with the assiduity of a limpet;
+nothing would tear her from her demure belief in her own virtue and the virtues
+of her religion. She was a limpet, with the sensitive side of her stuck to a
+rock, for ever dead to the rush of fresh and beautiful things past her. The
+face of this single worshipper became printed on Rachel&rsquo;s mind with an
+impression of keen horror, and she had it suddenly revealed to her what Helen
+meant and St. John meant when they proclaimed their hatred of Christianity.
+With the violence that now marked her feelings, she rejected all that she had
+implicitly believed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile Mr. Bax was half-way through the second lesson. She looked at him. He
+was a man of the world with supple lips and an agreeable manner, he was indeed
+a man of much kindliness and simplicity, though by no means clever, but she was
+not in the mood to give any one credit for such qualities, and examined him as
+though he were an epitome of all the vices of his service.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Right at the back of the chapel Mrs. Flushing, Hirst, and Hewet sat in a row in
+a very different frame of mind. Hewet was staring at the roof with his legs
+stuck out in front of him, for as he had never tried to make the service fit
+any feeling or idea of his, he was able to enjoy the beauty of the language
+without hindrance. His mind was occupied first with accidental things, such as
+the women&rsquo;s hair in front of him, the light on the faces, then with the
+words which seemed to him magnificent, and then more vaguely with the
+characters of the other worshippers. But when he suddenly perceived Rachel, all
+these thoughts were driven out of his head, and he thought only of her. The
+psalms, the prayers, the Litany, and the sermon were all reduced to one
+chanting sound which paused, and then renewed itself, a little higher or a
+little lower. He stared alternately at Rachel and at the ceiling, but his
+expression was now produced not by what he saw but by something in his mind. He
+was almost as painfully disturbed by his thoughts as she was by hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Early in the service Mrs. Flushing had discovered that she had taken up a Bible
+instead of a prayer-book, and, as she was sitting next to Hirst, she stole a
+glance over his shoulder. He was reading steadily in the thin pale-blue volume.
+Unable to understand, she peered closer, upon which Hirst politely laid the
+book before her, pointing to the first line of a Greek poem and then to the
+translation opposite.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that?&rdquo; she whispered inquisitively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sappho,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;The one Swinburne did&mdash;the best
+thing that&rsquo;s ever been written.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Flushing could not resist such an opportunity. She gulped down the Ode to
+Aphrodite during the Litany, keeping herself with difficulty from asking when
+Sappho lived, and what else she wrote worth reading, and contriving to come in
+punctually at the end with &ldquo;the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of
+the body, and the life everlastin&rsquo;. Amen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile Hirst took out an envelope and began scribbling on the back of it.
+When Mr. Bax mounted the pulpit he shut up Sappho with his envelope between the
+pages, settled his spectacles, and fixed his gaze intently upon the clergyman.
+Standing in the pulpit he looked very large and fat; the light coming through
+the greenish unstained window-glass made his face appear smooth and white like
+a very large egg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked round at all the faces looking mildly up at him, although some of
+them were the faces of men and women old enough to be his grandparents, and
+gave out his text with weighty significance. The argument of the sermon was
+that visitors to this beautiful land, although they were on a holiday, owed a
+duty to the natives. It did not, in truth, differ very much from a leading
+article upon topics of general interest in the weekly newspapers. It rambled
+with a kind of amiable verbosity from one heading to another, suggesting that
+all human beings are very much the same under their skins, illustrating this by
+the resemblance of the games which little Spanish boys play to the games little
+boys in London streets play, observing that very small things do influence
+people, particularly natives; in fact, a very dear friend of Mr. Bax&rsquo;s
+had told him that the success of our rule in India, that vast country, largely
+depended upon the strict code of politeness which the English adopted towards
+the natives, which led to the remark that small things were not necessarily
+small, and that somehow to the virtue of sympathy, which was a virtue never
+more needed than to-day, when we lived in a time of experiment and
+upheaval&mdash;witness the aeroplane and wireless telegraph, and there were
+other problems which hardly presented themselves to our fathers, but which no
+man who called himself a man could leave unsettled. Here Mr. Bax became more
+definitely clerical, if it were possible, he seemed to speak with a certain
+innocent craftiness, as he pointed out that all this laid a special duty upon
+earnest Christians. What men were inclined to say now was, &ldquo;Oh, that
+fellow&mdash;he&rsquo;s a parson.&rdquo; What we want them to say is,
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a good fellow&rdquo;&mdash;in other words, &ldquo;He is my
+brother.&rdquo; He exhorted them to keep in touch with men of the modern type;
+they must sympathise with their multifarious interests in order to keep before
+their eyes that whatever discoveries were made there was one discovery which
+could not be superseded, which was indeed as much of a necessity to the most
+successful and most brilliant of them all as it had been to their fathers. The
+humblest could help; the least important things had an influence (here his
+manner became definitely priestly and his remarks seemed to be directed to
+women, for indeed Mr. Bax&rsquo;s congregations were mainly composed of women,
+and he was used to assigning them their duties in his innocent clerical
+campaigns). Leaving more definite instruction, he passed on, and his theme
+broadened into a peroration for which he drew a long breath and stood very
+upright,&mdash;&ldquo;As a drop of water, detached, alone, separate from
+others, falling from the cloud and entering the great ocean, alters, so
+scientists tell us, not only the immediate spot in the ocean where it falls,
+but all the myriad drops which together compose the great universe of waters,
+and by this means alters the configuration of the globe and the lives of
+millions of sea creatures, and finally the lives of the men and women who seek
+their living upon the shores&mdash;as all this is within the compass of a
+single drop of water, such as any rain shower sends in millions to lose
+themselves in the earth, to lose themselves we say, but we know very well that
+the fruits of the earth could not flourish without them&mdash;so is a marvel
+comparable to this within the reach of each one of us, who dropping a little
+word or a little deed into the great universe alters it; yea, it is a solemn
+thought, <i>alters</i> it, for good or for evil, not for one instant, or in one
+vicinity, but throughout the entire race, and for all eternity.&rdquo; Whipping
+round as though to avoid applause, he continued with the same breath, but in a
+different tone of voice,&mdash;&ldquo;And now to God the Father . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gave his blessing, and then, while the solemn chords again issued from the
+harmonium behind the curtain, the different people began scraping and fumbling
+and moving very awkwardly and consciously towards the door. Half-way upstairs,
+at a point where the light and sounds of the upper world conflicted with the
+dimness and the dying hymn-tune of the under, Rachel felt a hand drop upon her
+shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Vinrace,&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing whispered peremptorily, &ldquo;stay
+to luncheon. It&rsquo;s such a dismal day. They don&rsquo;t even give one beef
+for luncheon. Please stay.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here they came out into the hall, where once more the little band was greeted
+with curious respectful glances by the people who had not gone to church,
+although their clothing made it clear that they approved of Sunday to the very
+verge of going to church. Rachel felt unable to stand any more of this
+particular atmosphere, and was about to say she must go back, when Terence
+passed them, drawn along in talk with Evelyn M. Rachel thereupon contented
+herself with saying that the people looked very respectable, which negative
+remark Mrs. Flushing interpreted to mean that she would stay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;English people abroad!&rdquo; she returned with a vivid flash of malice.
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t they awful! But we won&rsquo;t stay here,&rdquo; she
+continued, plucking at Rachel&rsquo;s arm. &ldquo;Come up to my room.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She bore her past Hewet and Evelyn and the Thornburys and the Elliots. Hewet
+stepped forward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Luncheon&mdash;&rdquo; he began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Vinrace has promised to lunch with me,&rdquo; said Mrs. Flushing,
+and began to pound energetically up the staircase, as though the middle classes
+of England were in pursuit. She did not stop until she had slammed her bedroom
+door behind them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, what did you think of it?&rdquo; she demanded, panting slightly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the disgust and horror which Rachel had been accumulating burst forth
+beyond her control.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought it the most loathsome exhibition I&rsquo;d ever seen!&rdquo;
+she broke out. &ldquo;How can they&mdash;how dare they&mdash;what do you mean
+by it&mdash;Mr. Bax, hospital nurses, old men, prostitutes,
+disgusting&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She hit off the points she remembered as fast as she could, but she was too
+indignant to stop to analyse her feelings. Mrs. Flushing watched her with keen
+gusto as she stood ejaculating with emphatic movements of her head and hands in
+the middle of the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go on, go on, do go on,&rdquo; she laughed, clapping her hands.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s delightful to hear you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why do you go?&rdquo; Rachel demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been every Sunday of my life ever since I can
+remember,&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing chuckled, as though that were a reason by
+itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel turned abruptly to the window. She did not know what it was that had put
+her into such a passion; the sight of Terence in the hall had confused her
+thoughts, leaving her merely indignant. She looked straight at their own villa,
+half-way up the side of the mountain. The most familiar view seen framed
+through glass has a certain unfamiliar distinction, and she grew calm as she
+gazed. Then she remembered that she was in the presence of some one she did not
+know well, and she turned and looked at Mrs. Flushing. Mrs. Flushing was still
+sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up, with her lips parted, so that her
+strong white teeth showed in two rows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;which d&rsquo;you like best, Mr. Hewet
+or Mr. Hirst?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Hewet,&rdquo; Rachel replied, but her voice did not sound natural.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which is the one who reads Greek in church?&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing
+demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It might have been either of them and while Mrs. Flushing proceeded to describe
+them both, and to say that both frightened her, but one frightened her more
+than the other, Rachel looked for a chair. The room, of course, was one of the
+largest and most luxurious in the hotel. There were a great many arm-chairs and
+settees covered in brown holland, but each of these was occupied by a large
+square piece of yellow cardboard, and all the pieces of cardboard were dotted
+or lined with spots or dashes of bright oil paint.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you&rsquo;re not to look at those,&rdquo; said Mrs. Flushing as she
+saw Rachel&rsquo;s eye wander. She jumped up, and turned as many as she could,
+face downwards, upon the floor. Rachel, however, managed to possess herself of
+one of them, and, with the vanity of an artist, Mrs. Flushing demanded
+anxiously, &ldquo;Well, well?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a hill,&rdquo; Rachel replied. There could be no doubt that
+Mrs. Flushing had represented the vigorous and abrupt fling of the earth up
+into the air; you could almost see the clods flying as it whirled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel passed from one to another. They were all marked by something of the
+jerk and decision of their maker; they were all perfectly untrained onslaughts
+of the brush upon some half-realised idea suggested by hill or tree; and they
+were all in some way characteristic of Mrs. Flushing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I see things movin&rsquo;,&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing explained.
+&ldquo;So&rdquo;&mdash;she swept her hand through a yard of the air. She then
+took up one of the cardboards which Rachel had laid aside, seated herself on a
+stool, and began to flourish a stump of charcoal. While she occupied herself in
+strokes which seemed to serve her as speech serves others, Rachel, who was very
+restless, looked about her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Open the wardrobe,&rdquo; said Mrs. Flushing after a pause, speaking
+indistinctly because of a paint-brush in her mouth, &ldquo;and look at the
+things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Rachel hesitated, Mrs. Flushing came forward, still with a paint-brush in
+her mouth, flung open the wings of her wardrobe, and tossed a quantity of
+shawls, stuffs, cloaks, embroideries, on to the bed. Rachel began to finger
+them. Mrs. Flushing came up once more, and dropped a quantity of beads,
+brooches, earrings, bracelets, tassels, and combs among the draperies. Then she
+went back to her stool and began to paint in silence. The stuffs were coloured
+and dark and pale; they made a curious swarm of lines and colours upon the
+counterpane, with the reddish lumps of stone and peacocks&rsquo; feathers and
+clear pale tortoise-shell combs lying among them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The women wore them hundreds of years ago, they wear &rsquo;em
+still,&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing remarked. &ldquo;My husband rides about and finds
+&rsquo;em; they don&rsquo;t know what they&rsquo;re worth, so we get &rsquo;em
+cheap. And we shall sell &rsquo;em to smart women in London,&rdquo; she
+chuckled, as though the thought of these ladies and their absurd appearance
+amused her. After painting for some minutes, she suddenly laid down her brush
+and fixed her eyes upon Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I tell you what I want to do,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I want to go up
+there and see things for myself. It&rsquo;s silly stayin&rsquo; here with a
+pack of old maids as though we were at the seaside in England. I want to go up
+the river and see the natives in their camps. It&rsquo;s only a matter of ten
+days under canvas. My husband&rsquo;s done it. One would lie out under the
+trees at night and be towed down the river by day, and if we saw anythin&rsquo;
+nice we&rsquo;d shout out and tell &rsquo;em to stop.&rdquo; She rose and began
+piercing the bed again and again with a long golden pin, as she watched to see
+what effect her suggestion had upon Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We must make up a party,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;Ten people could
+hire a launch. Now you&rsquo;ll come, and Mrs. Ambrose&rsquo;ll come, and will
+Mr. Hirst and t&rsquo;other gentleman come? Where&rsquo;s a pencil?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She became more and more determined and excited as she evolved her plan. She
+sat on the edge of the bed and wrote down a list of surnames, which she
+invariably spelt wrong. Rachel was enthusiastic, for indeed the idea was
+immeasurably delightful to her. She had always had a great desire to see the
+river, and the name of Terence threw a lustre over the prospect, which made it
+almost too good to come true. She did what she could to help Mrs. Flushing by
+suggesting names, helping her to spell them, and counting up the days of the
+week upon her fingers. As Mrs. Flushing wanted to know all she could tell her
+about the birth and pursuits of every person she suggested, and threw in wild
+stories of her own as to the temperaments and habits of artists, and people of
+the same name who used to come to Chillingley in the old days, but were
+doubtless not the same, though they too were very clever men interested in
+Egyptology, the business took some time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last Mrs. Flushing sought her diary for help, the method of reckoning dates
+on the fingers proving unsatisfactory. She opened and shut every drawer in her
+writing-table, and then cried furiously, &ldquo;Yarmouth! Yarmouth! Drat the
+woman! She&rsquo;s always out of the way when she&rsquo;s wanted!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment the luncheon gong began to work itself into its midday frenzy.
+Mrs. Flushing rang her bell violently. The door was opened by a handsome maid
+who was almost as upright as her mistress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Yarmouth,&rdquo; said Mrs. Flushing, &ldquo;just find my diary and
+see where ten days from now would bring us to, and ask the hall porter how many
+men &rsquo;ud be wanted to row eight people up the river for a week, and what
+it &rsquo;ud cost, and put it on a slip of paper and leave it on my
+dressing-table. Now&mdash;&rdquo; she pointed at the door with a superb
+forefinger so that Rachel had to lead the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, and Yarmouth,&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing called back over her shoulder.
+&ldquo;Put those things away and hang &rsquo;em in their right places,
+there&rsquo;s a good girl, or it fusses Mr. Flushin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To all of which Yarmouth merely replied, &ldquo;Yes, ma&rsquo;am.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they entered the long dining-room it was obvious that the day was still
+Sunday, although the mood was slightly abating. The Flushings&rsquo; table was
+set by the side in the window, so that Mrs. Flushing could scrutinise each
+figure as it entered, and her curiosity seemed to be intense.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Old Mrs. Paley,&rdquo; she whispered as the wheeled chair slowly made
+its way through the door, Arthur pushing behind. &ldquo;Thornburys&rdquo; came
+next. &ldquo;That nice woman,&rdquo; she nudged Rachel to look at Miss Allan.
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s her name?&rdquo; The painted lady who always came in late,
+tripping into the room with a prepared smile as though she came out upon a
+stage, might well have quailed before Mrs. Flushing&rsquo;s stare, which
+expressed her steely hostility to the whole tribe of painted ladies. Next came
+the two young men whom Mrs. Flushing called collectively the Hirsts. They sat
+down opposite, across the gangway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Flushing treated his wife with a mixture of admiration and indulgence,
+making up by the suavity and fluency of his speech for the abruptness of hers.
+While she darted and ejaculated he gave Rachel a sketch of the history of South
+American art. He would deal with one of his wife&rsquo;s exclamations, and then
+return as smoothly as ever to his theme. He knew very well how to make a
+luncheon pass agreeably, without being dull or intimate. He had formed the
+opinion, so he told Rachel, that wonderful treasures lay hid in the depths of
+the land; the things Rachel had seen were merely trifles picked up in the
+course of one short journey. He thought there might be giant gods hewn out of
+stone in the mountain-side; and colossal figures standing by themselves in the
+middle of vast green pasture lands, where none but natives had ever trod.
+Before the dawn of European art he believed that the primitive huntsmen and
+priests had built temples of massive stone slabs, had formed out of the dark
+rocks and the great cedar trees majestic figures of gods and of beasts, and
+symbols of the great forces, water, air, and forest among which they lived.
+There might be prehistoric towns, like those in Greece and Asia, standing in
+open places among the trees, filled with the works of this early race. Nobody
+had been there; scarcely anything was known. Thus talking and displaying the
+most picturesque of his theories, Rachel&rsquo;s attention was fixed upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did not see that Hewet kept looking at her across the gangway, between the
+figures of waiters hurrying past with plates. He was inattentive, and Hirst was
+finding him also very cross and disagreeable. They had touched upon all the
+usual topics&mdash;upon politics and literature, gossip and Christianity. They
+had quarrelled over the service, which was every bit as fine as Sappho,
+according to Hewet; so that Hirst&rsquo;s paganism was mere ostentation. Why go
+to church, he demanded, merely in order to read Sappho? Hirst observed that he
+had listened to every word of the sermon, as he could prove if Hewet would like
+a repetition of it; and he went to church in order to realise the nature of his
+Creator, which he had done very vividly that morning, thanks to Mr. Bax, who
+had inspired him to write three of the most superb lines in English literature,
+an invocation to the Deity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wrote &rsquo;em on the back of the envelope of my aunt&rsquo;s last
+letter,&rdquo; he said, and pulled it from between the pages of Sappho.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, let&rsquo;s hear them,&rdquo; said Hewet, slightly mollified by
+the prospect of a literary discussion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My dear Hewet, do you wish us both to be flung out of the hotel by an
+enraged mob of Thornburys and Elliots?&rdquo; Hirst enquired. &ldquo;The merest
+whisper would be sufficient to incriminate me for ever. God!&rdquo; he broke
+out, &ldquo;what&rsquo;s the use of attempting to write when the world&rsquo;s
+peopled by such damned fools? Seriously, Hewet, I advise you to give up
+literature. What&rsquo;s the good of it? There&rsquo;s your audience.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded his head at the tables where a very miscellaneous collection of
+Europeans were now engaged in eating, in some cases in gnawing, the stringy
+foreign fowls. Hewet looked, and grew more out of temper than ever. Hirst
+looked too. His eyes fell upon Rachel, and he bowed to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I rather think Rachel&rsquo;s in love with me,&rdquo; he remarked, as
+his eyes returned to his plate. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the worst of friendships
+with young women&mdash;they tend to fall in love with one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To that Hewet made no answer whatever, and sat singularly still. Hirst did not
+seem to mind getting no answer, for he returned to Mr. Bax again, quoting the
+peroration about the drop of water; and when Hewet scarcely replied to these
+remarks either, he merely pursed his lips, chose a fig, and relapsed quite
+contentedly into his own thoughts, of which he always had a very large supply.
+When luncheon was over they separated, taking their cups of coffee to different
+parts of the hall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From his chair beneath the palm-tree Hewet saw Rachel come out of the
+dining-room with the Flushings; he saw them look round for chairs, and choose
+three in a corner where they could go on talking in private. Mr. Flushing was
+now in the full tide of his discourse. He produced a sheet of paper upon which
+he made drawings as he went on with his talk. He saw Rachel lean over and look,
+pointing to this and that with her finger. Hewet unkindly compared Mr.
+Flushing, who was extremely well dressed for a hot climate, and rather
+elaborate in his manner, to a very persuasive shop-keeper. Meanwhile, as he sat
+looking at them, he was entangled in the Thornburys and Miss Allan, who, after
+hovering about for a minute or two, settled in chairs round him, holding their
+cups in their hands. They wanted to know whether he could tell them anything
+about Mr. Bax. Mr. Thornbury as usual sat saying nothing, looking vaguely ahead
+of him, occasionally raising his eye-glasses, as if to put them on, but always
+thinking better of it at the last moment, and letting them fall again. After
+some discussion, the ladies put it beyond a doubt that Mr. Bax was not the son
+of Mr. William Bax. There was a pause. Then Mrs. Thornbury remarked that she
+was still in the habit of saying Queen instead of King in the National Anthem.
+There was another pause. Then Miss Allan observed reflectively that going to
+church abroad always made her feel as if she had been to a sailor&rsquo;s
+funeral.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was then a very long pause, which threatened to be final, when,
+mercifully, a bird about the size of a magpie, but of a metallic blue colour,
+appeared on the section of the terrace that could be seen from where they sat.
+Mrs. Thornbury was led to enquire whether we should like it if all our rooks
+were blue&mdash;&ldquo;What do <i>you</i> think, William?&rdquo; she asked,
+touching her husband on the knee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If all our rooks were blue,&rdquo; he said,&mdash;he raised his glasses;
+he actually placed them on his nose&mdash;&ldquo;they would not live long in
+Wiltshire,&rdquo; he concluded; he dropped his glasses to his side again. The
+three elderly people now gazed meditatively at the bird, which was so obliging
+as to stay in the middle of the view for a considerable space of time, thus
+making it unnecessary for them to speak again. Hewet began to wonder whether he
+might not cross over to the Flushings&rsquo; corner, when Hirst appeared from
+the background, slipped into a chair by Rachel&rsquo;s side, and began to talk
+to her with every appearance of familiarity. Hewet could stand it no longer. He
+rose, took his hat and dashed out of doors.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap18"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<p>
+Everything he saw was distasteful to him. He hated the blue and white, the
+intensity and definiteness, the hum and heat of the south; the landscape seemed
+to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard background on the stage, and the
+mountain but a wooden screen against a sheet painted blue. He walked fast in
+spite of the heat of the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two roads led out of the town on the eastern side; one branched off towards the
+Ambroses&rsquo; villa, the other struck into the country, eventually reaching a
+village on the plain, but many footpaths, which had been stamped in the earth
+when it was wet, led off from it, across great dry fields, to scattered
+farm-houses, and the villas of rich natives. Hewet stepped off the road on to
+one of these, in order to avoid the hardness and heat of the main road, the
+dust of which was always being raised in small clouds by carts and ramshackle
+flies which carried parties of festive peasants, or turkeys swelling unevenly
+like a bundle of air balls beneath a net, or the brass bedstead and black
+wooden boxes of some newly wedded pair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The exercise indeed served to clear away the superficial irritations of the
+morning, but he remained miserable. It seemed proved beyond a doubt that Rachel
+was indifferent to him, for she had scarcely looked at him, and she had talked
+to Mr. Flushing with just the same interest with which she talked to him.
+Finally, Hirst&rsquo;s odious words flicked his mind like a whip, and he
+remembered that he had left her talking to Hirst. She was at this moment
+talking to him, and it might be true, as he said, that she was in love with
+him. He went over all the evidence for this supposition&mdash;her sudden
+interest in Hirst&rsquo;s writing, her way of quoting his opinions
+respectfully, or with only half a laugh; her very nickname for him, &ldquo;the
+great Man,&rdquo; might have some serious meaning in it. Supposing that there
+were an understanding between them, what would it mean to him?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Damn it all!&rdquo; he demanded, &ldquo;am I in love with her?&rdquo; To
+that he could only return himself one answer. He certainly was in love with
+her, if he knew what love meant. Ever since he had first seen her he had been
+interested and attracted, more and more interested and attracted, until he was
+scarcely able to think of anything except Rachel. But just as he was sliding
+into one of the long feasts of meditation about them both, he checked himself
+by asking whether he wanted to marry her? That was the real problem, for these
+miseries and agonies could not be endured, and it was necessary that he should
+make up his mind. He instantly decided that he did not want to marry any one.
+Partly because he was irritated by Rachel the idea of marriage irritated him.
+It immediately suggested the picture of two people sitting alone over the fire;
+the man was reading, the woman sewing. There was a second picture. He saw a man
+jump up, say good-night, leave the company and hasten away with the quiet
+secret look of one who is stealing to certain happiness. Both these pictures
+were very unpleasant, and even more so was a third picture, of husband and wife
+and friend; and the married people glancing at each other as though they were
+content to let something pass unquestioned, being themselves possessed of the
+deeper truth. Other pictures&mdash;he was walking very fast in his irritation,
+and they came before him without any conscious effort, like pictures on a
+sheet&mdash;succeeded these. Here were the worn husband and wife sitting with
+their children round them, very patient, tolerant, and wise. But that too, was
+an unpleasant picture. He tried all sorts of pictures, taking them from the
+lives of friends of his, for he knew many different married couples; but he saw
+them always, walled up in a warm firelit room. When, on the other hand, he
+began to think of unmarried people, he saw them active in an unlimited world;
+above all, standing on the same ground as the rest, without shelter or
+advantage. All the most individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and
+spinsters; indeed he was surprised to find that the women he most admired and
+knew best were unmarried women. Marriage seemed to be worse for them than it
+was for men. Leaving these general pictures he considered the people whom he
+had been observing lately at the hotel. He had often revolved these questions
+in his mind, as he watched Susan and Arthur, or Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury, or Mr.
+and Mrs. Elliot. He had observed how the shy happiness and surprise of the
+engaged couple had gradually been replaced by a comfortable, tolerant state of
+mind, as if they had already done with the adventure of intimacy and were
+taking up their parts. Susan used to pursue Arthur about with a sweater,
+because he had one day let slip that a brother of his had died of pneumonia.
+The sight amused him, but was not pleasant if you substituted Terence and
+Rachel for Arthur and Susan; and Arthur was far less eager to get you in a
+corner and talk about flying and the mechanics of aeroplanes. They would settle
+down. He then looked at the couples who had been married for several years. It
+was true that Mrs. Thornbury had a husband, and that for the most part she was
+wonderfully successful in bringing him into the conversation, but one could not
+imagine what they said to each other when they were alone. There was the same
+difficulty with regard to the Elliots, except that they probably bickered
+openly in private. They sometimes bickered in public, though these
+disagreements were painfully covered over by little insincerities on the part
+of the wife, who was afraid of public opinion, because she was much stupider
+than her husband, and had to make efforts to keep hold of him. There could be
+no doubt, he decided, that it would have been far better for the world if these
+couples had separated. Even the Ambroses, whom he admired and respected
+profoundly&mdash;in spite of all the love between them, was not their marriage
+too a compromise? She gave way to him; she spoilt him; she arranged things for
+him; she who was all truth to others was not true to her husband, was not true
+to her friends if they came in conflict with her husband. It was a strange and
+piteous flaw in her nature. Perhaps Rachel had been right, then, when she said
+that night in the garden, &ldquo;We bring out what&rsquo;s worst in each
+other&mdash;we should live separate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No, Rachel had been utterly wrong! Every argument seemed to be against
+undertaking the burden of marriage until he came to Rachel&rsquo;s argument,
+which was manifestly absurd. From having been the pursued, he turned and became
+the pursuer. Allowing the case against marriage to lapse, he began to consider
+the peculiarities of character which had led to her saying that. Had she meant
+it? Surely one ought to know the character of the person with whom one might
+spend all one&rsquo;s life; being a novelist, let him try to discover what sort
+of person she was. When he was with her he could not analyse her qualities,
+because he seemed to know them instinctively, but when he was away from her it
+sometimes seemed to him that he did not know her at all. She was young, but she
+was also old; she had little self-confidence, and yet she was a good judge of
+people. She was happy; but what made her happy? If they were alone and the
+excitement had worn off, and they had to deal with the ordinary facts of the
+day, what would happen? Casting his eye upon his own character, two things
+appeared to him: that he was very unpunctual, and that he disliked answering
+notes. As far as he knew Rachel was inclined to be punctual, but he could not
+remember that he had ever seen her with a pen in her hand. Let him next imagine
+a dinner-party, say at the Crooms, and Wilson, who had taken her down, talking
+about the state of the Liberal party. She would say&mdash;of course she was
+absolutely ignorant of politics. Nevertheless she was intelligent certainly,
+and honest too. Her temper was uncertain&mdash;that he had noticed&mdash;and
+she was not domestic, and she was not easy, and she was not quiet, or
+beautiful, except in some dresses in some lights. But the great gift she had
+was that she understood what was said to her; there had never been any one like
+her for talking to. You could say anything&mdash;you could say everything, and
+yet she was never servile. Here he pulled himself up, for it seemed to him
+suddenly that he knew less about her than about any one. All these thoughts had
+occurred to him many times already; often had he tried to argue and reason; and
+again he had reached the old state of doubt. He did not know her, and he did
+not know what she felt, or whether they could live together, or whether he
+wanted to marry her, and yet he was in love with her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Supposing he went to her and said (he slackened his pace and began to speak
+aloud, as if he were speaking to Rachel):
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I worship you, but I loathe marriage, I hate its smugness, its safety,
+its compromise, and the thought of you interfering in my work, hindering me;
+what would you answer?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stopped, leant against the trunk of a tree, and gazed without seeing them at
+some stones scattered on the bank of the dry river-bed. He saw Rachel&rsquo;s
+face distinctly, the grey eyes, the hair, the mouth; the face that could look
+so many things&mdash;plain, vacant, almost insignificant, or wild, passionate,
+almost beautiful, yet in his eyes was always the same because of the
+extraordinary freedom with which she looked at him, and spoke as she felt. What
+would she answer? What did she feel? Did she love him, or did she feel nothing
+at all for him or for any other man, being, as she had said that afternoon,
+free, like the wind or the sea?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, you&rsquo;re free!&rdquo; he exclaimed, in exultation at the thought
+of her, &ldquo;and I&rsquo;d keep you free. We&rsquo;d be free together.
+We&rsquo;d share everything together. No happiness would be like ours. No lives
+would compare with ours.&rdquo; He opened his arms wide as if to hold her and
+the world in one embrace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what her nature was, or
+how it would be if they lived together, he dropped to the ground and sat
+absorbed in the thought of her, and soon tormented by the desire to be in her
+presence again.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap19"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<p>
+But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that Hirst was
+still talking to Rachel. The party very soon broke up, the Flushings going in
+one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel remaining in the hall, pulling the
+illustrated papers about, turning from one to another, her movements expressing
+the unformed restless desire in her mind. She did not know whether to go or to
+stay, though Mrs. Flushing had commanded her to appear at tea. The hall was
+empty, save for Miss Willett who was playing scales with her fingers upon a
+sheet of sacred music, and the Carters, an opulent couple who disliked the
+girl, because her shoe laces were untied, and she did not look sufficiently
+cheery, which by some indirect process of thought led them to think that she
+would not like them. Rachel certainly would not have liked them, if she had
+seen them, for the excellent reason that Mr. Carter waxed his moustache, and
+Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they were evidently the kind of people who
+would not like her; but she was too much absorbed by her own restlessness to
+think or to look.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was turning over the slippery pages of an American magazine, when the hall
+door swung, a wedge of light fell upon the floor, and a small white figure upon
+whom the light seemed focussed, made straight across the room to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What! You here?&rdquo; Evelyn exclaimed. &ldquo;Just caught a glimpse of
+you at lunch; but you wouldn&rsquo;t condescend to look at <i>me</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was part of Evelyn&rsquo;s character that in spite of many snubs which she
+received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit of people she wanted to
+know, and in the long run generally succeeded in knowing them and even in
+making them like her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked round her. &ldquo;I hate this place. I hate these people,&rdquo; she
+said. &ldquo;I wish you&rsquo;d come up to my room with me. I do want to talk
+to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evelyn took her by the wrist and drew
+her out of the hall and up the stairs. As they went upstairs two steps at a
+time, Evelyn, who still kept hold of Rachel&rsquo;s hand, ejaculated broken
+sentences about not caring a hang what people said. &ldquo;Why should one, if
+one knows one&rsquo;s right? And let &rsquo;em all go to blazes! Them&rsquo;s
+my opinions!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms were
+twitching nervously. It was evident that she was only waiting for the door to
+shut to tell Rachel all about it. Indeed, directly they were inside her room,
+she sat on the end of the bed and said, &ldquo;I suppose you think I&rsquo;m
+mad?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about any one&rsquo;s state of
+mind. She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever occurred to her
+without fear of the consequences.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Somebody&rsquo;s proposed to you,&rdquo; she remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How on earth did you guess that?&rdquo; Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure
+mingling with her surprise. &ldquo;Do as I look as if I&rsquo;d just had a
+proposal?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You look as if you had them every day,&rdquo; Rachel replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t suppose I&rsquo;ve had more than you&rsquo;ve
+had,&rdquo; Evelyn laughed rather insincerely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never had one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you will&mdash;lots&mdash;it&rsquo;s the easiest thing in the
+world&mdash;But that&rsquo;s not what&rsquo;s happened this afternoon exactly.
+It&rsquo;s&mdash;Oh, it&rsquo;s a muddle, a detestable, horrible, disgusting
+muddle!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold water; for
+they were burning hot. Still sponging them and trembling slightly she turned
+and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous excitement: &ldquo;Alfred
+Perrott says I&rsquo;ve promised to marry him, and I say I never did. Sinclair
+says he&rsquo;ll shoot himself if I don&rsquo;t marry him, and I say,
+&lsquo;Well, shoot yourself!&rsquo; But of course he doesn&rsquo;t&mdash;they
+never do. And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me to
+give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott, and told me
+I&rsquo;d no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities of pleasant
+things like that. So at last I said to him, &lsquo;Well, Sinclair, you&rsquo;ve
+said enough now. You can just let me go.&rsquo; And then he caught me and
+kissed me&mdash;the disgusting brute&mdash;I can still feel his nasty hairy
+face just there&mdash;as if he&rsquo;d any right to, after what he&rsquo;d
+said!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!&rdquo;
+she cried; &ldquo;they&rsquo;ve no dignity, they&rsquo;ve no courage,
+they&rsquo;ve nothing but their beastly passions and their brute strength!
+Would any woman have behaved like that&mdash;if a man had said he didn&rsquo;t
+want her? We&rsquo;ve too much self-respect; we&rsquo;re infinitely finer than
+they are.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. Tears were now
+running down with the drops of cold water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It makes me angry,&rdquo; she explained, drying her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evelyn&rsquo;s position; she only
+thought that the world was full of people in torment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s only one man here I really like,&rdquo; Evelyn continued;
+&ldquo;Terence Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart seemed to be
+pressed together by cold hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;Why can you trust him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Evelyn. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you have
+feelings about people? Feelings you&rsquo;re absolutely certain are right? I
+had a long talk with Terence the other night. I felt we were really friends
+after that. There&rsquo;s something of a woman in him&mdash;&rdquo; She paused
+as though she were thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her,
+so at least Rachel interpreted her gaze.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She tried to force herself to say, &ldquo;Has he proposed to you?&rdquo; but
+the question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn was saying that
+the finest men were like women, and women were nobler than men&mdash;for
+example, one couldn&rsquo;t imagine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a
+mean thing or having anything base about her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How I&rsquo;d like you to know her!&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her eyes had
+regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she seemed to have
+forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. &ldquo;Lillah runs a home for
+inebriate women in the Deptford Road,&rdquo; she continued. &ldquo;She started
+it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it&rsquo;s now the biggest
+of its kind in England. You can&rsquo;t think what those women are
+like&mdash;and their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of the day and
+night. I&rsquo;ve often been with her. . . . That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s the
+matter with us. . . . We don&rsquo;t <i>do</i> things. What do you
+<i>do</i>?&rdquo; she demanded, looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical
+smile. Rachel had scarcely listened to any of this, and her expression was
+vacant and unhappy. She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and
+her work in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love
+affairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I play,&rdquo; she said with an affection of stolid composure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s about it!&rdquo; Evelyn laughed. &ldquo;We none of us do
+anything but play. And that&rsquo;s why women like Lillah Harrison, who&rsquo;s
+worth twenty of you and me, have to work themselves to the bone. But I&rsquo;m
+tired of playing,&rdquo; she went on, lying flat on the bed, and raising her
+arms above her head. Thus stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to do something. I&rsquo;ve got a splendid idea. Look
+here, you must join. I&rsquo;m sure you&rsquo;ve got any amount of stuff in
+you, though you look&mdash;well, as if you&rsquo;d lived all your life in a
+garden.&rdquo; She sat up, and began to explain with animation. &ldquo;I belong
+to a club in London. It meets every Saturday, so it&rsquo;s called the Saturday
+Club. We&rsquo;re supposed to talk about art, but I&rsquo;m sick of talking
+about art&mdash;what&rsquo;s the good of it? With all kinds of real things
+going on round one? It isn&rsquo;t as if they&rsquo;d got anything to say about
+art, either. So what I&rsquo;m going to tell &rsquo;em is that we&rsquo;ve
+talked enough about art, and we&rsquo;d better talk about life for a change.
+Questions that really matter to people&rsquo;s lives, the White Slave Traffic,
+Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And when we&rsquo;ve made up our
+mind what we want to do we could form ourselves into a society for doing it. .
+. . I&rsquo;m certain that if people like ourselves were to take things in hand
+instead of leaving it to policemen and magistrates, we could put a stop
+to&mdash;prostitution&rdquo;&mdash;she lowered her voice at the ugly
+word&mdash;&ldquo;in six months. My idea is that men and women ought to join in
+these matters. We ought to go into Piccadilly and stop one of these poor
+wretches and say: &lsquo;Now, look here, I&rsquo;m no better than you are, and
+I don&rsquo;t pretend to be any better, but you&rsquo;re doing what you know to
+be beastly, and I won&rsquo;t have you doing beastly things, because
+we&rsquo;re all the same under our skins, and if you do a beastly thing it does
+matter to me.&rsquo; That&rsquo;s what Mr. Bax was saying this morning, and
+it&rsquo;s true, though you clever people&mdash;you&rsquo;re clever too,
+aren&rsquo;t you?&mdash;don&rsquo;t believe it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Evelyn began talking&mdash;it was a fact she often regretted&mdash;her
+thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen to other
+people&rsquo;s thoughts. She continued without more pause than was needed for
+taking breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see why the Saturday club people shouldn&rsquo;t do a
+really great work in that way,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;Of course it would
+want organisation, some one to give their life to it, but I&rsquo;m ready to do
+that. My notion&rsquo;s to think of the human beings first and let the abstract
+ideas take care of themselves. What&rsquo;s wrong with Lillah&mdash;if there is
+anything wrong&mdash;is that she thinks of Temperance first and the women
+afterwards. Now there&rsquo;s one thing I&rsquo;ll say to my credit,&rdquo; she
+continued; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not intellectual or artistic or anything of that
+sort, but I&rsquo;m jolly human.&rdquo; She slipped off the bed and sat on the
+floor, looking up at Rachel. She searched up into her face as if she were
+trying to read what kind of character was concealed behind the face. She put
+her hand on Rachel&rsquo;s knee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It <i>is</i> being human that counts, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; she
+continued. &ldquo;Being real, whatever Mr. Hirst may say. Are you real?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close to her, and that
+there was something exciting in this closeness, although it was also
+disagreeable. She was spared the need of finding an answer to the question, for
+Evelyn proceeded, &ldquo;Do you <i>believe</i> in anything?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes, and to
+relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back her chair and
+exclaimed, &ldquo;In everything!&rdquo; and began to finger different objects,
+the books on the table, the photographs, the freshly leaved plant with the
+stiff bristles, which stood in a large earthenware pot in the window.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony, in
+the sun, in Mrs. Flushing,&rdquo; she remarked, still speaking recklessly, with
+something at the back of her mind forcing her to say the things that one
+usually does not say. &ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t believe in God, I don&rsquo;t
+believe in Mr. Bax, I don&rsquo;t believe in the hospital nurse. I don&rsquo;t
+believe&mdash;&rdquo; She took up a photograph and, looking at it, did not
+finish her sentence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s my mother,&rdquo; said Evelyn, who remained sitting on the
+floor binding her knees together with her arms, and watching Rachel curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel considered the portrait. &ldquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t much believe in
+her,&rdquo; she remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Murgatroyd looked indeed as if the life had been crushed out of her; she
+knelt on a chair, gazing piteously from behind the body of a Pomeranian dog
+which she clasped to her cheek, as if for protection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And that&rsquo;s my dad,&rdquo; said Evelyn, for there were two
+photographs in one frame. The second photograph represented a handsome soldier
+with high regular features and a heavy black moustache; his hand rested on the
+hilt of his sword; there was a decided likeness between him and Evelyn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it&rsquo;s because of them,&rdquo; said Evelyn, &ldquo;that
+I&rsquo;m going to help the other women. You&rsquo;ve heard about me, I
+suppose? They weren&rsquo;t married, you see; I&rsquo;m not anybody in
+particular. I&rsquo;m not a bit ashamed of it. They loved each other anyhow,
+and that&rsquo;s more than most people can say of their parents.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her hands, and compared
+them&mdash;the man and the woman who had, so Evelyn said, loved each other.
+That fact interested her more than the campaign on behalf of unfortunate women
+which Evelyn was once more beginning to describe. She looked again from one to
+the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What d&rsquo;you think it&rsquo;s like,&rdquo; she asked, as Evelyn
+paused for a minute, &ldquo;being in love?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you never been in love?&rdquo; Evelyn asked. &ldquo;Oh
+no&mdash;one&rsquo;s only got to look at you to see that,&rdquo; she added. She
+considered. &ldquo;I really was in love once,&rdquo; she said. She fell into
+reflection, her eyes losing their bright vitality and approaching something
+like an expression of tenderness. &ldquo;It was heavenly!&mdash;while it
+lasted. The worst of it is it don&rsquo;t last, not with me. That&rsquo;s the
+bother.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sinclair about which she
+had pretended to ask Rachel&rsquo;s advice. But she did not want advice; she
+wanted intimacy. When she looked at Rachel, who was still looking at the
+photographs on the bed, she could not help seeing that Rachel was not thinking
+about her. What was she thinking about, then? Evelyn was tormented by the
+little spark of life in her which was always trying to work through to other
+people, and was always being rebuffed. Falling silent she looked at her
+visitor, her shoes, her stockings, the combs in her hair, all the details of
+her dress in short, as though by seizing every detail she might get closer to
+the life within.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel at last put down the photographs, walked to the window and remarked,
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s odd. People talk as much about love as they do about
+religion.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish you&rsquo;d sit down and talk,&rdquo; said Evelyn impatiently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instead Rachel opened the window, which was made in two long panes, and looked
+down into the garden below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s where we got lost the first night,&rdquo; she said.
+&ldquo;It must have been in those bushes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They kill hens down there,&rdquo; said Evelyn. &ldquo;They cut their
+heads off with a knife&mdash;disgusting! But tell me&mdash;what&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to explore the hotel,&rdquo; Rachel interrupted. She drew
+her head in and looked at Evelyn, who still sat on the floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s just like other hotels,&rdquo; said Evelyn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That might be, although every room and passage and chair in the place had a
+character of its own in Rachel&rsquo;s eyes; but she could not bring herself to
+stay in one place any longer. She moved slowly towards the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is it you want?&rdquo; said Evelyn. &ldquo;You make me feel as if
+you were always thinking of something you don&rsquo;t say. . . . Do say
+it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Rachel made no response to this invitation either. She stopped with her
+fingers on the handle of the door, as if she remembered that some sort of
+pronouncement was due from her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ll marry one of them,&rdquo; she said, and then
+turned the handle and shut the door behind her. She walked slowly down the
+passage, running her hand along the wall beside her. She did not think which
+way she was going, and therefore walked down a passage which only led to a
+window and a balcony. She looked down at the kitchen premises, the wrong side
+of the hotel life, which was cut off from the right side by a maze of small
+bushes. The ground was bare, old tins were scattered about, and the bushes wore
+towels and aprons upon their heads to dry. Every now and then a waiter came out
+in a white apron and threw rubbish on to a heap. Two large women in cotton
+dresses were sitting on a bench with blood-smeared tin trays in front of them
+and yellow bodies across their knees. They were plucking the birds, and talking
+as they plucked. Suddenly a chicken came floundering, half flying, half running
+into the space, pursued by a third woman whose age could hardly be under
+eighty. Although wizened and unsteady on her legs she kept up the chase, egged
+on by the laughter of the others; her face was expressive of furious rage, and
+as she ran she swore in Spanish. Frightened by hand-clapping here, a napkin
+there, the bird ran this way and that in sharp angles, and finally fluttered
+straight at the old woman, who opened her scanty grey skirts to enclose it,
+dropped upon it in a bundle, and then holding it out cut its head off with an
+expression of vindictive energy and triumph combined. The blood and the ugly
+wriggling fascinated Rachel, so that although she knew that some one had come
+up behind and was standing beside her, she did not turn round until the old
+woman had settled down on the bench beside the others. Then she looked up
+sharply, because of the ugliness of what she had seen. It was Miss Allan who
+stood beside her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not a pretty sight,&rdquo; said Miss Allan, &ldquo;although I daresay
+it&rsquo;s really more humane than our method. . . . I don&rsquo;t believe
+you&rsquo;ve ever been in my room,&rdquo; she added, and turned away as if she
+meant Rachel to follow her. Rachel followed, for it seemed possible that each
+new person might remove the mystery which burdened her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bedrooms at the hotel were all on the same pattern, save that some were
+larger and some smaller; they had a floor of dark red tiles; they had a high
+bed, draped in mosquito curtains; they had each a writing-table and a
+dressing-table, and a couple of arm-chairs. But directly a box was unpacked the
+rooms became very different, so that Miss Allan&rsquo;s room was very unlike
+Evelyn&rsquo;s room. There were no variously coloured hatpins on her
+dressing-table; no scent-bottles; no narrow curved pairs of scissors; no great
+variety of shoes and boots; no silk petticoats lying on the chairs. The room
+was extremely neat. There seemed to be two pairs of everything. The
+writing-table, however, was piled with manuscript, and a table was drawn out to
+stand by the arm-chair on which were two separate heaps of dark library books,
+in which there were many slips of paper sticking out at different degrees of
+thickness. Miss Allan had asked Rachel to come in out of kindness, thinking
+that she was waiting about with nothing to do. Moreover, she liked young women,
+for she had taught many of them, and having received so much hospitality from
+the Ambroses she was glad to be able to repay a minute part of it. She looked
+about accordingly for something to show her. The room did not provide much
+entertainment. She touched her manuscript. &ldquo;Age of Chaucer; Age of
+Elizabeth; Age of Dryden,&rdquo; she reflected; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad there
+aren&rsquo;t many more ages. I&rsquo;m still in the middle of the eighteenth
+century. Won&rsquo;t you sit down, Miss Vinrace? The chair, though small, is
+firm. . . . Euphues. The germ of the English novel,&rdquo; she continued,
+glancing at another page. &ldquo;Is that the kind of thing that interests
+you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at Rachel with great kindness and simplicity, as though she would do
+her utmost to provide anything she wished to have. This expression had a
+remarkable charm in a face otherwise much lined with care and thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh no, it&rsquo;s music with you, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; she continued,
+recollecting, &ldquo;and I generally find that they don&rsquo;t go together.
+Sometimes of course we have prodigies&mdash;&rdquo; She was looking about her
+for something and now saw a jar on the mantelpiece which she reached down and
+gave to Rachel. &ldquo;If you put your finger into this jar you may be able to
+extract a piece of preserved ginger. Are you a prodigy?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the ginger was deep and could not be reached.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t bother,&rdquo; she said, as Miss Allan looked about for some
+other implement. &ldquo;I daresay I shouldn&rsquo;t like preserved
+ginger.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve never tried?&rdquo; enquired Miss Allan. &ldquo;Then I
+consider that it is your duty to try now. Why, you may add a new pleasure to
+life, and as you are still young&mdash;&rdquo; She wondered whether a
+button-hook would do. &ldquo;I make it a rule to try everything,&rdquo; she
+said. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think it would be very annoying if you tasted
+ginger for the first time on your death-bed, and found you never liked anything
+so much? I should be so exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on
+that account alone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was now successful, and a lump of ginger emerged on the end of the
+button-hook. While she went to wipe the button-hook, Rachel bit the ginger and
+at once cried, &ldquo;I must spit it out!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you sure you have really tasted it?&rdquo; Miss Allan demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For answer Rachel threw it out of the window.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An experience anyhow,&rdquo; said Miss Allan calmly. &ldquo;Let me
+see&mdash;I have nothing else to offer you, unless you would like to taste
+this.&rdquo; A small cupboard hung above her bed, and she took out of it a slim
+elegant jar filled with a bright green fluid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Crême de Menthe,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Liqueur, you know. It looks as
+if I drank, doesn&rsquo;t it? As a matter of fact it goes to prove what an
+exceptionally abstemious person I am. I&rsquo;ve had that jar for
+six-and-twenty years,&rdquo; she added, looking at it with pride, as she tipped
+it over, and from the height of the liquid it could be seen that the bottle was
+still untouched.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Twenty-six years?&rdquo; Rachel exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Allan was gratified, for she had meant Rachel to be surprised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When I went to Dresden six-and-twenty years ago,&rdquo; she said,
+&ldquo;a certain friend of mine announced her intention of making me a present.
+She thought that in the event of shipwreck or accident a stimulant might be
+useful. However, as I had no occasion for it, I gave it back on my return. On
+the eve of any foreign journey the same bottle always makes its appearance,
+with the same note; on my return in safety it is always handed back. I consider
+it a kind of charm against accidents. Though I was once detained twenty-four
+hours by an accident to the train in front of me, I have never met with any
+accident myself. Yes,&rdquo; she continued, now addressing the bottle,
+&ldquo;we have seen many climes and cupboards together, have we not? I intend
+one of these days to have a silver label made with an inscription. It is a
+gentleman, as you may observe, and his name is Oliver. . . . I do not think I
+could forgive you, Miss Vinrace, if you broke my Oliver,&rdquo; she said,
+firmly taking the bottle out of Rachel&rsquo;s hands and replacing it in the
+cupboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel was swinging the bottle by the neck. She was interested by Miss Allan to
+the point of forgetting the bottle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she exclaimed, &ldquo;I do think that odd; to have had a
+friend for twenty-six years, and a bottle, and&mdash;to have made all those
+journeys.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all; I call it the reverse of odd,&rdquo; Miss Allan replied.
+&ldquo;I always consider myself the most ordinary person I know. It&rsquo;s
+rather distinguished to be as ordinary as I am. I forget&mdash;are you a
+prodigy, or did you say you were not a prodigy?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She smiled at Rachel very kindly. She seemed to have known and experienced so
+much, as she moved cumbrously about the room, that surely there must be balm
+for all anguish in her words, could one induce her to have recourse to them.
+But Miss Allan, who was now locking the cupboard door, showed no signs of
+breaking the reticence which had snowed her under for years. An uncomfortable
+sensation kept Rachel silent; on the one hand, she wished to whirl high and
+strike a spark out of the cool pink flesh; on the other she perceived there was
+nothing to be done but to drift past each other in silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not a prodigy. I find it very difficult to say what I
+mean&mdash;&rdquo; she observed at length.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a matter of temperament, I believe,&rdquo; Miss Allan helped
+her. &ldquo;There are some people who have no difficulty; for myself I find
+there are a great many things I simply cannot say. But then I consider myself
+very slow. One of my colleagues now, knows whether she likes you or
+not&mdash;let me see, how does she do it?&mdash;by the way you say good-morning
+at breakfast. It is sometimes a matter of years before I can make up my mind.
+But most young people seem to find it easy?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh no,&rdquo; said Rachel. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s hard!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Allan looked at Rachel quietly, saying nothing; she suspected that there
+were difficulties of some kind. Then she put her hand to the back of her head,
+and discovered that one of the grey coils of hair had come loose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I must ask you to be so kind as to excuse me,&rdquo; she said, rising,
+&ldquo;if I do my hair. I have never yet found a satisfactory type of hairpin.
+I must change my dress, too, for the matter of that; and I should be
+particularly glad of your assistance, because there is a tiresome set of hooks
+which I <i>can</i> fasten for myself, but it takes from ten to fifteen minutes;
+whereas with your help&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She slipped off her coat and skirt and blouse, and stood doing her hair before
+the glass, a massive homely figure, her petticoat being so short that she stood
+on a pair of thick slate-grey legs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;People say youth is pleasant; I myself find middle age far
+pleasanter,&rdquo; she remarked, removing hair pins and combs, and taking up
+her brush. When it fell loose her hair only came down to her neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When one was young,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;things could seem so
+very serious if one was made that way. . . . And now my dress.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a wonderfully short space of time her hair had been reformed in its usual
+loops. The upper half of her body now became dark green with black stripes on
+it; the skirt, however, needed hooking at various angles, and Rachel had to
+kneel on the floor, fitting the eyes to the hooks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Our Miss Johnson used to find life very unsatisfactory, I
+remember,&rdquo; Miss Allan continued. She turned her back to the light.
+&ldquo;And then she took to breeding guinea-pigs for their spots, and became
+absorbed in that. I have just heard that the yellow guinea-pig has had a black
+baby. We had a bet of sixpence on about it. She will be very triumphant.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The skirt was fastened. She looked at herself in the glass with the curious
+stiffening of her face generally caused by looking in the glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Am I in a fit state to encounter my fellow-beings?&rdquo; she asked.
+&ldquo;I forget which way it is&mdash;but they find black animals very rarely
+have coloured babies&mdash;it may be the other way round. I have had it so
+often explained to me that it is very stupid of me to have forgotten
+again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She moved about the room acquiring small objects with quiet force, and fixing
+them about her&mdash;a locket, a watch and chain, a heavy gold bracelet, and
+the parti-coloured button of a suffrage society. Finally, completely equipped
+for Sunday tea, she stood before Rachel, and smiled at her kindly. She was not
+an impulsive woman, and her life had schooled her to restrain her tongue. At
+the same time, she was possessed of an amount of good-will towards others, and
+in particular towards the young, which often made her regret that speech was so
+difficult.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shall we descend?&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She put one hand upon Rachel&rsquo;s shoulder, and stooping, picked up a pair
+of walking-shoes with the other, and placed them neatly side by side outside
+her door. As they walked down the passage they passed many pairs of boots and
+shoes, some black and some brown, all side by side, and all different, even to
+the way in which they lay together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I always think that people are so like their boots,&rdquo; said Miss
+Allan. &ldquo;That is Mrs. Paley&rsquo;s&mdash;&rdquo; but as she spoke the
+door opened, and Mrs. Paley rolled out in her chair, equipped also for tea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She greeted Miss Allan and Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was just saying that people are so like their boots,&rdquo; said Miss
+Allan. Mrs. Paley did not hear. She repeated it more loudly still. Mrs. Paley
+did not hear. She repeated it a third time. Mrs. Paley heard, but she did not
+understand. She was apparently about to repeat it for the fourth time, when
+Rachel suddenly said something inarticulate, and disappeared down the corridor.
+This misunderstanding, which involved a complete block in the passage, seemed
+to her unbearable. She walked quickly and blindly in the opposite direction,
+and found herself at the end of a <i>cul de sac</i>. There was a window, and a
+table and a chair in the window, and upon the table stood a rusty inkstand, an
+ashtray, an old copy of a French newspaper, and a pen with a broken nib. Rachel
+sat down, as if to study the French newspaper, but a tear fell on the blurred
+French print, raising a soft blot. She lifted her head sharply, exclaiming
+aloud, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s intolerable!&rdquo; Looking out of the window with
+eyes that would have seen nothing even had they not been dazed by tears, she
+indulged herself at last in violent abuse of the entire day. It had been
+miserable from start to finish; first, the service in the chapel; then
+luncheon; then Evelyn; then Miss Allan; then old Mrs. Paley blocking up the
+passage. All day long she had been tantalized and put off. She had now reached
+one of those eminences, the result of some crisis, from which the world is
+finally displayed in its true proportions. She disliked the look of it
+immensely&mdash;churches, politicians, misfits, and huge impostures&mdash;men
+like Mr. Dalloway, men like Mr. Bax, Evelyn and her chatter, Mrs. Paley
+blocking up the passage. Meanwhile the steady beat of her own pulse represented
+the hot current of feeling that ran down beneath; beating, struggling,
+fretting. For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in the
+world, which tried to burst forth here&mdash;there&mdash;and was repressed now
+by Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous stupidity, the
+weight of the entire world. Thus tormented, she would twist her hands together,
+for all things were wrong, all people stupid. Vaguely seeing that there were
+people down in the garden beneath she represented them as aimless masses of
+matter, floating hither and thither, without aim except to impede her. What
+were they doing, those other people in the world?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nobody knows,&rdquo; she said. The force of her rage was beginning to
+spend itself, and the vision of the world which had been so vivid became dim.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a dream,&rdquo; she murmured. She considered the rusty
+inkstand, the pen, the ash-tray, and the old French newspaper. These small and
+worthless objects seemed to her to represent human lives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;re asleep and dreaming,&rdquo; she repeated. But the
+possibility which now suggested itself that one of the shapes might be the
+shape of Terence roused her from her melancholy lethargy. She became as
+restless as she had been before she sat down. She was no longer able to see the
+world as a town laid out beneath her. It was covered instead by a haze of
+feverish red mist. She had returned to the state in which she had been all day.
+Thinking was no escape. Physical movement was the only refuge, in and out of
+rooms, in and out of people&rsquo;s minds, seeking she knew not what. Therefore
+she rose, pushed back the table, and went downstairs. She went out of the hall
+door, and, turning the corner of the hotel, found herself among the people whom
+she had seen from the window. But owing to the broad sunshine after shaded
+passages, and to the substance of living people after dreams, the group
+appeared with startling intensity, as though the dusty surface had been peeled
+off everything, leaving only the reality and the instant. It had the look of a
+vision printed on the dark at night. White and grey and purple figures were
+scattered on the green, round wicker tables, in the middle the flame of the
+tea-urn made the air waver like a faulty sheet of glass, a massive green tree
+stood over them as if it were a moving force held at rest. As she approached,
+she could hear Evelyn&rsquo;s voice repeating monotonously, &ldquo;Here
+then&mdash;here&mdash;good doggie, come here&rdquo;; for a moment nothing
+seemed to happen; it all stood still, and then she realised that one of the
+figures was Helen Ambrose; and the dust again began to settle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The group indeed had come together in a miscellaneous way; one tea-table
+joining to another tea-table, and deck-chairs serving to connect two groups.
+But even at a distance it could be seen that Mrs. Flushing, upright and
+imperious, dominated the party. She was talking vehemently to Helen across the
+table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ten days under canvas,&rdquo; she was saying. &ldquo;No comforts. If you
+want comforts, don&rsquo;t come. But I may tell you, if you don&rsquo;t come
+you&rsquo;ll regret it all your life. You say yes?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment Mrs. Flushing caught sight of Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, there&rsquo;s your niece. She&rsquo;s promised. You&rsquo;re coming,
+aren&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; Having adopted the plan, she pursued it with the
+energy of a child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel took her part with eagerness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course I&rsquo;m coming. So are you, Helen. And Mr. Pepper
+too.&rdquo; As she sat she realised that she was surrounded by people she knew,
+but that Terence was not among them. From various angles people began saying
+what they thought of the proposed expedition. According to some it would be
+hot, but the nights would be cold; according to others, the difficulties would
+lie rather in getting a boat, and in speaking the language. Mrs. Flushing
+disposed of all objections, whether due to man or due to nature, by announcing
+that her husband would settle all that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile Mr. Flushing quietly explained to Helen that the expedition was
+really a simple matter; it took five days at the outside; and the place&mdash;a
+native village&mdash;was certainly well worth seeing before she returned to
+England. Helen murmured ambiguously, and did not commit herself to one answer
+rather than to another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tea-party, however, included too many different kinds of people for general
+conversation to flourish; and from Rachel&rsquo;s point of view possessed the
+great advantage that it was quite unnecessary for her to talk. Over there Susan
+and Arthur were explaining to Mrs. Paley that an expedition had been proposed;
+and Mrs. Paley having grasped the fact, gave the advice of an old traveller
+that they should take nice canned vegetables, fur cloaks, and insect powder.
+She leant over to Mrs. Flushing and whispered something which from the twinkle
+in her eyes probably had reference to bugs. Then Helen was reciting &ldquo;Toll
+for the Brave&rdquo; to St. John Hirst, in order apparently to win a sixpence
+which lay upon the table; while Mr. Hughling Elliot imposed silence upon his
+section of the audience by his fascinating anecdote of Lord Curzon and the
+undergraduate&rsquo;s bicycle. Mrs. Thornbury was trying to remember the name
+of a man who might have been another Garibaldi, and had written a book which
+they ought to read; and Mr. Thornbury recollected that he had a pair of
+binoculars at anybody&rsquo;s service. Miss Allan meanwhile murmured with the
+curious intimacy which a spinster often achieves with dogs, to the fox-terrier
+which Evelyn had at last induced to come over to them. Little particles of dust
+or blossom fell on the plates now and then when the branches sighed above.
+Rachel seemed to see and hear a little of everything, much as a river feels the
+twigs that fall into it and sees the sky above, but her eyes were too vague for
+Evelyn&rsquo;s liking. She came across, and sat on the ground at Rachel&rsquo;s
+feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; she asked suddenly. &ldquo;What are you thinking
+about?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Warrington,&rdquo; Rachel replied rashly, because she had to say
+something. She did indeed see Susan murmuring to Mrs. Elliot, while Arthur
+stared at her with complete confidence in his own love. Both Rachel and Evelyn
+then began to listen to what Susan was saying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s the ordering and the dogs and the garden, and the children
+coming to be taught,&rdquo; her voice proceeded rhythmically as if checking the
+list, &ldquo;and my tennis, and the village, and letters to write for father,
+and a thousand little things that don&rsquo;t sound much; but I never have a
+moment to myself, and when I go to bed, I&rsquo;m so sleepy I&rsquo;m off
+before my head touches the pillow. Besides I like to be a great deal with my
+Aunts&mdash;I&rsquo;m a great bore, aren&rsquo;t I, Aunt Emma?&rdquo; (she
+smiled at old Mrs. Paley, who with head slightly drooped was regarding the cake
+with speculative affection), &ldquo;and father has to be very careful about
+chills in winter which means a great deal of running about, because he
+won&rsquo;t look after himself, any more than you will, Arthur! So it all
+mounts up!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her voice mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life and her
+own nature. Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan, ignoring all that
+was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. She appeared insincere and
+cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the kind blue eyes now shallow and
+watery, the bloom of the cheeks congealed to a network of dry red canals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen turned to her. &ldquo;Did you go to church?&rdquo; she asked. She had won
+her sixpence and seemed making ready to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Rachel. &ldquo;For the last time,&rdquo; she added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In preparing to put on her gloves, Helen dropped one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not going?&rdquo; Evelyn asked, taking hold of one glove as
+if to keep them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s high time we went,&rdquo; said Helen. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you
+see how silent every one&rsquo;s getting&mdash;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A silence had fallen upon them all, caused partly by one of the accidents of
+talk, and partly because they saw some one approaching. Helen could not see who
+it was, but keeping her eyes fixed upon Rachel observed something which made
+her say to herself, &ldquo;So it&rsquo;s Hewet.&rdquo; She drew on her gloves
+with a curious sense of the significance of the moment. Then she rose, for Mrs.
+Flushing had seen Hewet too, and was demanding information about rivers and
+boats which showed that the whole conversation would now come over again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel followed her, and they walked in silence down the avenue. In spite of
+what Helen had seen and understood, the feeling that was uppermost in her mind
+was now curiously perverse; if she went on this expedition, she would not be
+able to have a bath, the effort appeared to her to be great and disagreeable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s so unpleasant, being cooped up with people one hardly
+knows,&rdquo; she remarked. &ldquo;People who mind being seen naked.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean to go?&rdquo; Rachel asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The intensity with which this was spoken irritated Mrs. Ambrose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mean to go, and I don&rsquo;t mean not to go,&rdquo; she
+replied. She became more and more casual and indifferent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After all, I daresay we&rsquo;ve seen all there is to be seen; and
+there&rsquo;s the bother of getting there, and whatever they may say it&rsquo;s
+bound to be vilely uncomfortable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some time Rachel made no reply; but every sentence Helen spoke increased
+her bitterness. At last she broke out&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank God, Helen, I&rsquo;m not like you! I sometimes think you
+don&rsquo;t think or feel or care to do anything but exist! You&rsquo;re like
+Mr. Hirst. You see that things are bad, and you pride yourself on saying so.
+It&rsquo;s what you call being honest; as a matter of fact it&rsquo;s being
+lazy, being dull, being nothing. You don&rsquo;t help; you put an end to
+things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen smiled as if she rather enjoyed the attack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; she enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It seems to me bad&mdash;that&rsquo;s all,&rdquo; Rachel replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite likely,&rdquo; said Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At any other time Rachel would probably have been silenced by her Aunt&rsquo;s
+candour; but this afternoon she was not in the mood to be silenced by any one.
+A quarrel would be welcome.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re only half alive,&rdquo; she continued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is that because I didn&rsquo;t accept Mr. Flushing&rsquo;s
+invitation?&rdquo; Helen asked, &ldquo;or do you always think that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the moment it appeared to Rachel that she had always seen the same faults in
+Helen, from the very first night on board the <i>Euphrosyne</i>, in spite of
+her beauty, in spite of her magnanimity and their love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, it&rsquo;s only what&rsquo;s the matter with every one!&rdquo; she
+exclaimed. &ldquo;No one feels&mdash;no one does anything but hurt. I tell you,
+Helen, the world&rsquo;s bad. It&rsquo;s an agony, living,
+wanting&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here she tore a handful of leaves from a bush and crushed them to control
+herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The lives of these people,&rdquo; she tried to explain, &ldquo;the
+aimlessness, the way they live. One goes from one to another, and it&rsquo;s
+all the same. One never gets what one wants out of any of them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her emotional state and her confusion would have made her an easy prey if Helen
+had wished to argue or had wished to draw confidences. But instead of talking
+she fell into a profound silence as they walked on. Aimless, trivial,
+meaningless, oh no&mdash;what she had seen at tea made it impossible for her to
+believe that. The little jokes, the chatter, the inanities of the afternoon had
+shrivelled up before her eyes. Underneath the likings and spites, the comings
+together and partings, great things were happening&mdash;terrible things,
+because they were so great. Her sense of safety was shaken, as if beneath twigs
+and dead leaves she had seen the movement of a snake. It seemed to her that a
+moment&rsquo;s respite was allowed, a moment&rsquo;s make-believe, and then
+again the profound and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to its
+liking, making and destroying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at Rachel walking beside her, still crushing the leaves in her
+fingers and absorbed in her own thoughts. She was in love, and she pitied her
+profoundly. But she roused herself from these thoughts and apologised.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m very sorry,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but if I&rsquo;m dull,
+it&rsquo;s my nature, and it can&rsquo;t be helped.&rdquo; If it was a natural
+defect, however, she found an easy remedy, for she went on to say that she
+thought Mr. Flushing&rsquo;s scheme a very good one, only needing a little
+consideration, which it appeared she had given it by the time they reached
+home. By that time they had settled that if anything more was said, they would
+accept the invitation.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap20"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+<p>
+When considered in detail by Mr. Flushing and Mrs. Ambrose the expedition
+proved neither dangerous nor difficult. They found also that it was not even
+unusual. Every year at this season English people made parties which steamed a
+short way up the river, landed, and looked at the native village, bought a
+certain number of things from the natives, and returned again without damage
+done to mind or body. When it was discovered that six people really wished the
+same thing the arrangements were soon carried out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Since the time of Elizabeth very few people had seen the river, and nothing has
+been done to change its appearance from what it was to the eyes of the
+Elizabethan voyagers. The time of Elizabeth was only distant from the present
+time by a moment of space compared with the ages which had passed since the
+water had run between those banks, and the green thickets swarmed there, and
+the small trees had grown to huge wrinkled trees in solitude. Changing only
+with the change of the sun and the clouds, the waving green mass had stood
+there for century after century, and the water had run between its banks
+ceaselessly, sometimes washing away earth and sometimes the branches of trees,
+while in other parts of the world one town had risen upon the ruins of another
+town, and the men in the towns had become more and more articulate and unlike
+each other. A few miles of this river were visible from the top of the mountain
+where some weeks before the party from the hotel had picnicked. Susan and
+Arthur had seen it as they kissed each other, and Terence and Rachel as they
+sat talking about Richmond, and Evelyn and Perrott as they strolled about,
+imagining that they were great captains sent to colonise the world. They had
+seen the broad blue mark across the sand where it flowed into the sea, and the
+green cloud of trees mass themselves about it farther up, and finally hide its
+waters altogether from sight. At intervals for the first twenty miles or so
+houses were scattered on the bank; by degrees the houses became huts, and,
+later still, there was neither hut nor house, but trees and grass, which were
+seen only by hunters, explorers, or merchants, marching or sailing, but making
+no settlement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By leaving Santa Marina early in the morning, driving twenty miles and riding
+eight, the party, which was composed finally of six English people, reached the
+river-side as the night fell. They came cantering through the trees&mdash;Mr.
+and Mrs. Flushing, Helen Ambrose, Rachel, Terence, and St. John. The tired
+little horses then stopped automatically, and the English dismounted. Mrs.
+Flushing strode to the river-bank in high spirits. The day had been long and
+hot, but she had enjoyed the speed and the open air; she had left the hotel
+which she hated, and she found the company to her liking. The river was
+swirling past in the darkness; they could just distinguish the smooth moving
+surface of the water, and the air was full of the sound of it. They stood in an
+empty space in the midst of great tree-trunks, and out there a little green
+light moving slightly up and down showed them where the steamer lay in which
+they were to embark.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When they all stood upon its deck they found that it was a very small boat
+which throbbed gently beneath them for a few minutes, and then shoved smoothly
+through the water. They seemed to be driving into the heart of the night, for
+the trees closed in front of them, and they could hear all round them the
+rustling of leaves. The great darkness had the usual effect of taking away all
+desire for communication by making their words sound thin and small; and, after
+walking round the deck three or four times, they clustered together, yawning
+deeply, and looking at the same spot of deep gloom on the banks. Murmuring very
+low in the rhythmical tone of one oppressed by the air, Mrs. Flushing began to
+wonder where they were to sleep, for they could not sleep downstairs, they
+could not sleep in a doghole smelling of oil, they could not sleep on deck,
+they could not sleep&mdash;She yawned profoundly. It was as Helen had foreseen;
+the question of nakedness had risen already, although they were half asleep,
+and almost invisible to each other. With St. John&rsquo;s help she stretched an
+awning, and persuaded Mrs. Flushing that she could take off her clothes behind
+this, and that no one would notice if by chance some part of her which had been
+concealed for forty-five years was laid bare to the human eye. Mattresses were
+thrown down, rugs provided, and the three women lay near each other in the soft
+open air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gentlemen, having smoked a certain number of cigarettes, dropped the
+glowing ends into the river, and looked for a time at the ripples wrinkling the
+black water beneath them, undressed too, and lay down at the other end of the
+boat. They were very tired, and curtained from each other by the darkness. The
+light from one lantern fell upon a few ropes, a few planks of the deck, and the
+rail of the boat, but beyond that there was unbroken darkness, no light reached
+their faces, or the trees which were massed on the sides of the river.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon Wilfrid Flushing slept, and Hirst slept. Hewet alone lay awake looking
+straight up into the sky. The gentle motion and the black shapes that were
+drawn ceaselessly across his eyes had the effect of making it impossible for
+him to think. Rachel&rsquo;s presence so near him lulled thought asleep. Being
+so near him, only a few paces off at the other end of the boat, she made it as
+impossible for him to think about her as it would have been impossible to see
+her if she had stood quite close to him, her forehead against his forehead. In
+some strange way the boat became identified with himself, and just as it would
+have been useless for him to get up and steer the boat, so was it useless for
+him to struggle any longer with the irresistible force of his own feelings. He
+was drawn on and on away from all he knew, slipping over barriers and past
+landmarks into unknown waters as the boat glided over the smooth surface of the
+river. In profound peace, enveloped in deeper unconsciousness than had been his
+for many nights, he lay on deck watching the tree-tops change their position
+slightly against the sky, and arch themselves, and sink and tower huge, until
+he passed from seeing them into dreams where he lay beneath the shadow of the
+vast trees, looking up into the sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When they woke next morning they had gone a considerable way up the river; on
+the right was a high yellow bank of sand tufted with trees, on the left a swamp
+quivering with long reeds and tall bamboos on the top of which, swaying
+slightly, perched vivid green and yellow birds. The morning was hot and still.
+After breakfast they drew chairs together and sat in an irregular semicircle in
+the bow. An awning above their heads protected them from the heat of the sun,
+and the breeze which the boat made aired them softly. Mrs. Flushing was already
+dotting and striping her canvas, her head jerking this way and that with the
+action of a bird nervously picking up grain; the others had books or pieces of
+paper or embroidery on their knees, at which they looked fitfully and again
+looked at the river ahead. At one point Hewet read part of a poem aloud, but
+the number of moving things entirely vanquished his words. He ceased to read,
+and no one spoke. They moved on under the shelter of the trees. There was now a
+covey of red birds feeding on one of the little islets to the left, or again a
+blue-green parrot flew shrieking from tree to tree. As they moved on the
+country grew wilder and wilder. The trees and the undergrowth seemed to be
+strangling each other near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle; while here
+and there a splendid tree towered high above the swarm, shaking its thin green
+umbrellas lightly in the upper air. Hewet looked at his books again. The
+morning was peaceful as the night had been, only it was very strange because he
+could see it was light, and he could see Rachel and hear her voice and be near
+to her. He felt as if he were waiting, as if somehow he were stationary among
+things that passed over him and around him, voices, people&rsquo;s bodies,
+birds, only Rachel too was waiting with him. He looked at her sometimes as if
+she must know that they were waiting together, and being drawn on together,
+without being able to offer any resistance. Again he read from his book:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Whoever you are holding me now in your hand,<br />
+Without one thing all will be useless.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+A bird gave a wild laugh, a monkey chuckled a malicious question, and, as fire
+fades in the hot sunshine, his words flickered and went out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By degrees as the river narrowed, and the high sandbanks fell to level ground
+thickly grown with trees, the sounds of the forest could be heard. It echoed
+like a hall. There were sudden cries; and then long spaces of silence, such as
+there are in a cathedral when a boy&rsquo;s voice has ceased and the echo of it
+still seems to haunt about the remote places of the roof. Once Mr. Flushing
+rose and spoke to a sailor, and even announced that some time after luncheon
+the steamer would stop, and they could walk a little way through the forest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are tracks all through the trees there,&rdquo; he explained.
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;re no distance from civilisation yet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He scrutinised his wife&rsquo;s painting. Too polite to praise it openly, he
+contented himself with cutting off one half of the picture with one hand, and
+giving a flourish in the air with the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;God!&rdquo; Hirst exclaimed, staring straight ahead. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t
+you think it&rsquo;s amazingly beautiful?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Beautiful?&rdquo; Helen enquired. It seemed a strange little word, and
+Hirst and herself both so small that she forgot to answer him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet felt that he must speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s where the Elizabethans got their style,&rdquo; he mused,
+staring into the profusion of leaves and blossoms and prodigious fruits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shakespeare? I hate Shakespeare!&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing exclaimed; and
+Wilfrid returned admiringly, &ldquo;I believe you&rsquo;re the only person who
+dares to say that, Alice.&rdquo; But Mrs. Flushing went on painting. She did
+not appear to attach much value to her husband&rsquo;s compliment, and painted
+steadily, sometimes muttering a half-audible word or groan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The morning was now very hot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at Hirst!&rdquo; Mr. Flushing whispered. His sheet of paper had
+slipped on to the deck, his head lay back, and he drew a long snoring breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence picked up the sheet of paper and spread it out before Rachel. It was a
+continuation of the poem on God which he had begun in the chapel, and it was so
+indecent that Rachel did not understand half of it although she saw that it was
+indecent. Hewet began to fill in words where Hirst had left spaces, but he soon
+ceased; his pencil rolled on deck. Gradually they approached nearer and nearer
+to the bank on the right-hand side, so that the light which covered them became
+definitely green, falling through a shade of green leaves, and Mrs. Flushing
+set aside her sketch and stared ahead of her in silence. Hirst woke up; they
+were then called to luncheon, and while they ate it, the steamer came to a
+standstill a little way out from the bank. The boat which was towed behind them
+was brought to the side, and the ladies were helped into it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For protection against boredom, Helen put a book of memoirs beneath her arm,
+and Mrs. Flushing her paint-box, and, thus equipped, they allowed themselves to
+be set on shore on the verge of the forest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had not strolled more than a few hundred yards along the track which ran
+parallel with the river before Helen professed to find it was unbearably hot.
+The river breeze had ceased, and a hot steamy atmosphere, thick with scents,
+came from the forest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall sit down here,&rdquo; she announced, pointing to the trunk of a
+tree which had fallen long ago and was now laced across and across by creepers
+and thong-like brambles. She seated herself, opened her parasol, and looked at
+the river which was barred by the stems of trees. She turned her back to the
+trees which disappeared in black shadow behind her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I quite agree,&rdquo; said Mrs. Flushing, and proceeded to undo her
+paint-box. Her husband strolled about to select an interesting point of view
+for her. Hirst cleared a space on the ground by Helen&rsquo;s side, and seated
+himself with great deliberation, as if he did not mean to move until he had
+talked to her for a long time. Terence and Rachel were left standing by
+themselves without occupation. Terence saw that the time had come as it was
+fated to come, but although he realised this he was completely calm and master
+of himself. He chose to stand for a few moments talking to Helen, and
+persuading her to leave her seat. Rachel joined him too in advising her to come
+with them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of all the people I&rsquo;ve ever met,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;you&rsquo;re the least adventurous. You might be sitting on green chairs
+in Hyde Park. Are you going to sit there the whole afternoon? Aren&rsquo;t you
+going to walk?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; said Helen, &ldquo;one&rsquo;s only got to use
+one&rsquo;s eye. There&rsquo;s everything here&mdash;everything,&rdquo; she
+repeated in a drowsy tone of voice. &ldquo;What will you gain by
+walking?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be hot and disagreeable by tea-time, we shall be cool and
+sweet,&rdquo; put in Hirst. Into his eyes as he looked up at them had come
+yellow and green reflections from the sky and the branches, robbing them of
+their intentness, and he seemed to think what he did not say. It was thus taken
+for granted by them both that Terence and Rachel proposed to walk into the
+woods together; with one look at each other they turned away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-bye!&rdquo; cried Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good-by. Beware of snakes,&rdquo; Hirst replied. He settled himself
+still more comfortably under the shade of the fallen tree and Helen&rsquo;s
+figure. As they went, Mr. Flushing called after them, &ldquo;We must start in
+an hour. Hewet, please remember that. An hour.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whether made by man, or for some reason preserved by nature, there was a wide
+pathway striking through the forest at right angles to the river. It resembled
+a drive in an English forest, save that tropical bushes with their sword-like
+leaves grew at the side, and the ground was covered with an unmarked springy
+moss instead of grass, starred with little yellow flowers. As they passed into
+the depths of the forest the light grew dimmer, and the noises of the ordinary
+world were replaced by those creaking and sighing sounds which suggest to the
+traveller in a forest that he is walking at the bottom of the sea. The path
+narrowed and turned; it was hedged in by dense creepers which knotted tree to
+tree, and burst here and there into star-shaped crimson blossoms. The sighing
+and creaking up above were broken every now and then by the jarring cry of some
+startled animal. The atmosphere was close and the air came at them in languid
+puffs of scent. The vast green light was broken here and there by a round of
+pure yellow sunlight which fell through some gap in the immense umbrella of
+green above, and in these yellow spaces crimson and black butterflies were
+circling and settling. Terence and Rachel hardly spoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not only did the silence weigh upon them, but they were both unable to frame
+any thoughts. There was something between them which had to be spoken of. One
+of them had to begin, but which of them was it to be? Then Hewet picked up a
+red fruit and threw it as high as he could. When it dropped, he would speak.
+They heard the flapping of great wings; they heard the fruit go pattering
+through the leaves and eventually fall with a thud. The silence was again
+profound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Does this frighten you?&rdquo; Terence asked when the sound of the fruit
+falling had completely died away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;I like it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She repeated &ldquo;I like it.&rdquo; She was walking fast, and holding herself
+more erect than usual. There was another pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You like being with me?&rdquo; Terence asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, with you,&rdquo; she replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen upon the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is what I have felt ever since I knew you,&rdquo; he replied.
+&ldquo;We are happy together.&rdquo; He did not seem to be speaking, or she to
+be hearing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very happy,&rdquo; she answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They continued to walk for some time in silence. Their steps unconsciously
+quickened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We love each other,&rdquo; Terence said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We love each other,&rdquo; she repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of strange
+unfamiliar sound which formed no words. Faster and faster they walked;
+simultaneously they stopped, clasped each other in their arms, then releasing
+themselves, dropped to the earth. They sat side by side. Sounds stood out from
+the background making a bridge across their silence; they heard the swish of
+the trees and some beast croaking in a remote world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We love each other,&rdquo; Terence repeated, searching into her face.
+Their faces were both very pale and quiet, and they said nothing. He was afraid
+to kiss her again. By degrees she drew close to him, and rested against him. In
+this position they sat for some time. She said &ldquo;Terence&rdquo; once; he
+answered &ldquo;Rachel.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Terrible&mdash;terrible,&rdquo; she murmured after another pause, but in
+saying this she was thinking as much of the persistent churning of the water as
+of her own feeling. On and on it went in the distance, the senseless and cruel
+churning of the water. She observed that the tears were running down
+Terence&rsquo;s cheeks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next movement was on his part. A very long time seemed to have passed. He
+took out his watch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Flushing said an hour. We&rsquo;ve been gone more than half an
+hour.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it takes that to get back,&rdquo; said Rachel. She raised herself
+very slowly. When she was standing up she stretched her arms and drew a deep
+breath, half a sigh, half a yawn. She appeared to be very tired. Her cheeks
+were white. &ldquo;Which way?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There,&rdquo; said Terence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They began to walk back down the mossy path again. The sighing and creaking
+continued far overhead, and the jarring cries of animals. The butterflies were
+circling still in the patches of yellow sunlight. At first Terence was certain
+of his way, but as they walked he became doubtful. They had to stop to
+consider, and then to return and start once more, for although he was certain
+of the direction of the river he was not certain of striking the point where
+they had left the others. Rachel followed him, stopping where he stopped,
+turning where he turned, ignorant of the way, ignorant why he stopped or why he
+turned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want to be late,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;because&mdash;&rdquo; He put a flower into her hand and her fingers
+closed upon it quietly. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re so late&mdash;so late&mdash;so
+horribly late,&rdquo; he repeated as if he were talking in his sleep.
+&ldquo;Ah&mdash;this is right. We turn here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They found themselves again in the broad path, like the drive in the English
+forest, where they had started when they left the others. They walked on in
+silence as people walking in their sleep, and were oddly conscious now and
+again of the mass of their bodies. Then Rachel exclaimed suddenly,
+&ldquo;Helen!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the sunny space at the edge of the forest they saw Helen still sitting on
+the tree-trunk, her dress showing very white in the sun, with Hirst still
+propped on his elbow by her side. They stopped instinctively. At the sight of
+other people they could not go on. They stood hand in hand for a minute or two
+in silence. They could not bear to face other people.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But we must go on,&rdquo; Rachel insisted at last, in the curious dull
+tone of voice in which they had both been speaking, and with a great effort
+they forced themselves to cover the short distance which lay between them and
+the pair sitting on the tree-trunk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they approached, Helen turned round and looked at them. She looked at them
+for some time without speaking, and when they were close to her she said
+quietly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you meet Mr. Flushing? He has gone to find you. He thought you must
+be lost, though I told him you weren&rsquo;t lost.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hirst half turned round and threw his head back so that he looked at the
+branches crossing themselves in the air above him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, was it worth the effort?&rdquo; he enquired dreamily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet sat down on the grass by his side and began to fan himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel had balanced herself near Helen on the end of the tree trunk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very hot,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You look exhausted anyhow,&rdquo; said Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s fearfully close in those trees,&rdquo; Helen remarked,
+picking up her book and shaking it free from the dried blades of grass which
+had fallen between the leaves. Then they were all silent, looking at the river
+swirling past in front of them between the trunks of the trees until Mr.
+Flushing interrupted them. He broke out of the trees a hundred yards to the
+left, exclaiming sharply:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, so you found the way after all. But it&rsquo;s late&mdash;much later
+than we arranged, Hewet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was slightly annoyed, and in his capacity as leader of the expedition,
+inclined to be dictatorial. He spoke quickly, using curiously sharp,
+meaningless words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Being late wouldn&rsquo;t matter normally, of course,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;but when it&rsquo;s a question of keeping the men up to
+time&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gathered them together and made them come down to the river-bank, where the
+boat was waiting to row them out to the steamer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The heat of the day was going down, and over their cups of tea the Flushings
+tended to become communicative. It seemed to Terence as he listened to them
+talking, that existence now went on in two different layers. Here were the
+Flushings talking, talking somewhere high up in the air above him, and he and
+Rachel had dropped to the bottom of the world together. But with something of a
+child&rsquo;s directness, Mrs. Flushing had also the instinct which leads a
+child to suspect what its elders wish to keep hidden. She fixed Terence with
+her vivid blue eyes and addressed herself to him in particular. What would he
+do, she wanted to know, if the boat ran upon a rock and sank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Would you care for anythin&rsquo; but savin&rsquo; yourself? Should I?
+No, no,&rdquo; she laughed, &ldquo;not one scrap&mdash;don&rsquo;t tell me.
+There&rsquo;s only two creatures the ordinary woman cares about,&rdquo; she
+continued, &ldquo;her child and her dog; and I don&rsquo;t believe it&rsquo;s
+even two with men. One reads a lot about love&mdash;that&rsquo;s why
+poetry&rsquo;s so dull. But what happens in real life, eh? It ain&rsquo;t
+love!&rdquo; she cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence murmured something unintelligible. Mr. Flushing, however, had recovered
+his urbanity. He was smoking a cigarette, and he now answered his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must always remember, Alice,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that your
+upbringing was very unnatural&mdash;unusual, I should say. They had no
+mother,&rdquo; he explained, dropping something of the formality of his tone;
+&ldquo;and a father&mdash;he was a very delightful man, I&rsquo;ve no doubt,
+but he cared only for racehorses and Greek statues. Tell them about the bath,
+Alice.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the stable-yard,&rdquo; said Mrs. Flushing. &ldquo;Covered with ice
+in winter. We had to get in; if we didn&rsquo;t, we were whipped. The strong
+ones lived&mdash;the others died. What you call survival of the fittest&mdash;a
+most excellent plan, I daresay, if you&rsquo;ve thirteen children!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And all this going on in the heart of England, in the nineteenth
+century!&rdquo; Mr. Flushing exclaimed, turning to Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d treat my children just the same if I had any,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Flushing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every word sounded quite distinctly in Terence&rsquo;s ears; but what were they
+saying, and who were they talking to, and who were they, these fantastic
+people, detached somewhere high up in the air? Now that they had drunk their
+tea, they rose and leant over the bow of the boat. The sun was going down, and
+the water was dark and crimson. The river had widened again, and they were
+passing a little island set like a dark wedge in the middle of the stream. Two
+great white birds with red lights on them stood there on stilt-like legs, and
+the beach of the island was unmarked, save by the skeleton print of
+birds&rsquo; feet. The branches of the trees on the bank looked more twisted
+and angular than ever, and the green of the leaves was lurid and splashed with
+gold. Then Hirst began to talk, leaning over the bow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It makes one awfully queer, don&rsquo;t you find?&rdquo; he complained.
+&ldquo;These trees get on one&rsquo;s nerves&mdash;it&rsquo;s all so crazy.
+God&rsquo;s undoubtedly mad. What sane person could have conceived a wilderness
+like this, and peopled it with apes and alligators? I should go mad if I lived
+here&mdash;raving mad.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence attempted to answer him, but Mrs. Ambrose replied instead. She bade him
+look at the way things massed themselves&mdash;look at the amazing colours,
+look at the shapes of the trees. She seemed to be protecting Terence from the
+approach of the others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Mr. Flushing. &ldquo;And in my opinion,&rdquo; he
+continued, &ldquo;the absence of population to which Hirst objects is precisely
+the significant touch. You must admit, Hirst, that a little Italian town even
+would vulgarise the whole scene, would detract from the vastness&mdash;the
+sense of elemental grandeur.&rdquo; He swept his hands towards the forest, and
+paused for a moment, looking at the great green mass, which was now falling
+silent. &ldquo;I own it makes us seem pretty small&mdash;us, not them.&rdquo;
+He nodded his head at a sailor who leant over the side spitting into the river.
+&ldquo;And that, I think, is what my wife feels, the essential superiority of
+the peasant&mdash;&rdquo; Under cover of Mr. Flushing&rsquo;s words, which
+continued now gently reasoning with St. John and persuading him, Terence drew
+Rachel to the side, pointing ostensibly to a great gnarled tree-trunk which had
+fallen and lay half in the water. He wished, at any rate, to be near her, but
+he found that he could say nothing. They could hear Mr. Flushing flowing on,
+now about his wife, now about art, now about the future of the country, little
+meaningless words floating high in air. As it was becoming cold he began to
+pace the deck with Hirst. Fragments of their talk came out distinctly as they
+passed&mdash;art, emotion, truth, reality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it true, or is it a dream?&rdquo; Rachel murmured, when they had
+passed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s true, it&rsquo;s true,&rdquo; he replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the breeze freshened, and there was a general desire for movement. When the
+party rearranged themselves under cover of rugs and cloaks, Terence and Rachel
+were at opposite ends of the circle, and could not speak to each other. But as
+the dark descended, the words of the others seemed to curl up and vanish as the
+ashes of burnt paper, and left them sitting perfectly silent at the bottom of
+the world. Occasional starts of exquisite joy ran through them, and then they
+were peaceful again.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap21"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+
+<p>
+Thanks to Mr. Flushing&rsquo;s discipline, the right stages of the river were
+reached at the right hours, and when next morning after breakfast the chairs
+were again drawn out in a semicircle in the bow, the launch was within a few
+miles of the native camp which was the limit of the journey. Mr. Flushing, as
+he sat down, advised them to keep their eyes fixed on the left bank, where they
+would soon pass a clearing, and in that clearing, was a hut where Mackenzie,
+the famous explorer, had died of fever some ten years ago, almost within reach
+of civilisation&mdash;Mackenzie, he repeated, the man who went farther inland
+than any one&rsquo;s been yet. Their eyes turned that way obediently. The eyes
+of Rachel saw nothing. Yellow and green shapes did, it is true, pass before
+them, but she only knew that one was large and another small; she did not know
+that they were trees. These directions to look here and there irritated her, as
+interruptions irritate a person absorbed in thought, although she was not
+thinking of anything. She was annoyed with all that was said, and with the
+aimless movements of people&rsquo;s bodies, because they seemed to interfere
+with her and to prevent her from speaking to Terence. Very soon Helen saw her
+staring moodily at a coil of rope, and making no effort to listen. Mr. Flushing
+and St. John were engaged in more or less continuous conversation about the
+future of the country from a political point of view, and the degree to which
+it had been explored; the others, with their legs stretched out, or chins
+poised on the hands, gazed in silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Ambrose looked and listened obediently enough, but inwardly she was prey
+to an uneasy mood not readily to be ascribed to any one cause. Looking on shore
+as Mr. Flushing bade her, she thought the country very beautiful, but also
+sultry and alarming. She did not like to feel herself the victim of
+unclassified emotions, and certainly as the launch slipped on and on, in the
+hot morning sun, she felt herself unreasonably moved. Whether the unfamiliarity
+of the forest was the cause of it, or something less definite, she could not
+determine. Her mind left the scene and occupied itself with anxieties for
+Ridley, for her children, for far-off things, such as old age and poverty and
+death. Hirst, too, was depressed. He had been looking forward to this
+expedition as to a holiday, for, once away from the hotel, surely wonderful
+things would happen, instead of which nothing happened, and here they were as
+uncomfortable, as restrained, as self-conscious as ever. That, of course, was
+what came of looking forward to anything; one was always disappointed. He
+blamed Wilfrid Flushing, who was so well dressed and so formal; he blamed Hewet
+and Rachel. Why didn&rsquo;t they talk? He looked at them sitting silent and
+self-absorbed, and the sight annoyed him. He supposed that they were engaged,
+or about to become engaged, but instead of being in the least romantic or
+exciting, that was as dull as everything else; it annoyed him, too, to think
+that they were in love. He drew close to Helen and began to tell her how
+uncomfortable his night had been, lying on the deck, sometimes too hot,
+sometimes too cold, and the stars so bright that he couldn&rsquo;t get to
+sleep. He had lain awake all night thinking, and when it was light enough to
+see, he had written twenty lines of his poem on God, and the awful thing was
+that he&rsquo;d practically proved the fact that God did not exist. He did not
+see that he was teasing her, and he went on to wonder what would happen if God
+did exist&mdash;&ldquo;an old gentleman in a beard and a long blue dressing
+gown, extremely testy and disagreeable as he&rsquo;s bound to be? Can you
+suggest a rhyme? God, rod, sod&mdash;all used; any others?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Although he spoke much as usual, Helen could have seen, had she looked, that he
+was also impatient and disturbed. But she was not called upon to answer, for
+Mr. Flushing now exclaimed &ldquo;There!&rdquo; They looked at the hut on the
+bank, a desolate place with a large rent in the roof, and the ground round it
+yellow, scarred with fires and scattered with rusty open tins.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did they find his dead body there?&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing exclaimed,
+leaning forward in her eagerness to see the spot where the explorer had died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They found his body and his skins and a notebook,&rdquo; her husband
+replied. But the boat had soon carried them on and left the place behind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was so hot that they scarcely moved, except now to change a foot, or, again,
+to strike a match. Their eyes, concentrated upon the bank, were full of the
+same green reflections, and their lips were slightly pressed together as though
+the sights they were passing gave rise to thoughts, save that Hirst&rsquo;s
+lips moved intermittently as half consciously he sought rhymes for God.
+Whatever the thoughts of the others, no one said anything for a considerable
+space. They had grown so accustomed to the wall of trees on either side that
+they looked up with a start when the light suddenly widened out and the trees
+came to an end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It almost reminds one of an English park,&rdquo; said Mr. Flushing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Indeed no change could have been greater. On both banks of the river lay an
+open lawn-like space, grass covered and planted, for the gentleness and order
+of the place suggested human care, with graceful trees on the top of little
+mounds. As far as they could gaze, this lawn rose and sank with the undulating
+motion of an old English park. The change of scene naturally suggested a change
+of position, grateful to most of them. They rose and leant over the rail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It might be Arundel or Windsor,&rdquo; Mr. Flushing continued, &ldquo;if
+you cut down that bush with the yellow flowers; and, by Jove, look!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rows of brown backs paused for a moment and then leapt with a motion as if they
+were springing over waves out of sight. For a moment no one of them could
+believe that they had really seen live animals in the open&mdash;a herd of wild
+deer, and the sight aroused a childlike excitement in them, dissipating their
+gloom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never in my life seen anything bigger than a hare!&rdquo;
+Hirst exclaimed with genuine excitement. &ldquo;What an ass I was not to bring
+my Kodak!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon afterwards the launch came gradually to a standstill, and the captain
+explained to Mr. Flushing that it would be pleasant for the passengers if they
+now went for a stroll on shore; if they chose to return within an hour, he
+would take them on to the village; if they chose to walk&mdash;it was only a
+mile or two farther on&mdash;he would meet them at the landing-place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The matter being settled, they were once more put on shore: the sailors,
+producing raisins and tobacco, leant upon the rail and watched the six English,
+whose coats and dresses looked so strange upon the green, wander off. A joke
+that was by no means proper set them all laughing, and then they turned round
+and lay at their ease upon the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Directly they landed, Terence and Rachel drew together slightly in advance of
+the others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank God!&rdquo; Terence exclaimed, drawing a long breath. &ldquo;At
+last we&rsquo;re alone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And if we keep ahead we can talk,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, although their position some yards in advance of the others made
+it possible for them to say anything they chose, they were both silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You love me?&rdquo; Terence asked at length, breaking the silence
+painfully. To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they were
+silent they were keenly conscious of each other&rsquo;s presence, and yet words
+were either too trivial or too large.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She murmured inarticulately, ending, &ldquo;And you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; he replied; but there were so many things to be said,
+and now that they were alone it seemed necessary to bring themselves still more
+near, and to surmount a barrier which had grown up since they had last spoken.
+It was difficult, frightening even, oddly embarrassing. At one moment he was
+clear-sighted, and, at the next, confused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now I&rsquo;m going to begin at the beginning,&rdquo; he said
+resolutely. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to tell you what I ought to have told you
+before. In the first place, I&rsquo;ve never been in love with other women, but
+I&rsquo;ve had other women. Then I&rsquo;ve great faults. I&rsquo;m very lazy,
+I&rsquo;m moody&mdash;&rdquo; He persisted, in spite of her exclamation,
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to know the worst of me. I&rsquo;m lustful. I&rsquo;m
+overcome by a sense of futility&mdash;incompetence. I ought never to have asked
+you to marry me, I expect. I&rsquo;m a bit of a snob; I&rsquo;m
+ambitious&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, our faults!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;What do they matter?&rdquo;
+Then she demanded, &ldquo;Am I in love&mdash;is this being in love&mdash;are we
+to marry each other?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Overcome by the charm of her voice and her presence, he exclaimed, &ldquo;Oh,
+you&rsquo;re free, Rachel. To you, time will make no difference, or marriage
+or&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The voices of the others behind them kept floating, now farther, now nearer,
+and Mrs. Flushing&rsquo;s laugh rose clearly by itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Marriage?&rdquo; Rachel repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The shouts were renewed behind, warning them that they were bearing too far to
+the left. Improving their course, he continued, &ldquo;Yes, marriage.&rdquo;
+The feeling that they could not be united until she knew all about him made him
+again endeavour to explain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All that&rsquo;s been bad in me, the things I&rsquo;ve put up
+with&mdash;the second best&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She murmured, considered her own life, but could not describe how it looked to
+her now.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the loneliness!&rdquo; he continued. A vision of walking with her
+through the streets of London came before his eyes. &ldquo;We will go for walks
+together,&rdquo; he said. The simplicity of the idea relieved them, and for the
+first time they laughed. They would have liked had they dared to take each
+other by the hand, but the consciousness of eyes fixed on them from behind had
+not yet deserted them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Books, people, sights&mdash;Mrs. Nutt, Greeley, Hutchinson,&rdquo; Hewet
+murmured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them seem unreal to
+each other, since the previous afternoon melted a little further, and their
+contact became more and more natural. Up through the sultry southern landscape
+they saw the world they knew appear clearer and more vividly than it had ever
+appeared before. As upon that occasion at the hotel when she had sat in the
+window, the world once more arranged itself beneath her gaze very vividly and
+in its true proportions. She glanced curiously at Terence from time to time,
+observing his grey coat and his purple tie; observing the man with whom she was
+to spend the rest of her life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After one of these glances she murmured, &ldquo;Yes, I&rsquo;m in love.
+There&rsquo;s no doubt; I&rsquo;m in love with you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, they remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so close together, as
+she spoke, that there seemed no division between them, and the next moment
+separate and far away again. Feeling this painfully, she exclaimed, &ldquo;It
+will be a fight.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But as she looked at him she perceived from the shape of his eyes, the lines
+about his mouth, and other peculiarities that he pleased her, and she added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where I want to fight, you have compassion. You&rsquo;re finer than I
+am; you&rsquo;re much finer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He returned her glance and smiled, perceiving, much as she had done, the very
+small individual things about her which made her delightful to him. She was his
+for ever. This barrier being surmounted, innumerable delights lay before them
+both.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not finer,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m only older,
+lazier; a man, not a woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A man,&rdquo; she repeated, and a curious sense of possession coming
+over her, it struck her that she might now touch him; she put out her hand and
+lightly touched his cheek. His fingers followed where hers had been, and the
+touch of his hand upon his face brought back the overpowering sense of
+unreality. This body of his was unreal; the whole world was unreal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s happened?&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;Why did I ask you to
+marry me? How did it happen?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you ask me to marry you?&rdquo; she wondered. They faded far away
+from each other, and neither of them could remember what had been said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We sat upon the ground,&rdquo; he recollected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We sat upon the ground,&rdquo; she confirmed him. The recollection of
+sitting upon the ground, such as it was, seemed to unite them again, and they
+walked on in silence, their minds sometimes working with difficulty and
+sometimes ceasing to work, their eyes alone perceiving the things round them.
+Now he would attempt again to tell her his faults, and why he loved her; and
+she would describe what she had felt at this time or at that time, and together
+they would interpret her feeling. So beautiful was the sound of their voices
+that by degrees they scarcely listened to the words they framed. Long silences
+came between their words, which were no longer silences of struggle and
+confusion but refreshing silences, in which trivial thoughts moved easily. They
+began to speak naturally of ordinary things, of the flowers and the trees, how
+they grew there so red, like garden flowers at home, and there bent and crooked
+like the arm of a twisted old man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing in her veins,
+or the water of the stream running over stones, Rachel became conscious of a
+new feeling within her. She wondered for a moment what it was, and then said to
+herself, with a little surprise at recognising in her own person so famous a
+thing:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is happiness, I suppose.&rdquo; And aloud to Terence she spoke,
+&ldquo;This is happiness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the heels of her words he answered, &ldquo;This is happiness,&rdquo; upon
+which they guessed that the feeling had sprung in both of them the same time.
+They began therefore to describe how this felt and that felt, how like it was
+and yet how different; for they were very different.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which they were
+now sunk. The repetition of Hewet&rsquo;s name in short, dissevered syllables
+was to them the crack of a dry branch or the laughter of a bird. The grasses
+and breezes sounding and murmuring all round them, they never noticed that the
+swishing of the grasses grew louder and louder, and did not cease with the
+lapse of the breeze. A hand dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel&rsquo;s shoulder;
+it might have been a bolt from heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass
+whipped across her eyes and filled her mouth and ears. Through the waving stems
+she saw a figure, large and shapeless against the sky. Helen was upon her.
+Rolled this way and that, now seeing only forests of green, and now the high
+blue heaven; she was speechless and almost without sense. At last she lay
+still, all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting. Over her
+loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman, of Terence and Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving; they came together
+and kissed in the air above her. Broken fragments of speech came down to her on
+the ground. She thought she heard them speak of love and then of marriage.
+Raising herself and sitting up, she too realised Helen&rsquo;s soft body, the
+strong and hospitable arms, and happiness swelling and breaking in one vast
+wave. When this fell away, and the grasses once more lay low, and the sky
+became horizontal, and the earth rolled out flat on each side, and the trees
+stood upright, she was the first to perceive a little row of human figures
+standing patiently in the distance. For the moment she could not remember who
+they were.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who are they?&rdquo; she asked, and then recollected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Falling into line behind Mr. Flushing, they were careful to leave at least
+three yards&rsquo; distance between the toe of his boot and the rim of her
+skirt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He led them across a stretch of green by the river-bank and then through a
+grove of trees, and bade them remark the signs of human habitation, the
+blackened grass, the charred tree-stumps, and there, through the trees, strange
+wooden nests, drawn together in an arch where the trees drew apart, the village
+which was the goal of their journey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stepping cautiously, they observed the women, who were squatting on the ground
+in triangular shapes, moving their hands, either plaiting straw or in kneading
+something in bowls. But when they had looked for a moment undiscovered, they
+were seen, and Mr. Flushing, advancing into the centre of the clearing, was
+engaged in talk with a lean majestic man, whose bones and hollows at once made
+the shapes of the Englishman&rsquo;s body appear ugly and unnatural. The women
+took no notice of the strangers, except that their hands paused for a moment
+and their long narrow eyes slid round and fixed upon them with the motionless
+inexpressive gaze of those removed from each other far far beyond the plunge of
+speech. Their hands moved again, but the stare continued. It followed them as
+they walked, as they peered into the huts where they could distinguish guns
+leaning in the corner, and bowls upon the floor, and stacks of rushes; in the
+dusk the solemn eyes of babies regarded them, and old women stared out too. As
+they sauntered about, the stare followed them, passing over their legs, their
+bodies, their heads, curiously not without hostility, like the crawl of a
+winter fly. As she drew apart her shawl and uncovered her breast to the lips of
+her baby, the eyes of a woman never left their faces, although they moved
+uneasily under her stare, and finally turned away, rather than stand there
+looking at her any longer. When sweetmeats were offered them, they put out
+great red hands to take them, and felt themselves treading cumbrously like
+tight-coated soldiers among these soft instinctive people. But soon the life of
+the village took no notice of them; they had become absorbed in it. The
+women&rsquo;s hands became busy again with the straw; their eyes dropped. If
+they moved, it was to fetch something from the hut, or to catch a straying
+child, or to cross the space with a jar balanced on their heads; if they spoke,
+it was to cry some harsh unintelligible cry. Voices rose when a child was
+beaten, and fell again; voices rose in song, which slid up a little way and
+down a little way, and settled again upon the same low and melancholy note.
+Seeking each other, Terence and Rachel drew together under a tree. Peaceful,
+and even beautiful at first, the sight of the women, who had given up looking
+at them, made them now feel very cold and melancholy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; Terence sighed at length, &ldquo;it makes us seem
+insignificant, doesn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel agreed. So it would go on for ever and ever, she said, those women
+sitting under the trees, the trees and the river. They turned away and began to
+walk through the trees, leaning, without fear of discovery, upon each
+other&rsquo;s arms. They had not gone far before they began to assure each
+other once more that they were in love, were happy, were content; but why was
+it so painful being in love, why was there so much pain in happiness?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sight of the village indeed affected them all curiously though all
+differently. St. John had left the others and was walking slowly down to the
+river, absorbed in his own thoughts, which were bitter and unhappy, for he felt
+himself alone; and Helen, standing by herself in the sunny space among the
+native women, was exposed to presentiments of disaster. The cries of the
+senseless beasts rang in her ears high and low in the air, as they ran from
+tree-trunk to tree-top. How small the little figures looked wandering through
+the trees! She became acutely conscious of the little limbs, the thin veins,
+the delicate flesh of men and women, which breaks so easily and lets the life
+escape compared with these great trees and deep waters. A falling branch, a
+foot that slips, and the earth has crushed them or the water drowned them. Thus
+thinking, she kept her eyes anxiously fixed upon the lovers, as if by doing so
+she could protect them from their fate. Turning, she found the Flushings by her
+side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were talking about the things they had bought and arguing whether they
+were really old, and whether there were not signs here and there of European
+influence. Helen was appealed to. She was made to look at a brooch, and then at
+a pair of ear-rings. But all the time she blamed them for having come on this
+expedition, for having ventured too far and exposed themselves. Then she roused
+herself and tried to talk, but in a few moments she caught herself seeing a
+picture of a boat upset on the river in England, at midday. It was morbid, she
+knew, to imagine such things; nevertheless she sought out the figures of the
+others between the trees, and whenever she saw them she kept her eyes fixed on
+them, so that she might be able to protect them from disaster.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when the sun went down and the steamer turned and began to steam back
+towards civilisation, again her fears were calmed. In the semi-darkness the
+chairs on deck and the people sitting in them were angular shapes, the mouth
+being indicated by a tiny burning spot, and the arm by the same spot moving up
+or down as the cigar or cigarette was lifted to and from the lips. Words
+crossed the darkness, but, not knowing where they fell, seemed to lack energy
+and substance. Deep sighs proceeded regularly, although with some attempt at
+suppression, from the large white mound which represented the person of Mrs.
+Flushing. The day had been long and very hot, and now that all the colours were
+blotted out the cool night air seemed to press soft fingers upon the eyelids,
+sealing them down. Some philosophical remark directed, apparently, at St. John
+Hirst missed its aim, and hung so long suspended in the air until it was
+engulfed by a yawn, that it was considered dead, and this gave the signal for
+stirring of legs and murmurs about sleep. The white mound moved, finally
+lengthened itself and disappeared, and after a few turns and paces St. John and
+Mr. Flushing withdrew, leaving the three chairs still occupied by three silent
+bodies. The light which came from a lamp high on the mast and a sky pale with
+stars left them with shapes but without features; but even in this darkness the
+withdrawal of the others made them feel each other very near, for they were all
+thinking of the same thing. For some time no one spoke, then Helen said with a
+sigh, &ldquo;So you&rsquo;re both very happy?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As if washed by the air her voice sounded more spiritual and softer than usual.
+Voices at a little distance answered her, &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through the darkness she was looking at them both, and trying to distinguish
+him. What was there for her to say? Rachel had passed beyond her guardianship.
+A voice might reach her ears, but never again would it carry as far as it had
+carried twenty-four hours ago. Nevertheless, speech seemed to be due from her
+before she went to bed. She wished to speak, but she felt strangely old and
+depressed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you realise what you&rsquo;re doing?&rdquo; she demanded.
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s young, you&rsquo;re both young; and marriage&mdash;&rdquo;
+Here she ceased. They begged her, however, to continue, with such earnestness
+in their voices, as if they only craved advice, that she was led to add:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Marriage! well, it&rsquo;s not easy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what we want to know,&rdquo; they answered, and she guessed
+that now they were looking at each other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It depends on both of you,&rdquo; she stated. Her face was turned
+towards Terence, and although he could hardly see her, he believed that her
+words really covered a genuine desire to know more about him. He raised himself
+from his semi-recumbent position and proceeded to tell her what she wanted to
+know. He spoke as lightly as he could in order to take away her depression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m twenty-seven, and I&rsquo;ve about seven hundred a
+year,&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;My temper is good on the whole, and health
+excellent, though Hirst detects a gouty tendency. Well, then, I think I&rsquo;m
+very intelligent.&rdquo; He paused as if for confirmation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen agreed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Though, unfortunately, rather lazy. I intend to allow Rachel to be a
+fool if she wants to, and&mdash;Do you find me on the whole satisfactory in
+other respects?&rdquo; he asked shyly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I like what I know of you,&rdquo; Helen replied. &ldquo;But
+then&mdash;one knows so little.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We shall live in London,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;and&mdash;&rdquo;
+With one voice they suddenly enquired whether she did not think them the
+happiest people that she had ever known.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hush,&rdquo; she checked them, &ldquo;Mrs. Flushing, remember.
+She&rsquo;s behind us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then they fell silent, and Terence and Rachel felt instinctively that their
+happiness had made her sad, and, while they were anxious to go on talking about
+themselves, they did not like to.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve talked too much about ourselves,&rdquo; Terence said.
+&ldquo;Tell us&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, tell us&mdash;&rdquo; Rachel echoed. They were both in the mood to
+believe that every one was capable of saying something very profound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What can I tell you?&rdquo; Helen reflected, speaking more to herself in
+a rambling style than as a prophetess delivering a message. She forced herself
+to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After all, though I scold Rachel, I&rsquo;m not much wiser myself.
+I&rsquo;m older, of course, I&rsquo;m half-way through, and you&rsquo;re just
+beginning. It&rsquo;s puzzling&mdash;sometimes, I think, disappointing; the
+great things aren&rsquo;t as great, perhaps, as one expects&mdash;but
+it&rsquo;s interesting&mdash;Oh, yes, you&rsquo;re certain to find it
+interesting&mdash;And so it goes on,&rdquo; they became conscious here of the
+procession of dark trees into which, as far as they could see, Helen was now
+looking, &ldquo;and there are pleasures where one doesn&rsquo;t expect them
+(you must write to your father), and you&rsquo;ll be very happy, I&rsquo;ve no
+doubt. But I must go to bed, and if you are sensible you will follow in ten
+minutes, and so,&rdquo; she rose and stood before them, almost featureless and
+very large, &ldquo;Good-night.&rdquo; She passed behind the curtain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After sitting in silence for the greater part of the ten minutes she allowed
+them, they rose and hung over the rail. Beneath them the smooth black water
+slipped away very fast and silently. The spark of a cigarette vanished behind
+them. &ldquo;A beautiful voice,&rdquo; Terence murmured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel assented. Helen had a beautiful voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a silence she asked, looking up into the sky, &ldquo;Are we on the deck
+of a steamer on a river in South America? Am I Rachel, are you Terence?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great black world lay round them. As they were drawn smoothly along it
+seemed possessed of immense thickness and endurance. They could discern pointed
+tree-tops and blunt rounded tree-tops. Raising their eyes above the trees, they
+fixed them on the stars and the pale border of sky above the trees. The little
+points of frosty light infinitely far away drew their eyes and held them fixed,
+so that it seemed as if they stayed a long time and fell a great distance when
+once more they realised their hands grasping the rail and their separate bodies
+standing side by side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d forgotten completely about me,&rdquo; Terence reproached
+her, taking her arm and beginning to pace the deck, &ldquo;and I never forget
+you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; she whispered, she had not forgotten, only the
+stars&mdash;the night&mdash;the dark&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re like a bird half asleep in its nest, Rachel. You&rsquo;re
+asleep. You&rsquo;re talking in your sleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half asleep, and murmuring broken words, they stood in the angle made by the
+bow of the boat. It slipped on down the river. Now a bell struck on the bridge,
+and they heard the lapping of water as it rippled away on either side, and once
+a bird startled in its sleep creaked, flew on to the next tree, and was silent
+again. The darkness poured down profusely, and left them with scarcely any
+feeling of life, except that they were standing there together in the darkness.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap22"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+
+<p>
+The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely over the earth
+and parted them from the strange day in the forest when they had been forced to
+tell each other what they wanted, this wish of theirs was revealed to other
+people, and in the process became slightly strange to themselves. Apparently it
+was not anything unusual that had happened; it was that they had become engaged
+to marry each other. The world, which consisted for the most part of the hotel
+and the villa, expressed itself glad on the whole that two people should marry,
+and allowed them to see that they were not expected to take part in the work
+which has to be done in order that the world shall go on, but might absent
+themselves for a time. They were accordingly left alone until they felt the
+silence as if, playing in a vast church, the door had been shut on them. They
+were driven to walk alone, and sit alone, to visit secret places where the
+flowers had never been picked and the trees were solitary. In solitude they
+could express those beautiful but too vast desires which were so oddly
+uncomfortable to the ears of other men and women&mdash;desires for a world,
+such as their own world which contained two people seemed to them to be, where
+people knew each other intimately and thus judged each other by what was good,
+and never quarrelled, because that was waste of time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun, or sitting in
+the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer embarrassed, or
+half-choked with meaning which could not express itself; they were not afraid
+of each other, or, like travellers down a twisting river, dazzled with sudden
+beauties when the corner is turned; the unexpected happened, but even the
+ordinary was lovable, and in many ways preferable to the ecstatic and
+mysterious, for it was refreshingly solid, and called out effort, and effort
+under such circumstances was not effort but delight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged, as far as the
+occasional writing of a word in pencil testified, in shaping the world as it
+appeared to him now that he and Rachel were going to be married. It was
+different certainly. The book called <i>Silence</i> would not now be the same
+book that it would have been. He would then put down his pencil and stare in
+front of him, and wonder in what respects the world was different&mdash;it had,
+perhaps, more solidity, more coherence, more importance, greater depth. Why,
+even the earth sometimes seemed to him very deep; not carved into hills and
+cities and fields, but heaped in great masses. He would look out of the window
+for ten minutes at a time; but no, he did not care for the earth swept of human
+beings. He liked human beings&mdash;he liked them, he suspected, better than
+Rachel did. There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite
+forgetful of him,&mdash;but he liked that quality in her. He liked the
+impersonality which it produced in her. At last, having written down a series
+of little sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them, he observed
+aloud, &ldquo;&lsquo;Women&mdash;under the heading Women I&rsquo;ve written:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base
+of most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on fact?
+Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because they
+don&rsquo;t think.&rsquo; What do you say, Rachel?&rdquo; He paused with his
+pencil in his hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel said nothing. Up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven sonata
+she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined staircase, energetically at
+first, then more laboriously advancing her feet with effort until she could go
+no higher and returned with a run to begin at the very bottom again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Again, it&rsquo;s the fashion now to say that women are more
+practical and less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable
+organising ability but no sense of honour&rsquo;&mdash;query, what is meant by
+masculine term, honour?&mdash;what corresponds to it in your sex? Eh?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected this opportunity of
+revealing the secrets of her sex. She had, indeed, advanced so far in the
+pursuit of wisdom that she allowed these secrets to rest undisturbed; it seemed
+to be reserved for a later generation to discuss them philosophically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she exclaimed at last, swinging
+round upon him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, Terence, it&rsquo;s no good; here am I, the best musician in South
+America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can&rsquo;t play a note because
+of you in the room interrupting me every other second.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t seem to realise that that&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;ve been
+aiming at for the last half-hour,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve no
+objection to nice simple tunes&mdash;indeed, I find them very helpful to my
+literary composition, but that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old
+dog going round on its hind legs in the rain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which were scattered on
+the table, conveying the congratulations of their friends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;&mdash;all possible wishes for all possible
+happiness,&rsquo;&rdquo; he read; &ldquo;correct, but not very vivid, are
+they?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re sheer nonsense!&rdquo; Rachel exclaimed. &ldquo;Think of
+words compared with sounds!&rdquo; she continued. &ldquo;Think of novels and
+plays and histories&mdash;&rdquo; Perched on the edge of the table, she stirred
+the red and yellow volumes contemptuously. She seemed to herself to be in a
+position where she could despise all human learning. Terence looked at them
+too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;God, Rachel, you do read trash!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;And
+you&rsquo;re behind the times too, my dear. No one dreams of reading this kind
+of thing now&mdash;antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions of life in
+the east end&mdash;oh, no, we&rsquo;ve exploded all that. Read poetry, Rachel,
+poetry, poetry, poetry!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his intention being to
+satirise the short sharp bark of the writer&rsquo;s English; but she paid no
+attention, and after an interval of meditation exclaimed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely
+of vast blocks of matter, and that we&rsquo;re nothing but patches of
+light&mdash;&rdquo; she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the
+carpet and up the wall&mdash;&ldquo;like that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Terence, &ldquo;I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs
+of my chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth. But at Cambridge, I can
+remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states of semi-coma
+about five o&rsquo;clock in the morning. Hirst does now, I expect&mdash;oh, no,
+Hirst wouldn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel continued, &ldquo;The day your note came, asking us to go on the picnic,
+I was sitting where you&rsquo;re sitting now, thinking that; I wonder if I
+could think that again? I wonder if the world&rsquo;s changed? and if so, when
+it&rsquo;ll stop changing, and which is the real world?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When I first saw you,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;I thought you were like a
+creature who&rsquo;d lived all its life among pearls and old bones. Your hands
+were wet, d&rsquo;you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a
+bit of bread, and then you said, &lsquo;Human Beings!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I thought you&mdash;a prig,&rdquo; she recollected. &ldquo;No;
+that&rsquo;s not quite it. There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I
+thought you and St. John were like those ants&mdash;very big, very ugly, very
+energetic, with all your virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I
+liked you&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You fell in love with me,&rdquo; he corrected her. &ldquo;You were in
+love with me all the time, only you didn&rsquo;t know it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I never fell in love with you,&rdquo; she asserted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rachel&mdash;what a lie&mdash;didn&rsquo;t you sit here looking at my
+window&mdash;didn&rsquo;t you wander about the hotel like an owl in the
+sun&mdash;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she repeated, &ldquo;I never fell in love, if falling in love
+is what people say it is, and it&rsquo;s the world that tells the lies and I
+tell the truth. Oh, what lies&mdash;what lies!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr. Pepper,
+from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It was strange,
+considering how very different these people were, that they used almost the
+same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her upon her engagement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever feel
+it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they were capable
+of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had done, much as the
+face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they didn&rsquo;t feel a thing why
+did they go and pretend to? The simplicity and arrogance and hardness of her
+youth, now concentrated into a single spark as it was by her love of him,
+puzzled Terence; being engaged had not that effect on him; the world was
+different, but not in that way; he still wanted the things he had always
+wanted, and in particular he wanted the companionship of other people more than
+ever perhaps. He took the letters out of her hand, and protested:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course they&rsquo;re absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just
+because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss Allan is;
+you can&rsquo;t deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she&rsquo;s got too many
+children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the bad instead
+of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees&mdash;hasn&rsquo;t she a kind
+of beauty&mdash;of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn&rsquo;t she
+rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river going on
+and on and on? By the way, Ralph&rsquo;s been made governor of the Carroway
+Islands&mdash;the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn&rsquo;t
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of the
+affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with her own
+destiny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t have eleven children,&rdquo; she asserted; &ldquo;I
+won&rsquo;t have the eyes of an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and
+down, as if one were a horse.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We must have a son and we must have a daughter,&rdquo; said Terence,
+putting down the letters, &ldquo;because, let alone the inestimable advantage
+of being our children, they&rsquo;d be so well brought up.&rdquo; They went on
+to sketch an outline of the ideal education&mdash;how their daughter should be
+required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted blue, to
+suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too practical; and their
+son&mdash;he should be taught to laugh at great men, that is, at distinguished
+successful men, at men who wore ribands and rose to the tops of their trees. He
+should in no way resemble (Rachel added) St. John Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst. Dwelling
+upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them; he had a mind
+like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. Where should we all be without
+him and his like? Choked in weeds; Christians, bigots,&mdash;why, Rachel
+herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs to men when they felt
+drowsy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you&rsquo;ll never see it!&rdquo; he exclaimed; &ldquo;because with
+all your virtues you don&rsquo;t, and you never will, care with every fibre of
+your being for the pursuit of truth! You&rsquo;ve no respect for facts, Rachel;
+you&rsquo;re essentially feminine.&rdquo; She did not trouble to deny it, nor
+did she think good to produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits
+which Terence admired. St. John Hirst said that she was in love with him; she
+would never forgive that; but the argument was not one to appeal to a man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I like him,&rdquo; she said, and she thought to herself that she
+also pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the
+warm mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we ourselves move
+about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St. John Hirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would not kiss him
+supposing he wished it, which was not likely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then bestowed upon
+him, Terence protested:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And compared with Hirst I&rsquo;m a perfect Zany.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;re wasting the morning&mdash;I ought to be writing my book, and
+you ought to be answering these.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve only got twenty-one whole mornings left,&rdquo; said Rachel.
+&ldquo;And my father&rsquo;ll be here in a day or two.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write laboriously,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My dear Evelyn&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had written, a process
+which he found essential to the composition of his own. For a considerable time
+nothing was to be heard but the ticking of the clock and the fitful scratch of
+Rachel&rsquo;s pen, as she produced phrases which bore a considerable likeness
+to those which she had condemned. She was struck by it herself, for she stopped
+writing and looked up; looked at Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked at the
+different pieces of furniture, at her bed in the corner, at the window-pane
+which showed the branches of a tree filled in with sky, heard the clock
+ticking, and was amazed at the gulf which lay between all that and her sheet of
+paper. Would there ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible? Even
+with Terence himself&mdash;how far apart they could be, how little she knew
+what was passing in his brain now! She then finished her sentence, which was
+awkward and ugly, and stated that they were &ldquo;both very happy, and going
+to be married in the autumn probably and hope to live in London, where we hope
+you will come and see us when we get back.&rdquo; Choosing
+&ldquo;affectionately,&rdquo; after some further speculation, rather than
+sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly beginning on another when
+Terence remarked, quoting from his book:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Listen to this, Rachel. &lsquo;It is probable that Hugh&rsquo;
+(he&rsquo;s the hero, a literary man), &lsquo;had not realised at the time of
+his marriage, any more than the young man of parts and imagination usually does
+realise, the nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the
+male from the needs and desires of the female. . . . At first they had been
+very happy. The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly
+companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them. Betty had proved
+herself the ideal comrade. . . . They had shouted <i>Love in the Valley</i> to
+each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn&rsquo; (and so on, and so
+on&mdash;I&rsquo;ll skip the descriptions). . . . &lsquo;But in London, after
+the boy&rsquo;s birth, all was changed. Betty was an admirable mother; but it
+did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that function is
+understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did not absorb the whole
+of her energies. She was young and strong, with healthy limbs and a body and
+brain that called urgently for exercise. . . .&rsquo; (In short she began to
+give tea-parties.) . . . &lsquo;Coming in late from this singular talk with old
+Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined room, where the two men had each unloosened
+his soul to the other, with the sound of the traffic humming in his ears, and
+the foggy London sky slung tragically across his mind . . . he found
+women&rsquo;s hats dotted about among his papers. Women&rsquo;s wraps and
+absurd little feminine shoes and umbrellas were in the hall. . . . Then the
+bills began to come in. . . . He tried to speak frankly to her. He found her
+lying on the great polar-bear skin in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they
+were dining with the Greens in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the
+diamonds wink and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve of her
+breast&mdash;a vision of adorable femininity. He forgave her all.&rsquo; (Well,
+this goes from bad to worse, and finally about fifty pages later, Hugh takes a
+week-end ticket to Swanage and &lsquo;has it out with himself on the downs
+above Corfe.&rsquo; . . . Here there&rsquo;s fifteen pages or so which
+we&rsquo;ll skip. The conclusion is . . .) &lsquo;They were different. Perhaps,
+in the far future, when generations of men had struggled and failed as he must
+now struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed, what she now made a pretence of
+being&mdash;the friend and companion&mdash;not the enemy and parasite of
+man.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The end of it is, you see, Hugh went back to his wife, poor fellow. It
+was his duty, as a married man. Lord, Rachel,&rdquo; he concluded, &ldquo;will
+it be like that when we&rsquo;re married?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instead of answering him she asked,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t people write about the things they do feel?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, that&rsquo;s the difficulty!&rdquo; he sighed, tossing the book
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, then, what will it be like when we&rsquo;re married? What are the
+things people do feel?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She seemed doubtful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sit on the floor and let me look at you,&rdquo; he commanded. Resting
+her chin on his knee, she looked straight at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He examined her curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not beautiful,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;but I like your
+face. I like the way your hair grows down in a point, and your eyes
+too&mdash;they never see anything. Your mouth&rsquo;s too big, and your cheeks
+would be better if they had more colour in them. But what I like about your
+face is that it makes one wonder what the devil you&rsquo;re thinking
+about&mdash;it makes me want to do that&mdash;&rdquo; He clenched his fist and
+shook it so near her that she started back, &ldquo;because now you look as if
+you&rsquo;d blow my brains out. There are moments,&rdquo; he continued,
+&ldquo;when, if we stood on a rock together, you&rsquo;d throw me into the
+sea.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hypnotised by the force of his eyes in hers, she repeated, &ldquo;If we stood
+on a rock together&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven about the
+roots of the world&mdash;the idea was incoherently delightful. She sprang up,
+and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting aside the chairs and
+tables as if she were indeed striking through the waters. He watched her with
+pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a passage for herself, and dealing
+triumphantly with the obstacles which would hinder their passage through life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It does seem possible!&rdquo; he exclaimed, &ldquo;though I&rsquo;ve
+always thought it the most unlikely thing in the world&mdash;I shall be in love
+with you all my life, and our marriage will be the most exciting thing
+that&rsquo;s ever been done! We&rsquo;ll never have a moment&rsquo;s
+peace&mdash;&rdquo; He caught her in his arms as she passed him, and they
+fought for mastery, imagining a rock, and the sea heaving beneath them. At last
+she was thrown to the floor, where she lay gasping, and crying for mercy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a mermaid! I can swim,&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;so the
+game&rsquo;s up.&rdquo; Her dress was torn across, and peace being established,
+she fetched a needle and thread and began to mend the tear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;be quiet and tell me about the world;
+tell me about everything that&rsquo;s ever happened, and I&rsquo;ll tell
+you&mdash;let me see, what can I tell you?&mdash;I&rsquo;ll tell you about Miss
+Montgomerie and the river party. She was left, you see, with one foot in the
+boat, and the other on shore.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had spent much time already in thus filling out for the other the course
+of their past lives, and the characters of their friends and relations, so that
+very soon Terence knew not only what Rachel&rsquo;s aunts might be expected to
+say upon every occasion, but also how their bedrooms were furnished, and what
+kind of bonnets they wore. He could sustain a conversation between Mrs. Hunt
+and Rachel, and carry on a tea-party including the Rev. William Johnson and
+Miss Macquoid, the Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth.
+But he had known many more people, and was far more highly skilled in the art
+of narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were, for the most part, of a
+curiously childlike and humorous kind, so that it generally fell to her lot to
+listen and ask questions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and felt, and
+sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other men and women
+might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she became very anxious
+to go back to England, which was full of people, where she could merely stand
+in the streets and look at them. According to him, too, there was an order, a
+pattern which made life reasonable, or if that word was foolish, made it of
+deep interest anyhow, for sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things
+happened as they did. Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as she
+believed. She should look for vanity&mdash;for vanity was a common
+quality&mdash;first in herself, and then in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they
+all had their share of it&mdash;and she would find it in ten people out of
+every twelve she met; and once linked together by one such tie she would find
+them not separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable, and she
+would come to love them when she found that they were like herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings were as
+various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes and manes, and horns and
+humps; and so, wrestling over the entire list of their acquaintances, and
+diverging into anecdote and theory and speculation, they came to know each
+other. The hours passed quickly, and seemed to them full to leaking-point.
+After a night&rsquo;s solitude they were always ready to begin again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist in free talk between
+men and women did in truth exist for both of them, although not quite in the
+measure she prescribed. Far more than upon the nature of sex they dwelt upon
+the nature of poetry, but it was true that talk which had no boundaries
+deepened and enlarged the strangely small bright view of a girl. In return for
+what he could tell her she brought him such curiosity and sensitiveness of
+perception, that he was led to doubt whether any gift bestowed by much reading
+and living was quite the equal of that for pleasure and pain. What would
+experience give her after all, except a kind of ridiculous formal balance, like
+that of a drilled dog in the street? He looked at her face and wondered how it
+would look in twenty years&rsquo; time, when the eyes had dulled, and the
+forehead wore those little persistent wrinkles which seem to show that the
+middle-aged are facing something hard which the young do not see? What would
+the hard thing be for them, he wondered? Then his thoughts turned to their life
+in England.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The thought of England was delightful, for together they would see the old
+things freshly; it would be England in June, and there would be June nights in
+the country; and the nightingales singing in the lanes, into which they could
+steal when the room grew hot; and there would be English meadows gleaming with
+water and set with stolid cows, and clouds dipping low and trailing across the
+green hills. As he sat in the room with her, he wished very often to be back
+again in the thick of life, doing things with Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He crossed to the window and exclaimed, &ldquo;Lord, how good it is to think of
+lanes, muddy lanes, with brambles and nettles, you know, and real grass fields,
+and farmyards with pigs and cows, and men walking beside carts with
+pitchforks&mdash;there&rsquo;s nothing to compare with that here&mdash;look at
+the stony red earth, and the bright blue sea, and the glaring white
+houses&mdash;how tired one gets of it! And the air, without a stain or a
+wrinkle. I&rsquo;d give anything for a sea mist.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel, too, had been thinking of the English country: the flat land rolling
+away to the sea, and the woods and the long straight roads, where one can walk
+for miles without seeing any one, and the great church towers and the curious
+houses clustered in the valleys, and the birds, and the dusk, and the rain
+falling against the windows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But London, London&rsquo;s the place,&rdquo; Terence continued. They
+looked together at the carpet, as though London itself were to be seen there
+lying on the floor, with all its spires and pinnacles pricking through the
+smoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the whole, what I should like best at this moment,&rdquo; Terence
+pondered, &ldquo;would be to find myself walking down Kingsway, by those big
+placards, you know, and turning into the Strand. Perhaps I might go and look
+over Waterloo Bridge for a moment. Then I&rsquo;d go along the Strand past the
+shops with all the new books in them, and through the little archway into the
+Temple. I always like the quiet after the uproar. You hear your own footsteps
+suddenly quite loud. The Temple&rsquo;s very pleasant. I think I should go and
+see if I could find dear old Hodgkin&mdash;the man who writes books about Van
+Eyck, you know. When I left England he was very sad about his tame magpie. He
+suspected that a man had poisoned it. And then Russell lives on the next
+staircase. I think you&rsquo;d like him. He&rsquo;s a passion for Handel. Well,
+Rachel,&rdquo; he concluded, dismissing the vision of London, &ldquo;we shall
+be doing that together in six weeks&rsquo; time, and it&rsquo;ll be the middle
+of June then&mdash;and June in London&mdash;my God! how pleasant it all
+is!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And we&rsquo;re certain to have it too,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It
+isn&rsquo;t as if we were expecting a great deal&mdash;only to walk about and
+look at things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only a thousand a year and perfect freedom,&rdquo; he replied.
+&ldquo;How many people in London d&rsquo;you think have that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now you&rsquo;ve spoilt it,&rdquo; she complained. &ldquo;Now
+we&rsquo;ve got to think of the horrors.&rdquo; She looked grudgingly at the
+novel which had once caused her perhaps an hour&rsquo;s discomfort, so that she
+had never opened it again, but kept it on her table, and looked at it
+occasionally, as some medieval monk kept a skull, or a crucifix to remind him
+of the frailty of the body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it true, Terence,&rdquo; she demanded, &ldquo;that women die with
+bugs crawling across their faces?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think it&rsquo;s very probable,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But you must
+admit, Rachel, that we so seldom think of anything but ourselves that an
+occasional twinge is really rather pleasant.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Accusing him of an affection of cynicism which was just as bad as
+sentimentality itself, she left her position by his side and knelt upon the
+window sill, twisting the curtain tassels between her fingers. A vague sense of
+dissatisfaction filled her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s so detestable in this country,&rdquo; she exclaimed,
+&ldquo;is the blue&mdash;always blue sky and blue sea. It&rsquo;s like a
+curtain&mdash;all the things one wants are on the other side of that. I want to
+know what&rsquo;s going on behind it. I hate these divisions, don&rsquo;t you,
+Terence? One person all in the dark about another person. Now I liked the
+Dalloways,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;and they&rsquo;re gone. I shall never
+see them again. Just by going on a ship we cut ourselves off entirely from the
+rest of the world. I want to see England there&mdash;London there&mdash;all
+sorts of people&mdash;why shouldn&rsquo;t one? why should one be shut up all by
+oneself in a room?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While she spoke thus half to herself and with increasing vagueness, because her
+eye was caught by a ship that had just come into the bay, she did not see that
+Terence had ceased to stare contentedly in front of him, and was looking at her
+keenly and with dissatisfaction. She seemed to be able to cut herself adrift
+from him, and to pass away to unknown places where she had no need of him. The
+thought roused his jealousy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I sometimes think you&rsquo;re not in love with me and never will
+be,&rdquo; he said energetically. She started and turned round at his words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t satisfy you in the way you satisfy me,&rdquo; he
+continued. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s something I can&rsquo;t get hold of in you. You
+don&rsquo;t want me as I want you&mdash;you&rsquo;re always wanting something
+else.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began pacing up and down the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps I ask too much,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;Perhaps it isn&rsquo;t
+really possible to have what I want. Men and women are too different. You
+can&rsquo;t understand&mdash;you don&rsquo;t understand&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came up to where she stood looking at him in silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed to her now that what he was saying was perfectly true, and that she
+wanted many more things than the love of one human being&mdash;the sea, the
+sky. She turned again and looked at the distant blue, which was so smooth and
+serene where the sky met the sea; she could not possibly want only one human
+being.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or is it only this damnable engagement?&rdquo; he continued.
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s be married here, before we go back&mdash;or is it too great
+a risk? Are we sure we want to marry each other?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They began pacing up and down the room, but although they came very near each
+other in their pacing, they took care not to touch each other. The hopelessness
+of their position overcame them both. They were impotent; they could never love
+each other sufficiently to overcome all these barriers, and they could never be
+satisfied with less. Realising this with intolerable keenness she stopped in
+front of him and exclaimed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s break it off, then.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The words did more to unite them than any amount of argument. As if they stood
+on the edge of a precipice they clung together. They knew that they could not
+separate; painful and terrible it might be, but they were joined for ever. They
+lapsed into silence, and after a time crept together in silence. Merely to be
+so close soothed them, and sitting side by side the divisions disappeared, and
+it seemed as if the world were once more solid and entire, and as if, in some
+strange way, they had grown larger and stronger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great
+reluctance. They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and with a brush
+tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling nothing all the
+morning, neither pain nor happiness. But it chilled them to see themselves in
+the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible they were really very
+small and separate, the size of the glass leaving a large space for the
+reflection of other things.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap23"></a>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+
+<p>
+But no brush was able to efface completely the expression of happiness, so that
+Mrs. Ambrose could not treat them when they came downstairs as if they had
+spent the morning in a way that could be discussed naturally. This being so,
+she joined in the world&rsquo;s conspiracy to consider them for the time
+incapacitated from the business of life, struck by their intensity of feeling
+into enmity against life, and almost succeeded in dismissing them from her
+thoughts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She reflected that she had done all that it was necessary to do in practical
+matters. She had written a great many letters, and had obtained
+Willoughby&rsquo;s consent. She had dwelt so often upon Mr. Hewet&rsquo;s
+prospects, his profession, his birth, appearance, and temperament, that she had
+almost forgotten what he was really like. When she refreshed herself by a look
+at him, she used to wonder again what he was like, and then, concluding that
+they were happy at any rate, thought no more about it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She might more profitably consider what would happen in three years&rsquo;
+time, or what might have happened if Rachel had been left to explore the world
+under her father&rsquo;s guidance. The result, she was honest enough to own,
+might have been better&mdash;who knows? She did not disguise from herself that
+Terence had faults. She was inclined to think him too easy and tolerant, just
+as he was inclined to think her perhaps a trifle hard&mdash;no, it was rather
+that she was uncompromising. In some ways she found St. John preferable; but
+then, of course, he would never have suited Rachel. Her friendship with St.
+John was established, for although she fluctuated between irritation and
+interest in a way that did credit to the candour of her disposition, she liked
+his company on the whole. He took her outside this little world of love and
+emotion. He had a grasp of facts. Supposing, for instance, that England made a
+sudden move towards some unknown port on the coast of Morocco, St. John knew
+what was at the back of it, and to hear him engaged with her husband in
+argument about finance and the balance of power, gave her an odd sense of
+stability. She respected their arguments without always listening to them, much
+as she respected a solid brick wall, or one of those immense municipal
+buildings which, although they compose the greater part of our cities, have
+been built day after day and year after year by unknown hands. She liked to sit
+and listen, and even felt a little elated when the engaged couple, after
+showing their profound lack of interest, slipped from the room, and were seen
+pulling flowers to pieces in the garden. It was not that she was jealous of
+them, but she did undoubtedly envy them their great unknown future that lay
+before them. Slipping from one such thought to another, she was at the
+dining-room with fruit in her hands. Sometimes she stopped to straighten a
+candle stooping with the heat, or disturbed some too rigid arrangement of the
+chairs. She had reason to suspect that Chailey had been balancing herself on
+the top of a ladder with a wet duster during their absence, and the room had
+never been quite like itself since. Returning from the dining-room for the
+third time, she perceived that one of the arm-chairs was now occupied by St.
+John. He lay back in it, with his eyes half shut, looking, as he always did,
+curiously buttoned up in a neat grey suit and fenced against the exuberance of
+a foreign climate which might at any moment proceed to take liberties with him.
+Her eyes rested on him gently and then passed on over his head. Finally she
+took the chair opposite.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t want to come here,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;but I
+was positively driven to it. . . . Evelyn M.,&rdquo; he groaned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat up, and began to explain with mock solemnity how the detestable woman
+was set upon marrying him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She pursues me about the place. This morning she appeared in the
+smoking-room. All I could do was to seize my hat and fly. I didn&rsquo;t want
+to come, but I couldn&rsquo;t stay and face another meal with her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, we must make the best of it,&rdquo; Helen replied philosophically.
+It was very hot, and they were indifferent to any amount of silence, so that
+they lay back in their chairs waiting for something to happen. The bell rang
+for luncheon, but there was no sound of movement in the house. Was there any
+news? Helen asked; anything in the papers? St. John shook his head. O yes, he
+had a letter from home, a letter from his mother, describing the suicide of the
+parlour-maid. She was called Susan Jane, and she came into the kitchen one
+afternoon, and said that she wanted cook to keep her money for her; she had
+twenty pounds in gold. Then she went out to buy herself a hat. She came in at
+half-past five and said that she had taken poison. They had only just time to
+get her into bed and call a doctor before she died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; Helen enquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;ll have to be an inquest,&rdquo; said St. John.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Why had she done it? He shrugged his shoulders. Why do people kill themselves?
+Why do the lower orders do any of the things they do do? Nobody knows. They sat
+in silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The bell&rsquo;s run fifteen minutes and they&rsquo;re not down,&rdquo;
+said Helen at length.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When they appeared, St. John explained why it had been necessary for him to
+come to luncheon. He imitated Evelyn&rsquo;s enthusiastic tone as she
+confronted him in the smoking-room. &ldquo;She thinks there can be nothing
+<i>quite</i> so thrilling as mathematics, so I&rsquo;ve lent her a large work
+in two volumes. It&rsquo;ll be interesting to see what she makes of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel could now afford to laugh at him. She reminded him of Gibbon; she had
+the first volume somewhere still; if he were undertaking the education of
+Evelyn, that surely was the test; or she had heard that Burke, upon the
+American Rebellion&mdash;Evelyn ought to read them both simultaneously. When
+St. John had disposed of her argument and had satisfied his hunger, he
+proceeded to tell them that the hotel was seething with scandals, some of the
+most appalling kind, which had happened in their absence; he was indeed much
+given to the study of his kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Evelyn M., for example&mdash;but that was told me in confidence.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense!&rdquo; Terence interposed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve heard about poor Sinclair, too?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes, I&rsquo;ve heard about Sinclair. He&rsquo;s retired to his mine
+with a revolver. He writes to Evelyn daily that he&rsquo;s thinking of
+committing suicide. I&rsquo;ve assured her that he&rsquo;s never been so happy
+in his life, and, on the whole, she&rsquo;s inclined to agree with me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But then she&rsquo;s entangled herself with Perrott,&rdquo; St. John
+continued; &ldquo;and I have reason to think, from something I saw in the
+passage, that everything isn&rsquo;t as it should be between Arthur and Susan.
+There&rsquo;s a young female lately arrived from Manchester. A very good thing
+if it were broken off, in my opinion. Their married life is something too
+horrible to contemplate. Oh, and I distinctly heard old Mrs. Paley rapping out
+the most fearful oaths as I passed her bedroom door. It&rsquo;s supposed that
+she tortures her maid in private&mdash;it&rsquo;s practically certain she does.
+One can tell it from the look in her eyes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When you&rsquo;re eighty and the gout tweezes you, you&rsquo;ll be
+swearing like a trooper,&rdquo; Terence remarked. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be very
+fat, very testy, very disagreeable. Can&rsquo;t you imagine him&mdash;bald as a
+coot, with a pair of sponge-bag trousers, a little spotted tie, and a
+corporation?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a pause Hirst remarked that the worst infamy had still to be told. He
+addressed himself to Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;ve hoofed out the prostitute. One night while we were away
+that old numskull Thornbury was doddering about the passages very late. (Nobody
+seems to have asked him what <i>he</i> was up to.) He saw the Signora Lola
+Mendoza, as she calls herself, cross the passage in her nightgown. He
+communicated his suspicions next morning to Elliot, with the result that
+Rodriguez went to the woman and gave her twenty-four hours in which to clear
+out of the place. No one seems to have enquired into the truth of the story, or
+to have asked Thornbury and Elliot what business it was of theirs; they had it
+entirely their own way. I propose that we should all sign a Round Robin, go to
+Rodriguez in a body, and insist upon a full enquiry. Something&rsquo;s got to
+be done, don&rsquo;t you agree?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet remarked that there could be no doubt as to the lady&rsquo;s profession.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Still,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s a great shame, poor woman;
+only I don&rsquo;t see what&rsquo;s to be done&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I quite agree with you, St. John,&rdquo; Helen burst out.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s monstrous. The hypocritical smugness of the English makes my
+blood boil. A man who&rsquo;s made a fortune in trade as Mr. Thornbury has is
+bound to be twice as bad as any prostitute.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She respected St. John&rsquo;s morality, which she took far more seriously than
+any one else did, and now entered into a discussion with him as to the steps
+that were to be taken to enforce their peculiar view of what was right. The
+argument led to some profoundly gloomy statements of a general nature. Who were
+they, after all&mdash;what authority had they&mdash;what power against the mass
+of superstition and ignorance? It was the English, of course; there must be
+something wrong in the English blood. Directly you met an English person, of
+the middle classes, you were conscious of an indefinable sensation of loathing;
+directly you saw the brown crescent of houses above Dover, the same thing came
+over you. But unfortunately St. John added, you couldn&rsquo;t trust these
+foreigners&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were interrupted by sounds of strife at the further end of the table.
+Rachel appealed to her aunt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Terence says we must go to tea with Mrs. Thornbury because she&rsquo;s
+been so kind, but I don&rsquo;t see it; in fact, I&rsquo;d rather have my right
+hand sawn in pieces&mdash;just imagine! the eyes of all those women!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fiddlesticks, Rachel,&rdquo; Terence replied. &ldquo;Who wants to look
+at you? You&rsquo;re consumed with vanity! You&rsquo;re a monster of conceit!
+Surely, Helen, you ought to have taught her by this time that she&rsquo;s a
+person of no conceivable importance whatever&mdash;not beautiful, or well
+dressed, or conspicuous for elegance or intellect, or deportment. A more
+ordinary sight than you are,&rdquo; he concluded, &ldquo;except for the tear
+across your dress has never been seen. However, stay at home if you want to.
+I&rsquo;m going.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She appealed again to her aunt. It wasn&rsquo;t the being looked at, she
+explained, but the things people were sure to say. The women in particular. She
+liked women, but where emotion was concerned they were as flies on a lump of
+sugar. They would be certain to ask her questions. Evelyn M. would say:
+&ldquo;Are you in love? Is it nice being in love?&rdquo; And Mrs.
+Thornbury&mdash;her eyes would go up and down, up and down&mdash;she shuddered
+at the thought of it. Indeed, the retirement of their life since their
+engagement had made her so sensitive, that she was not exaggerating her case.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She found an ally in Helen, who proceeded to expound her views of the human
+race, as she regarded with complacency the pyramid of variegated fruits in the
+centre of the table. It wasn&rsquo;t that they were cruel, or meant to hurt, or
+even stupid exactly; but she had always found that the ordinary person had so
+little emotion in his own life that the scent of it in the lives of others was
+like the scent of blood in the nostrils of a bloodhound. Warming to the theme,
+she continued:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Directly anything happens&mdash;it may be a marriage, or a birth, or a
+death&mdash;on the whole they prefer it to be a death&mdash;every one wants to
+see you. They insist upon seeing you. They&rsquo;ve got nothing to say; they
+don&rsquo;t care a rap for you; but you&rsquo;ve got to go to lunch or to tea
+or to dinner, and if you don&rsquo;t you&rsquo;re damned. It&rsquo;s the smell
+of blood,&rdquo; she continued; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t blame &rsquo;em; only they
+shan&rsquo;t have mine if I know it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked about her as if she had called up a legion of human beings, all
+hostile and all disagreeable, who encircled the table, with mouths gaping for
+blood, and made it appear a little island of neutral country in the midst of
+the enemy&rsquo;s country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her words roused her husband, who had been muttering rhythmically to himself,
+surveying his guests and his food and his wife with eyes that were now
+melancholy and now fierce, according to the fortunes of the lady in his ballad.
+He cut Helen short with a protest. He hated even the semblance of cynicism in
+women. &ldquo;Nonsense, nonsense,&rdquo; he remarked abruptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence and Rachel glanced at each other across the table, which meant that
+when they were married they would not behave like that. The entrance of Ridley
+into the conversation had a strange effect. It became at once more formal and
+more polite. It would have been impossible to talk quite easily of anything
+that came into their heads, and to say the word prostitute as simply as any
+other word. The talk now turned upon literature and politics, and Ridley told
+stories of the distinguished people he had known in his youth. Such talk was of
+the nature of an art, and the personalities and informalities of the young were
+silenced. As they rose to go, Helen stopped for a moment, leaning her elbows on
+the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve all been sitting here,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;for almost
+an hour, and you haven&rsquo;t noticed my figs, or my flowers, or the way the
+light comes through, or anything. I haven&rsquo;t been listening, because
+I&rsquo;ve been looking at you. You looked very beautiful; I wish you&rsquo;d
+go on sitting for ever.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She led the way to the drawing-room, where she took up her embroidery, and
+began again to dissuade Terence from walking down to the hotel in this heat.
+But the more she dissuaded, the more he was determined to go. He became
+irritated and obstinate. There were moments when they almost disliked each
+other. He wanted other people; he wanted Rachel, to see them with him. He
+suspected that Mrs. Ambrose would now try to dissuade her from going. He was
+annoyed by all this space and shade and beauty, and Hirst, recumbent, drooping
+a magazine from his wrist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going,&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;Rachel needn&rsquo;t come
+unless she wants to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you go, Hewet, I wish you&rsquo;d make enquiries about the
+prostitute,&rdquo; said Hirst. &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; he added,
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll walk half the way with you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Greatly to their surprise he raised himself, looked at his watch, and remarked
+that, as it was now half an hour since luncheon, the gastric juices had had
+sufficient time to secrete; he was trying a system, he explained, which
+involved short spells of exercise interspaced by longer intervals of rest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall be back at four,&rdquo; he remarked to Helen, &ldquo;when I
+shall lie down on the sofa and relax all my muscles completely.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So you&rsquo;re going, Rachel?&rdquo; Helen asked. &ldquo;You
+won&rsquo;t stay with me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She smiled, but she might have been sad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Was she sad, or was she really laughing? Rachel could not tell, and she felt
+for the moment very uncomfortable between Helen and Terence. Then she turned
+away, saying merely that she would go with Terence, on condition that he did
+all the talking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A narrow border of shadow ran along the road, which was broad enough for two,
+but not broad enough for three. St. John therefore dropped a little behind the
+pair, and the distance between them increased by degrees. Walking with a view
+to digestion, and with one eye upon his watch, he looked from time to time at
+the pair in front of him. They seemed to be so happy, so intimate, although
+they were walking side by side much as other people walk. They turned slightly
+toward each other now and then, and said something which he thought must be
+something very private. They were really disputing about Helen&rsquo;s
+character, and Terence was trying to explain why it was that she annoyed him so
+much sometimes. But St. John thought that they were saying things which they
+did not want him to hear, and was led to think of his own isolation. These
+people were happy, and in some ways he despised them for being made happy so
+simply, and in other ways he envied them. He was much more remarkable than they
+were, but he was not happy. People never liked him; he doubted sometimes
+whether even Helen liked him. To be simple, to be able to say simply what one
+felt, without the terrific self-consciousness which possessed him, and showed
+him his own face and words perpetually in a mirror, that would be worth almost
+any other gift, for it made one happy. Happiness, happiness, what was
+happiness? He was never happy. He saw too clearly the little vices and deceits
+and flaws of life, and, seeing them, it seemed to him honest to take notice of
+them. That was the reason, no doubt, why people generally disliked him, and
+complained that he was heartless and bitter. Certainly they never told him the
+things he wanted to be told, that he was nice and kind, and that they liked
+him. But it was true that half the sharp things that he said about them were
+said because he was unhappy or hurt himself. But he admitted that he had very
+seldom told any one that he cared for them, and when he had been demonstrative,
+he had generally regretted it afterwards. His feelings about Terence and Rachel
+were so complicated that he had never yet been able to bring himself to say
+that he was glad that they were going to be married. He saw their faults so
+clearly, and the inferior nature of a great deal of their feeling for each
+other, and he expected that their love would not last. He looked at them again,
+and, very strangely, for he was so used to thinking that he seldom saw
+anything, the look of them filled him with a simple emotion of affection in
+which there were some traces of pity also. What, after all, did people&rsquo;s
+faults matter in comparison with what was good in them? He resolved that he
+would now tell them what he felt. He quickened his pace and came up with them
+just as they reached the corner where the lane joined the main road. They stood
+still and began to laugh at him, and to ask him whether the gastric
+juices&mdash;but he stopped them and began to speak very quickly and stiffly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you remember the morning after the dance?&rdquo; he demanded.
+&ldquo;It was here we sat, and you talked nonsense, and Rachel made little
+heaps of stones. I, on the other hand, had the whole meaning of life revealed
+to me in a flash.&rdquo; He paused for a second, and drew his lips together in
+a tight little purse. &ldquo;Love,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It seems to me to
+explain everything. So, on the whole, I&rsquo;m very glad that you two are
+going to be married.&rdquo; He then turned round abruptly, without looking at
+them, and walked back to the villa. He felt both exalted and ashamed of himself
+for having thus said what he felt. Probably they were laughing at him, probably
+they thought him a fool, and, after all, had he really said what he felt?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was true that they laughed when he was gone; but the dispute about Helen
+which had become rather sharp, ceased, and they became peaceful and friendly.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap24"></a>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+
+<p>
+They reached the hotel rather early in the afternoon, so that most people were
+still lying down, or sitting speechless in their bedrooms, and Mrs. Thornbury,
+although she had asked them to tea, was nowhere to be seen. They sat down,
+therefore, in the shady hall, which was almost empty, and full of the light
+swishing sounds of air going to and fro in a large empty space. Yes, this
+arm-chair was the same arm-chair in which Rachel had sat that afternoon when
+Evelyn came up, and this was the magazine she had been looking at, and this the
+very picture, a picture of New York by lamplight. How odd it
+seemed&mdash;nothing had changed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By degrees a certain number of people began to come down the stairs and to pass
+through the hall, and in this dim light their figures possessed a sort of grace
+and beauty, although they were all unknown people. Sometimes they went straight
+through and out into the garden by the swing door, sometimes they stopped for a
+few minutes and bent over the tables and began turning over the newspapers.
+Terence and Rachel sat watching them through their half-closed
+eyelids&mdash;the Johnsons, the Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons&rsquo;, the
+Lees, the Morleys, the Campbells, the Gardiners. Some were dressed in white
+flannels and were carrying racquets under their arms, some were short, some
+tall, some were only children, and some perhaps were servants, but they all had
+their standing, their reason for following each other through the hall, their
+money, their position, whatever it might be. Terence soon gave up looking at
+them, for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he fell half asleep in his
+chair. Rachel watched the people for some time longer; she was fascinated by
+the certainty and the grace of their movements, and by the inevitable way in
+which they seemed to follow each other, and loiter and pass on and disappear.
+But after a time her thoughts wandered, and she began to think of the dance,
+which had been held in this room, only then the room itself looked quite
+different. Glancing round, she could hardly believe that it was the same room.
+It had looked so bare and so bright and formal on that night when they came
+into it out of the darkness; it had been filled, too, with little red, excited
+faces, always moving, and people so brightly dressed and so animated that they
+did not seem in the least like real people, nor did you feel that you could
+talk to them. And now the room was dim and quiet, and beautiful silent people
+passed through it, to whom you could go and say anything you liked. She felt
+herself amazingly secure as she sat in her arm-chair, and able to review not
+only the night of the dance, but the entire past, tenderly and humorously, as
+if she had been turning in a fog for a long time, and could now see exactly
+where she had turned. For the methods by which she had reached her present
+position, seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about them was
+that she had not known where they were leading her. That was the strange thing,
+that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed
+blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing
+nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed
+itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this
+certainty, and it was this process that people called living. Perhaps, then,
+every one really knew as she knew now where they were going; and things formed
+themselves into a pattern not only for her, but for them, and in that pattern
+lay satisfaction and meaning. When she looked back she could see that a meaning
+of some kind was apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the brief visit of
+the Dalloways whom she would never see again, and in the life of her father.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sound of Terence, breathing deep in his slumber, confirmed her in her calm.
+She was not sleepy although she did not see anything very distinctly, but
+although the figures passing through the hall became vaguer and vaguer, she
+believed that they all knew exactly where they were going, and the sense of
+their certainty filled her with comfort. For the moment she was as detached and
+disinterested as if she had no longer any lot in life, and she thought that she
+could now accept anything that came to her without being perplexed by the form
+in which it appeared. What was there to frighten or to perplex in the prospect
+of life? Why should this insight ever again desert her? The world was in truth
+so large, so hospitable, and after all it was so simple. &ldquo;Love,&rdquo;
+St. John had said, &ldquo;that seems to explain it all.&rdquo; Yes, but it was
+not the love of man for woman, of Terence for Rachel. Although they sat so
+close together, they had ceased to be little separate bodies; they had ceased
+to struggle and desire one another. There seemed to be peace between them. It
+might be love, but it was not the love of man for woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying back in his chair,
+and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth was, and his chin so small, and his
+nose curved like a switchback with a knob at the end. Naturally, looking like
+that he was lazy, and ambitious, and full of moods and faults. She remembered
+their quarrels, and in particular how they had been quarreling about Helen that
+very afternoon, and she thought how often they would quarrel in the thirty, or
+forty, or fifty years in which they would be living in the same house together,
+catching trains together, and getting annoyed because they were so different.
+But all this was superficial, and had nothing to do with the life that went on
+beneath the eyes and the mouth and the chin, for that life was independent of
+her, and independent of everything else. So too, although she was going to
+marry him and to live with him for thirty, or forty, or fifty years, and to
+quarrel, and to be so close to him, she was independent of him; she was
+independent of everything else. Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love
+that made her understand this, for she had never felt this independence, this
+calm, and this certainty until she fell in love with him, and perhaps this too
+was love. She wanted nothing else.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little distance
+looking at the couple lying back so peacefully in their arm-chairs. She could
+not make up her mind whether to disturb them or not, and then, seeming to
+recollect something, she came across the hall. The sound of her approach woke
+Terence, who sat up and rubbed his eyes. He heard Miss Allan talking to Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she was saying, &ldquo;this is very nice. It is very nice
+indeed. Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion. It cannot often happen
+that two couples who have never seen each other before meet in the same hotel
+and decide to get married.&rdquo; Then she paused and smiled, and seemed to
+have nothing more to say, so that Terence rose and asked her whether it was
+true that she had finished her book. Some one had said that she had really
+finished it. Her face lit up; she turned to him with a livelier expression than
+usual.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it,&rdquo; she said.
+&ldquo;That is, omitting Swinburne&mdash;Beowulf to Browning&mdash;I rather
+like the two B&rsquo;s myself. Beowulf to Browning,&rdquo; she repeated,
+&ldquo;I think that is the kind of title which might catch one&rsquo;s eye on a
+railway book-stall.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book, for no one knew what
+an amount of determination had gone to the making of it. Also she thought that
+it was a good piece of work, and, considering what anxiety she had been in
+about her brother while she wrote it, she could not resist telling them a
+little more about it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I must confess,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;that if I had known how
+many classics there are in English literature, and how verbose the best of them
+contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work. They only allow one
+seventy thousand words, you see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only seventy thousand words!&rdquo; Terence exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, and one has to say something about everybody,&rdquo; Miss Allan
+added. &ldquo;That is what I find so difficult, saying something different
+about everybody.&rdquo; Then she thought that she had said enough about
+herself, and she asked whether they had come down to join the tennis
+tournament. &ldquo;The young people are very keen about it. It begins again in
+half an hour.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her gaze rested benevolently upon them both, and, after a momentary pause, she
+remarked, looking at Rachel as if she had remembered something that would serve
+to keep her distinct from other people.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re the remarkable person who doesn&rsquo;t like ginger.&rdquo;
+But the kindness of the smile in her rather worn and courageous face made them
+feel that although she would scarcely remember them as individuals, she had
+laid upon them the burden of the new generation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And in that I quite agree with her,&rdquo; said a voice behind; Mrs.
+Thornbury had overheard the last few words about not liking ginger.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s associated in my mind with a horrid old aunt of ours (poor
+thing, she suffered dreadfully, so it isn&rsquo;t fair to call her horrid) who
+used to give it to us when we were small, and we never had the courage to tell
+her we didn&rsquo;t like it. We just had to put it out in the
+shrubbery&mdash;she had a big house near Bath.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They began moving slowly across the hall, when they were stopped by the impact
+of Evelyn, who dashed into them, as though in running downstairs to catch them
+her legs had got beyond her control.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she exclaimed, with her usual enthusiasm, seizing Rachel by
+the arm, &ldquo;I call this splendid! I guessed it was going to happen from the
+very beginning! I saw you two were made for each other. Now you&rsquo;ve just
+got to tell me all about it&mdash;when&rsquo;s it to be, where are you going to
+live&mdash;are you both tremendously happy?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the attention of the group was diverted to Mrs. Elliot, who was passing
+them with her eager but uncertain movement, carrying in her hands a plate and
+an empty hot-water bottle. She would have passed them, but Mrs. Thornbury went
+up and stopped her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank you, Hughling&rsquo;s better,&rdquo; she replied, in answer to
+Mrs. Thornbury&rsquo;s enquiry, &ldquo;but he&rsquo;s not an easy patient. He
+wants to know what his temperature is, and if I tell him he gets anxious, and
+if I don&rsquo;t tell him he suspects. You know what men are when they&rsquo;re
+ill! And of course there are none of the proper appliances, and, though he
+seems very willing and anxious to help&rdquo; (here she lowered her voice
+mysteriously), &ldquo;one can&rsquo;t feel that Dr. Rodriguez is the same as a
+proper doctor. If you would come and see him, Mr. Hewet,&rdquo; she added,
+&ldquo;I know it would cheer him up&mdash;lying there in bed all day&mdash;and
+the flies&mdash;But I must go and find Angelo&mdash;the food here&mdash;of
+course, with an invalid, one wants things particularly nice.&rdquo; And she
+hurried past them in search of the head waiter. The worry of nursing her
+husband had fixed a plaintive frown upon her forehead; she was pale and looked
+unhappy and more than usually inefficient, and her eyes wandered more vaguely
+than ever from point to point.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Poor thing!&rdquo; Mrs. Thornbury exclaimed. She told them that for some
+days Hughling Elliot had been ill, and the only doctor available was the
+brother of the proprietor, or so the proprietor said, whose right to the title
+of doctor was not above suspicion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know how wretched it is to be ill in a hotel,&rdquo; Mrs. Thornbury
+remarked, once more leading the way with Rachel to the garden. &ldquo;I spent
+six weeks on my honeymoon in having typhoid at Venice,&rdquo; she continued.
+&ldquo;But even so, I look back upon them as some of the happiest weeks in my
+life. Ah, yes,&rdquo; she said, taking Rachel&rsquo;s arm, &ldquo;you think
+yourself happy now, but it&rsquo;s nothing to the happiness that comes
+afterwards. And I assure you I could find it in my heart to envy you young
+people! You&rsquo;ve a much better time than we had, I may tell you. When I
+look back upon it, I can hardly believe how things have changed. When we were
+engaged I wasn&rsquo;t allowed to go for walks with William alone&mdash;some
+one had always to be in the room with us&mdash;I really believe I had to show
+my parents all his letters!&mdash;though they were very fond of him too.
+Indeed, I may say they looked upon him as their own son. It amuses me,&rdquo;
+she continued, &ldquo;to think how strict they were to us, when I see how they
+spoil their grand-children!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The table was laid under the tree again, and taking her place before the
+teacups, Mrs. Thornbury beckoned and nodded until she had collected quite a
+number of people, Susan and Arthur and Mr. Pepper, who were strolling about,
+waiting for the tournament to begin. A murmuring tree, a river brimming in the
+moonlight, Terence&rsquo;s words came back to Rachel as she sat drinking the
+tea and listening to the words which flowed on so lightly, so kindly, and with
+such silvery smoothness. This long life and all these children had left her
+very smooth; they seemed to have rubbed away the marks of individuality, and to
+have left only what was old and maternal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the things you young people are going to see!&rdquo; Mrs. Thornbury
+continued. She included them all in her forecast, she included them all in her
+maternity, although the party comprised William Pepper and Miss Allan, both of
+whom might have been supposed to have seen a fair share of the panorama.
+&ldquo;When I see how the world has changed in my lifetime,&rdquo; she went on,
+&ldquo;I can set no limit to what may happen in the next fifty years. Ah, no,
+Mr. Pepper, I don&rsquo;t agree with you in the least,&rdquo; she laughed,
+interrupting his gloomy remark about things going steadily from bad to worse.
+&ldquo;I know I ought to feel that, but I don&rsquo;t, I&rsquo;m afraid.
+They&rsquo;re going to be much better people than we were. Surely everything
+goes to prove that. All round me I see women, young women, women with household
+cares of every sort, going out and doing things that we should not have thought
+it possible to do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pepper thought her sentimental and irrational like all old women, but her
+manner of treating him as if he were a cross old baby baffled him and charmed
+him, and he could only reply to her with a curious grimace which was more a
+smile than a frown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And they remain women,&rdquo; Mrs. Thornbury added. &ldquo;They give a
+great deal to their children.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she said this she smiled slightly in the direction of Susan and Rachel. They
+did not like to be included in the same lot, but they both smiled a little
+self-consciously, and Arthur and Terence glanced at each other too. She made
+them feel that they were all in the same boat together, and they looked at the
+women they were going to marry and compared them. It was inexplicable how any
+one could wish to marry Rachel, incredible that any one should be ready to
+spend his life with Susan; but singular though the other&rsquo;s taste must be,
+they bore each other no ill-will on account of it; indeed, they liked each
+other rather the better for the eccentricity of their choice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I really must congratulate you,&rdquo; Susan remarked, as she leant
+across the table for the jam.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There seemed to be no foundation for St. John&rsquo;s gossip about Arthur and
+Susan. Sunburnt and vigorous they sat side by side, with their racquets across
+their knees, not saying much but smiling slightly all the time. Through the
+thin white clothes which they wore, it was possible to see the lines of their
+bodies and legs, the beautiful curves of their muscles, his leanness and her
+flesh, and it was natural to think of the firm-fleshed sturdy children that
+would be theirs. Their faces had too little shape in them to be beautiful, but
+they had clear eyes and an appearance of great health and power of endurance,
+for it seemed as if the blood would never cease to run in his veins, or to lie
+deeply and calmly in her cheeks. Their eyes at the present moment were brighter
+than usual, and wore the peculiar expression of pleasure and self-confidence
+which is seen in the eyes of athletes, for they had been playing tennis, and
+they were both first-rate at the game.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Evelyn had not spoken, but she had been looking from Susan to Rachel.
+Well&mdash;they had both made up their minds very easily, they had done in a
+very few weeks what it sometimes seemed to her that she would never be able to
+do. Although they were so different, she thought that she could see in each the
+same look of satisfaction and completion, the same calmness of manner, and the
+same slowness of movement. It was that slowness, that confidence, that content
+which she hated, she thought to herself. They moved so slowly because they were
+not single but double, and Susan was attached to Arthur, and Rachel to Terence,
+and for the sake of this one man they had renounced all other men, and
+movement, and the real things of life. Love was all very well, and those snug
+domestic houses, with the kitchen below and the nursery above, which were so
+secluded and self-contained, like little islands in the torrents of the world;
+but the real things were surely the things that happened, the causes, the wars,
+the ideals, which happened in the great world outside, and went so
+independently of these women, turning so quietly and beautifully towards the
+men. She looked at them sharply. Of course they were happy and content, but
+there must be better things than that. Surely one could get nearer to life, one
+could get more out of life, one could enjoy more and feel more than they would
+ever do. Rachel in particular looked so young&mdash;what could she know of
+life? She became restless, and getting up, crossed over to sit beside Rachel.
+She reminded her that she had promised to join her club.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The bother is,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;that I mayn&rsquo;t be able to
+start work seriously till October. I&rsquo;ve just had a letter from a friend
+of mine whose brother is in business in Moscow. They want me to stay with them,
+and as they&rsquo;re in the thick of all the conspiracies and anarchists,
+I&rsquo;ve a good mind to stop on my way home. It sounds too thrilling.&rdquo;
+She wanted to make Rachel see how thrilling it was. &ldquo;My friend knows a
+girl of fifteen who&rsquo;s been sent to Siberia for life merely because they
+caught her addressing a letter to an anarchist. And the letter wasn&rsquo;t
+from her, either. I&rsquo;d give all I have in the world to help on a
+revolution against the Russian government, and it&rsquo;s bound to come.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked from Rachel to Terence. They were both a little touched by the sight
+of her remembering how lately they had been listening to evil words about her,
+and Terence asked her what her scheme was, and she explained that she was going
+to found a club&mdash;a club for doing things, really doing them. She became
+very animated, as she talked on and on, for she professed herself certain that
+if once twenty people&mdash;no, ten would be enough if they were keen&mdash;set
+about doing things instead of talking about doing them, they could abolish
+almost every evil that exists. It was brains that were needed. If only people
+with brains&mdash;of course they would want a room, a nice room, in Bloomsbury
+preferably, where they could meet once a week. . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she talked Terence could see the traces of fading youth in her face, the
+lines that were being drawn by talk and excitement round her mouth and eyes,
+but he did not pity her; looking into those bright, rather hard, and very
+courageous eyes, he saw that she did not pity herself, or feel any desire to
+exchange her own life for the more refined and orderly lives of people like
+himself and St. John, although, as the years went by, the fight would become
+harder and harder. Perhaps, though, she would settle down; perhaps, after all,
+she would marry Perrott. While his mind was half occupied with what she was
+saying, he thought of her probable destiny, the light clouds of tobacco smoke
+serving to obscure his face from her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence smoked and Arthur smoked and Evelyn smoked, so that the air was full of
+the mist and fragrance of good tobacco. In the intervals when no one spoke,
+they heard far off the low murmur of the sea, as the waves quietly broke and
+spread the beach with a film of water, and withdrew to break again. The cool
+green light fell through the leaves of the tree, and there were soft crescents
+and diamonds of sunshine upon the plates and the tablecloth. Mrs. Thornbury,
+after watching them all for a time in silence, began to ask Rachel kindly
+questions&mdash;When did they all go back? Oh, they expected her father. She
+must want to see her father&mdash;there would be a great deal to tell him, and
+(she looked sympathetically at Terence) he would be so happy, she felt sure.
+Years ago, she continued, it might have been ten or twenty years ago, she
+remembered meeting Mr. Vinrace at a party, and, being so much struck by his
+face, which was so unlike the ordinary face one sees at a party, that she had
+asked who he was, and she was told that it was Mr. Vinrace, and she had always
+remembered the name,&mdash;an uncommon name,&mdash;and he had a lady with him,
+a very sweet-looking woman, but it was one of those dreadful London crushes,
+where you don&rsquo;t talk,&mdash;you only look at each other,&mdash;and
+although she had shaken hands with Mr. Vinrace, she didn&rsquo;t think they had
+said anything. She sighed very slightly, remembering the past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she turned to Mr. Pepper, who had become very dependent on her, so that he
+always chose a seat near her, and attended to what she was saying, although he
+did not often make any remark of his own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You who know everything, Mr. Pepper,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;tell us how
+did those wonderful French ladies manage their salons? Did we ever do anything
+of the same kind in England, or do you think that there is some reason why we
+cannot do it in England?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pepper was pleased to explain very accurately why there has never been an
+English salon. There were three reasons, and they were very good ones, he said.
+As for himself, when he went to a party, as one was sometimes obliged to, from
+a wish not to give offence&mdash;his niece, for example, had been married the
+other day&mdash;he walked into the middle of the room, said &ldquo;Ha!
+ha!&rdquo; as loud as ever he could, considered that he had done his duty, and
+walked away again. Mrs. Thornbury protested. She was going to give a party
+directly she got back, and they were all to be invited, and she should set
+people to watch Mr. Pepper, and if she heard that he had been caught saying
+&ldquo;Ha! ha!&rdquo; she would&mdash;she would do something very dreadful
+indeed to him. Arthur Venning suggested that what she must do was to rig up
+something in the nature of a surprise&mdash;a portrait, for example, of a nice
+old lady in a lace cap, concealing a bath of cold water, which at a signal
+could be sprung on Pepper&rsquo;s head; or they&rsquo;d have a chair which shot
+him twenty feet high directly he sat on it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Susan laughed. She had done her tea; she was feeling very well contented,
+partly because she had been playing tennis brilliantly, and then every one was
+so nice; she was beginning to find it so much easier to talk, and to hold her
+own even with quite clever people, for somehow clever people did not frighten
+her any more. Even Mr. Hirst, whom she had disliked when she first met him,
+really wasn&rsquo;t disagreeable; and, poor man, he always looked so ill;
+perhaps he was in love; perhaps he had been in love with Rachel&mdash;she
+really shouldn&rsquo;t wonder; or perhaps it was Evelyn&mdash;she was of course
+very attractive to men. Leaning forward, she went on with the conversation. She
+said that she thought that the reason why parties were so dull was mainly
+because gentlemen will not dress: even in London, she stated, it struck her
+very much how people don&rsquo;t think it necessary to dress in the evening,
+and of course if they don&rsquo;t dress in London they won&rsquo;t dress in the
+country. It was really quite a treat at Christmas-time when there were the Hunt
+balls, and the gentlemen wore nice red coats, but Arthur didn&rsquo;t care for
+dancing, so she supposed that they wouldn&rsquo;t go even to the ball in their
+little country town. She didn&rsquo;t think that people who were fond of one
+sport often care for another, although her father was an exception. But then he
+was an exception in every way&mdash;such a gardener, and he knew all about
+birds and animals, and of course he was simply adored by all the old women in
+the village, and at the same time what he really liked best was a book. You
+always knew where to find him if he were wanted; he would be in his study with
+a book. Very likely it would be an old, old book, some fusty old thing that no
+one else would dream of reading. She used to tell him that he would have made a
+first-rate old bookworm if only he hadn&rsquo;t had a family of six to support,
+and six children, she added, charmingly confident of universal sympathy,
+didn&rsquo;t leave one much time for being a bookworm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still talking about her father, of whom she was very proud, she rose, for
+Arthur upon looking at his watch found that it was time they went back again to
+the tennis court. The others did not move.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re very happy!&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury, looking
+benignantly after them. Rachel agreed; they seemed to be so certain of
+themselves; they seemed to know exactly what they wanted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you think they <i>are</i> happy?&rdquo; Evelyn murmured to
+Terence in an undertone, and she hoped that he would say that he did not think
+them happy; but, instead, he said that they must go too&mdash;go home, for they
+were always being late for meals, and Mrs. Ambrose, who was very stern and
+particular, didn&rsquo;t like that. Evelyn laid hold of Rachel&rsquo;s skirt
+and protested. Why should they go? It was still early, and she had so many
+things to say to them. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Terence, &ldquo;we must go,
+because we walk so slowly. We stop and look at things, and we talk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What d&rsquo;you talk about?&rdquo; Evelyn enquired, upon which he
+laughed and said that they talked about everything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Thornbury went with them to the gate, trailing very slowly and gracefully
+across the grass and the gravel, and talking all the time about flowers and
+birds. She told them that she had taken up the study of botany since her
+daughter married, and it was wonderful what a number of flowers there were
+which she had never seen, although she had lived in the country all her life
+and she was now seventy-two. It was a good thing to have some occupation which
+was quite independent of other people, she said, when one got old. But the odd
+thing was that one never felt old. She always felt that she was twenty-five,
+not a day more or a day less, but, of course, one couldn&rsquo;t expect other
+people to agree to that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to imagine
+that you&rsquo;re twenty-five,&rdquo; she said, looking from one to the other
+with her smooth, bright glance. &ldquo;It must be very wonderful, very
+wonderful indeed.&rdquo; She stood talking to them at the gate for a long time;
+she seemed reluctant that they should go.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap25"></a>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+
+<p>
+The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on the shore
+sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature, and even on the
+terrace under an awning the bricks were hot, and the air danced perpetually
+over the short dry grass. The red flowers in the stone basins were drooping
+with the heat, and the white blossoms which had been so smooth and thick only a
+few weeks ago were now dry, and their edges were curled and yellow. Only the
+stiff and hostile plants of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be grown
+upon spines, still remained standing upright and defied the sun to beat them
+down. It was too hot to talk, and it was not easy to find any book that would
+withstand the power of the sun. Many books had been tried and then let fall,
+and now Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the words of Milton
+had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary to understand what he was
+saying; one could merely listen to his words; one could almost handle them.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+he read,
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.<br />
+Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;<br />
+Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,<br />
+That had the sceptre from his father Brute.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+The words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be laden with meaning,
+and perhaps it was for this reason that it was painful to listen to them; they
+sounded strange; they meant different things from what they usually meant.
+Rachel at any rate could not keep her attention fixed upon them, but went off
+upon curious trains of thought suggested by words such as &ldquo;curb&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;Locrine&rdquo; and &ldquo;Brute,&rdquo; which brought unpleasant
+sights before her eyes, independently of their meaning. Owing to the heat and
+the dancing air the garden too looked strange&mdash;the trees were either too
+near or too far, and her head almost certainly ached. She was not quite
+certain, and therefore she did not know, whether to tell Terence now, or to let
+him go on reading. She decided that she would wait until he came to the end of
+a stanza, and if by that time she had turned her head this way and that, and it
+ached in every position undoubtedly, she would say very calmly that her head
+ached.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Sabrina fair,<br />
+    Listen where thou art sitting<br />
+Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,<br />
+    In twisted braids of lilies knitting<br />
+The loose train of thy amber dropping hair,<br />
+Listen for dear honour&rsquo;s sake,<br />
+    Goddess of the silver lake,<br />
+    Listen and save!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But her head ached; it ached whichever way she turned it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sat up and said as she had determined, &ldquo;My head aches so that I shall
+go indoors.&rdquo; He was half-way through the next verse, but he dropped the
+book instantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your head aches?&rdquo; he repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a few moments they sat looking at one another in silence, holding each
+other&rsquo;s hands. During this time his sense of dismay and catastrophe were
+almost physically painful; all round him he seemed to hear the shiver of broken
+glass which, as it fell to earth, left him sitting in the open air. But at the
+end of two minutes, noticing that she was not sharing his dismay, but was only
+rather more languid and heavy-eyed than usual, he recovered, fetched Helen, and
+asked her to tell him what they had better do, for Rachel had a headache.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Ambrose was not discomposed, but advised that she should go to bed, and
+added that she must expect her head to ache if she sat up to all hours and went
+out in the heat, but a few hours in bed would cure it completely. Terence was
+unreasonably reassured by her words, as he had been unreasonably depressed the
+moment before. Helen&rsquo;s sense seemed to have much in common with the
+ruthless good sense of nature, which avenged rashness by a headache, and, like
+nature&rsquo;s good sense, might be depended upon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel went to bed; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her, for a very long
+time, but at length, waking from a transparent kind of sleep, she saw the
+windows white in front of her, and recollected that some time before she had
+gone to bed with a headache, and that Helen had said it would be gone when she
+woke. She supposed, therefore, that she was now quite well again. At the same
+time the wall of her room was painfully white, and curved slightly, instead of
+being straight and flat. Turning her eyes to the window, she was not reassured
+by what she saw there. The movement of the blind as it filled with air and blew
+slowly out, drawing the cord with a little trailing sound along the floor,
+seemed to her terrifying, as if it were the movement of an animal in the room.
+She shut her eyes, and the pulse in her head beat so strongly that each thump
+seemed to tread upon a nerve, piercing her forehead with a little stab of pain.
+It might not be the same headache, but she certainly had a headache. She turned
+from side to side, in the hope that the coolness of the sheets would cure her,
+and that when she next opened her eyes to look the room would be as usual.
+After a considerable number of vain experiments, she resolved to put the matter
+beyond a doubt. She got out of bed and stood upright, holding on to the brass
+ball at the end of the bedstead. Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as
+the palm of her hand, and as the pains in her head and body and the instability
+of the floor proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and walk
+than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change was
+refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great as the discomfort
+of standing up. She accepted the idea that she would have to stay in bed all
+day long, and as she laid her head on the pillow, relinquished the happiness of
+the day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped her cheerful words,
+looked startled for a second and then unnaturally calm, the fact that she was
+ill was put beyond a doubt. It was confirmed when the whole household knew of
+it, when the song that some one was singing in the garden stopped suddenly, and
+when Maria, as she brought water, slipped past the bed with averted eyes. There
+was all the morning to get through, and then all the afternoon, and at
+intervals she made an effort to cross over into the ordinary world, but she
+found that her heat and discomfort had put a gulf between her world and the
+ordinary world which she could not bridge. At one point the door opened, and
+Helen came in with a little dark man who had&mdash;it was the chief thing she
+noticed about him&mdash;very hairy hands. She was drowsy and intolerably hot,
+and as he seemed shy and obsequious she scarcely troubled to answer him,
+although she understood that he was a doctor. At another point the door opened
+and Terence came in very gently, smiling too steadily, as she realised, for it
+to be natural. He sat down and talked to her, stroking her hands until it
+became irksome to her to lie any more in the same position and she turned
+round, and when she looked up again Helen was beside her and Terence had gone.
+It did not matter; she would see him to-morrow when things would be ordinary
+again. Her chief occupation during the day was to try to remember how the lines
+went:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,<br />
+In twisted braids of lilies knitting<br />
+The loose train of thy amber dropping hair;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+and the effort worried her because the adjectives persisted in getting into the
+wrong places.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second day did not differ very much from the first day, except that her bed
+had become very important, and the world outside, when she tried to think of
+it, appeared distinctly further off. The glassy, cool, translucent wave was
+almost visible before her, curling up at the end of the bed, and as it was
+refreshingly cool she tried to keep her mind fixed upon it. Helen was here, and
+Helen was there all day long; sometimes she said that it was lunchtime, and
+sometimes that it was teatime; but by the next day all landmarks were
+obliterated, and the outer world was so far away that the different sounds,
+such as the sounds of people moving overhead, could only be ascribed to their
+cause by a great effort of memory. The recollection of what she had felt, or of
+what she had been doing and thinking three days before, had faded entirely. On
+the other hand, every object in the room, and the bed itself, and her own body
+with its various limbs and their different sensations were more and more
+important each day. She was completely cut off, and unable to communicate with
+the rest of the world, isolated alone with her body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through the
+morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to the depths of
+the night. One evening when the room appeared very dim, either because it was
+evening or because the blinds were drawn, Helen said to her, &ldquo;Some one is
+going to sit here to-night. You won&rsquo;t mind?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Opening her eyes, Rachel saw not only Helen but a nurse in spectacles, whose
+face vaguely recalled something that she had once seen. She had seen her in the
+chapel. &ldquo;Nurse McInnis,&rdquo; said Helen, and the nurse smiled steadily
+as they all did, and said that she did not find many people who were frightened
+of her. After waiting for a moment they both disappeared, and having turned on
+her pillow Rachel woke to find herself in the midst of one of those
+interminable nights which do not end at twelve, but go on into the double
+figures&mdash;thirteen, fourteen, and so on until they reach the twenties, and
+then the thirties, and then the forties. She realised that there is nothing to
+prevent nights from doing this if they choose. At a great distance an elderly
+woman sat with her head bent down; Rachel raised herself slightly and saw with
+dismay that she was playing cards by the light of a candle which stood in the
+hollow of a newspaper. The sight had something inexplicably sinister about it,
+and she was terrified and cried out, upon which the woman laid down her cards
+and came across the room, shading the candle with her hands. Coming nearer and
+nearer across the great space of the room, she stood at last above
+Rachel&rsquo;s head and said, &ldquo;Not asleep? Let me make you
+comfortable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She put down the candle and began to arrange the bedclothes. It struck Rachel
+that a woman who sat playing cards in a cavern all night long would have very
+cold hands, and she shrunk from the touch of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, there&rsquo;s a toe all the way down there!&rdquo; the woman said,
+proceeding to tuck in the bedclothes. Rachel did not realise that the toe was
+hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must try and lie still,&rdquo; she proceeded, &ldquo;because if you
+lie still you will be less hot, and if you toss about you will make yourself
+more hot, and we don&rsquo;t want you to be any hotter than you are.&rdquo; She
+stood looking down upon Rachel for an enormous length of time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well,&rdquo; she
+repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling, and all her
+energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should move. But the
+shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed above her. She shut her eyes.
+When she opened them again several more hours had passed, but the night still
+lasted interminably. The woman was still playing cards, only she sat now in a
+tunnel under a river, and the light stood in a little archway in the wall above
+her. She cried &ldquo;Terence!&rdquo; and the peaked shadow again moved across
+the ceiling, as the woman with an enormous slow movement rose, and they both
+stood still above her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep Mr.
+Forrest in bed,&rdquo; the woman said, &ldquo;and he was such a tall
+gentleman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again shut her
+eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames, where there
+were little deformed women sitting in archways playing cards, while the bricks
+of which the wall was made oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid
+down the wall. But the little old women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a
+time, standing in the window together whispering, whispering incessantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile outside her room the sounds, the movements, and the lives of the
+other people in the house went on in the ordinary light of the sun, throughout
+the usual succession of hours. When, on the first day of her illness, it became
+clear that she would not be absolutely well, for her temperature was very high,
+until Friday, that day being Tuesday, Terence was filled with resentment, not
+against her, but against the force outside them which was separating them. He
+counted up the number of days that would almost certainly be spoilt for them.
+He realised, with an odd mixture of pleasure and annoyance, that, for the first
+time in his life, he was so dependent upon another person that his happiness
+was in her keeping. The days were completely wasted upon trifling, immaterial
+things, for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity all the usual
+occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point. The least intolerable
+occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel&rsquo;s illness, and to discuss
+every symptom and its meaning, and, when this subject was exhausted, to discuss
+illness of all kinds, and what caused them, and what cured them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Twice every day he went in to sit with Rachel, and twice every day the same
+thing happened. On going into her room, which was not very dark, where the
+music was lying about as usual, and her books and letters, his spirits rose
+instantly. When he saw her he felt completely reassured. She did not look very
+ill. Sitting by her side he would tell her what he had been doing, using his
+natural voice to speak to her, only a few tones lower down than usual; but by
+the time he had sat there for five minutes he was plunged into the deepest
+gloom. She was not the same; he could not bring them back to their old
+relationship; but although he knew that it was foolish he could not prevent
+himself from endeavouring to bring her back, to make her remember, and when
+this failed he was in despair. He always concluded as he left her room that it
+was worse to see her than not to see her, but by degrees, as the day wore on,
+the desire to see her returned and became almost too great to be borne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On Thursday morning when Terence went into her room he felt the usual increase
+of confidence. She turned round and made an effort to remember certain facts
+from the world that was so many millions of miles away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have come up from the hotel?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; I&rsquo;m staying here for the present,&rdquo; he said.
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve just had luncheon,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;and the mail
+has come in. There&rsquo;s a bundle of letters for you&mdash;letters from
+England.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instead of saying, as he meant her to say, that she wished to see them, she
+said nothing for some time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see, there they go, rolling off the edge of the hill,&rdquo; she
+said suddenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rolling, Rachel? What do you see rolling? There&rsquo;s nothing
+rolling.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The old woman with the knife,&rdquo; she replied, not speaking to
+Terence in particular, and looking past him. As she appeared to be looking at a
+vase on the shelf opposite, he rose and took it down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now they can&rsquo;t roll any more,&rdquo; he said cheerfully.
+Nevertheless she lay gazing at the same spot, and paid him no further attention
+although he spoke to her. He became so profoundly wretched that he could not
+endure to sit with her, but wandered about until he found St. John, who was
+reading <i>The Times</i> in the verandah. He laid it aside patiently, and heard
+all that Terence had to say about delirium. He was very patient with Terence.
+He treated him like a child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By Friday it could not be denied that the illness was no longer an attack that
+would pass off in a day or two; it was a real illness that required a good deal
+of organisation, and engrossed the attention of at least five people, but there
+was no reason to be anxious. Instead of lasting five days it was going to last
+ten days. Rodriguez was understood to say that there were well-known varieties
+of this illness. Rodriguez appeared to think that they were treating the
+illness with undue anxiety. His visits were always marked by the same show of
+confidence, and in his interviews with Terence he always waved aside his
+anxious and minute questions with a kind of flourish which seemed to indicate
+that they were all taking it much too seriously. He seemed curiously unwilling
+to sit down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A high temperature,&rdquo; he said, looking furtively about the room,
+and appearing to be more interested in the furniture and in Helen&rsquo;s
+embroidery than in anything else. &ldquo;In this climate you must expect a high
+temperature. You need not be alarmed by that. It is the pulse we go by&rdquo;
+(he tapped his own hairy wrist), &ldquo;and the pulse continues
+excellent.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thereupon he bowed and slipped out. The interview was conducted laboriously
+upon both sides in French, and this, together with the fact that he was
+optimistic, and that Terence respected the medical profession from hearsay,
+made him less critical than he would have been had he encountered the doctor in
+any other capacity. Unconsciously he took Rodriguez&rsquo; side against Helen,
+who seemed to have taken an unreasonable prejudice against him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Saturday came it was evident that the hours of the day must be more
+strictly organised than they had been. St. John offered his services; he said
+that he had nothing to do, and that he might as well spend the day at the villa
+if he could be of use. As if they were starting on a difficult expedition
+together, they parcelled out their duties between them, writing out an
+elaborate scheme of hours upon a large sheet of paper which was pinned to the
+drawing-room door. Their distance from the town, and the difficulty of
+procuring rare things with unknown names from the most unexpected places, made
+it necessary to think very carefully, and they found it unexpectedly difficult
+to do the simple but practical things that were required of them, as if they,
+being very tall, were asked to stoop down and arrange minute grains of sand in
+a pattern on the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was St. John&rsquo;s duty to fetch what was needed from the town, so that
+Terence would sit all through the long hot hours alone in the drawing-room,
+near the open door, listening for any movement upstairs, or call from Helen. He
+always forgot to pull down the blinds, so that he sat in bright sunshine, which
+worried him without his knowing what was the cause of it. The room was terribly
+stiff and uncomfortable. There were hats in the chairs, and medicine bottles
+among the books. He tried to read, but good books were too good, and bad books
+were too bad, and the only thing he could tolerate was the newspaper, which
+with its news of London, and the movements of real people who were giving
+dinner-parties and making speeches, seemed to give a little background of
+reality to what was otherwise mere nightmare. Then, just as his attention was
+fixed on the print, a soft call would come from Helen, or Mrs. Chailey would
+bring in something which was wanted upstairs, and he would run up very quietly
+in his socks, and put the jug on the little table which stood crowded with jugs
+and cups outside the bedroom door; or if he could catch Helen for a moment he
+would ask, &ldquo;How is she?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rather restless. . . . On the whole, quieter, I think.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The answer would be one or the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As usual she seemed to reserve something which she did not say, and Terence was
+conscious that they disagreed, and, without saying it aloud, were arguing
+against each other. But she was too hurried and pre-occupied to talk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The strain of listening and the effort of making practical arrangements and
+seeing that things worked smoothly, absorbed all Terence&rsquo;s power.
+Involved in this long dreary nightmare, he did not attempt to think what it
+amounted to. Rachel was ill; that was all; he must see that there was medicine
+and milk, and that things were ready when they were wanted. Thought had ceased;
+life itself had come to a standstill. Sunday was rather worse than Saturday had
+been, simply because the strain was a little greater every day, although
+nothing else had changed. The separate feelings of pleasure, interest, and
+pain, which combine to make up the ordinary day, were merged in one long-drawn
+sensation of sordid misery and profound boredom. He had never been so bored
+since he was shut up in the nursery alone as a child. The vision of Rachel as
+she was now, confused and heedless, had almost obliterated the vision of her as
+she had been once long ago; he could hardly believe that they had ever been
+happy, or engaged to be married, for what were feelings, what was there to be
+felt? Confusion covered every sight and person, and he seemed to see St. John,
+Ridley, and the stray people who came up now and then from the hotel to
+enquire, through a mist; the only people who were not hidden in this mist were
+Helen and Rodriguez, because they could tell him something definite about
+Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless the day followed the usual forms. At certain hours they went into
+the dining-room, and when they sat round the table they talked about
+indifferent things. St. John usually made it his business to start the talk and
+to keep it from dying out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve discovered the way to get Sancho past the white house,&rdquo;
+said St. John on Sunday at luncheon. &ldquo;You crackle a piece of paper in his
+ear, then he bolts for about a hundred yards, but he goes on quite well after
+that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, but he wants corn. You should see that he has corn.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think much of the stuff they give him; and Angelo seems a
+dirty little rascal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was then a long silence. Ridley murmured a few lines of poetry under his
+breath, and remarked, as if to conceal the fact that he had done so,
+&ldquo;Very hot to-day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two degrees higher than it was yesterday,&rdquo; said St. John. &ldquo;I
+wonder where these nuts come from,&rdquo; he observed, taking a nut out of the
+plate, turning it over in his fingers, and looking at it curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;London, I should think,&rdquo; said Terence, looking at the nut too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A competent man of business could make a fortune here in no time,&rdquo;
+St. John continued. &ldquo;I suppose the heat does something funny to
+people&rsquo;s brains. Even the English go a little queer. Anyhow they&rsquo;re
+hopeless people to deal with. They kept me three-quarters of an hour waiting at
+the chemist&rsquo;s this morning, for no reason whatever.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was another long pause. Then Ridley enquired, &ldquo;Rodriguez seems
+satisfied?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite,&rdquo; said Terence with decision. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just got to
+run its course.&rdquo; Whereupon Ridley heaved a deep sigh. He was genuinely
+sorry for every one, but at the same time he missed Helen considerably, and was
+a little aggrieved by the constant presence of the two young men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They moved back into the drawing-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look here, Hirst,&rdquo; said Terence, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s nothing to
+be done for two hours.&rdquo; He consulted the sheet pinned to the door.
+&ldquo;You go and lie down. I&rsquo;ll wait here. Chailey sits with Rachel
+while Helen has her luncheon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was asking a good deal of Hirst to tell him to go without waiting for a
+sight of Helen. These little glimpses of Helen were the only respites from
+strain and boredom, and very often they seemed to make up for the discomfort of
+the day, although she might not have anything to tell them. However, as they
+were on an expedition together, he had made up his mind to obey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen was very late in coming down. She looked like a person who has been
+sitting for a long time in the dark. She was pale and thinner, and the
+expression of her eyes was harassed but determined. She ate her luncheon
+quickly, and seemed indifferent to what she was doing. She brushed aside
+Terence&rsquo;s enquiries, and at last, as if he had not spoken, she looked at
+him with a slight frown and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We can&rsquo;t go on like this, Terence. Either you&rsquo;ve got to find
+another doctor, or you must tell Rodriguez to stop coming, and I&rsquo;ll
+manage for myself. It&rsquo;s no use for him to say that Rachel&rsquo;s better;
+she&rsquo;s not better; she&rsquo;s worse.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence suffered a terrific shock, like that which he had suffered when Rachel
+said, &ldquo;My head aches.&rdquo; He stilled it by reflecting that Helen was
+overwrought, and he was upheld in this opinion by his obstinate sense that she
+was opposed to him in the argument.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you think she&rsquo;s in danger?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No one can go on being as ill as that day after day&mdash;&rdquo; Helen
+replied. She looked at him, and spoke as if she felt some indignation with
+somebody.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very well, I&rsquo;ll talk to Rodriguez this afternoon,&rdquo; he
+replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen went upstairs at once.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing now could assuage Terence&rsquo;s anxiety. He could not read, nor could
+he sit still, and his sense of security was shaken, in spite of the fact that
+he was determined that Helen was exaggerating, and that Rachel was not very
+ill. But he wanted a third person to confirm him in his belief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Directly Rodriguez came down he demanded, &ldquo;Well, how is she? Do you think
+her worse?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is no reason for anxiety, I tell you&mdash;none,&rdquo; Rodriguez
+replied in his execrable French, smiling uneasily, and making little movements
+all the time as if to get away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hewet stood firmly between him and the door. He was determined to see for
+himself what kind of man he was. His confidence in the man vanished as he
+looked at him and saw his insignificance, his dirty appearance, his shiftiness,
+and his unintelligent, hairy face. It was strange that he had never seen this
+before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t object, of course, if we ask you to consult another
+doctor?&rdquo; he continued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this the little man became openly incensed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;You have not confidence in me? You object to
+my treatment? You wish me to give up the case?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; Terence replied, &ldquo;but in serious illness of
+this kind&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rodriguez shrugged his shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not serious, I assure you. You are overanxious. The young lady is
+not seriously ill, and I am a doctor. The lady of course is frightened,&rdquo;
+he sneered. &ldquo;I understand that perfectly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The name and address of the doctor is&mdash;?&rdquo; Terence continued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is no other doctor,&rdquo; Rodriguez replied sullenly.
+&ldquo;Every one has confidence in me. Look! I will show you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took out a packet of old letters and began turning them over as if in search
+of one that would confute Terence&rsquo;s suspicions. As he searched, he began
+to tell a story about an English lord who had trusted him&mdash;a great English
+lord, whose name he had, unfortunately, forgotten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is no other doctor in the place,&rdquo; he concluded, still
+turning over the letters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind,&rdquo; said Terence shortly. &ldquo;I will make enquiries
+for myself.&rdquo; Rodriguez put the letters back in his pocket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;I have no objection.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lifted his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, as if to repeat that they took
+the illness much too seriously and that there was no other doctor, and slipped
+out, leaving behind him an impression that he was conscious that he was
+distrusted, and that his malice was aroused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After this Terence could no longer stay downstairs. He went up, knocked at
+Rachel&rsquo;s door, and asked Helen whether he might see her for a few
+minutes. He had not seen her yesterday. She made no objection, and went and sat
+at a table in the window.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence sat down by the bedside. Rachel&rsquo;s face was changed. She looked as
+though she were entirely concentrated upon the effort of keeping alive. Her
+lips were drawn, and her cheeks were sunken and flushed, though without colour.
+Her eyes were not entirely shut, the lower half of the white part showing, not
+as if she saw, but as if they remained open because she was too much exhausted
+to close them. She opened them completely when he kissed her. But she only saw
+an old woman slicing a man&rsquo;s head off with a knife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There it falls!&rdquo; she murmured. She then turned to Terence and
+asked him anxiously some question about a man with mules, which he could not
+understand. &ldquo;Why doesn&rsquo;t he come? Why doesn&rsquo;t he come?&rdquo;
+she repeated. He was appalled to think of the dirty little man downstairs in
+connection with illness like this, and turned instinctively to Helen, but she
+was doing something at a table in the window, and did not seem to realise how
+great the shock to him must be. He rose to go, for he could not endure to
+listen any longer; his heart beat quickly and painfully with anger and misery.
+As he passed Helen she asked him in the same weary, unnatural, but determined
+voice to fetch her more ice, and to have the jug outside filled with fresh
+milk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he had done these errands he went to find Hirst. Exhausted and very hot,
+St. John had fallen asleep on a bed, but Terence woke him without scruple.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Helen thinks she&rsquo;s worse,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s no
+doubt she&rsquo;s frightfully ill. Rodriguez is useless. We must get another
+doctor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But there is no other doctor,&rdquo; said Hirst drowsily, sitting up and
+rubbing his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be a damned fool!&rdquo; Terence exclaimed. &ldquo;Of course
+there&rsquo;s another doctor, and, if there isn&rsquo;t, you&rsquo;ve got to
+find one. It ought to have been done days ago. I&rsquo;m going down to saddle
+the horse.&rdquo; He could not stay still in one place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In less than ten minutes St. John was riding to the town in the scorching heat
+in search of a doctor, his orders being to find one and bring him back if he
+had to be fetched in a special train.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We ought to have done it days ago,&rdquo; Hewet repeated angrily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he went back into the drawing-room he found that Mrs. Flushing was there,
+standing very erect in the middle of the room, having arrived, as people did in
+these days, by the kitchen or through the garden unannounced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s better?&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing enquired abruptly; they did not
+attempt to shake hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Terence. &ldquo;If anything, they think she&rsquo;s
+worse.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Flushing seemed to consider for a moment or two, looking straight at
+Terence all the time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me tell you,&rdquo; she said, speaking in nervous jerks,
+&ldquo;it&rsquo;s always about the seventh day one begins to get anxious. I
+daresay you&rsquo;ve been sittin&rsquo; here worryin&rsquo; by yourself. You
+think she&rsquo;s bad, but any one comin&rsquo; with a fresh eye would see she
+was better. Mr. Elliot&rsquo;s had fever; he&rsquo;s all right now,&rdquo; she
+threw out. &ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t anythin&rsquo; she caught on the expedition.
+What&rsquo;s it matter&mdash;a few days&rsquo; fever? My brother had fever for
+twenty-six days once. And in a week or two he was up and about. We gave him
+nothin&rsquo; but milk and arrowroot&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here Mrs. Chailey came in with a message.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m wanted upstairs,&rdquo; said Terence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see&mdash;she&rsquo;ll be better,&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing jerked out as
+he left the room. Her anxiety to persuade Terence was very great, and when he
+left her without saying anything she felt dissatisfied and restless; she did
+not like to stay, but she could not bear to go. She wandered from room to room
+looking for some one to talk to, but all the rooms were empty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence went upstairs, stood inside the door to take Helen&rsquo;s directions,
+looked over at Rachel, but did not attempt to speak to her. She appeared
+vaguely conscious of his presence, but it seemed to disturb her, and she
+turned, so that she lay with her back to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside, because it
+needed all her attention to follow the hot, red, quick sights which passed
+incessantly before her eyes. She knew that it was of enormous importance that
+she should attend to these sights and grasp their meaning, but she was always
+being just too late to hear or see something which would explain it all. For
+this reason, the faces,&mdash;Helen&rsquo;s face, the nurse&rsquo;s,
+Terence&rsquo;s, the doctor&rsquo;s,&mdash;which occasionally forced themselves
+very close to her, were worrying because they distracted her attention and she
+might miss the clue. However, on the fourth afternoon she was suddenly unable
+to keep Helen&rsquo;s face distinct from the sights themselves; her lips
+widened as she bent down over the bed, and she began to gabble unintelligibly
+like the rest. The sights were all concerned in some plot, some adventure, some
+escape. The nature of what they were doing changed incessantly, although there
+was always a reason behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp. Now they were
+among trees and savages, now they were on the sea, now they were on the tops of
+high towers; now they jumped; now they flew. But just as the crisis was about
+to happen, something invariably slipped in her brain, so that the whole effort
+had to begin over again. The heat was suffocating. At last the faces went
+further away; she fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually
+closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming
+sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her
+tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the
+bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light,
+while every now and then some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun wrangling with
+evasive and very garrulous natives, he extracted the information that there was
+a doctor, a French doctor, who was at present away on a holiday in the hills.
+It was quite impossible, so they said, to find him. With his experience of the
+country, St. John thought it unlikely that a telegram would either be sent or
+received; but having reduced the distance of the hill town, in which he was
+staying, from a hundred miles to thirty miles, and having hired a carriage and
+horses, he started at once to fetch the doctor himself. He succeeded in finding
+him, and eventually forced the unwilling man to leave his young wife and return
+forthwith. They reached the villa at midday on Tuesday.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence came out to receive them, and St. John was struck by the fact that he
+had grown perceptibly thinner in the interval; he was white too; his eyes
+looked strange. But the curt speech and the sulky masterful manner of Dr.
+Lesage impressed them both favourably, although at the same time it was obvious
+that he was very much annoyed at the whole affair. Coming downstairs he gave
+his directions emphatically, but it never occurred to him to give an opinion
+either because of the presence of Rodriguez who was now obsequious as well as
+malicious, or because he took it for granted that they knew already what was to
+be known.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he said with a shrug of his shoulders, when Terence
+asked him, &ldquo;Is she very ill?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were both conscious of a certain sense of relief when Dr. Lesage was gone,
+leaving explicit directions, and promising another visit in a few hours&rsquo;
+time; but, unfortunately, the rise of their spirits led them to talk more than
+usual, and in talking they quarrelled. They quarrelled about a road, the
+Portsmouth Road. St. John said that it is macadamised where it passes Hindhead,
+and Terence knew as well as he knew his own name that it is not macadamised at
+that point. In the course of the argument they said some very sharp things to
+each other, and the rest of the dinner was eaten in silence, save for an
+occasional half-stifled reflection from Ridley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When it grew dark and the lamps were brought in, Terence felt unable to control
+his irritation any longer. St. John went to bed in a state of complete
+exhaustion, bidding Terence good-night with rather more affection than usual
+because of their quarrel, and Ridley retired to his books. Left alone, Terence
+walked up and down the room; he stood at the open window.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lights were coming out one after another in the town beneath, and it was
+very peaceful and cool in the garden, so that he stepped out on to the terrace.
+As he stood there in the darkness, able only to see the shapes of trees through
+the fine grey light, he was overcome by a desire to escape, to have done with
+this suffering, to forget that Rachel was ill. He allowed himself to lapse into
+forgetfulness of everything. As if a wind that had been raging incessantly
+suddenly fell asleep, the fret and strain and anxiety which had been pressing
+on him passed away. He seemed to stand in an unvexed space of air, on a little
+island by himself; he was free and immune from pain. It did not matter whether
+Rachel was well or ill; it did not matter whether they were apart or together;
+nothing mattered&mdash;nothing mattered. The waves beat on the shore far away,
+and the soft wind passed through the branches of the trees, seeming to encircle
+him with peace and security, with dark and nothingness. Surely the world of
+strife and fret and anxiety was not the real world, but this was the real
+world, the world that lay beneath the superficial world, so that, whatever
+happened, one was secure. The quiet and peace seemed to lap his body in a fine
+cool sheet, soothing every nerve; his mind seemed once more to expand, and
+become natural.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house roused him; he
+turned instinctively and went into the drawing-room. The sight of the lamp-lit
+room brought back so abruptly all that he had forgotten that he stood for a
+moment unable to move. He remembered everything, the hour, the minute even,
+what point they had reached, and what was to come. He cursed himself for making
+believe for a minute that things were different from what they are. The night
+was now harder to face than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unable to stay in the empty drawing-room, he wandered out and sat on the stairs
+half-way up to Rachel&rsquo;s room. He longed for some one to talk to, but
+Hirst was asleep, and Ridley was asleep; there was no sound in Rachel&rsquo;s
+room. The only sound in the house was the sound of Chailey moving in the
+kitchen. At last there was a rustling on the stairs overhead, and Nurse McInnis
+came down fastening the links in her cuffs, in preparation for the
+night&rsquo;s watch. Terence rose and stopped her. He had scarcely spoken to
+her, but it was possible that she might confirm him in the belief which still
+persisted in his own mind that Rachel was not seriously ill. He told her in a
+whisper that Dr. Lesage had been and what he had said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, Nurse,&rdquo; he whispered, &ldquo;please tell me your opinion. Do
+you consider that she is very seriously ill? Is she in any danger?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The doctor has said&mdash;&rdquo; she began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, but I want your opinion. You have had experience of many cases like
+this?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I could not tell you more than Dr. Lesage, Mr. Hewet,&rdquo; she replied
+cautiously, as though her words might be used against her. &ldquo;The case is
+serious, but you may feel quite certain that we are doing all we can for Miss
+Vinrace.&rdquo; She spoke with some professional self-approbation. But she
+realised perhaps that she did not satisfy the young man, who still blocked her
+way, for she shifted her feet slightly upon the stair and looked out of the
+window where they could see the moon over the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you ask me,&rdquo; she began in a curiously stealthy tone, &ldquo;I
+never like May for my patients.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;May?&rdquo; Terence repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It may be a fancy, but I don&rsquo;t like to see anybody fall ill in
+May,&rdquo; she continued. &ldquo;Things seem to go wrong in May. Perhaps
+it&rsquo;s the moon. They say the moon affects the brain, don&rsquo;t they,
+Sir?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at her but he could not answer her; like all the others, when one
+looked at her she seemed to shrivel beneath one&rsquo;s eyes and become
+worthless, malicious, and untrustworthy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She slipped past him and disappeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though he went to his room he was unable even to take his clothes off. For a
+long time he paced up and down, and then leaning out of the window gazed at the
+earth which lay so dark against the paler blue of the sky. With a mixture of
+fear and loathing he looked at the slim black cypress trees which were still
+visible in the garden, and heard the unfamiliar creaking and grating sounds
+which show that the earth is still hot. All these sights and sounds appeared
+sinister and full of hostility and foreboding; together with the natives and
+the nurse and the doctor and the terrible force of the illness itself they
+seemed to be in conspiracy against him. They seemed to join together in their
+effort to extract the greatest possible amount of suffering from him. He could
+not get used to his pain, it was a revelation to him. He had never realised
+before that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain
+lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering, as
+if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating away the
+lives of men and women. He thought for the first time with understanding of
+words which had before seemed to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness
+of life. Now he knew for himself that life is hard and full of suffering. He
+looked at the scattered lights in the town beneath, and thought of Arthur and
+Susan, or Evelyn and Perrott venturing out unwittingly, and by their happiness
+laying themselves open to suffering such as this. How did they dare to love
+each other, he wondered; how had he himself dared to live as he had lived,
+rapidly and carelessly, passing from one thing to another, loving Rachel as he
+had loved her? Never again would he feel secure; he would never believe in the
+stability of life, or forget what depths of pain lie beneath small happiness
+and feelings of content and safety. It seemed to him as he looked back that
+their happiness had never been so great as his pain was now. There had always
+been something imperfect in their happiness, something they had wanted and had
+not been able to get. It had been fragmentary and incomplete, because they were
+so young and had not known what they were doing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree outside the window,
+and as the branch swayed in the darkness there came before his mind a picture
+of all the world that lay outside his window; he thought of the immense river
+and the immense forest, the vast stretches of dry earth and the plains of the
+sea that encircled the earth; from the sea the sky rose steep and enormous, and
+the air washed profoundly between the sky and the sea. How vast and dark it
+must be tonight, lying exposed to the wind; and in all this great space it was
+curious to think how few the towns were, and how small little rings of light,
+or single glow-worms he figured them, scattered here and there, among the
+swelling uncultivated folds of the world. And in those towns were little men
+and women, tiny men and women. Oh, it was absurd, when one thought of it, to
+sit here in a little room suffering and caring. What did anything matter?
+Rachel, a tiny creature, lay ill beneath him, and here in his little room he
+suffered on her account. The nearness of their bodies in this vast universe,
+and the minuteness of their bodies, seemed to him absurd and laughable. Nothing
+mattered, he repeated; they had no power, no hope. He leant on the window-sill,
+thinking, until he almost forgot the time and the place. Nevertheless, although
+he was convinced that it was absurd and laughable, and that they were small and
+hopeless, he never lost the sense that these thoughts somehow formed part of a
+life which he and Rachel would live together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Owing perhaps to the change of doctor, Rachel appeared to be rather better next
+day. Terribly pale and worn though Helen looked, there was a slight lifting of
+the cloud which had hung all these days in her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She talked to me,&rdquo; she said voluntarily. &ldquo;She asked me what
+day of the week it was, like herself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then suddenly, without any warning or any apparent reason, the tears formed in
+her eyes and rolled steadily down her cheeks. She cried with scarcely any
+attempt at movement of her features, and without any attempt to stop herself,
+as if she did not know that she was crying. In spite of the relief which her
+words gave him, Terence was dismayed by the sight; had everything given way?
+Were there no limits to the power of this illness? Would everything go down
+before it? Helen had always seemed to him strong and determined, and now she
+was like a child. He took her in his arms, and she clung to him like a child,
+crying softly and quietly upon his shoulder. Then she roused herself and wiped
+her tears away; it was silly to behave like that, she said; very silly, she
+repeated, when there could be no doubt that Rachel was better. She asked
+Terence to forgive her for her folly. She stopped at the door and came back and
+kissed him without saying anything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On this day indeed Rachel was conscious of what went on round her. She had come
+to the surface of the dark, sticky pool, and a wave seemed to bear her up and
+down with it; she had ceased to have any will of her own; she lay on the top of
+the wave conscious of some pain, but chiefly of weakness. The wave was replaced
+by the side of a mountain. Her body became a drift of melting snow, above which
+her knees rose in huge peaked mountains of bare bone. It was true that she saw
+Helen and saw her room, but everything had become very pale and
+semi-transparent. Sometimes she could see through the wall in front of her.
+Sometimes when Helen went away she seemed to go so far that Rachel&rsquo;s eyes
+could hardly follow her. The room also had an odd power of expanding, and
+though she pushed her voice out as far as possible until sometimes it became a
+bird and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever reached the person
+she was talking to. There were immense intervals or chasms, for things still
+had the power to appear visibly before her, between one moment and the next; it
+sometimes took an hour for Helen to raise her arm, pausing long between each
+jerky movement, and pour out medicine. Helen&rsquo;s form stooping to raise her
+in bed appeared of gigantic size, and came down upon her like the ceiling
+falling. But for long spaces of time she would merely lie conscious of her body
+floating on the top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote corner of her
+body, or escaped and gone flitting round the room. All sights were something of
+an effort, but the sight of Terence was the greatest effort, because he forced
+her to join mind to body in the desire to remember something. She did not wish
+to remember; it troubled her when people tried to disturb her loneliness; she
+wished to be alone. She wished for nothing else in the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Although she had cried, Terence observed Helen&rsquo;s greater hopefulness with
+something like triumph; in the argument between them she had made the first
+sign of admitting herself in the wrong. He waited for Dr. Lesage to come down
+that afternoon with considerable anxiety, but with the same certainty at the
+back of his mind that he would in time force them all to admit that they were
+in the wrong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As usual, Dr. Lesage was sulky in his manner and very short in his answers. To
+Terence&rsquo;s demand, &ldquo;She seems to be better?&rdquo; he replied,
+looking at him in an odd way, &ldquo;She has a chance of life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door shut and Terence walked across to the window. He leant his forehead
+against the pane.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rachel,&rdquo; he repeated to himself. &ldquo;She has a chance of life.
+Rachel.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How could they say these things of Rachel? Had any one yesterday seriously
+believed that Rachel was dying? They had been engaged for four weeks. A
+fortnight ago she had been perfectly well. What could fourteen days have done
+to bring her from that state to this? To realise what they meant by saying that
+she had a chance of life was beyond him, knowing as he did that they were
+engaged. He turned, still enveloped in the same dreary mist, and walked towards
+the door. Suddenly he saw it all. He saw the room and the garden, and the trees
+moving in the air, they could go on without her; she could die. For the first
+time since she fell ill he remembered exactly what she looked like and the way
+in which they cared for each other. The immense happiness of feeling her close
+to him mingled with a more intense anxiety than he had felt yet. He could not
+let her die; he could not live without her. But after a momentary struggle, the
+curtain fell again, and he saw nothing and felt nothing clearly. It was all
+going on&mdash;going on still, in the same way as before. Save for a physical
+pain when his heart beat, and the fact that his fingers were icy cold, he did
+not realise that he was anxious about anything. Within his mind he seemed to
+feel nothing about Rachel or about any one or anything in the world. He went on
+giving orders, arranging with Mrs. Chailey, writing out lists, and every now
+and then he went upstairs and put something quietly on the table outside
+Rachel&rsquo;s door. That night Dr. Lesage seemed to be less sulky than usual.
+He stayed voluntarily for a few moments, and, addressing St. John and Terence
+equally, as if he did not remember which of them was engaged to the young lady,
+said, &ldquo;I consider that her condition to-night is very grave.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Neither of them went to bed or suggested that the other should go to bed. They
+sat in the drawing-room playing picquet with the door open. St. John made up a
+bed upon the sofa, and when it was ready insisted that Terence should lie upon
+it. They began to quarrel as to who should lie on the sofa and who should lie
+upon a couple of chairs covered with rugs. St. John forced Terence at last to
+lie down upon the sofa.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be a fool, Terence,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll only
+get ill if you don&rsquo;t sleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Old fellow,&rdquo; he began, as Terence still refused, and stopped
+abruptly, fearing sentimentality; he found that he was on the verge of tears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began to say what he had long been wanting to say, that he was sorry for
+Terence, that he cared for him, that he cared for Rachel. Did she know how much
+he cared for her&mdash;had she said anything, asked perhaps? He was very
+anxious to say this, but he refrained, thinking that it was a selfish question
+after all, and what was the use of bothering Terence to talk about such things?
+He was already half asleep. But St. John could not sleep at once. If only, he
+thought to himself, as he lay in the darkness, something would happen&mdash;if
+only this strain would come to an end. He did not mind what happened, so long
+as the succession of these hard and dreary days was broken; he did not mind if
+she died. He felt himself disloyal in not minding it, but it seemed to him that
+he had no feelings left.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All night long there was no call or movement, except the opening and shutting
+of the bedroom door once. By degrees the light returned into the untidy room.
+At six the servants began to move; at seven they crept downstairs into the
+kitchen; and half an hour later the day began again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless it was not the same as the days that had gone before, although it
+would have been hard to say in what the difference consisted. Perhaps it was
+that they seemed to be waiting for something. There were certainly fewer things
+to be done than usual. People drifted through the drawing-room&mdash;Mr.
+Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury. They spoke very apologetically in low tones,
+refusing to sit down, but remaining for a considerable time standing up,
+although the only thing they had to say was, &ldquo;Is there anything we can
+do?&rdquo; and there was nothing they could do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how Helen had said that
+whenever anything happened to you this was how people behaved. Was she right,
+or was she wrong? He was too little interested to frame an opinion of his own.
+He put things away in his mind, as if one of these days he would think about
+them, but not now. The mist of unreality had deepened and deepened until it had
+produced a feeling of numbness all over his body. Was it his body? Were those
+really his own hands?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossible to sit alone in
+his room. He was very uncomfortable downstairs, and, as he did not know what
+was going on, constantly in the way; but he would not leave the drawing-room.
+Too restless to read, and having nothing to do, he began to pace up and down
+reciting poetry in an undertone. Occupied in various ways&mdash;now in undoing
+parcels, now in uncorking bottles, now in writing directions, the sound of
+Ridley&rsquo;s song and the beat of his pacing worked into the minds of Terence
+and St. John all the morning as a half comprehended refrain.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+They wrestled up, they wrestled down,<br />
+    They wrestled sore and still:<br />
+The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,<br />
+    That night he had his will.<br />
+<br />
+Like stags full spent, among the bent<br />
+    They dropped awhile to rest&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, it&rsquo;s intolerable!&rdquo; Hirst exclaimed, and then checked
+himself, as if it were a breach of their agreement. Again and again Terence
+would creep half-way up the stairs in case he might be able to glean news of
+Rachel. But the only news now was of a very fragmentary kind; she had drunk
+something; she had slept a little; she seemed quieter. In the same way, Dr.
+Lesage confined himself to talking about details, save once when he volunteered
+the information that he had just been called in to ascertain, by severing a
+vein in the wrist, that an old lady of eighty-five was really dead. She had a
+horror of being buried alive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a horror,&rdquo; he remarked, &ldquo;that we generally find in the
+very old, and seldom in the young.&rdquo; They both expressed their interest in
+what he told them; it seemed to them very strange. Another strange thing about
+the day was that the luncheon was forgotten by all of them until it was late in
+the afternoon, and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them, and looked strange too,
+because she wore a stiff print dress, and her sleeves were rolled up above her
+elbows. She seemed as oblivious of her appearance, however, as if she had been
+called out of her bed by a midnight alarm of fire, and she had forgotten, too,
+her reserve and her composure; she talked to them quite familiarly as if she
+had nursed them and held them naked on her knee. She assured them over and over
+again that it was their duty to eat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly than they expected.
+Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but on seeing them shut it again quickly;
+once Helen came down to fetch something, but she stopped as she left the room
+to look at a letter addressed to her. She stood for a moment turning it over,
+and the extraordinary and mournful beauty of her attitude struck Terence in the
+way things struck him now&mdash;as something to be put away in his mind and to
+be thought about afterwards. They scarcely spoke, the argument between them
+seeming to be suspended or forgotten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house, Ridley paced up and
+down the terrace repeating stanzas of a long poem, in a subdued but suddenly
+sonorous voice. Fragments of the poem were wafted in at the open window as he
+passed and repassed.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Peor and Baalim<br />
+Forsake their Temples dim,<br />
+    With that twice batter&rsquo;d God of Palestine<br />
+And mooned Astaroth&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to both the young men,
+but they had to be borne. As the evening drew on and the red light of the
+sunset glittered far away on the sea, the same sense of desperation attacked
+both Terence and St. John at the thought that the day was nearly over, and that
+another night was at hand. The appearance of one light after another in the
+town beneath them produced in Hirst a repetition of his terrible and disgusting
+desire to break down and sob. Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey. She
+explained that Maria, in opening a bottle, had been so foolish as to cut her
+arm badly, but she had bound it up; it was unfortunate when there was so much
+work to be done. Chailey herself limped because of the rheumatism in her feet,
+but it appeared to her mere waste of time to take any notice of the unruly
+flesh of servants. The evening went on. Dr. Lesage arrived unexpectedly, and
+stayed upstairs a very long time. He came down once and drank a cup of coffee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She is very ill,&rdquo; he said in answer to Ridley&rsquo;s question.
+All the annoyance had by this time left his manner, he was grave and formal,
+but at the same time it was full of consideration, which had not marked it
+before. He went upstairs again. The three men sat together in the drawing-room.
+Ridley was quite quiet now, and his attention seemed to be thoroughly awakened.
+Save for little half-voluntary movements and exclamations that were stifled at
+once, they waited in complete silence. It seemed as if they were at last
+brought together face to face with something definite.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was nearly eleven o&rsquo;clock when Dr. Lesage again appeared in the room.
+He approached them very slowly, and did not speak at once. He looked first at
+St. John and then at Terence, and said to Terence, &ldquo;Mr. Hewet, I think
+you should go upstairs now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence rose immediately, leaving the others seated with Dr. Lesage standing
+motionless between them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chailey was in the passage outside, repeating over and over again,
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s wicked&mdash;it&rsquo;s wicked.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terence paid her no attention; he heard what she was saying, but it conveyed no
+meaning to his mind. All the way upstairs he kept saying to himself,
+&ldquo;This has not happened to me. It is not possible that this has happened
+to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked curiously at his own hand on the banisters. The stairs were very
+steep, and it seemed to take him a long time to surmount them. Instead of
+feeling keenly, as he knew that he ought to feel, he felt nothing at all. When
+he opened the door he saw Helen sitting by the bedside. There were shaded
+lights on the table, and the room, though it seemed to be full of a great many
+things, was very tidy. There was a faint and not unpleasant smell of
+disinfectants. Helen rose and gave up her chair to him in silence. As they
+passed each other their eyes met in a peculiar level glance, he wondered at the
+extraordinary clearness of his eyes, and at the deep calm and sadness that
+dwelt in them. He sat down by the bedside, and a moment afterwards heard the
+door shut gently behind her. He was alone with Rachel, and a faint reflection
+of the sense of relief that they used to feel when they were left alone
+possessed him. He looked at her. He expected to find some terrible change in
+her, but there was none. She looked indeed very thin, and, as far as he could
+see, very tired, but she was the same as she had always been. Moreover, she saw
+him and knew him. She smiled at him and said, &ldquo;Hullo, Terence.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The curtain which had been drawn between them for so long vanished immediately.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Rachel,&rdquo; he replied in his usual voice, upon which she
+opened her eyes quite widely and smiled with her familiar smile. He kissed her
+and took her hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s been wretched without you,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She still looked at him and smiled, but soon a slight look of fatigue or
+perplexity came into her eyes and she shut them again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But when we&rsquo;re together we&rsquo;re perfectly happy,&rdquo; he
+said. He continued to hold her hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The light being dim, it was impossible to see any change in her face. An
+immense feeling of peace came over Terence, so that he had no wish to move or
+to speak. The terrible torture and unreality of the last days were over, and he
+had come out now into perfect certainty and peace. His mind began to work
+naturally again and with great ease. The longer he sat there the more
+profoundly was he conscious of the peace invading every corner of his soul.
+Once he held his breath and listened acutely; she was still breathing; he went
+on thinking for some time; they seemed to be thinking together; he seemed to be
+Rachel as well as himself; and then he listened again; no, she had ceased to
+breathe. So much the better&mdash;this was death. It was nothing; it was to
+cease to breathe. It was happiness, it was perfect happiness. They had now what
+they had always wanted to have, the union which had been impossible while they
+lived. Unconscious whether he thought the words or spoke them aloud, he said,
+&ldquo;No two people have ever been so happy as we have been. No one has ever
+loved as we have loved.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed to him that their complete union and happiness filled the room with
+rings eddying more and more widely. He had no wish in the world left
+unfulfilled. They possessed what could never be taken from them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was not conscious that any one had come into the room, but later, moments
+later, or hours later perhaps, he felt an arm behind him. The arms were round
+him. He did not want to have arms round him, and the mysterious whispering
+voices annoyed him. He laid Rachel&rsquo;s hand, which was now cold, upon the
+counterpane, and rose from his chair, and walked across to the window. The
+windows were uncurtained, and showed the moon, and a long silver pathway upon
+the surface of the waves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why,&rdquo; he said, in his ordinary tone of voice, &ldquo;look at the
+moon. There&rsquo;s a halo round the moon. We shall have rain to-morrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The arms, whether they were the arms of man or of woman, were round him again;
+they were pushing him gently towards the door. He turned of his own accord and
+walked steadily in advance of the arms, conscious of a little amusement at the
+strange way in which people behaved merely because some one was dead. He would
+go if they wished it, but nothing they could do would disturb his happiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he saw the passage outside the room, and the table with the cups and the
+plates, it suddenly came over him that here was a world in which he would never
+see Rachel again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rachel! Rachel!&rdquo; he shrieked, trying to rush back to her. But they
+prevented him, and pushed him down the passage and into a bedroom far from her
+room. Downstairs they could hear the thud of his feet on the floor, as he
+struggled to break free; and twice they heard him shout, &ldquo;Rachel,
+Rachel!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap26"></a>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+
+<p>
+For two or three hours longer the moon poured its light through the empty air.
+Unbroken by clouds it fell straightly, and lay almost like a chill white frost
+over the sea and the earth. During these hours the silence was not broken, and
+the only movement was caused by the movement of trees and branches which
+stirred slightly, and then the shadows that lay across the white spaces of the
+land moved too. In this profound silence one sound only was audible, the sound
+of a slight but continuous breathing which never ceased, although it never rose
+and never fell. It continued after the birds had begun to flutter from branch
+to branch, and could be heard behind the first thin notes of their voices. It
+continued all through the hours when the east whitened, and grew red, and a
+faint blue tinged the sky, but when the sun rose it ceased, and gave place to
+other sounds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first sounds that were heard were little inarticulate cries, the cries, it
+seemed, of children or of the very poor, of people who were very weak or in
+pain. But when the sun was above the horizon, the air which had been thin and
+pale grew every moment richer and warmer, and the sounds of life became bolder
+and more full of courage and authority. By degrees the smoke began to ascend in
+wavering breaths over the houses, and these slowly thickened, until they were
+as round and straight as columns, and instead of striking upon pale white
+blinds, the sun shone upon dark windows, beyond which there was depth and
+space.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sun had been up for many hours, and the great dome of air was warmed
+through and glittering with thin gold threads of sunlight, before any one moved
+in the hotel. White and massive it stood in the early light, half asleep with
+its blinds down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At about half-past nine Miss Allan came very slowly into the hall, and walked
+very slowly to the table where the morning papers were laid, but she did not
+put out her hand to take one; she stood still, thinking, with her head a little
+sunk upon her shoulders. She looked curiously old, and from the way in which
+she stood, a little hunched together and very massive, you could see what she
+would be like when she was really old, how she would sit day after day in her
+chair looking placidly in front of her. Other people began to come into the
+room, and to pass her, but she did not speak to any of them or even look at
+them, and at last, as if it were necessary to do something, she sat down in a
+chair, and looked quietly and fixedly in front of her. She felt very old this
+morning, and useless too, as if her life had been a failure, as if it had been
+hard and laborious to no purpose. She did not want to go on living, and yet she
+knew that she would. She was so strong that she would live to be a very old
+woman. She would probably live to be eighty, and as she was now fifty, that
+left thirty years more for her to live. She turned her hands over and over in
+her lap and looked at them curiously; her old hands, that had done so much work
+for her. There did not seem to be much point in it all; one went on, of course
+one went on. . . . She looked up to see Mrs. Thornbury standing beside her,
+with lines drawn upon her forehead, and her lips parted as if she were about to
+ask a question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Allan anticipated her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;She died this morning, very early, about
+three o&rsquo;clock.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Thornbury made a little exclamation, drew her lips together, and the tears
+rose in her eyes. Through them she looked at the hall which was now laid with
+great breadths of sunlight, and at the careless, casual groups of people who
+were standing beside the solid arm-chairs and tables. They looked to her
+unreal, or as people look who remain unconscious that some great explosion is
+about to take place beside them. But there was no explosion, and they went on
+standing by the chairs and the tables. Mrs. Thornbury no longer saw them, but,
+penetrating through them as though they were without substance, she saw the
+house, the people in the house, the room, the bed in the room, and the figure
+of the dead lying still in the dark beneath the sheets. She could almost see
+the dead. She could almost hear the voices of the mourners.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They expected it?&rdquo; she asked at length.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Allan could only shake her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know nothing,&rdquo; she replied, &ldquo;except what Mrs.
+Flushing&rsquo;s maid told me. She died early this morning.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two women looked at each other with a quiet significant gaze, and then,
+feeling oddly dazed, and seeking she did not know exactly what, Mrs. Thornbury
+went slowly upstairs and walked quietly along the passages, touching the wall
+with her fingers as if to guide herself. Housemaids were passing briskly from
+room to room, but Mrs. Thornbury avoided them; she hardly saw them; they seemed
+to her to be in another world. She did not even look up directly when Evelyn
+stopped her. It was evident that Evelyn had been lately in tears, and when she
+looked at Mrs. Thornbury she began to cry again. Together they drew into the
+hollow of a window, and stood there in silence. Broken words formed themselves
+at last among Evelyn&rsquo;s sobs. &ldquo;It was wicked,&rdquo; she sobbed,
+&ldquo;it was cruel&mdash;they were so happy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Thornbury patted her on the shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It seems hard&mdash;very hard,&rdquo; she said. She paused and looked
+out over the slope of the hill at the Ambroses&rsquo; villa; the windows were
+blazing in the sun, and she thought how the soul of the dead had passed from
+those windows. Something had passed from the world. It seemed to her strangely
+empty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And yet the older one grows,&rdquo; she continued, her eyes regaining
+more than their usual brightness, &ldquo;the more certain one becomes that
+there is a reason. How could one go on if there were no reason?&rdquo; she
+asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She asked the question of some one, but she did not ask it of Evelyn.
+Evelyn&rsquo;s sobs were becoming quieter. &ldquo;There must be a
+reason,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It can&rsquo;t only be an accident. For it was
+an accident&mdash;it need never have happened.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Thornbury sighed deeply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But we must not let ourselves think of that,&rdquo; she added,
+&ldquo;and let us hope that they don&rsquo;t either. Whatever they had done it
+might have been the same. These terrible illnesses&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no reason&mdash;I don&rsquo;t believe there&rsquo;s any
+reason at all!&rdquo; Evelyn broke out, pulling the blind down and letting it
+fly back with a little snap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why should these things happen? Why should people suffer? I honestly
+believe,&rdquo; she went on, lowering her voice slightly, &ldquo;that
+Rachel&rsquo;s in Heaven, but Terence. . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the good of it all?&rdquo; she demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Thornbury shook her head slightly but made no reply, and pressing
+Evelyn&rsquo;s hand she went on down the passage. Impelled by a strong desire
+to hear something, although she did not know exactly what there was to hear,
+she was making her way to the Flushings&rsquo; room. As she opened their door
+she felt that she had interrupted some argument between husband and wife. Mrs.
+Flushing was sitting with her back to the light, and Mr. Flushing was standing
+near her, arguing and trying to persuade her of something.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, here is Mrs. Thornbury,&rdquo; he began with some relief in his
+voice. &ldquo;You have heard, of course. My wife feels that she was in some way
+responsible. She urged poor Miss Vinrace to come on the expedition. I&rsquo;m
+sure you will agree with me that it is most unreasonable to feel that. We
+don&rsquo;t even know&mdash;in fact I think it most unlikely&mdash;that she
+caught her illness there. These diseases&mdash;Besides, she was set on going.
+She would have gone whether you asked her or not, Alice.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t, Wilfrid,&rdquo; said Mrs. Flushing, neither moving nor
+taking her eyes off the spot on the floor upon which they rested.
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the use of talking? What&rsquo;s the use&mdash;?&rdquo; She
+ceased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was coming to ask you,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury, addressing Wilfrid,
+for it was useless to speak to his wife. &ldquo;Is there anything you think
+that one could do? Has the father arrived? Could one go and see?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The strongest wish in her being at this moment was to be able to do something
+for the unhappy people&mdash;to see them&mdash;to assure them&mdash;to help
+them. It was dreadful to be so far away from them. But Mr. Flushing shook his
+head; he did not think that now&mdash;later perhaps one might be able to help.
+Here Mrs. Flushing rose stiffly, turned her back to them, and walked to the
+dressing-room opposite. As she walked, they could see her breast slowly rise
+and slowly fall. But her grief was silent. She shut the door behind her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists together, and began
+beating the back of a chair with them. She was like a wounded animal. She hated
+death; she was furious, outraged, indignant with death, as if it were a living
+creature. She refused to relinquish her friends to death. She would not submit
+to dark and nothingness. She began to pace up and down, clenching her hands,
+and making no attempt to stop the quick tears which raced down her cheeks. She
+sat still at last, but she did not submit. She looked stubborn and strong when
+she had ceased to cry.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+In the next room, meanwhile, Wilfrid was talking to Mrs. Thornbury with greater
+freedom now that his wife was not sitting there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the worst of these places,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;People
+will behave as though they were in England, and they&rsquo;re not. I&rsquo;ve
+no doubt myself that Miss Vinrace caught the infection up at the villa itself.
+She probably ran risks a dozen times a day that might have given her the
+illness. It&rsquo;s absurd to say she caught it with us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If he had not been sincerely sorry for them he would have been annoyed.
+&ldquo;Pepper tells me,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;that he left the house
+because he thought them so careless. He says they never washed their vegetables
+properly. Poor people! It&rsquo;s a fearful price to pay. But it&rsquo;s only
+what I&rsquo;ve seen over and over again&mdash;people seem to forget that these
+things happen, and then they do happen, and they&rsquo;re surprised.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Thornbury agreed with him that they had been very careless, and that there
+was no reason whatever to think that she had caught the fever on the
+expedition; and after talking about other things for a short time, she left him
+and went sadly along the passage to her own room. There must be some reason why
+such things happen, she thought to herself, as she shut the door. Only at first
+it was not easy to understand what it was. It seemed so strange&mdash;so
+unbelievable. Why, only three weeks ago&mdash;only a fortnight ago, she had
+seen Rachel; when she shut her eyes she could almost see her now, the quiet,
+shy girl who was going to be married. She thought of all that she would have
+missed had she died at Rachel&rsquo;s age, the children, the married life, the
+unimaginable depths and miracles that seemed to her, as she looked back, to
+have lain about her, day after day, and year after year. The stunned feeling,
+which had been making it difficult for her to think, gradually gave way to a
+feeling of the opposite nature; she thought very quickly and very clearly, and,
+looking back over all her experiences, tried to fit them into a kind of order.
+There was undoubtedly much suffering, much struggling, but, on the whole,
+surely there was a balance of happiness&mdash;surely order did prevail. Nor
+were the deaths of young people really the saddest things in life&mdash;they
+were saved so much; they kept so much. The dead&mdash;she called to mind those
+who had died early, accidentally&mdash;were beautiful; she often dreamt of the
+dead. And in time Terence himself would come to feel&mdash;She got up and began
+to wander restlessly about the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For an old woman of her age she was very restless, and for one of her clear,
+quick mind she was unusually perplexed. She could not settle to anything, so
+that she was relieved when the door opened. She went up to her husband, took
+him in her arms, and kissed him with unusual intensity, and then as they sat
+down together she began to pat him and question him as if he were a baby, an
+old, tired, querulous baby. She did not tell him about Miss Vinrace&rsquo;s
+death, for that would only disturb him, and he was put out already. She tried
+to discover why he was uneasy. Politics again? What were those horrid people
+doing? She spent the whole morning in discussing politics with her husband, and
+by degrees she became deeply interested in what they were saying. But every now
+and then what she was saying seemed to her oddly empty of meaning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At luncheon it was remarked by several people that the visitors at the hotel
+were beginning to leave; there were fewer every day. There were only forty
+people at luncheon, instead of the sixty that there had been. So old Mrs. Paley
+computed, gazing about her with her faded eyes, as she took her seat at her own
+table in the window. Her party generally consisted of Mr. Perrott as well as
+Arthur and Susan, and to-day Evelyn was lunching with them also.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was unusually subdued. Having noticed that her eyes were red, and guessing
+the reason, the others took pains to keep up an elaborate conversation between
+themselves. She suffered it to go on for a few minutes, leaning both elbows on
+the table, and leaving her soup untouched, when she exclaimed suddenly,
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how you feel, but I can simply think of nothing
+else!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gentlemen murmured sympathetically, and looked grave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Susan replied, &ldquo;Yes&mdash;isn&rsquo;t it perfectly awful? When you think
+what a nice girl she was&mdash;only just engaged, and this need never have
+happened&mdash;it seems too tragic.&rdquo; She looked at Arthur as though he
+might be able to help her with something more suitable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hard lines,&rdquo; said Arthur briefly. &ldquo;But it was a foolish
+thing to do&mdash;to go up that river.&rdquo; He shook his head. &ldquo;They
+should have known better. You can&rsquo;t expect Englishwomen to stand roughing
+it as the natives do who&rsquo;ve been acclimatised. I&rsquo;d half a mind to
+warn them at tea that day when it was being discussed. But it&rsquo;s no good
+saying these sort of things&mdash;it only puts people&rsquo;s backs up&mdash;it
+never makes any difference.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Old Mrs. Paley, hitherto contented with her soup, here intimated, by raising
+one hand to her ear, that she wished to know what was being said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You heard, Aunt Emma, that poor Miss Vinrace has died of the
+fever,&rdquo; Susan informed her gently. She could not speak of death loudly or
+even in her usual voice, so that Mrs. Paley did not catch a word. Arthur came
+to the rescue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Vinrace is dead,&rdquo; he said very distinctly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Paley merely bent a little towards him and asked, &ldquo;Eh?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Vinrace is dead,&rdquo; he repeated. It was only by stiffening all
+the muscles round his mouth that he could prevent himself from bursting into
+laughter, and forced himself to repeat for the third time, &ldquo;Miss Vinrace.
+. . . She&rsquo;s dead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that were outside
+her daily experience took some time to reach Mrs. Paley&rsquo;s consciousness.
+A weight seemed to rest upon her brain, impeding, though not damaging its
+action. She sat vague-eyed for at least a minute before she realised what
+Arthur meant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dead?&rdquo; she said vaguely. &ldquo;Miss Vinrace dead? Dear me . . .
+that&rsquo;s very sad. But I don&rsquo;t at the moment remember which she was.
+We seem to have made so many new acquaintances here.&rdquo; She looked at Susan
+for help. &ldquo;A tall dark girl, who just missed being handsome, with a high
+colour?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; Susan interposed. &ldquo;She was&mdash;&rdquo; then she gave
+it up in despair. There was no use in explaining that Mrs. Paley was thinking
+of the wrong person.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She ought not to have died,&rdquo; Mrs. Paley continued. &ldquo;She
+looked so strong. But people will drink the water. I can never make out why. It
+seems such a simple thing to tell them to put a bottle of Seltzer water in your
+bedroom. That&rsquo;s all the precaution I&rsquo;ve ever taken, and I&rsquo;ve
+been in every part of the world, I may say&mdash;Italy a dozen times over. . .
+. But young people always think they know better, and then they pay the
+penalty. Poor thing&mdash;I am very sorry for her.&rdquo; But the difficulty of
+peering into a dish of potatoes and helping herself engrossed her attention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arthur and Susan both secretly hoped that the subject was now disposed of, for
+there seemed to them something unpleasant in this discussion. But Evelyn was
+not ready to let it drop. Why would people never talk about the things that
+mattered?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe you care a bit!&rdquo; she said, turning savagely
+upon Mr. Perrott, who had sat all this time in silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I? Oh, yes, I do,&rdquo; he answered awkwardly, but with obvious
+sincerity. Evelyn&rsquo;s questions made him too feel uncomfortable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It seems so inexplicable,&rdquo; Evelyn continued. &ldquo;Death, I mean.
+Why should she be dead, and not you or I? It was only a fortnight ago that she
+was here with the rest of us. What d&rsquo;you believe?&rdquo; she demanded of
+Mr. Perrott. &ldquo;D&rsquo;you believe that things go on, that she&rsquo;s
+still somewhere&mdash;or d&rsquo;you think it&rsquo;s simply a game&mdash;we
+crumble up to nothing when we die? I&rsquo;m positive Rachel&rsquo;s not
+dead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Perrott would have said almost anything that Evelyn wanted him to say, but
+to assert that he believed in the immortality of the soul was not in his power.
+He sat silent, more deeply wrinkled than usual, crumbling his bread.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lest Evelyn should next ask him what he believed, Arthur, after making a pause
+equivalent to a full stop, started a completely different topic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Supposing,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a man were to write and tell you that
+he wanted five pounds because he had known your grandfather, what would you do?
+It was this way. My grandfather&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Invented a stove,&rdquo; said Evelyn. &ldquo;I know all about that. We
+had one in the conservatory to keep the plants warm.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t know I was so famous,&rdquo; said Arthur.
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he continued, determined at all costs to spin his story out
+at length, &ldquo;the old chap, being about the second best inventor of his
+day, and a capable lawyer too, died, as they always do, without making a will.
+Now Fielding, his clerk, with how much justice I don&rsquo;t know, always
+claimed that he meant to do something for him. The poor old boy&rsquo;s come
+down in the world through trying inventions on his own account, lives in Penge
+over a tobacconist&rsquo;s shop. I&rsquo;ve been to see him there. The question
+is&mdash;must I stump up or not? What does the abstract spirit of justice
+require, Perrott? Remember, I didn&rsquo;t benefit under my grandfather&rsquo;s
+will, and I&rsquo;ve no way of testing the truth of the story.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know much about the abstract spirit of justice,&rdquo;
+said Susan, smiling complacently at the others, &ldquo;but I&rsquo;m certain of
+one thing&mdash;he&rsquo;ll get his five pounds!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Mr. Perrott proceeded to deliver an opinion, and Evelyn insisted that he was
+much too stingy, like all lawyers, thinking of the letter and not of the
+spirit, while Mrs. Paley required to be kept informed between the courses as to
+what they were all saying, the luncheon passed with no interval of silence, and
+Arthur congratulated himself upon the tact with which the discussion had been
+smoothed over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they left the room it happened that Mrs. Paley&rsquo;s wheeled chair ran
+into the Elliots, who were coming through the door, as she was going out.
+Brought thus to a standstill for a moment, Arthur and Susan congratulated
+Hughling Elliot upon his convalescence,&mdash;he was down, cadaverous enough,
+for the first time,&mdash;and Mr. Perrott took occasion to say a few words in
+private to Evelyn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Would there be any chance of seeing you this afternoon, about
+three-thirty say? I shall be in the garden, by the fountain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The block dissolved before Evelyn answered. But as she left them in the hall,
+she looked at him brightly and said, &ldquo;Half-past three, did you say?
+That&rsquo;ll suit me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She ran upstairs with the feeling of spiritual exaltation and quickened life
+which the prospect of an emotional scene always aroused in her. That Mr.
+Perrott was again about to propose to her, she had no doubt, and she was aware
+that on this occasion she ought to be prepared with a definite answer, for she
+was going away in three days&rsquo; time. But she could not bring her mind to
+bear upon the question. To come to a decision was very difficult to her,
+because she had a natural dislike of anything final and done with; she liked to
+go on and on&mdash;always on and on. She was leaving, and, therefore, she
+occupied herself in laying her clothes out side by side upon the bed. She
+observed that some were very shabby. She took the photograph of her father and
+mother, and, before she laid it away in her box, she held it for a minute in
+her hand. Rachel had looked at it. Suddenly the keen feeling of some
+one&rsquo;s personality, which things that they have owned or handled sometimes
+preserves, overcame her; she felt Rachel in the room with her; it was as if she
+were on a ship at sea, and the life of the day was as unreal as the land in the
+distance. But by degrees the feeling of Rachel&rsquo;s presence passed away,
+and she could no longer realise her, for she had scarcely known her. But this
+momentary sensation left her depressed and fatigued. What had she done with her
+life? What future was there before her? What was make-believe, and what was
+real? Were these proposals and intimacies and adventures real, or was the
+contentment which she had seen on the faces of Susan and Rachel more real than
+anything she had ever felt?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made herself ready to go downstairs, absentmindedly, but her fingers were
+so well trained that they did the work of preparing her almost of their own
+accord. When she was actually on the way downstairs, the blood began to circle
+through her body of its own accord too, for her mind felt very dull.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Perrott was waiting for her. Indeed, he had gone straight into the garden
+after luncheon, and had been walking up and down the path for more than half an
+hour, in a state of acute suspense.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m late as usual!&rdquo; she exclaimed, as she caught sight of
+him. &ldquo;Well, you must forgive me; I had to pack up. . . . My word! It
+looks stormy! And that&rsquo;s a new steamer in the bay, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at the bay, in which a steamer was just dropping anchor, the smoke
+still hanging about it, while a swift black shudder ran through the waves.
+&ldquo;One&rsquo;s quite forgotten what rain looks like,&rdquo; she added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Mr. Perrott paid no attention to the steamer or to the weather.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Murgatroyd,&rdquo; he began with his usual formality, &ldquo;I
+asked you to come here from a very selfish motive, I fear. I do not think you
+need to be assured once more of my feelings; but, as you are leaving so soon, I
+felt that I could not let you go without asking you to tell me&mdash;have I any
+reason to hope that you will ever come to care for me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was very pale, and seemed unable to say any more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little gush of vitality which had come into Evelyn as she ran downstairs
+had left her, and she felt herself impotent. There was nothing for her to say;
+she felt nothing. Now that he was actually asking her, in his elderly gentle
+words, to marry him, she felt less for him than she had ever felt before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s sit down and talk it over,&rdquo; she said rather
+unsteadily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Perrott followed her to a curved green seat under a tree. They looked at
+the fountain in front of them, which had long ceased to play. Evelyn kept
+looking at the fountain instead of thinking of what she was saying; the
+fountain without any water seemed to be the type of her own being.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course I care for you,&rdquo; she began, rushing her words out in a
+hurry; &ldquo;I should be a brute if I didn&rsquo;t. I think you&rsquo;re quite
+one of the nicest people I&rsquo;ve ever known, and one of the finest too. But
+I wish . . . I wish you didn&rsquo;t care for me in that way. Are you sure you
+do?&rdquo; For the moment she honestly desired that he should say no.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite sure,&rdquo; said Mr. Perrott.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see, I&rsquo;m not as simple as most women,&rdquo; Evelyn continued.
+&ldquo;I think I want more. I don&rsquo;t know exactly what I feel.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat by her, watching her and refraining from speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I sometimes think I haven&rsquo;t got it in me to care very much for one
+person only. Some one else would make you a better wife. I can imagine you very
+happy with some one else.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you think that there is any chance that you will come to care for me,
+I am quite content to wait,&rdquo; said Mr. Perrott.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well&mdash;there&rsquo;s no hurry, is there?&rdquo; said Evelyn.
+&ldquo;Suppose I thought it over and wrote and told you when I get back?
+I&rsquo;m going to Moscow; I&rsquo;ll write from Moscow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Mr. Perrott persisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You cannot give me any kind of idea. I do not ask for a date . . . that
+would be most unreasonable.&rdquo; He paused, looking down at the gravel path.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she did not immediately answer, he went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know very well that I am not&mdash;that I have not much to offer you
+either in myself or in my circumstances. And I forget; it cannot seem the
+miracle to you that it does to me. Until I met you I had gone on in my own
+quiet way&mdash;we are both very quiet people, my sister and I&mdash;quite
+content with my lot. My friendship with Arthur was the most important thing in
+my life. Now that I know you, all that has changed. You seem to put such a
+spirit into everything. Life seems to hold so many possibilities that I had
+never dreamt of.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s splendid!&rdquo; Evelyn exclaimed, grasping his hand.
+&ldquo;Now you&rsquo;ll go back and start all kinds of things and make a great
+name in the world; and we&rsquo;ll go on being friends, whatever happens . . .
+we&rsquo;ll be great friends, won&rsquo;t we?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Evelyn!&rdquo; he moaned suddenly, and took her in his arms, and kissed
+her. She did not resent it, although it made little impression on her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she sat upright again, she said, &ldquo;I never see why one shouldn&rsquo;t
+go on being friends&mdash;though some people do. And friendships do make a
+difference, don&rsquo;t they? They are the kind of things that matter in
+one&rsquo;s life?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at her with a bewildered expression as if he did not really
+understand what she was saying. With a considerable effort he collected
+himself, stood up, and said, &ldquo;Now I think I have told you what I feel,
+and I will only add that I can wait as long as ever you wish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Left alone, Evelyn walked up and down the path. What did matter then? What was
+the meaning of it all?
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap27"></a>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+
+<p>
+All that evening the clouds gathered, until they closed entirely over the blue
+of the sky. They seemed to narrow the space between earth and heaven, so that
+there was no room for the air to move in freely; and the waves, too, lay flat,
+and yet rigid, as if they were restrained. The leaves on the bushes and trees
+in the garden hung closely together, and the feeling of pressure and restraint
+was increased by the short chirping sounds which came from birds and insects.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So strange were the lights and the silence that the busy hum of voices which
+usually filled the dining-room at meal times had distinct gaps in it, and
+during these silences the clatter of the knives upon plates became audible. The
+first roll of thunder and the first heavy drop striking the pane caused a
+little stir.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s coming!&rdquo; was said simultaneously in many different
+languages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was then a profound silence, as if the thunder had withdrawn into itself.
+People had just begun to eat again, when a gust of cold air came through the
+open windows, lifting tablecloths and skirts, a light flashed, and was
+instantly followed by a clap of thunder right over the hotel. The rain swished
+with it, and immediately there were all those sounds of windows being shut and
+doors slamming violently which accompany a storm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The room grew suddenly several degrees darker, for the wind seemed to be
+driving waves of darkness across the earth. No one attempted to eat for a time,
+but sat looking out at the garden, with their forks in the air. The flashes now
+came frequently, lighting up faces as if they were going to be photographed,
+surprising them in tense and unnatural expressions. The clap followed close and
+violently upon them. Several women half rose from their chairs and then sat
+down again, but dinner was continued uneasily with eyes upon the garden. The
+bushes outside were ruffled and whitened, and the wind pressed upon them so
+that they seemed to stoop to the ground. The waiters had to press dishes upon
+the diners&rsquo; notice; and the diners had to draw the attention of waiters,
+for they were all absorbed in looking at the storm. As the thunder showed no
+signs of withdrawing, but seemed massed right overhead, while the lightning
+aimed straight at the garden every time, an uneasy gloom replaced the first
+excitement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finishing the meal very quickly, people congregated in the hall, where they
+felt more secure than in any other place because they could retreat far from
+the windows, and although they heard the thunder, they could not see anything.
+A little boy was carried away sobbing in the arms of his mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While the storm continued, no one seemed inclined to sit down, but they
+collected in little groups under the central skylight, where they stood in a
+yellow atmosphere, looking upwards. Now and again their faces became white, as
+the lightning flashed, and finally a terrific crash came, making the panes of
+the skylight lift at the joints.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; several voices exclaimed at the same moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something struck,&rdquo; said a man&rsquo;s voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rain rushed down. The rain seemed now to extinguish the lightning and the
+thunder, and the hall became almost dark.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a minute or two, when nothing was heard but the rattle of water upon the
+glass, there was a perceptible slackening of the sound, and then the atmosphere
+became lighter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s over,&rdquo; said another voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a touch, all the electric lights were turned on, and revealed a crowd of
+people all standing, all looking with rather strained faces up at the skylight,
+but when they saw each other in the artificial light they turned at once and
+began to move away. For some minutes the rain continued to rattle upon the
+skylight, and the thunder gave another shake or two; but it was evident from
+the clearing of the darkness and the light drumming of the rain upon the roof,
+that the great confused ocean of air was travelling away from them, and passing
+high over head with its clouds and its rods of fire, out to sea. The building,
+which had seemed so small in the tumult of the storm, now became as square and
+spacious as usual.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the storm drew away, the people in the hall of the hotel sat down; and with
+a comfortable sense of relief, began to tell each other stories about great
+storms, and produced in many cases their occupations for the evening. The
+chess-board was brought out, and Mr. Elliot, who wore a stock instead of a
+collar as a sign of convalescence, but was otherwise much as usual, challenged
+Mr. Pepper to a final contest. Round them gathered a group of ladies with
+pieces of needlework, or in default of needlework, with novels, to superintend
+the game, much as if they were in charge of two small boys playing marbles.
+Every now and then they looked at the board and made some encouraging remark to
+the gentlemen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Paley just round the corner had her cards arranged in long ladders before
+her, with Susan sitting near to sympathise but not to correct, and the
+merchants and the miscellaneous people who had never been discovered to possess
+names were stretched in their arm-chairs with their newspapers on their knees.
+The conversation in these circumstances was very gentle, fragmentary, and
+intermittent, but the room was full of the indescribable stir of life. Every
+now and then the moth, which was now grey of wing and shiny of thorax, whizzed
+over their heads, and hit the lamps with a thud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A young woman put down her needlework and exclaimed, &ldquo;Poor creature! it
+would be kinder to kill it.&rdquo; But nobody seemed disposed to rouse himself
+in order to kill the moth. They watched it dash from lamp to lamp, because they
+were comfortable, and had nothing to do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the sofa, beside the chess-players, Mrs. Elliot was imparting a new stitch
+in knitting to Mrs. Thornbury, so that their heads came very near together, and
+were only to be distinguished by the old lace cap which Mrs. Thornbury wore in
+the evening. Mrs. Elliot was an expert at knitting, and disclaimed a compliment
+to that effect with evident pride.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose we&rsquo;re all proud of something,&rdquo; she said,
+&ldquo;and I&rsquo;m proud of my knitting. I think things like that run in
+families. We all knit well. I had an uncle who knitted his own socks to the day
+of his death&mdash;and he did it better than any of his daughters, dear old
+gentleman. Now I wonder that you, Miss Allan, who use your eyes so much,
+don&rsquo;t take up knitting in the evenings. You&rsquo;d find it such a
+relief, I should say&mdash;such a rest to the eyes&mdash;and the bazaars are so
+glad of things.&rdquo; Her voice dropped into the smooth half-conscious tone of
+the expert knitter; the words came gently one after another. &ldquo;As much as
+I do I can always dispose of, which is a comfort, for then I feel that I am not
+wasting my time&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Allan, being thus addressed, shut her novel and observed the others
+placidly for a time. At last she said, &ldquo;It is surely not natural to leave
+your wife because she happens to be in love with you. But that&mdash;as far as
+I can make out&mdash;is what the gentleman in my story does.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tut, tut, that doesn&rsquo;t sound good&mdash;no, that doesn&rsquo;t
+sound at all natural,&rdquo; murmured the knitters in their absorbed voices.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Still, it&rsquo;s the kind of book people call very clever,&rdquo; Miss
+Allan added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>Maternity</i>&mdash;by Michael Jessop&mdash;I presume,&rdquo; Mr.
+Elliot put in, for he could never resist the temptation of talking while he
+played chess.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;you know,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot, after a moment, &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t think people <i>do</i> write good novels now&mdash;not as good as
+they used to, anyhow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one took the trouble to agree with her or to disagree with her. Arthur
+Venning who was strolling about, sometimes looking at the game, sometimes
+reading a page of a magazine, looked at Miss Allan, who was half asleep, and
+said humorously, &ldquo;A penny for your thoughts, Miss Allan.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The others looked up. They were glad that he had not spoken to them. But Miss
+Allan replied without any hesitation, &ldquo;I was thinking of my imaginary
+uncle. Hasn&rsquo;t every one got an imaginary uncle?&rdquo; she continued.
+&ldquo;I have one&mdash;a most delightful old gentleman. He&rsquo;s always
+giving me things. Sometimes it&rsquo;s a gold watch; sometimes it&rsquo;s a
+carriage and pair; sometimes it&rsquo;s a beautiful little cottage in the New
+Forest; sometimes it&rsquo;s a ticket to the place I most want to see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She set them all thinking vaguely of the things they wanted. Mrs. Elliot knew
+exactly what she wanted; she wanted a child; and the usual little pucker
+deepened on her brow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;re such lucky people,&rdquo; she said, looking at her husband.
+&ldquo;We really have no wants.&rdquo; She was apt to say this, partly in order
+to convince herself, and partly in order to convince other people. But she was
+prevented from wondering how far she carried conviction by the entrance of Mr.
+and Mrs. Flushing, who came through the hall and stopped by the chess-board.
+Mrs. Flushing looked wilder than ever. A great strand of black hair looped down
+across her brow, her cheeks were whipped a dark blood red, and drops of rain
+made wet marks upon them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Flushing explained that they had been on the roof watching the storm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was a wonderful sight,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The lightning went
+right out over the sea, and lit up the waves and the ships far away. You
+can&rsquo;t think how wonderful the mountains looked too, with the lights on
+them, and the great masses of shadow. It&rsquo;s all over now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He slid down into a chair, becoming interested in the final struggle of the
+game.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you go back to-morrow?&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at Mrs.
+Flushing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And indeed one is not sorry to go back,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot,
+assuming an air of mournful anxiety, &ldquo;after all this illness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you afraid of dyin&rsquo;?&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing demanded scornfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think we are all afraid of that,&rdquo; said Mrs. Elliot with dignity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose we&rsquo;re all cowards when it comes to the point,&rdquo;
+said Mrs. Flushing, rubbing her cheek against the back of the chair.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure I am.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not a bit of it!&rdquo; said Mr. Flushing, turning round, for Mr. Pepper
+took a very long time to consider his move. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not cowardly to
+wish to live, Alice. It&rsquo;s the very reverse of cowardly. Personally,
+I&rsquo;d like to go on for a hundred years&mdash;granted, of course, that I
+had the full use of my faculties. Think of all the things that are bound to
+happen!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is what I feel,&rdquo; Mrs. Thornbury rejoined. &ldquo;The changes,
+the improvements, the inventions&mdash;and beauty. D&rsquo;you know I feel
+sometimes that I couldn&rsquo;t bear to die and cease to see beautiful things
+about me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would certainly be very dull to die before they have discovered
+whether there is life in Mars,&rdquo; Miss Allan added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you really believe there&rsquo;s life in Mars?&rdquo; asked Mrs.
+Flushing, turning to her for the first time with keen interest. &ldquo;Who
+tells you that? Some one who knows? D&rsquo;you know a man
+called&mdash;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here Mrs. Thornbury laid down her knitting, and a look of extreme solicitude
+came into her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is Mr. Hirst,&rdquo; she said quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+St. John had just come through the swing door. He was rather blown about by the
+wind, and his cheeks looked terribly pale, unshorn, and cavernous. After taking
+off his coat he was going to pass straight through the hall and up to his room,
+but he could not ignore the presence of so many people he knew, especially as
+Mrs. Thornbury rose and went up to him, holding out her hand. But the shock of
+the warm lamp-lit room, together with the sight of so many cheerful human
+beings sitting together at their ease, after the dark walk in the rain, and the
+long days of strain and horror, overcame him completely. He looked at Mrs.
+Thornbury and could not speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every one was silent. Mr. Pepper&rsquo;s hand stayed upon his Knight. Mrs.
+Thornbury somehow moved him to a chair, sat herself beside him, and with tears
+in her own eyes said gently, &ldquo;You have done everything for your
+friend.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her action set them all talking again as if they had never stopped, and Mr.
+Pepper finished the move with his Knight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There was nothing to be done,&rdquo; said St. John. He spoke very
+slowly. &ldquo;It seems impossible&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drew his hand across his eyes as if some dream came between him and the
+others and prevented him from seeing where he was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And that poor fellow,&rdquo; said Mrs. Thornbury, the tears falling
+again down her cheeks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Impossible,&rdquo; St. John repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did he have the consolation of knowing&mdash;?&rdquo; Mrs. Thornbury
+began very tentatively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But St. John made no reply. He lay back in his chair, half-seeing the others,
+half-hearing what they said. He was terribly tired, and the light and warmth,
+the movements of the hands, and the soft communicative voices soothed him; they
+gave him a strange sense of quiet and relief. As he sat there, motionless, this
+feeling of relief became a feeling of profound happiness. Without any sense of
+disloyalty to Terence and Rachel he ceased to think about either of them. The
+movements and the voices seemed to draw together from different parts of the
+room, and to combine themselves into a pattern before his eyes; he was content
+to sit silently watching the pattern build itself up, looking at what he hardly
+saw.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The game was really a good one, and Mr. Pepper and Mr. Elliot were becoming
+more and more set upon the struggle. Mrs. Thornbury, seeing that St. John did
+not wish to talk, resumed her knitting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lightning again!&rdquo; Mrs. Flushing suddenly exclaimed. A yellow light
+flashed across the blue window, and for a second they saw the green trees
+outside. She strode to the door, pushed it open, and stood half out in the open
+air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the light was only the reflection of the storm which was over. The rain had
+ceased, the heavy clouds were blown away, and the air was thin and clear,
+although vapourish mists were being driven swiftly across the moon. The sky was
+once more a deep and solemn blue, and the shape of the earth was visible at the
+bottom of the air, enormous, dark, and solid, rising into the tapering mass of
+the mountain, and pricked here and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of
+villas. The driving air, the drone of the trees, and the flashing light which
+now and again spread a broad illumination over the earth filled Mrs. Flushing
+with exultation. Her breasts rose and fell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Splendid! Splendid!&rdquo; she muttered to herself. Then she turned back
+into the hall and exclaimed in a peremptory voice, &ldquo;Come outside and see,
+Wilfrid; it&rsquo;s wonderful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some half-stirred; some rose; some dropped their balls of wool and began to
+stoop to look for them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To bed&mdash;to bed,&rdquo; said Miss Allan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was the move with your Queen that gave it away, Pepper,&rdquo;
+exclaimed Mr. Elliot triumphantly, sweeping the pieces together and standing
+up. He had won the game.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What? Pepper beaten at last? I congratulate you!&rdquo; said Arthur
+Venning, who was wheeling old Mrs. Paley to bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All these voices sounded gratefully in St. John&rsquo;s ears as he lay
+half-asleep, and yet vividly conscious of everything around him. Across his
+eyes passed a procession of objects, black and indistinct, the figures of
+people picking up their books, their cards, their balls of wool, their
+work-baskets, and passing him one after another on their way to bed.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Voyage Out, by Virginia Woolf
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Voyage Out
+
+Author: Virginia Woolf
+
+Release Date: January 12, 2006 [EBook #144]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VOYAGE OUT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE VOYAGE OUT (1915)
+
+
+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:
+
+     {See the html (144-h) or the UTF-8 (144-0) version of this file
+     for 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
+self-consciousness. 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 wheezing for some minutes like an old man
+preparing to cough, now struck nine. The sound slightly disturbed
+certain somnolent merchants, government officials, and men of
+independent means who were lying back in their chairs, chatting,
+smoking, ruminating about their affairs, with their eyes half shut;
+they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and then closed them
+again. They had the appearance of crocodiles so fully gorged by their
+last meal that the future of the world gives them no anxiety whatever.
+The only disturbance in the placid bright room was caused by a large
+moth which shot from light to light, whizzing over elaborate heads of
+hair, and causing several young women to raise their hands nervously and
+exclaim, "Some one ought to kill it!"
+
+Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not spoken for a
+long time.
+
+When the clock struck, Hirst said:
+
+"Ah, the creatures begin to stir. . . ." He watched them raise
+themselves, look about them, and settle down again. "What I abhor most
+of all," he concluded, "is the female breast. Imagine being Venning and
+having to get into bed with Susan! But the really repulsive thing is
+that they feel nothing at all--about what I do when I have a hot bath.
+They're gross, they're absurd, they're utterly intolerable!"
+
+So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded to think about
+himself, about science, about Cambridge, about the Bar, about Helen and
+what she thought of him, until, being very tired, he was nodding off to
+sleep.
+
+Suddenly Hewet woke him up.
+
+"How d'you know what you feel, Hirst?"
+
+"Are you in love?" asked Hirst. He put in his eyeglass.
+
+"Don't be a fool," said Hewet.
+
+"Well, I'll sit down and think about it," said Hirst. "One really ought
+to. If these people would only think about things, the world would be a
+far better place for us all to live in. Are you trying to think?"
+
+That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour, but
+he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.
+
+"I shall go for a walk," he said.
+
+"Remember we weren't in bed last night," said Hirst with a prodigious
+yawn.
+
+Hewet rose and stretched himself.
+
+"I want to go and get a breath of air," he said.
+
+An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and forbidding
+him to settle into any one train of thought. It was precisely as if he
+had been in the middle of a talk which interested him profoundly when
+some one came up and interrupted him. He could not finish the talk, and
+the longer he sat there the more he wanted to finish it. As the talk
+that had been interrupted was a talk with Rachel, he had to ask himself
+why he felt this, and why he wanted to go on talking to her. Hirst would
+merely say that he was in love with her. But he was not in love with
+her. Did love begin in that way, with the wish to go on talking? No. It
+always began in his case with definite physical sensations, and these
+were now absent, he did not even find her physically attractive.
+There was something, of course, unusual about her--she was young,
+inexperienced, and inquisitive, they had been more open with each other
+than was usually possible. He always found girls interesting to talk to,
+and surely these were good reasons why he should wish to go on talking
+to her; and last night, what with the crowd and the confusion, he had
+only been able to begin to talk to her. What was she doing now? Lying on
+a sofa and looking at the ceiling, perhaps. He could imagine her doing
+that, and Helen in an arm-chair, with her hands on the arm of it,
+so--looking ahead of her, with her great big eyes--oh no, they'd be
+talking, of course, about the dance. But suppose Rachel was going away
+in a day or two, suppose this was the end of her visit, and her
+father had arrived in one of the steamers anchored in the bay,--it was
+intolerable to know so little. Therefore he exclaimed, "How d'you know
+what you feel, Hirst?" to stop himself from thinking.
+
+But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their aimless
+movements and their unknown lives were disturbing, so that he longed for
+the empty darkness. The first thing he looked for when he stepped out
+of the hall door was the light of the Ambroses' villa. When he had
+definitely decided that a certain light apart from the others higher up
+the hill was their light, he was considerably reassured. There seemed
+to be at once a little stability in all this incoherence. Without any
+definite plan in his head, he took the turning to the right and walked
+through the town and came to the wall by the meeting of the roads, where
+he stopped. The booming of the sea was audible. The dark-blue mass of
+the mountains rose against the paler blue of the sky. There was no moon,
+but myriads of stars, and lights were anchored up and down in the dark
+waves of earth all round him. He had meant to go back, but the single
+light of the Ambroses' villa had now become three separate lights, and
+he was tempted to go on. He might as well make sure that Rachel was
+still there. Walking fast, he soon stood by the iron gate of their
+garden, and pushed it open; the outline of the house suddenly appeared
+sharply before his eyes, and the thin column of the verandah cutting
+across the palely lit gravel of the terrace. He hesitated. At the back
+of the house some one was rattling cans. He approached the front; the
+light on the terrace showed him that the sitting-rooms were on that
+side. He stood as near the light as he could by the corner of the house,
+the leaves of a creeper brushing his face. After a moment he could hear
+a voice. The voice went on steadily; it was not talking, but from the
+continuity of the sound it was a voice reading aloud. He crept a little
+closer; he crumpled the leaves together so as to stop their rustling
+about his ears. It might be Rachel's voice. He left the shadow and
+stepped into the radius of the light, and then heard a sentence spoken
+quite distinctly.
+
+"And there we lived from the year 1860 to 1895, the happiest years of
+my parents' lives, and there in 1862 my brother Maurice was born, to the
+delight of his parents, as he was destined to be the delight of all who
+knew him."
+
+The voice quickened, and the tone became conclusive rising slightly in
+pitch, as if these words were at the end of the chapter. Hewet drew
+back again into the shadow. There was a long silence. He could just
+hear chairs being moved inside. He had almost decided to go back, when
+suddenly two figures appeared at the window, not six feet from him.
+
+"It was Maurice Fielding, of course, that your mother was engaged to,"
+said Helen's voice. She spoke reflectively, looking out into the dark
+garden, and thinking evidently as much of the look of the night as of
+what she was saying.
+
+"Mother?" said Rachel. Hewet's heart leapt, and he noticed the fact. Her
+voice, though low, was full of surprise.
+
+"You didn't know that?" said Helen.
+
+"I never knew there'd been any one else," said Rachel. She was clearly
+surprised, but all they said was said low and inexpressively, because
+they were speaking out into the cool dark night.
+
+"More people were in love with her than with any one I've ever known,"
+Helen stated. "She had that power--she enjoyed things. She wasn't
+beautiful, but--I was thinking of her last night at the dance. She
+got on with every kind of person, and then she made it all so
+amazingly--funny."
+
+It appeared that Helen was going back into the past, choosing her words
+deliberately, comparing Theresa with the people she had known since
+Theresa died.
+
+"I don't know how she did it," she continued, and ceased, and there was
+a long pause, in which a little owl called first here, then there, as it
+moved from tree to tree in the garden.
+
+"That's so like Aunt Lucy and Aunt Katie," said Rachel at last. "They
+always make out that she was very sad and very good."
+
+"Then why, for goodness' sake, did they do nothing but criticize her
+when she was alive?" said Helen. Very gentle their voices sounded, as if
+they fell through the waves of the sea.
+
+"If I were to die to-morrow . . ." she began.
+
+The broken sentences had an extraordinary beauty and detachment in
+Hewet's ears, and a kind of mystery too, as though they were spoken by
+people in their sleep.
+
+"No, Rachel," Helen's voice continued, "I'm not going to walk in the
+garden; it's damp--it's sure to be damp; besides, I see at least a dozen
+toads."
+
+"Toads? Those are stones, Helen. Come out. It's nicer out. The flowers
+smell," Rachel replied.
+
+Hewet drew still farther back. His heart was beating very quickly.
+Apparently Rachel tried to pull Helen out on to the terrace, and
+helen resisted. There was a certain amount of scuffling, entreating,
+resisting, and laughter from both of them. Then a man's form appeared.
+Hewet could not hear what they were all saying. In a minute they had
+gone in; he could hear bolts grating then; there was dead silence, and
+all the lights went out.
+
+He turned away, still crumpling and uncrumpling a handful of leaves
+which he had torn from the wall. An exquisite sense of pleasure and
+relief possessed him; it was all so solid and peaceful after the ball
+at the hotel, whether he was in love with them or not, and he was not in
+love with them; no, but it was good that they should be alive.
+
+After standing still for a minute or two he turned and began to walk
+towards the gate. With the movement of his body, the excitement, the
+romance and the richness of life crowded into his brain. He shouted out
+a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he stumbled among lines
+and fragments of lines which had no meaning at all except for the beauty
+of the words. He shut the gate, and ran swinging from side to side down
+the hill, shouting any nonsense that came into his head. "Here am I,"
+he cried rhythmically, as his feet pounded to the left and to the right,
+"plunging along, like an elephant in the jungle, stripping the branches
+as I go (he snatched at the twigs of a bush at the roadside), roaring
+innumerable words, lovely words about innumerable things, running
+downhill and talking nonsense aloud to myself about roads and leaves
+and lights and women coming out into the darkness--about women--about
+Rachel, about Rachel." He stopped and drew a deep breath. The night
+seemed immense and hospitable, and although so dark there seemed to
+be things moving down there in the harbour and movement out at sea.
+He gazed until the darkness numbed him, and then he walked on quickly,
+still murmuring to himself. "And I ought to be in bed, snoring
+and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. Dreams and realities, dreams and
+realities, dreams and realities," he repeated all the way up the avenue,
+scarcely knowing what he said, until he reached the front door. Here he
+paused for a second, and collected himself before he opened the door.
+
+His eyes were dazed, his hands very cold, and his brain excited and yet
+half asleep. Inside the door everything was as he had left it except
+that the hall was now empty. There were the chairs turning in towards
+each other where people had sat talking, and the empty glasses on little
+tables, and the newspapers scattered on the floor. As he shut the door
+he felt as if he were enclosed in a square box, and instantly shrivelled
+up. It was all very bright and very small. He stopped for a minute by
+the long table to find a paper which he had meant to read, but he was
+still too much under the influence of the dark and the fresh air to
+consider carefully which paper it was or where he had seen it.
+
+As he fumbled vaguely among the papers he saw a figure cross the tail of
+his eye, coming downstairs. He heard the swishing sound of skirts, and
+to his great surprise, Evelyn M. came up to him, laid her hand on the
+table as if to prevent him from taking up a paper, and said:
+
+"You're just the person I wanted to talk to." Her voice was a little
+unpleasant and metallic, her eyes were very bright, and she kept them
+fixed upon him.
+
+"To talk to me?" he repeated. "But I'm half asleep."
+
+"But I think you understand better than most people," she answered, and
+sat down on a little chair placed beside a big leather chair so that
+Hewet had to sit down beside her.
+
+"Well?" he said. He yawned openly, and lit a cigarette. He could not
+believe that this was really happening to him. "What is it?"
+
+"Are you really sympathetic, or is it just a pose?" she demanded.
+
+"It's for you to say," he replied. "I'm interested, I think." He still
+felt numb all over and as if she was much too close to him.
+
+"Any one can be interested!" she cried impatiently. "Your friend Mr.
+Hirst's interested, I daresay however, I do believe in you. You look
+as if you'd got a nice sister, somehow." She paused, picking at some
+sequins on her knees, and then, as if she had made up her mind, she
+started off, "Anyhow, I'm going to ask your advice. D'you ever get into
+a state where you don't know your own mind? That's the state I'm in now.
+You see, last night at the dance Raymond Oliver,--he's the tall dark
+boy who looks as if he had Indian blood in him, but he says he's not
+really,--well, we were sitting out together, and he told me all about
+himself, how unhappy he is at home, and how he hates being out here.
+They've put him into some beastly mining business. He says it's
+beastly--I should like it, I know, but that's neither here nor there.
+And I felt awfully sorry for him, one couldn't help being sorry for him,
+and when he asked me to let him kiss me, I did. I don't see any harm
+in that, do you? And then this morning he said he'd thought I meant
+something more, and I wasn't the sort to let any one kiss me. And we
+talked and talked. I daresay I was very silly, but one can't help liking
+people when one's sorry for them. I do like him most awfully--" She
+paused. "So I gave him half a promise, and then, you see, there's Alfred
+Perrott."
+
+"Oh, Perrott," said Hewet.
+
+"We got to know each other on that picnic the other day," she continued.
+"He seemed so lonely, especially as Arthur had gone off with Susan, and
+one couldn't help guessing what was in his mind. So we had quite a long
+talk when you were looking at the ruins, and he told me all about his
+life, and his struggles, and how fearfully hard it had been. D'you know,
+he was a boy in a grocer's shop and took parcels to people's houses in
+a basket? That interested me awfully, because I always say it doesn't
+matter how you're born if you've got the right stuff in you. And he told
+me about his sister who's paralysed, poor girl, and one can see she's a
+great trial, though he's evidently very devoted to her. I must say I do
+admire people like that! I don't expect you do because you're so clever.
+Well, last night we sat out in the garden together, and I couldn't help
+seeing what he wanted to say, and comforting him a little, and telling
+him I did care--I really do--only, then, there's Raymond Oliver. What I
+want you to tell me is, can one be in love with two people at once, or
+can't one?"
+
+She became silent, and sat with her chin on her hands, looking very
+intent, as if she were facing a real problem which had to be discussed
+between them.
+
+"I think it depends what sort of person you are," said Hewet. He
+looked at her. She was small and pretty, aged perhaps twenty-eight or
+twenty-nine, but though dashing and sharply cut, her features expressed
+nothing very clearly, except a great deal of spirit and good health.
+
+"Who are you, what are you; you see, I know nothing about you," he
+continued.
+
+"Well, I was coming to that," said Evelyn M. She continued to rest her
+chin on her hands and to look intently ahead of her. "I'm the daughter
+of a mother and no father, if that interests you," she said. "It's not a
+very nice thing to be. It's what often happens in the country. She was
+a farmer's daughter, and he was rather a swell--the young man up at the
+great house. He never made things straight--never married her--though
+he allowed us quite a lot of money. His people wouldn't let him. Poor
+father! I can't help liking him. Mother wasn't the sort of woman who
+could keep him straight, anyhow. He was killed in the war. I believe
+his men worshipped him. They say great big troopers broke down and cried
+over his body on the battlefield. I wish I'd known him. Mother had all
+the life crushed out of her. The world--" She clenched her fist. "Oh,
+people can be horrid to a woman like that!" She turned upon Hewet.
+
+"Well," she said, "d'you want to know any more about me?"
+
+"But you?" he asked, "Who looked after you?"
+
+"I've looked after myself mostly," she laughed. "I've had splendid
+friends. I do like people! That's the trouble. What would you do if you
+liked two people, both of them tremendously, and you couldn't tell which
+most?"
+
+"I should go on liking them--I should wait and see. Why not?"
+
+"But one has to make up one's mind," said Evelyn. "Or are you one of the
+people who doesn't believe in marriages and all that? Look here--this
+isn't fair, I do all the telling, and you tell nothing. Perhaps you're
+the same as your friend"--she looked at him suspiciously; "perhaps you
+don't like me?"
+
+"I don't know you," said Hewet.
+
+"I know when I like a person directly I see them! I knew I liked you the
+very first night at dinner. Oh dear," she continued impatiently, "what
+a lot of bother would be saved if only people would say the things they
+think straight out! I'm made like that. I can't help it."
+
+"But don't you find it leads to difficulties?" Hewet asked.
+
+"That's men's fault," she answered. "They always drag it in-love, I
+mean."
+
+"And so you've gone on having one proposal after another," said Hewet.
+
+"I don't suppose I've had more proposals than most women," said Evelyn,
+but she spoke without conviction.
+
+"Five, six, ten?" Hewet ventured.
+
+Evelyn seemed to intimate that perhaps ten was the right figure, but
+that it really was not a high one.
+
+"I believe you're thinking me a heartless flirt," she protested. "But
+I don't care if you are. I don't care what any one thinks of me. Just
+because one's interested and likes to be friends with men, and talk to
+them as one talks to women, one's called a flirt."
+
+"But Miss Murgatroyd--"
+
+"I wish you'd call me Evelyn," she interrupted.
+
+"After ten proposals do you honestly think that men are the same as
+women?"
+
+"Honestly, honestly,--how I hate that word! It's always used by prigs,"
+cried Evelyn. "Honestly I think they ought to be. That's what's so
+disappointing. Every time one thinks it's not going to happen, and every
+time it does."
+
+"The pursuit of Friendship," said Hewet. "The title of a comedy."
+
+"You're horrid," she cried. "You don't care a bit really. You might be
+Mr. Hirst."
+
+"Well," said Hewet, "let's consider. Let us consider--" He paused,
+because for the moment he could not remember what it was that they had
+to consider. He was far more interested in her than in her story, for as
+she went on speaking his numbness had disappeared, and he was conscious
+of a mixture of liking, pity, and distrust. "You've promised to marry
+both Oliver and Perrott?" he concluded.
+
+"Not exactly promised," said Evelyn. "I can't make up my mind which I
+really like best. Oh how I detest modern life!" she flung off. "It must
+have been so much easier for the Elizabethans! I thought the other day
+on that mountain how I'd have liked to be one of those colonists, to cut
+down trees and make laws and all that, instead of fooling about with all
+these people who think one's just a pretty young lady. Though I'm not.
+I really might _do_ something." She reflected in silence for a minute.
+Then she said:
+
+"I'm afraid right down in my heart that Alfred Perrot _won't_ do. He's
+not strong, is he?"
+
+"Perhaps he couldn't cut down a tree," said Hewet. "Have you never cared
+for anybody?" he asked.
+
+"I've cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them," she said. "I
+suppose I'm too fastidious. All my life I've wanted somebody I could
+look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are so small."
+
+"What d'you mean by splendid?" Hewet asked. "People are--nothing more."
+
+Evelyn was puzzled.
+
+"We don't care for people because of their qualities," he tried to
+explain. "It's just them that we care for,"--he struck a match--"just
+that," he said, pointing to the flames.
+
+"I see what you mean," she said, "but I don't agree. I do know why I
+care for people, and I think I'm hardly ever wrong. I see at once what
+they've got in them. Now I think you must be rather splendid; but not
+Mr. Hirst."
+
+Hewlet shook his head.
+
+"He's not nearly so unselfish, or so sympathetic, or so big, or so
+understanding," Evelyn continued.
+
+Hewet sat silent, smoking his cigarette.
+
+"I should hate cutting down trees," he remarked.
+
+"I'm not trying to flirt with you, though I suppose you think I am!"
+Evelyn shot out. "I'd never have come to you if I'd thought you'd merely
+think odious things of me!" The tears came into her eyes.
+
+"Do you never flirt?" he asked.
+
+"Of course I don't," she protested. "Haven't I told you? I want
+friendship; I want to care for some one greater and nobler than I am,
+and if they fall in love with me it isn't my fault; I don't want it; I
+positively hate it."
+
+Hewet could see that there was very little use in going on with the
+conversation, for it was obvious that Evelyn did not wish to say
+anything in particular, but to impress upon him an image of herself,
+being, for some reason which she would not reveal, unhappy, or insecure.
+He was very tired, and a pale waiter kept walking ostentatiously into
+the middle of the room and looking at them meaningly.
+
+"They want to shut up," he said. "My advice is that you should tell
+Oliver and Perrott to-morrow that you've made up your mind that you
+don't mean to marry either of them. I'm certain you don't. If you
+change your mind you can always tell them so. They're both sensible men;
+they'll understand. And then all this bother will be over." He got up.
+
+But Evelyn did not move. She sat looking up at him with her bright eager
+eyes, in the depths of which he thought he detected some disappointment,
+or dissatisfaction.
+
+"Good-night," he said.
+
+"There are heaps of things I want to say to you still," she said. "And
+I'm going to, some time. I suppose you must go to bed now?"
+
+"Yes," said Hewet. "I'm half asleep." He left her still sitting by
+herself in the empty hall.
+
+"Why is it that they _won't_ be honest?" he muttered to himself as he
+went upstairs. Why was it that relations between different people were
+so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous
+that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an instinct
+to be examined carefully and probably crushed? What had Evelyn really
+wished to say to him? What was she feeling left alone in the empty
+hall? The mystery of life and the unreality even of one's own sensations
+overcame him as he walked down the corridor which led to his room. It
+was dimly lighted, but sufficiently for him to see a figure in a bright
+dressing-gown pass swiftly in front of him, the figure of a woman
+crossing from one room to another.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+
+Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually
+meeting in a hotel at midnight, they possess one advantage at least over
+the bonds which unite the elderly, who have lived together once and so
+must live for ever. Slight they may be, but vivid and genuine, merely
+because the power to break them is within the grasp of each, and there
+is no reason for continuance except a true desire that continue they
+shall. When two people have been married for years they seem to become
+unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if
+alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and
+in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its
+loneliness. The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this
+stage of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to
+recall with an effort whether a thing had been said or only thought,
+shared or dreamt in private. At four o'clock in the afternoon two or
+three days later Mrs. Ambrose was standing brushing her hair, while
+her husband was in the dressing-room which opened out of her room, and
+occasionally, through the cascade of water--he was washing his face--she
+caught exclamations, "So it goes on year after year; I wish, I wish, I
+wish I could make an end of it," to which she paid no attention.
+
+"It's white? Or only brown?" Thus she herself murmured, examining a hair
+which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. She pulled it out and laid
+it on the dressing-table. She was criticising her own appearance, or
+rather approving of it, standing a little way back from the glass and
+looking at her own face with superb pride and melancholy, when her
+husband appeared in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half
+obscured by a towel.
+
+"You often tell me I don't notice things," he remarked.
+
+"Tell me if this is a white hair, then?" she replied. She laid the hair
+on his hand.
+
+"There's not a white hair on your head," he exclaimed.
+
+"Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt," she sighed; and bowed her head under
+his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced only a kiss
+where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife then proceeded to
+move about the room, casually murmuring.
+
+"What was that you were saying?" Helen remarked, after an interval of
+conversation which no third person could have understood.
+
+"Rachel--you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel," he observed
+significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked
+at him. His observations were apt to be true.
+
+"Young gentlemen don't interest themselves in young women's education
+without a motive," he remarked.
+
+"Oh, Hirst," said Helen.
+
+"Hirst and Hewet, they're all the same to me--all covered with spots,"
+he replied. "He advises her to read Gibbon. Did you know that?"
+
+Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior to her
+husband in powers of observation. She merely said:
+
+"Nothing would surprise me. Even that dreadful flying man we met at the
+dance--even Mr. Dalloway--even--"
+
+"I advise you to be circumspect," said Ridley. "There's Willoughby,
+remember--Willoughby"; he pointed at a letter.
+
+Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her
+dressing-table. Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive,
+perpetually jocular, robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring
+after his daughter's manners and morals--hoping she wasn't a bore, and
+bidding them pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she
+were--and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion, and
+then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little natives who
+went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he roared English
+oaths at them, "popping my head out of the window just as I was, in my
+shirt sleeves. The beggars had the sense to scatter."
+
+"If Theresa married Willoughby," she remarked, turning the page with a
+hairpin, "one doesn't see what's to prevent Rachel--"
+
+But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with the
+washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of
+Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and yet
+Ridley couldn't simply point at the door and tell him to go. The truth
+of it was, they saw too many people. And so on and so on, more conjugal
+talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both ready to
+go down to tea.
+
+The first thing that caught Helen's eye as she came downstairs was a
+carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding on the
+tops of hats. She had only time to gain the drawing-room before two
+names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thornbury
+came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.
+
+"Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing," said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand.
+"A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry."
+
+Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically. She was a woman of forty
+perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust, though not as
+tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.
+
+She looked Helen straight in the face and said, "You have a charmin'
+house."
+
+She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you, and
+though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous at the
+same time. Mrs. Thornbury acted as interpreter, making things smooth all
+round by a series of charming commonplace remarks.
+
+"I've taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose," she said, "to promise that you
+will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the benefit of your experience.
+I'm sure no one here knows the country as well as you do. No one takes
+such wonderful long walks. No one, I'm sure, has your encyclopaedic
+knowledge upon every subject. Mr. Wilfrid Flushing is a collector. He
+has discovered really beautiful things already. I had no notion that the
+peasants were so artistic--though of course in the past--"
+
+"Not old things--new things," interrupted Mrs. Flushing curtly. "That
+is, if he takes my advice."
+
+The Ambroses had not lived for many years in London without knowing
+something of a good many people, by name at least, and Helen remembered
+hearing of the Flushings. Mr. Flushing was a man who kept an old
+furniture shop; he had always said he would not marry because most women
+have red cheeks, and would not take a house because most houses have
+narrow staircases, and would not eat meat because most animals bleed
+when they are killed; and then he had married an eccentric aristocratic
+lady, who certainly was not pale, who looked as if she ate meat, who had
+forced him to do all the things he most disliked--and this then was the
+lady. Helen looked at her with interest. They had moved out into the
+garden, where the tea was laid under a tree, and Mrs. Flushing was
+helping herself to cherry jam. She had a peculiar jerking movement of
+the body when she spoke, which caused the canary-coloured plume on
+her hat to jerk too. Her small but finely-cut and vigorous features,
+together with the deep red of lips and cheeks, pointed to many
+generations of well-trained and well-nourished ancestors behind her.
+
+"Nothin' that's more than twenty years old interests me," she continued.
+"Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they stick 'em in museums when
+they're only fit for burnin'."
+
+"I quite agree," Helen laughed. "But my husband spends his life in
+digging up manuscripts which nobody wants." She was amused by Ridley's
+expression of startled disapproval.
+
+"There's a clever man in London called John who paints ever so much
+better than the old masters," Mrs. Flushing continued. "His pictures
+excite me--nothin' that's old excites me."
+
+"But even his pictures will become old," Mrs. Thornbury intervened.
+
+"Then I'll have 'em burnt, or I'll put it in my will," said Mrs.
+Flushing.
+
+"And Mrs. Flushing lived in one of the most beautiful old houses in
+England--Chillingley," Mrs. Thornbury explained to the rest of them.
+
+"If I'd my way I'd burn that to-morrow," Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had
+a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless.
+
+"What does any sane person want with those great big houses?" she
+demanded. "If you go downstairs after dark you're covered with black
+beetles, and the electric lights always goin' out. What would you do
+if spiders came out of the tap when you turned on the hot water?" she
+demanded, fixing her eye on Helen.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose shrugged her shoulders with a smile.
+
+"This is what I like," said Mrs. Flushing. She jerked her head at the
+Villa. "A little house in a garden. I had one once in Ireland. One could
+lie in bed in the mornin' and pick roses outside the window with one's
+toes."
+
+"And the gardeners, weren't they surprised?" Mrs. Thornbury enquired.
+
+"There were no gardeners," Mrs. Flushing chuckled. "Nobody but me and
+an old woman without any teeth. You know the poor in Ireland lose their
+teeth after they're twenty. But you wouldn't expect a politician to
+understand that--Arthur Balfour wouldn't understand that."
+
+Ridley sighed that he never expected any one to understand anything,
+least of all politicians.
+
+"However," he concluded, "there's one advantage I find in extreme old
+age--nothing matters a hang except one's food and one's digestion. All
+I ask is to be left alone to moulder away in solitude. It's obvious that
+the world's going as fast as it can to--the Nethermost Pit, and all I
+can do is to sit still and consume as much of my own smoke as possible."
+He groaned, and with a melancholy glance laid the jam on his bread, for
+he felt the atmosphere of this abrupt lady distinctly unsympathetic.
+
+"I always contradict my husband when he says that," said Mrs. Thornbury
+sweetly. "You men! Where would you be if it weren't for the women!"
+
+"Read the _Symposium_," said Ridley grimly.
+
+"_Symposium_?" cried Mrs. Flushing. "That's Latin or Greek? Tell me, is
+there a good translation?"
+
+"No," said Ridley. "You will have to learn Greek."
+
+Mrs. Flushing cried, "Ah, ah, ah! I'd rather break stones in the road. I
+always envy the men who break stones and sit on those nice little heaps
+all day wearin' spectacles. I'd infinitely rather break stones than
+clean out poultry runs, or feed the cows, or--"
+
+Here Rachel came up from the lower garden with a book in her hand.
+
+"What's that book?" said Ridley, when she had shaken hands.
+
+"It's Gibbon," said Rachel as she sat down.
+
+"_The_ _Decline_ _and_ _Fall_ _of_ _the_ _Roman_ _Empire_?" said Mrs.
+Thornbury. "A very wonderful book, I know. My dear father was always
+quoting it at us, with the result that we resolved never to read a
+line."
+
+"Gibbon the historian?" enquired Mrs. Flushing. "I connect him with
+some of the happiest hours of my life. We used to lie in bed and read
+Gibbon--about the massacres of the Christians, I remember--when we were
+supposed to be asleep. It's no joke, I can tell you, readin' a great
+big book, in double columns, by a night-light, and the light that comes
+through a chink in the door. Then there were the moths--tiger moths,
+yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. Louisa, my sister, would have the
+window open. I wanted it shut. We fought every night of our lives over
+that window. Have you ever seen a moth dyin' in a night-light?" she
+enquired.
+
+Again there was an interruption. Hewet and Hirst appeared at the
+drawing-room window and came up to the tea-table.
+
+Rachel's heart beat hard. She was conscious of an extraordinary
+intensity in everything, as though their presence stripped some
+cover off the surface of things; but the greetings were remarkably
+commonplace.
+
+"Excuse me," said Hirst, rising from his chair directly he had sat down.
+He went into the drawing-room, and returned with a cushion which he
+placed carefully upon his seat.
+
+"Rheumatism," he remarked, as he sat down for the second time.
+
+"The result of the dance?" Helen enquired.
+
+"Whenever I get at all run down I tend to be rheumatic," Hirst stated.
+He bent his wrist back sharply. "I hear little pieces of chalk grinding
+together!"
+
+Rachel looked at him. She was amused, and yet she was respectful; if
+such a thing could be, the upper part of her face seemed to laugh, and
+the lower part to check its laughter.
+
+Hewet picked up the book that lay on the ground.
+
+"You like this?" he asked in an undertone.
+
+"No, I don't like it," she replied. She had indeed been trying all
+the afternoon to read it, and for some reason the glory which she had
+perceived at first had faded, and, read as she would, she could not
+grasp the meaning with her mind.
+
+"It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth," she hazarded.
+Evidently she meant Hewet alone to hear her words, but Hirst demanded,
+"What d'you mean?"
+
+She was instantly ashamed of her figure of speech, for she could not
+explain it in words of sober criticism.
+
+"Surely it's the most perfect style, so far as style goes, that's ever
+been invented," he continued. "Every sentence is practically perfect,
+and the wit--"
+
+"Ugly in body, repulsive in mind," she thought, instead of thinking
+about Gibbon's style. "Yes, but strong, searching, unyielding in
+mind." She looked at his big head, a disproportionate part of which was
+occupied by the forehead, and at the direct, severe eyes.
+
+"I give you up in despair," he said. He meant it lightly, but she took
+it seriously, and believed that her value as a human being was lessened
+because she did not happen to admire the style of Gibbon. The others
+were talking now in a group about the native villages which Mrs.
+Flushing ought to visit.
+
+"I despair too," she said impetuously. "How are you going to judge
+people merely by their minds?"
+
+"You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect," said St. John in his jaunty
+manner, which was always irritating because it made the person he
+talked to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest. "'Be good, sweet maid'--I
+thought Mr. Kingsley and my Aunt were now obsolete."
+
+"One can be very nice without having read a book," she asserted. Very
+silly and simple her words sounded, and laid her open to derision.
+
+"Did I ever deny it?" Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.
+
+Most unexpectedly Mrs. Thornbury here intervened, either because it
+was her mission to keep things smooth or because she had long wished to
+speak to Mr. Hirst, feeling as she did that young men were her sons.
+
+"I have lived all my life with people like your Aunt, Mr. Hirst," she
+said, leaning forward in her chair. Her brown squirrel-like eyes became
+even brighter than usual. "They have never heard of Gibbon. They only
+care for their pheasants and their peasants. They are great big men who
+look so fine on horseback, as people must have done, I think, in the
+days of the great wars. Say what you like against them--they are animal,
+they are unintellectual; they don't read themselves, and they don't want
+others to read, but they are some of the finest and the kindest human
+beings on the face of the earth! You would be surprised at some of
+the stories I could tell. You have never guessed, perhaps, at all the
+romances that go on in the heart of the country. There are the people,
+I feel, among whom Shakespeare will be born if he is ever born again. In
+those old houses, up among the Downs--"
+
+"My Aunt," Hirst interrupted, "spends her life in East Lambeth among
+the degraded poor. I only quoted my Aunt because she is inclined to
+persecute people she calls 'intellectual,' which is what I suspect Miss
+Vinrace of doing. It's all the fashion now. If you're clever it's
+always taken for granted that you're completely without sympathy,
+understanding, affection--all the things that really matter. Oh, you
+Christians! You're the most conceited, patronising, hypocritical set of
+old humbugs in the kingdom! Of course," he continued, "I'm the first
+to allow your country gentlemen great merits. For one thing, they're
+probably quite frank about their passions, which we are not. My father,
+who is a clergyman in Norfolk, says that there is hardly a squire in the
+country who does not--"
+
+"But about Gibbon?" Hewet interrupted. The look of nervous tension which
+had come over every face was relaxed by the interruption.
+
+"You find him monotonous, I suppose. But you know--" He opened the book,
+and began searching for passages to read aloud, and in a little time he
+found a good one which he considered suitable. But there was nothing in
+the world that bored Ridley more than being read aloud to, and he was
+besides scrupulously fastidious as to the dress and behaviour of ladies.
+In the space of fifteen minutes he had decided against Mrs. Flushing on
+the ground that her orange plume did not suit her complexion, that she
+spoke too loud, that she crossed her legs, and finally, when he saw
+her accept a cigarette that Hewet offered her, he jumped up, exclaiming
+something about "bar parlours," and left them. Mrs. Flushing was
+evidently relieved by his departure. She puffed her cigarette, stuck her
+legs out, and examined Helen closely as to the character and reputation
+of their common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry. By a series of little
+strategems she drove her to define Mrs. Parry as somewhat elderly, by no
+means beautiful, very much made up--an insolent old harridan, in short,
+whose parties were amusing because one met odd people; but Helen
+herself always pitied poor Mr. Parry, who was understood to be shut up
+downstairs with cases full of gems, while his wife enjoyed herself
+in the drawing-room. "Not that I believe what people say against
+her--although she hints, of course--" Upon which Mrs. Flushing cried out
+with delight:
+
+"She's my first cousin! Go on--go on!"
+
+When Mrs. Flushing rose to go she was obviously delighted with her new
+acquaintances. She made three or four different plans for meeting or
+going on an expedition, or showing Helen the things they had bought,
+on her way to the carriage. She included them all in a vague but
+magnificent invitation.
+
+As Helen returned to the garden again, Ridley's words of warning came
+into her head, and she hesitated a moment and looked at Rachel sitting
+between Hirst and Hewet. But she could draw no conclusions, for Hewet
+was still reading Gibbon aloud, and Rachel, for all the expression she
+had, might have been a shell, and his words water rubbing against her
+ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge of a rock.
+
+Hewet's voice was very pleasant. When he reached the end of the period
+Hewet stopped, and no one volunteered any criticism.
+
+"I do adore the aristocracy!" Hirst exclaimed after a moment's pause.
+"They're so amazingly unscrupulous. None of us would dare to behave as
+that woman behaves."
+
+"What I like about them," said Helen as she sat down, "is that they're
+so well put together. Naked, Mrs. Flushing would be superb. Dressed as
+she dresses, it's absurd, of course."
+
+"Yes," said Hirst. A shade of depression crossed his face. "I've never
+weighed more than ten stone in my life," he said, "which is ridiculous,
+considering my height, and I've actually gone down in weight since we
+came here. I daresay that accounts for the rheumatism." Again he jerked
+his wrist back sharply, so that Helen might hear the grinding of the
+chalk stones. She could not help smiling.
+
+"It's no laughing matter for me, I assure you," he protested. "My
+mother's a chronic invalid, and I'm always expecting to be told that
+I've got heart disease myself. Rheumatism always goes to the heart in
+the end."
+
+"For goodness' sake, Hirst," Hewet protested; "one might think you were
+an old cripple of eighty. If it comes to that, I had an aunt who died of
+cancer myself, but I put a bold face on it--" He rose and began tilting
+his chair backwards and forwards on its hind legs. "Is any one here
+inclined for a walk?" he said. "There's a magnificent walk, up behind
+the house. You come out on to a cliff and look right down into the sea.
+The rocks are all red; you can see them through the water. The other day
+I saw a sight that fairly took my breath away--about twenty jelly-fish,
+semi-transparent, pink, with long streamers, floating on the top of the
+waves."
+
+"Sure they weren't mermaids?" said Hirst. "It's much too hot to climb
+uphill." He looked at Helen, who showed no signs of moving.
+
+"Yes, it's too hot," Helen decided.
+
+There was a short silence.
+
+"I'd like to come," said Rachel.
+
+"But she might have said that anyhow," Helen thought to herself as Hewet
+and Rachel went away together, and Helen was left alone with St. John,
+to St. John's obvious satisfaction.
+
+He may have been satisfied, but his usual difficulty in deciding that
+one subject was more deserving of notice than another prevented him from
+speaking for some time. He sat staring intently at the head of a dead
+match, while Helen considered--so it seemed from the expression of her
+eyes--something not closely connected with the present moment.
+
+At last St. John exclaimed, "Damn! Damn everything! Damn everybody!" he
+added. "At Cambridge there are people to talk to."
+
+"At Cambridge there are people to talk to," Helen echoed him,
+rhythmically and absent-mindedly. Then she woke up. "By the way, have
+you settled what you're going to do--is it to be Cambridge or the Bar?"
+
+He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for Helen was still
+slightly inattentive. She had been thinking about Rachel and which of
+the two young men she was likely to fall in love with, and now sitting
+opposite to Hirst she thought, "He's ugly. It's a pity they're so ugly."
+
+She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking of the
+clever, honest, interesting young men she knew, of whom Hirst was a
+good example, and wondering whether it was necessary that thought and
+scholarship should thus maltreat their bodies, and should thus elevate
+their minds to a very high tower from which the human race appeared to
+them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.
+
+"And the future?" she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men
+becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming more and
+more like Rachel. "Oh no," she concluded, glancing at him, "one wouldn't
+marry you. Well, then, the future of the race is in the hands of Susan
+and Arthur; no--that's dreadful. Of farm labourers; no--not of the
+English at all, but of Russians and Chinese." This train of thought did
+not satisfy her, and was interrupted by St. John, who began again:
+
+"I wish you knew Bennett. He's the greatest man in the world."
+
+"Bennett?" she enquired. Becoming more at ease, St. John dropped the
+concentrated abruptness of his manner, and explained that Bennett was
+a man who lived in an old windmill six miles out of Cambridge. He lived
+the perfect life, according to St. John, very lonely, very simple,
+caring only for the truth of things, always ready to talk, and
+extraordinarily modest, though his mind was of the greatest.
+
+"Don't you think," said St. John, when he had done describing him, "that
+kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather flimsy? Did you notice at
+tea how poor old Hewet had to change the conversation? How they were
+all ready to pounce upon me because they thought I was going to say
+something improper? It wasn't anything, really. If Bennett had been
+there he'd have said exactly what he meant to say, or he'd have got up
+and gone. But there's something rather bad for the character in that--I
+mean if one hasn't got Bennett's character. It's inclined to make one
+bitter. Should you say that I was bitter?"
+
+Helen did not answer, and he continued:
+
+"Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it's a beastly thing to be.
+But the worst of me is that I'm so envious. I envy every one. I can't
+endure people who do things better than I do--perfectly absurd things
+too--waiters balancing piles of plates--even Arthur, because Susan's in
+love with him. I want people to like me, and they don't. It's partly my
+appearance, I expect," he continued, "though it's an absolute lie to
+say I've Jewish blood in me--as a matter of fact we've been in Norfolk,
+Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall, for three centuries at least. It must be
+awfully soothing to be like you--every one liking one at once."
+
+"I assure you they don't," Helen laughed.
+
+"They do," said Hirst with conviction. "In the first place, you're
+the most beautiful woman I've ever seen; in the second, you have an
+exceptionally nice nature."
+
+If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his teacup
+he would have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure, partly with an
+impulse of affection towards the young man who had seemed, and would
+seem again, so ugly and so limited. She pitied him, for she suspected
+that he suffered, and she was interested in him, for many of the things
+he said seemed to her true; she admired the morality of youth, and yet
+she felt imprisoned. As if her instinct were to escape to something
+brightly coloured and impersonal, which she could hold in her hands,
+she went into the house and returned with her embroidery. But he was not
+interested in her embroidery; he did not even look at it.
+
+"About Miss Vinrace," he began,--"oh, look here, do let's be St. John
+and Helen, and Rachel and Terence--what's she like? Does she reason,
+does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool?"
+
+"Oh no," said Helen, with great decision. From her observations at
+tea she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to educate
+Rachel. She had gradually come to be interested in her niece, and fond
+of her; she disliked some things about her very much, she was amused by
+others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being,
+experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with
+powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling. Somewhere in the
+depths of her, too, she was bound to Rachel by the indestructible if
+inexplicable ties of sex. "She seems vague, but she's a will of her
+own," she said, as if in the interval she had run through her qualities.
+
+The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being
+difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses into the
+dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in her skeins of silk, or, with
+head a little drawn back and eyes narrowed, considered the effect of
+the whole. Thus she merely said, "Um-m-m" to St. John's next remark, "I
+shall ask her to go for a walk with me."
+
+Perhaps he resented this division of attention. He sat silent watching
+Helen closely.
+
+"You're absolutely happy," he proclaimed at last.
+
+"Yes?" Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.
+
+"Marriage, I suppose," said St. John.
+
+"Yes," said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.
+
+"Children?" St. John enquired.
+
+"Yes," said Helen, sticking her needle in again. "I don't know why I'm
+happy," she suddenly laughed, looking him full in the face. There was a
+considerable pause.
+
+"There's an abyss between us," said St. John. His voice sounded as if
+it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks. "You're infinitely
+simpler than I am. Women always are, of course. That's the difficulty.
+One never knows how a woman gets there. Supposing all the time you're
+thinking, 'Oh, what a morbid young man!'"
+
+Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand. From
+her position she saw his head in front of the dark pyramid of a
+magnolia-tree. With one foot raised on the rung of a chair, and her
+elbow out in the attitude for sewing, her own figure possessed the
+sublimity of a woman's of the early world, spinning the thread of
+fate--the sublimity possessed by many women of the present day who fall
+into the attitude required by scrubbing or sewing. St. John looked at
+her.
+
+"I suppose you've never paid any a compliment in the course of your
+life," he said irrelevantly.
+
+"I spoil Ridley rather," Helen considered.
+
+"I'm going to ask you point blank--do you like me?"
+
+After a certain pause, she replied, "Yes, certainly."
+
+"Thank God!" he exclaimed. "That's one mercy. You see," he continued
+with emotion, "I'd rather you liked me than any one I've ever met."
+
+"What about the five philosophers?" said Helen, with a laugh, stitching
+firmly and swiftly at her canvas. "I wish you'd describe them."
+
+Hirst had no particular wish to describe them, but when he began to
+consider them he found himself soothed and strengthened. Far away to the
+other side of the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey medieval
+courts, they appeared remarkable figures, free-spoken men with whom one
+could be at ease; incomparably more subtle in emotion than the people
+here. They gave him, certainly, what no woman could give him, not Helen
+even. Warming at the thought of them, he went on to lay his case before
+Mrs. Ambrose. Should he stay on at Cambridge or should he go to the
+Bar? One day he thought one thing, another day another. Helen listened
+attentively. At last, without any preface, she pronounced her decision.
+
+"Leave Cambridge and go to the Bar," she said. He pressed her for her
+reasons.
+
+"I think you'd enjoy London more," she said. It did not seem a very
+subtle reason, but she appeared to think it sufficient. She looked at
+him against the background of flowering magnolia. There was something
+curious in the sight. Perhaps it was that the heavy wax-like flowers
+were so smooth and inarticulate, and his face--he had thrown his hat
+away, his hair was rumpled, he held his eye-glasses in his hand, so
+that a red mark appeared on either side of his nose--was so worried and
+garrulous. It was a beautiful bush, spreading very widely, and all the
+time she had sat there talking she had been noticing the patches of
+shade and the shape of the leaves, and the way the great white flowers
+sat in the midst of the green. She had noticed it half-consciously,
+nevertheless the pattern had become part of their talk. She laid down
+her sewing, and began to walk up and down the garden, and Hirst rose too
+and paced by her side. He was rather disturbed, uncomfortable, and full
+of thought. Neither of them spoke.
+
+The sun was beginning to go down, and a change had come over the
+mountains, as if they were robbed of their earthly substance, and
+composed merely of intense blue mist. Long thin clouds of flamingo red,
+with edges like the edges of curled ostrich feathers, lay up and down
+the sky at different altitudes. The roofs of the town seemed to have
+sunk lower than usual; the cypresses appeared very black between the
+roofs, and the roofs themselves were brown and white. As usual in
+the evening, single cries and single bells became audible rising from
+beneath.
+
+St. John stopped suddenly.
+
+"Well, you must take the responsibility," he said. "I've made up my
+mind; I shall go to the Bar."
+
+His words were very serious, almost emotional; they recalled Helen after
+a second's hesitation.
+
+"I'm sure you're right," she said warmly, and shook the hand he held
+out. "You'll be a great man, I'm certain."
+
+Then, as if to make him look at the scene, she swept her hand round the
+immense circumference of the view. From the sea, over the roofs of the
+town, across the crests of the mountains, over the river and the plain,
+and again across the crests of the mountains it swept until it reached
+the villa, the garden, the magnolia-tree, and the figures of Hirst and
+herself standing together, when it dropped to her side.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+
+Hewet and Rachel had long ago reached the particular place on the edge
+of the cliff where, looking down into the sea, you might chance on
+jelly-fish and dolphins. Looking the other way, the vast expanse of land
+gave them a sensation which is given by no view, however extended, in
+England; the villages and the hills there having names, and the farthest
+horizon of hills as often as not dipping and showing a line of mist
+which is the sea; here the view was one of infinite sun-dried earth,
+earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers, earth widening
+and spreading away and away like the immense floor of the sea, earth
+chequered by day and by night, and partitioned into different lands,
+where famous cities were founded, and the races of men changed from dark
+savages to white civilised men, and back to dark savages again. Perhaps
+their English blood made this prospect uncomfortably impersonal and
+hostile to them, for having once turned their faces that way they next
+turned them to the sea, and for the rest of the time sat looking at
+the sea. The sea, though it was a thin and sparkling water here, which
+seemed incapable of surge or anger, eventually narrowed itself, clouded
+its pure tint with grey, and swirled through narrow channels and dashed
+in a shiver of broken waters against massive granite rocks. It was this
+sea that flowed up to the mouth of the Thames; and the Thames washed the
+roots of the city of London.
+
+Hewet's thoughts had followed some such course as this, for the first
+thing he said as they stood on the edge of the cliff was--
+
+"I'd like to be in England!"
+
+Rachel lay down on her elbow, and parted the tall grasses which grew on
+the edge, so that she might have a clear view. The water was very calm;
+rocking up and down at the base of the cliff, and so clear that one
+could see the red of the stones at the bottom of it. So it had been at
+the birth of the world, and so it had remained ever since. Probably no
+human being had ever broken that water with boat or with body. Obeying
+some impulse, she determined to mar that eternity of peace, and threw
+the largest pebble she could find. It struck the water, and the ripples
+spread out and out. Hewet looked down too.
+
+"It's wonderful," he said, as they widened and ceased. The freshness and
+the newness seemed to him wonderful. He threw a pebble next. There was
+scarcely any sound.
+
+"But England," Rachel murmured in the absorbed tone of one whose eyes
+are concentrated upon some sight. "What d'you want with England?"
+
+"My friends chiefly," he said, "and all the things one does."
+
+He could look at Rachel without her noticing it. She was still absorbed
+in the water and the exquisitely pleasant sensations which a little
+depth of the sea washing over rocks suggests. He noticed that she was
+wearing a dress of deep blue colour, made of a soft thin cotton stuff,
+which clung to the shape of her body. It was a body with the angles
+and hollows of a young woman's body not yet developed, but in no way
+distorted, and thus interesting and even lovable. Raising his eyes Hewet
+observed her head; she had taken her hat off, and the face rested on her
+hand. As she looked down into the sea, her lips were slightly parted.
+The expression was one of childlike intentness, as if she were watching
+for a fish to swim past over the clear red rocks. Nevertheless her
+twenty-four years of life had given her a look of reserve. Her hand,
+which lay on the ground, the fingers curling slightly in, was well
+shaped and competent; the square-tipped and nervous fingers were the
+fingers of a musician. With something like anguish Hewet realised that,
+far from being unattractive, her body was very attractive to him. She
+looked up suddenly. Her eyes were full of eagerness and interest.
+
+"You write novels?" she asked.
+
+For the moment he could not think what he was saying. He was overcome
+with the desire to hold her in his arms.
+
+"Oh yes," he said. "That is, I want to write them."
+
+She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.
+
+"Novels," she repeated. "Why do you write novels? You ought to write
+music. Music, you see"--she shifted her eyes, and became less desirable
+as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain change upon her
+face--"music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at
+once. With writing it seems to me there's so much"--she paused for an
+expression, and rubbed her fingers in the earth--"scratching on the
+matchbox. Most of the time when I was reading Gibbon this afternoon
+I was horribly, oh infernally, damnably bored!" She gave a shake of
+laughter, looking at Hewet, who laughed too.
+
+"_I_ shan't lend you books," he remarked.
+
+"Why is it," Rachel continued, "that I can laugh at Mr. Hirst to you,
+but not to his face? At tea I was completely overwhelmed, not by his
+ugliness--by his mind." She enclosed a circle in the air with her hands.
+She realised with a great sense of comfort who easily she could talk
+to Hewet, those thorns or ragged corners which tear the surface of some
+relationships being smoothed away.
+
+"So I observed," said Hewet. "That's a thing that never ceases to amaze
+me." He had recovered his composure to such an extent that he could
+light and smoke a cigarette, and feeling her ease, became happy and easy
+himself.
+
+"The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for
+men," he went on. "I believe we must have the sort of power over you
+that we're said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as
+we are or they'd never obey us. For that very reason, I'm inclined to
+doubt that you'll ever do anything even when you have the vote." He
+looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and
+young. "It'll take at least six generations before you're sufficiently
+thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what
+a bully the ordinary man is," he continued, "the ordinary hard-working,
+rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up
+and a certain position to maintain. And then, of course, the daughters
+have to give way to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have to
+bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes over
+again. And meanwhile there are the women in the background. . . . Do you
+really think that the vote will do you any good?"
+
+"The vote?" Rachel repeated. She had to visualise it as a little bit of
+paper which she dropped into a box before she understood his question,
+and looking at each other they smiled at something absurd in the
+question.
+
+"Not to me," she said. "But I play the piano. . . . Are men really like
+that?" she asked, returning to the question that interested her. "I'm
+not afraid of you." She looked at him easily.
+
+"Oh, I'm different," Hewet replied. "I've got between six and seven
+hundred a year of my own. And then no one takes a novelist seriously,
+thank heavens. There's no doubt it helps to make up for the drudgery of
+a profession if a man's taken very, very seriously by every one--if
+he gets appointments, and has offices and a title, and lots of letters
+after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees. I don't grudge it 'em,
+though sometimes it comes over me--what an amazing concoction! What a
+miracle the masculine conception of life is--judges, civil servants,
+army, navy, Houses of Parliament, lord mayors--what a world we've made
+of it! Look at Hirst now. I assure you," he said, "not a day's passed
+since we came here without a discussion as to whether he's to stay on at
+Cambridge or to go to the Bar. It's his career--his sacred career. And
+if I've heard it twenty times, I'm sure his mother and sister have heard
+it five hundred times. Can't you imagine the family conclaves, and the
+sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St. John must have
+the school-room to himself--'St. John's working,' 'St. John wants his
+tea brought to him.' Don't you know the kind of thing? No wonder that
+St. John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. It is too.
+He has to earn his living. But St. John's sister--" Hewet puffed in
+silence. "No one takes her seriously, poor dear. She feeds the rabbits."
+
+"Yes," said Rachel. "I've fed rabbits for twenty-four years; it seems
+odd now." She looked meditative, and Hewet, who had been talking much at
+random and instinctively adopting the feminine point of view, saw that
+she would now talk about herself, which was what he wanted, for so they
+might come to know each other.
+
+She looked back meditatively upon her past life.
+
+"How do you spend your day?" he asked.
+
+She meditated still. When she thought of their day it seemed to her it
+was cut into four pieces by their meals. These divisions were absolutely
+rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate themselves within
+the four rigid bars. Looking back at her life, that was what she saw.
+
+"Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight," she said.
+
+"Well," said Hewet, "what d'you do in the morning?"
+
+"I need to play the piano for hours and hours."
+
+"And after luncheon?"
+
+"Then I went shopping with one of my aunts. Or we went to see some one,
+or we took a message; or we did something that had to be done--the taps
+might be leaking. They visit the poor a good deal--old char-women with
+bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. Or I used to walk in the
+park by myself. And after tea people sometimes called; or in summer we
+sat in the garden or played croquet; in winter I read aloud, while
+they worked; after dinner I played the piano and they wrote letters.
+If father was at home we had friends of his to dinner, and about once a
+month we went up to the play. Every now and then we dined out; sometimes
+I went to a dance in London, but that was difficult because of getting
+back. The people we saw were old family friends, and relations, but we
+didn't see many people. There was the clergyman, Mr. Pepper, and the
+Hunts. Father generally wanted to be quiet when he came home, because he
+works very hard at Hull. Also my aunts aren't very strong. A house takes
+up a lot of time if you do it properly. Our servants were always bad,
+and so Aunt Lucy used to do a good deal in the kitchen, and Aunt Clara,
+I think, spent most of the morning dusting the drawing-room and going
+through the linen and silver. Then there were the dogs. They had to be
+exercised, besides being washed and brushed. Now Sandy's dead, but Aunt
+Clara has a very old cockatoo that came from India. Everything in
+our house," she exclaimed, "comes from somewhere! It's full of old
+furniture, not really old, Victorian, things mother's family had or
+father's family had, which they didn't like to get rid of, I suppose,
+though we've really no room for them. It's rather a nice house," she
+continued, "except that it's a little dingy--dull I should say." She
+called up before her eyes a vision of the drawing-room at home; it was
+a large oblong room, with a square window opening on the garden. Green
+plush chairs stood against the wall; there was a heavy carved book-case,
+with glass doors, and a general impression of faded sofa covers, large
+spaces of pale green, and baskets with pieces of wool-work dropping out
+of them. Photographs from old Italian masterpieces hung on the walls,
+and views of Venetian bridges and Swedish waterfalls which members of
+the family had seen years ago. There were also one or two portraits of
+fathers and grandmothers, and an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after
+the picture by Watts. It was a room without definite character, being
+neither typically and openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor
+really comfortable. Rachel roused herself from the contemplation of this
+familiar picture.
+
+"But this isn't very interesting for you," she said, looking up.
+
+"Good Lord!" Hewet exclaimed. "I've never been so much interested in my
+life." She then realised that while she had been thinking of Richmond,
+his eyes had never left her face. The knowledge of this excited her.
+
+"Go on, please go on," he urged. "Let's imagine it's a Wednesday. You're
+all at luncheon. You sit there, and Aunt Lucy there, and Aunt Clara
+here"; he arranged three pebbles on the grass between them.
+
+"Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb," Rachel continued. She fixed her
+gaze upon the pebbles. "There's a very ugly yellow china stand in
+front of me, called a dumb waiter, on which are three dishes, one for
+biscuits, one for butter, and one for cheese. There's a pot of ferns.
+Then there's Blanche the maid, who snuffles because of her nose. We
+talk--oh yes, it's Aunt Lucy's afternoon at Walworth, so we're rather
+quick over luncheon. She goes off. She has a purple bag, and a black
+notebook. Aunt Clara has what they call a G.F.S. meeting in the
+drawing-room on Wednesday, so I take the dogs out. I go up Richmond
+Hill, along the terrace, into the park. It's the 18th of April--the same
+day as it is here. It's spring in England. The ground is rather damp.
+However, I cross the road and get on to the grass and we walk along, and
+I sing as I always do when I'm alone, until we come to the open place
+where you can see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day.
+Hampstead Church spire there, Westminster Cathedral over there, and
+factory chimneys about here. There's generally a haze over the low parts
+of London; but it's often blue over the park when London's in a mist.
+It's the open place that the balloons cross going over to Hurlingham.
+They're pale yellow. Well, then, it smells very good, particularly if
+they happen to be burning wood in the keeper's lodge which is there.
+I could tell you now how to get from place to place, and exactly what
+trees you'd pass, and where you'd cross the roads. You see, I played
+there when I was small. Spring is good, but it's best in the autumn
+when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky, and I go back through the
+streets, and you can't see people properly; they come past very quick,
+you just see their faces and then they're gone--that's what I like--and
+no one knows in the least what you're doing--"
+
+"But you have to be back for tea, I suppose?" Hewet checked her.
+
+"Tea? Oh yes. Five o'clock. Then I say what I've done, and my aunts
+say what they've done, and perhaps some one comes in: Mrs. Hunt, let's
+suppose. She's an old lady with a lame leg. She has or she once had
+eight children; so we ask after them. They're all over the world; so we
+ask where they are, and sometimes they're ill, or they're stationed in
+a cholera district, or in some place where it only rains once in five
+months. Mrs. Hunt," she said with a smile, "had a son who was hugged to
+death by a bear."
+
+Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused by
+the same things that amused her. She was reassured. But she thought it
+necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.
+
+"You can't conceive how it interests me," he said. Indeed, his cigarette
+had gone out, and he had to light another.
+
+"Why does it interest you?" she asked.
+
+"Partly because you're a woman," he replied. When he said this, Rachel,
+who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a
+childlike state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became
+self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under observation,
+as she felt with St. John Hirst. She was about to launch into an
+argument which would have made them both feel bitterly against each
+other, and to define sensations which had no such importance as words
+were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a different
+direction.
+
+"I've often walked along the streets where people live all in a row, and
+one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth the
+women were doing inside," he said. "Just consider: it's the beginning of
+the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman had ever come
+out by herself and said things at all. There it was going on in the
+background, for all those thousands of years, this curious silent
+unrepresented life. Of course we're always writing about women--abusing
+them, or jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it's never come from
+women themselves. I believe we still don't know in the least how they
+live, or what they feel, or what they do precisely. If one's a man, the
+only confidences one gets are from young women about their love affairs.
+But the lives of women of forty, of unmarried women, of working women,
+of women who keep shops and bring up children, of women like your aunts
+or Mrs. Thornbury or Miss Allan--one knows nothing whatever about them.
+They won't tell you. Either they're afraid, or they've got a way of
+treating men. It's the man's view that's represented, you see. Think of
+a railway train: fifteen carriages for men who want to smoke. Doesn't it
+make your blood boil? If I were a woman I'd blow some one's brains
+out. Don't you laugh at us a great deal? Don't you think it all a great
+humbug? You, I mean--how does it all strike you?"
+
+His determination to know, while it gave meaning to their talk, hampered
+her; he seemed to press further and further, and made it appear so
+important. She took some time to answer, and during that time she went
+over and over the course of her twenty-four years, lighting now on one
+point, now on another--on her aunts, her mother, her father, and at last
+her mind fixed upon her aunts and her father, and she tried to describe
+them as at this distance they appeared to her.
+
+They were very much afraid of her father. He was a great dim force in
+the house, by means of which they held on to the great world which is
+represented every morning in the _Times_. But the real life of the house
+was something quite different from this. It went on independently of
+Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself from him. He was good-humoured
+towards them, but contemptuous. She had always taken it for granted that
+his point of view was just, and founded upon an ideal scale of things
+where the life of one person was absolutely more important than the life
+of another, and that in that scale they were much less importance than
+he was. But did she really believe that? Hewet's words made her think.
+She always submitted to her father, just as they did, but it was her
+aunts who influenced her really; her aunts who built up the fine,
+closely woven substance of their life at home. They were less splendid
+but more natural than her father was. All her rages had been against
+them; it was their world with its four meals, its punctuality, and
+servants on the stairs at half-past ten, that she examined so closely
+and wanted so vehemently to smash to atoms. Following these thoughts she
+looked up and said:
+
+"And there's a sort of beauty in it--there they are at Richmond at this
+very moment building things up. They're all wrong, perhaps, but there's
+a sort of beauty in it," she repeated. "It's so unconscious, so modest.
+And yet they feel things. They do mind if people die. Old spinsters are
+always doing things. I don't quite know what they do. Only that was what
+I felt when I lived with them. It was very real."
+
+She reviewed their little journeys to and fro, to Walworth, to charwomen
+with bad legs, to meetings for this and that, their minute acts of
+charity and unselfishness which flowered punctually from a definite view
+of what they ought to do, their friendships, their tastes and habits;
+she saw all these things like grains of sand falling, falling through
+innumerable days, making an atmosphere and building up a solid mass, a
+background. Hewet observed her as she considered this.
+
+"Were you happy?" he demanded.
+
+Again she had become absorbed in something else, and he called her back
+to an unusually vivid consciousness of herself.
+
+"I was both," she replied. "I was happy and I was miserable. You've no
+conception what it's like--to be a young woman." She looked straight at
+him. "There are terrors and agonies," she said, keeping her eye on him
+as if to detect the slightest hint of laughter.
+
+"I can believe it," he said. He returned her look with perfect
+sincerity.
+
+"Women one sees in the streets," she said.
+
+"Prostitutes?"
+
+"Men kissing one."
+
+He nodded his head.
+
+"You were never told?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"And then," she began and stopped. Here came in the great space of life
+into which no one had ever penetrated. All that she had been saying
+about her father and her aunts and walks in Richmond Park, and what they
+did from hour to hour, was merely on the surface. Hewet was watching
+her. Did he demand that she should describe that also? Why did he sit
+so near and keep his eye on her? Why did they not have done with this
+searching and agony? Why did they not kiss each other simply? She wished
+to kiss him. But all the time she went on spinning out words.
+
+"A girl is more lonely than a boy. No one cares in the least what she
+does. Nothing's expected of her. Unless one's very pretty people don't
+listen to what you say. . . . And that is what I like," she added
+energetically, as if the memory were very happy. "I like walking in
+Richmond Park and singing to myself and knowing it doesn't matter a damn
+to anybody. I like seeing things go on--as we saw you that night when
+you didn't see us--I love the freedom of it--it's like being the wind or
+the sea." She turned with a curious fling of her hands and looked at the
+sea. It was still very blue, dancing away as far as the eye could reach,
+but the light on it was yellower, and the clouds were turning flamingo
+red.
+
+A feeling of intense depression crossed Hewet's mind as she spoke.
+It seemed plain that she would never care for one person rather than
+another; she was evidently quite indifferent to him; they seemed to
+come very near, and then they were as far apart as ever again; and her
+gesture as she turned away had been oddly beautiful.
+
+"Nonsense," he said abruptly. "You like people. You like admiration.
+Your real grudge against Hirst is that he doesn't admire you."
+
+She made no answer for some time. Then she said:
+
+"That's probably true. Of course I like people--I like almost every one
+I've ever met."
+
+She turned her back on the sea and regarded Hewet with friendly if
+critical eyes. He was good-looking in the sense that he had always had
+a sufficiency of beef to eat and fresh air to breathe. His head was big;
+the eyes were also large; though generally vague they could be forcible;
+and the lips were sensitive. One might account him a man of considerable
+passion and fitful energy, likely to be at the mercy of moods which had
+little relation to facts; at once tolerant and fastidious. The breadth
+of his forehead showed capacity for thought. The interest with which
+Rachel looked at him was heard in her voice.
+
+"What novels do you write?" she asked.
+
+"I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; "the things people
+don't say. But the difficulty is immense." He sighed. "However, you
+don't care," he continued. He looked at her almost severely. "Nobody
+cares. All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the writer
+is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he's put in. As for the
+novel itself, the whole conception, the way one's seen the thing,
+felt about it, make it stand in relation to other things, not one in
+a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether there's
+anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other people," he
+indicated the hotel, "are always wanting something they can't get. But
+there's an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even in the attempt
+to write. What you said just now is true: one doesn't want to be things;
+one wants merely to be allowed to see them."
+
+Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he
+gazed out to sea.
+
+It was Rachel's turn now to feel depressed. As he talked of writing he
+had become suddenly impersonal. He might never care for any one; all
+that desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt pressing on
+her almost painfully, had completely vanished.
+
+"Are you a good writer?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," he said. "I'm not first-rate, of course; I'm good second-rate;
+about as good as Thackeray, I should say."
+
+Rachel was amazed. For one thing it amazed her to hear Thackeray called
+second-rate; and then she could not widen her point of view to believe
+that there could be great writers in existence at the present day, or
+if there were, that any one she knew could be a great writer, and his
+self-confidence astounded her, and he became more and more remote.
+
+"My other novel," Hewet continued, "is about a young man who is obsessed
+by an idea--the idea of being a gentleman. He manages to exist at
+Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year. He has a coat; it was once a very
+good coat. But the trousers--they're not so good. Well, he goes up to
+London, gets into good society, owing to an early-morning adventure on
+the banks of the Serpentine. He is led into telling lies--my idea, you
+see, is to show the gradual corruption of the soul--calls himself the
+son of some great landed proprietor in Devonshire. Meanwhile the coat
+becomes older and older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers. Can't
+you imagine the wretched man, after some splendid evening of debauchery,
+contemplating these garments--hanging them over the end of the bed,
+arranging them now in full light, now in shade, and wondering whether
+they will survive him, or he will survive them? Thoughts of suicide
+cross his mind. He has a friend, too, a man who somehow subsists
+upon selling small birds, for which he sets traps in the fields near
+Uxbridge. They're scholars, both of them. I know one or two wretched
+starving creatures like that who quote Aristotle at you over a fried
+herring and a pint of porter. Fashionable life, too, I have to represent
+at some length, in order to show my hero under all circumstances. Lady
+Theo Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the good fortune to stop,
+is the daughter of a very fine old Tory peer. I'm going to describe the
+kind of parties I once went to--the fashionable intellectuals, you know,
+who like to have the latest book on their tables. They give parties,
+river parties, parties where you play games. There's no difficulty in
+conceiving incidents; the difficulty is to put them into shape--not to
+get run away with, as Lady Theo was. It ended disastrously for her, poor
+woman, for the book, as I planned it, was going to end in profound and
+sordid respectability. Disowned by her father, she marries my hero, and
+they live in a snug little villa outside Croydon, in which town he is
+set up as a house agent. He never succeeds in becoming a real gentleman
+after all. That's the interesting part of it. Does it seem to you the
+kind of book you'd like to read?" he enquired; "or perhaps you'd like my
+Stuart tragedy better," he continued, without waiting for her to answer
+him. "My idea is that there's a certain quality of beauty in the past,
+which the ordinary historical novelist completely ruins by his absurd
+conventions. The moon becomes the Regent of the Skies. People clap spurs
+to their horses, and so on. I'm going to treat people as though they
+were exactly the same as we are. The advantage is that, detached from
+modern conditions, one can make them more intense and more abstract then
+people who live as we do."
+
+Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a certain
+amount of bewilderment. They both sat thinking their own thoughts.
+
+"I'm not like Hirst," said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke meditatively;
+"I don't see circles of chalk between people's feet. I sometimes wish I
+did. It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused. One can't
+come to any decision at all; one's less and less capable of making
+judgments. D'you find that? And then one never knows what any one feels.
+We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything
+more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes
+along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know."
+
+As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and rearranging
+in the grass the stones which had represented Rachel and her aunts
+at luncheon. He was speaking as much to himself as to Rachel. He was
+reasoning against the desire, which had returned with intensity, to take
+her in his arms; to have done with indirectness; to explain exactly what
+he felt. What he said was against his belief; all the things that were
+important about her he knew; he felt them in the air around them; but he
+said nothing; he went on arranging the stones.
+
+"I like you; d'you like me?" Rachel suddenly observed.
+
+"I like you immensely," Hewet replied, speaking with the relief of a
+person who is unexpectedly given an opportunity of saying what he wants
+to say. He stopped moving the pebbles.
+
+"Mightn't we call each other Rachel and Terence?" he asked.
+
+"Terence," Rachel repeated. "Terence--that's like the cry of an owl."
+
+She looked up with a sudden rush of delight, and in looking at Terence
+with eyes widened by pleasure she was struck by the change that had come
+over the sky behind them. The substantial blue day had faded to a paler
+and more ethereal blue; the clouds were pink, far away and closely
+packed together; and the peace of evening had replaced the heat of the
+southern afternoon, in which they had started on their walk.
+
+"It must be late!" she exclaimed.
+
+It was nearly eight o'clock.
+
+"But eight o'clock doesn't count here, does it?" Terence asked, as they
+got up and turned inland again. They began to walk rather quickly down
+the hill on a little path between the olive trees.
+
+They felt more intimate because they shared the knowledge of what eight
+o'clock in Richmond meant. Terence walked in front, for there was not
+room for them side by side.
+
+"What I want to do in writing novels is very much what you want to do
+when you play the piano, I expect," he began, turning and speaking over
+his shoulder. "We want to find out what's behind things, don't we?--Look
+at the lights down there," he continued, "scattered about anyhow. Things
+I feel come to me like lights. . . . I want to combine them. . . . Have
+you ever seen fireworks that make figures? . . . I want to make figures.
+. . . Is that what you want to do?"
+
+Now they were out on the road and could walk side by side.
+
+"When I play the piano? Music is different. . . . But I see what you
+mean." They tried to invent theories and to make their theories agree.
+As Hewet had no knowledge of music, Rachel took his stick and drew
+figures in the thin white dust to explain how Bach wrote his fugues.
+
+"My musical gift was ruined," he explained, as they walked on after
+one of these demonstrations, "by the village organist at home, who
+had invented a system of notation which he tried to teach me, with the
+result that I never got to the tune-playing at all. My mother
+thought music wasn't manly for boys; she wanted me to kill rats and
+birds--that's the worst of living in the country. We live in Devonshire.
+It's the loveliest place in the world. Only--it's always difficult at
+home when one's grown up. I'd like you to know one of my sisters. . . .
+Oh, here's your gate--" He pushed it open. They paused for a moment.
+She could not ask him to come in. She could not say that she hoped they
+would meet again; there was nothing to be said, and so without a word
+she went through the gate, and was soon invisible. Directly Hewet lost
+sight of her, he felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly than
+before. Their talk had been interrupted in the middle, just as he was
+beginning to say the things he wanted to say. After all, what had they
+been able to say? He ran his mind over the things they had said, the
+random, unnecessary things which had eddied round and round and used
+up all the time, and drawn them so close together and flung them so far
+apart, and left him in the end unsatisfied, ignorant still of what she
+felt and of what she was like. What was the use of talking, talking,
+merely talking?
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+
+It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came from
+England left a few people on the shores of Santa Marina who drove up to
+the hotel. The fact that the Ambroses had a house where one could escape
+momentarily from the slightly inhuman atmosphere of an hotel was a
+source of genuine pleasure not only to Hirst and Hewet, but to the
+Elliots, the Thornburys, the Flushings, Miss Allan, Evelyn M., together
+with other people whose identity was so little developed that the
+Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names. By degrees there
+was established a kind of correspondence between the two houses, the big
+and the small, so that at most hours of the day one house could guess
+what was going on in the other, and the words "the villa" and "the
+hotel" called up the idea of two separate systems of life. Acquaintances
+showed signs of developing into friends, for that one tie to Mrs.
+Parry's drawing-room had inevitably split into many other ties attached
+to different parts of England, and sometimes these alliances seemed
+cynically fragile, and sometimes painfully acute, lacking as they did
+the supporting background of organised English life. One night when the
+moon was round between the trees, Evelyn M. told Helen the story of
+her life, and claimed her everlasting friendship; or another occasion,
+merely because of a sigh, or a pause, or a word thoughtlessly dropped,
+poor Mrs. Elliot left the villa half in tears, vowing never again to
+meet the cold and scornful woman who had insulted her, and in truth,
+meet again they never did. It did not seem worth while to piece together
+so slight a friendship.
+
+Hewet, indeed, might have found excellent material at this time up
+at the villa for some chapters in the novel which was to be called
+"Silence, or the Things People don't say." Helen and Rachel had become
+very silent. Having detected, as she thought, a secret, and judging that
+Rachel meant to keep it from her, Mrs. Ambrose respected it carefully,
+but from that cause, though unintentionally, a curious atmosphere of
+reserve grew up between them. Instead of sharing their views upon all
+subjects, and plunging after an idea wherever it might lead, they spoke
+chiefly in comment upon the people they saw, and the secret between
+them made itself felt in what they said even of Thornburys and Elliots.
+Always calm and unemotional in her judgments, Mrs. Ambrose was
+now inclined to be definitely pessimistic. She was not severe upon
+individuals so much as incredulous of the kindness of destiny, fate,
+what happens in the long run, and apt to insist that this was generally
+adverse to people in proportion as they deserved well. Even this theory
+she was ready to discard in favour of one which made chaos triumphant,
+things happening for no reason at all, and every one groping about in
+illusion and ignorance. With a certain pleasure she developed these
+views to her niece, taking a letter from home as her test: which gave
+good news, but might just as well have given bad. How did she know that
+at this very moment both her children were not lying dead, crushed by
+motor omnibuses? "It's happening to somebody: why shouldn't it happen
+to me?" she would argue, her face taking on the stoical expression of
+anticipated sorrow. However sincere these views may have been, they were
+undoubtedly called forth by the irrational state of her niece's mind.
+It was so fluctuating, and went so quickly from joy to despair, that it
+seemed necessary to confront it with some stable opinion which naturally
+became dark as well as stable. Perhaps Mrs. Ambrose had some idea that
+in leading the talk into these quarters she might discover what was in
+Rachel's mind, but it was difficult to judge, for sometimes she would
+agree with the gloomiest thing that was said, at other times she refused
+to listen, and rammed Helen's theories down her throat with laughter,
+chatter, ridicule of the wildest, and fierce bursts of anger even at
+what she called the "croaking of a raven in the mud."
+
+"It's hard enough without that," she asserted.
+
+"What's hard?" Helen demanded.
+
+"Life," she replied, and then they both became silent.
+
+Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why
+an hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid
+that the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating to a
+spectator. True to her creed, she did not attempt to interfere, although
+there were enough of those weak moments of depression to make it
+perfectly easy for a less scrupulous person to press through and know
+all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did not choose. All these
+moods ran themselves into one general effect, which Helen compared to
+the sliding of a river, quick, quicker, quicker still, as it races to a
+waterfall. Her instinct was to cry out Stop! but even had there been
+any use in crying Stop! she would have refrained, thinking it best that
+things should take their way, the water racing because the earth was
+shaped to make it race.
+
+It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was watched, or
+that there was anything in her manner likely to draw attention to her.
+What had happened to her she did not know. Her mind was very much in the
+condition of the racing water to which Helen compared it. She wanted
+to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to see him when he was not
+there; it was an agony to miss seeing him; agonies were strewn all about
+her day on account of him, but she never asked herself what this force
+driving through her life arose from. She thought of no result any more
+than a tree perpetually pressed downwards by the wind considers the
+result of being pressed downwards by the wind.
+
+During the two or three weeks which had passed since their walk, half a
+dozen notes from him had accumulated in her drawer. She would read
+them, and spend the whole morning in a daze of happiness; the sunny land
+outside the window being no less capable of analysing its own colour
+and heat than she was of analysing hers. In these moods she found it
+impossible to read or play the piano, even to move being beyond her
+inclination. The time passed without her noticing it. When it was dark
+she was drawn to the window by the lights of the hotel. A light that
+went in and out was the light in Terence's window: there he sat, reading
+perhaps, or now he was walking up and down pulling out one book after
+another; and now he was seated in his chair again, and she tried to
+imagine what he was thinking about. The steady lights marked the rooms
+where Terence sat with people moving round him. Every one who stayed in
+the hotel had a peculiar romance and interest about them. They were not
+ordinary people. She would attribute wisdom to Mrs. Elliot, beauty to
+Susan Warrington, a splendid vitality to Evelyn M., because Terence
+spoke to them. As unreflecting and pervasive were the moods of
+depression. Her mind was as the landscape outside when dark beneath
+clouds and straitly lashed by wind and hail. Again she would sit passive
+in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen's fantastical or gloomy words
+were like so many darts goading her to cry out against the hardness of
+life. Best of all were the moods when for no reason again this stress of
+feeling slackened, and life went on as usual, only with a joy and colour
+in its events that was unknown before; they had a significance like that
+which she had seen in the tree: the nights were black bars separating
+her from the days; she would have liked to run all the days into one
+long continuity of sensation. Although these moods were directly or
+indirectly caused by the presence of Terence or the thought of him, she
+never said to herself that she was in love with him, or considered what
+was to happen if she continued to feel such things, so that Helen's
+image of the river sliding on to the waterfall had a great likeness to
+the facts, and the alarm which Helen sometimes felt was justified.
+
+In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was incapable of
+making a plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind. She
+abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day,
+meeting him the next, receiving his letters always with a start of
+surprise. Any woman experienced in the progress of courtship would have
+come by certain opinions from all this which would have given her at
+least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever been in love with Rachel,
+and she had never been in love with any one. Moreover, none of the books
+she read, from _Wuthering_ _Heights_ to _Man_ _and_ _Superman_, and the
+plays of Ibsen, suggested from their analysis of love that what their
+heroines felt was what she was feeling now. It seemed to her that her
+sensations had no name.
+
+She met Terence frequently. When they did not meet, he was apt to send a
+note with a book or about a book, for he had not been able after all to
+neglect that approach to intimacy. But sometimes he did not come or did
+not write for several days at a time. Again when they met their meeting
+might be one of inspiriting joy or of harassing despair. Over all their
+partings hung the sense of interruption, leaving them both unsatisfied,
+though ignorant that the other shared the feeling.
+
+If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even more completely
+ignorant of his. At first he moved as a god; as she came to know him
+better he was still the centre of light, but combined with this beauty
+a wonderful power of making her daring and confident of herself. She
+was conscious of emotions and powers which she had never suspected in
+herself, and of a depth in the world hitherto unknown. When she thought
+of their relationship she saw rather than reasoned, representing her
+view of what Terence felt by a picture of him drawn across the room to
+stand by her side. This passage across the room amounted to a physical
+sensation, but what it meant she did not know.
+
+Thus the time went on, wearing a calm, bright look upon its surface.
+Letters came from England, letters came from Willoughby, and the days
+accumulated their small events which shaped the year. Superficially,
+three odes of Pindar were mended, Helen covered about five inches of her
+embroidery, and St. John completed the first two acts of a play. He and
+Rachel being now very good friends, he read them aloud to her, and she
+was so genuinely impressed by the skill of his rhythms and the variety
+of his adjectives, as well as by the fact that he was Terence's friend,
+that he began to wonder whether he was not intended for literature
+rather than for law. It was a time of profound thought and sudden
+revelations for more than one couple, and several single people.
+
+A Sunday came, which no one in the villa with the exception of Rachel
+and the Spanish maid proposed to recognise. Rachel still went to church,
+because she had never, according to Helen, taken the trouble to think
+about it. Since they had celebrated the service at the hotel she went
+there expecting to get some pleasure from her passage across the garden
+and through the hall of the hotel, although it was very doubtful whether
+she would see Terence, or at any rate have the chance of speaking to
+him.
+
+As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English, there was
+almost as much difference between Sunday and Wednesday as there is in
+England, and Sunday appeared here as there, the mute black ghost or
+penitent spirit of the busy weekday. The English could not pale the
+sunshine, but they could in some miraculous way slow down the hours,
+dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and make even the servants and
+page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. The best clothes which
+every one put on helped the general effect; it seemed that no lady could
+sit down without bending a clean starched petticoat, and no gentleman
+could breathe without a sudden crackle from a stiff shirt-front. As the
+hands of the clock neared eleven, on this particular Sunday, various
+people tended to draw together in the hall, clasping little red-leaved
+books in their hands. The clock marked a few minutes to the hour when
+a stout black figure passed through the hall with a preoccupied
+expression, as though he would rather not recognise salutations,
+although aware of them, and disappeared down the corridor which led from
+it.
+
+"Mr. Bax," Mrs. Thornbury whispered.
+
+The little group of people then began to move off in the same direction
+as the stout black figure. Looked at in an odd way by people who made
+no effort to join them, they moved with one exception slowly and
+consciously towards the stairs. Mrs. Flushing was the exception. She
+came running downstairs, strode across the hall, joined the procession
+much out of breath, demanding of Mrs. Thornbury in an agitated whisper,
+"Where, where?"
+
+"We are all going," said Mrs. Thornbury gently, and soon they were
+descending the stairs two by two. Rachel was among the first to descend.
+She did not see that Terence and Hirst came in at the rear possessed of
+no black volume, but of one thin book bound in light-blue cloth, which
+St. John carried under his arm.
+
+The chapel was the old chapel of the monks. It was a profound cool place
+where they had said Mass for hundreds of years, and done penance in
+the cold moonlight, and worshipped old brown pictures and carved saints
+which stood with upraised hands of blessing in the hollows in the walls.
+The transition from Catholic to Protestant worship had been bridged by a
+time of disuse, when there were no services, and the place was used for
+storing jars of oil, liqueur, and deck-chairs; the hotel flourishing,
+some religious body had taken the place in hand, and it was now fitted
+out with a number of glazed yellow benches, claret-coloured footstools;
+it had a small pulpit, and a brass eagle carrying the Bible on its back,
+while the piety of different women had supplied ugly squares of carpet,
+and long strips of embroidery heavily wrought with monograms in gold.
+
+As the congregation entered they were met by mild sweet chords issuing
+from a harmonium, where Miss Willett, concealed from view by a baize
+curtain, struck emphatic chords with uncertain fingers. The sound spread
+through the chapel as the rings of water spread from a fallen stone. The
+twenty or twenty-five people who composed the congregation first bowed
+their heads and then sat up and looked about them. It was very quiet,
+and the light down here seemed paler than the light above. The usual
+bows and smiles were dispensed with, but they recognised each other.
+The Lord's Prayer was read over them. As the childlike battle of voices
+rose, the congregation, many of whom had only met on the staircase, felt
+themselves pathetically united and well-disposed towards each other.
+As if the prayer were a torch applied to fuel, a smoke seemed to rise
+automatically and fill the place with the ghosts of innumerable services
+on innumerable Sunday mornings at home. Susan Warrington in particular
+was conscious of the sweetest sense of sisterhood, as she covered her
+face with her hands and saw slips of bent backs through the chinks
+between her fingers. Her emotions rose calmly and evenly, approving of
+herself and of life at the same time. It was all so quiet and so good.
+But having created this peaceful atmosphere Mr. Bax suddenly turned the
+page and read a psalm. Though he read it with no change of voice the
+mood was broken.
+
+"Be merciful unto me, O God," he read, "for man goeth about to devour
+me: he is daily fighting and troubling me. . . . They daily mistake my
+words: all that they imagine is to do me evil. They hold all together
+and keep themselves close. . . . Break their teeth, O God, in their
+mouths; smite the jaw-bones of the lions, O Lord: let them fall away
+like water that runneth apace; and when they shoot their arrows let them
+be rooted out."
+
+Nothing in Susan's experience at all corresponded with this, and as she
+had no love of language she had long ceased to attend to such remarks,
+although she followed them with the same kind of mechanical respect with
+which she heard many of Lear's speeches read aloud. Her mind was still
+serene and really occupied with praise of her own nature and praise of
+God, that is of the solemn and satisfactory order of the world.
+
+But it could be seen from a glance at their faces that most of the
+others, the men in particular, felt the inconvenience of the sudden
+intrusion of this old savage. They looked more secular and critical as
+then listened to the ravings of the old black man with a cloth round his
+loins cursing with vehement gesture by a camp-fire in the desert. After
+that there was a general sound of pages being turned as if they were in
+class, and then they read a little bit of the Old Testament about making
+a well, very much as school boys translate an easy passage from the
+_Anabasis_ when they have shut up their French grammar. Then they
+returned to the New Testament and the sad and beautiful figure
+of Christ. While Christ spoke they made another effort to fit his
+interpretation of life upon the lives they lived, but as they were all
+very different, some practical, some ambitious, some stupid, some wild
+and experimental, some in love, and others long past any feeling except
+a feeling of comfort, they did very different things with the words of
+Christ.
+
+From their faces it seemed that for the most part they made no effort
+at all, and, recumbent as it were, accepted the ideas the words gave
+as representing goodness, in the same way, no doubt, as one of those
+industrious needlewomen had accepted the bright ugly pattern on her mat
+as beauty.
+
+Whatever the reason might be, for the first time in her life, instead
+of slipping at once into some curious pleasant cloud of emotion, too
+familiar to be considered, Rachel listened critically to what was being
+said. By the time they had swung in an irregular way from prayer to
+psalm, from psalm to history, from history to poetry, and Mr. Bax was
+giving out his text, she was in a state of acute discomfort. Such was
+the discomfort she felt when forced to sit through an unsatisfactory
+piece of music badly played. Tantalised, enraged by the clumsy
+insensitiveness of the conductor, who put the stress on the wrong
+places, and annoyed by the vast flock of the audience tamely praising
+and acquiescing without knowing or caring, so she was not tantalized and
+enraged, only here, with eyes half-shut and lips pursed together, the
+atmosphere of forced solemnity increased her anger. All round her were
+people pretending to feel what they did not feel, while somewhere above
+her floated the idea which they could none of them grasp, which they
+pretended to grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful idea,
+an idea like a butterfly. One after another, vast and hard and cold,
+appeared to her the churches all over the world where this blundering
+effort and misunderstanding were perpetually going on, great buildings,
+filled with innumerable men and women, not seeing clearly, who
+finally gave up the effort to see, and relapsed tamely into praise and
+acquiescence, half-shutting their eyes and pursing up their lips. The
+thought had the same sort of physical discomfort as is caused by a film
+of mist always coming between the eyes and the printed page. She did her
+best to brush away the film and to conceive something to be worshipped
+as the service went on, but failed, always misled by the voice of Mr.
+Bax saying things which misrepresented the idea, and by the patter of
+baaing inexpressive human voices falling round her like damp leaves. The
+effort was tiring and dispiriting. She ceased to listen, and fixed her
+eyes on the face of a woman near her, a hospital nurse, whose expression
+of devout attention seemed to prove that she was at any rate receiving
+satisfaction. But looking at her carefully she came to the conclusion
+that the hospital nurse was only slavishly acquiescent, and that the
+look of satisfaction was produced by no splendid conception of God
+within her. How indeed, could she conceive anything far outside her own
+experience, a woman with a commonplace face like hers, a little round
+red face, upon which trivial duties and trivial spites had drawn lines,
+whose weak blue eyes saw without intensity or individuality, whose
+features were blurred, insensitive, and callous? She was adoring
+something shallow and smug, clinging to it, so the obstinate mouth
+witnessed, with the assiduity of a limpet; nothing would tear her from
+her demure belief in her own virtue and the virtues of her religion. She
+was a limpet, with the sensitive side of her stuck to a rock, for ever
+dead to the rush of fresh and beautiful things past her. The face
+of this single worshipper became printed on Rachel's mind with an
+impression of keen horror, and she had it suddenly revealed to her what
+Helen meant and St. John meant when they proclaimed their hatred of
+Christianity. With the violence that now marked her feelings, she
+rejected all that she had implicitly believed.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Bax was half-way through the second lesson. She looked at
+him. He was a man of the world with supple lips and an agreeable manner,
+he was indeed a man of much kindliness and simplicity, though by no
+means clever, but she was not in the mood to give any one credit for
+such qualities, and examined him as though he were an epitome of all the
+vices of his service.
+
+Right at the back of the chapel Mrs. Flushing, Hirst, and Hewet sat in
+a row in a very different frame of mind. Hewet was staring at the roof
+with his legs stuck out in front of him, for as he had never tried to
+make the service fit any feeling or idea of his, he was able to enjoy
+the beauty of the language without hindrance. His mind was occupied
+first with accidental things, such as the women's hair in front of
+him, the light on the faces, then with the words which seemed to him
+magnificent, and then more vaguely with the characters of the other
+worshippers. But when he suddenly perceived Rachel, all these thoughts
+were driven out of his head, and he thought only of her. The psalms,
+the prayers, the Litany, and the sermon were all reduced to one chanting
+sound which paused, and then renewed itself, a little higher or a little
+lower. He stared alternately at Rachel and at the ceiling, but his
+expression was now produced not by what he saw but by something in his
+mind. He was almost as painfully disturbed by his thoughts as she was by
+hers.
+
+Early in the service Mrs. Flushing had discovered that she had taken up
+a Bible instead of a prayer-book, and, as she was sitting next to Hirst,
+she stole a glance over his shoulder. He was reading steadily in the
+thin pale-blue volume. Unable to understand, she peered closer, upon
+which Hirst politely laid the book before her, pointing to the first
+line of a Greek poem and then to the translation opposite.
+
+"What's that?" she whispered inquisitively.
+
+"Sappho," he replied. "The one Swinburne did--the best thing that's ever
+been written."
+
+Mrs. Flushing could not resist such an opportunity. She gulped down the
+Ode to Aphrodite during the Litany, keeping herself with difficulty from
+asking when Sappho lived, and what else she wrote worth reading, and
+contriving to come in punctually at the end with "the forgiveness of
+sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlastin'. Amen."
+
+Meanwhile Hirst took out an envelope and began scribbling on the back of
+it. When Mr. Bax mounted the pulpit he shut up Sappho with his envelope
+between the pages, settled his spectacles, and fixed his gaze intently
+upon the clergyman. Standing in the pulpit he looked very large and fat;
+the light coming through the greenish unstained window-glass made his
+face appear smooth and white like a very large egg.
+
+He looked round at all the faces looking mildly up at him, although
+some of them were the faces of men and women old enough to be his
+grandparents, and gave out his text with weighty significance. The
+argument of the sermon was that visitors to this beautiful land,
+although they were on a holiday, owed a duty to the natives. It did not,
+in truth, differ very much from a leading article upon topics of general
+interest in the weekly newspapers. It rambled with a kind of amiable
+verbosity from one heading to another, suggesting that all human beings
+are very much the same under their skins, illustrating this by the
+resemblance of the games which little Spanish boys play to the games
+little boys in London streets play, observing that very small things do
+influence people, particularly natives; in fact, a very dear friend of
+Mr. Bax's had told him that the success of our rule in India, that vast
+country, largely depended upon the strict code of politeness which the
+English adopted towards the natives, which led to the remark that small
+things were not necessarily small, and that somehow to the virtue of
+sympathy, which was a virtue never more needed than to-day, when we
+lived in a time of experiment and upheaval--witness the aeroplane and
+wireless telegraph, and there were other problems which hardly presented
+themselves to our fathers, but which no man who called himself a man
+could leave unsettled. Here Mr. Bax became more definitely clerical, if
+it were possible, he seemed to speak with a certain innocent craftiness,
+as he pointed out that all this laid a special duty upon earnest
+Christians. What men were inclined to say now was, "Oh, that
+fellow--he's a parson." What we want them to say is, "He's a good
+fellow"--in other words, "He is my brother." He exhorted them to keep
+in touch with men of the modern type; they must sympathise with their
+multifarious interests in order to keep before their eyes that whatever
+discoveries were made there was one discovery which could not be
+superseded, which was indeed as much of a necessity to the most
+successful and most brilliant of them all as it had been to their
+fathers. The humblest could help; the least important things had an
+influence (here his manner became definitely priestly and his remarks
+seemed to be directed to women, for indeed Mr. Bax's congregations were
+mainly composed of women, and he was used to assigning them their duties
+in his innocent clerical campaigns). Leaving more definite instruction,
+he passed on, and his theme broadened into a peroration for which
+he drew a long breath and stood very upright,--"As a drop of water,
+detached, alone, separate from others, falling from the cloud and
+entering the great ocean, alters, so scientists tell us, not only the
+immediate spot in the ocean where it falls, but all the myriad drops
+which together compose the great universe of waters, and by this means
+alters the configuration of the globe and the lives of millions of sea
+creatures, and finally the lives of the men and women who seek their
+living upon the shores--as all this is within the compass of a single
+drop of water, such as any rain shower sends in millions to lose
+themselves in the earth, to lose themselves we say, but we know very
+well that the fruits of the earth could not flourish without them--so
+is a marvel comparable to this within the reach of each one of us, who
+dropping a little word or a little deed into the great universe alters
+it; yea, it is a solemn thought, _alters_ it, for good or for evil, not
+for one instant, or in one vicinity, but throughout the entire race,
+and for all eternity." Whipping round as though to avoid applause, he
+continued with the same breath, but in a different tone of voice,--"And
+now to God the Father . . ."
+
+He gave his blessing, and then, while the solemn chords again issued
+from the harmonium behind the curtain, the different people began
+scraping and fumbling and moving very awkwardly and consciously towards
+the door. Half-way upstairs, at a point where the light and sounds of
+the upper world conflicted with the dimness and the dying hymn-tune of
+the under, Rachel felt a hand drop upon her shoulder.
+
+"Miss Vinrace," Mrs. Flushing whispered peremptorily, "stay to luncheon.
+It's such a dismal day. They don't even give one beef for luncheon.
+Please stay."
+
+Here they came out into the hall, where once more the little band was
+greeted with curious respectful glances by the people who had not gone
+to church, although their clothing made it clear that they approved of
+Sunday to the very verge of going to church. Rachel felt unable to stand
+any more of this particular atmosphere, and was about to say she must
+go back, when Terence passed them, drawn along in talk with Evelyn M.
+Rachel thereupon contented herself with saying that the people looked
+very respectable, which negative remark Mrs. Flushing interpreted to
+mean that she would stay.
+
+"English people abroad!" she returned with a vivid flash of malice.
+"Ain't they awful! But we won't stay here," she continued, plucking at
+Rachel's arm. "Come up to my room."
+
+She bore her past Hewet and Evelyn and the Thornburys and the Elliots.
+Hewet stepped forward.
+
+"Luncheon--" he began.
+
+"Miss Vinrace has promised to lunch with me," said Mrs. Flushing, and
+began to pound energetically up the staircase, as though the middle
+classes of England were in pursuit. She did not stop until she had
+slammed her bedroom door behind them.
+
+"Well, what did you think of it?" she demanded, panting slightly.
+
+All the disgust and horror which Rachel had been accumulating burst
+forth beyond her control.
+
+"I thought it the most loathsome exhibition I'd ever seen!" she broke
+out. "How can they--how dare they--what do you mean by it--Mr. Bax,
+hospital nurses, old men, prostitutes, disgusting--"
+
+She hit off the points she remembered as fast as she could, but she was
+too indignant to stop to analyse her feelings. Mrs. Flushing watched her
+with keen gusto as she stood ejaculating with emphatic movements of her
+head and hands in the middle of the room.
+
+"Go on, go on, do go on," she laughed, clapping her hands. "It's
+delightful to hear you!"
+
+"But why do you go?" Rachel demanded.
+
+"I've been every Sunday of my life ever since I can remember," Mrs.
+Flushing chuckled, as though that were a reason by itself.
+
+Rachel turned abruptly to the window. She did not know what it was that
+had put her into such a passion; the sight of Terence in the hall had
+confused her thoughts, leaving her merely indignant. She looked straight
+at their own villa, half-way up the side of the mountain. The most
+familiar view seen framed through glass has a certain unfamiliar
+distinction, and she grew calm as she gazed. Then she remembered that
+she was in the presence of some one she did not know well, and she
+turned and looked at Mrs. Flushing. Mrs. Flushing was still sitting
+on the edge of the bed, looking up, with her lips parted, so that her
+strong white teeth showed in two rows.
+
+"Tell me," she said, "which d'you like best, Mr. Hewet or Mr. Hirst?"
+
+"Mr. Hewet," Rachel replied, but her voice did not sound natural.
+
+"Which is the one who reads Greek in church?" Mrs. Flushing demanded.
+
+It might have been either of them and while Mrs. Flushing proceeded
+to describe them both, and to say that both frightened her, but one
+frightened her more than the other, Rachel looked for a chair. The room,
+of course, was one of the largest and most luxurious in the hotel. There
+were a great many arm-chairs and settees covered in brown holland, but
+each of these was occupied by a large square piece of yellow cardboard,
+and all the pieces of cardboard were dotted or lined with spots or
+dashes of bright oil paint.
+
+"But you're not to look at those," said Mrs. Flushing as she saw
+Rachel's eye wander. She jumped up, and turned as many as she could,
+face downwards, upon the floor. Rachel, however, managed to possess
+herself of one of them, and, with the vanity of an artist, Mrs. Flushing
+demanded anxiously, "Well, well?"
+
+"It's a hill," Rachel replied. There could be no doubt that Mrs.
+Flushing had represented the vigorous and abrupt fling of the earth up
+into the air; you could almost see the clods flying as it whirled.
+
+Rachel passed from one to another. They were all marked by something of
+the jerk and decision of their maker; they were all perfectly untrained
+onslaughts of the brush upon some half-realised idea suggested by hill
+or tree; and they were all in some way characteristic of Mrs. Flushing.
+
+"I see things movin'," Mrs. Flushing explained. "So"--she swept her hand
+through a yard of the air. She then took up one of the cardboards which
+Rachel had laid aside, seated herself on a stool, and began to flourish
+a stump of charcoal. While she occupied herself in strokes which seemed
+to serve her as speech serves others, Rachel, who was very restless,
+looked about her.
+
+"Open the wardrobe," said Mrs. Flushing after a pause, speaking
+indistinctly because of a paint-brush in her mouth, "and look at the
+things."
+
+As Rachel hesitated, Mrs. Flushing came forward, still with a
+paint-brush in her mouth, flung open the wings of her wardrobe, and
+tossed a quantity of shawls, stuffs, cloaks, embroideries, on to the
+bed. Rachel began to finger them. Mrs. Flushing came up once more, and
+dropped a quantity of beads, brooches, earrings, bracelets, tassels, and
+combs among the draperies. Then she went back to her stool and began to
+paint in silence. The stuffs were coloured and dark and pale; they made
+a curious swarm of lines and colours upon the counterpane, with
+the reddish lumps of stone and peacocks' feathers and clear pale
+tortoise-shell combs lying among them.
+
+"The women wore them hundreds of years ago, they wear 'em still," Mrs.
+Flushing remarked. "My husband rides about and finds 'em; they don't
+know what they're worth, so we get 'em cheap. And we shall sell 'em to
+smart women in London," she chuckled, as though the thought of these
+ladies and their absurd appearance amused her. After painting for
+some minutes, she suddenly laid down her brush and fixed her eyes upon
+Rachel.
+
+"I tell you what I want to do," she said. "I want to go up there and see
+things for myself. It's silly stayin' here with a pack of old maids as
+though we were at the seaside in England. I want to go up the river and
+see the natives in their camps. It's only a matter of ten days under
+canvas. My husband's done it. One would lie out under the trees at night
+and be towed down the river by day, and if we saw anythin' nice we'd
+shout out and tell 'em to stop." She rose and began piercing the bed
+again and again with a long golden pin, as she watched to see what
+effect her suggestion had upon Rachel.
+
+"We must make up a party," she went on. "Ten people could hire a launch.
+Now you'll come, and Mrs. Ambrose'll come, and will Mr. Hirst and
+t'other gentleman come? Where's a pencil?"
+
+She became more and more determined and excited as she evolved her plan.
+She sat on the edge of the bed and wrote down a list of surnames, which
+she invariably spelt wrong. Rachel was enthusiastic, for indeed the idea
+was immeasurably delightful to her. She had always had a great desire to
+see the river, and the name of Terence threw a lustre over the prospect,
+which made it almost too good to come true. She did what she could to
+help Mrs. Flushing by suggesting names, helping her to spell them, and
+counting up the days of the week upon her fingers. As Mrs. Flushing
+wanted to know all she could tell her about the birth and pursuits of
+every person she suggested, and threw in wild stories of her own as to
+the temperaments and habits of artists, and people of the same name who
+used to come to Chillingley in the old days, but were doubtless not the
+same, though they too were very clever men interested in Egyptology, the
+business took some time.
+
+At last Mrs. Flushing sought her diary for help, the method of reckoning
+dates on the fingers proving unsatisfactory. She opened and shut every
+drawer in her writing-table, and then cried furiously, "Yarmouth!
+Yarmouth! Drat the woman! She's always out of the way when she's
+wanted!"
+
+At this moment the luncheon gong began to work itself into its midday
+frenzy. Mrs. Flushing rang her bell violently. The door was opened by a
+handsome maid who was almost as upright as her mistress.
+
+"Oh, Yarmouth," said Mrs. Flushing, "just find my diary and see where
+ten days from now would bring us to, and ask the hall porter how many
+men 'ud be wanted to row eight people up the river for a week, and
+what it 'ud cost, and put it on a slip of paper and leave it on my
+dressing-table. Now--" she pointed at the door with a superb forefinger
+so that Rachel had to lead the way.
+
+"Oh, and Yarmouth," Mrs. Flushing called back over her shoulder. "Put
+those things away and hang 'em in their right places, there's a good
+girl, or it fusses Mr. Flushin'."
+
+To all of which Yarmouth merely replied, "Yes, ma'am."
+
+As they entered the long dining-room it was obvious that the day was
+still Sunday, although the mood was slightly abating. The Flushings'
+table was set by the side in the window, so that Mrs. Flushing could
+scrutinise each figure as it entered, and her curiosity seemed to be
+intense.
+
+"Old Mrs. Paley," she whispered as the wheeled chair slowly made its way
+through the door, Arthur pushing behind. "Thornburys" came next. "That
+nice woman," she nudged Rachel to look at Miss Allan. "What's her name?"
+The painted lady who always came in late, tripping into the room with
+a prepared smile as though she came out upon a stage, might well
+have quailed before Mrs. Flushing's stare, which expressed her steely
+hostility to the whole tribe of painted ladies. Next came the two young
+men whom Mrs. Flushing called collectively the Hirsts. They sat down
+opposite, across the gangway.
+
+Mr. Flushing treated his wife with a mixture of admiration and
+indulgence, making up by the suavity and fluency of his speech for the
+abruptness of hers. While she darted and ejaculated he gave Rachel a
+sketch of the history of South American art. He would deal with one
+of his wife's exclamations, and then return as smoothly as ever to his
+theme. He knew very well how to make a luncheon pass agreeably, without
+being dull or intimate. He had formed the opinion, so he told Rachel,
+that wonderful treasures lay hid in the depths of the land; the things
+Rachel had seen were merely trifles picked up in the course of one short
+journey. He thought there might be giant gods hewn out of stone in the
+mountain-side; and colossal figures standing by themselves in the middle
+of vast green pasture lands, where none but natives had ever trod.
+Before the dawn of European art he believed that the primitive huntsmen
+and priests had built temples of massive stone slabs, had formed out of
+the dark rocks and the great cedar trees majestic figures of gods and
+of beasts, and symbols of the great forces, water, air, and forest among
+which they lived. There might be prehistoric towns, like those in Greece
+and Asia, standing in open places among the trees, filled with the works
+of this early race. Nobody had been there; scarcely anything was known.
+Thus talking and displaying the most picturesque of his theories,
+Rachel's attention was fixed upon him.
+
+She did not see that Hewet kept looking at her across the gangway,
+between the figures of waiters hurrying past with plates. He was
+inattentive, and Hirst was finding him also very cross and disagreeable.
+They had touched upon all the usual topics--upon politics and
+literature, gossip and Christianity. They had quarrelled over the
+service, which was every bit as fine as Sappho, according to Hewet;
+so that Hirst's paganism was mere ostentation. Why go to church, he
+demanded, merely in order to read Sappho? Hirst observed that he had
+listened to every word of the sermon, as he could prove if Hewet would
+like a repetition of it; and he went to church in order to realise the
+nature of his Creator, which he had done very vividly that morning,
+thanks to Mr. Bax, who had inspired him to write three of the most
+superb lines in English literature, an invocation to the Deity.
+
+"I wrote 'em on the back of the envelope of my aunt's last letter," he
+said, and pulled it from between the pages of Sappho.
+
+"Well, let's hear them," said Hewet, slightly mollified by the prospect
+of a literary discussion.
+
+"My dear Hewet, do you wish us both to be flung out of the hotel by
+an enraged mob of Thornburys and Elliots?" Hirst enquired. "The merest
+whisper would be sufficient to incriminate me for ever. God!" he broke
+out, "what's the use of attempting to write when the world's peopled by
+such damned fools? Seriously, Hewet, I advise you to give up literature.
+What's the good of it? There's your audience."
+
+He nodded his head at the tables where a very miscellaneous collection
+of Europeans were now engaged in eating, in some cases in gnawing, the
+stringy foreign fowls. Hewet looked, and grew more out of temper than
+ever. Hirst looked too. His eyes fell upon Rachel, and he bowed to her.
+
+"I rather think Rachel's in love with me," he remarked, as his eyes
+returned to his plate. "That's the worst of friendships with young
+women--they tend to fall in love with one."
+
+To that Hewet made no answer whatever, and sat singularly still. Hirst
+did not seem to mind getting no answer, for he returned to Mr. Bax
+again, quoting the peroration about the drop of water; and when Hewet
+scarcely replied to these remarks either, he merely pursed his lips,
+chose a fig, and relapsed quite contentedly into his own thoughts, of
+which he always had a very large supply. When luncheon was over they
+separated, taking their cups of coffee to different parts of the hall.
+
+From his chair beneath the palm-tree Hewet saw Rachel come out of the
+dining-room with the Flushings; he saw them look round for chairs, and
+choose three in a corner where they could go on talking in private. Mr.
+Flushing was now in the full tide of his discourse. He produced a sheet
+of paper upon which he made drawings as he went on with his talk. He saw
+Rachel lean over and look, pointing to this and that with her finger.
+Hewet unkindly compared Mr. Flushing, who was extremely well dressed for
+a hot climate, and rather elaborate in his manner, to a very persuasive
+shop-keeper. Meanwhile, as he sat looking at them, he was entangled in
+the Thornburys and Miss Allan, who, after hovering about for a minute
+or two, settled in chairs round him, holding their cups in their hands.
+They wanted to know whether he could tell them anything about Mr. Bax.
+Mr. Thornbury as usual sat saying nothing, looking vaguely ahead of him,
+occasionally raising his eye-glasses, as if to put them on, but always
+thinking better of it at the last moment, and letting them fall again.
+After some discussion, the ladies put it beyond a doubt that Mr. Bax was
+not the son of Mr. William Bax. There was a pause. Then Mrs. Thornbury
+remarked that she was still in the habit of saying Queen instead of
+King in the National Anthem. There was another pause. Then Miss Allan
+observed reflectively that going to church abroad always made her feel
+as if she had been to a sailor's funeral.
+
+There was then a very long pause, which threatened to be final, when,
+mercifully, a bird about the size of a magpie, but of a metallic blue
+colour, appeared on the section of the terrace that could be seen from
+where they sat. Mrs. Thornbury was led to enquire whether we should
+like it if all our rooks were blue--"What do _you_ think, William?" she
+asked, touching her husband on the knee.
+
+"If all our rooks were blue," he said,--he raised his glasses;
+he actually placed them on his nose--"they would not live long in
+Wiltshire," he concluded; he dropped his glasses to his side again. The
+three elderly people now gazed meditatively at the bird, which was so
+obliging as to stay in the middle of the view for a considerable space
+of time, thus making it unnecessary for them to speak again. Hewet began
+to wonder whether he might not cross over to the Flushings' corner, when
+Hirst appeared from the background, slipped into a chair by Rachel's
+side, and began to talk to her with every appearance of familiarity.
+Hewet could stand it no longer. He rose, took his hat and dashed out of
+doors.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+
+Everything he saw was distasteful to him. He hated the blue and white,
+the intensity and definiteness, the hum and heat of the south;
+the landscape seemed to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard
+background on the stage, and the mountain but a wooden screen against a
+sheet painted blue. He walked fast in spite of the heat of the sun.
+
+Two roads led out of the town on the eastern side; one branched
+off towards the Ambroses' villa, the other struck into the country,
+eventually reaching a village on the plain, but many footpaths, which
+had been stamped in the earth when it was wet, led off from it, across
+great dry fields, to scattered farm-houses, and the villas of rich
+natives. Hewet stepped off the road on to one of these, in order to
+avoid the hardness and heat of the main road, the dust of which was
+always being raised in small clouds by carts and ramshackle flies which
+carried parties of festive peasants, or turkeys swelling unevenly like
+a bundle of air balls beneath a net, or the brass bedstead and black
+wooden boxes of some newly wedded pair.
+
+The exercise indeed served to clear away the superficial irritations of
+the morning, but he remained miserable. It seemed proved beyond a doubt
+that Rachel was indifferent to him, for she had scarcely looked at him,
+and she had talked to Mr. Flushing with just the same interest with
+which she talked to him. Finally, Hirst's odious words flicked his mind
+like a whip, and he remembered that he had left her talking to Hirst.
+She was at this moment talking to him, and it might be true, as he said,
+that she was in love with him. He went over all the evidence for this
+supposition--her sudden interest in Hirst's writing, her way of quoting
+his opinions respectfully, or with only half a laugh; her very nickname
+for him, "the great Man," might have some serious meaning in it.
+Supposing that there were an understanding between them, what would it
+mean to him?
+
+"Damn it all!" he demanded, "am I in love with her?" To that he could
+only return himself one answer. He certainly was in love with her, if
+he knew what love meant. Ever since he had first seen her he had been
+interested and attracted, more and more interested and attracted, until
+he was scarcely able to think of anything except Rachel. But just as he
+was sliding into one of the long feasts of meditation about them both,
+he checked himself by asking whether he wanted to marry her? That was
+the real problem, for these miseries and agonies could not be endured,
+and it was necessary that he should make up his mind. He instantly
+decided that he did not want to marry any one. Partly because he was
+irritated by Rachel the idea of marriage irritated him. It immediately
+suggested the picture of two people sitting alone over the fire; the man
+was reading, the woman sewing. There was a second picture. He saw a
+man jump up, say good-night, leave the company and hasten away with
+the quiet secret look of one who is stealing to certain happiness.
+Both these pictures were very unpleasant, and even more so was a third
+picture, of husband and wife and friend; and the married people
+glancing at each other as though they were content to let something
+pass unquestioned, being themselves possessed of the deeper truth. Other
+pictures--he was walking very fast in his irritation, and they
+came before him without any conscious effort, like pictures on a
+sheet--succeeded these. Here were the worn husband and wife sitting with
+their children round them, very patient, tolerant, and wise. But that
+too, was an unpleasant picture. He tried all sorts of pictures, taking
+them from the lives of friends of his, for he knew many different
+married couples; but he saw them always, walled up in a warm firelit
+room. When, on the other hand, he began to think of unmarried people, he
+saw them active in an unlimited world; above all, standing on the
+same ground as the rest, without shelter or advantage. All the most
+individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and spinsters;
+indeed he was surprised to find that the women he most admired and knew
+best were unmarried women. Marriage seemed to be worse for them than
+it was for men. Leaving these general pictures he considered the people
+whom he had been observing lately at the hotel. He had often revolved
+these questions in his mind, as he watched Susan and Arthur, or Mr.
+and Mrs. Thornbury, or Mr. and Mrs. Elliot. He had observed how the shy
+happiness and surprise of the engaged couple had gradually been replaced
+by a comfortable, tolerant state of mind, as if they had already done
+with the adventure of intimacy and were taking up their parts. Susan
+used to pursue Arthur about with a sweater, because he had one day let
+slip that a brother of his had died of pneumonia. The sight amused him,
+but was not pleasant if you substituted Terence and Rachel for Arthur
+and Susan; and Arthur was far less eager to get you in a corner and talk
+about flying and the mechanics of aeroplanes. They would settle down.
+He then looked at the couples who had been married for several years. It
+was true that Mrs. Thornbury had a husband, and that for the most part
+she was wonderfully successful in bringing him into the conversation,
+but one could not imagine what they said to each other when they were
+alone. There was the same difficulty with regard to the Elliots, except
+that they probably bickered openly in private. They sometimes bickered
+in public, though these disagreements were painfully covered over by
+little insincerities on the part of the wife, who was afraid of public
+opinion, because she was much stupider than her husband, and had to make
+efforts to keep hold of him. There could be no doubt, he decided,
+that it would have been far better for the world if these couples
+had separated. Even the Ambroses, whom he admired and respected
+profoundly--in spite of all the love between them, was not their
+marriage too a compromise? She gave way to him; she spoilt him; she
+arranged things for him; she who was all truth to others was not true to
+her husband, was not true to her friends if they came in conflict with
+her husband. It was a strange and piteous flaw in her nature. Perhaps
+Rachel had been right, then, when she said that night in the garden, "We
+bring out what's worst in each other--we should live separate."
+
+No Rachel had been utterly wrong! Every argument seemed to be against
+undertaking the burden of marriage until he came to Rachel's argument,
+which was manifestly absurd. From having been the pursued, he turned
+and became the pursuer. Allowing the case against marriage to lapse, he
+began to consider the peculiarities of character which had led to her
+saying that. Had she meant it? Surely one ought to know the character of
+the person with whom one might spend all one's life; being a novelist,
+let him try to discover what sort of person she was. When he was with
+her he could not analyse her qualities, because he seemed to know them
+instinctively, but when he was away from her it sometimes seemed to him
+that he did not know her at all. She was young, but she was also old;
+she had little self-confidence, and yet she was a good judge of people.
+She was happy; but what made her happy? If they were alone and the
+excitement had worn off, and they had to deal with the ordinary facts of
+the day, what would happen? Casting his eye upon his own character,
+two things appeared to him: that he was very unpunctual, and that he
+disliked answering notes. As far as he knew Rachel was inclined to be
+punctual, but he could not remember that he had ever seen her with a pen
+in her hand. Let him next imagine a dinner-party, say at the Crooms, and
+Wilson, who had taken her down, talking about the state of the Liberal
+party. She would say--of course she was absolutely ignorant of politics.
+Nevertheless she was intelligent certainly, and honest too. Her temper
+was uncertain--that he had noticed--and she was not domestic, and
+she was not easy, and she was not quiet, or beautiful, except in
+some dresses in some lights. But the great gift she had was that she
+understood what was said to her; there had never been any one like her
+for talking to. You could say anything--you could say everything, and
+yet she was never servile. Here he pulled himself up, for it seemed to
+him suddenly that he knew less about her than about any one. All these
+thoughts had occurred to him many times already; often had he tried to
+argue and reason; and again he had reached the old state of doubt. He
+did not know her, and he did not know what she felt, or whether they
+could live together, or whether he wanted to marry her, and yet he was
+in love with her.
+
+Supposing he went to her and said (he slackened his pace and began to
+speak aloud, as if he were speaking to Rachel):
+
+"I worship you, but I loathe marriage, I hate its smugness, its safety,
+its compromise, and the thought of you interfering in my work, hindering
+me; what would you answer?"
+
+He stopped, leant against the trunk of a tree, and gazed without seeing
+them at some stones scattered on the bank of the dry river-bed. He saw
+Rachel's face distinctly, the grey eyes, the hair, the mouth; the face
+that could look so many things--plain, vacant, almost insignificant, or
+wild, passionate, almost beautiful, yet in his eyes was always the same
+because of the extraordinary freedom with which she looked at him, and
+spoke as she felt. What would she answer? What did she feel? Did she
+love him, or did she feel nothing at all for him or for any other man,
+being, as she had said that afternoon, free, like the wind or the sea?
+
+"Oh, you're free!" he exclaimed, in exultation at the thought of her,
+"and I'd keep you free. We'd be free together. We'd share everything
+together. No happiness would be like ours. No lives would compare with
+ours." He opened his arms wide as if to hold her and the world in one
+embrace.
+
+No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what her nature
+was, or how it would be if they lived together, he dropped to the ground
+and sat absorbed in the thought of her, and soon tormented by the desire
+to be in her presence again.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX
+
+
+But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that Hirst
+was still talking to Rachel. The party very soon broke up, the Flushings
+going in one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel remaining in the
+hall, pulling the illustrated papers about, turning from one to another,
+her movements expressing the unformed restless desire in her mind.
+She did not know whether to go or to stay, though Mrs. Flushing had
+commanded her to appear at tea. The hall was empty, save for Miss
+Willett who was playing scales with her fingers upon a sheet of sacred
+music, and the Carters, an opulent couple who disliked the girl, because
+her shoe laces were untied, and she did not look sufficiently cheery,
+which by some indirect process of thought led them to think that she
+would not like them. Rachel certainly would not have liked them, if
+she had seen them, for the excellent reason that Mr. Carter waxed his
+moustache, and Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they were evidently the
+kind of people who would not like her; but she was too much absorbed by
+her own restlessness to think or to look.
+
+She was turning over the slippery pages of an American magazine, when
+the hall door swung, a wedge of light fell upon the floor, and a small
+white figure upon whom the light seemed focussed, made straight across
+the room to her.
+
+"What! You here?" Evelyn exclaimed. "Just caught a glimpse of you at
+lunch; but you wouldn't condescend to look at _me_."
+
+It was part of Evelyn's character that in spite of many snubs which she
+received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit of people she wanted
+to know, and in the long run generally succeeded in knowing them and
+even in making them like her.
+
+She looked round her. "I hate this place. I hate these people," she
+said. "I wish you'd come up to my room with me. I do want to talk to
+you."
+
+As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evelyn took her by the wrist and
+drew her out of the hall and up the stairs. As they went upstairs
+two steps at a time, Evelyn, who still kept hold of Rachel's hand,
+ejaculated broken sentences about not caring a hang what people said.
+"Why should one, if one knows one's right? And let 'em all go to blazes!
+Them's my opinions!"
+
+She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms were
+twitching nervously. It was evident that she was only waiting for the
+door to shut to tell Rachel all about it. Indeed, directly they were
+inside her room, she sat on the end of the bed and said, "I suppose you
+think I'm mad?"
+
+Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about any one's state of
+mind. She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever occurred
+to her without fear of the consequences.
+
+"Somebody's proposed to you," she remarked.
+
+"How on earth did you guess that?" Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure
+mingling with her surprise. "Do as I look as if I'd just had a
+proposal?"
+
+"You look as if you had them every day," Rachel replied.
+
+"But I don't suppose I've had more than you've had," Evelyn laughed
+rather insincerely.
+
+"I've never had one."
+
+"But you will--lots--it's the easiest thing in the world--But that's
+not what's happened this afternoon exactly. It's--Oh, it's a muddle, a
+detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!"
+
+She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold
+water; for they were burning hot. Still sponging them and trembling
+slightly she turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous
+excitement: "Alfred Perrott says I've promised to marry him, and I say I
+never did. Sinclair says he'll shoot himself if I don't marry him, and
+I say, 'Well, shoot yourself!' But of course he doesn't--they never do.
+And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me to
+give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott, and
+told me I'd no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities of
+pleasant things like that. So at last I said to him, 'Well, Sinclair,
+you've said enough now. You can just let me go.' And then he caught me
+and kissed me--the disgusting brute--I can still feel his nasty hairy
+face just there--as if he'd any right to, after what he'd said!"
+
+She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.
+
+"I've never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!" she cried;
+"they've no dignity, they've no courage, they've nothing but their
+beastly passions and their brute strength! Would any woman have
+behaved like that--if a man had said he didn't want her? We've too much
+self-respect; we're infinitely finer than they are."
+
+She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. Tears
+were now running down with the drops of cold water.
+
+"It makes me angry," she explained, drying her eyes.
+
+Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evelyn's position; she
+only thought that the world was full or people in torment.
+
+"There's only one man here I really like," Evelyn continued; "Terence
+Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him."
+
+At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart seemed
+to be pressed together by cold hands.
+
+"Why?" she asked. "Why can you trust him?"
+
+"I don't know," said Evelyn. "Don't you have feelings about people?
+Feelings you're absolutely certain are right? I had a long talk with
+Terence the other night. I felt we were really friends after that.
+There's something of a woman in him--" She paused as though she were
+thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her, so at least
+Rachel interpreted her gaze.
+
+She tried to force herself to say, "Has to be proposed to you?" but the
+question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn was saying
+that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler than men--for
+example, one couldn't imagine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a
+mean thing or having anything base about her.
+
+"How I'd like you to know her!" she exclaimed.
+
+She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her
+eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she
+seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. "Lillah
+runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road," she continued.
+"She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it's
+now the biggest of its kind in England. You can't think what those women
+are like--and their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of the
+day and night. I've often been with her. . . . That's what's the matter
+with us. . . . We don't _do_ things. What do you _do_?" she demanded,
+looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile. Rachel had scarcely
+listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and unhappy. She
+had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her work in the
+Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love affairs.
+
+"I play," she said with an affection of stolid composure.
+
+"That's about it!" Evelyn laughed. "We none of us do anything but play.
+And that's why women like Lillah Harrison, who's worth twenty of you and
+me, have to work themselves to the bone. But I'm tired of playing," she
+went on, lying flat on the bed, and raising her arms above her head.
+Thus stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.
+
+"I'm going to do something. I've got a splendid idea. Look here, you
+must join. I'm sure you've got any amount of stuff in you, though you
+look--well, as if you'd lived all your life in a garden." She sat up,
+and began to explain with animation. "I belong to a club in London. It
+meets every Saturday, so it's called the Saturday Club. We're supposed
+to talk about art, but I'm sick of talking about art--what's the good
+of it? With all kinds of real things going on round one? It isn't as if
+they'd got anything to say about art, either. So what I'm going to tell
+'em is that we've talked enough about art, and we'd better talk about
+life for a change. Questions that really matter to people's lives, the
+White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And
+when we've made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves
+into a society for doing it. . . . I'm certain that if people like
+ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to policemen
+and magistrates, we could put a stop to--prostitution"--she lowered her
+voice at the ugly word--"in six months. My idea is that men and women
+ought to join in these matters. We ought to go into Piccadilly and stop
+one of these poor wretches and say: 'Now, look here, I'm no better than
+you are, and I don't pretend to be any better, but you're doing what you
+know to be beastly, and I won't have you doing beastly things, because
+we're all the same under our skins, and if you do a beastly thing it
+does matter to me.' That's what Mr. Bax was saying this morning,
+and it's true, though you clever people--you're clever too, aren't
+you?--don't believe it."
+
+When Evelyn began talking--it was a fact she often regretted--her
+thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen to other
+people's thoughts. She continued without more pause than was needed for
+taking breath.
+
+"I don't see why the Saturday club people shouldn't do a really great
+work in that way," she went on. "Of course it would want organisation,
+some one to give their life to it, but I'm ready to do that. My notion's
+to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care
+of themselves. What's wrong with Lillah--if there is anything wrong--is
+that she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards. Now
+there's one thing I'll say to my credit," she continued; "I'm not
+intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort, but I'm jolly human."
+She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor, looking up at Rachel. She
+searched up into her face as if she were trying to read what kind of
+character was concealed behind the face. She put her hand on Rachel's
+knee.
+
+"It _is_ being human that counts, isn't it?" she continued. "Being real,
+whatever Mr. Hirst may say. Are you real?"
+
+Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close to her,
+and that there was something exciting in this closeness, although it was
+also disagreeable. She was spared the need of finding an answer to the
+question, for Evelyn proceeded, "Do you _believe_ in anything?"
+
+In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes, and to
+relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back her chair and
+exclaimed, "In everything!" and began to finger different objects, the
+books on the table, the photographs, the freshly leaved plant with the
+stiff bristles, which stood in a large earthenware pot in the window.
+
+"I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony,
+in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing," she remarked, still speaking recklessly,
+with something at the back of her mind forcing her to say the things
+that one usually does not say. "But I don't believe in God, I don't
+believe in Mr. Bax, I don't believe in the hospital nurse. I don't
+believe--" She took up a photograph and, looking at it, did not finish
+her sentence.
+
+"That's my mother," said Evelyn, who remained sitting on the floor
+binding her knees together with her arms, and watching Rachel curiously.
+
+Rachel considered the portrait. "Well, I don't much believe in her," she
+remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.
+
+Mrs. Murgatroyd looked indeed as if the life had been crushed out of
+her; she knelt on a chair, gazing piteously from behind the body of a
+Pomeranian dog which she clasped to her cheek, as if for protection.
+
+"And that's my dad," said Evelyn, for there were two photographs in one
+frame. The second photograph represented a handsome soldier with high
+regular features and a heavy black moustache; his hand rested on the
+hilt of his sword; there was a decided likeness between him and Evelyn.
+
+"And it's because of them," said Evelyn, "that I'm going to help the
+other women. You've heard about me, I suppose? They weren't married, you
+see; I'm not anybody in particular. I'm not a bit ashamed of it. They
+loved each other anyhow, and that's more than most people can say of
+their parents."
+
+Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her hands, and
+compared them--the man and the woman who had, so Evelyn said, loved
+each other. That fact interested her more than the campaign on behalf of
+unfortunate women which Evelyn was once more beginning to describe. She
+looked again from one to the other.
+
+"What d'you think it's like," she asked, as Evelyn paused for a minute,
+"being in love?"
+
+"Have you never been in love?" Evelyn asked. "Oh no--one's only got to
+look at you to see that," she added. She considered. "I really was in
+love once," she said. She fell into reflection, her eyes losing
+their bright vitality and approaching something like an expression of
+tenderness. "It was heavenly!--while it lasted. The worst of it is it
+don't last, not with me. That's the bother."
+
+She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sinclair about
+which she had pretended to ask Rachel's advice. But she did not want
+advice; she wanted intimacy. When she looked at Rachel, who was still
+looking at the photographs on the bed, she could not help seeing that
+Rachel was not thinking about her. What was she thinking about, then?
+Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of life in her which was always
+trying to work through to other people, and was always being rebuffed.
+Falling silent she looked at her visitor, her shoes, her stockings, the
+combs in her hair, all the details of her dress in short, as though by
+seizing every detail she might get closer to the life within.
+
+Rachel at last put down the photographs, walked to the window and
+remarked, "It's odd. People talk as much about love as they do about
+religion."
+
+"I wish you'd sit down and talk," said Evelyn impatiently.
+
+Instead Rachel opened the window, which was made in two long panes, and
+looked down into the garden below.
+
+"That's where we got lost the first night," she said. "It must have been
+in those bushes."
+
+"They kill hens down there," said Evelyn. "They cut their heads off with
+a knife--disgusting! But tell me--what--"
+
+"I'd like to explore the hotel," Rachel interrupted. She drew her head
+in and looked at Evelyn, who still sat on the floor.
+
+"It's just like other hotels," said Evelyn.
+
+That might be, although every room and passage and chair in the place
+had a character of its own in Rachel's eyes; but she could not bring
+herself to stay in one place any longer. She moved slowly towards the
+door.
+
+"What is it you want?" said Evelyn. "You make me feel as if you were
+always thinking of something you don't say. . . . Do say it!"
+
+But Rachel made no response to this invitation either. She stopped with
+her fingers on the handle of the door, as if she remembered that some
+sort of pronouncement was due from her.
+
+"I suppose you'll marry one of them," she said, and then turned the
+handle and shut the door behind her. She walked slowly down the passage,
+running her hand along the wall beside her. She did not think which way
+she was going, and therefore walked down a passage which only led to a
+window and a balcony. She looked down at the kitchen premises, the wrong
+side of the hotel life, which was cut off from the right side by a maze
+of small bushes. The ground was bare, old tins were scattered about, and
+the bushes wore towels and aprons upon their heads to dry. Every now and
+then a waiter came out in a white apron and threw rubbish on to a
+heap. Two large women in cotton dresses were sitting on a bench with
+blood-smeared tin trays in front of them and yellow bodies across
+their knees. They were plucking the birds, and talking as they plucked.
+Suddenly a chicken came floundering, half flying, half running into the
+space, pursued by a third woman whose age could hardly be under eighty.
+Although wizened and unsteady on her legs she kept up the chase, egged
+on by the laughter of the others; her face was expressive of furious
+rage, and as she ran she swore in Spanish. Frightened by hand-clapping
+here, a napkin there, the bird ran this way and that in sharp angles,
+and finally fluttered straight at the old woman, who opened her scanty
+grey skirts to enclose it, dropped upon it in a bundle, and then holding
+it out cut its head off with an expression of vindictive energy and
+triumph combined. The blood and the ugly wriggling fascinated Rachel, so
+that although she knew that some one had come up behind and was standing
+beside her, she did not turn round until the old woman had settled down
+on the bench beside the others. Then she looked up sharply, because of
+the ugliness of what she had seen. It was Miss Allan who stood beside
+her.
+
+"Not a pretty sight," said Miss Allan, "although I daresay it's really
+more humane than our method. . . . I don't believe you've ever been in
+my room," she added, and turned away as if she meant Rachel to follow
+her. Rachel followed, for it seemed possible that each new person might
+remove the mystery which burdened her.
+
+The bedrooms at the hotel were all on the same pattern, save that some
+were larger and some smaller; they had a floor of dark red tiles;
+they had a high bed, draped in mosquito curtains; they had each a
+writing-table and a dressing-table, and a couple of arm-chairs. But
+directly a box was unpacked the rooms became very different, so that
+Miss Allan's room was very unlike Evelyn's room. There were no variously
+coloured hatpins on her dressing-table; no scent-bottles; no narrow
+curved pairs of scissors; no great variety of shoes and boots; no silk
+petticoats lying on the chairs. The room was extremely neat. There
+seemed to be two pairs of everything. The writing-table, however,
+was piled with manuscript, and a table was drawn out to stand by the
+arm-chair on which were two separate heaps of dark library books, in
+which there were many slips of paper sticking out at different degrees
+of thickness. Miss Allan had asked Rachel to come in out of kindness,
+thinking that she was waiting about with nothing to do. Moreover, she
+liked young women, for she had taught many of them, and having received
+so much hospitality from the Ambroses she was glad to be able to repay
+a minute part of it. She looked about accordingly for something to
+show her. The room did not provide much entertainment. She touched
+her manuscript. "Age of Chaucer; Age of Elizabeth; Age of Dryden,"
+she reflected; "I'm glad there aren't many more ages. I'm still in the
+middle of the eighteenth century. Won't you sit down, Miss Vinrace? The
+chair, though small, is firm. . . . Euphues. The germ of the English
+novel," she continued, glancing at another page. "Is that the kind of
+thing that interests you?"
+
+She looked at Rachel with great kindness and simplicity, as though
+she would do her utmost to provide anything she wished to have. This
+expression had a remarkable charm in a face otherwise much lined with
+care and thought.
+
+"Oh no, it's music with you, isn't it?" she continued, recollecting,
+"and I generally find that they don't go together. Sometimes of course
+we have prodigies--" She was looking about her for something and now saw
+a jar on the mantelpiece which she reached down and gave to Rachel. "If
+you put your finger into this jar you may be able to extract a piece of
+preserved ginger. Are you a prodigy?"
+
+But the ginger was deep and could not be reached.
+
+"Don't bother," she said, as Miss Allan looked about for some other
+implement. "I daresay I shouldn't like preserved ginger."
+
+"You've never tried?" enquired Miss Allan. "Then I consider that it is
+your duty to try now. Why, you may add a new pleasure to life, and as
+you are still young--" She wondered whether a button-hook would do. "I
+make it a rule to try everything," she said. "Don't you think it
+would be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first time on your
+death-bed, and found you never liked anything so much? I should be
+so exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on that account
+alone."
+
+She was now successful, and a lump of ginger emerged on the end of the
+button-hook. While she went to wipe the button-hook, Rachel bit the
+ginger and at once cried, "I must spit it out!"
+
+"Are you sure you have really tasted it?" Miss Allan demanded.
+
+For answer Rachel threw it out of the window.
+
+"An experience anyhow," said Miss Allan calmly. "Let me see--I have
+nothing else to offer you, unless you would like to taste this." A small
+cupboard hung above her bed, and she took out of it a slim elegant jar
+filled with a bright green fluid.
+
+"Creme de Menthe," she said. "Liqueur, you know. It looks as if I drank,
+doesn't it? As a matter of fact it goes to prove what an exceptionally
+abstemious person I am. I've had that jar for six-and-twenty years,"
+she added, looking at it with pride, as she tipped it over, and from
+the height of the liquid it could be seen that the bottle was still
+untouched.
+
+"Twenty-six years?" Rachel exclaimed.
+
+Miss Allan was gratified, for she had meant Rachel to be surprised.
+
+"When I went to Dresden six-and-twenty years ago," she said, "a certain
+friend of mine announced her intention of making me a present. She
+thought that in the event of shipwreck or accident a stimulant might
+be useful. However, as I had no occasion for it, I gave it back on my
+return. On the eve of any foreign journey the same bottle always makes
+its appearance, with the same note; on my return in safety it is always
+handed back. I consider it a kind of charm against accidents. Though I
+was once detained twenty-four hours by an accident to the train in front
+of me, I have never met with any accident myself. Yes," she continued,
+now addressing the bottle, "we have seen many climes and cupboards
+together, have we not? I intend one of these days to have a silver label
+made with an inscription. It is a gentleman, as you may observe, and his
+name is Oliver. . . . I do not think I could forgive you, Miss Vinrace,
+if you broke my Oliver," she said, firmly taking the bottle out of
+Rachel's hands and replacing it in the cupboard.
+
+Rachel was swinging the bottle by the neck. She was interested by Miss
+Allan to the point of forgetting the bottle.
+
+"Well," she exclaimed, "I do think that odd; to have had a friend for
+twenty-six years, and a bottle, and--to have made all those journeys."
+
+"Not at all; I call it the reverse of odd," Miss Allan replied. "I
+always consider myself the most ordinary person I know. It's rather
+distinguished to be as ordinary as I am. I forget--are you a prodigy, or
+did you say you were not a prodigy?"
+
+She smiled at Rachel very kindly. She seemed to have known and
+experienced so much, as she moved cumbrously about the room, that surely
+there must be balm for all anguish in her words, could one induce her to
+have recourse to them. But Miss Allan, who was now locking the cupboard
+door, showed no signs of breaking the reticence which had snowed her
+under for years. An uncomfortable sensation kept Rachel silent; on the
+one hand, she wished to whirl high and strike a spark out of the cool
+pink flesh; on the other she perceived there was nothing to be done but
+to drift past each other in silence.
+
+"I'm not a prodigy. I find it very difficult to say what I mean--" she
+observed at length.
+
+"It's a matter of temperament, I believe," Miss Allan helped her. "There
+are some people who have no difficulty; for myself I find there are a
+great many things I simply cannot say. But then I consider myself very
+slow. One of my colleagues now, knows whether she likes you or not--let
+me see, how does she do it?--by the way you say good-morning at
+breakfast. It is sometimes a matter of years before I can make up my
+mind. But most young people seem to find it easy?"
+
+"Oh no," said Rachel. "It's hard!"
+
+Miss Allan looked at Rachel quietly, saying nothing; she suspected that
+there were difficulties of some kind. Then she put her hand to the back
+of her head, and discovered that one of the grey coils of hair had come
+loose.
+
+"I must ask you to be so kind as to excuse me," she said, rising, "if
+I do my hair. I have never yet found a satisfactory type of hairpin.
+I must change my dress, too, for the matter of that; and I should be
+particularly glad of your assistance, because there is a tiresome set of
+hooks which I _can_ fasten for myself, but it takes from ten to fifteen
+minutes; whereas with your help--"
+
+She slipped off her coat and skirt and blouse, and stood doing her hair
+before the glass, a massive homely figure, her petticoat being so short
+that she stood on a pair of thick slate-grey legs.
+
+"People say youth is pleasant; I myself find middle age far pleasanter,"
+she remarked, removing hair pins and combs, and taking up her brush.
+When it fell loose her hair only came down to her neck.
+
+"When one was young," she continued, "things could seem so very serious
+if one was made that way. . . . And now my dress."
+
+In a wonderfully short space of time her hair had been reformed in its
+usual loops. The upper half of her body now became dark green with black
+stripes on it; the skirt, however, needed hooking at various angles, and
+Rachel had to kneel on the floor, fitting the eyes to the hooks.
+
+"Our Miss Johnson used to find life very unsatisfactory, I remember,"
+Miss Allan continued. She turned her back to the light. "And then she
+took to breeding guinea-pigs for their spots, and became absorbed in
+that. I have just heard that the yellow guinea-pig has had a black baby.
+We had a bet of sixpence on about it. She will be very triumphant."
+
+The skirt was fastened. She looked at herself in the glass with the
+curious stiffening of her face generally caused by looking in the glass.
+
+"Am I in a fit state to encounter my fellow-beings?" she asked. "I
+forget which way it is--but they find black animals very rarely have
+coloured babies--it may be the other way round. I have had it so often
+explained to me that it is very stupid of me to have forgotten again."
+
+She moved about the room acquiring small objects with quiet force,
+and fixing them about her--a locket, a watch and chain, a heavy gold
+bracelet, and the parti-coloured button of a suffrage society. Finally,
+completely equipped for Sunday tea, she stood before Rachel, and smiled
+at her kindly. She was not an impulsive woman, and her life had schooled
+her to restrain her tongue. At the same time, she was possessed of an
+amount of good-will towards others, and in particular towards the young,
+which often made her regret that speech was so difficult.
+
+"Shall we descend?" she said.
+
+She put one hand upon Rachel's shoulder, and stooping, picked up a pair
+of walking-shoes with the other, and placed them neatly side by side
+outside her door. As they walked down the passage they passed many pairs
+of boots and shoes, some black and some brown, all side by side, and all
+different, even to the way in which they lay together.
+
+"I always think that people are so like their boots," said Miss Allan.
+"That is Mrs. Paley's--" but as she spoke the door opened, and Mrs.
+Paley rolled out in her chair, equipped also for tea.
+
+She greeted Miss Allan and Rachel.
+
+"I was just saying that people are so like their boots," said Miss
+Allan. Mrs. Paley did not hear. She repeated it more loudly still. Mrs.
+Paley did not hear. She repeated it a third time. Mrs. Paley heard, but
+she did not understand. She was apparently about to repeat it for the
+fourth time, when Rachel suddenly said something inarticulate, and
+disappeared down the corridor. This misunderstanding, which involved
+a complete block in the passage, seemed to her unbearable. She walked
+quickly and blindly in the opposite direction, and found herself at the
+end of a _cul_ _de_ _sac_. There was a window, and a table and a chair
+in the window, and upon the table stood a rusty inkstand, an ashtray, an
+old copy of a French newspaper, and a pen with a broken nib. Rachel
+sat down, as if to study the French newspaper, but a tear fell on the
+blurred French print, raising a soft blot. She lifted her head sharply,
+exclaiming aloud, "It's intolerable!" Looking out of the window with
+eyes that would have seen nothing even had they not been dazed by tears,
+she indulged herself at last in violent abuse of the entire day. It had
+been miserable from start to finish; first, the service in the chapel;
+then luncheon; then Evelyn; then Miss Allan; then old Mrs. Paley
+blocking up the passage. All day long she had been tantalized and put
+off. She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of
+some crisis, from which the world is finally displayed in its
+true proportions. She disliked the look of it immensely--churches,
+politicians, misfits, and huge impostures--men like Mr. Dalloway,
+men like Mr. Bax, Evelyn and her chatter, Mrs. Paley blocking up the
+passage. Meanwhile the steady beat of her own pulse represented the hot
+current of feeling that ran down beneath; beating, struggling, fretting.
+For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in the world,
+which tried to burst forth here--there--and was repressed now by Mr.
+Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous stupidity, the
+weight of the entire world. Thus tormented, she would twist her hands
+together, for all things were wrong, all people stupid. Vaguely seeing
+that there were people down in the garden beneath she represented them
+as aimless masses of matter, floating hither and thither, without aim
+except to impede her. What were they doing, those other people in the
+world?
+
+"Nobody knows," she said. The force of her rage was beginning to spend
+itself, and the vision of the world which had been so vivid became dim.
+
+"It's a dream," she murmured. She considered the rusty inkstand,
+the pen, the ash-tray, and the old French newspaper. These small and
+worthless objects seemed to her to represent human lives.
+
+"We're asleep and dreaming," she repeated. But the possibility which now
+suggested itself that one of the shapes might be the shape of Terence
+roused her from her melancholy lethargy. She became as restless as she
+had been before she sat down. She was no longer able to see the world
+as a town laid out beneath her. It was covered instead by a haze of
+feverish red mist. She had returned to the state in which she had been
+all day. Thinking was no escape. Physical movement was the only refuge,
+in and out of rooms, in and out of people's minds, seeking she knew not
+what. Therefore she rose, pushed back the table, and went downstairs.
+She went out of the hall door, and, turning the corner of the hotel,
+found herself among the people whom she had seen from the window. But
+owing to the broad sunshine after shaded passages, and to the substance
+of living people after dreams, the group appeared with startling
+intensity, as though the dusty surface had been peeled off everything,
+leaving only the reality and the instant. It had the look of a vision
+printed on the dark at night. White and grey and purple figures were
+scattered on the green, round wicker tables, in the middle the flame of
+the tea-urn made the air waver like a faulty sheet of glass, a massive
+green tree stood over them as if it were a moving force held at rest.
+As she approached, she could hear Evelyn's voice repeating monotonously,
+"Here then--here--good doggie, come here"; for a moment nothing seemed
+to happen; it all stood still, and then she realised that one of the
+figures was Helen Ambrose; and the dust again began to settle.
+
+The group indeed had come together in a miscellaneous way; one tea-table
+joining to another tea-table, and deck-chairs serving to connect two
+groups. But even at a distance it could be seen that Mrs. Flushing,
+upright and imperious, dominated the party. She was talking vehemently
+to Helen across the table.
+
+"Ten days under canvas," she was saying. "No comforts. If you want
+comforts, don't come. But I may tell you, if you don't come you'll
+regret it all your life. You say yes?"
+
+At this moment Mrs. Flushing caught sight of Rachel.
+
+"Ah, there's your niece. She's promised. You're coming, aren't you?"
+Having adopted the plan, she pursued it with the energy of a child.
+
+Rachel took her part with eagerness.
+
+"Of course I'm coming. So are you, Helen. And Mr. Pepper too." As she
+sat she realised that she was surrounded by people she knew, but that
+Terence was not among them. From various angles people began saying what
+they thought of the proposed expedition. According to some it would be
+hot, but the nights would be cold; according to others, the difficulties
+would lie rather in getting a boat, and in speaking the language.
+Mrs. Flushing disposed of all objections, whether due to man or due to
+nature, by announcing that her husband would settle all that.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Flushing quietly explained to Helen that the expedition
+was really a simple matter; it took five days at the outside; and the
+place--a native village--was certainly well worth seeing before she
+returned to England. Helen murmured ambiguously, and did not commit
+herself to one answer rather than to another.
+
+The tea-party, however, included too many different kinds of people
+for general conversation to flourish; and from Rachel's point of view
+possessed the great advantage that it was quite unnecessary for her to
+talk. Over there Susan and Arthur were explaining to Mrs. Paley that an
+expedition had been proposed; and Mrs. Paley having grasped the fact,
+gave the advice of an old traveller that they should take nice canned
+vegetables, fur cloaks, and insect powder. She leant over to Mrs.
+Flushing and whispered something which from the twinkle in her eyes
+probably had reference to bugs. Then Helen was reciting "Toll for the
+Brave" to St. John Hirst, in order apparently to win a sixpence which
+lay upon the table; while Mr. Hughling Elliot imposed silence upon his
+section of the audience by his fascinating anecdote of Lord Curzon and
+the undergraduate's bicycle. Mrs. Thornbury was trying to remember the
+name of a man who might have been another Garibaldi, and had written a
+book which they ought to read; and Mr. Thornbury recollected that he had
+a pair of binoculars at anybody's service. Miss Allan meanwhile murmured
+with the curious intimacy which a spinster often achieves with dogs, to
+the fox-terrier which Evelyn had at last induced to come over to them.
+Little particles of dust or blossom fell on the plates now and then when
+the branches sighed above. Rachel seemed to see and hear a little of
+everything, much as a river feels the twigs that fall into it and sees
+the sky above, but her eyes were too vague for Evelyn's liking. She came
+across, and sat on the ground at Rachel's feet.
+
+"Well?" she asked suddenly. "What are you thinking about?"
+
+"Miss Warrington," Rachel replied rashly, because she had to say
+something. She did indeed see Susan murmuring to Mrs. Elliot, while
+Arthur stared at her with complete confidence in his own love. Both
+Rachel and Evelyn then began to listen to what Susan was saying.
+
+"There's the ordering and the dogs and the garden, and the children
+coming to be taught," her voice proceeded rhythmically as if checking
+the list, "and my tennis, and the village, and letters to write for
+father, and a thousand little things that don't sound much; but I never
+have a moment to myself, and when I got to bed, I'm so sleepy I'm off
+before my head touches the pillow. Besides I like to be a great deal
+with my Aunts--I'm a great bore, aren't I, Aunt Emma?" (she smiled at
+old Mrs. Paley, who with head slightly drooped was regarding the cake
+with speculative affection), "and father has to be very careful about
+chills in winter which means a great deal of running about, because
+he won't look after himself, any more than you will, Arthur! So it all
+mounts up!"
+
+Her voice mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life
+and her own nature. Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan,
+ignoring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. She
+appeared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the
+kind blue eyes now shallow and watery, the bloom of the cheeks congealed
+to a network of dry red canals.
+
+Helen turned to her. "Did you go to church?" she asked. She had won her
+sixpence and seemed making ready to go.
+
+"Yes," said Rachel. "For the last time," she added.
+
+In preparing to put on her gloves, Helen dropped one.
+
+"You're not going?" Evelyn asked, taking hold of one glove as if to keep
+them.
+
+"It's high time we went," said Helen. "Don't you see how silent every
+one's getting--?"
+
+A silence had fallen upon them all, caused partly by one of the
+accidents of talk, and partly because they saw some one approaching.
+Helen could not see who it was, but keeping her eyes fixed upon Rachel
+observed something which made her say to herself, "So it's Hewet."
+She drew on her gloves with a curious sense of the significance of the
+moment. Then she rose, for Mrs. Flushing had seen Hewet too, and was
+demanding information about rivers and boats which showed that the whole
+conversation would now come over again.
+
+Rachel followed her, and they walked in silence down the avenue. In
+spite of what Helen had seen and understood, the feeling that was
+uppermost in her mind was now curiously perverse; if she went on this
+expedition, she would not be able to have a bath, the effort appeared to
+her to be great and disagreeable.
+
+"It's so unpleasant, being cooped up with people one hardly knows," she
+remarked. "People who mind being seen naked."
+
+"You don't mean to go?" Rachel asked.
+
+The intensity with which this was spoken irritated Mrs. Ambrose.
+
+"I don't mean to go, and I don't mean not to go," she replied. She
+became more and more casual and indifferent.
+
+"After all, I daresay we've seen all there is to be seen; and there's
+the bother of getting there, and whatever they may say it's bound to be
+vilely uncomfortable."
+
+For some time Rachel made no reply; but every sentence Helen spoke
+increased her bitterness. At last she broke out--
+
+"Thank God, Helen, I'm not like you! I sometimes think you don't think
+or feel or care to do anything but exist! You're like Mr. Hirst. You see
+that things are bad, and you pride yourself on saying so. It's what
+you call being honest; as a matter of fact it's being lazy, being dull,
+being nothing. You don't help; you put an end to things."
+
+Helen smiled as if she rather enjoyed the attack.
+
+"Well?" she enquired.
+
+"It seems to me bad--that's all," Rachel replied.
+
+"Quite likely," said Helen.
+
+At any other time Rachel would probably have been silenced by her Aunt's
+candour; but this afternoon she was not in the mood to be silenced by
+any one. A quarrel would be welcome.
+
+"You're only half alive," she continued.
+
+"Is that because I didn't accept Mr. Flushing's invitation?" Helen
+asked, "or do you always think that?"
+
+At the moment it appeared to Rachel that she had always seen the same
+faults in Helen, from the very first night on board the _Euphrosyne_, in
+spite of her beauty, in spite of her magnanimity and their love.
+
+"Oh, it's only what's the matter with every one!" she exclaimed. "No
+one feels--no one does anything but hurt. I tell you, Helen, the world's
+bad. It's an agony, living, wanting--"
+
+Here she tore a handful of leaves from a bush and crushed them to
+control herself.
+
+"The lives of these people," she tried to explain, the aimlessness, the
+way they live. "One goes from one to another, and it's all the same. One
+never gets what one wants out of any of them."
+
+Her emotional state and her confusion would have made her an easy prey
+if Helen had wished to argue or had wished to draw confidences. But
+instead of talking she fell into a profound silence as they walked on.
+Aimless, trivial, meaningless, oh no--what she had seen at tea made it
+impossible for her to believe that. The little jokes, the chatter, the
+inanities of the afternoon had shrivelled up before her eyes. Underneath
+the likings and spites, the comings together and partings, great things
+were happening--terrible things, because they were so great. Her sense
+of safety was shaken, as if beneath twigs and dead leaves she had seen
+the movement of a snake. It seemed to her that a moment's respite
+was allowed, a moment's make-believe, and then again the profound and
+reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to its liking, making
+and destroying.
+
+She looked at Rachel walking beside her, still crushing the leaves in
+her fingers and absorbed in her own thoughts. She was in love, and she
+pitied her profoundly. But she roused herself from these thoughts
+and apologised. "I'm very sorry," she said, "but if I'm dull, it's my
+nature, and it can't be helped." If it was a natural defect, however,
+she found an easy remedy, for she went on to say that she thought Mr.
+Flushing's scheme a very good one, only needing a little consideration,
+which it appeared she had given it by the time they reached home. By
+that time they had settled that if anything more was said, they would
+accept the invitation.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX
+
+
+When considered in detail by Mr. Flushing and Mrs. Ambrose the
+expedition proved neither dangerous nor difficult. They found also that
+it was not even unusual. Every year at this season English people made
+parties which steamed a short way up the river, landed, and looked at
+the native village, bought a certain number of things from the natives,
+and returned again without damage done to mind or body. When it was
+discovered that six people really wished the same thing the arrangements
+were soon carried out.
+
+Since the time of Elizabeth very few people had seen the river, and
+nothing has been done to change its appearance from what it was to the
+eyes of the Elizabethan voyagers. The time of Elizabeth was only distant
+from the present time by a moment of space compared with the ages which
+had passed since the water had run between those banks, and the green
+thickets swarmed there, and the small trees had grown to huge wrinkled
+trees in solitude. Changing only with the change of the sun and the
+clouds, the waving green mass had stood there for century after century,
+and the water had run between its banks ceaselessly, sometimes washing
+away earth and sometimes the branches of trees, while in other parts of
+the world one town had risen upon the ruins of another town, and the men
+in the towns had become more and more articulate and unlike each other.
+A few miles of this river were visible from the top of the mountain
+where some weeks before the party from the hotel had picnicked. Susan
+and Arthur had seen it as they kissed each other, and Terence and Rachel
+as they sat talking about Richmond, and Evelyn and Perrott as they
+strolled about, imagining that they were great captains sent to colonise
+the world. They had seen the broad blue mark across the sand where it
+flowed into the sea, and the green cloud of trees mass themselves about
+it farther up, and finally hide its waters altogether from sight. At
+intervals for the first twenty miles or so houses were scattered on the
+bank; by degrees the houses became huts, and, later still, there was
+neither hut nor house, but trees and grass, which were seen only by
+hunters, explorers, or merchants, marching or sailing, but making no
+settlement.
+
+By leaving Santa Marina early in the morning, driving twenty miles
+and riding eight, the party, which was composed finally of six English
+people, reached the river-side as the night fell. They came cantering
+through the trees--Mr. and Mrs. Flushing, Helen Ambrose, Rachel,
+Terence, and St. John. The tired little horses then stopped
+automatically, and the English dismounted. Mrs. Flushing strode to the
+river-bank in high spirits. The day had been long and hot, but she had
+enjoyed the speed and the open air; she had left the hotel which she
+hated, and she found the company to her liking. The river was swirling
+past in the darkness; they could just distinguish the smooth moving
+surface of the water, and the air was full of the sound of it. They
+stood in an empty space in the midst of great tree-trunks, and out there
+a little green light moving slightly up and down showed them where the
+steamer lay in which they were to embark.
+
+When they all stood upon its deck they found that it was a very small
+boat which throbbed gently beneath them for a few minutes, and then
+shoved smoothly through the water. They seemed to be driving into the
+heart of the night, for the trees closed in front of them, and they
+could hear all round them the rustling of leaves. The great darkness had
+the usual effect of taking away all desire for communication by making
+their words sound thin and small; and, after walking round the deck
+three or four times, they clustered together, yawning deeply, and
+looking at the same spot of deep gloom on the banks. Murmuring very low
+in the rhythmical tone of one oppressed by the air, Mrs. Flushing began
+to wonder where they were to sleep, for they could not sleep downstairs,
+they could not sleep in a doghole smelling of oil, they could not sleep
+on deck, they could not sleep--She yawned profoundly. It was as Helen
+had foreseen; the question of nakedness had risen already, although they
+were half asleep, and almost invisible to each other. With St. John's
+help she stretched an awning, and persuaded Mrs. Flushing that she could
+take off her clothes behind this, and that no one would notice if by
+chance some part of her which had been concealed for forty-five years
+was laid bare to the human eye. Mattresses were thrown down, rugs
+provided, and the three women lay near each other in the soft open air.
+
+The gentlemen, having smoked a certain number of cigarettes, dropped
+the glowing ends into the river, and looked for a time at the ripples
+wrinkling the black water beneath them, undressed too, and lay down at
+the other end of the boat. They were very tired, and curtained from each
+other by the darkness. The light from one lantern fell upon a few ropes,
+a few planks of the deck, and the rail of the boat, but beyond that
+there was unbroken darkness, no light reached their faces, or the trees
+which were massed on the sides of the river.
+
+Soon Wilfrid Flushing slept, and Hirst slept. Hewet alone lay awake
+looking straight up into the sky. The gentle motion and the black shapes
+that were drawn ceaselessly across his eyes had the effect of making
+it impossible for him to think. Rachel's presence so near him lulled
+thought asleep. Being so near him, only a few paces off at the other end
+of the boat, she made it as impossible for him to think about her as it
+would have been impossible to see her if she had stood quite close to
+him, her forehead against his forehead. In some strange way the boat
+became identified with himself, and just as it would have been useless
+for him to get up and steer the boat, so was it useless for him to
+struggle any longer with the irresistible force of his own feelings. He
+was drawn on and on away from all he knew, slipping over barriers and
+past landmarks into unknown waters as the boat glided over the
+smooth surface of the river. In profound peace, enveloped in deeper
+unconsciousness than had been his for many nights, he lay on deck
+watching the tree-tops change their position slightly against the sky,
+and arch themselves, and sink and tower huge, until he passed from
+seeing them into dreams where he lay beneath the shadow of the vast
+trees, looking up into the sky.
+
+When they woke next morning they had gone a considerable way up the
+river; on the right was a high yellow bank of sand tufted with trees, on
+the left a swamp quivering with long reeds and tall bamboos on the top
+of which, swaying slightly, perched vivid green and yellow birds. The
+morning was hot and still. After breakfast they drew chairs together and
+sat in an irregular semicircle in the bow. An awning above their heads
+protected them from the heat of the sun, and the breeze which the boat
+made aired them softly. Mrs. Flushing was already dotting and striping
+her canvas, her head jerking this way and that with the action of a bird
+nervously picking up grain; the others had books or pieces of paper
+or embroidery on their knees, at which they looked fitfully and again
+looked at the river ahead. At one point Hewet read part of a poem aloud,
+but the number of moving things entirely vanquished his words. He ceased
+to read, and no one spoke. They moved on under the shelter of the trees.
+There was now a covey of red birds feeding on one of the little islets
+to the left, or again a blue-green parrot flew shrieking from tree to
+tree. As they moved on the country grew wilder and wilder. The trees and
+the undergrowth seemed to be strangling each other near the ground in a
+multitudinous wrestle; while here and there a splendid tree towered high
+above the swarm, shaking its thin green umbrellas lightly in the upper
+air. Hewet looked at his books again. The morning was peaceful as the
+night had been, only it was very strange because he could see it was
+light, and he could see Rachel and hear her voice and be near to her.
+He felt as if he were waiting, as if somehow he were stationary among
+things that passed over him and around him, voices, people's bodies,
+birds, only Rachel too was waiting with him. He looked at her sometimes
+as if she must know that they were waiting together, and being drawn on
+together, without being able to offer any resistance. Again he read from
+his book:
+
+     Whoever you are holding me now in your hand,
+     Without one thing all will be useless.
+
+A bird gave a wild laugh, a monkey chuckled a malicious question, and,
+as fire fades in the hot sunshine, his words flickered and went out.
+
+By degrees as the river narrowed, and the high sandbanks fell to level
+ground thickly grown with trees, the sounds of the forest could be
+heard. It echoed like a hall. There were sudden cries; and then long
+spaces of silence, such as there are in a cathedral when a boy's voice
+has ceased and the echo of it still seems to haunt about the remote
+places of the roof. Once Mr. Flushing rose and spoke to a sailor, and
+even announced that some time after luncheon the steamer would stop, and
+they could walk a little way through the forest.
+
+"There are tracks all through the trees there," he explained. "We're no
+distance from civilisation yet."
+
+He scrutinised his wife's painting. Too polite to praise it openly,
+he contented himself with cutting off one half of the picture with one
+hand, and giving a flourish in the air with the other.
+
+"God!" Hirst exclaimed, staring straight ahead. "Don't you think it's
+amazingly beautiful?"
+
+"Beautiful?" Helen enquired. It seemed a strange little word, and Hirst
+and herself both so small that she forgot to answer him.
+
+Hewet felt that he must speak.
+
+"That's where the Elizabethans got their style," he mused, staring into
+the profusion of leaves and blossoms and prodigious fruits.
+
+"Shakespeare? I hate Shakespeare!" Mrs. Flushing exclaimed; and Wilfrid
+returned admiringly, "I believe you're the only person who dares to say
+that, Alice." But Mrs. Flushing went on painting. She did not appear
+to attach much value to her husband's compliment, and painted steadily,
+sometimes muttering a half-audible word or groan.
+
+The morning was now very hot.
+
+"Look at Hirst!" Mr. Flushing whispered. His sheet of paper had slipped
+on to the deck, his head lay back, and he drew a long snoring breath.
+
+Terence picked up the sheet of paper and spread it out before Rachel. It
+was a continuation of the poem on God which he had begun in the chapel,
+and it was so indecent that Rachel did not understand half of it
+although she saw that it was indecent. Hewet began to fill in words
+where Hirst had left spaces, but he soon ceased; his pencil rolled on
+deck. Gradually they approached nearer and nearer to the bank on the
+right-hand side, so that the light which covered them became definitely
+green, falling through a shade of green leaves, and Mrs. Flushing set
+aside her sketch and stared ahead of her in silence. Hirst woke up; they
+were then called to luncheon, and while they ate it, the steamer came
+to a standstill a little way out from the bank. The boat which was towed
+behind them was brought to the side, and the ladies were helped into it.
+
+For protection against boredom, Helen put a book of memoirs beneath her
+arm, and Mrs. Flushing her paint-box, and, thus equipped, they allowed
+themselves to be set on shore on the verge of the forest.
+
+They had not strolled more than a few hundred yards along the track
+which ran parallel with the river before Helen professed to find it
+was unbearably hot. The river breeze had ceased, and a hot steamy
+atmosphere, thick with scents, came from the forest.
+
+"I shall sit down here," she announced, pointing to the trunk of a
+tree which had fallen long ago and was now laced across and across
+by creepers and thong-like brambles. She seated herself, opened her
+parasol, and looked at the river which was barred by the stems of trees.
+She turned her back to the trees which disappeared in black shadow
+behind her.
+
+"I quite agree," said Mrs. Flushing, and proceeded to undo her
+paint-box. Her husband strolled about to select an interesting point of
+view for her. Hirst cleared a space on the ground by Helen's side, and
+seated himself with great deliberation, as if he did not mean to move
+until he had talked to her for a long time. Terence and Rachel were left
+standing by themselves without occupation. Terence saw that the time
+had come as it was fated to come, but although he realised this he
+was completely calm and master of himself. He chose to stand for a few
+moments talking to Helen, and persuading her to leave her seat. Rachel
+joined him too in advising her to come with them.
+
+"Of all the people I've ever met," he said, "you're the least
+adventurous. You might be sitting on green chairs in Hyde Park. Are you
+going to sit there the whole afternoon? Aren't you going to walk?"
+
+"Oh, no," said Helen, "one's only got to use one's eye. There's
+everything here--everything," she repeated in a drowsy tone of voice.
+"What will you gain by walking?"
+
+"You'll be hot and disagreeable by tea-time, we shall be cool and
+sweet," put in Hirst. Into his eyes as he looked up at them had come
+yellow and green reflections from the sky and the branches, robbing them
+of their intentness, and he seemed to think what he did not say. It was
+thus taken for granted by them both that Terence and Rachel proposed to
+walk into the woods together; with one look at each other they turned
+away.
+
+"Good-bye!" cried Rachel.
+
+"Good-by. Beware of snakes," Hirst replied. He settled himself still
+more comfortably under the shade of the fallen tree and Helen's figure.
+As they went, Mr. Flushing called after them, "We must start in an hour.
+Hewet, please remember that. An hour."
+
+Whether made by man, or for some reason preserved by nature, there was
+a wide pathway striking through the forest at right angles to the river.
+It resembled a drive in an English forest, save that tropical bushes
+with their sword-like leaves grew at the side, and the ground was
+covered with an unmarked springy moss instead of grass, starred with
+little yellow flowers. As they passed into the depths of the forest the
+light grew dimmer, and the noises of the ordinary world were replaced
+by those creaking and sighing sounds which suggest to the traveller in
+a forest that he is walking at the bottom of the sea. The path narrowed
+and turned; it was hedged in by dense creepers which knotted tree to
+tree, and burst here and there into star-shaped crimson blossoms. The
+sighing and creaking up above were broken every now and then by the
+jarring cry of some startled animal. The atmosphere was close and the
+air came at them in languid puffs of scent. The vast green light was
+broken here and there by a round of pure yellow sunlight which fell
+through some gap in the immense umbrella of green above, and in these
+yellow spaces crimson and black butterflies were circling and settling.
+Terence and Rachel hardly spoke.
+
+Not only did the silence weigh upon them, but they were both unable to
+frame any thoughts. There was something between them which had to be
+spoken of. One of them had to begin, but which of them was it to be?
+Then Hewet picked up a red fruit and threw it as high as he could. When
+it dropped, he would speak. They heard the flapping of great wings; they
+heard the fruit go pattering through the leaves and eventually fall with
+a thud. The silence was again profound.
+
+"Does this frighten you?" Terence asked when the sound of the fruit
+falling had completely died away.
+
+"No," she answered. "I like it."
+
+She repeated "I like it." She was walking fast, and holding herself more
+erect than usual. There was another pause.
+
+"You like being with me?" Terence asked.
+
+"Yes, with you," she replied.
+
+He was silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen upon the
+world.
+
+"That is what I have felt ever since I knew you," he replied. "We are
+happy together." He did not seem to be speaking, or she to be hearing.
+
+"Very happy," she answered.
+
+They continued to walk for some time in silence. Their steps
+unconsciously quickened.
+
+"We love each other," Terence said.
+
+"We love each other," she repeated.
+
+The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of
+strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words. Faster and faster they
+walked; simultaneously they stopped, clasped each other in their arms,
+then releasing themselves, dropped to the earth. They sat side by
+side. Sounds stood out from the background making a bridge across their
+silence; they heard the swish of the trees and some beast croaking in a
+remote world.
+
+"We love each other," Terence repeated, searching into her face. Their
+faces were both very pale and quiet, and they said nothing. He was
+afraid to kiss her again. By degrees she drew close to him, and rested
+against him. In this position they sat for some time. She said "Terence"
+once; he answered "Rachel."
+
+"Terrible--terrible," she murmured after another pause, but in saying
+this she was thinking as much of the persistent churning of the water as
+of her own feeling. On and on it went in the distance, the senseless and
+cruel churning of the water. She observed that the tears were running
+down Terence's cheeks.
+
+The next movement was on his part. A very long time seemed to have
+passed. He took out his watch.
+
+"Flushing said an hour. We've been gone more than half an hour."
+
+"And it takes that to get back," said Rachel. She raised herself very
+slowly. When she was standing up she stretched her arms and drew a deep
+breath, half a sigh, half a yawn. She appeared to be very tired. Her
+cheeks were white. "Which way?" she asked.
+
+"There," said Terence.
+
+They began to walk back down the mossy path again. The sighing and
+creaking continued far overhead, and the jarring cries of animals. The
+butterflies were circling still in the patches of yellow sunlight.
+At first Terence was certain of his way, but as they walked he became
+doubtful. They had to stop to consider, and then to return and start
+once more, for although he was certain of the direction of the river he
+was not certain of striking the point where they had left the others.
+Rachel followed him, stopping where he stopped, turning where he turned,
+ignorant of the way, ignorant why he stopped or why he turned.
+
+"I don't want to be late," he said, "because--" He put a flower into her
+hand and her fingers closed upon it quietly. "We're so late--so
+late--so horribly late," he repeated as if he were talking in his sleep.
+"Ah--this is right. We turn here."
+
+They found themselves again in the broad path, like the drive in the
+English forest, where they had started when they left the others. They
+walked on in silence as people walking in their sleep, and were oddly
+conscious now and again of the mass of their bodies. Then Rachel
+exclaimed suddenly, "Helen!"
+
+In the sunny space at the edge of the forest they saw Helen still
+sitting on the tree-trunk, her dress showing very white in the sun,
+with Hirst still propped on his elbow by her side. They stopped
+instinctively. At the sight of other people they could not go on. They
+stood hand in hand for a minute or two in silence. They could not bear
+to face other people.
+
+"But we must go on," Rachel insisted at last, in the curious dull tone
+of voice in which they had both been speaking, and with a great effort
+they forced themselves to cover the short distance which lay between
+them and the pair sitting on the tree-trunk.
+
+As they approached, Helen turned round and looked at them. She looked at
+them for some time without speaking, and when they were close to her she
+said quietly:
+
+"Did you meet Mr. Flushing? He has gone to find you. He thought you must
+be lost, though I told him you weren't lost."
+
+Hirst half turned round and threw his head back so that he looked at the
+branches crossing themselves in the air above him.
+
+"Well, was it worth the effort?" he enquired dreamily.
+
+Hewet sat down on the grass by his side and began to fan himself.
+
+Rachel had balanced herself near Helen on the end of the tree trunk.
+
+"Very hot," she said.
+
+"You look exhausted anyhow," said Hirst.
+
+"It's fearfully close in those trees," Helen remarked, picking up her
+book and shaking it free from the dried blades of grass which had fallen
+between the leaves. Then they were all silent, looking at the river
+swirling past in front of them between the trunks of the trees until Mr.
+Flushing interrupted them. He broke out of the trees a hundred yards to
+the left, exclaiming sharply:
+
+"Ah, so you found the way after all. But it's late--much later than we
+arranged, Hewet."
+
+He was slightly annoyed, and in his capacity as leader of the
+expedition, inclined to be dictatorial. He spoke quickly, using
+curiously sharp, meaningless words.
+
+"Being late wouldn't matter normally, of course," he said, "but when
+it's a question of keeping the men up to time--"
+
+He gathered them together and made them come down to the river-bank,
+where the boat was waiting to row them out to the steamer.
+
+The heat of the day was going down, and over their cups of tea the
+Flushings tended to become communicative. It seemed to Terence as he
+listened to them talking, that existence now went on in two different
+layers. Here were the Flushings talking, talking somewhere high up in
+the air above him, and he and Rachel had dropped to the bottom of
+the world together. But with something of a child's directness, Mrs.
+Flushing had also the instinct which leads a child to suspect what its
+elders wish to keep hidden. She fixed Terence with her vivid blue eyes
+and addressed herself to him in particular. What would he do, she wanted
+to know, if the boat ran upon a rock and sank.
+
+"Would you care for anythin' but savin' yourself? Should I? No, no," she
+laughed, "not one scrap--don't tell me. There's only two creatures the
+ordinary woman cares about," she continued, "her child and her dog;
+and I don't believe it's even two with men. One reads a lot about
+love--that's why poetry's so dull. But what happens in real life, he? It
+ain't love!" she cried.
+
+Terence murmured something unintelligible. Mr. Flushing, however, had
+recovered his urbanity. He was smoking a cigarette, and he now answered
+his wife.
+
+"You must always remember, Alice," he said, "that your upbringing
+was very unnatural--unusual, I should say. They had no mother," he
+explained, dropping something of the formality of his tone; "and a
+father--he was a very delightful man, I've no doubt, but he cared only
+for racehorses and Greek statues. Tell them about the bath, Alice."
+
+"In the stable-yard," said Mrs. Flushing. "Covered with ice in winter.
+We had to get in; if we didn't, we were whipped. The strong ones
+lived--the others died. What you call survival of the fittest--a most
+excellent plan, I daresay, if you've thirteen children!"
+
+"And all this going on in the heart of England, in the nineteenth
+century!" Mr. Flushing exclaimed, turning to Helen.
+
+"I'd treat my children just the same if I had any," said Mrs. Flushing.
+
+Every word sounded quite distinctly in Terence's ears; but what were
+they saying, and who were they talking to, and who were they, these
+fantastic people, detached somewhere high up in the air? Now that they
+had drunk their tea, they rose and leant over the bow of the boat. The
+sun was going down, and the water was dark and crimson. The river had
+widened again, and they were passing a little island set like a dark
+wedge in the middle of the stream. Two great white birds with red lights
+on them stood there on stilt-like legs, and the beach of the island was
+unmarked, save by the skeleton print of birds' feet. The branches of
+the trees on the bank looked more twisted and angular than ever, and the
+green of the leaves was lurid and splashed with gold. Then Hirst began
+to talk, leaning over the bow.
+
+"It makes one awfully queer, don't you find?" he complained. "These
+trees get on one's nerves--it's all so crazy. God's undoubtedly mad.
+What sane person could have conceived a wilderness like this, and
+peopled it with apes and alligators? I should go mad if I lived
+here--raving mad."
+
+Terence attempted to answer him, but Mrs. Ambrose replied instead. She
+bade him look at the way things massed themselves--look at the amazing
+colours, look at the shapes of the trees. She seemed to be protecting
+Terence from the approach of the others.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Flushing. "And in my opinion," he continued, "the
+absence of population to which Hirst objects is precisely the
+significant touch. You must admit, Hirst, that a little Italian
+town even would vulgarise the whole scene, would detract from the
+vastness--the sense of elemental grandeur." He swept his hands towards
+the forest, and paused for a moment, looking at the great green mass,
+which was now falling silent. "I own it makes us seem pretty small--us,
+not them." He nodded his head at a sailor who leant over the side
+spitting into the river. "And that, I think, is what my wife feels, the
+essential superiority of the peasant--" Under cover of Mr. Flushing's
+words, which continued now gently reasoning with St. John and persuading
+him, Terence drew Rachel to the side, pointing ostensibly to a great
+gnarled tree-trunk which had fallen and lay half in the water. He
+wished, at any rate, to be near her, but he found that he could say
+nothing. They could hear Mr. Flushing flowing on, now about his wife,
+now about art, now about the future of the country, little meaningless
+words floating high in air. As it was becoming cold he began to pace
+the deck with Hirst. Fragments of their talk came out distinctly as they
+passed--art, emotion, truth, reality.
+
+"Is it true, or is it a dream?" Rachel murmured, when they had passed.
+
+"It's true, it's true," he replied.
+
+But the breeze freshened, and there was a general desire for movement.
+When the party rearranged themselves under cover of rugs and cloaks,
+Terence and Rachel were at opposite ends of the circle, and could not
+speak to each other. But as the dark descended, the words of the others
+seemed to curl up and vanish as the ashes of burnt paper, and left them
+sitting perfectly silent at the bottom of the world. Occasional starts
+of exquisite joy ran through them, and then they were peaceful again.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI
+
+
+Thanks to Mr. Flushing's discipline, the right stages of the river were
+reached at the right hours, and when next morning after breakfast the
+chairs were again drawn out in a semicircle in the bow, the launch
+was within a few miles of the native camp which was the limit of the
+journey. Mr. Flushing, as he sat down, advised them to keep their eyes
+fixed on the left bank, where they would soon pass a clearing, and in
+that clearing, was a hut where Mackenzie, the famous explorer, had
+died of fever some ten years ago, almost within reach of
+civilisation--Mackenzie, he repeated, the man who went farther inland
+than any one's been yet. Their eyes turned that way obediently. The eyes
+of Rachel saw nothing. Yellow and green shapes did, it is true, pass
+before them, but she only knew that one was large and another small;
+she did not know that they were trees. These directions to look here
+and there irritated her, as interruptions irritate a person absorbed in
+thought, although she was not thinking of anything. She was annoyed with
+all that was said, and with the aimless movements of people's bodies,
+because they seemed to interfere with her and to prevent her from
+speaking to Terence. Very soon Helen saw her staring moodily at a coil
+of rope, and making no effort to listen. Mr. Flushing and St. John were
+engaged in more or less continuous conversation about the future of the
+country from a political point of view, and the degree to which it
+had been explored; the others, with their legs stretched out, or chins
+poised on the hands, gazed in silence.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose looked and listened obediently enough, but inwardly she
+was prey to an uneasy mood not readily to be ascribed to any one cause.
+Looking on shore as Mr. Flushing bade her, she thought the country
+very beautiful, but also sultry and alarming. She did not like to feel
+herself the victim of unclassified emotions, and certainly as the launch
+slipped on and on, in the hot morning sun, she felt herself unreasonably
+moved. Whether the unfamiliarity of the forest was the cause of it,
+or something less definite, she could not determine. Her mind left the
+scene and occupied itself with anxieties for Ridley, for her children,
+for far-off things, such as old age and poverty and death. Hirst, too,
+was depressed. He had been looking forward to this expedition as to a
+holiday, for, once away from the hotel, surely wonderful things would
+happen, instead of which nothing happened, and here they were as
+uncomfortable, as restrained, as self-conscious as ever. That, of
+course, was what came of looking forward to anything; one was always
+disappointed. He blamed Wilfrid Flushing, who was so well dressed and so
+formal; he blamed Hewet and Rachel. Why didn't they talk? He looked at
+them sitting silent and self-absorbed, and the sight annoyed him. He
+supposed that they were engaged, or about to become engaged, but
+instead of being in the least romantic or exciting, that was as dull as
+everything else; it annoyed him, too, to think that they were in love.
+He drew close to Helen and began to tell her how uncomfortable his night
+had been, lying on the deck, sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold, and
+the stars so bright that he couldn't get to sleep. He had lain awake
+all night thinking, and when it was light enough to see, he had written
+twenty lines of his poem on God, and the awful thing was that he'd
+practically proved the fact that God did not exist. He did not see that
+he was teasing her, and he went on to wonder what would happen if God
+did exist--"an old gentleman in a beard and a long blue dressing gown,
+extremely testy and disagreeable as he's bound to be? Can you suggest a
+rhyme? God, rod, sod--all used; any others?"
+
+Although he spoke much as usual, Helen could have seen, had she looked,
+that he was also impatient and disturbed. But she was not called upon to
+answer, for Mr. Flushing now exclaimed "There!" They looked at the hut
+on the bank, a desolate place with a large rent in the roof, and the
+ground round it yellow, scarred with fires and scattered with rusty open
+tins.
+
+"Did they find his dead body there?" Mrs. Flushing exclaimed, leaning
+forward in her eagerness to see the spot where the explorer had died.
+
+"They found his body and his skins and a notebook," her husband replied.
+But the boat had soon carried them on and left the place behind.
+
+It was so hot that they scarcely moved, except now to change a foot, or,
+again, to strike a match. Their eyes, concentrated upon the bank, were
+full of the same green reflections, and their lips were slightly pressed
+together as though the sights they were passing gave rise to thoughts,
+save that Hirst's lips moved intermittently as half consciously he
+sought rhymes for God. Whatever the thoughts of the others, no one said
+anything for a considerable space. They had grown so accustomed to the
+wall of trees on either side that they looked up with a start when the
+light suddenly widened out and the trees came to an end.
+
+"It almost reminds one of an English park," said Mr. Flushing.
+
+Indeed no change could have been greater. On both banks of the river lay
+an open lawn-like space, grass covered and planted, for the gentleness
+and order of the place suggested human care, with graceful trees on the
+top of little mounds. As far as they could gaze, this lawn rose and sank
+with the undulating motion of an old English park. The change of scene
+naturally suggested a change of position, grateful to most of them. They
+rose and leant over the rail.
+
+"It might be Arundel or Windsor," Mr. Flushing continued, "if you cut
+down that bush with the yellow flowers; and, by Jove, look!"
+
+Rows of brown backs paused for a moment and then leapt with a motion as
+if they were springing over waves out of sight. For a moment no one of
+them could believe that they had really seen live animals in the open--a
+herd of wild deer, and the sight aroused a childlike excitement in them,
+dissipating their gloom.
+
+"I've never in my life seen anything bigger than a hare!" Hirst
+exclaimed with genuine excitement. "What an ass I was not to bring my
+Kodak!"
+
+Soon afterwards the launch came gradually to a standstill, and the
+captain explained to Mr. Flushing that it would be pleasant for the
+passengers if they now went for a stroll on shore; if they chose to
+return within an hour, he would take them on to the village; if they
+chose to walk--it was only a mile or two farther on--he would meet them
+at the landing-place.
+
+The matter being settled, they were once more put on shore: the sailors,
+producing raisins and tobacco, leant upon the rail and watched the
+six English, whose coats and dresses looked so strange upon the green,
+wander off. A joke that was by no means proper set them all laughing,
+and then they turned round and lay at their ease upon the deck.
+
+Directly they landed, Terence and Rachel drew together slightly in
+advance of the others.
+
+"Thank God!" Terence exclaimed, drawing a long breath. "At last we're
+alone."
+
+"And if we keep ahead we can talk," said Rachel.
+
+Nevertheless, although their position some yards in advance of the
+others made it possible for them to say anything they chose, they were
+both silent.
+
+"You love me?" Terence asked at length, breaking the silence painfully.
+To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they were
+silent they were keenly conscious of each other's presence, and yet
+words were either too trivial or too large.
+
+She murmured inarticulately, ending, "And you?"
+
+"Yes, yes," he replied; but there were so many things to be said, and
+now that they were alone it seemed necessary to bring themselves still
+more near, and to surmount a barrier which had grown up since they had
+last spoken. It was difficult, frightening even, oddly embarrassing. At
+one moment he was clear-sighted, and, at the next, confused.
+
+"Now I'm going to begin at the beginning," he said resolutely. "I'm
+going to tell you what I ought to have told you before. In the first
+place, I've never been in love with other women, but I've had other
+women. Then I've great faults. I'm very lazy, I'm moody--" He persisted,
+in spite of her exclamation, "You've got to know the worst of me. I'm
+lustful. I'm overcome by a sense of futility--incompetence. I ought
+never to have asked you to marry me, I expect. I'm a bit of a snob; I'm
+ambitious--"
+
+"Oh, our faults!" she cried. "What do they matter?" Then she demanded,
+"Am I in love--is this being in love--are we to marry each other?"
+
+Overcome by the charm of her voice and her presence, he exclaimed, "Oh,
+you're free, Rachel. To you, time will make no difference, or marriage
+or--"
+
+The voices of the others behind them kept floating, now farther, now
+nearer, and Mrs. Flushing's laugh rose clearly by itself.
+
+"Marriage?" Rachel repeated.
+
+The shouts were renewed behind, warning them that they were bearing too
+far to the left. Improving their course, he continued, "Yes, marriage."
+The feeling that they could not be united until she knew all about him
+made him again endeavour to explain.
+
+"All that's been bad in me, the things I've put up with--the second
+best--"
+
+She murmured, considered her own life, but could not describe how it
+looked to her now.
+
+"And the loneliness!" he continued. A vision of walking with her through
+the streets of London came before his eyes. "We will go for walks
+together," he said. The simplicity of the idea relieved them, and for
+the first time they laughed. They would have liked had they dared to
+take each other by the hand, but the consciousness of eyes fixed on them
+from behind had not yet deserted them.
+
+"Books, people, sights--Mrs. Nutt, Greeley, Hutchinson," Hewet murmured.
+
+With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them seem
+unreal to each other, since the previous afternoon melted a little
+further, and their contact became more and more natural. Up through the
+sultry southern landscape they saw the world they knew appear clearer
+and more vividly than it had ever appeared before. As upon that occasion
+at the hotel when she had sat in the window, the world once more
+arranged itself beneath her gaze very vividly and in its true
+proportions. She glanced curiously at Terence from time to time,
+observing his grey coat and his purple tie; observing the man with whom
+she was to spend the rest of her life.
+
+After one of these glances she murmured, "Yes, I'm in love. There's no
+doubt; I'm in love with you."
+
+Nevertheless, they remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so close
+together, as she spoke, that there seemed no division between them, and
+the next moment separate and far away again. Feeling this painfully, she
+exclaimed, "It will be a fight."
+
+But as she looked at him she perceived from the shape of his eyes, the
+lines about his mouth, and other peculiarities that he pleased her, and
+she added:
+
+"Where I want to fight, you have compassion. You're finer than I am;
+you're much finer."
+
+He returned her glance and smiled, perceiving, much as she had done, the
+very small individual things about her which made her delightful to
+him. She was his for ever. This barrier being surmounted, innumerable
+delights lay before them both.
+
+"I'm not finer," he answered. "I'm only older, lazier; a man, not a
+woman."
+
+"A man," she repeated, and a curious sense of possession coming over
+her, it struck her that she might now touch him; she put out her hand
+and lightly touched his cheek. His fingers followed where hers had been,
+and the touch of his hand upon his face brought back the overpowering
+sense of unreality. This body of his was unreal; the whole world was
+unreal.
+
+"What's happened?" he began. "Why did I ask you to marry me? How did it
+happen?"
+
+"Did you ask me to marry you?" she wondered. They faded far away from
+each other, and neither of them could remember what had been said.
+
+"We sat upon the ground," he recollected.
+
+"We sat upon the ground," she confirmed him. The recollection of sitting
+upon the ground, such as it was, seemed to unite them again, and they
+walked on in silence, their minds sometimes working with difficulty and
+sometimes ceasing to work, their eyes alone perceiving the things round
+them. Now he would attempt again to tell her his faults, and why he
+loved her; and she would describe what she had felt at this time or at
+that time, and together they would interpret her feeling. So beautiful
+was the sound of their voices that by degrees they scarcely listened
+to the words they framed. Long silences came between their words,
+which were no longer silences of struggle and confusion but refreshing
+silences, in which trivial thoughts moved easily. They began to speak
+naturally of ordinary things, of the flowers and the trees, how they
+grew there so red, like garden flowers at home, and there bent and
+crooked like the arm of a twisted old man.
+
+Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing in her
+veins, or the water of the stream running over stones, Rachel became
+conscious of a new feeling within her. She wondered for a moment what it
+was, and then said to herself, with a little surprise at recognising in
+her own person so famous a thing:
+
+"This is happiness, I suppose." And aloud to Terence she spoke, "This is
+happiness."
+
+On the heels of her words he answered, "This is happiness," upon which
+they guessed that the feeling had sprung in both of them the same time.
+They began therefore to describe how this felt and that felt, how like
+it was and yet how different; for they were very different.
+
+Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which
+they were now sunk. The repetition of Hewet's name in short, dissevered
+syllables was to them the crack of a dry branch or the laughter of a
+bird. The grasses and breezes sounding and murmuring all round them,
+they never noticed that the swishing of the grasses grew louder and
+louder, and did not cease with the lapse of the breeze. A hand dropped
+abrupt as iron on Rachel's shoulder; it might have been a bolt from
+heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass whipped across her eyes and
+filled her mouth and ears. Through the waving stems she saw a figure,
+large and shapeless against the sky. Helen was upon her. Rolled this
+way and that, now seeing only forests of green, and now the high blue
+heaven; she was speechless and almost without sense. At last she lay
+still, all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting.
+Over her loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman, of
+Terence and Helen.
+
+Both were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving; they came
+together and kissed in the air above her. Broken fragments of speech
+came down to her on the ground. She thought she heard them speak of love
+and then of marriage. Raising herself and sitting up, she too realised
+Helen's soft body, the strong and hospitable arms, and happiness
+swelling and breaking in one vast wave. When this fell away, and the
+grasses once more lay low, and the sky became horizontal, and the earth
+rolled out flat on each side, and the trees stood upright, she was the
+first to perceive a little row of human figures standing patiently in
+the distance. For the moment she could not remember who they were.
+
+"Who are they?" she asked, and then recollected.
+
+Falling into line behind Mr. Flushing, they were careful to leave at
+least three yards' distance between the toe of his boot and the rim of
+her skirt.
+
+He led them across a stretch of green by the river-bank and then through
+a grove of trees, and bade them remark the signs of human habitation,
+the blackened grass, the charred tree-stumps, and there, through the
+trees, strange wooden nests, drawn together in an arch where the trees
+drew apart, the village which was the goal of their journey.
+
+Stepping cautiously, they observed the women, who were squatting on the
+ground in triangular shapes, moving their hands, either plaiting straw
+or in kneading something in bowls. But when they had looked for a moment
+undiscovered, they were seen, and Mr. Flushing, advancing into the
+centre of the clearing, was engaged in talk with a lean majestic man,
+whose bones and hollows at once made the shapes of the Englishman's body
+appear ugly and unnatural. The women took no notice of the strangers,
+except that their hands paused for a moment and their long narrow eyes
+slid round and fixed upon them with the motionless inexpensive gaze of
+those removed from each other far far beyond the plunge of speech. Their
+hands moved again, but the stare continued. It followed them as they
+walked, as they peered into the huts where they could distinguish guns
+leaning in the corner, and bowls upon the floor, and stacks of rushes;
+in the dusk the solemn eyes of babies regarded them, and old women
+stared out too. As they sauntered about, the stare followed them,
+passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously not
+without hostility, like the crawl of a winter fly. As she drew apart her
+shawl and uncovered her breast to the lips of her baby, the eyes of a
+woman never left their faces, although they moved uneasily under her
+stare, and finally turned away, rather than stand there looking at her
+any longer. When sweetmeats were offered them, they put out great
+red hands to take them, and felt themselves treading cumbrously like
+tight-coated soldiers among these soft instinctive people. But soon the
+life of the village took no notice of them; they had become absorbed
+in it. The women's hands became busy again with the straw; their eyes
+dropped. If they moved, it was to fetch something from the hut, or to
+catch a straying child, or to cross the space with a jar balanced on
+their heads; if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh unintelligible
+cry. Voices rose when a child was beaten, and fell again; voices rose
+in song, which slid up a little way and down a little way, and settled
+again upon the same low and melancholy note. Seeking each other, Terence
+and Rachel drew together under a tree. Peaceful, and even beautiful at
+first, the sight of the women, who had given up looking at them, made
+them now feel very cold and melancholy.
+
+"Well," Terence sighed at length, "it makes us seem insignificant,
+doesn't it?"
+
+Rachel agreed. So it would go on for ever and ever, she said, those
+women sitting under the trees, the trees and the river. They turned away
+and began to walk through the trees, leaning, without fear of discovery,
+upon each other's arms. They had not gone far before they began to
+assure each other once more that they were in love, were happy, were
+content; but why was it so painful being in love, why was there so much
+pain in happiness?
+
+The sight of the village indeed affected them all curiously though all
+differently. St. John had left the others and was walking slowly down to
+the river, absorbed in his own thoughts, which were bitter and unhappy,
+for he felt himself alone; and Helen, standing by herself in the sunny
+space among the native women, was exposed to presentiments of disaster.
+The cries of the senseless beasts rang in her ears high and low in
+the air, as they ran from tree-trunk to tree-top. How small the little
+figures looked wandering through the trees! She became acutely conscious
+of the little limbs, the thin veins, the delicate flesh of men and
+women, which breaks so easily and lets the life escape compared with
+these great trees and deep waters. A falling branch, a foot that slips,
+and the earth has crushed them or the water drowned them. Thus thinking,
+she kept her eyes anxiously fixed upon the lovers, as if by doing so she
+could protect them from their fate. Turning, she found the Flushings by
+her side.
+
+They were talking about the things they had bought and arguing whether
+they were really old, and whether there were not signs here and there
+of European influence. Helen was appealed to. She was made to look at
+a brooch, and then at a pair of ear-rings. But all the time she blamed
+them for having come on this expedition, for having ventured too far and
+exposed themselves. Then she roused herself and tried to talk, but in a
+few moments she caught herself seeing a picture of a boat upset on the
+river in England, at midday. It was morbid, she knew, to imagine such
+things; nevertheless she sought out the figures of the others between
+the trees, and whenever she saw them she kept her eyes fixed on them, so
+that she might be able to protect them from disaster.
+
+But when the sun went down and the steamer turned and began to
+steam back towards civilisation, again her fears were calmed. In the
+semi-darkness the chairs on deck and the people sitting in them were
+angular shapes, the mouth being indicated by a tiny burning spot, and
+the arm by the same spot moving up or down as the cigar or cigarette
+was lifted to and from the lips. Words crossed the darkness, but, not
+knowing where they fell, seemed to lack energy and substance. Deep
+sights proceeded regularly, although with some attempt at suppression,
+from the large white mound which represented the person of Mrs.
+Flushing. The day had been long and very hot, and now that all the
+colours were blotted out the cool night air seemed to press soft fingers
+upon the eyelids, sealing them down. Some philosophical remark directed,
+apparently, at St. John Hirst missed its aim, and hung so long suspended
+in the air until it was engulfed by a yawn, that it was considered dead,
+and this gave the signal for stirring of legs and murmurs about sleep.
+The white mound moved, finally lengthened itself and disappeared, and
+after a few turns and paces St. John and Mr. Flushing withdrew, leaving
+the three chairs still occupied by three silent bodies. The light which
+came from a lamp high on the mast and a sky pale with stars left
+them with shapes but without features; but even in this darkness the
+withdrawal of the others made them feel each other very near, for they
+were all thinking of the same thing. For some time no one spoke, then
+Helen said with a sigh, "So you're both very happy?"
+
+As if washed by the air her voice sounded more spiritual and softer than
+usual. Voices at a little distance answered her, "Yes."
+
+Through the darkness she was looking at them both, and trying to
+distinguish him. What was there for her to say? Rachel had passed beyond
+her guardianship. A voice might reach her ears, but never again would
+it carry as far as it had carried twenty-four hours ago. Nevertheless,
+speech seemed to be due from her before she went to bed. She wished to
+speak, but she felt strangely old and depressed.
+
+"D'you realise what you're doing?" she demanded. "She's young, you're
+both young; and marriage--" Here she ceased. They begged her, however,
+to continue, with such earnestness in their voices, as if they only
+craved advice, that she was led to add:
+
+"Marriage! well, it's not easy."
+
+"That's what we want to know," they answered, and she guessed that now
+they were looking at each other.
+
+"It depends on both of you," she stated. Her face was turned towards
+Terence, and although he could hardly see her, he believed that her
+words really covered a genuine desire to know more about him. He raised
+himself from his semi-recumbent position and proceeded to tell her what
+she wanted to know. He spoke as lightly as he could in order to take
+away her depression.
+
+"I'm twenty-seven, and I've about seven hundred a year," he began. "My
+temper is good on the whole, and health excellent, though Hirst detects
+a gouty tendency. Well, then, I think I'm very intelligent." He paused
+as if for confirmation.
+
+Helen agreed.
+
+"Though, unfortunately, rather lazy. I intend to allow Rachel to be a
+fool if she wants to, and--Do you find me on the whole satisfactory in
+other respects?" he asked shyly.
+
+"Yes, I like what I know of you," Helen replied.
+
+"But then--one knows so little."
+
+"We shall live in London," he continued, "and--" With one voice they
+suddenly enquired whether she did not think them the happiest people
+that she had ever known.
+
+"Hush," she checked them, "Mrs. Flushing, remember. She's behind us."
+
+Then they fell silent, and Terence and Rachel felt instinctively that
+their happiness had made her sad, and, while they were anxious to go on
+talking about themselves, they did not like to.
+
+"We've talked too much about ourselves," Terence said. "Tell us--"
+
+"Yes, tell us--" Rachel echoed. They were both in the mood to believe
+that every one was capable of saying something very profound.
+
+"What can I tell you?" Helen reflected, speaking more to herself in a
+rambling style than as a prophetess delivering a message. She forced
+herself to speak.
+
+"After all, though I scold Rachel, I'm not much wiser myself. I'm
+older, of course, I'm half-way through, and you're just beginning. It's
+puzzling--sometimes, I think, disappointing; the great things aren't as
+great, perhaps, as one expects--but it's interesting--Oh, yes, you're
+certain to find it interesting--And so it goes on," they became
+conscious here of the procession of dark trees into which, as far as
+they could see, Helen was now looking, "and there are pleasures where
+one doesn't expect them (you must write to your father), and you'll be
+very happy, I've no doubt. But I must go to bed, and if you are sensible
+you will follow in ten minutes, and so," she rose and stood before them,
+almost featureless and very large, "Good-night." She passed behind the
+curtain.
+
+After sitting in silence for the greater part of the ten minutes she
+allowed them, they rose and hung over the rail. Beneath them the
+smooth black water slipped away very fast and silently. The spark of a
+cigarette vanished behind them. "A beautiful voice," Terence murmured.
+
+Rachel assented. Helen had a beautiful voice.
+
+After a silence she asked, looking up into the sky, "Are we on the deck
+of a steamer on a river in South America? Am I Rachel, are you Terence?"
+
+The great black world lay round them. As they were drawn smoothly along
+it seemed possessed of immense thickness and endurance. They could
+discern pointed tree-tops and blunt rounded tree-tops. Raising their
+eyes above the trees, they fixed them on the stars and the pale border
+of sky above the trees. The little points of frosty light infinitely far
+away drew their eyes and held them fixed, so that it seemed as if
+they stayed a long time and fell a great distance when once more
+they realised their hands grasping the rail and their separate bodies
+standing side by side.
+
+"You'd forgotten completely about me," Terence reproached her, taking
+her arm and beginning to pace the deck, "and I never forget you."
+
+"Oh, no," she whispered, she had not forgotten, only the stars--the
+night--the dark--
+
+"You're like a bird half asleep in its nest, Rachel. You're asleep.
+You're talking in your sleep."
+
+Half asleep, and murmuring broken words, they stood in the angle made by
+the bow of the boat. It slipped on down the river. Now a bell struck on
+the bridge, and they heard the lapping of water as it rippled away on
+either side, and once a bird startled in its sleep creaked, flew on to
+the next tree, and was silent again. The darkness poured down profusely,
+and left them with scarcely any feeling of life, except that they were
+standing there together in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII
+
+
+The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely over
+the earth and parted them from the strange day in the forest when they
+had been forced to tell each other what they wanted, this wish of theirs
+was revealed to other people, and in the process became slightly strange
+to themselves. Apparently it was not anything unusual that had happened;
+it was that they had become engaged to marry each other. The world,
+which consisted for the most part of the hotel and the villa, expressed
+itself glad on the whole that two people should marry, and allowed them
+to see that they were not expected to take part in the work which has to
+be done in order that the world shall go on, but might absent themselves
+for a time. They were accordingly left alone until they felt the silence
+as if, playing in a vast church, the door had been shut on them. They
+were driven to walk alone, and sit alone, to visit secret places where
+the flowers had never been picked and the trees were solitary. In
+solitude they could express those beautiful but too vast desires which
+were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other men and women--desires
+for a world, such as their own world which contained two people seemed
+to them to be, where people knew each other intimately and thus judged
+each other by what was good, and never quarrelled, because that was
+waste of time.
+
+They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun,
+or sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer
+embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express itself;
+they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a twisting
+river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned; the
+unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many
+ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly
+solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was
+not effort but delight.
+
+While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged, as far
+as the occasional writing of a word in pencil testified, in shaping
+the world as it appeared to him now that he and Rachel were going to be
+married. It was different certainly. The book called _Silence_ would not
+now be the same book that it would have been. He would then put down his
+pencil and stare in front of him, and wonder in what respects the world
+was different--it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence, more
+importance, greater depth. Why, even the earth sometimes seemed to him
+very deep; not carved into hills and cities and fields, but heaped in
+great masses. He would look out of the window for ten minutes at a time;
+but no, he did not care for the earth swept of human beings. He liked
+human beings--he liked them, he suspected, better than Rachel did. There
+she was, swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful of
+him,--but he liked that quality in her. He liked the impersonality which
+it produced in her. At last, having written down a series of little
+sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them, he observed
+aloud, "'Women--'under the heading Women I've written:
+
+"'Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base of
+most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on fact?
+Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because they
+don't think.' What do you say, Rachel?" He paused with his pencil in his
+hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.
+
+Rachel said nothing. Up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven
+sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined staircase,
+energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her feet with
+effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run to begin at
+the very bottom again.
+
+"'Again, it's the fashion now to say that women are more practical and
+less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable organising
+ability but no sense of honour'--query, what is meant by masculine term,
+honour?--what corresponds to it in your sex? Eh?"
+
+Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected this
+opportunity of revealing the secrets of her sex. She had, indeed,
+advanced so far in the pursuit of wisdom that she allowed these secrets
+to rest undisturbed; it seemed to be reserved for a later generation to
+discuss them philosophically.
+
+Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she exclaimed at last,
+swinging round upon him:
+
+"No, Terence, it's no good; here am I, the best musician in South
+America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can't play a note
+because of you in the room interrupting me every other second."
+
+"You don't seem to realise that that's what I've been aiming at for
+the last half-hour," he remarked. "I've no objection to nice simple
+tunes--indeed, I find them very helpful to my literary composition, but
+that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on
+its hind legs in the rain."
+
+He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which were
+scattered on the table, conveying the congratulations of their friends.
+
+"'--all possible wishes for all possible happiness,'" he read; "correct,
+but not very vivid, are they?"
+
+"They're sheer nonsense!" Rachel exclaimed. "Think of words compared
+with sounds!" she continued. "Think of novels and plays and histories--"
+Perched on the edge of the table, she stirred the red and yellow volumes
+contemptuously. She seemed to herself to be in a position where she
+could despise all human learning. Terence looked at them too.
+
+"God, Rachel, you do read trash!" he exclaimed. "And you're behind
+the times too, my dear. No one dreams of reading this kind of thing
+now--antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions of life in the
+east end--oh, no, we've exploded all that. Read poetry, Rachel, poetry,
+poetry, poetry!"
+
+Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his intention being
+to satirise the short sharp bark of the writer's English; but she paid
+no attention, and after an interval of meditation exclaimed:
+
+"Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely
+of vast blocks of matter, and that we're nothing but patches of light--"
+she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the
+wall--"like that?"
+
+"No," said Terence, "I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my chair
+might be rooted in the bowels of the earth. But at Cambridge, I can
+remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states
+of semi-coma about five o'clock in the morning. Hirst does now, I
+expect--oh, no, Hirst wouldn't."
+
+Rachel continued, "The day your note came, asking us to go on the
+picnic, I was sitting where you're sitting now, thinking that; I wonder
+if I could think that again? I wonder if the world's changed? and if so,
+when it'll stop changing, and which is the real world?"
+
+"When I first saw you," he began, "I thought you were like a creature
+who'd lived all its life among pearls and old bones. Your hands were
+wet, d'you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit of
+bread, and then you said, 'Human Beings!'"
+
+"And I thought you--a prig," she recollected. "No; that's not quite it.
+There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St. John
+were like those ants--very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all your
+virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you--"
+
+"You fell in love with me," he corrected her. "You were in love with me
+all the time, only you didn't know it."
+
+"No, I never fell in love with you," she asserted.
+
+"Rachel--what a lie--didn't you sit here looking at my window--didn't
+you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun--?"
+
+"No," she repeated, "I never fell in love, if falling in love is what
+people say it is, and it's the world that tells the lies and I tell the
+truth. Oh, what lies--what lies!"
+
+She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr.
+Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It
+was strange, considering how very different these people were, that they
+used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her upon
+her engagement.
+
+That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever
+feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they
+were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service
+had done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they
+didn't feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? The simplicity and
+arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single
+spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence; being engaged had
+not that effect on him; the world was different, but not in that way;
+he still wanted the things he had always wanted, and in particular he
+wanted the companionship of other people more than ever perhaps. He took
+the letters out of her hand, and protested:
+
+"Of course they're absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just
+because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss Allan
+is; you can't deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she's got too many
+children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the bad
+instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees--hasn't she a
+kind of beauty--of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn't
+she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river
+going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph's been made governor of the
+Carroway Islands--the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn't
+it?"
+
+But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of
+the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with her
+own destiny.
+
+"I won't have eleven children," she asserted; "I won't have the eyes of
+an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were
+a horse."
+
+"We must have a son and we must have a daughter," said Terence, putting
+down the letters, "because, let alone the inestimable advantage of being
+our children, they'd be so well brought up." They went on to sketch an
+outline of the ideal education--how their daughter should be required
+from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted blue, to
+suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too practical;
+and their son--he should be taught to laugh at great men, that is, at
+distinguished successful men, at men who wore ribands and rose to the
+tops of their trees. He should in no way resemble (Rachel added) St.
+John Hirst.
+
+At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst.
+Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them;
+he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. Where
+should we all be without him and his like? Choked in weeds; Christians,
+bigots,--why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs
+to men when they felt drowsy.
+
+"But you'll never see it!" he exclaimed; "because with all your virtues
+you don't, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being
+for the pursuit of truth! You've no respect for facts, Rachel; you're
+essentially feminine." She did not trouble to deny it, nor did she think
+good to produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits which
+Terence admired. St. John Hirst said that she was in love with him; she
+would never forgive that; but the argument was not one to appeal to a
+man.
+
+"But I like him," she said, and she thought to herself that she also
+pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the
+warm mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we ourselves
+move about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St. John Hirst.
+
+She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would not kiss
+him supposing he wished it, which was not likely.
+
+As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then
+bestowed upon him, Terence protested:
+
+"And compared with Hirst I'm a perfect Zany."
+
+The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.
+
+"We're wasting the morning--I ought to be writing my book, and you ought
+to be answering these."
+
+"We've only got twenty-one whole mornings left," said Rachel. "And my
+father'll be here in a day or two."
+
+However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write
+laboriously,
+
+"My dear Evelyn--"
+
+Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had written, a
+process which he found essential to the composition of his own. For a
+considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking of the clock
+and the fitful scratch of Rachel's pen, as she produced phrases which
+bore a considerable likeness to those which she had condemned. She was
+struck by it herself, for she stopped writing and looked up; looked
+at Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked at the different pieces of
+furniture, at her bed in the corner, at the window-pane which showed the
+branches of a tree filled in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and was
+amazed at the gulf which lay between all that and her sheet of paper.
+Would there ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible? Even
+with Terence himself--how far apart they could be, how little she knew
+what was passing in his brain now! She then finished her sentence, which
+was awkward and ugly, and stated that they were "both very happy, and
+going to be married in the autumn probably and hope to live in London,
+where we hope you will come and see us when we get back." Choosing
+"affectionately," after some further speculation, rather than sincerely,
+she signed the letter and was doggedly beginning on another when Terence
+remarked, quoting from his book:
+
+"Listen to this, Rachel. 'It is probable that Hugh' (he's the hero, a
+literary man), 'had not realised at the time of his marriage, any more
+than the young man of parts and imagination usually does realise, the
+nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the male
+from the needs and desires of the female. . . . At first they had been
+very happy. The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly
+companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them. Betty had
+proved herself the ideal comrade. . . . They had shouted _Love_ _in_
+_the_ _Valley_ to each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn'
+(and so on, and so on--I'll skip the descriptions). . . . 'But in
+London, after the boy's birth, all was changed. Betty was an admirable
+mother; but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as
+that function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes,
+did not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and strong, with
+healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise.
+. . .' (In short she began to give tea-parties.) . . . 'Coming in late
+from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined
+room, where the two men had each unloosened his soul to the other, with
+the sound of the traffic humming in his ears, and the foggy London sky
+slung tragically across his mind . . . he found women's hats dotted
+about among his papers. Women's wraps and absurd little feminine shoes
+and umbrellas were in the hall. . . . Then the bills began to come in.
+. . . He tried to speak frankly to her. He found her lying on the great
+polar-bear skin in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining
+with the Greens in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the
+diamonds wink and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve of
+her breast--a vision of adorable femininity. He forgave her all.' (Well,
+this goes from bad to worse, and finally about fifty pages later, Hugh
+takes a week-end ticket to Swanage and 'has it out with himself on the
+downs above Corfe.' . . . Here there's fifteen pages or so which we'll
+skip. The conclusion is . . .) 'They were different. Perhaps, in the far
+future, when generations of men had struggled and failed as he must now
+struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed, what she now made a pretence
+of being--the friend and companion--not the enemy and parasite of man.'
+
+"The end of it is, you see, Hugh went back to his wife, poor fellow. It
+was his duty, as a married man. Lord, Rachel," he concluded, "will it be
+like that when we're married?"
+
+Instead of answering him she asked,
+
+"Why don't people write about the things they do feel?"
+
+"Ah, that's the difficulty!" he sighed, tossing the book away.
+
+"Well, then, what will it be like when we're married? What are the
+things people do feel?"
+
+She seemed doubtful.
+
+"Sit on the floor and let me look at you," he commanded. Resting her
+chin on his knee, she looked straight at him.
+
+He examined her curiously.
+
+"You're not beautiful," he began, "but I like your face. I like the
+way your hair grows down in a point, and your eyes too--they never see
+anything. Your mouth's too big, and your cheeks would be better if they
+had more colour in them. But what I like about your face is that it
+makes one wonder what the devil you're thinking about--it makes me want
+to do that--" He clenched his fist and shook it so near her that she
+started back, "because now you look as if you'd blow my brains out.
+There are moments," he continued, "when, if we stood on a rock together,
+you'd throw me into the sea."
+
+Hypnotised by the force of his eyes in hers, she repeated, "If we stood
+on a rock together--"
+
+To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven
+about the roots of the world--the idea was incoherently delightful. She
+sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting aside
+the chairs and tables as if she were indeed striking through the waters.
+He watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a passage for
+herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles which would hinder
+their passage through life.
+
+"It does seem possible!" he exclaimed, "though I've always thought it
+the most unlikely thing in the world--I shall be in love with you all my
+life, and our marriage will be the most exciting thing that's ever been
+done! We'll never have a moment's peace--" He caught her in his arms as
+she passed him, and they fought for mastery, imagining a rock, and the
+sea heaving beneath them. At last she was thrown to the floor, where she
+lay gasping, and crying for mercy.
+
+"I'm a mermaid! I can swim," she cried, "so the game's up." Her dress
+was torn across, and peace being established, she fetched a needle and
+thread and began to mend the tear.
+
+"And now," she said, "be quiet and tell me about the world; tell me
+about everything that's ever happened, and I'll tell you--let me see,
+what can I tell you?--I'll tell you about Miss Montgomerie and the river
+party. She was left, you see, with one foot in the boat, and the other
+on shore."
+
+They had spent much time already in thus filling out for the other the
+course of their past lives, and the characters of their friends and
+relations, so that very soon Terence knew not only what Rachel's
+aunts might be expected to say upon every occasion, but also how their
+bedrooms were furnished, and what kind of bonnets they wore. He could
+sustain a conversation between Mrs. Hunt and Rachel, and carry on a
+tea-party including the Rev. William Johnson and Miss Macquoid, the
+Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth. But he had
+known many more people, and was far more highly skilled in the art of
+narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were, for the most part,
+of a curiously childlike and humorous kind, so that it generally fell to
+her lot to listen and ask questions.
+
+He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and
+felt, and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other
+men and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she
+became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people,
+where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them. According
+to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made life reasonable,
+or if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest anyhow, for
+sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they
+did. Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as she believed.
+She should look for vanity--for vanity was a common quality--first in
+herself, and then in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they all had their
+share of it--and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve she
+met; and once linked together by one such tie she would find them not
+separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable, and she
+would come to love them when she found that they were like herself.
+
+If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings were as
+various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes and manes, and
+horns and humps; and so, wrestling over the entire list of their
+acquaintances, and diverging into anecdote and theory and speculation,
+they came to know each other. The hours passed quickly, and seemed to
+them full to leaking-point. After a night's solitude they were always
+ready to begin again.
+
+The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist in free talk
+between men and women did in truth exist for both of them, although not
+quite in the measure she prescribed. Far more than upon the nature of
+sex they dwelt upon the nature of poetry, but it was true that talk
+which had no boundaries deepened and enlarged the strangely small bright
+view of a girl. In return for what he could tell her she brought him
+such curiosity and sensitiveness of perception, that he was led to doubt
+whether any gift bestowed by much reading and living was quite the equal
+of that for pleasure and pain. What would experience give her after all,
+except a kind of ridiculous formal balance, like that of a drilled dog
+in the street? He looked at her face and wondered how it would look
+in twenty years' time, when the eyes had dulled, and the forehead wore
+those little persistent wrinkles which seem to show that the middle-aged
+are facing something hard which the young do not see? What would the
+hard thing be for them, he wondered? Then his thoughts turned to their
+life in England.
+
+The thought of England was delightful, for together they would see the
+old things freshly; it would be England in June, and there would be June
+nights in the country; and the nightingales singing in the lanes,
+into which they could steal when the room grew hot; and there would be
+English meadows gleaming with water and set with stolid cows, and clouds
+dipping low and trailing across the green hills. As he sat in the room
+with her, he wished very often to be back again in the thick of life,
+doing things with Rachel.
+
+He crossed to the window and exclaimed, "Lord, how good it is to think
+of lanes, muddy lanes, with brambles and nettles, you know, and real
+grass fields, and farmyards with pigs and cows, and men walking beside
+carts with pitchforks--there's nothing to compare with that here--look
+at the stony red earth, and the bright blue sea, and the glaring white
+houses--how tired one gets of it! And the air, without a stain or a
+wrinkle. I'd give anything for a sea mist."
+
+Rachel, too, had been thinking of the English country: the flat land
+rolling away to the sea, and the woods and the long straight roads,
+where one can walk for miles without seeing any one, and the great
+church towers and the curious houses clustered in the valleys, and the
+birds, and the dusk, and the rain falling against the windows.
+
+"But London, London's the place," Terence continued. They looked
+together at the carpet, as though London itself were to be seen there
+lying on the floor, with all its spires and pinnacles pricking through
+the smoke.
+
+"On the whole, what I should like best at this moment," Terence
+pondered, "would be to find myself walking down Kingsway, by those big
+placards, you know, and turning into the Strand. Perhaps I might go and
+look over Waterloo Bridge for a moment. Then I'd go along the Strand
+past the shops with all the new books in them, and through the little
+archway into the Temple. I always like the quiet after the uproar. You
+hear your own footsteps suddenly quite loud. The Temple's very pleasant.
+I think I should go and see if I could find dear old Hodgkin--the man
+who writes books about Van Eyck, you know. When I left England he was
+very sad about his tame magpie. He suspected that a man had poisoned it.
+And then Russell lives on the next staircase. I think you'd like him.
+He's a passion for Handel. Well, Rachel," he concluded, dismissing the
+vision of London, "we shall be doing that together in six weeks' time,
+and it'll be the middle of June then--and June in London--my God! how
+pleasant it all is!"
+
+"And we're certain to have it too," she said. "It isn't as if we were
+expecting a great deal--only to walk about and look at things."
+
+"Only a thousand a year and perfect freedom," he replied. "How many
+people in London d'you think have that?"
+
+"And now you've spoilt it," she complained. "Now we've got to think of
+the horrors." She looked grudgingly at the novel which had once caused
+her perhaps an hour's discomfort, so that she had never opened it
+again, but kept it on her table, and looked at it occasionally, as some
+medieval monk kept a skull, or a crucifix to remind him of the frailty
+of the body.
+
+"Is it true, Terence," she demanded, "that women die with bugs crawling
+across their faces?"
+
+"I think it's very probable," he said. "But you must admit, Rachel, that
+we so seldom think of anything but ourselves that an occasional twinge
+is really rather pleasant."
+
+Accusing him of an affection of cynicism which was just as bad as
+sentimentality itself, she left her position by his side and knelt upon
+the window sill, twisting the curtain tassels between her fingers. A
+vague sense of dissatisfaction filled her.
+
+"What's so detestable in this country," she exclaimed, "is the
+blue--always blue sky and blue sea. It's like a curtain--all the things
+one wants are on the other side of that. I want to know what's going on
+behind it. I hate these divisions, don't you, Terence? One person all
+in the dark about another person. Now I liked the Dalloways," she
+continued, "and they're gone. I shall never see them again. Just by
+going on a ship we cut ourselves off entirely from the rest of
+the world. I want to see England there--London there--all sorts of
+people--why shouldn't one? why should one be shut up all by oneself in a
+room?"
+
+While she spoke thus half to herself and with increasing vagueness,
+because her eye was caught by a ship that had just come into the bay,
+she did not see that Terence had ceased to stare contentedly in front of
+him, and was looking at her keenly and with dissatisfaction. She seemed
+to be able to cut herself adrift from him, and to pass away to unknown
+places where she had no need of him. The thought roused his jealousy.
+
+"I sometimes think you're not in love with me and never will be," he
+said energetically. She started and turned round at his words.
+
+"I don't satisfy you in the way you satisfy me," he continued. "There's
+something I can't get hold of in you. You don't want me as I want
+you--you're always wanting something else."
+
+He began pacing up and down the room.
+
+"Perhaps I ask too much," he went on. "Perhaps it isn't really possible
+to have what I want. Men and women are too different. You can't
+understand--you don't understand--"
+
+He came up to where she stood looking at him in silence.
+
+It seemed to her now that what he was saying was perfectly true, and
+that she wanted many more things than the love of one human being--the
+sea, the sky. She turned again the looked at the distant blue, which was
+so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could not possibly
+want only one human being.
+
+"Or is it only this damnable engagement?" he continued. "Let's be
+married here, before we go back--or is it too great a risk? Are we sure
+we want to marry each other?"
+
+They began pacing up and down the room, but although they came very near
+each other in their pacing, they took care not to touch each other. The
+hopelessness of their position overcame them both. They were impotent;
+they could never love each other sufficiently to overcome all these
+barriers, and they could never be satisfied with less. Realising this
+with intolerable keenness she stopped in front of him and exclaimed:
+
+"Let's break it off, then."
+
+The words did more to unite them than any amount of argument. As if they
+stood on the edge of a precipice they clung together. They knew that
+they could not separate; painful and terrible it might be, but they
+were joined for ever. They lapsed into silence, and after a time crept
+together in silence. Merely to be so close soothed them, and sitting
+side by side the divisions disappeared, and it seemed as if the world
+were once more solid and entire, and as if, in some strange way, they
+had grown larger and stronger.
+
+It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great
+reluctance. They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and
+with a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling
+nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. But it chilled
+them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and
+indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the
+glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII
+
+
+But no brush was able to efface completely the expression of happiness,
+so that Mrs. Ambrose could not treat them when they came downstairs
+as if they had spent the morning in a way that could be discussed
+naturally. This being so, she joined in the world's conspiracy to
+consider them for the time incapacitated from the business of life,
+struck by their intensity of feeling into enmity against life, and
+almost succeeded in dismissing them from her thoughts.
+
+She reflected that she had done all that it was necessary to do in
+practical matters. She had written a great many letters, and had
+obtained Willoughby's consent. She had dwelt so often upon Mr. Hewet's
+prospects, his profession, his birth, appearance, and temperament, that
+she had almost forgotten what he was really like. When she refreshed
+herself by a look at him, she used to wonder again what he was like, and
+then, concluding that they were happy at any rate, thought no more about
+it.
+
+She might more profitably consider what would happen in three years'
+time, or what might have happened if Rachel had been left to explore the
+world under her father's guidance. The result, she was honest enough
+to own, might have been better--who knows? She did not disguise from
+herself that Terence had faults. She was inclined to think him too easy
+and tolerant, just as he was inclined to think her perhaps a trifle
+hard--no, it was rather that she was uncompromising. In some ways she
+found St. John preferable; but then, of course, he would never have
+suited Rachel. Her friendship with St. John was established, for
+although she fluctuated between irritation and interest in a way that
+did credit to the candour of her disposition, she liked his company on
+the whole. He took her outside this little world of love and emotion.
+He had a grasp of facts. Supposing, for instance, that England made a
+sudden move towards some unknown port on the coast of Morocco, St.
+John knew what was at the back of it, and to hear him engaged with her
+husband in argument about finance and the balance of power, gave her
+an odd sense of stability. She respected their arguments without always
+listening to them, much as she respected a solid brick wall, or one
+of those immense municipal buildings which, although they compose the
+greater part of our cities, have been built day after day and year after
+year by unknown hands. She liked to sit and listen, and even felt a
+little elated when the engaged couple, after showing their profound lack
+of interest, slipped from the room, and were seen pulling flowers to
+pieces in the garden. It was not that she was jealous of them, but she
+did undoubtedly envy them their great unknown future that lay before
+them. Slipping from one such thought to another, she was at the
+dining-room with fruit in her hands. Sometimes she stopped to straighten
+a candle stooping with the heat, or disturbed some too rigid arrangement
+of the chairs. She had reason to suspect that Chailey had been balancing
+herself on the top of a ladder with a wet duster during their absence,
+and the room had never been quite like itself since. Returning from the
+dining-room for the third time, she perceived that one of the arm-chairs
+was now occupied by St. John. He lay back in it, with his eyes half
+shut, looking, as he always did, curiously buttoned up in a neat grey
+suit and fenced against the exuberance of a foreign climate which might
+at any moment proceed to take liberties with him. Her eyes rested on
+him gently and then passed on over his head. Finally she took the chair
+opposite.
+
+"I didn't want to come here," he said at last, "but I was positively
+driven to it. . . . Evelyn M.," he groaned.
+
+He sat up, and began to explain with mock solemnity how the detestable
+woman was set upon marrying him.
+
+"She pursues me about the place. This morning she appeared in the
+smoking-room. All I could do was to seize my hat and fly. I didn't want
+to come, but I couldn't stay and face another meal with her."
+
+"Well, we must make the best of it," Helen replied philosophically. It
+was very hot, and they were indifferent to any amount of silence, so
+that they lay back in their chairs waiting for something to happen. The
+bell rang for luncheon, but there was no sound of movement in the house.
+Was there any news? Helen asked; anything in the papers? St. John shook
+his head. O yes, he had a letter from home, a letter from his mother,
+describing the suicide of the parlour-maid. She was called Susan Jane,
+and she came into the kitchen one afternoon, and said that she wanted
+cook to keep her money for her; she had twenty pounds in gold. Then she
+went out to buy herself a hat. She came in at half-past five and said
+that she had taken poison. They had only just time to get her into bed
+and call a doctor before she died.
+
+"Well?" Helen enquired.
+
+"There'll have to be an inquest," said St. John.
+
+Why had she done it? He shrugged his shoulders. Why do people kill
+themselves? Why do the lower orders do any of the things they do do?
+Nobody knows. They sat in silence.
+
+"The bell's run fifteen minutes and they're not down," said Helen at
+length.
+
+When they appeared, St. John explained why it had been necessary for
+him to come to luncheon. He imitated Evelyn's enthusiastic tone as she
+confronted him in the smoking-room. "She thinks there can be nothing
+_quite_ so thrilling as mathematics, so I've lent her a large work in
+two volumes. It'll be interesting to see what she makes of it."
+
+Rachel could now afford to laugh at him. She reminded him of Gibbon;
+she had the first volume somewhere still; if he were undertaking the
+education of Evelyn, that surely was the test; or she had heard that
+Burke, upon the American Rebellion--Evelyn ought to read them both
+simultaneously. When St. John had disposed of her argument and had
+satisfied his hunger, he proceeded to tell them that the hotel was
+seething with scandals, some of the most appalling kind, which had
+happened in their absence; he was indeed much given to the study of his
+kind.
+
+"Evelyn M., for example--but that was told me in confidence."
+
+"Nonsense!" Terence interposed.
+
+"You've heard about poor Sinclair, too?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I've heard about Sinclair. He's retired to his mine with a
+revolver. He writes to Evelyn daily that he's thinking of committing
+suicide. I've assured her that he's never been so happy in his life,
+and, on the whole, she's inclined to agree with me."
+
+"But then she's entangled herself with Perrott," St. John continued;
+"and I have reason to think, from something I saw in the passage, that
+everything isn't as it should be between Arthur and Susan. There's a
+young female lately arrived from Manchester. A very good thing if it
+were broken off, in my opinion. Their married life is something too
+horrible to contemplate. Oh, and I distinctly heard old Mrs. Paley
+rapping out the most fearful oaths as I passed her bedroom door. It's
+supposed that she tortures her maid in private--it's practically certain
+she does. One can tell it from the look in her eyes."
+
+"When you're eighty and the gout tweezes you, you'll be swearing like
+a trooper," Terence remarked. "You'll be very fat, very testy, very
+disagreeable. Can't you imagine him--bald as a coot, with a pair of
+sponge-bag trousers, a little spotted tie, and a corporation?"
+
+After a pause Hirst remarked that the worst infamy had still to be told.
+He addressed himself to Helen.
+
+"They've hoofed out the prostitute. One night while we were away that
+old numskull Thornbury was doddering about the passages very late.
+(Nobody seems to have asked him what _he_ was up to.) He saw the Signora
+Lola Mendoza, as she calls herself, cross the passage in her nightgown.
+He communicated his suspicions next morning to Elliot, with the result
+that Rodriguez went to the woman and gave her twenty-four hours in which
+to clear out of the place. No one seems to have enquired into the truth
+of the story, or to have asked Thornbury and Elliot what business it was
+of theirs; they had it entirely their own way. I propose that we should
+all sign a Round Robin, go to Rodriguez in a body, and insist upon a
+full enquiry. Something's got to be done, don't you agree?"
+
+Hewet remarked that there could be no doubt as to the lady's profession.
+
+"Still," he added, "it's a great shame, poor woman; only I don't see
+what's to be done--"
+
+"I quite agree with you, St. John," Helen burst out. "It's monstrous.
+The hypocritical smugness of the English makes my blood boil. A man
+who's made a fortune in trade as Mr. Thornbury has is bound to be twice
+as bad as any prostitute."
+
+She respected St. John's morality, which she took far more seriously
+than any one else did, and now entered into a discussion with him as to
+the steps that were to be taken to enforce their peculiar view of what
+was right. The argument led to some profoundly gloomy statements of a
+general nature. Who were they, after all--what authority had they--what
+power against the mass of superstition and ignorance? It was the
+English, of course; there must be something wrong in the English blood.
+Directly you met an English person, of the middle classes, you were
+conscious of an indefinable sensation of loathing; directly you saw the
+brown crescent of houses above Dover, the same thing came over you. But
+unfortunately St. John added, you couldn't trust these foreigners--
+
+They were interrupted by sounds of strife at the further end of the
+table. Rachel appealed to her aunt.
+
+"Terence says we must go to tea with Mrs. Thornbury because she's been
+so kind, but I don't see it; in fact, I'd rather have my right hand sawn
+in pieces--just imagine! the eyes of all those women!"
+
+"Fiddlesticks, Rachel," Terence replied. "Who wants to look at you?
+You're consumed with vanity! You're a monster of conceit! Surely, Helen,
+you ought to have taught her by this time that she's a person of no
+conceivable importance whatever--not beautiful, or well dressed, or
+conspicuous for elegance or intellect, or deportment. A more ordinary
+sight than you are," he concluded, "except for the tear across your
+dress has never been seen. However, stay at home if you want to. I'm
+going."
+
+She appealed again to her aunt. It wasn't the being looked at, she
+explained, but the things people were sure to say. The women in
+particular. She liked women, but where emotion was concerned they were
+as flies on a lump of sugar. They would be certain to ask her questions.
+Evelyn M. would say: "Are you in love? Is it nice being in love?"
+And Mrs. Thornbury--her eyes would go up and down, up and down--she
+shuddered at the thought of it. Indeed, the retirement of their life
+since their engagement had made her so sensitive, that she was not
+exaggerating her case.
+
+She found an ally in Helen, who proceeded to expound her views of the
+human race, as she regarded with complacency the pyramid of variegated
+fruits in the centre of the table. It wasn't that they were cruel, or
+meant to hurt, or even stupid exactly; but she had always found that the
+ordinary person had so little emotion in his own life that the scent of
+it in the lives of others was like the scent of blood in the nostrils of
+a bloodhound. Warming to the theme, she continued:
+
+"Directly anything happens--it may be a marriage, or a birth, or a
+death--on the whole they prefer it to be a death--every one wants to see
+you. They insist upon seeing you. They've got nothing to say; they
+don't care a rap for you; but you've got to go to lunch or to tea or to
+dinner, and if you don't you're damned. It's the smell of blood," she
+continued; "I don't blame 'em; only they shan't have mind if I know it!"
+
+She looked about her as if she had called up a legion of human beings,
+all hostile and all disagreeable, who encircled the table, with mouths
+gaping for blood, and made it appear a little island of neutral country
+in the midst of the enemy's country.
+
+Her words roused her husband, who had been muttering rhythmically to
+himself, surveying his guests and his food and his wife with eyes that
+were now melancholy and now fierce, according to the fortunes of the
+lady in his ballad. He cut Helen short with a protest. He hated even
+the semblance of cynicism in women. "Nonsense, nonsense," he remarked
+abruptly.
+
+Terence and Rachel glanced at each other across the table, which
+meant that when they were married they would not behave like that. The
+entrance of Ridley into the conversation had a strange effect. It became
+at once more formal and more polite. It would have been impossible to
+talk quite easily of anything that came into their heads, and to say the
+word prostitute as simply as any other word. The talk now turned upon
+literature and politics, and Ridley told stories of the distinguished
+people he had known in his youth. Such talk was of the nature of an art,
+and the personalities and informalities of the young were silenced. As
+they rose to go, Helen stopped for a moment, leaning her elbows on the
+table.
+
+"You've all been sitting here," she said, "for almost an hour, and
+you haven't noticed my figs, or my flowers, or the way the light comes
+through, or anything. I haven't been listening, because I've been
+looking at you. You looked very beautiful; I wish you'd go on sitting
+for ever."
+
+She led the way to the drawing-room, where she took up her embroidery,
+and began again to dissuade Terence from walking down to the hotel in
+this heat. But the more she dissuaded, the more he was determined to go.
+He became irritated and obstinate. There were moments when they almost
+disliked each other. He wanted other people; he wanted Rachel, to see
+them with him. He suspected that Mrs. Ambrose would now try to dissuade
+her from going. He was annoyed by all this space and shade and beauty,
+and Hirst, recumbent, drooping a magazine from his wrist.
+
+"I'm going," he repeated. "Rachel needn't come unless she wants to."
+
+"If you go, Hewet, I wish you'd make enquiries about the prostitute,"
+said Hirst. "Look here," he added, "I'll walk half the way with you."
+
+Greatly to their surprise he raised himself, looked at his watch, and
+remarked that, as it was now half an hour since luncheon, the gastric
+juices had had sufficient time to secrete; he was trying a system, he
+explained, which involved short spells of exercise interspaced by longer
+intervals of rest.
+
+"I shall be back at four," he remarked to Helen, "when I shall lie down
+on the sofa and relax all my muscles completely."
+
+"So you're going, Rachel?" Helen asked. "You won't stay with me?"
+
+She smiled, but she might have been sad.
+
+Was she sad, or was she really laughing? Rachel could not tell, and she
+felt for the moment very uncomfortable between Helen and Terence.
+Then she turned away, saying merely that she would go with Terence, on
+condition that he did all the talking.
+
+A narrow border of shadow ran along the road, which was broad enough for
+two, but not broad enough for three. St. John therefore dropped a little
+behind the pair, and the distance between them increased by degrees.
+Walking with a view to digestion, and with one eye upon his watch, he
+looked from time to time at the pair in front of him. They seemed to be
+so happy, so intimate, although they were walking side by side much as
+other people walk. They turned slightly toward each other now and then,
+and said something which he thought must be something very private. They
+were really disputing about Helen's character, and Terence was trying to
+explain why it was that she annoyed him so much sometimes. But St. John
+thought that they were saying things which they did not want him to
+hear, and was led to think of his own isolation. These people were
+happy, and in some ways he despised them for being made happy so simply,
+and in other ways he envied them. He was much more remarkable than they
+were, but he was not happy. People never liked him; he doubted sometimes
+whether even Helen liked him. To be simple, to be able to say simply
+what one felt, without the terrific self-consciousness which possessed
+him, and showed him his own face and words perpetually in a mirror, that
+would be worth almost any other gift, for it made one happy. Happiness,
+happiness, what was happiness? He was never happy. He saw too clearly
+the little vices and deceits and flaws of life, and, seeing them, it
+seemed to him honest to take notice of them. That was the reason, no
+doubt, why people generally disliked him, and complained that he was
+heartless and bitter. Certainly they never told him the things he wanted
+to be told, that he was nice and kind, and that they liked him. But it
+was true that half the sharp things that he said about them were said
+because he was unhappy or hurt himself. But he admitted that he had
+very seldom told any one that he cared for them, and when he had been
+demonstrative, he had generally regretted it afterwards. His feelings
+about Terence and Rachel were so complicated that he had never yet been
+able to bring himself to say that he was glad that they were going to
+be married. He saw their faults so clearly, and the inferior nature of
+a great deal of their feeling for each other, and he expected that their
+love would not last. He looked at them again, and, very strangely, for
+he was so used to thinking that he seldom saw anything, the look of them
+filled him with a simple emotion of affection in which there were some
+traces of pity also. What, after all, did people's faults matter in
+comparison with what was good in them? He resolved that he would now
+tell them what he felt. He quickened his pace and came up with them just
+as they reached the corner where the lane joined the main road. They
+stood still and began to laugh at him, and to ask him whether the
+gastric juices--but he stopped them and began to speak very quickly and
+stiffly.
+
+"D'you remember the morning after the dance?" he demanded. "It was here
+we sat, and you talked nonsense, and Rachel made little heaps of stones.
+I, on the other hand, had the whole meaning of life revealed to me in
+a flash." He paused for a second, and drew his lips together in a tight
+little purse. "Love," he said. "It seems to me to explain everything.
+So, on the whole, I'm very glad that you two are going to be married."
+He then turned round abruptly, without looking at them, and walked back
+to the villa. He felt both exalted and ashamed of himself for having
+thus said what he felt. Probably they were laughing at him, probably
+they thought him a fool, and, after all, had he really said what he
+felt?
+
+It was true that they laughed when he was gone; but the dispute about
+Helen which had become rather sharp, ceased, and they became peaceful
+and friendly.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIV
+
+
+They reached the hotel rather early in the afternoon, so that most
+people were still lying down, or sitting speechless in their bedrooms,
+and Mrs. Thornbury, although she had asked them to tea, was nowhere to
+be seen. They sat down, therefore, in the shady hall, which was almost
+empty, and full of the light swishing sounds of air going to and fro in
+a large empty space. Yes, this arm-chair was the same arm-chair in which
+Rachel had sat that afternoon when Evelyn came up, and this was the
+magazine she had been looking at, and this the very picture, a picture
+of New York by lamplight. How odd it seemed--nothing had changed.
+
+By degrees a certain number of people began to come down the stairs and
+to pass through the hall, and in this dim light their figures possessed
+a sort of grace and beauty, although they were all unknown people.
+Sometimes they went straight through and out into the garden by the
+swing door, sometimes they stopped for a few minutes and bent over the
+tables and began turning over the newspapers. Terence and Rachel sat
+watching them through their half-closed eyelids--the Johnsons,
+the Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons', the Lees, the Morleys, the
+Campbells, the Gardiners. Some were dressed in white flannels and were
+carrying racquets under their arms, some were short, some tall, some
+were only children, and some perhaps were servants, but they all had
+their standing, their reason for following each other through the hall,
+their money, their position, whatever it might be. Terence soon gave up
+looking at them, for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he fell half
+asleep in his chair. Rachel watched the people for some time longer; she
+was fascinated by the certainty and the grace of their movements, and by
+the inevitable way in which they seemed to follow each other, and loiter
+and pass on and disappear. But after a time her thoughts wandered, and
+she began to think of the dance, which had been held in this room, only
+then the room itself looked quite different. Glancing round, she could
+hardly believe that it was the same room. It had looked so bare and
+so bright and formal on that night when they came into it out of the
+darkness; it had been filled, too, with little red, excited faces,
+always moving, and people so brightly dressed and so animated that they
+did not seem in the least like real people, nor did you feel that you
+could talk to them. And now the room was dim and quiet, and beautiful
+silent people passed through it, to whom you could go and say anything
+you liked. She felt herself amazingly secure as she sat in her
+arm-chair, and able to review not only the night of the dance, but the
+entire past, tenderly and humorously, as if she had been turning in a
+fog for a long time, and could now see exactly where she had turned. For
+the methods by which she had reached her present position, seemed to her
+very strange, and the strangest thing about them was that she had not
+known where they were leading her. That was the strange thing, that
+one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed
+blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and
+knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something
+had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm,
+this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called
+living. Perhaps, then, every one really knew as she knew now where they
+were going; and things formed themselves into a pattern not only for
+her, but for them, and in that pattern lay satisfaction and meaning.
+When she looked back she could see that a meaning of some kind was
+apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the brief visit of the
+Dalloways whom she would never see again, and in the life of her father.
+
+The sound of Terence, breathing deep in his slumber, confirmed her in
+her calm. She was not sleepy although she did not see anything very
+distinctly, but although the figures passing through the hall became
+vaguer and vaguer, she believed that they all knew exactly where they
+were going, and the sense of their certainty filled her with comfort.
+For the moment she was as detached and disinterested as if she had
+no longer any lot in life, and she thought that she could now accept
+anything that came to her without being perplexed by the form in which
+it appeared. What was there to frighten or to perplex in the prospect
+of life? Why should this insight ever again desert her? The world was in
+truth so large, so hospitable, and after all it was so simple. "Love,"
+St. John had said, "that seems to explain it all." Yes, but it was not
+the love of man for woman, of Terence for Rachel. Although they sat so
+close together, they had ceased to be little separate bodies; they had
+ceased to struggle and desire one another. There seemed to be peace
+between them. It might be love, but it was not the love of man for
+woman.
+
+Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying back in his
+chair, and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth was, and his chin
+so small, and his nose curved like a switchback with a knob at the end.
+Naturally, looking like that he was lazy, and ambitious, and full of
+moods and faults. She remembered their quarrels, and in particular
+how they had been quarreling about Helen that very afternoon, and she
+thought how often they would quarrel in the thirty, or forty, or fifty
+years in which they would be living in the same house together, catching
+trains together, and getting annoyed because they were so different. But
+all this was superficial, and had nothing to do with the life that
+went on beneath the eyes and the mouth and the chin, for that life was
+independent of her, and independent of everything else. So too, although
+she was going to marry him and to live with him for thirty, or forty,
+or fifty years, and to quarrel, and to be so close to him, she
+was independent of him; she was independent of everything else.
+Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love that made her understand
+this, for she had never felt this independence, this calm, and this
+certainty until she fell in love with him, and perhaps this too was
+love. She wanted nothing else.
+
+For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little
+distance looking at the couple lying back so peacefully in their
+arm-chairs. She could not make up her mind whether to disturb them or
+not, and then, seeming to recollect something, she came across the hall.
+The sound of her approach woke Terence, who sat up and rubbed his eyes.
+He heard Miss Allan talking to Rachel.
+
+"Well," she was saying, "this is very nice. It is very nice indeed.
+Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion. It cannot often happen
+that two couples who have never seen each other before meet in the same
+hotel and decide to get married." Then she paused and smiled, and seemed
+to have nothing more to say, so that Terence rose and asked her whether
+it was true that she had finished her book. Some one had said that
+she had really finished it. Her face lit up; she turned to him with a
+livelier expression than usual.
+
+"Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it," she said. "That
+is, omitting Swinburne--Beowulf to Browning--I rather like the two B's
+myself. Beowulf to Browning," she repeated, "I think that is the kind of
+title which might catch one's eye on a railway book-stall."
+
+She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book, for no one
+knew what an amount of determination had gone to the making of it. Also
+she thought that it was a good piece of work, and, considering what
+anxiety she had been in about her brother while she wrote it, she could
+not resist telling them a little more about it.
+
+"I must confess," she continued, "that if I had known how many classics
+there are in English literature, and how verbose the best of them
+contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work. They only allow
+one seventy thousand words, you see."
+
+"Only seventy thousand words!" Terence exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, and one has to say something about everybody," Miss Allan added.
+"That is what I find so difficult, saying something different about
+everybody." Then she thought that she had said enough about herself, and
+she asked whether they had come down to join the tennis tournament. "The
+young people are very keen about it. It begins again in half an hour."
+
+Her gaze rested benevolently upon them both, and, after a momentary
+pause, she remarked, looking at Rachel as if she had remembered
+something that would serve to keep her distinct from other people.
+
+"You're the remarkable person who doesn't like ginger." But the kindness
+of the smile in her rather worn and courageous face made them feel that
+although she would scarcely remember them as individuals, she had laid
+upon them the burden of the new generation.
+
+"And in that I quite agree with her," said a voice behind; Mrs.
+Thornbury had overheard the last few words about not liking ginger.
+"It's associated in my mind with a horrid old aunt of ours (poor thing,
+she suffered dreadfully, so it isn't fair to call her horrid) who used
+to give it to us when we were small, and we never had the courage
+to tell her we didn't like it. We just had to put it out in the
+shrubbery--she had a big house near Bath."
+
+They began moving slowly across the hall, when they were stopped by the
+impact of Evelyn, who dashed into them, as though in running downstairs
+to catch them her legs had got beyond her control.
+
+"Well," she exclaimed, with her usual enthusiasm, seizing Rachel by the
+arm, "I call this splendid! I guessed it was going to happen from the
+very beginning! I saw you two were made for each other. Now you've just
+got to tell me all about it--when's it to be, where are you going to
+live--are you both tremendously happy?"
+
+But the attention of the group was diverted to Mrs. Elliot, who was
+passing them with her eager but uncertain movement, carrying in her
+hands a plate and an empty hot-water bottle. She would have passed them,
+but Mrs. Thornbury went up and stopped her.
+
+"Thank you, Hughling's better," she replied, in answer to Mrs.
+Thornbury's enquiry, "but he's not an easy patient. He wants to know
+what his temperature is, and if I tell him he gets anxious, and if I
+don't tell him he suspects. You know what men are when they're ill! And
+of course there are none of the proper appliances, and, though he
+seems very willing and anxious to help" (here she lowered her voice
+mysteriously), "one can't feel that Dr. Rodriguez is the same as a
+proper doctor. If you would come and see him, Mr. Hewet," she added,
+"I know it would cheer him up--lying there in bed all day--and the
+flies--But I must go and find Angelo--the food here--of course, with an
+invalid, one wants things particularly nice." And she hurried past them
+in search of the head waiter. The worry of nursing her husband had fixed
+a plaintive frown upon her forehead; she was pale and looked unhappy and
+more than usually inefficient, and her eyes wandered more vaguely than
+ever from point to point.
+
+"Poor thing!" Mrs. Thornbury exclaimed. She told them that for some
+days Hughling Elliot had been ill, and the only doctor available was the
+brother of the proprietor, or so the proprietor said, whose right to the
+title of doctor was not above suspicion.
+
+"I know how wretched it is to be ill in a hotel," Mrs. Thornbury
+remarked, once more leading the way with Rachel to the garden. "I spent
+six weeks on my honeymoon in having typhoid at Venice," she continued.
+"But even so, I look back upon them as some of the happiest weeks in my
+life. Ah, yes," she said, taking Rachel's arm, "you think yourself happy
+now, but it's nothing to the happiness that comes afterwards. And I
+assure you I could find it in my heart to envy you young people! You've
+a much better time than we had, I may tell you. When I look back upon
+it, I can hardly believe how things have changed. When we were engaged
+I wasn't allowed to go for walks with William alone--some one had always
+to be in the room with us--I really believe I had to show my parents all
+his letters!--though they were very fond of him too. Indeed, I may say
+they looked upon him as their own son. It amuses me," she continued,
+"to think how strict they were to us, when I see how they spoil their
+grand-children!"
+
+The table was laid under the tree again, and taking her place before
+the teacups, Mrs. Thornbury beckoned and nodded until she had collected
+quite a number of people, Susan and Arthur and Mr. Pepper, who were
+strolling about, waiting for the tournament to begin. A murmuring tree,
+a river brimming in the moonlight, Terence's words came back to Rachel
+as she sat drinking the tea and listening to the words which flowed on
+so lightly, so kindly, and with such silvery smoothness. This long life
+and all these children had left her very smooth; they seemed to have
+rubbed away the marks of individuality, and to have left only what was
+old and maternal.
+
+"And the things you young people are going to see!" Mrs. Thornbury
+continued. She included them all in her forecast, she included them all
+in her maternity, although the party comprised William Pepper and Miss
+Allan, both of whom might have been supposed to have seen a fair share
+of the panorama. "When I see how the world has changed in my lifetime,"
+she went on, "I can set no limit to what may happen in the next fifty
+years. Ah, no, Mr. Pepper, I don't agree with you in the least," she
+laughed, interrupting his gloomy remark about things going steadily from
+bad to worse. "I know I ought to feel that, but I don't, I'm afraid.
+They're going to be much better people than we were. Surely everything
+goes to prove that. All round me I see women, young women, women with
+household cares of every sort, going out and doing things that we should
+not have thought it possible to do."
+
+Mr. Pepper thought her sentimental and irrational like all old women,
+but her manner of treating him as if he were a cross old baby baffled
+him and charmed him, and he could only reply to her with a curious
+grimace which was more a smile than a frown.
+
+"And they remain women," Mrs. Thornbury added. "They give a great deal
+to their children."
+
+As she said this she smiled slightly in the direction of Susan and
+Rachel. They did not like to be included in the same lot, but they both
+smiled a little self-consciously, and Arthur and Terence glanced at
+each other too. She made them feel that they were all in the same boat
+together, and they looked at the women they were going to marry and
+compared them. It was inexplicable how any one could wish to marry
+Rachel, incredible that any one should be ready to spend his life with
+Susan; but singular though the other's taste must be, they bore each
+other no ill-will on account of it; indeed, they liked each other rather
+the better for the eccentricity of their choice.
+
+"I really must congratulate you," Susan remarked, as she leant across
+the table for the jam.
+
+There seemed to be no foundation for St. John's gossip about Arthur and
+Susan. Sunburnt and vigorous they sat side by side, with their racquets
+across their knees, not saying much but smiling slightly all the time.
+Through the thin white clothes which they wore, it was possible to
+see the lines of their bodies and legs, the beautiful curves of their
+muscles, his leanness and her flesh, and it was natural to think of the
+firm-fleshed sturdy children that would be theirs. Their faces had too
+little shape in them to be beautiful, but they had clear eyes and an
+appearance of great health and power of endurance, for it seemed as if
+the blood would never cease to run in his veins, or to lie deeply and
+calmly in her cheeks. Their eyes at the present moment were brighter
+than usual, and wore the peculiar expression of pleasure and
+self-confidence which is seen in the eyes of athletes, for they had been
+playing tennis, and they were both first-rate at the game.
+
+Evelyn had not spoken, but she had been looking from Susan to Rachel.
+Well--they had both made up their minds very easily, they had done in a
+very few weeks what it sometimes seemed to her that she would never be
+able to do. Although they were so different, she thought that she could
+see in each the same look of satisfaction and completion, the same
+calmness of manner, and the same slowness of movement. It was that
+slowness, that confidence, that content which she hated, she thought to
+herself. They moved so slowly because they were not single but double,
+and Susan was attached to Arthur, and Rachel to Terence, and for the
+sake of this one man they had renounced all other men, and movement, and
+the real things of life. Love was all very well, and those snug domestic
+houses, with the kitchen below and the nursery above, which were so
+secluded and self-contained, like little islands in the torrents of the
+world; but the real things were surely the things that happened, the
+causes, the wars, the ideals, which happened in the great world outside,
+and went so independently of these women, turning so quietly and
+beautifully towards the men. She looked at them sharply. Of course
+they were happy and content, but there must be better things than that.
+Surely one could get nearer to life, one could get more out of life,
+one could enjoy more and feel more than they would ever do. Rachel in
+particular looked so young--what could she know of life? She became
+restless, and getting up, crossed over to sit beside Rachel. She
+reminded her that she had promised to join her club.
+
+"The bother is," she went on, "that I mayn't be able to start work
+seriously till October. I've just had a letter from a friend of mine
+whose brother is in business in Moscow. They want me to stay with them,
+and as they're in the thick of all the conspiracies and anarchists, I've
+a good mind to stop on my way home. It sounds too thrilling." She wanted
+to make Rachel see how thrilling it was. "My friend knows a girl of
+fifteen who's been sent to Siberia for life merely because they caught
+her addressing a letter to an anarchist. And the letter wasn't from her,
+either. I'd give all I have in the world to help on a revolution against
+the Russian government, and it's bound to come."
+
+She looked from Rachel to Terence. They were both a little touched by
+the sight of her remembering how lately they had been listening to evil
+words about her, and Terence asked her what her scheme was, and she
+explained that she was going to found a club--a club for doing things,
+really doing them. She became very animated, as she talked on and on,
+for she professed herself certain that if once twenty people--no, ten
+would be enough if they were keen--set about doing things instead of
+talking about doing them, they could abolish almost every evil that
+exists. It was brains that were needed. If only people with brains--of
+course they would want a room, a nice room, in Bloomsbury preferably,
+where they could meet once a week. . . .
+
+As she talked Terence could see the traces of fading youth in her face,
+the lines that were being drawn by talk and excitement round her mouth
+and eyes, but he did not pity her; looking into those bright, rather
+hard, and very courageous eyes, he saw that she did not pity herself,
+or feel any desire to exchange her own life for the more refined and
+orderly lives of people like himself and St. John, although, as the
+years went by, the fight would become harder and harder. Perhaps,
+though, she would settle down; perhaps, after all, she would marry
+Perrott. While his mind was half occupied with what she was saying,
+he thought of her probable destiny, the light clouds of tobacco smoke
+serving to obscure his face from her eyes.
+
+Terence smoked and Arthur smoked and Evelyn smoked, so that the air was
+full of the mist and fragrance of good tobacco. In the intervals when
+no one spoke, they heard far off the low murmur of the sea, as the waves
+quietly broke and spread the beach with a film of water, and withdrew to
+break again. The cool green light fell through the leaves of the tree,
+and there were soft crescents and diamonds of sunshine upon the plates
+and the tablecloth. Mrs. Thornbury, after watching them all for a time
+in silence, began to ask Rachel kindly questions--When did they all
+go back? Oh, they expected her father. She must want to see her
+father--there would be a great deal to tell him, and (she looked
+sympathetically at Terence) he would be so happy, she felt sure. Years
+ago, she continued, it might have been ten or twenty years ago, she
+remembered meeting Mr. Vinrace at a party, and, being so much struck
+by his face, which was so unlike the ordinary face one sees at a party,
+that she had asked who he was, and she was told that it was Mr. Vinrace,
+and she had always remembered the name,--an uncommon name,--and he had
+a lady with him, a very sweet-looking woman, but it was one of those
+dreadful London crushes, where you don't talk,--you only look at each
+other,--and although she had shaken hands with Mr. Vinrace, she didn't
+think they had said anything. She sighed very slightly, remembering the
+past.
+
+Then she turned to Mr. Pepper, who had become very dependent on her,
+so that he always chose a seat near her, and attended to what she was
+saying, although he did not often make any remark of his own.
+
+"You who know everything, Mr. Pepper," she said, "tell us how did those
+wonderful French ladies manage their salons? Did we ever do anything of
+the same kind in England, or do you think that there is some reason why
+we cannot do it in England?"
+
+Mr. Pepper was pleased to explain very accurately why there has never
+been an English salon. There were three reasons, and they were very
+good ones, he said. As for himself, when he went to a party, as one was
+sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence--his niece, for
+example, had been married the other day--he walked into the middle of
+the room, said "Ha! ha!" as loud as ever he could, considered that he
+had done his duty, and walked away again. Mrs. Thornbury protested. She
+was going to give a party directly she got back, and they were all to be
+invited, and she should set people to watch Mr. Pepper, and if she
+heard that he had been caught saying "Ha! ha!" she would--she would do
+something very dreadful indeed to him. Arthur Venning suggested that
+what she must do was to rig up something in the nature of a surprise--a
+portrait, for example, of a nice old lady in a lace cap, concealing a
+bath of cold water, which at a signal could be sprung on Pepper's head;
+or they'd have a chair which shot him twenty feet high directly he sat
+on it.
+
+Susan laughed. She had done her tea; she was feeling very well
+contented, partly because she had been playing tennis brilliantly, and
+then every one was so nice; she was beginning to find it so much easier
+to talk, and to hold her own even with quite clever people, for somehow
+clever people did not frighten her any more. Even Mr. Hirst, whom she
+had disliked when she first met him, really wasn't disagreeable; and,
+poor man, he always looked so ill; perhaps he was in love; perhaps he
+had been in love with Rachel--she really shouldn't wonder; or perhaps it
+was Evelyn--she was of course very attractive to men. Leaning forward,
+she went on with the conversation. She said that she thought that the
+reason why parties were so dull was mainly because gentlemen will not
+dress: even in London, she stated, it struck her very much how people
+don't think it necessary to dress in the evening, and of course if they
+don't dress in London they won't dress in the country. It was really
+quite a treat at Christmas-time when there were the Hunt balls, and the
+gentlemen wore nice red coats, but Arthur didn't care for dancing, so
+she supposed that they wouldn't go even to the ball in their little
+country town. She didn't think that people who were fond of one sport
+often care for another, although her father was an exception. But then
+he was an exception in every way--such a gardener, and he knew all about
+birds and animals, and of course he was simply adored by all the old
+women in the village, and at the same time what he really liked best was
+a book. You always knew where to find him if he were wanted; he would be
+in his study with a book. Very likely it would be an old, old book, some
+fusty old thing that no one else would dream of reading. She used to
+tell him that he would have made a first-rate old bookworm if only he
+hadn't had a family of six to support, and six children, she added,
+charmingly confident of universal sympathy, didn't leave one much time
+for being a bookworm.
+
+Still talking about her father, of whom she was very proud, she rose,
+for Arthur upon looking at his watch found that it was time they went
+back again to the tennis court. The others did not move.
+
+"They're very happy!" said Mrs. Thornbury, looking benignantly after
+them. Rachel agreed; they seemed to be so certain of themselves; they
+seemed to know exactly what they wanted.
+
+"D'you think they _are_ happy?" Evelyn murmured to Terence in an
+undertone, and she hoped that he would say that he did not think them
+happy; but, instead, he said that they must go too--go home, for they
+were always being late for meals, and Mrs. Ambrose, who was very stern
+and particular, didn't like that. Evelyn laid hold of Rachel's skirt and
+protested. Why should they go? It was still early, and she had so many
+things to say to them. "No," said Terence, "we must go, because we walk
+so slowly. We stop and look at things, and we talk."
+
+"What d'you talk about?" Evelyn enquired, upon which he laughed and said
+that they talked about everything.
+
+Mrs. Thornbury went with them to the gate, trailing very slowly and
+gracefully across the grass and the gravel, and talking all the time
+about flowers and birds. She told them that she had taken up the study
+of botany since her daughter married, and it was wonderful what a number
+of flowers there were which she had never seen, although she had lived
+in the country all her life and she was now seventy-two. It was a good
+thing to have some occupation which was quite independent of other
+people, she said, when one got old. But the odd thing was that one never
+felt old. She always felt that she was twenty-five, not a day more or a
+day less, but, of course, one couldn't expect other people to agree to
+that.
+
+"It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to imagine
+that you're twenty-five," she said, looking from one to the other with
+her smooth, bright glance. "It must be very wonderful, very wonderful
+indeed." She stood talking to them at the gate for a long time; she
+seemed reluctant that they should go.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXV
+
+
+The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on
+the shore sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature,
+and even on the terrace under an awning the bricks were hot, and the
+air danced perpetually over the short dry grass. The red flowers in the
+stone basins were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which
+had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now dry, and
+their edges were curled and yellow. Only the stiff and hostile plants
+of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be grown upon spines, still
+remained standing upright and defied the sun to beat them down. It
+was too hot to talk, and it was not easy to find any book that would
+withstand the power of the sun. Many books had been tried and then let
+fall, and now Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the
+words of Milton had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary to
+understand what he was saying; one could merely listen to his words; one
+could almost handle them.
+
+There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,
+
+he read,
+
+     That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.
+       Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;
+     Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,
+       That had the sceptre from his father Brute.
+
+The words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be laden with
+meaning, and perhaps it was for this reason that it was painful to
+listen to them; they sounded strange; they meant different things from
+what they usually meant. Rachel at any rate could not keep her attention
+fixed upon them, but went off upon curious trains of thought suggested
+by words such as "curb" and "Locrine" and "Brute," which brought
+unpleasant sights before her eyes, independently of their meaning. Owing
+to the heat and the dancing air the garden too looked strange--the trees
+were either too near or too far, and her head almost certainly ached.
+She was not quite certain, and therefore she did not know, whether to
+tell Terence now, or to let him go on reading. She decided that she
+would wait until he came to the end of a stanza, and if by that time she
+had turned her head this way and that, and it ached in every position
+undoubtedly, she would say very calmly that her head ached.
+
+     Sabrina fair,
+       Listen where thou art sitting
+     Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
+       In twisted braids of lilies knitting
+     The loose train of thy amber dropping hair,
+       Listen for dear honour's sake,
+     Goddess of the silver lake,
+       Listen and save!
+
+But her head ached; it ached whichever way she turned it.
+
+She sat up and said as she had determined, "My head aches so that
+I shall go indoors." He was half-way through the next verse, but he
+dropped the book instantly.
+
+"Your head aches?" he repeated.
+
+For a few moments they sat looking at one another in silence, holding
+each other's hands. During this time his sense of dismay and catastrophe
+were almost physically painful; all round him he seemed to hear the
+shiver of broken glass which, as it fell to earth, left him sitting in
+the open air. But at the end of two minutes, noticing that she was not
+sharing his dismay, but was only rather more languid and heavy-eyed than
+usual, he recovered, fetched Helen, and asked her to tell him what they
+had better do, for Rachel had a headache.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose was not discomposed, but advised that she should go to bed,
+and added that she must expect her head to ache if she sat up to all
+hours and went out in the heat, but a few hours in bed would cure it
+completely. Terence was unreasonably reassured by her words, as he had
+been unreasonably depressed the moment before. Helen's sense seemed
+to have much in common with the ruthless good sense of nature, which
+avenged rashness by a headache, and, like nature's good sense, might be
+depended upon.
+
+Rachel went to bed; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her, for a very
+long time, but at length, waking from a transparent kind of sleep, she
+saw the windows white in front of her, and recollected that some time
+before she had gone to bed with a headache, and that Helen had said it
+would be gone when she woke. She supposed, therefore, that she was now
+quite well again. At the same time the wall of her room was painfully
+white, and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat. Turning
+her eyes to the window, she was not reassured by what she saw there. The
+movement of the blind as it filled with air and blew slowly out, drawing
+the cord with a little trailing sound along the floor, seemed to her
+terrifying, as if it were the movement of an animal in the room. She
+shut her eyes, and the pulse in her head beat so strongly that each
+thump seemed to tread upon a nerve, piercing her forehead with a little
+stab of pain. It might not be the same headache, but she certainly had a
+headache. She turned from side to side, in the hope that the coolness
+of the sheets would cure her, and that when she next opened her eyes
+to look the room would be as usual. After a considerable number of vain
+experiments, she resolved to put the matter beyond a doubt. She got out
+of bed and stood upright, holding on to the brass ball at the end of the
+bedstead. Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of her
+hand, and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of the
+floor proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and walk
+than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change was
+refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great as the
+discomfort of standing up. She accepted the idea that she would have
+to stay in bed all day long, and as she laid her head on the pillow,
+relinquished the happiness of the day.
+
+When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped her cheerful
+words, looked startled for a second and then unnaturally calm, the fact
+that she was ill was put beyond a doubt. It was confirmed when the whole
+household knew of it, when the song that some one was singing in the
+garden stopped suddenly, and when Maria, as she brought water, slipped
+past the bed with averted eyes. There was all the morning to get
+through, and then all the afternoon, and at intervals she made an effort
+to cross over into the ordinary world, but she found that her heat and
+discomfort had put a gulf between her world and the ordinary world which
+she could not bridge. At one point the door opened, and Helen came in
+with a little dark man who had--it was the chief thing she noticed about
+him--very hairy hands. She was drowsy and intolerably hot, and as he
+seemed shy and obsequious she scarcely troubled to answer him, although
+she understood that he was a doctor. At another point the door opened
+and Terence came in very gently, smiling too steadily, as she realised,
+for it to be natural. He sat down and talked to her, stroking her hands
+until it became irksome to her to lie any more in the same position and
+she turned round, and when she looked up again Helen was beside her and
+Terence had gone. It did not matter; she would see him to-morrow when
+things would be ordinary again. Her chief occupation during the day was
+to try to remember how the lines went:
+
+     Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
+     In twisted braids of lilies knitting
+       The loose train of thy amber dropping hair;
+
+and the effort worried her because the adjectives persisted in getting
+into the wrong places.
+
+The second day did not differ very much from the first day, except that
+her bed had become very important, and the world outside, when she
+tried to think of it, appeared distinctly further off. The glassy, cool,
+translucent wave was almost visible before her, curling up at the end
+of the bed, and as it was refreshingly cool she tried to keep her
+mind fixed upon it. Helen was here, and Helen was there all day long;
+sometimes she said that it was lunchtime, and sometimes that it was
+teatime; but by the next day all landmarks were obliterated, and the
+outer world was so far away that the different sounds, such as the
+sounds of people moving overhead, could only be ascribed to their cause
+by a great effort of memory. The recollection of what she had felt, or
+of what she had been doing and thinking three days before, had faded
+entirely. On the other hand, every object in the room, and the bed
+itself, and her own body with its various limbs and their different
+sensations were more and more important each day. She was completely
+cut off, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated
+alone with her body.
+
+Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through the
+morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to the
+depths of the night. One evening when the room appeared very dim, either
+because it was evening or because the blinds were drawn, Helen said to
+her, "Some one is going to sit here to-night. You won't mind?"
+
+Opening her eyes, Rachel saw not only Helen but a nurse in spectacles,
+whose face vaguely recalled something that she had once seen. She had
+seen her in the chapel. "Nurse McInnis," said Helen, and the nurse
+smiled steadily as they all did, and said that she did not find many
+people who were frightened of her. After waiting for a moment they both
+disappeared, and having turned on her pillow Rachel woke to find herself
+in the midst of one of those interminable nights which do not end at
+twelve, but go on into the double figures--thirteen, fourteen, and so
+on until they reach the twenties, and then the thirties, and then the
+forties. She realised that there is nothing to prevent nights from doing
+this if they choose. At a great distance an elderly woman sat with her
+head bent down; Rachel raised herself slightly and saw with dismay that
+she was playing cards by the light of a candle which stood in the hollow
+of a newspaper. The sight had something inexplicably sinister about it,
+and she was terrified and cried out, upon which the woman laid down
+her cards and came across the room, shading the candle with her hands.
+Coming nearer and nearer across the great space of the room, she stood
+at last above Rachel's head and said, "Not asleep? Let me make you
+comfortable."
+
+She put down the candle and began to arrange the bedclothes. It struck
+Rachel that a woman who sat playing cards in a cavern all night long
+would have very cold hands, and she shrunk from the touch of them.
+
+"Why, there's a toe all the way down there!" the woman said, proceeding
+to tuck in the bedclothes. Rachel did not realise that the toe was hers.
+
+"You must try and lie still," she proceeded, "because if you lie still
+you will be less hot, and if you toss about you will make yourself more
+hot, and we don't want you to be any hotter than you are." She stood
+looking down upon Rachel for an enormous length of time.
+
+"And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well," she repeated.
+
+Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling, and
+all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should
+move. But the shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed above
+her. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again several more hours
+had passed, but the night still lasted interminably. The woman was still
+playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel under a river, and the light
+stood in a little archway in the wall above her. She cried "Terence!"
+and the peaked shadow again moved across the ceiling, as the woman with
+an enormous slow movement rose, and they both stood still above her.
+
+"It's just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep Mr. Forrest
+in bed," the woman said, "and he was such a tall gentleman."
+
+In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again shut
+her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames,
+where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing
+cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp,
+which collected into drops and slid down the wall. But the little old
+women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time, standing in the
+window together whispering, whispering incessantly.
+
+Meanwhile outside her room the sounds, the movements, and the lives of
+the other people in the house went on in the ordinary light of the sun,
+throughout the usual succession of hours. When, on the first day of her
+illness, it became clear that she would not be absolutely well, for her
+temperature was very high, until Friday, that day being Tuesday, Terence
+was filled with resentment, not against her, but against the force
+outside them which was separating them. He counted up the number of days
+that would almost certainly be spoilt for them. He realised, with an odd
+mixture of pleasure and annoyance, that, for the first time in his life,
+he was so dependent upon another person that his happiness was in her
+keeping. The days were completely wasted upon trifling, immaterial
+things, for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity all the
+usual occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point. The least
+intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel's illness,
+and to discuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this subject was
+exhausted, to discuss illness of all kinds, and what caused them, and
+what cured them.
+
+Twice every day he went in to sit with Rachel, and twice every day the
+same thing happened. On going into her room, which was not very dark,
+where the music was lying about as usual, and her books and letters, his
+spirits rose instantly. When he saw her he felt completely reassured.
+She did not look very ill. Sitting by her side he would tell her what
+he had been doing, using his natural voice to speak to her, only a few
+tones lower down than usual; but by the time he had sat there for five
+minutes he was plunged into the deepest gloom. She was not the same;
+he could not bring them back to their old relationship; but although he
+knew that it was foolish he could not prevent himself from endeavouring
+to bring her back, to make her remember, and when this failed he was in
+despair. He always concluded as he left her room that it was worse to
+see her than not to see her, but by degrees, as the day wore on, the
+desire to see her returned and became almost too great to be borne.
+
+On Thursday morning when Terence went into her room he felt the usual
+increase of confidence. She turned round and made an effort to remember
+certain facts from the world that was so many millions of miles away.
+
+"You have come up from the hotel?" she asked.
+
+"No; I'm staying here for the present," he said. "We've just had
+luncheon," he continued, "and the mail has come in. There's a bundle of
+letters for you--letters from England."
+
+Instead of saying, as he meant her to say, that she wished to see them,
+she said nothing for some time.
+
+"You see, there they go, rolling off the edge of the hill," she said
+suddenly.
+
+"Rolling, Rachel? What do you see rolling? There's nothing rolling."
+
+"The old woman with the knife," she replied, not speaking to Terence
+in particular, and looking past him. As she appeared to be looking at a
+vase on the shelf opposite, he rose and took it down.
+
+"Now they can't roll any more," he said cheerfully. Nevertheless she lay
+gazing at the same spot, and paid him no further attention although he
+spoke to her. He became so profoundly wretched that he could not endure
+to sit with her, but wandered about until he found St. John, who was
+reading _The_ _Times_ in the verandah. He laid it aside patiently, and
+heard all that Terence had to say about delirium. He was very patient
+with Terence. He treated him like a child.
+
+By Friday it could not be denied that the illness was no longer an
+attack that would pass off in a day or two; it was a real illness that
+required a good deal of organisation, and engrossed the attention of
+at least five people, but there was no reason to be anxious. Instead
+of lasting five days it was going to last ten days. Rodriguez was
+understood to say that there were well-known varieties of this illness.
+Rodriguez appeared to think that they were treating the illness with
+undue anxiety. His visits were always marked by the same show of
+confidence, and in his interviews with Terence he always waved aside
+his anxious and minute questions with a kind of flourish which seemed
+to indicate that they were all taking it much too seriously. He seemed
+curiously unwilling to sit down.
+
+"A high temperature," he said, looking furtively about the room,
+and appearing to be more interested in the furniture and in Helen's
+embroidery than in anything else. "In this climate you must expect a
+high temperature. You need not be alarmed by that. It is the pulse we
+go by" (he tapped his own hairy wrist), "and the pulse continues
+excellent."
+
+Thereupon he bowed and slipped out. The interview was conducted
+laboriously upon both sides in French, and this, together with the
+fact that he was optimistic, and that Terence respected the medical
+profession from hearsay, made him less critical than he would have been
+had he encountered the doctor in any other capacity. Unconsciously
+he took Rodriguez' side against Helen, who seemed to have taken an
+unreasonable prejudice against him.
+
+When Saturday came it was evident that the hours of the day must be more
+strictly organised than they had been. St. John offered his services; he
+said that he had nothing to do, and that he might as well spend the
+day at the villa if he could be of use. As if they were starting on a
+difficult expedition together, they parcelled out their duties between
+them, writing out an elaborate scheme of hours upon a large sheet of
+paper which was pinned to the drawing-room door. Their distance from
+the town, and the difficulty of procuring rare things with unknown
+names from the most unexpected places, made it necessary to think very
+carefully, and they found it unexpectedly difficult to do the simple
+but practical things that were required of them, as if they, being very
+tall, were asked to stoop down and arrange minute grains of sand in a
+pattern on the ground.
+
+It was St. John's duty to fetch what was needed from the town, so
+that Terence would sit all through the long hot hours alone in the
+drawing-room, near the open door, listening for any movement upstairs,
+or call from Helen. He always forgot to pull down the blinds, so that he
+sat in bright sunshine, which worried him without his knowing what was
+the cause of it. The room was terribly stiff and uncomfortable. There
+were hats in the chairs, and medicine bottles among the books. He tried
+to read, but good books were too good, and bad books were too bad, and
+the only thing he could tolerate was the newspaper, which with its
+news of London, and the movements of real people who were giving
+dinner-parties and making speeches, seemed to give a little background
+of reality to what was otherwise mere nightmare. Then, just as his
+attention was fixed on the print, a soft call would come from Helen, or
+Mrs. Chailey would bring in something which was wanted upstairs, and he
+would run up very quietly in his socks, and put the jug on the little
+table which stood crowded with jugs and cups outside the bedroom door;
+or if he could catch Helen for a moment he would ask, "How is she?"
+
+"Rather restless. . . . On the whole, quieter, I think."
+
+The answer would be one or the other.
+
+As usual she seemed to reserve something which she did not say, and
+Terence was conscious that they disagreed, and, without saying it
+aloud, were arguing against each other. But she was too hurried and
+pre-occupied to talk.
+
+The strain of listening and the effort of making practical arrangements
+and seeing that things worked smoothly, absorbed all Terence's power.
+Involved in this long dreary nightmare, he did not attempt to think what
+it amounted to. Rachel was ill; that was all; he must see that there
+was medicine and milk, and that things were ready when they were wanted.
+Thought had ceased; life itself had come to a standstill. Sunday was
+rather worse than Saturday had been, simply because the strain was
+a little greater every day, although nothing else had changed. The
+separate feelings of pleasure, interest, and pain, which combine to make
+up the ordinary day, were merged in one long-drawn sensation of sordid
+misery and profound boredom. He had never been so bored since he was
+shut up in the nursery alone as a child. The vision of Rachel as she was
+now, confused and heedless, had almost obliterated the vision of her as
+she had been once long ago; he could hardly believe that they had ever
+been happy, or engaged to be married, for what were feelings, what
+was there to be felt? Confusion covered every sight and person, and he
+seemed to see St. John, Ridley, and the stray people who came up now and
+then from the hotel to enquire, through a mist; the only people who were
+not hidden in this mist were Helen and Rodriguez, because they could
+tell him something definite about Rachel.
+
+Nevertheless the day followed the usual forms. At certain hours they
+went into the dining-room, and when they sat round the table they talked
+about indifferent things. St. John usually made it his business to start
+the talk and to keep it from dying out.
+
+"I've discovered the way to get Sancho past the white house," said St.
+John on Sunday at luncheon. "You crackle a piece of paper in his ear,
+then he bolts for about a hundred yards, but he goes on quite well after
+that."
+
+"Yes, but he wants corn. You should see that he has corn."
+
+"I don't think much of the stuff they give him; and Angelo seems a dirty
+little rascal."
+
+There was then a long silence. Ridley murmured a few lines of poetry
+under his breath, and remarked, as if to conceal the fact that he had
+done so, "Very hot to-day."
+
+"Two degrees higher than it was yesterday," said St. John. "I wonder
+where these nuts come from," he observed, taking a nut out of the plate,
+turning it over in his fingers, and looking at it curiously.
+
+"London, I should think," said Terence, looking at the nut too.
+
+"A competent man of business could make a fortune here in no time," St.
+John continued. "I suppose the heat does something funny to people's
+brains. Even the English go a little queer. Anyhow they're hopeless
+people to deal with. They kept me three-quarters of an hour waiting at
+the chemist's this morning, for no reason whatever."
+
+There was another long pause. Then Ridley enquired, "Rodriguez seems
+satisfied?"
+
+"Quite," said Terence with decision. "It's just got to run its course."
+Whereupon Ridley heaved a deep sigh. He was genuinely sorry for every
+one, but at the same time he missed Helen considerably, and was a little
+aggrieved by the constant presence of the two young men.
+
+They moved back into the drawing-room.
+
+"Look here, Hirst," said Terence, "there's nothing to be done for two
+hours." He consulted the sheet pinned to the door. "You go and lie down.
+I'll wait here. Chailey sits with Rachel while Helen has her luncheon."
+
+It was asking a good deal of Hirst to tell him to go without waiting for
+a sight of Helen. These little glimpses of Helen were the only respites
+from strain and boredom, and very often they seemed to make up for the
+discomfort of the day, although she might not have anything to tell
+them. However, as they were on an expedition together, he had made up
+his mind to obey.
+
+Helen was very late in coming down. She looked like a person who has
+been sitting for a long time in the dark. She was pale and thinner,
+and the expression of her eyes was harassed but determined. She ate
+her luncheon quickly, and seemed indifferent to what she was doing. She
+brushed aside Terence's enquiries, and at last, as if he had not spoken,
+she looked at him with a slight frown and said:
+
+"We can't go on like this, Terence. Either you've got to find another
+doctor, or you must tell Rodriguez to stop coming, and I'll manage
+for myself. It's no use for him to say that Rachel's better; she's not
+better; she's worse."
+
+Terence suffered a terrific shock, like that which he had suffered when
+Rachel said, "My head aches." He stilled it by reflecting that Helen was
+overwrought, and he was upheld in this opinion by his obstinate sense
+that she was opposed to him in the argument.
+
+"Do you think she's in danger?" he asked.
+
+"No one can go on being as ill as that day after day--" Helen replied.
+She looked at him, and spoke as if she felt some indignation with
+somebody.
+
+"Very well, I'll talk to Rodriguez this afternoon," he replied.
+
+Helen went upstairs at once.
+
+Nothing now could assuage Terence's anxiety. He could not read, nor
+could he sit still, and his sense of security was shaken, in spite of
+the fact that he was determined that Helen was exaggerating, and that
+Rachel was not very ill. But he wanted a third person to confirm him in
+his belief.
+
+Directly Rodriguez came down he demanded, "Well, how is she? Do you
+think her worse?"
+
+"There is no reason for anxiety, I tell you--none," Rodriguez replied in
+his execrable French, smiling uneasily, and making little movements all
+the time as if to get away.
+
+Hewet stood firmly between him and the door. He was determined to see
+for himself what kind of man he was. His confidence in the man vanished
+as he looked at him and saw his insignificance, his dirty appearance,
+his shiftiness, and his unintelligent, hairy face. It was strange that
+he had never seen this before.
+
+"You won't object, of course, if we ask you to consult another doctor?"
+he continued.
+
+At this the little man became openly incensed.
+
+"Ah!" he cried. "You have not confidence in me? You object to my
+treatment? You wish me to give up the case?"
+
+"Not at all," Terence replied, "but in serious illness of this kind--"
+
+Rodriguez shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"It is not serious, I assure you. You are overanxious. The young lady is
+not seriously ill, and I am a doctor. The lady of course is frightened,"
+he sneered. "I understand that perfectly."
+
+"The name and address of the doctor is--?" Terence continued.
+
+"There is no other doctor," Rodriguez replied sullenly. "Every one has
+confidence in me. Look! I will show you."
+
+He took out a packet of old letters and began turning them over as if in
+search of one that would confute Terence's suspicions. As he searched,
+he began to tell a story about an English lord who had trusted him--a
+great English lord, whose name he had, unfortunately, forgotten.
+
+"There is no other doctor in the place," he concluded, still turning
+over the letters.
+
+"Never mind," said Terence shortly. "I will make enquiries for myself."
+Rodriguez put the letters back in his pocket.
+
+"Very well," he remarked. "I have no objection."
+
+He lifted his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, as if to repeat that
+they took the illness much too seriously and that there was no other
+doctor, and slipped out, leaving behind him an impression that he was
+conscious that he was distrusted, and that his malice was aroused.
+
+After this Terence could no longer stay downstairs. He went up, knocked
+at Rachel's door, and asked Helen whether he might see her for a few
+minutes. He had not seen her yesterday. She made no objection, and went
+and sat at a table in the window.
+
+Terence sat down by the bedside. Rachel's face was changed. She looked
+as though she were entirely concentrated upon the effort of keeping
+alive. Her lips were drawn, and her cheeks were sunken and flushed,
+though without colour. Her eyes were not entirely shut, the lower half
+of the white part showing, not as if she saw, but as if they remained
+open because she was too much exhausted to close them. She opened them
+completely when he kissed her. But she only saw an old woman slicing a
+man's head off with a knife.
+
+"There it falls!" she murmured. She then turned to Terence and asked
+him anxiously some question about a man with mules, which he could not
+understand. "Why doesn't he come? Why doesn't he come?" she repeated. He
+was appalled to think of the dirty little man downstairs in connection
+with illness like this, and turning instinctively to Helen, but she was
+doing something at a table in the window, and did not seem to realise
+how great the shock to him must be. He rose to go, for he could not
+endure to listen any longer; his heart beat quickly and painfully with
+anger and misery. As he passed Helen she asked him in the same weary,
+unnatural, but determined voice to fetch her more ice, and to have the
+jug outside filled with fresh milk.
+
+When he had done these errands he went to find Hirst. Exhausted and very
+hot, St. John had fallen asleep on a bed, but Terence woke him without
+scruple.
+
+"Helen thinks she's worse," he said. "There's no doubt she's frightfully
+ill. Rodriguez is useless. We must get another doctor."
+
+"But there is no other doctor," said Hirst drowsily, sitting up and
+rubbing his eyes.
+
+"Don't be a damned fool!" Terence exclaimed. "Of course there's another
+doctor, and, if there isn't, you've got to find one. It ought to have
+been done days ago. I'm going down to saddle the horse." He could not
+stay still in one place.
+
+In less than ten minutes St. John was riding to the town in the
+scorching heat in search of a doctor, his orders being to find one and
+bring him back if he had to be fetched in a special train.
+
+"We ought to have done it days ago," Hewet repeated angrily.
+
+When he went back into the drawing-room he found that Mrs. Flushing was
+there, standing very erect in the middle of the room, having arrived,
+as people did in these days, by the kitchen or through the garden
+unannounced.
+
+"She's better?" Mrs. Flushing enquired abruptly; they did not attempt to
+shake hands.
+
+"No," said Terence. "If anything, they think she's worse."
+
+Mrs. Flushing seemed to consider for a moment or two, looking straight
+at Terence all the time.
+
+"Let me tell you," she said, speaking in nervous jerks, "it's always
+about the seventh day one begins to get anxious. I daresay you've been
+sittin' here worryin' by yourself. You think she's bad, but any one
+comin' with a fresh eye would see she was better. Mr. Elliot's had
+fever; he's all right now," she threw out. "It wasn't anythin' she
+caught on the expedition. What's it matter--a few days' fever? My
+brother had fever for twenty-six days once. And in a week or two he was
+up and about. We gave him nothin' but milk and arrowroot--"
+
+Here Mrs. Chailey came in with a message.
+
+"I'm wanted upstairs," said Terence.
+
+"You see--she'll be better," Mrs. Flushing jerked out as he left the
+room. Her anxiety to persuade Terence was very great, and when he left
+her without saying anything she felt dissatisfied and restless; she did
+not like to stay, but she could not bear to go. She wandered from room
+to room looking for some one to talk to, but all the rooms were empty.
+
+Terence went upstairs, stood inside the door to take Helen's directions,
+looked over at Rachel, but did not attempt to speak to her. She appeared
+vaguely conscious of his presence, but it seemed to disturb her, and she
+turned, so that she lay with her back to him.
+
+For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside, because
+it needed all her attention to follow the hot, red, quick sights which
+passed incessantly before her eyes. She knew that it was of enormous
+importance that she should attend to these sights and grasp their
+meaning, but she was always being just too late to hear or see something
+which would explain it all. For this reason, the faces,--Helen's
+face, the nurse's, Terence's, the doctor's,--which occasionally forced
+themselves very close to her, were worrying because they distracted her
+attention and she might miss the clue. However, on the fourth afternoon
+she was suddenly unable to keep Helen's face distinct from the sights
+themselves; her lips widened as she bent down over the bed, and she
+began to gabble unintelligibly like the rest. The sights were all
+concerned in some plot, some adventure, some escape. The nature of what
+they were doing changed incessantly, although there was always a reason
+behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp. Now they were among trees
+and savages, now they were on the sea, now they were on the tops of high
+towers; now they jumped; now they flew. But just as the crisis was about
+to happen, something invariably slipped in her brain, so that the whole
+effort had to begin over again. The heat was suffocating. At last the
+faces went further away; she fell into a deep pool of sticky water,
+which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing
+but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over
+her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she
+was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea. There she lay,
+sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then
+some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea.
+
+After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun wrangling
+with evasive and very garrulous natives, he extracted the information
+that there was a doctor, a French doctor, who was at present away on
+a holiday in the hills. It was quite impossible, so they said, to find
+him. With his experience of the country, St. John thought it unlikely
+that a telegram would either be sent or received; but having reduced the
+distance of the hill town, in which he was staying, from a hundred miles
+to thirty miles, and having hired a carriage and horses, he started
+at once to fetch the doctor himself. He succeeded in finding him, and
+eventually forced the unwilling man to leave his young wife and return
+forthwith. They reached the villa at midday on Tuesday.
+
+Terence came out to receive them, and St. John was struck by the fact
+that he had grown perceptibly thinner in the interval; he was white too;
+his eyes looked strange. But the curt speech and the sulky masterful
+manner of Dr. Lesage impressed them both favourably, although at the
+same time it was obvious that he was very much annoyed at the whole
+affair. Coming downstairs he gave his directions emphatically, but it
+never occurred to him to give an opinion either because of the presence
+of Rodriguez who was now obsequious as well as malicious, or because he
+took it for granted that they knew already what was to be known.
+
+"Of course," he said with a shrug of his shoulders, when Terence asked
+him, "Is she very ill?"
+
+They were both conscious of a certain sense of relief when Dr. Lesage
+was gone, leaving explicit directions, and promising another visit in a
+few hours' time; but, unfortunately, the rise of their spirits led them
+to talk more than usual, and in talking they quarrelled. They quarrelled
+about a road, the Portsmouth Road. St. John said that it is macadamised
+where it passes Hindhead, and Terence knew as well as he knew his own
+name that it is not macadamised at that point. In the course of the
+argument they said some very sharp things to each other, and the rest
+of the dinner was eaten in silence, save for an occasional half-stifled
+reflection from Ridley.
+
+When it grew dark and the lamps were brought in, Terence felt unable to
+control his irritation any longer. St. John went to bed in a state
+of complete exhaustion, bidding Terence good-night with rather more
+affection than usual because of their quarrel, and Ridley retired to his
+books. Left alone, Terence walked up and down the room; he stood at the
+open window.
+
+The lights were coming out one after another in the town beneath, and it
+was very peaceful and cool in the garden, so that he stepped out on to
+the terrace. As he stood there in the darkness, able only to see the
+shapes of trees through the fine grey light, he was overcome by a desire
+to escape, to have done with this suffering, to forget that Rachel was
+ill. He allowed himself to lapse into forgetfulness of everything. As if
+a wind that had been raging incessantly suddenly fell asleep, the fret
+and strain and anxiety which had been pressing on him passed away.
+He seemed to stand in an unvexed space of air, on a little island by
+himself; he was free and immune from pain. It did not matter whether
+Rachel was well or ill; it did not matter whether they were apart or
+together; nothing mattered--nothing mattered. The waves beat on the
+shore far away, and the soft wind passed through the branches of the
+trees, seeming to encircle him with peace and security, with dark and
+nothingness. Surely the world of strife and fret and anxiety was not the
+real world, but this was the real world, the world that lay beneath the
+superficial world, so that, whatever happened, one was secure. The quiet
+and peace seemed to lap his body in a fine cool sheet, soothing every
+nerve; his mind seemed once more to expand, and become natural.
+
+But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house roused him;
+he turned instinctively and went into the drawing-room. The sight of the
+lamp-lit room brought back so abruptly all that he had forgotten that he
+stood for a moment unable to move. He remembered everything, the hour,
+the minute even, what point they had reached, and what was to come.
+He cursed himself for making believe for a minute that things were
+different from what they are. The night was now harder to face than
+ever.
+
+Unable to stay in the empty drawing-room, he wandered out and sat on the
+stairs half-way up to Rachel's room. He longed for some one to talk
+to, but Hirst was asleep, and Ridley was asleep; there was no sound
+in Rachel's room. The only sound in the house was the sound of Chailey
+moving in the kitchen. At last there was a rustling on the stairs
+overhead, and Nurse McInnis came down fastening the links in her cuffs,
+in preparation for the night's watch. Terence rose and stopped her. He
+had scarcely spoken to her, but it was possible that she might confirm
+him in the belief which still persisted in his own mind that Rachel was
+not seriously ill. He told her in a whisper that Dr. Lesage had been and
+what he had said.
+
+"Now, Nurse," he whispered, "please tell me your opinion. Do you
+consider that she is very seriously ill? Is she in any danger?"
+
+"The doctor has said--" she began.
+
+"Yes, but I want your opinion. You have had experience of many cases
+like this?"
+
+"I could not tell you more than Dr. Lesage, Mr. Hewet," she replied
+cautiously, as though her words might be used against her. "The case is
+serious, but you may feel quite certain that we are doing all we can for
+Miss Vinrace." She spoke with some professional self-approbation. But
+she realised perhaps that she did not satisfy the young man, who still
+blocked her way, for she shifted her feet slightly upon the stair and
+looked out of the window where they could see the moon over the sea.
+
+"If you ask me," she began in a curiously stealthy tone, "I never like
+May for my patients."
+
+"May?" Terence repeated.
+
+"It may be a fancy, but I don't like to see anybody fall ill in May,"
+she continued. "Things seem to go wrong in May. Perhaps it's the moon.
+They say the moon affects the brain, don't they, Sir?"
+
+He looked at her but he could not answer her; like all the others, when
+one looked at her she seemed to shrivel beneath one's eyes and become
+worthless, malicious, and untrustworthy.
+
+She slipped past him and disappeared.
+
+Though he went to his room he was unable even to take his clothes off.
+For a long time he paced up and down, and then leaning out of the window
+gazed at the earth which lay so dark against the paler blue of the sky.
+With a mixture of fear and loathing he looked at the slim black cypress
+trees which were still visible in the garden, and heard the unfamiliar
+creaking and grating sounds which show that the earth is still hot.
+All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and full of hostility and
+foreboding; together with the natives and the nurse and the doctor and
+the terrible force of the illness itself they seemed to be in conspiracy
+against him. They seemed to join together in their effort to extract the
+greatest possible amount of suffering from him. He could not get used to
+his pain, it was a revelation to him. He had never realised before that
+underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies,
+quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering,
+as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating
+away the lives of men and women. He thought for the first time with
+understanding of words which had before seemed to him empty: the
+struggle of life; the hardness of life. Now he knew for himself that
+life is hard and full of suffering. He looked at the scattered lights in
+the town beneath, and thought of Arthur and Susan, or Evelyn and Perrott
+venturing out unwittingly, and by their happiness laying themselves
+open to suffering such as this. How did they dare to love each other, he
+wondered; how had he himself dared to live as he had lived, rapidly and
+carelessly, passing from one thing to another, loving Rachel as he had
+loved her? Never again would he feel secure; he would never believe in
+the stability of life, or forget what depths of pain lie beneath small
+happiness and feelings of content and safety. It seemed to him as he
+looked back that their happiness had never been so great as his pain
+was now. There had always been something imperfect in their happiness,
+something they had wanted and had not been able to get. It had been
+fragmentary and incomplete, because they were so young and had not known
+what they were doing.
+
+The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree outside the
+window, and as the branch swayed in the darkness there came before his
+mind a picture of all the world that lay outside his window; he thought
+of the immense river and the immense forest, the vast stretches of dry
+earth and the plains of the sea that encircled the earth; from the sea
+the sky rose steep and enormous, and the air washed profoundly between
+the sky and the sea. How vast and dark it must be tonight, lying exposed
+to the wind; and in all this great space it was curious to think how
+few the towns were, and how small little rings of light, or single
+glow-worms he figured them, scattered here and there, among the swelling
+uncultivated folds of the world. And in those towns were little men and
+women, tiny men and women. Oh, it was absurd, when one thought of it,
+to sit here in a little room suffering and caring. What did anything
+matter? Rachel, a tiny creature, lay ill beneath him, and here in his
+little room he suffered on her account. The nearness of their bodies in
+this vast universe, and the minuteness of their bodies, seemed to him
+absurd and laughable. Nothing mattered, he repeated; they had no power,
+no hope. He leant on the window-sill, thinking, until he almost forgot
+the time and the place. Nevertheless, although he was convinced that
+it was absurd and laughable, and that they were small and hopeless, he
+never lost the sense that these thoughts somehow formed part of a life
+which he and Rachel would live together.
+
+Owing perhaps to the change of doctor, Rachel appeared to be rather
+better next day. Terribly pale and worn though Helen looked, there was a
+slight lifting of the cloud which had hung all these days in her eyes.
+
+"She talked to me," she said voluntarily. "She asked me what day of the
+week it was, like herself."
+
+Then suddenly, without any warning or any apparent reason, the tears
+formed in her eyes and rolled steadily down her cheeks. She cried
+with scarcely any attempt at movement of her features, and without any
+attempt to stop herself, as if she did not know that she was crying. In
+spite of the relief which her words gave him, Terence was dismayed by
+the sight; had everything given way? Were there no limits to the power
+of this illness? Would everything go down before it? Helen had always
+seemed to him strong and determined, and now she was like a child. He
+took her in his arms, and she clung to him like a child, crying softly
+and quietly upon his shoulder. Then she roused herself and wiped her
+tears away; it was silly to behave like that, she said; very silly, she
+repeated, when there could be no doubt that Rachel was better. She asked
+Terence to forgive her for her folly. She stopped at the door and came
+back and kissed him without saying anything.
+
+On this day indeed Rachel was conscious of what went on round her. She
+had come to the surface of the dark, sticky pool, and a wave seemed to
+bear her up and down with it; she had ceased to have any will of her
+own; she lay on the top of the wave conscious of some pain, but chiefly
+of weakness. The wave was replaced by the side of a mountain. Her body
+became a drift of melting snow, above which her knees rose in huge
+peaked mountains of bare bone. It was true that she saw Helen and saw
+her room, but everything had become very pale and semi-transparent.
+Sometimes she could see through the wall in front of her. Sometimes when
+Helen went away she seemed to go so far that Rachel's eyes could hardly
+follow her. The room also had an odd power of expanding, and though she
+pushed her voice out as far as possible until sometimes it became a
+bird and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever reached the
+person she was talking to. There were immense intervals or chasms, for
+things still had the power to appear visibly before her, between one
+moment and the next; it sometimes took an hour for Helen to raise her
+arm, pausing long between each jerky movement, and pour out medicine.
+Helen's form stooping to raise her in bed appeared of gigantic size, and
+came down upon her like the ceiling falling. But for long spaces of time
+she would merely lie conscious of her body floating on the top of the
+bed and her mind driven to some remote corner of her body, or escaped
+and gone flitting round the room. All sights were something of an
+effort, but the sight of Terence was the greatest effort, because he
+forced her to join mind to body in the desire to remember something. She
+did not wish to remember; it troubled her when people tried to disturb
+her loneliness; she wished to be alone. She wished for nothing else in
+the world.
+
+Although she had cried, Terence observed Helen's greater hopefulness
+with something like triumph; in the argument between them she had made
+the first sign of admitting herself in the wrong. He waited for Dr.
+Lesage to come down that afternoon with considerable anxiety, but with
+the same certainty at the back of his mind that he would in time force
+them all to admit that they were in the wrong.
+
+As usual, Dr. Lesage was sulky in his manner and very short in his
+answers. To Terence's demand, "She seems to be better?" he replied,
+looking at him in an odd way, "She has a chance of life."
+
+The door shut and Terence walked across to the window. He leant his
+forehead against the pane.
+
+"Rachel," he repeated to himself. "She has a chance of life. Rachel."
+
+How could they say these things of Rachel? Had any one yesterday
+seriously believed that Rachel was dying? They had been engaged for four
+weeks. A fortnight ago she had been perfectly well. What could fourteen
+days have done to bring her from that state to this? To realise what
+they meant by saying that she had a chance of life was beyond him,
+knowing as he did that they were engaged. He turned, still enveloped in
+the same dreary mist, and walked towards the door. Suddenly he saw it
+all. He saw the room and the garden, and the trees moving in the air,
+they could go on without her; she could die. For the first time since
+she fell ill he remembered exactly what she looked like and the way in
+which they cared for each other. The immense happiness of feeling her
+close to him mingled with a more intense anxiety than he had felt yet.
+He could not let her die; he could not live without her. But after a
+momentary struggle, the curtain fell again, and he saw nothing and felt
+nothing clearly. It was all going on--going on still, in the same way as
+before. Save for a physical pain when his heart beat, and the fact that
+his fingers were icy cold, he did not realise that he was anxious about
+anything. Within his mind he seemed to feel nothing about Rachel or
+about any one or anything in the world. He went on giving orders,
+arranging with Mrs. Chailey, writing out lists, and every now and then
+he went upstairs and put something quietly on the table outside Rachel's
+door. That night Dr. Lesage seemed to be less sulky than usual. He
+stayed voluntarily for a few moments, and, addressing St. John and
+Terence equally, as if he did not remember which of them was engaged to
+the young lady, said, "I consider that her condition to-night is very
+grave."
+
+Neither of them went to bed or suggested that the other should go to
+bed. They sat in the drawing-room playing picquet with the door open.
+St. John made up a bed upon the sofa, and when it was ready insisted
+that Terence should lie upon it. They began to quarrel as to who should
+lie on the sofa and who should lie upon a couple of chairs covered with
+rugs. St. John forced Terence at last to lie down upon the sofa.
+
+"Don't be a fool, Terence," he said. "You'll only get ill if you don't
+sleep."
+
+"Old fellow," he began, as Terence still refused, and stopped abruptly,
+fearing sentimentality; he found that he was on the verge of tears.
+
+He began to say what he had long been wanting to say, that he was sorry
+for Terence, that he cared for him, that he cared for Rachel. Did she
+know how much he cared for her--had she said anything, asked perhaps? He
+was very anxious to say this, but he refrained, thinking that it was a
+selfish question after all, and what was the use of bothering Terence to
+talk about such things? He was already half asleep. But St. John could
+not sleep at once. If only, he thought to himself, as he lay in the
+darkness, something would happen--if only this strain would come to an
+end. He did not mind what happened, so long as the succession of these
+hard and dreary days was broken; he did not mind if she died. He felt
+himself disloyal in not minding it, but it seemed to him that he had no
+feelings left.
+
+All night long there was no call or movement, except the opening and
+shutting of the bedroom door once. By degrees the light returned into
+the untidy room. At six the servants began to move; at seven they crept
+downstairs into the kitchen; and half an hour later the day began again.
+
+Nevertheless it was not the same as the days that had gone before,
+although it would have been hard to say in what the difference
+consisted. Perhaps it was that they seemed to be waiting for something.
+There were certainly fewer things to be done than usual. People drifted
+through the drawing-room--Mr. Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury. They
+spoke very apologetically in low tones, refusing to sit down, but
+remaining for a considerable time standing up, although the only thing
+they had to say was, "Is there anything we can do?" and there was
+nothing they could do.
+
+Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how Helen had
+said that whenever anything happened to you this was how people behaved.
+Was she right, or was she wrong? He was too little interested to frame
+an opinion of his own. He put things away in his mind, as if one of
+these days he would think about them, but not now. The mist of unreality
+had deepened and deepened until it had produced a feeling of numbness
+all over his body. Was it his body? Were those really his own hands?
+
+This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossible to sit
+alone in his room. He was very uncomfortable downstairs, and, as he
+did not know what was going on, constantly in the way; but he would not
+leave the drawing-room. Too restless to read, and having nothing to do,
+he began to pace up and down reciting poetry in an undertone. Occupied
+in various ways--now in undoing parcels, now in uncorking bottles, now
+in writing directions, the sound of Ridley's song and the beat of his
+pacing worked into the minds of Terence and St. John all the morning as
+a half comprehended refrain.
+
+     They wrestled up, they wrestled down,
+       They wrestled sore and still:
+     The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,
+       That night he had his will.
+
+     Like stags full spent, among the bent
+       They dropped awhile to rest--
+
+"Oh, it's intolerable!" Hirst exclaimed, and then checked himself, as if
+it were a breach of their agreement. Again and again Terence would creep
+half-way up the stairs in case he might be able to glean news of Rachel.
+But the only news now was of a very fragmentary kind; she had drunk
+something; she had slept a little; she seemed quieter. In the same way,
+Dr. Lesage confined himself to talking about details, save once when
+he volunteered the information that he had just been called in to
+ascertain, by severing a vein in the wrist, that an old lady of
+eighty-five was really dead. She had a horror of being buried alive.
+
+"It is a horror," he remarked, "that we generally find in the very old,
+and seldom in the young." They both expressed their interest in what he
+told them; it seemed to them very strange. Another strange thing about
+the day was that the luncheon was forgotten by all of them until it was
+late in the afternoon, and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them, and looked
+strange too, because she wore a stiff print dress, and her sleeves were
+rolled up above her elbows. She seemed as oblivious of her appearance,
+however, as if she had been called out of her bed by a midnight alarm
+of fire, and she had forgotten, too, her reserve and her composure; she
+talked to them quite familiarly as if she had nursed them and held them
+naked on her knee. She assured them over and over again that it was
+their duty to eat.
+
+The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly than they
+expected. Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but on seeing them shut it
+again quickly; once Helen came down to fetch something, but she stopped
+as she left the room to look at a letter addressed to her. She stood for
+a moment turning it over, and the extraordinary and mournful beauty
+of her attitude struck Terence in the way things struck him now--as
+something to be put away in his mind and to be thought about afterwards.
+They scarcely spoke, the argument between them seeming to be suspended
+or forgotten.
+
+Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house, Ridley paced
+up and down the terrace repeating stanzas of a long poem, in a subdued
+but suddenly sonorous voice. Fragments of the poem were wafted in at the
+open window as he passed and repassed.
+
+     Peor and Baalim
+       Forsake their Temples dim,
+     With that twice batter'd God of Palestine
+       And mooned Astaroth--
+
+The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to both the young
+men, but they had to be borne. As the evening drew on and the red
+light of the sunset glittered far away on the sea, the same sense of
+desperation attacked both Terence and St. John at the thought that the
+day was nearly over, and that another night was at hand. The appearance
+of one light after another in the town beneath them produced in Hirst a
+repetition of his terrible and disgusting desire to break down and sob.
+Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey. She explained that Maria, in
+opening a bottle, had been so foolish as to cut her arm badly, but she
+had bound it up; it was unfortunate when there was so much work to be
+done. Chailey herself limped because of the rheumatism in her feet, but
+it appeared to her mere waste of time to take any notice of the unruly
+flesh of servants. The evening went on. Dr. Lesage arrived unexpectedly,
+and stayed upstairs a very long time. He came down once and drank a cup
+of coffee.
+
+"She is very ill," he said in answer to Ridley's question. All the
+annoyance had by this time left his manner, he was grave and formal, but
+at the same time it was full of consideration, which had not marked
+it before. He went upstairs again. The three men sat together in the
+drawing-room. Ridley was quite quiet now, and his attention seemed to
+be thoroughly awakened. Save for little half-voluntary movements and
+exclamations that were stifled at once, they waited in complete silence.
+It seemed as if they were at last brought together face to face with
+something definite.
+
+It was nearly eleven o'clock when Dr. Lesage again appeared in the room.
+He approached them very slowly, and did not speak at once. He looked
+first at St. John and then at Terence, and said to Terence, "Mr. Hewet,
+I think you should go upstairs now."
+
+Terence rose immediately, leaving the others seated with Dr. Lesage
+standing motionless between them.
+
+Chailey was in the passage outside, repeating over and over again, "It's
+wicked--it's wicked."
+
+Terence paid her no attention; he heard what she was saying, but it
+conveyed no meaning to his mind. All the way upstairs he kept saying to
+himself, "This has not happened to me. It is not possible that this has
+happened to me."
+
+He looked curiously at his own hand on the banisters. The stairs were
+very steep, and it seemed to take him a long time to surmount them.
+Instead of feeling keenly, as he knew that he ought to feel, he felt
+nothing at all. When he opened the door he saw Helen sitting by the
+bedside. There were shaded lights on the table, and the room, though
+it seemed to be full of a great many things, was very tidy. There was a
+faint and not unpleasant smell of disinfectants. Helen rose and gave up
+her chair to him in silence. As they passed each other their eyes met in
+a peculiar level glance, he wondered at the extraordinary clearness of
+his eyes, and at the deep calm and sadness that dwelt in them. He sat
+down by the bedside, and a moment afterwards heard the door shut gently
+behind her. He was alone with Rachel, and a faint reflection of the
+sense of relief that they used to feel when they were left alone
+possessed him. He looked at her. He expected to find some terrible
+change in her, but there was none. She looked indeed very thin, and, as
+far as he could see, very tired, but she was the same as she had always
+been. Moreover, she saw him and knew him. She smiled at him and said,
+"Hullo, Terence."
+
+The curtain which had been drawn between them for so long vanished
+immediately.
+
+"Well, Rachel," he replied in his usual voice, upon which she opened her
+eyes quite widely and smiled with her familiar smile. He kissed her and
+took her hand.
+
+"It's been wretched without you," he said.
+
+She still looked at him and smiled, but soon a slight look of fatigue or
+perplexity came into her eyes and she shut them again.
+
+"But when we're together we're perfectly happy," he said. He continued
+to hold her hand.
+
+The light being dim, it was impossible to see any change in her face.
+An immense feeling of peace came over Terence, so that he had no wish
+to move or to speak. The terrible torture and unreality of the last days
+were over, and he had come out now into perfect certainty and peace. His
+mind began to work naturally again and with great ease. The longer he
+sat there the more profoundly was he conscious of the peace invading
+every corner of his soul. Once he held his breath and listened acutely;
+she was still breathing; he went on thinking for some time; they seemed
+to be thinking together; he seemed to be Rachel as well as himself;
+and then he listened again; no, she had ceased to breathe. So much the
+better--this was death. It was nothing; it was to cease to breathe.
+It was happiness, it was perfect happiness. They had now what they had
+always wanted to have, the union which had been impossible while they
+lived. Unconscious whether he thought the words or spoke them aloud, he
+said, "No two people have ever been so happy as we have been. No one has
+ever loved as we have loved."
+
+It seemed to him that their complete union and happiness filled the room
+with rings eddying more and more widely. He had no wish in the world
+left unfulfilled. They possessed what could never be taken from them.
+
+He was not conscious that any one had come into the room, but later,
+moments later, or hours later perhaps, he felt an arm behind him. The
+arms were round him. He did not want to have arms round him, and the
+mysterious whispering voices annoyed him. He laid Rachel's hand, which
+was now cold, upon the counterpane, and rose from his chair, and walked
+across to the window. The windows were uncurtained, and showed the moon,
+and a long silver pathway upon the surface of the waves.
+
+"Why," he said, in his ordinary tone of voice, "look at the moon.
+There's a halo round the moon. We shall have rain to-morrow."
+
+The arms, whether they were the arms of man or of woman, were round him
+again; they were pushing him gently towards the door. He turned of his
+own accord and walked steadily in advance of the arms, conscious of
+a little amusement at the strange way in which people behaved merely
+because some one was dead. He would go if they wished it, but nothing
+they could do would disturb his happiness.
+
+As he saw the passage outside the room, and the table with the cups and
+the plates, it suddenly came over him that here was a world in which he
+would never see Rachel again.
+
+"Rachel! Rachel!" he shrieked, trying to rush back to her. But they
+prevented him, and pushed him down the passage and into a bedroom far
+from her room. Downstairs they could hear the thud of his feet on the
+floor, as he struggled to break free; and twice they heard him shout,
+"Rachel, Rachel!"
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVI
+
+
+For two or three hours longer the moon poured its light through the
+empty air. Unbroken by clouds it fell straightly, and lay almost like
+a chill white frost over the sea and the earth. During these hours the
+silence was not broken, and the only movement was caused by the movement
+of trees and branches which stirred slightly, and then the shadows that
+lay across the white spaces of the land moved too. In this profound
+silence one sound only was audible, the sound of a slight but continuous
+breathing which never ceased, although it never rose and never fell. It
+continued after the birds had begun to flutter from branch to branch,
+and could be heard behind the first thin notes of their voices. It
+continued all through the hours when the east whitened, and grew red,
+and a faint blue tinged the sky, but when the sun rose it ceased, and
+gave place to other sounds.
+
+The first sounds that were heard were little inarticulate cries, the
+cries, it seemed, of children or of the very poor, of people who were
+very weak or in pain. But when the sun was above the horizon, the air
+which had been thin and pale grew every moment richer and warmer, and
+the sounds of life became bolder and more full of courage and authority.
+By degrees the smoke began to ascend in wavering breaths over the
+houses, and these slowly thickened, until they were as round and
+straight as columns, and instead of striking upon pale white blinds, the
+sun shone upon dark windows, beyond which there was depth and space.
+
+The sun had been up for many hours, and the great dome of air was warmed
+through and glittering with thin gold threads of sunlight, before any
+one moved in the hotel. White and massive it stood in the early light,
+half asleep with its blinds down.
+
+At about half-past nine Miss Allan came very slowly into the hall, and
+walked very slowly to the table where the morning papers were laid, but
+she did not put out her hand to take one; she stood still, thinking,
+with her head a little sunk upon her shoulders. She looked curiously
+old, and from the way in which she stood, a little hunched together and
+very massive, you could see what she would be like when she was really
+old, how she would sit day after day in her chair looking placidly in
+front of her. Other people began to come into the room, and to pass her,
+but she did not speak to any of them or even look at them, and at last,
+as if it were necessary to do something, she sat down in a chair, and
+looked quietly and fixedly in front of her. She felt very old this
+morning, and useless too, as if her life had been a failure, as if it
+had been hard and laborious to no purpose. She did not want to go on
+living, and yet she knew that she would. She was so strong that she
+would live to be a very old woman. She would probably live to be eighty,
+and as she was now fifty, that left thirty years more for her to
+live. She turned her hands over and over in her lap and looked at them
+curiously; her old hands, that had done so much work for her. There did
+not seem to be much point in it all; one went on, of course one went
+on. . . . She looked up to see Mrs. Thornbury standing beside her, with
+lines drawn upon her forehead, and her lips parted as if she were about
+to ask a question.
+
+Miss Allan anticipated her.
+
+"Yes," she said. "She died this morning, very early, about three
+o'clock."
+
+Mrs. Thornbury made a little exclamation, drew her lips together, and
+the tears rose in her eyes. Through them she looked at the hall which
+was now laid with great breadths of sunlight, and at the careless,
+casual groups of people who were standing beside the solid arm-chairs
+and tables. They looked to her unreal, or as people look who remain
+unconscious that some great explosion is about to take place beside
+them. But there was no explosion, and they went on standing by
+the chairs and the tables. Mrs. Thornbury no longer saw them, but,
+penetrating through them as though they were without substance, she saw
+the house, the people in the house, the room, the bed in the room, and
+the figure of the dead lying still in the dark beneath the sheets.
+She could almost see the dead. She could almost hear the voices of the
+mourners.
+
+"They expected it?" she asked at length.
+
+Miss Allan could only shake her head.
+
+"I know nothing," she replied, "except what Mrs. Flushing's maid told
+me. She died early this morning."
+
+The two women looked at each other with a quiet significant gaze, and
+then, feeling oddly dazed, and seeking she did not know exactly what,
+Mrs. Thornbury went slowly upstairs and walked quietly along the
+passages, touching the wall with her fingers as if to guide herself.
+Housemaids were passing briskly from room to room, but Mrs. Thornbury
+avoided them; she hardly saw them; they seemed to her to be in another
+world. She did not even look up directly when Evelyn stopped her. It
+was evident that Evelyn had been lately in tears, and when she looked
+at Mrs. Thornbury she began to cry again. Together they drew into the
+hollow of a window, and stood there in silence. Broken words formed
+themselves at last among Evelyn's sobs. "It was wicked," she sobbed, "it
+was cruel--they were so happy."
+
+Mrs. Thornbury patted her on the shoulder.
+
+"It seems hard--very hard," she said. She paused and looked out over the
+slope of the hill at the Ambroses' villa; the windows were blazing in
+the sun, and she thought how the soul of the dead had passed from those
+windows. Something had passed from the world. It seemed to her strangely
+empty.
+
+"And yet the older one grows," she continued, her eyes regaining more
+than their usual brightness, "the more certain one becomes that there is
+a reason. How could one go on if there were no reason?" she asked.
+
+She asked the question of some one, but she did not ask it of Evelyn.
+Evelyn's sobs were becoming quieter. "There must be a reason," she said.
+"It can't only be an accident. For it was an accident--it need never
+have happened."
+
+Mrs. Thornbury sighed deeply.
+
+"But we must not let ourselves think of that," she added, "and let us
+hope that they don't either. Whatever they had done it might have been
+the same. These terrible illnesses--"
+
+"There's no reason--I don't believe there's any reason at all!" Evelyn
+broke out, pulling the blind down and letting it fly back with a little
+snap.
+
+"Why should these things happen? Why should people suffer? I honestly
+believe," she went on, lowering her voice slightly, "that Rachel's in
+Heaven, but Terence. . . ."
+
+"What's the good of it all?" she demanded.
+
+Mrs. Thornbury shook her head slightly but made no reply, and pressing
+Evelyn's hand she went on down the passage. Impelled by a strong desire
+to hear something, although she did not know exactly what there was to
+hear, she was making her way to the Flushings' room. As she opened their
+door she felt that she had interrupted some argument between husband
+and wife. Mrs. Flushing was sitting with her back to the light, and Mr.
+Flushing was standing near her, arguing and trying to persuade her of
+something.
+
+"Ah, here is Mrs. Thornbury," he began with some relief in his voice.
+"You have heard, of course. My wife feels that she was in some way
+responsible. She urged poor Miss Vinrace to come on the expedition. I'm
+sure you will agree with me that it is most unreasonable to feel that.
+We don't even know--in fact I think it most unlikely--that she caught
+her illness there. These diseases--Besides, she was set on going. She
+would have gone whether you asked her or not, Alice."
+
+"Don't, Wilfrid," said Mrs. Flushing, neither moving nor taking her eyes
+off the spot on the floor upon which they rested. "What's the use of
+talking? What's the use--?" She ceased.
+
+"I was coming to ask you," said Mrs. Thornbury, addressing Wilfrid, for
+it was useless to speak to his wife. "Is there anything you think that
+one could do? Has the father arrived? Could one go and see?"
+
+The strongest wish in her being at this moment was to be able to do
+something for the unhappy people--to see them--to assure them--to help
+them. It was dreadful to be so far away from them. But Mr. Flushing
+shook his head; he did not think that now--later perhaps one might be
+able to help. Here Mrs. Flushing rose stiffly, turned her back to them,
+and walked to the dressing-room opposite. As she walked, they could see
+her breast slowly rise and slowly fall. But her grief was silent. She
+shut the door behind her.
+
+When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists together, and began
+beating the back of a chair with them. She was like a wounded animal.
+She hated death; she was furious, outraged, indignant with death, as
+if it were a living creature. She refused to relinquish her friends to
+death. She would not submit to dark and nothingness. She began to pace
+up and down, clenching her hands, and making no attempt to stop the
+quick tears which raced down her cheeks. She sat still at last, but she
+did not submit. She looked stubborn and strong when she had ceased to
+cry.
+
+In the next room, meanwhile, Wilfrid was talking to Mrs. Thornbury with
+greater freedom now that his wife was not sitting there.
+
+"That's the worst of these places," he said. "People will behave as
+though they were in England, and they're not. I've no doubt myself that
+Miss Vinrace caught the infection up at the villa itself. She probably
+ran risks a dozen times a day that might have given her the illness.
+It's absurd to say she caught it with us."
+
+If he had not been sincerely sorry for them he would have been annoyed.
+"Pepper tells me," he continued, "that he left the house because he
+thought them so careless. He says they never washed their vegetables
+properly. Poor people! It's a fearful price to pay. But it's only what
+I've seen over and over again--people seem to forget that these things
+happen, and then they do happen, and they're surprised."
+
+Mrs. Thornbury agreed with him that they had been very careless, and
+that there was no reason whatever to think that she had caught the fever
+on the expedition; and after talking about other things for a short
+time, she left him and went sadly along the passage to her own room.
+There must be some reason why such things happen, she thought to
+herself, as she shut the door. Only at first it was not easy to
+understand what it was. It seemed so strange--so unbelievable. Why, only
+three weeks ago--only a fortnight ago, she had seen Rachel; when she
+shut her eyes she could almost see her now, the quiet, shy girl who was
+going to be married. She thought of all that she would have missed
+had she died at Rachel's age, the children, the married life, the
+unimaginable depths and miracles that seemed to her, as she looked back,
+to have lain about her, day after day, and year after year. The stunned
+feeling, which had been making it difficult for her to think, gradually
+gave way to a feeling of the opposite nature; she thought very quickly
+and very clearly, and, looking back over all her experiences, tried to
+fit them into a kind of order. There was undoubtedly much suffering,
+much struggling, but, on the whole, surely there was a balance of
+happiness--surely order did prevail. Nor were the deaths of young people
+really the saddest things in life--they were saved so much; they kept
+so much. The dead--she called to mind those who had died early,
+accidentally--were beautiful; she often dreamt of the dead. And in
+time Terence himself would come to feel--She got up and began to wander
+restlessly about the room.
+
+For an old woman of her age she was very restless, and for one of her
+clear, quick mind she was unusually perplexed. She could not settle to
+anything, so that she was relieved when the door opened. She went up
+to her husband, took him in her arms, and kissed him with unusual
+intensity, and then as they sat down together she began to pat him and
+question him as if he were a baby, an old, tired, querulous baby. She
+did not tell him about Miss Vinrace's death, for that would only disturb
+him, and he was put out already. She tried to discover why he was
+uneasy. Politics again? What were those horrid people doing? She spent
+the whole morning in discussing politics with her husband, and by
+degrees she became deeply interested in what they were saying. But every
+now and then what she was saying seemed to her oddly empty of meaning.
+
+At luncheon it was remarked by several people that the visitors at the
+hotel were beginning to leave; there were fewer every day. There were
+only forty people at luncheon, instead of the sixty that there had been.
+So old Mrs. Paley computed, gazing about her with her faded eyes, as
+she took her seat at her own table in the window. Her party generally
+consisted of Mr. Perrott as well as Arthur and Susan, and to-day Evelyn
+was lunching with them also.
+
+She was unusually subdued. Having noticed that her eyes were red, and
+guessing the reason, the others took pains to keep up an elaborate
+conversation between themselves. She suffered it to go on for a
+few minutes, leaning both elbows on the table, and leaving her soup
+untouched, when she exclaimed suddenly, "I don't know how you feel, but
+I can simply think of nothing else!"
+
+The gentlemen murmured sympathetically, and looked grave.
+
+Susan replied, "Yes--isn't it perfectly awful? When you think what
+a nice girl she was--only just engaged, and this need never have
+happened--it seems too tragic." She looked at Arthur as though he might
+be able to help her with something more suitable.
+
+"Hard lines," said Arthur briefly. "But it was a foolish thing to do--to
+go up that river." He shook his head. "They should have known better.
+You can't expect Englishwomen to stand roughing it as the natives do
+who've been acclimatised. I'd half a mind to warn them at tea that
+day when it was being discussed. But it's no good saying these sort of
+things--it only puts people's backs up--it never makes any difference."
+
+Old Mrs. Paley, hitherto contented with her soup, here intimated, by
+raising one hand to her ear, that she wished to know what was being
+said.
+
+"You heard, Aunt Emma, that poor Miss Vinrace has died of the fever,"
+Susan informed her gently. She could not speak of death loudly or even
+in her usual voice, so that Mrs. Paley did not catch a word. Arthur came
+to the rescue.
+
+"Miss Vinrace is dead," he said very distinctly.
+
+Mrs. Paley merely bent a little towards him and asked, "Eh?"
+
+"Miss Vinrace is dead," he repeated. It was only by stiffening all the
+muscles round his mouth that he could prevent himself from bursting
+into laughter, and forced himself to repeat for the third time, "Miss
+Vinrace. . . . She's dead."
+
+Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that were
+outside her daily experience took some time to reach Mrs. Paley's
+consciousness. A weight seemed to rest upon her brain, impeding, though
+not damaging its action. She sat vague-eyed for at least a minute before
+she realised what Arthur meant.
+
+"Dead?" she said vaguely. "Miss Vinrace dead? Dear me . . . that's very
+sad. But I don't at the moment remember which she was. We seem to have
+made so many new acquaintances here." She looked at Susan for help. "A
+tall dark girl, who just missed being handsome, with a high colour?"
+
+"No," Susan interposed. "She was--" then she gave it up in despair.
+There was no use in explaining that Mrs. Paley was thinking of the wrong
+person.
+
+"She ought not to have died," Mrs. Paley continued. "She looked so
+strong. But people will drink the water. I can never make out why. It
+seems such a simple thing to tell them to put a bottle of Seltzer water
+in your bedroom. That's all the precaution I've ever taken, and I've
+been in every part of the world, I may say--Italy a dozen times over.
+. . . But young people always think they know better, and then they pay
+the penalty. Poor thing--I am very sorry for her." But the difficulty
+of peering into a dish of potatoes and helping herself engrossed her
+attention.
+
+Arthur and Susan both secretly hoped that the subject was now disposed
+of, for there seemed to them something unpleasant in this discussion.
+But Evelyn was not ready to let it drop. Why would people never talk
+about the things that mattered?
+
+"I don't believe you care a bit!" she said, turning savagely upon Mr.
+Perrott, who had sat all this time in silence.
+
+"I? Oh, yes, I do," he answered awkwardly, but with obvious sincerity.
+Evelyn's questions made him too feel uncomfortable.
+
+"It seems so inexplicable," Evelyn continued. "Death, I mean. Why should
+she be dead, and not you or I? It was only a fortnight ago that she
+was here with the rest of us. What d'you believe?" she demanded of
+mr. Perrott. "D'you believe that things go on, that she's still
+somewhere--or d'you think it's simply a game--we crumble up to nothing
+when we die? I'm positive Rachel's not dead."
+
+Mr. Perrott would have said almost anything that Evelyn wanted him to
+say, but to assert that he believed in the immortality of the soul
+was not in his power. He sat silent, more deeply wrinkled than usual,
+crumbling his bread.
+
+Lest Evelyn should next ask him what he believed, Arthur, after making a
+pause equivalent to a full stop, started a completely different topic.
+
+"Supposing," he said, "a man were to write and tell you that he wanted
+five pounds because he had known your grandfather, what would you do? It
+was this way. My grandfather--"
+
+"Invented a stove," said Evelyn. "I know all about that. We had one in
+the conservatory to keep the plants warm."
+
+"Didn't know I was so famous," said Arthur. "Well," he continued,
+determined at all costs to spin his story out at length, "the old chap,
+being about the second best inventor of his day, and a capable lawyer
+too, died, as they always do, without making a will. Now Fielding, his
+clerk, with how much justice I don't know, always claimed that he meant
+to do something for him. The poor old boy's come down in the world
+through trying inventions on his own account, lives in Penge over a
+tobacconist's shop. I've been to see him there. The question is--must
+I stump up or not? What does the abstract spirit of justice require,
+Perrott? Remember, I didn't benefit under my grandfather's will, and
+I've no way of testing the truth of the story."
+
+"I don't know much about the abstract spirit of justice," said Susan,
+smiling complacently at the others, "but I'm certain of one thing--he'll
+get his five pounds!"
+
+As Mr. Perrott proceeded to deliver an opinion, and Evelyn insisted that
+he was much too stingy, like all lawyers, thinking of the letter and not
+of the spirit, while Mrs. Paley required to be kept informed between
+the courses as to what they were all saying, the luncheon passed with no
+interval of silence, and Arthur congratulated himself upon the tact with
+which the discussion had been smoothed over.
+
+As they left the room it happened that Mrs. Paley's wheeled chair ran
+into the Elliots, who were coming through the door, as she was going
+out. Brought thus to a standstill for a moment, Arthur and Susan
+congratulated Hughling Elliot upon his convalescence,--he was down,
+cadaverous enough, for the first time,--and Mr. Perrott took occasion to
+say a few words in private to Evelyn.
+
+"Would there be any chance of seeing you this afternoon, about
+three-thirty say? I shall be in the garden, by the fountain."
+
+The block dissolved before Evelyn answered. But as she left them in the
+hall, she looked at him brightly and said, "Half-past three, did you
+say? That'll suit me."
+
+She ran upstairs with the feeling of spiritual exaltation and quickened
+life which the prospect of an emotional scene always aroused in her.
+That Mr. Perrott was again about to propose to her, she had no doubt,
+and she was aware that on this occasion she ought to be prepared with
+a definite answer, for she was going away in three days' time. But
+she could not bring her mind to bear upon the question. To come to a
+decision was very difficult to her, because she had a natural dislike of
+anything final and done with; she liked to go on and on--always on and
+on. She was leaving, and, therefore, she occupied herself in laying her
+clothes out side by side upon the bed. She observed that some were very
+shabby. She took the photograph of her father and mother, and, before
+she laid it away in her box, she held it for a minute in her hand.
+Rachel had looked at it. Suddenly the keen feeling of some one's
+personality, which things that they have owned or handled sometimes
+preserves, overcame her; she felt Rachel in the room with her; it was as
+if she were on a ship at sea, and the life of the day was as unreal
+as the land in the distance. But by degrees the feeling of Rachel's
+presence passed away, and she could no longer realise her, for she had
+scarcely known her. But this momentary sensation left her depressed and
+fatigued. What had she done with her life? What future was there before
+her? What was make-believe, and what was real? Were these proposals and
+intimacies and adventures real, or was the contentment which she had
+seen on the faces of Susan and Rachel more real than anything she had
+ever felt?
+
+She made herself ready to go downstairs, absentmindedly, but her fingers
+were so well trained that they did the work of preparing her almost of
+their own accord. When she was actually on the way downstairs, the blood
+began to circle through her body of its own accord too, for her mind
+felt very dull.
+
+Mr. Perrott was waiting for her. Indeed, he had gone straight into the
+garden after luncheon, and had been walking up and down the path for
+more than half an hour, in a state of acute suspense.
+
+"I'm late as usual!" she exclaimed, as she caught sight of him. "Well,
+you must forgive me; I had to pack up. . . . My word! It looks stormy!
+And that's a new steamer in the bay, isn't it?"
+
+She looked at the bay, in which a steamer was just dropping anchor, the
+smoke still hanging about it, while a swift black shudder ran through
+the waves. "One's quite forgotten what rain looks like," she added.
+
+But Mr. Perrott paid no attention to the steamer or to the weather.
+
+"Miss Murgatroyd," he began with his usual formality, "I asked you to
+come here from a very selfish motive, I fear. I do not think you need to
+be assured once more of my feelings; but, as you are leaving so soon, I
+felt that I could not let you go without asking you to tell me--have I
+any reason to hope that you will ever come to care for me?"
+
+He was very pale, and seemed unable to say any more.
+
+The little gush of vitality which had come into Evelyn as she ran
+downstairs had left her, and she felt herself impotent. There was
+nothing for her to say; she felt nothing. Now that he was actually
+asking her, in his elderly gentle words, to marry him, she felt less for
+him than she had ever felt before.
+
+"Let's sit down and talk it over," she said rather unsteadily.
+
+Mr. Perrott followed her to a curved green seat under a tree. They
+looked at the fountain in front of them, which had long ceased to play.
+Evelyn kept looking at the fountain instead of thinking of what she was
+saying; the fountain without any water seemed to be the type of her own
+being.
+
+"Of course I care for you," she began, rushing her words out in a hurry;
+"I should be a brute if I didn't. I think you're quite one of the nicest
+people I've ever known, and one of the finest too. But I wish . . . I
+wish you didn't care for me in that way. Are you sure you do?" For the
+moment she honestly desired that he should say no.
+
+"Quite sure," said Mr. Perrott.
+
+"You see, I'm not as simple as most women," Evelyn continued. "I think I
+want more. I don't know exactly what I feel."
+
+He sat by her, watching her and refraining from speech.
+
+"I sometimes think I haven't got it in me to care very much for one
+person only. Some one else would make you a better wife. I can imagine
+you very happy with some one else."
+
+"If you think that there is any chance that you will come to care for
+me, I am quite content to wait," said Mr. Perrott.
+
+"Well--there's no hurry, is there?" said Evelyn. "Suppose I thought it
+over and wrote and told you when I get back? I'm going to Moscow; I'll
+write from Moscow."
+
+But Mr. Perrott persisted.
+
+"You cannot give me any kind of idea. I do not ask for a date . . . that
+would be most unreasonable." He paused, looking down at the gravel path.
+
+As she did not immediately answer, he went on.
+
+"I know very well that I am not--that I have not much to offer you
+either in myself or in my circumstances. And I forget; it cannot seem
+the miracle to you that it does to me. Until I met you I had gone on in
+my own quiet way--we are both very quiet people, my sister and I--quite
+content with my lot. My friendship with Arthur was the most important
+thing in my life. Now that I know you, all that has changed. You seem
+to put such a spirit into everything. Life seems to hold so many
+possibilities that I had never dreamt of."
+
+"That's splendid!" Evelyn exclaimed, grasping his hand. "Now you'll go
+back and start all kinds of things and make a great name in the world;
+and we'll go on being friends, whatever happens . . . we'll be great
+friends, won't we?"
+
+"Evelyn!" he moaned suddenly, and took her in his arms, and kissed her.
+She did not resent it, although it made little impression on her.
+
+As she sat upright again, she said, "I never see why one shouldn't go
+on being friends--though some people do. And friendships do make a
+difference, don't they? They are the kind of things that matter in one's
+life?"
+
+He looked at her with a bewildered expression as if he did not really
+understand what she was saying. With a considerable effort he collected
+himself, stood up, and said, "Now I think I have told you what I feel,
+and I will only add that I can wait as long as ever you wish."
+
+Left alone, Evelyn walked up and down the path. What did matter than?
+What was the meaning of it all?
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVII
+
+
+All that evening the clouds gathered, until they closed entirely over
+the blue of the sky. They seemed to narrow the space between earth and
+heaven, so that there was no room for the air to move in freely; and
+the waves, too, lay flat, and yet rigid, as if they were restrained. The
+leaves on the bushes and trees in the garden hung closely together,
+and the feeling of pressure and restraint was increased by the short
+chirping sounds which came from birds and insects.
+
+So strange were the lights and the silence that the busy hum of voices
+which usually filled the dining-room at meal times had distinct gaps
+in it, and during these silences the clatter of the knives upon plates
+became audible. The first roll of thunder and the first heavy drop
+striking the pane caused a little stir.
+
+"It's coming!" was said simultaneously in many different languages.
+
+There was then a profound silence, as if the thunder had withdrawn into
+itself. People had just begun to eat again, when a gust of cold air
+came through the open windows, lifting tablecloths and skirts, a light
+flashed, and was instantly followed by a clap of thunder right over the
+hotel. The rain swished with it, and immediately there were all
+those sounds of windows being shut and doors slamming violently which
+accompany a storm.
+
+The room grew suddenly several degrees darker, for the wind seemed to be
+driving waves of darkness across the earth. No one attempted to eat for
+a time, but sat looking out at the garden, with their forks in the air.
+The flashes now came frequently, lighting up faces as if they were going
+to be photographed, surprising them in tense and unnatural expressions.
+The clap followed close and violently upon them. Several women half
+rose from their chairs and then sat down again, but dinner was continued
+uneasily with eyes upon the garden. The bushes outside were ruffled and
+whitened, and the wind pressed upon them so that they seemed to stoop to
+the ground. The waiters had to press dishes upon the diners' notice;
+and the diners had to draw the attention of waiters, for they were all
+absorbed in looking at the storm. As the thunder showed no signs of
+withdrawing, but seemed massed right overhead, while the lightning aimed
+straight at the garden every time, an uneasy gloom replaced the first
+excitement.
+
+Finishing the meal very quickly, people congregated in the hall, where
+they felt more secure than in any other place because they could retreat
+far from the windows, and although they heard the thunder, they could
+not see anything. A little boy was carried away sobbing in the arms of
+his mother.
+
+While the storm continued, no one seemed inclined to sit down, but they
+collected in little groups under the central skylight, where they stood
+in a yellow atmosphere, looking upwards. Now and again their faces
+became white, as the lightning flashed, and finally a terrific crash
+came, making the panes of the skylight lift at the joints.
+
+"Ah!" several voices exclaimed at the same moment.
+
+"Something struck," said a man's voice.
+
+The rain rushed down. The rain seemed now to extinguish the lightning
+and the thunder, and the hall became almost dark.
+
+After a minute or two, when nothing was heard but the rattle of water
+upon the glass, there was a perceptible slackening of the sound, and
+then the atmosphere became lighter.
+
+"It's over," said another voice.
+
+At a touch, all the electric lights were turned on, and revealed a crowd
+of people all standing, all looking with rather strained faces up at
+the skylight, but when they saw each other in the artificial light
+they turned at once and began to move away. For some minutes the rain
+continued to rattle upon the skylight, and the thunder gave another
+shake or two; but it was evident from the clearing of the darkness and
+the light drumming of the rain upon the roof, that the great confused
+ocean of air was travelling away from them, and passing high over head
+with its clouds and its rods of fire, out to sea. The building, which
+had seemed so small in the tumult of the storm, now became as square and
+spacious as usual.
+
+As the storm drew away, the people in the hall of the hotel sat down;
+and with a comfortable sense of relief, began to tell each other stories
+about great storms, and produced in many cases their occupations for
+the evening. The chess-board was brought out, and Mr. Elliot, who wore a
+stock instead of a collar as a sign of convalescence, but was otherwise
+much as usual, challenged Mr. Pepper to a final contest. Round them
+gathered a group of ladies with pieces of needlework, or in default of
+needlework, with novels, to superintend the game, much as if they were
+in charge of two small boys playing marbles. Every now and then they
+looked at the board and made some encouraging remark to the gentlemen.
+
+Mrs. Paley just round the corner had her cards arranged in long ladders
+before her, with Susan sitting near to sympathise but not to correct,
+and the merchants and the miscellaneous people who had never been
+discovered to possess names were stretched in their arm-chairs with
+their newspapers on their knees. The conversation in these circumstances
+was very gentle, fragmentary, and intermittent, but the room was full of
+the indescribable stir of life. Every now and then the moth, which was
+now grey of wing and shiny of thorax, whizzed over their heads, and hit
+the lamps with a thud.
+
+A young woman put down her needlework and exclaimed, "Poor creature! it
+would be kinder to kill it." But nobody seemed disposed to rouse himself
+in order to kill the moth. They watched it dash from lamp to lamp,
+because they were comfortable, and had nothing to do.
+
+On the sofa, beside the chess-players, Mrs. Elliot was imparting a new
+stitch in knitting to Mrs. Thornbury, so that their heads came very near
+together, and were only to be distinguished by the old lace cap which
+Mrs. Thornbury wore in the evening. Mrs. Elliot was an expert at
+knitting, and disclaimed a compliment to that effect with evident pride.
+
+"I suppose we're all proud of something," she said, "and I'm proud of my
+knitting. I think things like that run in families. We all knit well. I
+had an uncle who knitted his own socks to the day of his death--and
+he did it better than any of his daughters, dear old gentleman. Now I
+wonder that you, Miss Allan, who use your eyes so much, don't take
+up knitting in the evenings. You'd find it such a relief, I should
+say--such a rest to the eyes--and the bazaars are so glad of things."
+Her voice dropped into the smooth half-conscious tone of the expert
+knitter; the words came gently one after another. "As much as I do I
+can always dispose of, which is a comfort, for then I feel that I am not
+wasting my time--"
+
+Miss Allan, being thus addressed, shut her novel and observed the others
+placidly for a time. At last she said, "It is surely not natural to
+leave your wife because she happens to be in love with you. But that--as
+far as I can make out--is what the gentleman in my story does."
+
+"Tut, tut, that doesn't sound good--no, that doesn't sound at all
+natural," murmured the knitters in their absorbed voices.
+
+"Still, it's the kind of book people call very clever," Miss Allan
+added.
+
+"_Maternity_--by Michael Jessop--I presume," Mr. Elliot put in, for he
+could never resist the temptation of talking while he played chess.
+
+"D'you know," said Mrs. Elliot, after a moment, "I don't think people
+_do_ write good novels now--not as good as they used to, anyhow."
+
+No one took the trouble to agree with her or to disagree with her.
+Arthur Venning who was strolling about, sometimes looking at the game,
+sometimes reading a page of a magazine, looked at Miss Allan, who was
+half asleep, and said humorously, "A penny for your thoughts, Miss
+Allan."
+
+The others looked up. They were glad that he had not spoken to them.
+But Miss Allan replied without any hesitation, "I was thinking of
+my imaginary uncle. Hasn't every one got an imaginary uncle?" she
+continued. "I have one--a most delightful old gentleman. He's always
+giving me things. Sometimes it's a gold watch; sometimes it's a carriage
+and pair; sometimes it's a beautiful little cottage in the New Forest;
+sometimes it's a ticket to the place I most want to see."
+
+She set them all thinking vaguely of the things they wanted. Mrs. Elliot
+knew exactly what she wanted; she wanted a child; and the usual little
+pucker deepened on her brow.
+
+"We're such lucky people," she said, looking at her husband. "We really
+have no wants." She was apt to say this, partly in order to convince
+herself, and partly in order to convince other people. But she was
+prevented from wondering how far she carried conviction by the entrance
+of Mr. and Mrs. Flushing, who came through the hall and stopped by the
+chess-board. Mrs. Flushing looked wilder than ever. A great strand of
+black hair looped down across her brow, her cheeks were whipped a dark
+blood red, and drops of rain made wet marks upon them.
+
+Mr. Flushing explained that they had been on the roof watching the
+storm.
+
+"It was a wonderful sight," he said. "The lightning went right out over
+the sea, and lit up the waves and the ships far away. You can't think
+how wonderful the mountains looked too, with the lights on them, and the
+great masses of shadow. It's all over now."
+
+He slid down into a chair, becoming interested in the final struggle of
+the game.
+
+"And you go back to-morrow?" said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at Mrs.
+Flushing.
+
+"Yes," she replied.
+
+"And indeed one is not sorry to go back," said Mrs. Elliot, assuming an
+air of mournful anxiety, "after all this illness."
+
+"Are you afraid of dyin'?" Mrs. Flushing demanded scornfully.
+
+"I think we are all afraid of that," said Mrs. Elliot with dignity.
+
+"I suppose we're all cowards when it comes to the point," said Mrs.
+Flushing, rubbing her cheek against the back of the chair. "I'm sure I
+am."
+
+"Not a bit of it!" said Mr. Flushing, turning round, for Mr. Pepper took
+a very long time to consider his move. "It's not cowardly to wish to
+live, Alice. It's the very reverse of cowardly. Personally, I'd like to
+go on for a hundred years--granted, of course, that I had the full use
+of my faculties. Think of all the things that are bound to happen!"
+"That is what I feel," Mrs. Thornbury rejoined. "The changes, the
+improvements, the inventions--and beauty. D'you know I feel sometimes
+that I couldn't bear to die and cease to see beautiful things about me?"
+
+"It would certainly be very dull to die before they have discovered
+whether there is life in Mars," Miss Allan added.
+
+"Do you really believe there's life in Mars?" asked Mrs. Flushing,
+turning to her for the first time with keen interest. "Who tells you
+that? Some one who knows? D'you know a man called--?"
+
+Here Mrs. Thornbury laid down her knitting, and a look of extreme
+solicitude came into her eyes.
+
+"There is Mr. Hirst," she said quietly.
+
+St. John had just come through the swing door. He was rather blown
+about by the wind, and his cheeks looked terribly pale, unshorn, and
+cavernous. After taking off his coat he was going to pass straight
+through the hall and up to his room, but he could not ignore the
+presence of so many people he knew, especially as Mrs. Thornbury rose
+and went up to him, holding out her hand. But the shock of the warm
+lamp-lit room, together with the sight of so many cheerful human beings
+sitting together at their ease, after the dark walk in the rain, and the
+long days of strain and horror, overcame him completely. He looked at
+Mrs. Thornbury and could not speak.
+
+Every one was silent. Mr. Pepper's hand stayed upon his Knight. Mrs.
+Thornbury somehow moved him to a chair, sat herself beside him, and with
+tears in her own eyes said gently, "You have done everything for your
+friend."
+
+Her action set them all talking again as if they had never stopped, and
+Mr. Pepper finished the move with his Knight.
+
+"There was nothing to be done," said St. John. He spoke very slowly. "It
+seems impossible--"
+
+He drew his hand across his eyes as if some dream came between him and
+the others and prevented him from seeing where he was.
+
+"And that poor fellow," said Mrs. Thornbury, the tears falling again
+down her cheeks.
+
+"Impossible," St. John repeated.
+
+"Did he have the consolation of knowing--?" Mrs. Thornbury began very
+tentatively.
+
+But St. John made no reply. He lay back in his chair, half-seeing the
+others, half-hearing what they said. He was terribly tired, and the
+light and warmth, the movements of the hands, and the soft communicative
+voices soothed him; they gave him a strange sense of quiet and relief.
+As he sat there, motionless, this feeling of relief became a feeling
+of profound happiness. Without any sense of disloyalty to Terence and
+Rachel he ceased to think about either of them. The movements and the
+voices seemed to draw together from different parts of the room, and to
+combine themselves into a pattern before his eyes; he was content to sit
+silently watching the pattern build itself up, looking at what he hardly
+saw.
+
+The game was really a good one, and Mr. Pepper and Mr. Elliot were
+becoming more and more set upon the struggle. Mrs. Thornbury, seeing
+that St. John did not wish to talk, resumed her knitting.
+
+"Lightning again!" Mrs. Flushing suddenly exclaimed. A yellow light
+flashed across the blue window, and for a second they saw the green
+trees outside. She strode to the door, pushed it open, and stood half
+out in the open air.
+
+But the light was only the reflection of the storm which was over. The
+rain had ceased, the heavy clouds were blown away, and the air was thin
+and clear, although vapourish mists were being driven swiftly across the
+moon. The sky was once more a deep and solemn blue, and the shape of the
+earth was visible at the bottom of the air, enormous, dark, and solid,
+rising into the tapering mass of the mountain, and pricked here and
+there on the slopes by the tiny lights of villas. The driving air, the
+drone of the trees, and the flashing light which now and again spread a
+broad illumination over the earth filled Mrs. Flushing with exultation.
+Her breasts rose and fell.
+
+"Splendid! Splendid!" she muttered to herself. Then she turned back into
+the hall and exclaimed in a peremptory voice, "Come outside and see,
+Wilfrid; it's wonderful."
+
+Some half-stirred; some rose; some dropped their balls of wool and began
+to stoop to look for them.
+
+"To bed--to bed," said Miss Allan.
+
+"It was the move with your Queen that gave it away, Pepper," exclaimed
+Mr. Elliot triumphantly, sweeping the pieces together and standing up.
+He had won the game.
+
+"What? Pepper beaten at last? I congratulate you!" said Arthur Venning,
+who was wheeling old Mrs. Paley to bed.
+
+All these voices sounded gratefully in St. John's ears as he lay
+half-asleep, and yet vividly conscious of everything around him. Across
+his eyes passed a procession of objects, black and indistinct, the
+figures of people picking up their books, their cards, their balls of
+wool, their work-baskets, and passing him one after another on their way
+to bed.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Voyage Out, by Virginia Woolf
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+
+
+
+
+
+THE VOYAGE OUT
+(1915)
+
+
+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 wheezing for some minutes like an old
+man preparing to cough, now struck nine.  The sound slightly
+disturbed certain somnolent merchants, government officials,
+and men of independent means who were lying back in their chairs,
+chatting, smoking, ruminating about their affairs, with their eyes
+half shut; they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and then
+closed them again.  They had the appearance of crocodiles so fully
+gorged by their last meal that the future of the world gives them
+no anxiety whatever.  The only disturbance in the placid bright
+room was caused by a large moth which shot from light to light,
+whizzing over elaborate heads of hair, and causing several young women
+to raise their hands nervously and exclaim, "Some one ought to kill it!"
+
+Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not spoken
+for a long time.
+
+When the clock struck, Hirst said:
+
+"Ah, the creatures begin to stir.  . . ." He watched them
+raise themselves, look about them, and settle down again. 
+"What I abhor most of all," he concluded, "is the female breast. 
+Imagine being Venning and having to get into bed with Susan! 
+But the really repulsive thing is that they feel nothing at all--
+about what I do when I have a hot bath.  They're gross, they're absurd,
+they're utterly intolerable!"
+
+So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded to think
+about himself, about science, about Cambridge, about the Bar,
+about Helen and what she thought of him, until, being very tired,
+he was nodding off to sleep.
+
+Suddenly Hewet woke him up.
+
+"How d'you know what you feel, Hirst?"
+
+"Are you in love?" asked Hirst.  He put in his eyeglass.
+
+"Don't be a fool," said Hewet.
+
+"Well, I'll sit down and think about it," said Hirst.  "One really
+ought to.  If these people would only think about things,
+the world would be a far better place for us all to live in. 
+Are you trying to think?"
+
+That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour,
+but he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.
+
+"I shall go for a walk," he said.
+
+"Remember we weren't in bed last night," said Hirst with a prodigious yawn.
+
+Hewet rose and stretched himself.
+
+"I want to go and get a breath of air," he said.
+
+An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and forbidding
+him to settle into any one train of thought.  It was precisely as if he
+had been in the middle of a talk which interested him profoundly when
+some one came up and interrupted him.  He could not finish the talk,
+and the longer he sat there the more he wanted to finish it. 
+As the talk that had been interrupted was a talk with Rachel,
+he had to ask himself why he felt this, and why he wanted to go on
+talking to her.  Hirst would merely say that he was in love with her. 
+But he was not in love with her.  Did love begin in that way,
+with the wish to go on talking?  No. It always began in his case with
+definite physical sensations, and these were now absent, he did not
+even find her physically attractive.  There was something, of course,
+unusual about her--she was young, inexperienced, and inquisitive,
+they had been more open with each other than was usually possible. 
+He always found girls interesting to talk to, and surely these
+were good reasons why he should wish to go on talking to her;
+and last night, what with the crowd and the confusion, he had
+only been able to begin to talk to her.  What was she doing now? 
+Lying on a sofa and looking at the ceiling, perhaps.  He could
+imagine her doing that, and Helen in an arm-chair, with her hands
+on the arm of it, so--looking ahead of her, with her great big eyes--
+oh no, they'd be talking, of course, about the dance.  But suppose
+Rachel was going away in a day or two, suppose this was the end
+of her visit, and her father had arrived in one of the steamers
+anchored in the bay,--it was intolerable to know so little. 
+Therefore he exclaimed, "How d'you know what you feel, Hirst?" to stop
+himself from thinking.
+
+But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their aimless
+movements and their unknown lives were disturbing, so that he longed
+for the empty darkness.  The first thing he looked for when he stepped
+out of the hall door was the light of the Ambroses' villa.  When he
+had definitely decided that a certain light apart from the others
+higher up the hill was their light, he was considerably reassured. 
+There seemed to be at once a little stability in all this incoherence. 
+Without any definite plan in his head, he took the turning to the right
+and walked through the town and came to the wall by the meeting
+of the roads, where he stopped.  The booming of the sea was audible. 
+The dark-blue mass of the mountains rose against the paler blue
+of the sky.  There was no moon, but myriads of stars, and lights
+were anchored up and down in the dark waves of earth all round him. 
+He had meant to go back, but the single light of the Ambroses'
+villa had now become three separate lights, and he was tempted to go on. 
+He might as well make sure that Rachel was still there.  Walking fast,
+he soon stood by the iron gate of their garden, and pushed it open;
+the outline of the house suddenly appeared sharply before his eyes,
+and the thin column of the verandah cutting across the palely lit
+gravel of the terrace.  He hesitated.  At the back of the house
+some one was rattling cans.  He approached the front; the light on
+the terrace showed him that the sitting-rooms were on that side. 
+He stood as near the light as he could by the corner of the house,
+the leaves of a creeper brushing his face.  After a moment he could
+hear a voice.  The voice went on steadily; it was not talking,
+but from the continuity of the sound it was a voice reading aloud. 
+He crept a little closer; he crumpled the leaves together so as to
+stop their rustling about his ears.  It might be Rachel's voice. 
+He left the shadow and stepped into the radius of the light, and then
+heard a sentence spoken quite distinctly.
+
+"And there we lived from the year 1860 to 1895, the happiest years
+of my parents' lives, and there in 1862 my brother Maurice was born,
+to the delight of his parents, as he was destined to be the delight
+of all who knew him."
+
+The voice quickened, and the tone became conclusive rising slightly
+in pitch, as if these words were at the end of the chapter. 
+Hewet drew back again into the shadow.  There was a long silence. 
+He could just hear chairs being moved inside.  He had almost decided
+to go back, when suddenly two figures appeared at the window, not six
+feet from him.
+
+"It was Maurice Fielding, of course, that your mother was engaged to,"
+said Helen's voice.  She spoke reflectively, looking out into
+the dark garden, and thinking evidently as much of the look
+of the night as of what she was saying.
+
+"Mother?" said Rachel.  Hewet's heart leapt, and he noticed the fact. 
+Her voice, though low, was full of surprise.
+
+"You didn't know that?" said Helen.
+
+"I never knew there'd been any one else," said Rachel.  She was
+clearly surprised, but all they said was said low and inexpressively,
+because they were speaking out into the cool dark night.
+
+"More people were in love with her than with any one I've ever known,"
+Helen stated.  She had that power--she enjoyed things.  She wasn't
+beautiful, but--I was thinking of her last night at the dance. 
+She got on with every kind of person, and then she made it all
+so amazingly--funny."
+
+It appeared that Helen was going back into the past, choosing her
+words deliberately, comparing Theresa with the people she had known
+since Theresa died.
+
+"I don't know how she did it," she continued, and ceased, and there
+was a long pause, in which a little owl called first here, then there,
+as it moved from tree to tree in the garden.
+
+"That's so like Aunt Lucy and Aunt Katie," said Rachel at last. 
+"They always make out that she was very sad and very good."
+
+"Then why, for goodness' sake, did they do nothing but criticize her
+when she was alive?" said Helen.  Very gentle their voices sounded,
+as if they fell through the waves of the sea.
+
+"If I were to die to-morrow . . ." she began.
+
+The broken sentences had an extraordinary beauty and detachment
+in Hewet's ears, and a kind of mystery too, as though they were
+spoken by people in their sleep.
+
+"No, Rachel," Helen's voice continued, "I'm not going to walk
+in the garden; it's damp--it's sure to be damp; besides, I see
+at least a dozen toads."
+
+"Toads?  Those are stones, Helen.  Come out.  It's nicer out. 
+The flowers smell," Rachel replied.
+
+Hewet drew still farther back.  His heart was beating very quickly. 
+Apparently Rachel tried to pull Helen out on to the terrace,
+and helen resisted.  There was a certain amount of scuffling,
+entreating, resisting, and laughter from both of them.  Then a man's
+form appeared.  Hewet could not hear what they were all saying. 
+In a minute they had gone in; he could hear bolts grating then;
+there was dead silence, and all the lights went out.
+
+He turned away, still crumpling and uncrumpling a handful of leaves
+which he had torn from the wall.  An exquisite sense of pleasure
+and relief possessed him; it was all so solid and peaceful after
+the ball at the hotel, whether he was in love with them or not,
+and he was not in love with them; no, but it was good that they
+should be alive.
+
+After standing still for a minute or two he turned and began to walk
+towards the gate.  With the movement of his body, the excitement,
+the romance and the richness of life crowded into his brain. 
+He shouted out a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he
+stumbled among lines and fragments of lines which had no meaning
+at all except for the beauty of the words.  He shut the gate,
+and ran swinging from side to side down the hill, shouting any
+nonsense that came into his head.  "Here am I," he cried rhythmically,
+as his feet pounded to the left and to the right, "plunging along,
+like an elephant in the jungle, stripping the branches as I go
+(he snatched at the twigs of a bush at the roadside), roaring
+innumerable words, lovely words about innumerable things, running
+downhill and talking nonsense aloud to myself about roads and leaves
+and lights and women coming out into the darkness--about women--
+about Rachel, about Rachel."  He stopped and drew a deep breath. 
+The night seemed immense and hospitable, and although so dark there
+seemed to be things moving down there in the harbour and movement out
+at sea.  He gazed until the darkness numbed him, and then he walked
+on quickly, still murmuring to himself.  "And I ought to be in bed,
+snoring and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming.  Dreams and realities,
+dreams and realities, dreams and realities," he repeated all the way
+up the avenue, scarcely knowing what he said, until he reached
+the front door.  Here he paused for a second, and collected himself
+before he opened the door.
+
+His eyes were dazed, his hands very cold, and his brain excited
+and yet half asleep.  Inside the door everything was as he had left
+it except that the hall was now empty.  There were the chairs turning
+in towards each other where people had sat talking, and the empty
+glasses on little tables, and the newspapers scattered on the floor. 
+As he shut the door he felt as if he were enclosed in a square box,
+and instantly shrivelled up.  It was all very bright and very small. 
+He stopped for a minute by the long table to find a paper which he
+had meant to read, but he was still too much under the influence
+of the dark and the fresh air to consider carefully which paper it
+was or where he had seen it.
+
+As he fumbled vaguely among the papers he saw a figure cross the tail
+of his eye, coming downstairs.  He heard the swishing sound of skirts,
+and to his great surprise, Evelyn M. came up to him, laid her hand
+on the table as if to prevent him from taking up a paper, and said:
+
+"You're just the person I wanted to talk to."  Her voice was
+a little unpleasant and metallic, her eyes were very bright,
+and she kept them fixed upon him.
+
+"To talk to me?" he repeated.  "But I'm half asleep."
+
+"But I think you understand better than most people," she answered,
+and sat down on a little chair placed beside a big leather chair
+so that Hewet had to sit down beside her.
+
+"Well?" he said.  He yawned openly, and lit a cigarette. 
+He could not believe that this was really happening to him. 
+"What is it?"
+
+"Are you really sympathetic, or is it just a pose?" she demanded.
+
+"It's for you to say," he replied.  "I'm interested, I think." 
+He still felt numb all over and as if she was much too close
+to him.
+
+"Any one can be interested!" she cried impatiently.  "Your friend
+Mr. Hirst's interested, I daresay.  however, I do believe in you. 
+You look as if you'd got a nice sister, somehow."  She paused,
+picking at some sequins on her knees, and then, as if she had made up
+her mind, she started off, "Anyhow, I'm going to ask your advice. 
+D'you ever get into a state where you don't know your own mind? 
+That's the state I'm in now.  You see, last night at the dance
+Raymond Oliver,--he's the tall dark boy who looks as if he had Indian
+blood in him, but he says he's not really,--well, we were sitting
+out together, and he told me all about himself, how unhappy he is
+at home, and how he hates being out here.  They've put him into some
+beastly mining business.  He says it's beastly--I should like it,
+I know, but that's neither here nor there.  And I felt awfully sorry
+for him, one couldn't help being sorry for him, and when he asked me
+to let him kiss me, I did.  I don't see any harm in that, do you? 
+And then this morning he said he'd thought I meant something more,
+and I wasn't the sort to let any one kiss me.  And we talked
+and talked.  I daresay I was very silly, but one can't help liking
+people when one's sorry for them.  I do like him most awfully--"
+She paused.  "So I gave him half a promise, and then, you see,
+there's Alfred Perrott."
+
+"Oh, Perrott," said Hewet.
+
+"We got to know each other on that picnic the other day," she continued. 
+"He seemed so lonely, especially as Arthur had gone off with Susan,
+and one couldn't help guessing what was in his mind.  So we had quite
+a long talk when you were looking at the ruins, and he told me all
+about his life, and his struggles, and how fearfully hard it had been. 
+D'you know, he was a boy in a grocer's shop and took parcels to
+people's houses in a basket?  That interested me awfully, because I
+always say it doesn't matter how you're born if you've got the right
+stuff in you.  And he told me about his sister who's paralysed,
+poor girl, and one can see she's a great trial, though he's evidently
+very devoted to her.  I must say I do admire people like that! 
+I don't expect you do because you're so clever.  Well, last night
+we sat out in the garden together, and I couldn't help seeing
+what he wanted to say, and comforting him a little, and telling
+him I did care--I really do--only, then, there's Raymond Oliver. 
+What I want you to tell me is, can one be in love with two people
+at once, or can't one?"
+
+She became silent, and sat with her chin on her hands, looking very intent,
+as if she were facing a real problem which had to be discussed between them.
+
+"I think it depends what sort of person you are," said Hewet. 
+He looked at her.  She was small and pretty, aged perhaps
+twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but though dashing and sharply cut,
+her features expressed nothing very clearly, except a great deal
+of spirit and good health.
+
+"Who are you, what are you; you see, I know nothing about you,"
+he continued.
+
+"Well, I was coming to that," said Evelyn M. She continued to
+rest her chin on her hands and to look intently ahead of her. 
+"I'm the daughter of a mother and no father, if that interests you,"
+she said.  "It's not a very nice thing to be.  It's what often happens
+in the country.  She was a farmer's daughter, and he was rather a swell--
+the young man up at the great house.  He never made things straight--
+never married her--though he allowed us quite a lot of money. 
+His people wouldn't let him.  Poor father!  I can't help liking him. 
+Mother wasn't the sort of woman who could keep him straight, anyhow. 
+He was killed in the war.  I believe his men worshipped him. 
+They say great big troopers broke down and cried over his body
+on the battlefield.  I wish I'd known him.  Mother had all the
+life crushed out of her.  The world--" She clenched her fist. 
+"Oh, people can be horrid to a woman like that!"  She turned
+upon Hewet.
+
+"Well," she said, "d'you want to know any more about me?"
+
+"But you?" he asked, "Who looked after you?"
+
+"I've looked after myself mostly," she laughed.  "I've had
+splendid friends.  I do like people!  That's the trouble. 
+What would you do if you liked two people, both of them tremendously,
+and you couldn't tell which most?"
+
+"I should go on liking them--I should wait and see.  Why not?"
+
+"But one has to make up one's mind," said Evelyn.  "Or are you
+one of the people who doesn't believe in marriages and all that? 
+Look here--this isn't fair, I do all the telling, and you tell nothing. 
+Perhaps you're the same as your friend"--she looked at him suspiciously;
+"perhaps you don't like me?"
+
+"I don't know you," said Hewet.
+
+"I know when I like a person directly I see them!  I knew I liked you
+the very first night at dinner.  Oh dear," she continued impatiently,
+"what a lot of bother would be saved if only people would say the
+things they think straight out!  I'm made like that.  I can't help it."
+
+"But don't you find it leads to difficulties?"  Hewet asked.
+
+"That's men's fault," she answered.  "They always drag it in-love,
+I mean."
+
+"And so you've gone on having one proposal after another,"
+said Hewet.
+
+"I don't suppose I've had more proposals than most women,"
+said Evelyn, but she spoke without conviction.
+
+"Five, six, ten?"  Hewet ventured.
+
+Evelyn seemed to intimate that perhaps ten was the right figure,
+but that it really was not a high one.
+
+"I believe you're thinking me a heartless flirt," she protested. 
+"But I don't care if you are.  I don't care what any one thinks of me. 
+Just because one's interested and likes to be friends with men,
+and talk to them as one talks to women, one's called a flirt."
+
+"But Miss Murgatroyd--"
+
+"I wish you'd call me Evelyn," she interrupted.
+
+"After ten proposals do you honestly think that men are the same
+as women?"
+
+"Honestly, honestly,--how I hate that word!  It's always used by prigs,"
+cried Evelyn.  "Honestly I think they ought to be.  That's what's
+so disappointing.  Every time one thinks it's not going to happen,
+and every time it does."
+
+"The pursuit of Friendship," said Hewet.  "The title of a comedy."
+
+"You're horrid," she cried.  "You don't care a bit really. 
+You might be Mr. Hirst."
+
+"Well," said Hewet, "let's consider.  Let us consider--" He paused,
+because for the moment he could not remember what it was that they
+had to consider.  He was far more interested in her than in her story,
+for as she went on speaking his numbness had disappeared,
+and he was conscious of a mixture of liking, pity, and distrust. 
+"You've promised to marry both Oliver and Perrott?" he concluded.
+
+"Not exactly promised," said Evelyn.  "I can't make up my mind which I
+really like best.  Oh how I detest modern life!" she flung off. 
+"It must have been so much easier for the Elizabethans!  I thought
+the other day on that mountain how I'd have liked to be one of
+those colonists, to cut down trees and make laws and all that,
+instead of fooling about with all these people who think one's just
+a pretty young lady.  Though I'm not.  I really might _do_ something." 
+She reflected in silence for a minute.  Then she said:
+
+"I'm afraid right down in my heart that Alfred Perrot _won't_ do. 
+He's not strong, is he?"
+
+"Perhaps he couldn't cut down a tree," said Hewet.  "Have you
+never cared for anybody?" he asked.
+
+"I've cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them," she said. 
+"I suppose I'm too fastidious.  All my life I've wanted somebody I
+could look up to, somebody great and big and splendid.  Most men are
+so small."
+
+"What d'you mean by splendid?"  Hewet asked.  "People are--
+nothing more."
+
+Evelyn was puzzled.
+
+"We don't care for people because of their qualities,"
+he tried to explain.  "It's just them that we care for,"--
+he struck a match--"just that," he said, pointing to the flames.
+
+"I see what you mean," she said, "but I don't agree.  I do know why
+I care for people, and I think I'm hardly ever wrong.  I see at once
+what they've got in them.  Now I think you must be rather splendid;
+but not Mr. Hirst."
+
+Hewlet shook his head.
+
+"He's not nearly so unselfish, or so sympathetic, or so big,
+or so understanding," Evelyn continued.
+
+Hewet sat silent, smoking his cigarette.
+
+"I should hate cutting down trees," he remarked.
+
+"I'm not trying to flirt with you, though I suppose you think I am!" 
+Evelyn shot out.  "I'd never have come to you if I'd thought you'd
+merely think odious things of me!"  The tears came into her eyes.
+
+"Do you never flirt?" he asked.
+
+"Of course I don't," she protested.  "Haven't I told you? 
+I want friendship; I want to care for some one greater and nobler
+than I am, and if they fall in love with me it isn't my fault;
+I don't want it; I positively hate it."
+
+Hewet could see that there was very little use in going on with
+the conversation, for it was obvious that Evelyn did not wish to say
+anything in particular, but to impress upon him an image of herself,
+being, for some reason which she would not reveal, unhappy, or insecure. 
+He was very tired, and a pale waiter kept walking ostentatiously
+into the middle of the room and looking at them meaningly.
+
+"They want to shut up," he said.  "My advice is that you should tell
+Oliver and Perrott to-morrow that you've made up your mind that you don't
+mean to marry either of them.  I'm certain you don't. If you change
+your mind you can always tell them so.  They're both sensible men;
+they'll understand.  And then all this bother will be over." 
+He got up.
+
+But Evelyn did not move.  She sat looking up at him with her
+bright eager eyes, in the depths of which he thought he detected
+some disappointment, or dissatisfaction.
+
+"Good-night," he said.
+
+"There are heaps of things I want to say to you still," she said. 
+"And I'm going to, some time.  I suppose you must go to bed now?"
+
+"Yes," said Hewet.  "I'm half asleep."  He left her still sitting
+by herself in the empty hall.
+
+"Why is it that they _won't_ be honest?" he muttered to himself as he
+went upstairs.  Why was it that relations between different people
+were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words
+so dangerous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being
+was an instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed? 
+What had Evelyn really wished to say to him?  What was she feeling left
+alone in the empty hall?  The mystery of life and the unreality even
+of one's own sensations overcame him as he walked down the corridor
+which led to his room.  It was dimly lighted, but sufficiently
+for him to see a figure in a bright dressing-gown pass swiftly
+in front of him, the figure of a woman crossing from one room to another.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+
+
+Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually
+meeting in a hotel at midnight, they possess one advantage at least
+over the bonds which unite the elderly, who have lived together
+once and so must live for ever.  Slight they may be, but vivid
+and genuine, merely because the power to break them is within
+the grasp of each, and there is no reason for continuance except
+a true desire that continue they shall.  When two people have been
+married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's
+bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things
+which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem
+to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness. 
+The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this stage
+of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to
+recall with an effort whether a thing had been said or only thought,
+shared or dreamt in private.  At four o'clock in the afternoon two
+or three days later Mrs. Ambrose was standing brushing her hair,
+while her husband was in the dressing-room which opened out of her room,
+and occasionally, through the cascade of water--he was washing
+his face--she caught exclamations, "So it goes on year after year;
+I wish, I wish, I wish I could make an end of it," to which she
+paid no attention.
+
+"It's white?  Or only brown?"  Thus she herself murmured,
+examining a hair which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. 
+She pulled it out and laid it on the dressing-table. She was
+criticising her own appearance, or rather approving of it,
+standing a little way back from the glass and looking at her own
+face with superb pride and melancholy, when her husband appeared
+in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half obscured by a towel.
+
+"You often tell me I don't notice things," he remarked.
+
+"Tell me if this is a white hair, then?" she replied.  She laid
+the hair on his hand.
+
+"There's not a white hair on your head," he exclaimed.
+
+"Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt," she sighed; and bowed her head
+under his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced
+only a kiss where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife
+then proceeded to move about the room, casually murmuring.
+
+"What was that you were saying?"  Helen remarked, after an interval
+of conversation which no third person could have understood.
+
+"Rachel--you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel," he observed significantly,
+and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked at him. 
+His observations were apt to be true.
+
+"Young gentlemen don't interest themselves in young women's education
+without a motive," he remarked.
+
+"Oh, Hirst," said Helen.
+
+"Hirst and Hewet, they're all the same to me--all covered with spots,"
+he replied.  "He advises her to read Gibbon.  Did you know that?"
+
+Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior
+to her husband in powers of observation.  She merely said:
+
+"Nothing would surprise me.  Even that dreadful flying man we met
+at the dance--even Mr. Dalloway--even--"
+
+"I advise you to be circumspect," said Ridley.  "There's Willoughby,
+remember--Willoughby"; he pointed at a letter.
+
+Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her dressing-table.
+Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive, perpetually jocular,
+robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring after his daughter's
+manners and morals--hoping she wasn't a bore, and bidding them
+pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she were--
+and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion,
+and then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little
+natives who went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he
+roared English oaths at them, "popping my head out of the window
+just as I was, in my shirt sleeves.  The beggars had the sense to scatter."
+
+"If Theresa married Willoughby," she remarked, turning the page
+with a hairpin, "one doesn't see what's to prevent Rachel--"
+
+But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with
+the washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits
+of Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man,
+and yet Ridley couldn't simply point at the door and tell him to go. 
+The truth of it was, they saw too many people.  And so on and so on,
+more conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they
+were both ready to go down to tea.
+
+The first thing that caught Helen's eye as she came downstairs
+was a carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding
+on the tops of hats.  She had only time to gain the drawing-room
+before two names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid,
+and Mrs. Thornbury came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.
+
+"Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing," said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand. 
+"A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry."
+
+Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically.  She was a woman of
+forty perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust,
+though not as tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.
+
+She looked Helen straight in the face and said, "You have a charmin' house."
+
+She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you,
+and though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous
+at the same time.  Mrs. Thornbury acted as interpreter, making things
+smooth all round by a series of charming commonplace remarks.
+
+"I've taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose," she said, "to promise
+that you will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the benefit
+of your experience.  I'm sure no one here knows the country as
+well as you do.  No one takes such wonderful long walks.  No one,
+I'm sure, has your encyclopaedic knowledge upon every subject. 
+Mr. Wilfrid Flushing is a collector.  He has discovered really beautiful
+things already.  I had no notion that the peasants were so artistic--
+though of course in the past--"
+
+"Not old things--new things," interrupted Mrs. Flushing curtly. 
+"That is, if he takes my advice."
+
+The Ambroses had not lived for many years in London without knowing
+something of a good many people, by name at least, and Helen remembered
+hearing of the Flushings.  Mr. Flushing was a man who kept an old
+furniture shop; he had always said he would not marry because most
+women have red cheeks, and would not take a house because most houses
+have narrow staircases, and would not eat meat because most animals
+bleed when they are killed; and then he had married an eccentric
+aristocratic lady, who certainly was not pale, who looked as if she
+ate meat, who had forced him to do all the things he most disliked--
+and this then was the lady.  Helen looked at her with interest. 
+They had moved out into the garden, where the tea was laid under
+a tree, and Mrs. Flushing was helping herself to cherry jam. 
+She had a peculiar jerking movement of the body when she spoke,
+which caused the canary-coloured plume on her hat to jerk too. 
+Her small but finely-cut and vigorous features, together with the deep
+red of lips and cheeks, pointed to many generations of well-trained
+and well-nourished ancestors behind her.
+
+"Nothin' that's more than twenty years old interests me,"
+she continued.  "Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they stick
+'em in museums when they're only fit for burnin'."
+
+"I quite agree," Helen laughed.  "But my husband spends his life
+in digging up manuscripts which nobody wants."  She was amused
+by Ridley's expression of startled disapproval.
+
+"There's a clever man in London called John who paints ever
+so much better than the old masters," Mrs. Flushing continued. 
+"His pictures excite me--nothin' that's old excites me."
+
+"But even his pictures will become old," Mrs. Thornbury intervened.
+
+"Then I'll have 'em burnt, or I'll put it in my will," said Mrs. Flushing.
+
+"And Mrs. Flushing lived in one of the most beautiful old houses
+in England--Chillingley," Mrs. Thornbury explained to the rest
+of them.
+
+"If I'd my way I'd burn that to-morrow," Mrs. Flushing laughed. 
+She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless.
+
+"What does any sane person want with those great big houses?"
+she demanded.  "If you go downstairs after dark you're covered
+with black beetles, and the electric lights always goin' out. 
+What would you do if spiders came out of the tap when you turned
+on the hot water?" she demanded, fixing her eye on Helen.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose shrugged her shoulders with a smile.
+
+"This is what I like," said Mrs. Flushing.  She jerked her head at
+the Villa.  "A little house in a garden.  I had one once in Ireland. 
+One could lie in bed in the mornin' and pick roses outside the window
+with one's toes."
+
+"And the gardeners, weren't they surprised?"  Mrs. Thornbury enquired.
+
+"There were no gardeners," Mrs. Flushing chuckled.  "Nobody but me
+and an old woman without any teeth.  You know the poor in Ireland
+lose their teeth after they're twenty.  But you wouldn't expect
+a politician to understand that--Arthur Balfour wouldn't understand that."
+
+Ridley sighed that he never expected any one to understand anything,
+least of all politicians.
+
+"However," he concluded, "there's one advantage I find in extreme
+old age--nothing matters a hang except one's food and one's digestion. 
+All I ask is to be left alone to moulder away in solitude.  It's obvious
+that the world's going as fast as it can to--the Nethermost Pit,
+and all I can do is to sit still and consume as much of my own
+smoke as possible."  He groaned, and with a melancholy glance laid
+the jam on his bread, for he felt the atmosphere of this abrupt
+lady distinctly unsympathetic.
+
+"I always contradict my husband when he says that," said Mrs. Thornbury
+sweetly.  "You men!  Where would you be if it weren't for the women!"
+
+"Read the _Symposium_," said Ridley grimly.
+
+"_Symposium_?" cried Mrs. Flushing.  "That's Latin or Greek? 
+Tell me, is there a good translation?"
+
+"No," said Ridley.  "You will have to learn Greek."
+
+Mrs. Flushing cried, "Ah, ah, ah!  I'd rather break stones in the road. 
+I always envy the men who break stones and sit on those nice little
+heaps all day wearin' spectacles.  I'd infinitely rather break
+stones than clean out poultry runs, or feed the cows, or--"
+
+Here Rachel came up from the lower garden with a book in her hand.
+
+"What's that book?" said Ridley, when she had shaken hands.
+
+"It's Gibbon," said Rachel as she sat down.
+
+"_The_ _Decline_ _and_ _Fall_ _of_ _the_ _Roman_ _Empire_?"
+said Mrs. Thornbury.  "A very wonderful book, I know.  My dear
+father was always quoting it at us, with the result that we resolved
+never to read a line."
+
+"Gibbon the historian?" enquired Mrs. Flushing.  "I connect him
+with some of the happiest hours of my life.  We used to lie in bed
+and read Gibbon--about the massacres of the Christians, I remember--
+when we were supposed to be asleep.  It's no joke, I can tell you,
+readin' a great big book, in double columns, by a night-light,
+and the light that comes through a chink in the door.  Then there
+were the moths--tiger moths, yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. 
+Louisa, my sister, would have the window open.  I wanted it shut. 
+We fought every night of our lives over that window.  Have you ever
+seen a moth dyin' in a night-light?" she enquired.
+
+Again there was an interruption.  Hewet and Hirst appeared
+at the drawing-room window and came up to the tea-table.
+
+Rachel's heart beat hard.  She was conscious of an extraordinary
+intensity in everything, as though their presence stripped some cover
+off the surface of things; but the greetings were remarkably commonplace.
+
+"Excuse me," said Hirst, rising from his chair directly he
+had sat down.  He went into the drawing-room, and returned
+with a cushion which he placed carefully upon his seat.
+
+"Rheumatism," he remarked, as he sat down for the second time.
+
+"The result of the dance?"  Helen enquired.
+
+"Whenever I get at all run down I tend to be rheumatic," Hirst stated. 
+He bent his wrist back sharply.  "I hear little pieces of chalk
+grinding together!"
+
+Rachel looked at him.  She was amused, and yet she was respectful;
+if such a thing could be, the upper part of her face seemed to laugh,
+and the lower part to check its laughter.
+
+Hewet picked up the book that lay on the ground.
+
+"You like this?" he asked in an undertone.
+
+"No, I don't like it," she replied.  She had indeed been trying
+all the afternoon to read it, and for some reason the glory which
+she had perceived at first had faded, and, read as she would,
+she could not grasp the meaning with her mind.
+
+"It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth," she hazarded. 
+Evidently she meant Hewet alone to hear her words, but Hirst demanded,
+"What d'you mean?"
+
+She was instantly ashamed of her figure of speech, for she could
+not explain it in words of sober criticism.
+
+"Surely it's the most perfect style, so far as style goes, that's ever
+been invented," he continued.  "Every sentence is practically perfect,
+and the wit--"
+
+"Ugly in body, repulsive in mind," she thought, instead of thinking
+about Gibbon's style.  "Yes, but strong, searching, unyielding in mind." 
+She looked at his big head, a disproportionate part of which was
+occupied by the forehead, and at the direct, severe eyes.
+
+"I give you up in despair," he said.  He meant it lightly, but she
+took it seriously, and believed that her value as a human being was
+lessened because she did not happen to admire the style of Gibbon. 
+The others were talking now in a group about the native villages
+which Mrs. Flushing ought to visit.
+
+"I despair too," she said impetuously.  "How are you going to judge
+people merely by their minds?"
+
+"You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect," said St. John in his
+jaunty manner, which was always irritating because it made the person
+he talked to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest.  "'Be good,
+sweet maid'--I thought Mr. Kingsley and my Aunt were now obsolete."
+
+"One can be very nice without having read a book," she asserted. 
+Very silly and simple her words sounded, and laid her open
+to derision.
+
+"Did I ever deny it?"  Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.
+
+Most unexpectedly Mrs. Thornbury here intervened, either because it
+was her mission to keep things smooth or because she had long
+wished to speak to Mr. Hirst, feeling as she did that young men
+were her sons.
+
+"I have lived all my life with people like your Aunt, Mr. Hirst,"
+she said, leaning forward in her chair.  Her brown squirrel-like
+eyes became even brighter than usual.  "They have never heard
+of Gibbon.  They only care for their pheasants and their peasants. 
+They are great big men who look so fine on horseback, as people
+must have done, I think, in the days of the great wars.  Say what
+you like against them--they are animal, they are unintellectual;
+they don't read themselves, and they don't want others to read,
+but they are some of the finest and the kindest human beings on
+the face of the earth!  You would be surprised at some of the stories
+I could tell.  You have never guessed, perhaps, at all the romances
+that go on in the heart of the country.  There are the people, I feel,
+among whom Shakespeare will be born if he is ever born again. 
+In those old houses, up among the Downs--"
+
+"My Aunt," Hirst interrupted, "spends her life in East Lambeth
+among the degraded poor.  I only quoted my Aunt because she is
+inclined to persecute people she calls 'intellectual,' which is
+what I suspect Miss Vinrace of doing.  It's all the fashion now. 
+If you're clever it's always taken for granted that you're completely
+without sympathy, understanding, affection--all the things that
+really matter.  Oh, you Christians!  You're the most conceited,
+patronising, hypocritical set of old humbugs in the kingdom!  Of course,"
+he continued, "I'm the first to allow your country gentlemen great merits. 
+For one thing, they're probably quite frank about their passions,
+which we are not.  My father, who is a clergyman in Norfolk,
+says that there is hardly a squire in the country who does not--"
+
+"But about Gibbon?"  Hewet interrupted.  The look of nervous tension
+which had come over every face was relaxed by the interruption.
+
+"You find him monotonous, I suppose.  But you know--" He opened
+the book, and began searching for passages to read aloud, and in
+a little time he found a good one which he considered suitable. 
+But there was nothing in the world that bored Ridley more than being
+read aloud to, and he was besides scrupulously fastidious as to
+the dress and behaviour of ladies.  In the space of fifteen minutes
+he had decided against Mrs. Flushing on the ground that her orange
+plume did not suit her complexion, that she spoke too loud, that she
+crossed her legs, and finally, when he saw her accept a cigarette
+that Hewet offered her, he jumped up, exclaiming something about
+"bar parlours," and left them.  Mrs. Flushing was evidently relieved
+by his departure.  She puffed her cigarette, stuck her legs out,
+and examined Helen closely as to the character and reputation
+of their common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry.  By a series of little
+strategems she drove her to define Mrs. Parry as somewhat elderly,
+by no means beautiful, very much made up--an insolent old harridan,
+in short, whose parties were amusing because one met odd people;
+but Helen herself always pitied poor Mr. Parry, who was understood
+to be shut up downstairs with cases full of gems, while his
+wife enjoyed herself in the drawing-room. "Not that I believe
+what people say against her--although she hints, of course--"
+Upon which Mrs. Flushing cried out with delight:
+
+"She's my first cousin!  Go on--go on!"
+
+When Mrs. Flushing rose to go she was obviously delighted with
+her new acquaintances.  She made three or four different plans
+for meeting or going on an expedition, or showing Helen the things
+they had bought, on her way to the carriage.  She included them
+all in a vague but magnificent invitation.
+
+As Helen returned to the garden again, Ridley's words of warning
+came into her head, and she hesitated a moment and looked at Rachel
+sitting between Hirst and Hewet.  But she could draw no conclusions,
+for Hewet was still reading Gibbon aloud, and Rachel, for all
+the expression she had, might have been a shell, and his words
+water rubbing against her ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge
+of a rock.
+
+Hewet's voice was very pleasant.  When he reached the end
+of the period Hewet stopped, and no one volunteered any criticism.
+
+"I do adore the aristocracy!"  Hirst exclaimed after a moment's pause. 
+"They're so amazingly unscrupulous.  None of us would dare to behave
+as that woman behaves."
+
+"What I like about them," said Helen as she sat down, "is that they're
+so well put together.  Naked, Mrs. Flushing would be superb. 
+Dressed as she dresses, it's absurd, of course."
+
+"Yes," said Hirst.  A shade of depression crossed his face. 
+"I've never weighed more than ten stone in my life," he said,
+"which is ridiculous, considering my height, and I've actually
+gone down in weight since we came here.  I daresay that accounts
+for the rheumatism."  Again he jerked his wrist back sharply,
+so that Helen might hear the grinding of the chalk stones. 
+She could not help smiling.
+
+"It's no laughing matter for me, I assure you," he protested. 
+"My mother's a chronic invalid, and I'm always expecting to be
+told that I've got heart disease myself.  Rheumatism always goes
+to the heart in the end."
+
+"For goodness' sake, Hirst," Hewet protested; "one might think
+you were an old cripple of eighty.  If it comes to that, I had
+an aunt who died of cancer myself, but I put a bold face on it--"
+He rose and began tilting his chair backwards and forwards
+on its hind legs.  "Is any one here inclined for a walk?"
+he said.  "There's a magnificent walk, up behind the house. 
+You come out on to a cliff and look right down into the sea. 
+The rocks are all red; you can see them through the water. 
+The other day I saw a sight that fairly took my breath away--
+about twenty jelly-fish, semi-transparent, pink, with long streamers,
+floating on the top of the waves."
+
+"Sure they weren't mermaids?" said Hirst.  "It's much too hot
+to climb uphill."  He looked at Helen, who showed no signs of moving.
+
+"Yes, it's too hot," Helen decided.
+
+There was a short silence.
+
+"I'd like to come," said Rachel.
+
+"But she might have said that anyhow," Helen thought to herself
+as Hewet and Rachel went away together, and Helen was left alone
+with St. John, to St. John's obvious satisfaction.
+
+He may have been satisfied, but his usual difficulty in deciding
+that one subject was more deserving of notice than another prevented
+him from speaking for some time.  He sat staring intently at the head
+of a dead match, while Helen considered--so it seemed from the expression
+of her eyes--something not closely connected with the present moment.
+
+At last St. John exclaimed, "Damn!  Damn everything!  Damn everybody!"
+he added.  "At Cambridge there are people to talk to."
+
+"At Cambridge there are people to talk to," Helen echoed him,
+rhythmically and absent-mindedly. Then she woke up.  "By the way,
+have you settled what you're going to do--is it to be Cambridge or
+the Bar?"
+
+He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for Helen was
+still slightly inattentive.  She had been thinking about Rachel
+and which of the two young men she was likely to fall in love with,
+and now sitting opposite to Hirst she thought, "He's ugly. 
+It's a pity they're so ugly."
+
+She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking
+of the clever, honest, interesting young men she knew, of whom
+Hirst was a good example, and wondering whether it was necessary
+that thought and scholarship should thus maltreat their bodies,
+and should thus elevate their minds to a very high tower from which
+the human race appeared to them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.
+
+"And the future?" she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men
+becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming
+more and more like Rachel.  "Oh no," she concluded, glancing at him,
+"one wouldn't marry you.  Well, then, the future of the race
+is in the hands of Susan and Arthur; no--that's dreadful. 
+Of farm labourers; no--not of the English at all, but of Russians
+and Chinese."  This train of thought did not satisfy her, and was
+interrupted by St. John, who began again:
+
+"I wish you knew Bennett.  He's the greatest man in the world."
+
+"Bennett?" she enquired.  Becoming more at ease, St. John dropped
+the concentrated abruptness of his manner, and explained that Bennett
+was a man who lived in an old windmill six miles out of Cambridge. 
+He lived the perfect life, according to St. John, very lonely,
+very simple, caring only for the truth of things, always ready to talk,
+and extraordinarily modest, though his mind was of the greatest.
+
+"Don't you think," said St. John, when he had done describing him,
+"that kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather flimsy?  Did you
+notice at tea how poor old Hewet had to change the conversation? 
+How they were all ready to pounce upon me because they thought I
+was going to say something improper?  It wasn't anything, really. 
+If Bennett had been there he'd have said exactly what he meant to say,
+or he'd have got up and gone.  But there's something rather bad for
+the character in that--I mean if one hasn't got Bennett's character. 
+It's inclined to make one bitter.  Should you say that I was bitter?"
+
+Helen did not answer, and he continued:
+
+"Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it's a beastly thing to be. 
+But the worst of me is that I'm so envious.  I envy every one. 
+I can't endure people who do things better than I do--perfectly absurd
+things too--waiters balancing piles of plates--even Arthur,
+because Susan's in love with him.  I want people to like me,
+and they don't. It's partly my appearance, I expect," he continued,
+"though it's an absolute lie to say I've Jewish blood in me--
+as a matter of fact we've been in Norfolk, Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall,
+for three centuries at least.  It must be awfully soothing to be like you--
+every one liking one at once."
+
+"I assure you they don't," Helen laughed.
+
+"They do," said Hirst with conviction.  "In the first place,
+you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen; in the second,
+you have an exceptionally nice nature."
+
+If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his teacup
+he would have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure, partly with
+an impulse of affection towards the young man who had seemed,
+and would seem again, so ugly and so limited.  She pitied him,
+for she suspected that he suffered, and she was interested in him,
+for many of the things he said seemed to her true; she admired
+the morality of youth, and yet she felt imprisoned.  As if her
+instinct were to escape to something brightly coloured and impersonal,
+which she could hold in her hands, she went into the house and returned
+with her embroidery.  But he was not interested in her embroidery;
+he did not even look at it.
+
+"About Miss Vinrace," he began,--"oh, look here, do let's be St. John
+and Helen, and Rachel and Terence--what's she like?  Does she reason,
+does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool?"
+
+"Oh no," said Helen, with great decision.  From her observations
+at tea she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to
+educate Rachel.  She had gradually come to be interested in her niece,
+and fond of her; she disliked some things about her very much,
+she was amused by others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live
+if unformed human being, experimental, and not always fortunate
+in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a capacity
+for feeling.  Somewhere in the depths of her, too, she was bound
+to Rachel by the indestructible if inexplicable ties of sex. 
+"She seems vague, but she's a will of her own," she said, as if in
+the interval she had run through her qualities.
+
+The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being
+difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses
+into the dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in her skeins
+of silk, or, with head a little drawn back and eyes narrowed,
+considered the effect of the whole.  Thus she merely said, "Um-m-m" to
+St. John's next remark, "I shall ask her to go for a walk with me."
+
+Perhaps he resented this division of attention.  He sat silent
+watching Helen closely.
+
+"You're absolutely happy," he proclaimed at last.
+
+"Yes?"  Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.
+
+"Marriage, I suppose," said St. John.
+
+"Yes," said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.
+
+"Children?"  St. John enquired.
+
+"Yes," said Helen, sticking her needle in again.  "I don't know why
+I'm happy," she suddenly laughed, looking him full in the face. 
+There was a considerable pause.
+
+"There's an abyss between us," said St. John.  His voice sounded
+as if it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks. 
+"You're infinitely simpler than I am.  Women always are, of course. 
+That's the difficulty.  One never knows how a woman gets there. 
+Supposing all the time you're thinking, 'Oh, what a morbid
+young man!'"
+
+Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand. 
+From her position she saw his head in front of the dark pyramid
+of a magnolia-tree. With one foot raised on the rung of a chair,
+and her elbow out in the attitude for sewing, her own figure possessed
+the sublimity of a woman's of the early world, spinning the thread
+of fate--the sublimity possessed by many women of the present
+day who fall into the attitude required by scrubbing or sewing. 
+St. John looked at her.
+
+"I suppose you've never paid any a compliment in the course
+of your life," he said irrelevantly.
+
+"I spoil Ridley rather," Helen considered.
+
+"I'm going to ask you point blank--do you like me?"
+
+After a certain pause, she replied, "Yes, certainly."
+
+"Thank God!" he exclaimed.  "That's one mercy.  You see," he continued
+with emotion, "I'd rather you liked me than any one I've ever met."
+
+"What about the five philosophers?" said Helen, with a laugh,
+stitching firmly and swiftly at her canvas.  "I wish you'd
+describe them."
+
+Hirst had no particular wish to describe them, but when he began
+to consider them he found himself soothed and strengthened.  Far away
+to the other side of the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey
+medieval courts, they appeared remarkable figures, free-spoken men
+with whom one could be at ease; incomparably more subtle in emotion
+than the people here.  They gave him, certainly, what no woman
+could give him, not Helen even.  Warming at the thought of them,
+he went on to lay his case before Mrs. Ambrose.  Should he stay
+on at Cambridge or should he go to the Bar?  One day he thought
+one thing, another day another.  Helen listened attentively. 
+At last, without any preface, she pronounced her decision.
+
+"Leave Cambridge and go to the Bar," she said.  He pressed her
+for her reasons.
+
+"I think you'd enjoy London more," she said.  It did not seem
+a very subtle reason, but she appeared to think it sufficient. 
+She looked at him against the background of flowering magnolia. 
+There was something curious in the sight.  Perhaps it was that the heavy
+wax-like flowers were so smooth and inarticulate, and his face--
+he had thrown his hat away, his hair was rumpled, he held his
+eye-glasses in his hand, so that a red mark appeared on either side
+of his nose--was so worried and garrulous.  It was a beautiful bush,
+spreading very widely, and all the time she had sat there talking she
+had been noticing the patches of shade and the shape of the leaves,
+and the way the great white flowers sat in the midst of the green. 
+She had noticed it half-consciously, nevertheless the pattern had
+become part of their talk.  She laid down her sewing, and began to walk
+up and down the garden, and Hirst rose too and paced by her side. 
+He was rather disturbed, uncomfortable, and full of thought. 
+Neither of them spoke.
+
+The sun was beginning to go down, and a change had come over the mountains,
+as if they were robbed of their earthly substance, and composed merely
+of intense blue mist.  Long thin clouds of flamingo red, with edges
+like the edges of curled ostrich feathers, lay up and down the sky
+at different altitudes.  The roofs of the town seemed to have sunk
+lower than usual; the cypresses appeared very black between the roofs,
+and the roofs themselves were brown and white.  As usual in the evening,
+single cries and single bells became audible rising from beneath.
+
+St. John stopped suddenly.
+
+"Well, you must take the responsibility," he said.  "I've made up
+my mind; I shall go to the Bar."
+
+His words were very serious, almost emotional; they recalled Helen
+after a second's hesitation.
+
+"I'm sure you're right," she said warmly, and shook the hand he
+held out.  "You'll be a great man, I'm certain."
+
+Then, as if to make him look at the scene, she swept her hand round
+the immense circumference of the view.  From the sea, over the roofs
+of the town, across the crests of the mountains, over the river
+and the plain, and again across the crests of the mountains it
+swept until it reached the villa, the garden, the magnolia-tree,
+and the figures of Hirst and herself standing together, when it
+dropped to her side.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+
+
+Hewet and Rachel had long ago reached the particular place on
+the edge of the cliff where, looking down into the sea, you might
+chance on jelly-fish and dolphins.  Looking the other way, the vast
+expanse of land gave them a sensation which is given by no view,
+however extended, in England; the villages and the hills there
+having names, and the farthest horizon of hills as often as not
+dipping and showing a line of mist which is the sea; here the view
+was one of infinite sun-dried earth, earth pointed in pinnacles,
+heaped in vast barriers, earth widening and spreading away and away
+like the immense floor of the sea, earth chequered by day and by night,
+and partitioned into different lands, where famous cities were founded,
+and the races of men changed from dark savages to white civilised men,
+and back to dark savages again.  Perhaps their English blood
+made this prospect uncomfortably impersonal and hostile to them,
+for having once turned their faces that way they next turned them
+to the sea, and for the rest of the time sat looking at the sea. 
+The sea, though it was a thin and sparkling water here, which seemed
+incapable of surge or anger, eventually narrowed itself, clouded its
+pure tint with grey, and swirled through narrow channels and dashed
+in a shiver of broken waters against massive granite rocks. 
+It was this sea that flowed up to the mouth of the Thames;
+and the Thames washed the roots of the city of London.
+
+Hewet's thoughts had followed some such course as this, for the
+first thing he said as they stood on the edge of the cliff was--
+
+"I'd like to be in England!"
+
+Rachel lay down on her elbow, and parted the tall grasses which grew
+on the edge, so that she might have a clear view.  The water was
+very calm; rocking up and down at the base of the cliff, and so clear
+that one could see the red of the stones at the bottom of it. 
+So it had been at the birth of the world, and so it had remained
+ever since.  Probably no human being had ever broken that water
+with boat or with body.  Obeying some impulse, she determined to mar
+that eternity of peace, and threw the largest pebble she could find. 
+It struck the water, and the ripples spread out and out. 
+Hewet looked down too.
+
+"It's wonderful," he said, as they widened and ceased.  The freshness
+and the newness seemed to him wonderful.  He threw a pebble next. 
+There was scarcely any sound.
+
+"But England," Rachel murmured in the absorbed tone of one whose eyes
+are concentrated upon some sight.  "What d'you want with England?"
+
+"My friends chiefly," he said, "and all the things one does."
+
+He could look at Rachel without her noticing it.  She was still
+absorbed in the water and the exquisitely pleasant sensations
+which a little depth of the sea washing over rocks suggests. 
+He noticed that she was wearing a dress of deep blue colour, made of
+a soft thin cotton stuff, which clung to the shape of her body. 
+It was a body with the angles and hollows of a young woman's body
+not yet developed, but in no way distorted, and thus interesting
+and even lovable.  Raising his eyes Hewet observed her head;
+she had taken her hat off, and the face rested on her hand. 
+As she looked down into the sea, her lips were slightly parted. 
+The expression was one of childlike intentness, as if she were
+watching for a fish to swim past over the clear red rocks. 
+Nevertheless her twenty-four years of life had given her a look
+of reserve.  Her hand, which lay on the ground, the fingers curling
+slightly in, was well shaped and competent; the square-tipped
+and nervous fingers were the fingers of a musician.  With something
+like anguish Hewet realised that, far from being unattractive,
+her body was very attractive to him.  She looked up suddenly. 
+Her eyes were full of eagerness and interest.
+
+"You write novels?" she asked.
+
+For the moment he could not think what he was saying.  He was
+overcome with the desire to hold her in his arms.
+
+"Oh yes," he said.  "That is, I want to write them."
+
+She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.
+
+"Novels," she repeated.  "Why do you write novels?  You ought
+to write music.  Music, you see"--she shifted her eyes, and became
+less desirable as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain
+change upon her face--"music goes straight for things.  It says
+all there is to say at once.  With writing it seems to me there's
+so much"--she paused for an expression, and rubbed her fingers
+in the earth--"scratching on the matchbox.  Most of the time when I
+was reading Gibbon this afternoon I was horribly, oh infernally,
+damnably bored!"  She gave a shake of laughter, looking at Hewet,
+who laughed too.
+
+"_I_ shan't lend you books," he remarked.
+
+"Why is it," Rachel continued, "that I can laugh at Mr. Hirst
+to you, but not to his face?  At tea I was completely overwhelmed,
+not by his ugliness--by his mind."  She enclosed a circle in the air
+with her hands.  She realised with a great sense of comfort who
+easily she could talk to Hewet, those thorns or ragged corners
+which tear the surface of some relationships being smoothed away.
+
+"So I observed," said Hewet.  "That's a thing that never ceases
+to amaze me."  He had recovered his composure to such an extent
+that he could light and smoke a cigarette, and feeling her ease,
+became happy and easy himself.
+
+"The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women,
+have for men," he went on.  "I believe we must have the sort of power
+over you that we're said to have over horses.  They see us three times
+as big as we are or they'd never obey us.  For that very reason,
+I'm inclined to doubt that you'll ever do anything even when you
+have the vote."  He looked at her reflectively.  She appeared very
+smooth and sensitive and young.  "It'll take at least six generations
+before you're sufficiently thick-skinned to go into law courts
+and business offices.  Consider what a bully the ordinary man is,"
+he continued, "the ordinary hard-working, rather ambitious solicitor
+or man of business with a family to bring up and a certain position
+to maintain.  And then, of course, the daughters have to give way
+to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have to bully and
+shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes over again. 
+And meanwhile there are the women in the background.  . . . Do you
+really think that the vote will do you any good?"
+
+"The vote?"  Rachel repeated.  She had to visualise it as a little
+bit of paper which she dropped into a box before she understood
+his question, and looking at each other they smiled at something
+absurd in the question.
+
+"Not to me," she said.  "But I play the piano.  . . . Are men really
+like that?" she asked, returning to the question that interested her. 
+"I'm not afraid of you."  She looked at him easily.
+
+"Oh, I'm different," Hewet replied.  "I've got between six and seven
+hundred a year of my own.  And then no one takes a novelist seriously,
+thank heavens.  There's no doubt it helps to make up for the drudgery
+of a profession if a man's taken very, very seriously by every one--
+if he gets appointments, and has offices and a title, and lots
+of letters after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees. 
+I don't grudge it 'em, though sometimes it comes over me--what an
+amazing concoction!  What a miracle the masculine conception of
+life is--judges, civil servants, army, navy, Houses of Parliament,
+lord mayors--what a world we've made of it!  Look at Hirst now. 
+I assure you," he said, "not a day's passed since we came here without
+a discussion as to whether he's to stay on at Cambridge or to go
+to the Bar.  It's his career--his sacred career.  And if I've
+heard it twenty times, I'm sure his mother and sister have heard
+it five hundred times.  Can't you imagine the family conclaves,
+and the sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St. John
+must have the school-room to himself--'St. John's working,' 'St. John
+wants his tea brought to him.'  Don't you know the kind of thing? 
+No wonder that St. John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. 
+It is too.  He has to earn his living.  But St. John's sister--"
+Hewet puffed in silence.  "No one takes her seriously, poor dear. 
+She feeds the rabbits."
+
+"Yes," said Rachel.  "I've fed rabbits for twenty-four years; it seems
+odd now."  She looked meditative, and Hewet, who had been talking
+much at random and instinctively adopting the feminine point of view,
+saw that she would now talk about herself, which was what he wanted,
+for so they might come to know each other.
+
+She looked back meditatively upon her past life.
+
+"How do you spend your day?" he asked.
+
+She meditated still.  When she thought of their day it seemed
+to her it was cut into four pieces by their meals.  These divisions
+were absolutely rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate
+themselves within the four rigid bars.  Looking back at her life,
+that was what she saw.
+
+"Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight," she said.
+
+"Well," said Hewet, "what d'you do in the morning?"
+
+"I need to play the piano for hours and hours."
+
+"And after luncheon?"
+
+"Then I went shopping with one of my aunts.  Or we went to see some one,
+or we took a message; or we did something that had to be done--
+the taps might be leaking.  They visit the poor a good deal--
+old char-women with bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. 
+Or I used to walk in the park by myself.  And after tea people
+sometimes called; or in summer we sat in the garden or played croquet;
+in winter I read aloud, while they worked; after dinner I played
+the piano and they wrote letters.  If father was at home we had friends
+of his to dinner, and about once a month we went up to the play. 
+Every now and then we dined out; sometimes I went to a dance
+in London, but that was difficult because of getting back. 
+The people we saw were old family friends, and relations, but we
+didn't see many people.  There was the clergyman, Mr. Pepper,
+and the Hunts.  Father generally wanted to be quiet when he
+came home, because he works very hard at Hull.  Also my aunts aren't
+very strong.  A house takes up a lot of time if you do it properly. 
+Our servants were always bad, and so Aunt Lucy used to do a good deal
+in the kitchen, and Aunt Clara, I think, spent most of the morning
+dusting the drawing-room and going through the linen and silver. 
+Then there were the dogs.  They had to be exercised, besides being
+washed and brushed.  Now Sandy's dead, but Aunt Clara has a very
+old cockatoo that came from India.  Everything in our house,"
+she exclaimed, "comes from somewhere!  It's full of old furniture,
+not really old, Victorian, things mother's family had or father's
+family had, which they didn't like to get rid of, I suppose,
+though we've really no room for them.  It's rather a nice house,"
+she continued, "except that it's a little dingy--dull I should say." 
+She called up before her eyes a vision of the drawing-room at home;
+it was a large oblong room, with a square window opening on the garden. 
+Green plush chairs stood against the wall; there was a heavy carved
+book-case, with glass doors, and a general impression of faded
+sofa covers, large spaces of pale green, and baskets with pieces
+of wool-work dropping out of them.  Photographs from old Italian
+masterpieces hung on the walls, and views of Venetian bridges and
+Swedish waterfalls which members of the family had seen years ago. 
+There were also one or two portraits of fathers and grandmothers,
+and an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after the picture by Watts. 
+It was a room without definite character, being neither typically
+and openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor really comfortable. 
+Rachel roused herself from the contemplation of this familiar
+picture.
+
+"But this isn't very interesting for you," she said, looking up.
+
+"Good Lord!"  Hewet exclaimed.  "I've never been so much interested
+in my life."  She then realised that while she had been thinking
+of Richmond, his eyes had never left her face.  The knowledge
+of this excited her.
+
+"Go on, please go on," he urged.  "Let's imagine it's a Wednesday. 
+You're all at luncheon.  You sit there, and Aunt Lucy there,
+and Aunt Clara here"; he arranged three pebbles on the grass
+between them.
+
+"Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb," Rachel continued. 
+She fixed her gaze upon the pebbles.  "There's a very ugly yellow
+china stand in front of me, called a dumb waiter, on which are
+three dishes, one for biscuits, one for butter, and one for cheese. 
+There's a pot of ferns.  Then there's Blanche the maid, who snuffles
+because of her nose.  We talk--oh yes, it's Aunt Lucy's afternoon
+at Walworth, so we're rather quick over luncheon.  She goes off. 
+She has a purple bag, and a black notebook.  Aunt Clara has
+what they call a G.F.S. meeting in the drawing-room on Wednesday,
+so I take the dogs out.  I go up Richmond Hill, along the terrace,
+into the park.  It's the 18th of April--the same day as it is here. 
+It's spring in England.  The ground is rather damp.  However, I cross
+the road and get on to the grass and we walk along, and I sing
+as I always do when I'm alone, until we come to the open place
+where you can see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day. 
+Hampstead Church spire there, Westminster Cathedral over there,
+and factory chimneys about here.  There's generally a haze over the low
+parts of London; but it's often blue over the park when London's
+in a mist.  It's the open place that the balloons cross going over
+to Hurlingham.  They're pale yellow.  Well, then, it smells very good,
+particularly if they happen to be burning wood in the keeper's lodge
+which is there.  I could tell you now how to get from place to place,
+and exactly what trees you'd pass, and where you'd cross the roads. 
+You see, I played there when I was small.  Spring is good, but it's
+best in the autumn when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky,
+and I go back through the streets, and you can't see people properly;
+they come past very quick, you just see their faces and then
+they're gone--that's what I like--and no one knows in the least what
+you're doing--"
+
+"But you have to be back for tea, I suppose?"  Hewet checked her.
+
+"Tea?  Oh yes.  Five o'clock. Then I say what I've done, and my
+aunts say what they've done, and perhaps some one comes in: 
+Mrs. Hunt, let's suppose.  She's an old lady with a lame leg. 
+She has or she once had eight children; so we ask after them. 
+They're all over the world; so we ask where they are, and sometimes
+they're ill, or they're stationed in a cholera district, or in
+some place where it only rains once in five months.  Mrs. Hunt,"
+she said with a smile, "had a son who was hugged to death by
+a bear."
+
+Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused
+by the same things that amused her.  She was reassured.  But she
+thought it necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.
+
+"You can't conceive how it interests me," he said. 
+Indeed, his cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another.
+
+"Why does it interest you?" she asked.
+
+"Partly because you're a woman," he replied.  When he said this,
+Rachel, who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a
+childlike state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became
+self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under observation,
+as she felt with St. John Hirst.  She was about to launch into an argument
+which would have made them both feel bitterly against each other,
+and to define sensations which had no such importance as words
+were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a different direction.
+
+"I've often walked along the streets where people live all in a row,
+and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on
+earth the women were doing inside," he said.  "Just consider: 
+it's the beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years
+ago no woman had ever come out by herself and said things at all. 
+There it was going on in the background, for all those thousands
+of years, this curious silent unrepresented life.  Of course we're
+always writing about women--abusing them, or jeering at them,
+or worshipping them; but it's never come from women themselves. 
+I believe we still don't know in the least how they live,
+or what they feel, or what they do precisely.  If one's a man,
+the only confidences one gets are from young women about their
+love affairs.  But the lives of women of forty, of unmarried women,
+of working women, of women who keep shops and bring up children,
+of women like your aunts or Mrs. Thornbury or Miss Allan--
+one knows nothing whatever about them.  They won't tell you. 
+Either they're afraid, or they've got a way of treating men. 
+It's the man's view that's represented, you see.  Think of a
+railway train:  fifteen carriages for men who want to smoke. 
+Doesn't it make your blood boil?  If I were a woman I'd blow
+some one's brains out.  Don't you laugh at us a great deal? 
+Don't you think it all a great humbug?  You, I mean--how does it
+all strike you?"
+
+His determination to know, while it gave meaning to their talk,
+hampered her; he seemed to press further and further, and made it
+appear so important.  She took some time to answer, and during that
+time she went over and over the course of her twenty-four years,
+lighting now on one point, now on another--on her aunts, her mother,
+her father, and at last her mind fixed upon her aunts and her father,
+and she tried to describe them as at this distance they appeared
+to her.
+
+They were very much afraid of her father.  He was a great dim force
+in the house, by means of which they held on to the great world
+which is represented every morning in the _Times_.  But the real
+life of the house was something quite different from this. 
+It went on independently of Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself
+from him.  He was good-humoured towards them, but contemptuous. 
+She had always taken it for granted that his point of view was just,
+and founded upon an ideal scale of things where the life of one
+person was absolutely more important than the life of another,
+and that in that scale they were much less importance than he was. 
+But did she really believe that?  Hewet's words made her think. 
+She always submitted to her father, just as they did, but it was her
+aunts who influenced her really; her aunts who built up the fine,
+closely woven substance of their life at home.  They were less
+splendid but more natural than her father was.  All her rages
+had been against them; it was their world with its four meals,
+its punctuality, and servants on the stairs at half-past ten, that she
+examined so closely and wanted so vehemently to smash to atoms. 
+Following these thoughts she looked up and said:
+
+"And there's a sort of beauty in it--there they are at Richmond
+at this very moment building things up.  They're all wrong,
+perhaps, but there's a sort of beauty in it," she repeated. 
+"It's so unconscious, so modest.  And yet they feel things. 
+They do mind if people die.  Old spinsters are always doing things. 
+I don't quite know what they do.  Only that was what I felt when I
+lived with them.  It was very real."
+
+She reviewed their little journeys to and fro, to Walworth,
+to charwomen with bad legs, to meetings for this and that,
+their minute acts of charity and unselfishness which flowered
+punctually from a definite view of what they ought to do,
+their friendships, their tastes and habits; she saw all these things
+like grains of sand falling, falling through innumerable days,
+making an atmosphere and building up a solid mass, a background. 
+Hewet observed her as she considered this.
+
+"Were you happy?" he demanded.
+
+Again she had become absorbed in something else, and he called
+her back to an unusually vivid consciousness of herself.
+
+"I was both," she replied.  "I was happy and I was miserable. 
+You've no conception what it's like--to be a young woman." 
+She looked straight at him.  "There are terrors and agonies,"
+she said, keeping her eye on him as if to detect the slightest hint
+of laughter.
+
+"I can believe it," he said.  He returned her look with perfect sincerity.
+
+"Women one sees in the streets," she said.
+
+"Prostitutes?"
+
+"Men kissing one."
+
+He nodded his head.
+
+"You were never told?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"And then," she began and stopped.  Here came in the great space
+of life into which no one had ever penetrated.  All that she had been
+saying about her father and her aunts and walks in Richmond Park,
+and what they did from hour to hour, was merely on the surface. 
+Hewet was watching her.  Did he demand that she should describe
+that also?  Why did he sit so near and keep his eye on her? 
+Why did they not have done with this searching and agony?  Why did
+they not kiss each other simply?  She wished to kiss him.  But all
+the time she went on spinning out words.
+
+"A girl is more lonely than a boy.  No one cares in the least what
+she does.  Nothing's expected of her.  Unless one's very pretty
+people don't listen to what you say.  . . . And that is what I like,"
+she added energetically, as if the memory were very happy. 
+"I like walking in Richmond Park and singing to myself and
+knowing it doesn't matter a damn to anybody.  I like seeing
+things go on--as we saw you that night when you didn't see us--
+I love the freedom of it--it's like being the wind or the sea." 
+She turned with a curious fling of her hands and looked at the sea. 
+It was still very blue, dancing away as far as the eye could reach,
+but the light on it was yellower, and the clouds were turning
+flamingo red.
+
+A feeling of intense depression crossed Hewet's mind as she spoke. 
+It seemed plain that she would never care for one person rather
+than another; she was evidently quite indifferent to him; they seemed
+to come very near, and then they were as far apart as ever again;
+and her gesture as she turned away had been oddly beautiful.
+
+"Nonsense," he said abruptly.  "You like people.  You like admiration. 
+Your real grudge against Hirst is that he doesn't admire you."
+
+She made no answer for some time.  Then she said:
+
+"That's probably true.  Of course I like people--I like almost
+every one I've ever met."
+
+She turned her back on the sea and regarded Hewet with friendly
+if critical eyes.  He was good-looking in the sense that he had
+always had a sufficiency of beef to eat and fresh air to breathe. 
+His head was big; the eyes were also large; though generally
+vague they could be forcible; and the lips were sensitive. 
+One might account him a man of considerable passion and fitful energy,
+likely to be at the mercy of moods which had little relation to facts;
+at once tolerant and fastidious.  The breadth of his forehead showed
+capacity for thought.  The interest with which Rachel looked at him
+was heard in her voice.
+
+"What novels do you write?" she asked.
+
+"I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; "the things people
+don't say.  But the difficulty is immense."  He sighed.  "However, you
+don't care," he continued.  He looked at her almost severely. 
+"Nobody cares.  All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person
+the writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he's put in. 
+As for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one's seen
+the thing, felt about it, make it stand in relation to other things,
+not one in a million cares for that.  And yet I sometimes wonder
+whether there's anything else in the whole world worth doing. 
+These other people," he indicated the hotel, "are always wanting
+something they can't get.  But there's an extraordinary satisfaction
+in writing, even in the attempt to write.  What you said just now
+is true:  one doesn't want to be things; one wants merely to be
+allowed to see them."
+
+Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he
+gazed out to sea.
+
+It was Rachel's turn now to feel depressed.  As he talked of writing
+he had become suddenly impersonal.  He might never care for any one;
+all that desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt
+pressing on her almost painfully, had completely vanished.
+
+"Are you a good writer?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," he said.  "I'm not first-rate, of course; I'm good second-rate;
+about as good as Thackeray, I should say."
+
+Rachel was amazed.  For one thing it amazed her to hear Thackeray
+called second-rate; and then she could not widen her point of
+view to believe that there could be great writers in existence
+at the present day, or if there were, that any one she knew
+could be a great writer, and his self-confidence astounded her,
+and he became more and more remote.
+
+"My other novel," Hewet continued, "is about a young man
+who is obsessed by an idea--the idea of being a gentleman. 
+He manages to exist at Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year. 
+He has a coat; it was once a very good coat.  But the trousers--
+they're not so good.  Well, he goes up to London, gets into
+good society, owing to an early-morning adventure on the banks
+of the Serpentine.  He is led into telling lies--my idea, you see,
+is to show the gradual corruption of the soul--calls himself the son
+of some great landed proprietor in Devonshire.  Meanwhile the coat
+becomes older and older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers. 
+Can't you imagine the wretched man, after some splendid evening
+of debauchery, contemplating these garments--hanging them over
+the end of the bed, arranging them now in full light, now in shade,
+and wondering whether they will survive him, or he will survive them? 
+Thoughts of suicide cross his mind.  He has a friend, too, a man
+who somehow subsists upon selling small birds, for which he sets
+traps in the fields near Uxbridge.  They're scholars, both of them. 
+I know one or two wretched starving creatures like that who quote
+Aristotle at you over a fried herring and a pint of porter. 
+Fashionable life, too, I have to represent at some length,
+in order to show my hero under all circumstances.  Lady Theo
+Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the good fortune to stop,
+is the daughter of a very fine old Tory peer.  I'm going to describe
+the kind of parties I once went to--the fashionable intellectuals,
+you know, who like to have the latest book on their tables. 
+They give parties, river parties, parties where you play games. 
+There's no difficulty in conceiving incidents; the difficulty is
+to put them into shape--not to get run away with, as Lady Theo was. 
+It ended disastrously for her, poor woman, for the book, as I
+planned it, was going to end in profound and sordid respectability. 
+Disowned by her father, she marries my hero, and they live in a snug
+little villa outside Croydon, in which town he is set up as a
+house agent.  He never succeeds in becoming a real gentleman after all. 
+That's the interesting part of it.  Does it seem to you the kind of book
+you'd like to read?" he enquired; "or perhaps you'd like my Stuart
+tragedy better," he continued, without waiting for her to answer him. 
+"My idea is that there's a certain quality of beauty in the past,
+which the ordinary historical novelist completely ruins by his
+absurd conventions.  The moon becomes the Regent of the Skies. 
+People clap spurs to their horses, and so on.  I'm going to treat
+people as though they were exactly the same as we are.  The advantage
+is that, detached from modern conditions, one can make them more
+intense and more abstract then people who live as we do."
+
+Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a certain
+amount of bewilderment.  They both sat thinking their own thoughts.
+
+"I'm not like Hirst," said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke meditatively;
+"I don't see circles of chalk between people's feet.  I sometimes wish
+I did.  It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused. 
+One can't come to any decision at all; one's less and less capable
+of making judgments.  D'you find that?  And then one never knows
+what any one feels.  We're all in the dark.  We try to find out,
+but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's
+opinion of another person?  One goes along thinking one knows;
+but one really doesn't know."
+
+As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and rearranging
+in the grass the stones which had represented Rachel and her aunts
+at luncheon.  He was speaking as much to himself as to Rachel. 
+He was reasoning against the desire, which had returned with intensity,
+to take her in his arms; to have done with indirectness; to explain
+exactly what he felt.  What he said was against his belief;
+all the things that were important about her he knew; he felt them
+in the air around them; but he said nothing; he went on arranging
+the stones.
+
+"I like you; d'you like me?"  Rachel suddenly observed.
+
+"I like you immensely," Hewet replied, speaking with the relief
+of a person who is unexpectedly given an opportunity of saying
+what he wants to say.  He stopped moving the pebbles.
+
+"Mightn't we call each other Rachel and Terence?" he asked.
+
+"Terence," Rachel repeated.  "Terence--that's like the cry of an owl."
+
+She looked up with a sudden rush of delight, and in looking at
+Terence with eyes widened by pleasure she was struck by the change
+that had come over the sky behind them.  The substantial blue day
+had faded to a paler and more ethereal blue; the clouds were pink,
+far away and closely packed together; and the peace of evening
+had replaced the heat of the southern afternoon, in which they
+had started on their walk.
+
+"It must be late!" she exclaimed.
+
+It was nearly eight o'clock.
+
+"But eight o'clock doesn't count here, does it?"  Terence asked,
+as they got up and turned inland again.  They began to walk rather
+quickly down the hill on a little path between the olive trees.
+
+They felt more intimate because they shared the knowledge of
+what eight o'clock in Richmond meant.  Terence walked in front,
+for there was not room for them side by side.
+
+"What I want to do in writing novels is very much what you want to do
+when you play the piano, I expect," he began, turning and speaking over
+his shoulder.  "We want to find out what's behind things, don't we?--
+Look at the lights down there," he continued, "scattered about anyhow. 
+Things I feel come to me like lights.  . . . I want to combine them. 
+. . . Have you ever seen fireworks that make figures? . . . I want
+to make figures.  . . . Is that what you want to do?"
+
+Now they were out on the road and could walk side by side.
+
+"When I play the piano?  Music is different.  . . . But I see what you mean." 
+They tried to invent theories and to make their theories agree. 
+As Hewet had no knowledge of music, Rachel took his stick and drew
+figures in the thin white dust to explain how Bach wrote his fugues.
+
+"My musical gift was ruined," he explained, as they walked on after
+one of these demonstrations, "by the village organist at home,
+who had invented a system of notation which he tried to teach me,
+with the result that I never got to the tune-playing at all. 
+My mother thought music wasn't manly for boys; she wanted me to
+kill rats and birds--that's the worst of living in the country. 
+We live in Devonshire.  It's the loveliest place in the world. 
+Only--it's always difficult at home when one's grown up.  I'd like
+you to know one of my sisters.  . . . Oh, here's your gate--"
+He pushed it open.  They paused for a moment.  She could not ask him
+to come in.  She could not say that she hoped they would meet again;
+there was nothing to be said, and so without a word she went through
+the gate, and was soon invisible.  Directly Hewet lost sight of her,
+he felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly than before. 
+Their talk had been interrupted in the middle, just as he
+was beginning to say the things he wanted to say.  After all,
+what had they been able to say?  He ran his mind over the things
+they had said, the random, unnecessary things which had eddied round
+and round and used up all the time, and drawn them so close together
+and flung them so far apart, and left him in the end unsatisfied,
+ignorant still of what she felt and of what she was like.  What was
+the use of talking, talking, merely talking?
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+
+
+It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came from
+England left a few people on the shores of Santa Marina who drove
+up to the hotel.  The fact that the Ambroses had a house where one
+could escape momentarily from the slightly inhuman atmosphere of an
+hotel was a source of genuine pleasure not only to Hirst and Hewet,
+but to the Elliots, the Thornburys, the Flushings, Miss Allan,
+Evelyn M., together with other people whose identity was so little
+developed that the Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names. 
+By degrees there was established a kind of correspondence between
+the two houses, the big and the small, so that at most hours
+of the day one house could guess what was going on in the other,
+and the words "the villa" and "the hotel" called up the idea of two
+separate systems of life.  Acquaintances showed signs of developing
+into friends, for that one tie to Mrs. Parry's drawing-room had
+inevitably split into many other ties attached to different parts
+of England, and sometimes these alliances seemed cynically fragile,
+and sometimes painfully acute, lacking as they did the supporting
+background of organised English life.  One night when the moon was
+round between the trees, Evelyn M. told Helen the story of her life,
+and claimed her everlasting friendship; or another occasion,
+merely because of a sigh, or a pause, or a word thoughtlessly dropped,
+poor Mrs. Elliot left the villa half in tears, vowing never again
+to meet the cold and scornful woman who had insulted her, and in truth,
+meet again they never did.  It did not seem worth while to piece
+together so slight a friendship.
+
+Hewet, indeed, might have found excellent material at this time up
+at the villa for some chapters in the novel which was to be called
+"Silence, or the Things People don't say."  Helen and Rachel had
+become very silent.  Having detected, as she thought, a secret,
+and judging that Rachel meant to keep it from her, Mrs. Ambrose
+respected it carefully, but from that cause, though unintentionally,
+a curious atmosphere of reserve grew up between them.  Instead of
+sharing their views upon all subjects, and plunging after an idea
+wherever it might lead, they spoke chiefly in comment upon
+the people they saw, and the secret between them made itself felt
+in what they said even of Thornburys and Elliots.  Always calm
+and unemotional in her judgments, Mrs. Ambrose was now inclined
+to be definitely pessimistic.  She was not severe upon individuals
+so much as incredulous of the kindness of destiny, fate, what happens
+in the long run, and apt to insist that this was generally adverse
+to people in proportion as they deserved well.  Even this theory she
+was ready to discard in favour of one which made chaos triumphant,
+things happening for no reason at all, and every one groping about
+in illusion and ignorance.  With a certain pleasure she developed
+these views to her niece, taking a letter from home as her test: 
+which gave good news, but might just as well have given bad. 
+How did she know that at this very moment both her children were
+not lying dead, crushed by motor omnibuses?  "It's happening
+to somebody:  why shouldn't it happen to me?" she would argue,
+her face taking on the stoical expression of anticipated sorrow. 
+however sincere these views may have been, they were undoubtedly
+called forth by the irrational state of her niece's mind. 
+It was so fluctuating, and went so quickly from joy to despair,
+that it seemed necessary to confront it with some stable opinion
+which naturally became dark as well as stable.  Perhaps Mrs. Ambrose
+had some idea that in leading the talk into these quarters she might
+discover what was in Rachel's mind, but it was difficult to judge,
+for sometimes she would agree with the gloomiest thing that was said,
+at other times she refused to listen, and rammed Helen's theories
+down her throat with laughter, chatter, ridicule of the wildest,
+and fierce bursts of anger even at what she called the "croaking of a
+raven in the mud."
+
+"It's hard enough without that," she asserted.
+
+"What's hard?"  Helen demanded.
+
+"Life," she replied, and then they both became silent.
+
+Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why
+an hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid
+that the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating
+to a spectator.  True to her creed, she did not attempt to interfere,
+although there were enough of those weak moments of depression
+to make it perfectly easy for a less scrupulous person to press
+through and know all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did
+not choose.  All these moods ran themselves into one general effect,
+which Helen compared to the sliding of a river, quick, quicker,
+quicker still, as it races to a waterfall.  Her instinct was to cry
+out Stop! but even had there been any use in crying Stop! she would
+have refrained, thinking it best that things should take their way,
+the water racing because the earth was shaped to make it race.
+
+It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was watched,
+or that there was anything in her manner likely to draw attention to her. 
+What had happened to her she did not know.  Her mind was very much
+in the condition of the racing water to which Helen compared it. 
+She wanted to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to see
+him when he was not there; it was an agony to miss seeing him;
+agonies were strewn all about her day on account of him, but she never
+asked herself what this force driving through her life arose from. 
+She thought of no result any more than a tree perpetually pressed
+downwards by the wind considers the result of being pressed downwards
+by the wind.
+
+During the two or three weeks which had passed since their walk,
+half a dozen notes from him had accumulated in her drawer.  She would
+read them, and spend the whole morning in a daze of happiness;
+the sunny land outside the window being no less capable of analysing
+its own colour and heat than she was of analysing hers.  In these moods
+she found it impossible to read or play the piano, even to move being
+beyond her inclination.  The time passed without her noticing it. 
+When it was dark she was drawn to the window by the lights of the hotel. 
+A light that went in and out was the light in Terence's window: 
+there he sat, reading perhaps, or now he was walking up and down
+pulling out one book after another; and now he was seated in his
+chair again, and she tried to imagine what he was thinking about. 
+The steady lights marked the rooms where Terence sat with people
+moving round him.  Every one who stayed in the hotel had a peculiar
+romance and interest about them.  They were not ordinary people. 
+She would attribute wisdom to Mrs. Elliot, beauty to Susan Warrington,
+a splendid vitality to Evelyn M., because Terence spoke to them. 
+As unreflecting and pervasive were the moods of depression. 
+Her mind was as the landscape outside when dark beneath clouds
+and straitly lashed by wind and hail.  Again she would sit passive
+in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen's fantastical or gloomy
+words were like so many darts goading her to cry out against the
+hardness of life.  Best of all were the moods when for no reason
+again this stress of feeling slackened, and life went on as usual,
+only with a joy and colour in its events that was unknown before;
+they had a significance like that which she had seen in the tree: 
+the nights were black bars separating her from the days;
+she would have liked to run all the days into one long continuity
+of sensation.  Although these moods were directly or indirectly
+caused by the presence of Terence or the thought of him, she never
+said to herself that she was in love with him, or considered
+what was to happen if she continued to feel such things, so that
+Helen's image of the river sliding on to the waterfall had a great
+likeness to the facts, and the alarm which Helen sometimes felt
+was justified.
+
+In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was incapable
+of making a plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind. 
+She abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day,
+meeting him the next, receiving his letters always with a start
+of surprise.  Any woman experienced in the progress of courtship
+would have come by certain opinions from all this which would have
+given her at least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever been
+in love with Rachel, and she had never been in love with any one. 
+Moreover, none of the books she read, from _Wuthering_ _Heights_
+to _Man_ _and_ _Superman_, and the plays of Ibsen, suggested from
+their analysis of love that what their heroines felt was what she
+was feeling now.  It seemed to her that her sensations had no name.
+
+She met Terence frequently.  When they did not meet, he was apt
+to send a note with a book or about a book, for he had not been
+able after all to neglect that approach to intimacy.  But sometimes
+he did not come or did not write for several days at a time. 
+Again when they met their meeting might be one of inspiriting joy
+or of harassing despair.  Over all their partings hung the sense
+of interruption, leaving them both unsatisfied, though ignorant
+that the other shared the feeling.
+
+If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even more
+completely ignorant of his.  At first he moved as a god;
+as she came to know him better he was still the centre of light,
+but combined with this beauty a wonderful power of making her daring
+and confident of herself.  She was conscious of emotions and powers
+which she had never suspected in herself, and of a depth in the world
+hitherto unknown.  When she thought of their relationship she saw
+rather than reasoned, representing her view of what Terence felt
+by a picture of him drawn across the room to stand by her side. 
+This passage across the room amounted to a physical sensation,
+but what it meant she did not know.
+
+Thus the time went on, wearing a calm, bright look upon its surface. 
+Letters came from England, letters came from Willoughby,
+and the days accumulated their small events which shaped the year. 
+Superficially, three odes of Pindar were mended, Helen covered about
+five inches of her embroidery, and St. John completed the first
+two acts of a play.  He and Rachel being now very good friends,
+he read them aloud to her, and she was so genuinely impressed
+by the skill of his rhythms and the variety of his adjectives,
+as well as by the fact that he was Terence's friend, that he began
+to wonder whether he was not intended for literature rather than
+for law.  It was a time of profound thought and sudden revelations
+for more than one couple, and several single people.
+
+A Sunday came, which no one in the villa with the exception of
+Rachel and the Spanish maid proposed to recognise.  Rachel still
+went to church, because she had never, according to Helen,
+taken the trouble to think about it.  Since they had celebrated
+the service at the hotel she went there expecting to get some
+pleasure from her passage across the garden and through the hall
+of the hotel, although it was very doubtful whether she would
+see Terence, or at any rate have the chance of speaking to him.
+
+As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English,
+there was almost as much difference between Sunday and Wednesday
+as there is in England, and Sunday appeared here as there, the mute
+black ghost or penitent spirit of the busy weekday.  The English
+could not pale the sunshine, but they could in some miraculous way
+slow down the hours, dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and make
+even the servants and page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. 
+The best clothes which every one put on helped the general effect;
+it seemed that no lady could sit down without bending a clean starched
+petticoat, and no gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle
+from a stiff shirt-front. As the hands of the clock neared eleven,
+on this particular Sunday, various people tended to draw together
+in the hall, clasping little redleaved books in their hands. 
+The clock marked a few minutes to the hour when a stout black figure
+passed through the hall with a preoccupied expression, as though
+he would rather not recognise salutations, although aware of them,
+and disappeared down the corridor which led from it.
+
+"Mr. Bax," Mrs. Thornbury whispered.
+
+The little group of people then began to move off in the same
+direction as the stout black figure.  Looked at in an odd
+way by people who made no effort to join them, they moved
+with one exception slowly and consciously towards the stairs. 
+Mrs. Flushing was the exception.  She came running downstairs,
+strode across the hall, joined the procession much out of breath,
+demanding of Mrs. Thornbury in an agitated whisper, "Where, where?"
+
+"We are all going," said Mrs. Thornbury gently, and soon they
+were descending the stairs two by two.  Rachel was among
+the first to descend.  She did not see that Terence and Hirst
+came in at the rear possessed of no black volume, but of one
+thin book bound in light-blue cloth, which St. John carried under his arm.
+
+The chapel was the old chapel of the monks.  It was a profound cool
+place where they had said Mass for hundreds of years, and done penance
+in the cold moonlight, and worshipped old brown pictures and carved
+saints which stood with upraised hands of blessing in the hollows
+in the walls.  The transition from Catholic to Protestant worship
+had been bridged by a time of disuse, when there were no services,
+and the place was used for storing jars of oil, liqueur, and deck-chairs;
+the hotel flourishing, some religious body had taken the place in hand,
+and it was now fitted out with a number of glazed yellow benches,
+claret-coloured footstools; it had a small pulpit, and a brass eagle
+carrying the Bible on its back, while the piety of different women
+had supplied ugly squares of carpet, and long strips of embroidery
+heavily wrought with monograms in gold.
+
+As the congregation entered they were met by mild sweet chords
+issuing from a harmonium, where Miss Willett, concealed from view
+by a baize curtain, struck emphatic chords with uncertain fingers. 
+The sound spread through the chapel as the rings of water spread
+from a fallen stone.  The twenty or twenty-five people who composed
+the congregation first bowed their heads and then sat up and looked
+about them.  It was very quiet, and the light down here seemed paler
+than the light above.  The usual bows and smiles were dispensed with,
+but they recognised each other.  The Lord's Prayer was read over them. 
+As the childlike battle of voices rose, the congregation,
+many of whom had only met on the staircase, felt themselves
+pathetically united and well-disposed towards each other. 
+As if the prayer were a torch applied to fuel, a smoke seemed to rise
+automatically and fill the place with the ghosts of innumerable
+services on innumerable Sunday mornings at home.  Susan Warrington
+in particular was conscious of the sweetest sense of sisterhood,
+as she covered her face with her hands and saw slips of bent backs
+through the chinks between her fingers.  Her emotions rose calmly
+and evenly, approving of herself and of life at the same time. 
+It was all so quiet and so good.  But having created this peaceful
+atmosphere Mr. Bax suddenly turned the page and read a psalm. 
+Though he read it with no change of voice the mood was broken.
+
+"Be merciful unto me, O God," he read, "for man goeth about to devour me: 
+he is daily fighting and troubling me.  . . . They daily mistake
+my words:  all that they imagine is to do me evil.  They hold
+all together and keep themselves close.  . . . Break their teeth,
+O God, in their mouths; smite the jaw-bones of the lions, O Lord: 
+let them fall away like water that runneth apace; and when they shoot
+their arrows let them be rooted out."
+
+Nothing in Susan's experience at all corresponded with this,
+and as she had no love of language she had long ceased to attend
+to such remarks, although she followed them with the same kind
+of mechanical respect with which she heard many of Lear's speeches
+read aloud.  Her mind was still serene and really occupied with
+praise of her own nature and praise of God, that is of the solemn
+and satisfactory order of the world.
+
+But it could be seen from a glance at their faces that most of the others,
+the men in particular, felt the inconvenience of the sudden intrusion
+of this old savage.  They looked more secular and critical as then
+listened to the ravings of the old black man with a cloth round his
+loins cursing with vehement gesture by a camp-fire in the desert. 
+After that there was a general sound of pages being turned as if
+they were in class, and then they read a little bit of the Old
+Testament about making a well, very much as school boys translate
+an easy passage from the _Anabasis_ when they have shut up their
+French grammar.  Then they returned to the New Testament and the sad
+and beautiful figure of Christ.  While Christ spoke they made
+another effort to fit his interpretation of life upon the lives
+they lived, but as they were all very different, some practical,
+some ambitious, some stupid, some wild and experimental, some in love,
+and others long past any feeling except a feeling of comfort,
+they did very different things with the words of Christ.
+
+From their faces it seemed that for the most part they made
+no effort at all, and, recumbent as it were, accepted the ideas
+the words gave as representing goodness, in the same way, no doubt,
+as one of those industrious needlewomen had accepted the bright
+ugly pattern on her mat as beauty.
+
+Whatever the reason might be, for the first time in her life,
+instead of slipping at once into some curious pleasant cloud
+of emotion, too familiar to be considered, Rachel listened critically
+to what was being said.  By the time they had swung in an irregular
+way from prayer to psalm, from psalm to history, from history
+to poetry, and Mr. Bax was giving out his text, she was in a state
+of acute discomfort.  Such was the discomfort she felt when forced
+to sit through an unsatisfactory piece of music badly played. 
+Tantalised, enraged by the clumsy insensitiveness of the conductor,
+who put the stress on the wrong places, and annoyed by the vast
+flock of the audience tamely praising and acquiescing without
+knowing or caring, so she was not tantalized and enraged, only here,
+with eyes half-shut and lips pursed together, the atmosphere of
+forced solemnity increased her anger.  All round her were people
+pretending to feel what they did not feel, while somewhere above
+her floated the idea which they could none of them grasp, which they
+pretended to grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful idea,
+an idea like a butterfly.  One after another, vast and hard and cold,
+appeared to her the churches all over the world where this blundering
+effort and misunderstanding were perpetually going on, great buildings,
+filled with innumerable men and women, not seeing clearly,
+who finally gave up the effort to see, and relapsed tamely into praise
+and acquiescence, half-shutting their eyes and pursing up their lips. 
+The thought had the same sort of physical discomfort as is caused
+by a film of mist always coming between the eyes and the printed page. 
+She did her best to brush away the film and to conceive something
+to be worshipped as the service went on, but failed, always misled
+by the voice of Mr. Bax saying things which misrepresented the idea,
+and by the patter of baaing inexpressive human voices falling round
+her like damp leaves.  The effort was tiring and dispiriting. 
+She ceased to listen, and fixed her eyes on the face of a woman
+near her, a hospital nurse, whose expression of devout attention
+seemed to prove that she was at any rate receiving satisfaction. 
+But looking at her carefully she came to the conclusion that the
+hospital nurse was only slavishly acquiescent, and that the look of
+satisfaction was produced by no splendid conception of God within her. 
+How indeed, could she conceive anything far outside her own experience,
+a woman with a commonplace face like hers, a little round red face,
+upon which trivial duties and trivial spites had drawn lines, whose weak
+blue eyes saw without intensity or individuality, whose features
+were blurred, insensitive, and callous?  She was adoring something
+shallow and smug, clinging to it, so the obstinate mouth witnessed,
+with the assiduity of a limpet; nothing would tear her from her
+demure belief in her own virtue and the virtues of her religion. 
+She was a limpet, with the sensitive side of her stuck to a rock,
+for ever dead to the rush of fresh and beautiful things past her. 
+The face of this single worshipper became printed on Rachel's mind
+with an impression of keen horror, and she had it suddenly revealed
+to her what Helen meant and St. John meant when they proclaimed their
+hatred of Christianity.  With the violence that now marked her feelings,
+she rejected all that she had implicitly believed.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Bax was half-way through the second lesson. 
+She looked at him.  He was a man of the world with supple lips
+and an agreeable manner, he was indeed a man of much kindliness
+and simplicity, though by no means clever, but she was not in
+the mood to give any one credit for such qualities, and examined
+him as though he were an epitome of all the vices of his service.
+
+Right at the back of the chapel Mrs. Flushing, Hirst, and Hewet
+sat in a row in a very different frame of mind.  Hewet was staring
+at the roof with his legs stuck out in front of him, for as he
+had never tried to make the service fit any feeling or idea of his,
+he was able to enjoy the beauty of the language without hindrance. 
+His mind was occupied first with accidental things, such as the
+women's hair in front of him, the light on the faces, then with
+the words which seemed to him magnificent, and then more vaguely
+with the characters of the other worshippers.  But when he suddenly
+perceived Rachel, all these thoughts were driven out of his head,
+and he thought only of her.  The psalms, the prayers, the Litany,
+and the sermon were all reduced to one chanting sound which paused,
+and then renewed itself, a little higher or a little lower. 
+He stared alternately at Rachel and at the ceiling, but his expression
+was now produced not by what he saw but by something in his mind. 
+He was almost as painfully disturbed by his thoughts as she was
+by hers.
+
+Early in the service Mrs. Flushing had discovered that she had taken up
+a Bible instead of a prayer-book, and, as she was sitting next to Hirst,
+she stole a glance over his shoulder.  He was reading steadily in
+the thin pale-blue volume.  Unable to understand, she peered closer,
+upon which Hirst politely laid the book before her, pointing to
+the first line of a Greek poem and then to the translation opposite.
+
+"What's that?" she whispered inquisitively.
+
+"Sappho," he replied.  "The one Swinburne did--the best thing
+that's ever been written."
+
+Mrs. Flushing could not resist such an opportunity.  She gulped
+down the Ode to Aphrodite during the Litany, keeping herself with
+difficulty from asking when Sappho lived, and what else she wrote
+worth reading, and contriving to come in punctually at the end
+with "the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body,
+and the life everlastin'. Amen."
+
+Meanwhile Hirst took out an envelope and began scribbling on the back
+of it.  When Mr. Bax mounted the pulpit he shut up Sappho with his
+envelope between the pages, settled his spectacles, and fixed his
+gaze intently upon the clergyman.  Standing in the pulpit he looked
+very large and fat; the light coming through the greenish unstained
+window-glass made his face appear smooth and white like a very large egg.
+
+He looked round at all the faces looking mildly up at him,
+although some of them were the faces of men and women old enough to be
+his grandparents, and gave out his text with weighty significance. 
+The argument of the sermon was that visitors to this beautiful land,
+although they were on a holiday, owed a duty to the natives. 
+It did not, in truth, differ very much from a leading article upon
+topics of general interest in the weekly newspapers.  It rambled
+with a kind of amiable verbosity from one heading to another,
+suggesting that all human beings are very much the same under
+their skins, illustrating this by the resemblance of the games
+which little Spanish boys play to the games little boys in London
+streets play, observing that very small things do influence people,
+particularly natives; in fact, a very dear friend of Mr. Bax's had
+told him that the success of our rule in India, that vast country,
+largely depended upon the strict code of politeness which the
+English adopted towards the natives, which led to the remark
+that small things were not necessarily small, and that somehow
+to the virtue of sympathy, which was a virtue never more needed
+than to-day, when we lived in a time of experiment and upheaval--
+witness the aeroplane and wireless telegraph, and there were
+other problems which hardly presented themselves to our fathers,
+but which no man who called himself a man could leave unsettled. 
+Here Mr. Bax became more definitely clerical, if it were possible,
+he seemed to speak with a certain innocent craftiness, as he pointed
+out that all this laid a special duty upon earnest Christians. 
+What men were inclined to say now was, "Oh, that fellow--he's a parson." 
+What we want them to say is, "He's a good fellow"--in other words,
+"He is my brother."  He exhorted them to keep in touch with men
+of the modern type; they must sympathise with their multifarious
+interests in order to keep before their eyes that whatever discoveries
+were made there was one discovery which could not be superseded,
+which was indeed as much of a necessity to the most successful
+and most brilliant of them all as it had been to their fathers. 
+The humblest could help; the least important things had an influence
+(here his manner became definitely priestly and his remarks seemed
+to be directed to women, for indeed Mr. Bax's congregations were
+mainly composed of women, and he was used to assigning them their
+duties in his innocent clerical campaigns). Leaving more definite
+instruction, he passed on, and his theme broadened into a peroration
+for which he drew a long breath and stood very upright,--"As a drop
+of water, detached, alone, separate from others, falling from
+the cloud and entering the great ocean, alters, so scientists
+tell us, not only the immediate spot in the ocean where it falls,
+but all the myriad drops which together compose the great universe
+of waters, and by this means alters the configuration of the globe
+and the lives of millions of sea creatures, and finally the lives
+of the men and women who seek their living upon the shores--
+as all this is within the compass of a single drop of water,
+such as any rain shower sends in millions to lose themselves
+in the earth, to lose themselves we say, but we know very well
+that the fruits of the earth could not flourish without them--
+so is a marvel comparable to this within the reach of each one
+of us, who dropping a little word or a little deed into the great
+universe alters it; yea, it is a solemn thought, _alters_ it,
+for good or for evil, not for one instant, or in one vicinity,
+but throughout the entire race, and for all eternity."  Whipping round
+as though to avoid applause, he continued with the same breath,
+but in a different tone of voice,--"And now to God the Father . .
+."
+
+He gave his blessing, and then, while the solemn chords again issued
+from the harmonium behind the curtain, the different people began
+scraping and fumbling and moving very awkwardly and consciously
+towards the door.  Half-way upstairs, at a point where the light and
+sounds of the upper world conflicted with the dimness and the dying
+hymn-tune of the under, Rachel felt a hand drop upon her shoulder.
+
+"Miss Vinrace," Mrs. Flushing whispered peremptorily, "stay to luncheon. 
+It's such a dismal day.  They don't even give one beef for luncheon. 
+Please stay."
+
+Here they came out into the hall, where once more the little
+band was greeted with curious respectful glances by the people
+who had not gone to church, although their clothing made it clear
+that they approved of Sunday to the very verge of going to church. 
+Rachel felt unable to stand any more of this particular atmosphere,
+and was about to say she must go back, when Terence passed them,
+drawn along in talk with Evelyn M. Rachel thereupon contented
+herself with saying that the people looked very respectable,
+which negative remark Mrs. Flushing interpreted to mean that she
+would stay.
+
+"English people abroad!" she returned with a vivid flash of malice. 
+"Ain't they awful!  But we won't stay here," she continued,
+plucking at Rachel's arm.  "Come up to my room."
+
+She bore her past Hewet and Evelyn and the Thornburys and the Elliots. 
+Hewet stepped forward.
+
+"Luncheon--" he began.
+
+"Miss Vinrace has promised to lunch with me," said Mrs. Flushing,
+and began to pound energetically up the staircase, as though
+the middle classes of England were in pursuit.  She did not stop
+until she had slammed her bedroom door behind them.
+
+"Well, what did you think of it?" she demanded, panting slightly.
+
+All the disgust and horror which Rachel had been accumulating burst
+forth beyond her control.
+
+"I thought it the most loathsome exhibition I'd ever seen!"
+she broke out.  "How can they--how dare they--what do you mean by it--
+Mr. Bax, hospital nurses, old men, prostitutes, disgusting--"
+
+She hit off the points she remembered as fast as she could, but she
+was too indignant to stop to analyse her feelings.  Mrs. Flushing
+watched her with keen gusto as she stood ejaculating with emphatic
+movements of her head and hands in the middle of the room.
+
+"Go on, go on, do go on," she laughed, clapping her hands. 
+"It's delightful to hear you!"
+
+"But why do you go?"  Rachel demanded.
+
+"I've been every Sunday of my life ever since I can remember,"
+Mrs. Flushing chuckled, as though that were a reason by itself.
+
+Rachel turned abruptly to the window.  She did not know what it
+was that had put her into such a passion; the sight of Terence in
+the hall had confused her thoughts, leaving her merely indignant. 
+She looked straight at their own villa, half-way up the side of
+the mountain.  The most familiar view seen framed through glass has
+a certain unfamiliar distinction, and she grew calm as she gazed. 
+Then she remembered that she was in the presence of some one she
+did not know well, and she turned and looked at Mrs. Flushing. 
+Mrs. Flushing was still sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up,
+with her lips parted, so that her strong white teeth showed in
+two rows.
+
+"Tell me," she said, "which d'you like best, Mr. Hewet or Mr. Hirst?"
+
+"Mr. Hewet," Rachel replied, but her voice did not sound natural.
+
+"Which is the one who reads Greek in church?"  Mrs. Flushing demanded.
+
+It might have been either of them and while Mrs. Flushing proceeded
+to describe them both, and to say that both frightened her, but one
+frightened her more than the other, Rachel looked for a chair. 
+The room, of course, was one of the largest and most luxurious
+in the hotel.  There were a great many arm-chairs and settees
+covered in brown holland, but each of these was occupied by a large
+square piece of yellow cardboard, and all the pieces of cardboard
+were dotted or lined with spots or dashes of bright oil paint.
+
+"But you're not to look at those," said Mrs. Flushing as she saw
+Rachel's eye wander.  She jumped up, and turned as many as she could,
+face downwards, upon the floor.  Rachel, however, managed to
+possess herself of one of them, and, with the vanity of an artist,
+Mrs. Flushing demanded anxiously, "Well, well?"
+
+"It's a hill," Rachel replied.  There could be no doubt that
+Mrs. Flushing had represented the vigorous and abrupt fling of the
+earth up into the air; you could almost see the clods flying as it whirled.
+
+Rachel passed from one to another.  They were all marked by something
+of the jerk and decision of their maker; they were all perfectly untrained
+onslaughts of the brush upon some half-realised idea suggested by
+hill or tree; and they were all in some way characteristic of Mrs. Flushing.
+
+"I see things movin'," Mrs. Flushing explained.  "So"--she
+swept her hand through a yard of the air.  She then took up one
+of the cardboards which Rachel had laid aside, seated herself
+on a stool, and began to flourish a stump of charcoal.  While she
+occupied herself in strokes which seemed to serve her as speech
+serves others, Rachel, who was very restless, looked about her.
+
+"Open the wardrobe," said Mrs. Flushing after a pause, speaking
+indistinctly because of a paint-brush in her mouth, "and look at the things."
+
+As Rachel hesitated, Mrs. Flushing came forward, still with a paint-brush
+in her mouth, flung open the wings of her wardrobe, and tossed
+a quantity of shawls, stuffs, cloaks, embroideries, on to the bed. 
+Rachel began to finger them.  Mrs. Flushing came up once more,
+and dropped a quantity of beads, brooches, earrings, bracelets, tassels,
+and combs among the draperies.  Then she went back to her stool
+and began to paint in silence.  The stuffs were coloured and dark
+and pale; they made a curious swarm of lines and colours upon
+the counterpane, with the reddish lumps of stone and peacocks'
+feathers and clear pale tortoise-shell combs lying among them.
+
+"The women wore them hundreds of years ago, they wear 'em still,"
+Mrs. Flushing remarked.  "My husband rides about and finds 'em;
+they don't know what they're worth, so we get 'em cheap.  And we
+shall sell 'em to smart women in London," she chuckled, as though
+the thought of these ladies and their absurd appearance amused her. 
+After painting for some minutes, she suddenly laid down her brush and
+fixed her eyes upon Rachel.
+
+"I tell you what I want to do," she said.  "I want to go up there
+and see things for myself.  It's silly stayin' here with a pack
+of old maids as though we were at the seaside in England.  I want
+to go up the river and see the natives in their camps.  It's only
+a matter of ten days under canvas.  My husband's done it.  One would
+lie out under the trees at night and be towed down the river by day,
+and if we saw anythin' nice we'd shout out and tell 'em to stop." 
+She rose and began piercing the bed again and again with a long
+golden pin, as she watched to see what effect her suggestion had
+upon Rachel.
+
+"We must make up a party," she went on.  "Ten people could hire
+a launch.  Now you'll come, and Mrs. Ambrose'll come, and will
+Mr. Hirst and t'other gentleman come?  Where's a pencil?"
+
+She became more and more determined and excited as she evolved her plan. 
+She sat on the edge of the bed and wrote down a list of surnames,
+which she invariably spelt wrong.  Rachel was enthusiastic, for indeed
+the idea was immeasurably delightful to her.  She had always had a
+great desire to see the river, and the name of Terence threw a lustre
+over the prospect, which made it almost too good to come true. 
+She did what she could to help Mrs. Flushing by suggesting names,
+helping her to spell them, and counting up the days of the week upon
+her fingers.  As Mrs. Flushing wanted to know all she could tell
+her about the birth and pursuits of every person she suggested,
+and threw in wild stories of her own as to the temperaments and
+habits of artists, and people of the same name who used to come
+to Chillingley in the old days, but were doubtless not the same,
+though they too were very clever men interested in Egyptology,
+the business took some time.
+
+At last Mrs. Flushing sought her diary for help, the method
+of reckoning dates on the fingers proving unsatisfactory. 
+She opened and shut every drawer in her writing-table, and then
+cried furiously, "Yarmouth!  Yarmouth!  Drat the woman! 
+She's always out of the way when she's wanted!"
+
+At this moment the luncheon gong began to work itself into its
+midday frenzy.  Mrs. Flushing rang her bell violently.  The door
+was opened by a handsome maid who was almost as upright as her mistress.
+
+"Oh, Yarmouth," said Mrs. Flushing, "just find my diary and see
+where ten days from now would bring us to, and ask the hall porter
+how many men 'ud be wanted to row eight people up the river for a week,
+and what it 'ud cost, and put it on a slip of paper and leave it
+on my dressing-table. Now--" she pointed at the door with a superb
+forefinger so that Rachel had to lead the way.
+
+"Oh, and Yarmouth," Mrs. Flushing called back over her shoulder. 
+"Put those things away and hang 'em in their right places, there's a
+good girl, or it fusses Mr. Flushin'."
+
+To all of which Yarmouth merely replied, "Yes, ma'am."
+
+As they entered the long dining-room it was obvious that the day
+was still Sunday, although the mood was slightly abating. 
+The Flushings' table was set by the side in the window,
+so that Mrs. Flushing could scrutinise each figure as it entered,
+and her curiosity seemed to be intense.
+
+"Old Mrs. Paley," she whispered as the wheeled chair slowly made its
+way through the door, Arthur pushing behind.  "Thornburys" came next. 
+"That nice woman," she nudged Rachel to look at Miss Allan. 
+"What's her name?"  The painted lady who always came in late,
+tripping into the room with a prepared smile as though she came out
+upon a stage, might well have quailed before Mrs. Flushing's stare,
+which expressed her steely hostility to the whole tribe of painted ladies. 
+Next came the two young men whom Mrs. Flushing called collectively
+the Hirsts.  They sat down opposite, across the gangway.
+
+Mr. Flushing treated his wife with a mixture of admiration and indulgence,
+making up by the suavity and fluency of his speech for the abruptness
+of hers.  While she darted and ejaculated he gave Rachel a sketch
+of the history of South American art.  He would deal with one of his
+wife's exclamations, and then return as smoothly as ever to his theme. 
+He knew very well how to make a luncheon pass agreeably, without being
+dull or intimate.  He had formed the opinion, so he told Rachel,
+that wonderful treasures lay hid in the depths of the land;
+the things Rachel had seen were merely trifles picked up in the course
+of one short journey.  He thought there might be giant gods hewn
+out of stone in the mountain-side; and colossal figures standing
+by themselves in the middle of vast green pasture lands, where none
+but natives had ever trod.  Before the dawn of European art he
+believed that the primitive huntsmen and priests had built temples
+of massive stone slabs, had formed out of the dark rocks and the great
+cedar trees majestic figures of gods and of beasts, and symbols
+of the great forces, water, air, and forest among which they lived. 
+There might be prehistoric towns, like those in Greece and Asia,
+standing in open places among the trees, filled with the works of this
+early race.  Nobody had been there; scarcely anything was known. 
+Thus talking and displaying the most picturesque of his theories,
+Rachel's attention was fixed upon him.
+
+She did not see that Hewet kept looking at her across the gangway,
+between the figures of waiters hurrying past with plates. 
+He was inattentive, and Hirst was finding him also very cross
+and disagreeable.  They had touched upon all the usual topics--
+upon politics and literature, gossip and Christianity.  They had
+quarrelled over the service, which was every bit as fine as Sappho,
+according to Hewet; so that Hirst's paganism was mere ostentation. 
+Why go to church, he demanded, merely in order to read Sappho? 
+Hirst observed that he had listened to every word of the sermon,
+as he could prove if Hewet would like a repetition of it; and he went
+to church in order to realise the nature of his Creator, which he had
+done very vividly that morning, thanks to Mr. Bax, who had inspired
+him to write three of the most superb lines in English literature,
+an invocation to the Deity.
+
+"I wrote 'em on the back of the envelope of my aunt's last letter,"
+he said, and pulled it from between the pages of Sappho.
+
+"Well, let's hear them," said Hewet, slightly mollified
+by the prospect of a literary discussion.
+
+"My dear Hewet, do you wish us both to be flung out of the hotel
+by an enraged mob of Thornburys and Elliots?"  Hirst enquired. 
+"The merest whisper would be sufficient to incriminate me
+for ever.  God!" he broke out, "what's the use of attempting to write
+when the world's peopled by such damned fools?  Seriously, Hewet,
+I advise you to give up literature.  What's the good of it? 
+There's your audience."
+
+He nodded his head at the tables where a very miscellaneous collection
+of Europeans were now engaged in eating, in some cases in gnawing,
+the stringy foreign fowls.  Hewet looked, and grew more out of
+temper than ever.  Hirst looked too.  His eyes fell upon Rachel,
+and he bowed to her.
+
+"I rather think Rachel's in love with me," he remarked, as his
+eyes returned to his plate.  "That's the worst of friendships
+with young women--they tend to fall in love with one."
+
+To that Hewet made no answer whatever, and sat singularly still. 
+Hirst did not seem to mind getting no answer, for he returned
+to Mr. Bax again, quoting the peroration about the drop of water;
+and when Hewet scarcely replied to these remarks either, he merely
+pursed his lips, chose a fig, and relapsed quite contentedly into
+his own thoughts, of which he always had a very large supply. 
+When luncheon was over they separated, taking their cups of coffee to
+different parts of the hall.
+
+From his chair beneath the palm-tree Hewet saw Rachel come out of
+the dining-room with the Flushings; he saw them look round for chairs,
+and choose three in a corner where they could go on talking
+in private.  Mr. Flushing was now in the full tide of his discourse. 
+He produced a sheet of paper upon which he made drawings as he went
+on with his talk.  He saw Rachel lean over and look, pointing to this
+and that with her finger.  Hewet unkindly compared Mr. Flushing,
+who was extremely well dressed for a hot climate, and rather
+elaborate in his manner, to a very persuasive shop-keeper. Meanwhile,
+as he sat looking at them, he was entangled in the Thornburys
+and Miss Allan, who, after hovering about for a minute or two,
+settled in chairs round him, holding their cups in their hands. 
+They wanted to know whether he could tell them anything about Mr. Bax. 
+Mr. Thornbury as usual sat saying nothing, looking vaguely ahead
+of him, occasionally raising his eye-glasses, as if to put them on,
+but always thinking better of it at the last moment, and letting
+them fall again.  After some discussion, the ladies put it
+beyond a doubt that Mr. Bax was not the son of Mr. William Bax. 
+There was a pause.  Then Mrs. Thornbury remarked that she was still
+in the habit of saying Queen instead of King in the National Anthem. 
+There was another pause.  Then Miss Allan observed reflectively that
+going to church abroad always made her feel as if she had been to a
+sailor's funeral.
+
+There was then a very long pause, which threatened to be final,
+when, mercifully, a bird about the size of a magpie, but of a metallic
+blue colour, appeared on the section of the terrace that could
+be seen from where they sat.  Mrs. Thornbury was led to enquire
+whether we should like it if all our rooks were blue--"What
+do _you_ think, William?" she asked, touching her husband on the knee.
+
+"If all our rooks were blue," he said,--he raised his glasses;
+he actually placed them on his nose--"they would not live long
+in Wiltshire," he concluded; he dropped his glasses to his side again. 
+The three elderly people now gazed meditatively at the bird,
+which was so obliging as to stay in the middle of the view for a
+considerable space of time, thus making it unnecessary for them to
+speak again.  Hewet began to wonder whether he might not cross over
+to the Flushings' corner, when Hirst appeared from the background,
+slipped into a chair by Rachel's side, and began to talk to her with
+every appearance of familiarity.  Hewet could stand it no longer. 
+He rose, took his hat and dashed out of doors.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+
+
+Everything he saw was distasteful to him.  He hated the blue and white,
+the intensity and definiteness, the hum and heat of the south;
+the landscape seemed to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard
+background on the stage, and the mountain but a wooden screen
+against a sheet painted blue.  He walked fast in spite of the heat
+of the sun.
+
+Two roads led out of the town on the eastern side; one branched off
+towards the Ambroses' villa, the other struck into the country,
+eventually reaching a village on the plain, but many footpaths,
+which had been stamped in the earth when it was wet, led off from it,
+across great dry fields, to scattered farm-houses, and the villas
+of rich natives.  Hewet stepped off the road on to one of these,
+in order to avoid the hardness and heat of the main road,
+the dust of which was always being raised in small clouds by carts
+and ramshackle flies which carried parties of festive peasants,
+or turkeys swelling unevenly like a bundle of air balls beneath
+a net, or the brass bedstead and black wooden boxes of some newly
+wedded pair.
+
+The exercise indeed served to clear away the superficial irritations
+of the morning, but he remained miserable.  It seemed proved beyond
+a doubt that Rachel was indifferent to him, for she had scarcely
+looked at him, and she had talked to Mr. Flushing with just the same
+interest with which she talked to him.  Finally, Hirst's odious
+words flicked his mind like a whip, and he remembered that he had
+left her talking to Hirst.  She was at this moment talking to him,
+and it might be true, as he said, that she was in love with him. 
+He went over all the evidence for this supposition--her sudden interest
+in Hirst's writing, her way of quoting his opinions respectfully,
+or with only half a laugh; her very nickname for him, "the great Man,"
+might have some serious meaning in it.  Supposing that there were
+an understanding between them, what would it mean to him?
+
+"Damn it all!" he demanded, "am I in love with her?"  To that he could
+only return himself one answer.  He certainly was in love with her,
+if he knew what love meant.  Ever since he had first seen her he had
+been interested and attracted, more and more interested and attracted,
+until he was scarcely able to think of anything except Rachel. 
+But just as he was sliding into one of the long feasts of meditation about
+them both, he checked himself by asking whether he wanted to marry her? 
+That was the real problem, for these miseries and agonies could not
+be endured, and it was necessary that he should make up his mind. 
+He instantly decided that he did not want to marry any one. 
+Partly because he was irritated by Rachel the idea of marriage
+irritated him.  It immediately suggested the picture of two people
+sitting alone over the fire; the man was reading, the woman sewing. 
+There was a second picture.  He saw a man jump up, say good-night,
+leave the company and hasten away with the quiet secret look of one
+who is stealing to certain happiness.  Both these pictures were
+very unpleasant, and even more so was a third picture, of husband
+and wife and friend; and the married people glancing at each other
+as though they were content to let something pass unquestioned,
+being themselves possessed of the deeper truth.  Other pictures--
+he was walking very fast in his irritation, and they came before
+him without any conscious effort, like pictures on a sheet--
+succeeded these.  Here were the worn husband and wife sitting
+with their children round them, very patient, tolerant, and wise. 
+But that too, was an unpleasant picture.  He tried all sorts
+of pictures, taking them from the lives of friends of his, for he knew
+many different married couples; but he saw them always, walled up
+in a warm firelit room.  When, on the other hand, he began to think
+of unmarried people, he saw them active in an unlimited world;
+above all, standing on the same ground as the rest, without shelter
+or advantage.  All the most individual and humane of his friends
+were bachelors and spinsters; indeed he was surprised to find
+that the women he most admired and knew best were unmarried women. 
+Marriage seemed to be worse for them than it was for men. 
+Leaving these general pictures he considered the people whom he
+had been observing lately at the hotel.  He had often revolved
+these questions in his mind, as he watched Susan and Arthur,
+or Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury, or Mr. and Mrs. Elliot.  He had observed
+how the shy happiness and surprise of the engaged couple had gradually
+been replaced by a comfortable, tolerant state of mind, as if they
+had already done with the adventure of intimacy and were taking up
+their parts.  Susan used to pursue Arthur about with a sweater,
+because he had one day let slip that a brother of his had died
+of pneumonia.  The sight amused him, but was not pleasant if you
+substituted Terence and Rachel for Arthur and Susan; and Arthur
+was far less eager to get you in a corner and talk about flying and
+the mechanics of aeroplanes.  They would settle down.  He then looked
+at the couples who had been married for several years.  It was true
+that Mrs. Thornbury had a husband, and that for the most part she
+was wonderfully successful in bringing him into the conversation,
+but one could not imagine what they said to each other when they
+were alone.  There was the same difficulty with regard to the Elliots,
+except that they probably bickered openly in private.  They sometimes
+bickered in public, though these disagreements were painfully
+covered over by little insincerities on the part of the wife,
+who was afraid of public opinion, because she was much stupider
+than her husband, and had to make efforts to keep hold of him. 
+There could be no doubt, he decided, that it would have been far better
+for the world if these couples had separated.  Even the Ambroses,
+whom he admired and respected profoundly--in spite of all
+the love between them, was not their marriage too a compromise? 
+She gave way to him; she spoilt him; she arranged things for him;
+she who was all truth to others was not true to her husband, was not
+true to her friends if they came in conflict with her husband. 
+It was a strange and piteous flaw in her nature.  Perhaps Rachel had
+been right, then, when she said that night in the garden, "We bring
+out what's worst in each other--we should live separate."
+
+No Rachel had been utterly wrong!  Every argument seemed to be against
+undertaking the burden of marriage until he came to Rachel's argument,
+which was manifestly absurd.  From having been the pursued, he turned
+and became the pursuer.  Allowing the case against marriage to lapse,
+he began to consider the peculiarities of character which had led
+to her saying that.  Had she meant it?  Surely one ought to know
+the character of the person with whom one might spend all one's life;
+being a novelist, let him try to discover what sort of person she was. 
+When he was with her he could not analyse her qualities, because he
+seemed to know them instinctively, but when he was away from her it
+sometimes seemed to him that he did not know her at all.  She was young,
+but she was also old; she had little self-confidence, and yet she
+was a good judge of people.  She was happy; but what made her happy? 
+If they were alone and the excitement had worn off, and they had
+to deal with the ordinary facts of the day, what would happen? 
+Casting his eye upon his own character, two things appeared to him: 
+that he was very unpunctual, and that he disliked answering notes. 
+As far as he knew Rachel was inclined to be punctual, but he could
+not remember that he had ever seen her with a pen in her hand. 
+Let him next imagine a dinner-party, say at the Crooms, and Wilson,
+who had taken her down, talking about the state of the Liberal party. 
+She would say--of course she was absolutely ignorant of politics. 
+Nevertheless she was intelligent certainly, and honest too. 
+Her temper was uncertain--that he had noticed--and she was not domestic,
+and she was not easy, and she was not quiet, or beautiful,
+except in some dresses in some lights.  But the great gift she
+had was that she understood what was said to her; there had never
+been any one like her for talking to.  You could say anything--
+you could say everything, and yet she was never servile.  Here he
+pulled himself up, for it seemed to him suddenly that he knew less
+about her than about any one.  All these thoughts had occurred
+to him many times already; often had he tried to argue and reason;
+and again he had reached the old state of doubt.  He did not know her,
+and he did not know what she felt, or whether they could live together,
+or whether he wanted to marry her, and yet he was in love with
+her.
+
+Supposing he went to her and said (he slackened his pace and began
+to speak aloud, as if he were speaking to Rachel):
+
+"I worship you, but I loathe marriage, I hate its smugness, its safety,
+its compromise, and the thought of you interfering in my work,
+hindering me; what would you answer?"
+
+He stopped, leant against the trunk of a tree, and gazed without
+seeing them at some stones scattered on the bank of the dry
+river-bed. He saw Rachel's face distinctly, the grey eyes, the hair,
+the mouth; the face that could look so many things--plain, vacant,
+almost insignificant, or wild, passionate, almost beautiful,
+yet in his eyes was always the same because of the extraordinary
+freedom with which she looked at him, and spoke as she felt. 
+What would she answer?  What did she feel?  Did she love him,
+or did she feel nothing at all for him or for any other man, being,
+as she had said that afternoon, free, like the wind or the sea?
+
+"Oh, you're free!" he exclaimed, in exultation at the thought
+of her, "and I'd keep you free.  We'd be free together. 
+We'd share everything together.  No happiness would be like ours. 
+No lives would compare with ours."  He opened his arms wide
+as if to hold her and the world in one embrace.
+
+No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what
+her nature was, or how it would be if they lived together,
+he dropped to the ground and sat absorbed in the thought of her,
+and soon tormented by the desire to be in her presence again.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX
+
+
+
+But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that
+Hirst was still talking to Rachel.  The party very soon broke up,
+the Flushings going in one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel
+remaining in the hall, pulling the illustrated papers about,
+turning from one to another, her movements expressing the unformed
+restless desire in her mind.  She did not know whether to go or
+to stay, though Mrs. Flushing had commanded her to appear at tea. 
+The hall was empty, save for Miss Willett who was playing scales with
+her fingers upon a sheet of sacred music, and the Carters, an opulent
+couple who disliked the girl, because her shoe laces were untied,
+and she did not look sufficiently cheery, which by some indirect
+process of thought led them to think that she would not like them. 
+Rachel certainly would not have liked them, if she had seen them,
+for the excellent reason that Mr. Carter waxed his moustache,
+and Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they were evidently the kind
+of people who would not like her; but she was too much absorbed
+by her own restlessness to think or to look.
+
+She was turning over the slippery pages of an American magazine,
+when the hall door swung, a wedge of light fell upon the floor,
+and a small white figure upon whom the light seemed focussed,
+made straight across the room to her.
+
+"What!  You here?"  Evelyn exclaimed.  "Just caught a glimpse
+of you at lunch; but you wouldn't condescend to look at _me_."
+
+It was part of Evelyn's character that in spite of many snubs
+which she received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit
+of people she wanted to know, and in the long run generally
+succeeded in knowing them and even in making them like her.
+
+She looked round her.  "I hate this place.  I hate these people,"
+she said.  "I wish you'd come up to my room with me.  I do want to
+talk to you."
+
+As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evelyn took her by the wrist
+and drew her out of the hall and up the stairs.  As they went upstairs
+two steps at a time, Evelyn, who still kept hold of Rachel's hand,
+ejaculated broken sentences about not caring a hang what people said. 
+"Why should one, if one knows one's right?  And let 'em all go
+to blazes!  Them's my opinions!"
+
+She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms
+were twitching nervously.  It was evident that she was only waiting
+for the door to shut to tell Rachel all about it.  Indeed, directly they
+were inside her room, she sat on the end of the bed and said,
+"I suppose you think I'm mad?"
+
+Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about any one's state
+of mind.  She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever
+occurred to her without fear of the consequences.
+
+"Somebody's proposed to you," she remarked.
+
+"How on earth did you guess that?"  Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure
+mingling with her surprise.  "Do as I look as if I'd just had
+a proposal?"
+
+"You look as if you had them every day," Rachel replied.
+
+"But I don't suppose I've had more than you've had," Evelyn laughed
+rather insincerely.
+
+"I've never had one."
+
+"But you will--lots--it's the easiest thing in the world--But that's
+not what's happened this afternoon exactly.  It's--Oh, it's a muddle,
+a detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!"
+
+She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold water;
+for they were burning hot.  Still sponging them and trembling slightly she
+turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous excitement: 
+"Alfred Perrott says I've promised to marry him, and I say I never did. 
+Sinclair says he'll shoot himself if I don't marry him, and I say,
+'Well, shoot yourself!'  But of course he doesn't--they never do. 
+And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me
+to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott,
+and told me I'd no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities
+of pleasant things like that.  So at last I said to him,
+'Well, Sinclair, you've said enough now.  You can just let me go.' 
+And then he caught me and kissed me--the disgusting brute--I can
+still feel his nasty hairy face just there--as if he'd any right to,
+after what he'd said!"
+
+She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.
+
+"I've never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!"
+she cried; "they've no dignity, they've no courage, they've nothing
+but their beastly passions and their brute strength!  Would any
+woman have behaved like that--if a man had said he didn't want her? 
+We've too much self-respect; we're infinitely finer than they are."
+
+She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. 
+Tears were now running down with the drops of cold water.
+
+"It makes me angry," she explained, drying her eyes.
+
+Rachel sat watching her.  She did not think of Evelyn's position;
+she only thought that the world was full or people in torment.
+
+"There's only one man here I really like," Evelyn continued;
+"Terence Hewet.  One feels as if one could trust him."
+
+At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart
+seemed to be pressed together by cold hands.
+
+"Why?" she asked.  "Why can you trust him?"
+
+"I don't know," said Evelyn.  "Don't you have feelings about people? 
+Feelings you're absolutely certain are right?  I had a long talk with
+Terence the other night.  I felt we were really friends after that. 
+There's something of a woman in him--" She paused as though she
+were thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her,
+so at least Rachel interpreted her gaze.
+
+She tried to force herself to say, "Has to be proposed to you?"
+but the question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn
+was saying that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler
+than men--for example, one couldn't imagine a woman like Lillah
+Harrison thinking a mean thing or having anything base about her.
+
+"How I'd like you to know her!" she exclaimed.
+
+She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. 
+Her eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality,
+and she seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. 
+"Lillah runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,"
+she continued.  "She started it, managed it, did everything off
+her own bat, and it's now the biggest of its kind in England. 
+You can't think what those women are like--and their homes. 
+But she goes among them at all hours of the day and night. 
+I've often been with her.  . . . That's what's the matter with us. 
+. . . We don't _do_ things.  What do you _do_?" she demanded,
+looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile.  Rachel had scarcely
+listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and unhappy. 
+She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her work
+in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love
+affairs.
+
+"I play," she said with an affection of stolid composure.
+
+"That's about it!"  Evelyn laughed.  "We none of us do anything
+but play.  And that's why women like Lillah Harrison, who's worth
+twenty of you and me, have to work themselves to the bone. 
+But I'm tired of playing," she went on, lying flat on the bed,
+and raising her arms above her head.  Thus stretched out, she looked
+more diminutive than ever.
+
+"I'm going to do something.  I've got a splendid idea.  Look here,
+you must join.  I'm sure you've got any amount of stuff in you,
+though you look--well, as if you'd lived all your life in a garden." 
+She sat up, and began to explain with animation.  "I belong to a club
+in London.  It meets every Saturday, so it's called the Saturday Club. 
+We're supposed to talk about art, but I'm sick of talking about art--
+what's the good of it?  With all kinds of real things going on round one? 
+It isn't as if they'd got anything to say about art, either. 
+So what I'm going to tell 'em is that we've talked enough about art,
+and we'd better talk about life for a change.  Questions that really
+matter to people's lives, the White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage,
+the Insurance Bill, and so on.  And when we've made up our mind what
+we want to do we could form ourselves into a society for doing it. 
+. . . I'm certain that if people like ourselves were to take
+things in hand instead of leaving it to policemen and magistrates,
+we could put a stop to--prostitution"--she lowered her voice
+at the ugly word--"in six months.  My idea is that men and women
+ought to join in these matters.  We ought to go into Piccadilly
+and stop one of these poor wretches and say:  'Now, look here,
+I'm no better than you are, and I don't pretend to be any better,
+but you're doing what you know to be beastly, and I won't have
+you doing beastly things, because we're all the same under
+our skins, and if you do a beastly thing it does matter to me.' 
+That's what Mr. Bax was saying this morning, and it's true,
+though you clever people--you're clever too, aren't you?--
+don't believe it."
+
+When Evelyn began talking--it was a fact she often regretted--
+her thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen
+to other people's thoughts.  She continued without more pause than
+was needed for taking breath.
+
+"I don't see why the Saturday club people shouldn't do a really great
+work in that way," she went on.  "Of course it would want organisation,
+some one to give their life to it, but I'm ready to do that.  My notion's
+to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care
+of themselves.  What's wrong with Lillah--if there is anything wrong--
+is that she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards. 
+Now there's one thing I'll say to my credit," she continued;
+"I'm not intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort,
+but I'm jolly human."  She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor,
+looking up at Rachel.  She searched up into her face as if she were
+trying to read what kind of character was concealed behind the face. 
+She put her hand on Rachel's knee.
+
+"It _is_ being human that counts, isn't it?" she continued. 
+"Being real, whatever Mr. Hirst may say.  Are you real?"
+
+Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close
+to her, and that there was something exciting in this closeness,
+although it was also disagreeable.  She was spared the need of
+finding an answer to the question, for Evelyn proceeded, "Do you
+_believe_ in anything?"
+
+In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes,
+and to relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back
+her chair and exclaimed, "In everything!" and began to finger
+different objects, the books on the table, the photographs,
+the freshly leaved plant with the stiff bristles, which stood
+in a large earthenware pot in the window.
+
+"I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony,
+in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing," she remarked, still speaking recklessly,
+with something at the back of her mind forcing her to say the things
+that one usually does not say.  "But I don't believe in God,
+I don't believe in Mr. Bax, I don't believe in the hospital nurse. 
+I don't believe--" She took up a photograph and, looking at it,
+did not finish her sentence.
+
+"That's my mother," said Evelyn, who remained sitting on the floor
+binding her knees together with her arms, and watching Rachel curiously.
+
+Rachel considered the portrait.  "Well, I don't much believe in her,"
+she remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.
+
+Mrs. Murgatroyd looked indeed as if the life had been crushed
+out of her; she knelt on a chair, gazing piteously from behind
+the body of a Pomeranian dog which she clasped to her cheek,
+as if for protection.
+
+"And that's my dad," said Evelyn, for there were two photographs
+in one frame.  The second photograph represented a handsome
+soldier with high regular features and a heavy black moustache;
+his hand rested on the hilt of his sword; there was a decided
+likeness between him and Evelyn.
+
+"And it's because of them," said Evelyn, "that I'm going
+to help the other women.  You've heard about me, I suppose? 
+They weren't married, you see; I'm not anybody in particular. 
+I'm not a bit ashamed of it.  They loved each other anyhow,
+and that's more than most people can say of their parents."
+
+Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her hands,
+and compared them--the man and the woman who had, so Evelyn said,
+loved each other.  That fact interested her more than the campaign
+on behalf of unfortunate women which Evelyn was once more beginning
+to describe.  She looked again from one to the other.
+
+"What d'you think it's like," she asked, as Evelyn paused for a minute,
+"being in love?"
+
+"Have you never been in love?"  Evelyn asked.  "Oh no--one's only
+got to look at you to see that," she added.  She considered. 
+"I really was in love once," she said.  She fell into reflection,
+her eyes losing their bright vitality and approaching something like
+an expression of tenderness.  "It was heavenly!--while it lasted. 
+The worst of it is it don't last, not with me.  That's the bother."
+
+She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sinclair
+about which she had pretended to ask Rachel's advice.  But she did
+not want advice; she wanted intimacy.  When she looked at Rachel,
+who was still looking at the photographs on the bed, she could not
+help seeing that Rachel was not thinking about her.  What was she
+thinking about, then?  Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of
+life in her which was always trying to work through to other people,
+and was always being rebuffed.  Falling silent she looked at
+her visitor, her shoes, her stockings, the combs in her hair,
+all the details of her dress in short, as though by seizing every
+detail she might get closer to the life within.
+
+Rachel at last put down the photographs, walked to the window
+and remarked, "It's odd.  People talk as much about love as they
+do about religion."
+
+"I wish you'd sit down and talk," said Evelyn impatiently.
+
+Instead Rachel opened the window, which was made in two long panes,
+and looked down into the garden below.
+
+"That's where we got lost the first night," she said.  "It must
+have been in those bushes."
+
+"They kill hens down there," said Evelyn.  "They cut their heads
+off with a knife--disgusting!  But tell me--what--"
+
+"I'd like to explore the hotel," Rachel interrupted.  She drew
+her head in and looked at Evelyn, who still sat on the floor.
+
+"It's just like other hotels," said Evelyn.
+
+That might be, although every room and passage and chair
+in the place had a character of its own in Rachel's eyes;
+but she could not bring herself to stay in one place any longer. 
+She moved slowly towards the door.
+
+"What is it you want?" said Evelyn.  "You make me feel as if you
+were always thinking of something you don't say.  . . . Do say it!"
+
+But Rachel made no response to this invitation either.  She stopped
+with her fingers on the handle of the door, as if she remembered
+that some sort of pronouncement was due from her.
+
+"I suppose you'll marry one of them," she said, and then turned
+the handle and shut the door behind her.  She walked slowly
+down the passage, running her hand along the wall beside her. 
+She did not think which way she was going, and therefore walked
+down a passage which only led to a window and a balcony.  She looked
+down at the kitchen premises, the wrong side of the hotel life,
+which was cut off from the right side by a maze of small bushes. 
+The ground was bare, old tins were scattered about, and the bushes
+wore towels and aprons upon their heads to dry.  Every now and then
+a waiter came out in a white apron and threw rubbish on to a heap. 
+Two large women in cotton dresses were sitting on a bench with
+blood-smeared tin trays in front of them and yellow bodies across
+their knees.  They were plucking the birds, and talking as they plucked. 
+Suddenly a chicken came floundering, half flying, half running
+into the space, pursued by a third woman whose age could hardly be
+under eighty.  Although wizened and unsteady on her legs she kept
+up the chase, egged on by the laughter of the others; her face was
+expressive of furious rage, and as she ran she swore in Spanish. 
+Frightened by hand-clapping here, a napkin there, the bird ran
+this way and that in sharp angles, and finally fluttered straight
+at the old woman, who opened her scanty grey skirts to enclose it,
+dropped upon it in a bundle, and then holding it out cut its head
+off with an expression of vindictive energy and triumph combined. 
+The blood and the ugly wriggling fascinated Rachel, so that although
+she knew that some one had come up behind and was standing beside her,
+she did not turn round until the old woman had settled down on
+the bench beside the others.  Then she looked up sharply, because of
+the ugliness of what she had seen.  It was Miss Allan who stood
+beside her.
+
+"Not a pretty sight," said Miss Allan, "although I daresay it's
+really more humane than our method.  . . . I don't believe you've
+ever been in my room," she added, and turned away as if she meant
+Rachel to follow her.  Rachel followed, for it seemed possible
+that each new person might remove the mystery which burdened her.
+
+The bedrooms at the hotel were all on the same pattern, save that some
+were larger and some smaller; they had a floor of dark red tiles;
+they had a high bed, draped in mosquito curtains; they had each
+a writing-table and a dressing-table, and a couple of arm-chairs.
+But directly a box was unpacked the rooms became very different,
+so that Miss Allan's room was very unlike Evelyn's room. 
+There were no variously coloured hatpins on her dressing-table;
+no scent-bottles; no narrow curved pairs of scissors; no great variety
+of shoes and boots; no silk petticoats lying on the chairs.  The room
+was extremely neat.  There seemed to be two pairs of everything. 
+The writing-table, however, was piled with manuscript, and a table
+was drawn out to stand by the arm-chair on which were two separate
+heaps of dark library books, in which there were many slips of paper
+sticking out at different degrees of thickness.  Miss Allan had asked
+Rachel to come in out of kindness, thinking that she was waiting
+about with nothing to do.  Moreover, she liked young women, for she
+had taught many of them, and having received so much hospitality from
+the Ambroses she was glad to be able to repay a minute part of it. 
+She looked about accordingly for something to show her.  The room
+did not provide much entertainment.  She touched her manuscript. 
+"Age of Chaucer; Age of Elizabeth; Age of Dryden," she reflected;
+"I'm glad there aren't many more ages.  I'm still in the middle of
+the eighteenth century.  Won't you sit down, Miss Vinrace?  The chair,
+though small, is firm.  . . . Euphues.  The germ of the English novel,"
+she continued, glancing at another page.  "Is that the kind of thing
+that interests you?"
+
+She looked at Rachel with great kindness and simplicity, as though
+she would do her utmost to provide anything she wished to have. 
+This expression had a remarkable charm in a face otherwise much lined
+with care and thought.
+
+"Oh no, it's music with you, isn't it?" she continued,
+recollecting, "and I generally find that they don't go together. 
+Sometimes of course we have prodigies--" She was looking about her
+for something and now saw a jar on the mantelpiece which she reached
+down and gave to Rachel.  "If you put your finger into this jar
+you may be able to extract a piece of preserved ginger.  Are you a prodigy?"
+
+But the ginger was deep and could not be reached.
+
+"Don't bother," she said, as Miss Allan looked about for some
+other implement.  "I daresay I shouldn't like preserved ginger."
+
+"You've never tried?" enquired Miss Allan.  "Then I consider that it
+is your duty to try now.  Why, you may add a new pleasure to life,
+and as you are still young--" She wondered whether a button-hook
+would do.  "I make it a rule to try everything," she said.  "Don't you
+think it would be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first
+time on your death-bed, and found you never liked anything so much? 
+I should be so exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well
+on that account alone."
+
+She was now successful, and a lump of ginger emerged on the end
+of the button-hook. While she went to wipe the button-hook, Rachel
+bit the ginger and at once cried, "I must spit it out!"
+
+"Are you sure you have really tasted it?"  Miss Allan demanded.
+
+For answer Rachel threw it out of the window.
+
+"An experience anyhow," said Miss Allan calmly.  "Let me see--I have
+nothing else to offer you, unless you would like to taste this." 
+A small cupboard hung above her bed, and she took out of it a slim
+elegant jar filled with a bright green fluid.
+
+"Creme de Menthe," she said.  "Liqueur, you know.  It looks
+as if I drank, doesn't it?  As a matter of fact it goes to prove
+what an exceptionally abstemious person I am.  I've had that jar
+for six-and-twenty years," she added, looking at it with pride,
+as she tipped it over, and from the height of the liquid it could
+be seen that the bottle was still untouched.
+
+"Twenty-six years?"  Rachel exclaimed.
+
+Miss Allan was gratified, for she had meant Rachel to be surprised.
+
+"When I went to Dresden six-and-twenty years ago," she said,
+"a certain friend of mine announced her intention of making me
+a present.  She thought that in the event of shipwreck or accident
+a stimulant might be useful.  However, as I had no occasion for it,
+I gave it back on my return.  On the eve of any foreign journey
+the same bottle always makes its appearance, with the same note;
+on my return in safety it is always handed back.  I consider it a kind
+of charm against accidents.  Though I was once detained twenty-four
+hours by an accident to the train in front of me, I have never met
+with any accident myself.  Yes," she continued, now addressing
+the bottle, "we have seen many climes and cupboards together,
+have we not?  I intend one of these days to have a silver label
+made with an inscription.  It is a gentleman, as you may observe,
+and his name is Oliver.  . . . I do not think I could forgive you,
+Miss Vinrace, if you broke my Oliver," she said, firmly taking the
+bottle out of Rachel's hands and replacing it in the cupboard.
+
+Rachel was swinging the bottle by the neck.  She was interested
+by Miss Allan to the point of forgetting the bottle.
+
+"Well," she exclaimed, "I do think that odd; to have had a friend
+for twenty-six years, and a bottle, and--to have made all those journeys."
+
+"Not at all; I call it the reverse of odd," Miss Allan replied. 
+"I always consider myself the most ordinary person I know. 
+It's rather distinguished to be as ordinary as I am.  I forget--
+are you a prodigy, or did you say you were not a prodigy?"
+
+She smiled at Rachel very kindly.  She seemed to have known
+and experienced so much, as she moved cumbrously about the room,
+that surely there must be balm for all anguish in her words,
+could one induce her to have recourse to them.  But Miss Allan,
+who was now locking the cupboard door, showed no signs of
+breaking the reticence which had snowed her under for years. 
+An uncomfortable sensation kept Rachel silent; on the one hand,
+she wished to whirl high and strike a spark out of the cool pink flesh;
+on the other she perceived there was nothing to be done but to drift
+past each other in silence.
+
+"I'm not a prodigy.  I find it very difficult to say what I mean--"
+she observed at length.
+
+"It's a matter of temperament, I believe," Miss Allan helped her. 
+"There are some people who have no difficulty; for myself I find
+there are a great many things I simply cannot say.  But then I
+consider myself very slow.  One of my colleagues now, knows whether
+she likes you or not--let me see, how does she do it?--by the way you
+say good-morning at breakfast.  It is sometimes a matter of years
+before I can make up my mind.  But most young people seem to find
+it easy?"
+
+"Oh no," said Rachel.  "It's hard!"
+
+Miss Allan looked at Rachel quietly, saying nothing; she suspected
+that there were difficulties of some kind.  Then she put her hand
+to the back of her head, and discovered that one of the grey coils
+of hair had come loose.
+
+"I must ask you to be so kind as to excuse me," she said, rising,
+"if I do my hair.  I have never yet found a satisfactory type
+of hairpin.  I must change my dress, too, for the matter of that;
+and I should be particularly glad of your assistance, because there
+is a tiresome set of hooks which I _can_ fasten for myself,
+but it takes from ten to fifteen minutes; whereas with your help--"
+
+She slipped off her coat and skirt and blouse, and stood doing
+her hair before the glass, a massive homely figure, her petticoat
+being so short that she stood on a pair of thick slate-grey legs.
+
+"People say youth is pleasant; I myself find middle age far pleasanter,"
+she remarked, removing hair pins and combs, and taking up her brush. 
+When it fell loose her hair only came down to her neck.
+
+"When one was young," she continued, "things could seem so very
+serious if one was made that way.  . . . And now my dress."
+
+In a wonderfully short space of time her hair had been reformed in its
+usual loops.  The upper half of her body now became dark green with black
+stripes on it; the skirt, however, needed hooking at various angles,
+and Rachel had to kneel on the floor, fitting the eyes to the hooks.
+
+"Our Miss Johnson used to find life very unsatisfactory, I remember,"
+Miss Allan continued.  She turned her back to the light.  "And then
+she took to breeding guinea-pigs for their spots, and became
+absorbed in that.  I have just heard that the yellow guinea-pig
+has had a black baby.  We had a bet of sixpence on about it. 
+She will be very triumphant."
+
+The skirt was fastened.  She looked at herself in the glass with
+the curious stiffening of her face generally caused by looking
+in the glass.
+
+"Am I in a fit state to encounter my fellow-beings?" she asked. 
+"I forget which way it is--but they find black animals very rarely
+have coloured babies--it may be the other way round.  I have had
+it so often explained to me that it is very stupid of me to have
+forgotten again."
+
+She moved about the room acquiring small objects with quiet force,
+and fixing them about her--a locket, a watch and chain, a heavy
+gold bracelet, and the parti-coloured button of a suffrage society. 
+Finally, completely equipped for Sunday tea, she stood before Rachel,
+and smiled at her kindly.  She was not an impulsive woman, and her
+life had schooled her to restrain her tongue.  At the same time,
+she was possessed of an amount of good-will towards others,
+and in particular towards the young, which often made her regret
+that speech was so difficult.
+
+"Shall we descend?" she said.
+
+She put one hand upon Rachel's shoulder, and stooping, picked up
+a pair of walking-shoes with the other, and placed them neatly side
+by side outside her door.  As they walked down the passage they
+passed many pairs of boots and shoes, some black and some brown,
+all side by side, and all different, even to the way in which they
+lay together.
+
+"I always think that people are so like their boots," said Miss Allan. 
+"That is Mrs. Paley's--" but as she spoke the door opened,
+and Mrs. Paley rolled out in her chair, equipped also for tea.
+
+She greeted Miss Allan and Rachel.
+
+"I was just saying that people are so like their boots,"
+said Miss Allan.  Mrs. Paley did not hear.  She repeated it
+more loudly still.  Mrs. Paley did not hear.  She repeated it
+a third time.  Mrs. Paley heard, but she did not understand. 
+She was apparently about to repeat it for the fourth time,
+when Rachel suddenly said something inarticulate, and disappeared
+down the corridor.  This misunderstanding, which involved a complete
+block in the passage, seemed to her unbearable.  She walked quickly
+and blindly in the opposite direction, and found herself at the end
+of a _cul_ _de_ _sac_.  There was a window, and a table and a
+chair in the window, and upon the table stood a rusty inkstand,
+an ashtray, an old copy of a French newspaper, and a pen with a
+broken nib.  Rachel sat down, as if to study the French newspaper,
+but a tear fell on the blurred French print, raising a soft blot. 
+She lifted her head sharply, exclaiming aloud, "It's intolerable!" 
+Looking out of the window with eyes that would have seen nothing
+even had they not been dazed by tears, she indulged herself at last
+in violent abuse of the entire day.  It had been miserable from
+start to finish; first, the service in the chapel; then luncheon;
+then Evelyn; then Miss Allan; then old Mrs. Paley blocking up
+the passage.  All day long she had been tantalized and put off. 
+She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of some crisis,
+from which the world is finally displayed in its true proportions. 
+She disliked the look of it immensely--churches, politicians, misfits,
+and huge impostures--men like Mr. Dalloway, men like Mr. Bax,
+Evelyn and her chatter, Mrs. Paley blocking up the passage. 
+Meanwhile the steady beat of her own pulse represented the hot current
+of feeling that ran down beneath; beating, struggling, fretting. 
+For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in the world,
+which tried to burst forth here--there--and was repressed now by
+Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous stupidity,
+the weight of the entire world.  Thus tormented, she would twist
+her hands together, for all things were wrong, all people stupid. 
+Vaguely seeing that there were people down in the garden beneath
+she represented them as aimless masses of matter, floating hither
+and thither, without aim except to impede her.  What were they doing,
+those other people in the world?
+
+"Nobody knows," she said.  The force of her rage was beginning
+to spend itself, and the vision of the world which had been so vivid
+became dim.
+
+"It's a dream," she murmured.  She considered the rusty inkstand,
+the pen, the ash-tray, and the old French newspaper.  These small
+and worthless objects seemed to her to represent human lives.
+
+"We're asleep and dreaming," she repeated.  But the possibility
+which now suggested itself that one of the shapes might be
+the shape of Terence roused her from her melancholy lethargy. 
+She became as restless as she had been before she sat down.  She was
+no longer able to see the world as a town laid out beneath her. 
+It was covered instead by a haze of feverish red mist.  She had
+returned to the state in which she had been all day.  Thinking was
+no escape.  Physical movement was the only refuge, in and out
+of rooms, in and out of people's minds, seeking she knew not what. 
+Therefore she rose, pushed back the table, and went downstairs. 
+She went out of the hall door, and, turning the corner of the hotel,
+found herself among the people whom she had seen from the window. 
+But owing to the broad sunshine after shaded passages, and to
+the substance of living people after dreams, the group appeared
+with startling intensity, as though the dusty surface had been
+peeled off everything, leaving only the reality and the instant. 
+It had the look of a vision printed on the dark at night. 
+White and grey and purple figures were scattered on the green,
+round wicker tables, in the middle the flame of the tea-urn made
+the air waver like a faulty sheet of glass, a massive green tree
+stood over them as if it were a moving force held at rest. 
+As she approached, she could hear Evelyn's voice repeating monotonously,
+"Here then--here--good doggie, come here"; for a moment nothing
+seemed to happen; it all stood still, and then she realised that
+one of the figures was Helen Ambrose; and the dust again began
+to settle.
+
+The group indeed had come together in a miscellaneous way;
+one tea-table joining to another tea-table, and deck-chairs serving
+to connect two groups.  But even at a distance it could be seen
+that Mrs. Flushing, upright and imperious, dominated the party. 
+She was talking vehemently to Helen across the table.
+
+"Ten days under canvas," she was saying.  "No comforts.  If you
+want comforts, don't come.  But I may tell you, if you don't come
+you'll regret it all your life.  You say yes?"
+
+At this moment Mrs. Flushing caught sight of Rachel.
+
+"Ah, there's your niece.  She's promised.  You're coming, aren't you?" 
+Having adopted the plan, she pursued it with the energy of a child.
+
+Rachel took her part with eagerness.
+
+"Of course I'm coming.  So are you, Helen.  And Mr. Pepper too." 
+As she sat she realised that she was surrounded by people she knew,
+but that Terence was not among them.  From various angles people
+began saying what they thought of the proposed expedition. 
+According to some it would be hot, but the nights would be cold;
+according to others, the difficulties would lie rather in getting a boat,
+and in speaking the language.  Mrs. Flushing disposed of all objections,
+whether due to man or due to nature, by announcing that her husband
+would settle all that.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Flushing quietly explained to Helen that the expedition
+was really a simple matter; it took five days at the outside;
+and the place--a native village--was certainly well worth seeing
+before she returned to England.  Helen murmured ambiguously,
+and did not commit herself to one answer rather than to another.
+
+The tea-party, however, included too many different kinds of people
+for general conversation to flourish; and from Rachel's point
+of view possessed the great advantage that it was quite unnecessary
+for her to talk.  Over there Susan and Arthur were explaining
+to Mrs. Paley that an expedition had been proposed; and Mrs. Paley
+having grasped the fact, gave the advice of an old traveller that they
+should take nice canned vegetables, fur cloaks, and insect powder. 
+She leant over to Mrs. Flushing and whispered something which
+from the twinkle in her eyes probably had reference to bugs. 
+Then Helen was reciting "Toll for the Brave" to St. John Hirst,
+in order apparently to win a sixpence which lay upon the table;
+while Mr. Hughling Elliot imposed silence upon his section
+of the audience by his fascinating anecdote of Lord Curzon
+and the undergraduate's bicycle.  Mrs. Thornbury was trying to
+remember the name of a man who might have been another Garibaldi,
+and had written a book which they ought to read; and Mr. Thornbury
+recollected that he had a pair of binoculars at anybody's service. 
+Miss Allan meanwhile murmured with the curious intimacy which a spinster
+often achieves with dogs, to the fox-terrier which Evelyn had at last
+induced to come over to them.  Little particles of dust or blossom
+fell on the plates now and then when the branches sighed above. 
+Rachel seemed to see and hear a little of everything, much as a
+river feels the twigs that fall into it and sees the sky above,
+but her eyes were too vague for Evelyn's liking.  She came across,
+and sat on the ground at Rachel's feet.
+
+"Well?" she asked suddenly.  "What are you thinking about?"
+
+"Miss Warrington," Rachel replied rashly, because she had to
+say something.  She did indeed see Susan murmuring to Mrs. Elliot,
+while Arthur stared at her with complete confidence in his own love. 
+Both Rachel and Evelyn then began to listen to what Susan was saying.
+
+"There's the ordering and the dogs and the garden, and the children
+coming to be taught," her voice proceeded rhythmically as if checking
+the list, "and my tennis, and the village, and letters to write
+for father, and a thousand little things that don't sound much;
+but I never have a moment to myself, and when I got to bed,
+I'm so sleepy I'm off before my head touches the pillow.  Besides I
+like to be a great deal with my Aunts--I'm a great bore, aren't I,
+Aunt Emma?" (she smiled at old Mrs. Paley, who with head slightly
+drooped was regarding the cake with speculative affection), "and
+father has to be very careful about chills in winter which means
+a great deal of running about, because he won't look after himself,
+any more than you will, Arthur!  So it all mounts up!"
+
+Her voice mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life
+and her own nature.  Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan,
+ignoring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. 
+She appeared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific,
+the kind blue eyes now shallow and watery, the bloom of the cheeks
+congealed to a network of dry red canals.
+
+Helen turned to her.  "Did you go to church?" she asked. 
+She had won her sixpence and seemed making ready to go.
+
+"Yes," said Rachel.  "For the last time," she added.
+
+In preparing to put on her gloves, Helen dropped one.
+
+"You're not going?"  Evelyn asked, taking hold of one glove
+as if to keep them.
+
+"It's high time we went," said Helen.  "Don't you see how silent
+every one's getting--?"
+
+A silence had fallen upon them all, caused partly by one of the
+accidents of talk, and partly because they saw some one approaching. 
+Helen could not see who it was, but keeping her eyes fixed upon Rachel
+observed something which made her say to herself, "So it's Hewet." 
+She drew on her gloves with a curious sense of the significance
+of the moment.  Then she rose, for Mrs. Flushing had seen Hewet too,
+and was demanding information about rivers and boats which showed
+that the whole conversation would now come over again.
+
+Rachel followed her, and they walked in silence down the avenue. 
+In spite of what Helen had seen and understood, the feeling that was
+uppermost in her mind was now curiously perverse; if she went on
+this expedition, she would not be able to have a bath, the effort
+appeared to her to be great and disagreeable.
+
+"It's so unpleasant, being cooped up with people one hardly knows,"
+she remarked.  "People who mind being seen naked."
+
+"You don't mean to go?"  Rachel asked.
+
+The intensity with which this was spoken irritated Mrs. Ambrose.
+
+"I don't mean to go, and I don't mean not to go," she replied. 
+She became more and more casual and indifferent.
+
+"After all, I daresay we've seen all there is to be seen;
+and there's the bother of getting there, and whatever they
+may say it's bound to be vilely uncomfortable."
+
+For some time Rachel made no reply; but every sentence Helen spoke
+increased her bitterness.  At last she broke out--
+
+"Thank God, Helen, I'm not like you!  I sometimes think you don't think
+or feel or care to do anything but exist!  You're like Mr. Hirst. 
+You see that things are bad, and you pride yourself on saying so. 
+It's what you call being honest; as a matter of fact it's being lazy,
+being dull, being nothing.  You don't help; you put an end
+to things."
+
+Helen smiled as if she rather enjoyed the attack.
+
+"Well?" she enquired.
+
+"It seems to me bad--that's all," Rachel replied.
+
+"Quite likely," said Helen.
+
+At any other time Rachel would probably have been silenced by her
+Aunt's candour; but this afternoon she was not in the mood to be
+silenced by any one.  A quarrel would be welcome.
+
+"You're only half alive," she continued.
+
+"Is that because I didn't accept Mr. Flushing's invitation?" 
+Helen asked, "or do you always think that?"
+
+At the moment it appeared to Rachel that she had always seen the same
+faults in Helen, from the very first night on board the _Euphrosyne_,
+in spite of her beauty, in spite of her magnanimity and their love.
+
+"Oh, it's only what's the matter with every one!" she exclaimed. 
+"No one feels--no one does anything but hurt.  I tell you, Helen,
+the world's bad.  It's an agony, living, wanting--"
+
+Here she tore a handful of leaves from a bush and crushed them
+to control herself.
+
+"The lives of these people," she tried to explain, the aimlessness,
+the way they live.  One goes from one to another, and it's all the same. 
+One never gets what one wants out of any of them."
+
+Her emotional state and her confusion would have made her an easy
+prey if Helen had wished to argue or had wished to draw confidences. 
+But instead of talking she fell into a profound silence as they
+walked on.  Aimless, trivial, meaningless, oh no--what she
+had seen at tea made it impossible for her to believe that. 
+The little jokes, the chatter, the inanities of the afternoon had
+shrivelled up before her eyes.  Underneath the likings and spites,
+the comings together and partings, great things were happening--
+terrible things, because they were so great.  Her sense of safety
+was shaken, as if beneath twigs and dead leaves she had seen
+the movement of a snake.  It seemed to her that a moment's respite
+was allowed, a moment's make-believe, and then again the profound
+and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to its liking,
+making and destroying.
+
+She looked at Rachel walking beside her, still crushing the leaves
+in her fingers and absorbed in her own thoughts.  She was in love,
+and she pitied her profoundly.  But she roused herself from
+these thoughts and apologised.  "I'm very sorry," she said,
+"but if I'm dull, it's my nature, and it can't be helped."  If it
+was a natural defect, however, she found an easy remedy, for she went
+on to say that she thought Mr. Flushing's scheme a very good one,
+only needing a little consideration, which it appeared she had given
+it by the time they reached home.  By that time they had settled
+that if anything more was said, they would accept the invitation.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX
+
+
+
+When considered in detail by Mr. Flushing and Mrs. Ambrose
+the expedition proved neither dangerous nor difficult. 
+They found also that it was not even unusual.  Every year at this
+season English people made parties which steamed a short way up
+the river, landed, and looked at the native village, bought a certain
+number of things from the natives, and returned again without
+damage done to mind or body.  When it was discovered that six
+people really wished the same thing the arrangements were soon carried out.
+
+Since the time of Elizabeth very few people had seen the river,
+and nothing has been done to change its appearance from what it
+was to the eyes of the Elizabethan voyagers.  The time of Elizabeth
+was only distant from the present time by a moment of space
+compared with the ages which had passed since the water had run
+between those banks, and the green thickets swarmed there,
+and the small trees had grown to huge wrinkled trees in solitude. 
+Changing only with the change of the sun and the clouds, the waving
+green mass had stood there for century after century, and the water
+had run between its banks ceaselessly, sometimes washing away
+earth and sometimes the branches of trees, while in other parts
+of the world one town had risen upon the ruins of another town,
+and the men in the towns had become more and more articulate
+and unlike each other.  A few miles of this river were visible
+from the top of the mountain where some weeks before the party
+from the hotel had picnicked.  Susan and Arthur had seen it as they
+kissed each other, and Terence and Rachel as they sat talking
+about Richmond, and Evelyn and Perrott as they strolled about,
+imagining that they were great captains sent to colonise the world. 
+They had seen the broad blue mark across the sand where it flowed
+into the sea, and the green cloud of trees mass themselves about it
+farther up, and finally hide its waters altogether from sight. 
+At intervals for the first twenty miles or so houses were scattered
+on the bank; by degrees the houses became huts, and, later still,
+there was neither hut nor house, but trees and grass, which were
+seen only by hunters, explorers, or merchants, marching or sailing,
+but making no settlement.
+
+By leaving Santa Marina early in the morning, driving twenty
+miles and riding eight, the party, which was composed finally
+of six English people, reached the river-side as the night fell. 
+They came cantering through the trees--Mr. and Mrs. Flushing,
+Helen Ambrose, Rachel, Terence, and St. John.  The tired little
+horses then stopped automatically, and the English dismounted. 
+Mrs. Flushing strode to the river-bank in high spirits.  The day had
+been long and hot, but she had enjoyed the speed and the open air;
+she had left the hotel which she hated, and she found the company
+to her liking.  The river was swirling past in the darkness;
+they could just distinguish the smooth moving surface of the water,
+and the air was full of the sound of it.  They stood in an empty
+space in the midst of great tree-trunks, and out there a little green
+light moving slightly up and down showed them where the steamer lay
+in which they were to embark.
+
+When they all stood upon its deck they found that it was a very
+small boat which throbbed gently beneath them for a few minutes,
+and then shoved smoothly through the water.  They seemed to be
+driving into the heart of the night, for the trees closed in
+front of them, and they could hear all round them the rustling
+of leaves.  The great darkness had the usual effect of taking away
+all desire for communication by making their words sound thin
+and small; and, after walking round the deck three or four times,
+they clustered together, yawning deeply, and looking at the same spot
+of deep gloom on the banks.  Murmuring very low in the rhythmical
+tone of one oppressed by the air, Mrs. Flushing began to wonder
+where they were to sleep, for they could not sleep downstairs,
+they could not sleep in a doghole smelling of oil, they could not
+sleep on deck, they could not sleep--She yawned profoundly.  It was
+as Helen had foreseen; the question of nakedness had risen already,
+although they were half asleep, and almost invisible to each other. 
+With St. John's help she stretched an awning, and persuaded
+Mrs. Flushing that she could take off her clothes behind this,
+and that no one would notice if by chance some part of her which had
+been concealed for forty-five years was laid bare to the human eye. 
+Mattresses were thrown down, rugs provided, and the three women
+lay near each other in the soft open air.
+
+The gentlemen, having smoked a certain number of cigarettes,
+dropped the glowing ends into the river, and looked for a time at
+the ripples wrinkling the black water beneath them, undressed too,
+and lay down at the other end of the boat.  They were very tired,
+and curtained from each other by the darkness.  The light from one
+lantern fell upon a few ropes, a few planks of the deck, and the rail
+of the boat, but beyond that there was unbroken darkness, no light
+reached their faces, or the trees which were massed on the sides
+of the river.
+
+Soon Wilfrid Flushing slept, and Hirst slept.  Hewet alone lay awake
+looking straight up into the sky.  The gentle motion and the black
+shapes that were drawn ceaselessly across his eyes had the effect
+of making it impossible for him to think.  Rachel's presence so near
+him lulled thought asleep.  Being so near him, only a few paces off
+at the other end of the boat, she made it as impossible for him
+to think about her as it would have been impossible to see her if she
+had stood quite close to him, her forehead against his forehead. 
+In some strange way the boat became identified with himself, and just
+as it would have been useless for him to get up and steer the boat,
+so was it useless for him to struggle any longer with the irresistible
+force of his own feelings.  He was drawn on and on away from all
+he knew, slipping over barriers and past landmarks into unknown
+waters as the boat glided over the smooth surface of the river. 
+In profound peace, enveloped in deeper unconsciousness than had been
+his for many nights, he lay on deck watching the tree-tops change
+their position slightly against the sky, and arch themselves,
+and sink and tower huge, until he passed from seeing them into
+dreams where he lay beneath the shadow of the vast trees, looking up
+into the sky.
+
+When they woke next morning they had gone a considerable way up
+the river; on the right was a high yellow bank of sand tufted
+with trees, on the left a swamp quivering with long reeds and tall
+bamboos on the top of which, swaying slightly, perched vivid green
+and yellow birds.  The morning was hot and still.  After breakfast they
+drew chairs together and sat in an irregular semicircle in the bow. 
+An awning above their heads protected them from the heat of the sun,
+and the breeze which the boat made aired them softly.  Mrs. Flushing
+was already dotting and striping her canvas, her head jerking this
+way and that with the action of a bird nervously picking up grain;
+the others had books or pieces of paper or embroidery on their knees,
+at which they looked fitfully and again looked at the river ahead. 
+At one point Hewet read part of a poem aloud, but the number of
+moving things entirely vanquished his words.  He ceased to read,
+and no one spoke.  They moved on under the shelter of the trees. 
+There was now a covey of red birds feeding on one of the little islets
+to the left, or again a blue-green parrot flew shrieking from tree
+to tree.  As they moved on the country grew wilder and wilder. 
+The trees and the undergrowth seemed to be strangling each other
+near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle; while here and there
+a splendid tree towered high above the swarm, shaking its thin green
+umbrellas lightly in the upper air.  Hewet looked at his books again. 
+The morning was peaceful as the night had been, only it was very
+strange because he could see it was light, and he could see Rachel
+and hear her voice and be near to her.  He felt as if he were waiting,
+as if somehow he were stationary among things that passed over him
+and around him, voices, people's bodies, birds, only Rachel too
+was waiting with him.  He looked at her sometimes as if she must
+know that they were waiting together, and being drawn on together,
+without being able to offer any resistance.  Again he read from
+his book:
+
+   Whoever you are holding me now in your hand,
+   Without one thing all will be useless.
+
+A bird gave a wild laugh, a monkey chuckled a malicious question,
+and, as fire fades in the hot sunshine, his words flickered and went out.
+
+By degrees as the river narrowed, and the high sandbanks fell
+to level ground thickly grown with trees, the sounds of the forest
+could be heard.  It echoed like a hall.  There were sudden cries;
+and then long spaces of silence, such as there are in a cathedral
+when a boy's voice has ceased and the echo of it still seems
+to haunt about the remote places of the roof.  Once Mr. Flushing
+rose and spoke to a sailor, and even announced that some time
+after luncheon the steamer would stop, and they could walk a little
+way through the forest.
+
+"There are tracks all through the trees there," he explained. 
+"We're no distance from civilisation yet."
+
+He scrutinised his wife's painting.  Too polite to praise it openly,
+he contented himself with cutting off one half of the picture
+with one hand, and giving a flourish in the air with the other.
+
+"God!"  Hirst exclaimed, staring straight ahead.  "Don't you think
+it's amazingly beautiful?"
+
+"Beautiful?"  Helen enquired.  It seemed a strange little word,
+and Hirst and herself both so small that she forgot to answer him.
+
+Hewet felt that he must speak.
+
+"That's where the Elizabethans got their style," he mused,
+staring into the profusion of leaves and blossoms and prodigious fruits.
+
+"Shakespeare?  I hate Shakespeare!"  Mrs. Flushing exclaimed;
+and Wilfrid returned admiringly, "I believe you're the only person
+who dares to say that, Alice."  But Mrs. Flushing went on painting. 
+She did not appear to attach much value to her husband's compliment,
+and painted steadily, sometimes muttering a half-audible word
+or groan.
+
+The morning was now very hot.
+
+"Look at Hirst!"  Mr. Flushing whispered.  His sheet of paper
+had slipped on to the deck, his head lay back, and he drew a long
+snoring breath.
+
+Terence picked up the sheet of paper and spread it out before Rachel. 
+It was a continuation of the poem on God which he had begun
+in the chapel, and it was so indecent that Rachel did not
+understand half of it although she saw that it was indecent. 
+Hewet began to fill in words where Hirst had left spaces,
+but he soon ceased; his pencil rolled on deck.  Gradually they
+approached nearer and nearer to the bank on the right-hand side,
+so that the light which covered them became definitely green,
+falling through a shade of green leaves, and Mrs. Flushing set aside
+her sketch and stared ahead of her in silence.  Hirst woke up;
+they were then called to luncheon, and while they ate it,
+the steamer came to a standstill a little way out from the bank. 
+The boat which was towed behind them was brought to the side,
+and the ladies were helped into it.
+
+For protection against boredom, Helen put a book of memoirs beneath
+her arm, and Mrs. Flushing her paint-box, and, thus equipped,
+they allowed themselves to be set on shore on the verge of the forest.
+
+They had not strolled more than a few hundred yards along the track
+which ran parallel with the river before Helen professed to find
+it was unbearably hot.  The river breeze had ceased, and a hot
+steamy atmosphere, thick with scents, came from the forest.
+
+"I shall sit down here," she announced, pointing to the trunk of a tree
+which had fallen long ago and was now laced across and across by creepers
+and thong-like brambles.  She seated herself, opened her parasol,
+and looked at the river which was barred by the stems of trees. 
+She turned her back to the trees which disappeared in black shadow
+behind her.
+
+"I quite agree," said Mrs. Flushing, and proceeded to undo her
+paint-box. Her husband strolled about to select an interesting
+point of view for her.  Hirst cleared a space on the ground by
+Helen's side, and seated himself with great deliberation, as if he
+did not mean to move until he had talked to her for a long time. 
+Terence and Rachel were left standing by themselves without occupation. 
+Terence saw that the time had come as it was fated to come,
+but although he realised this he was completely calm and master
+of himself.  He chose to stand for a few moments talking to Helen,
+and persuading her to leave her seat.  Rachel joined him too
+in advising her to come with them.
+
+"Of all the people I've ever met," he said, "you're the least adventurous. 
+You might be sitting on green chairs in Hyde Park.  Are you
+going to sit there the whole afternoon?  Aren't you going to walk?"
+
+"Oh, no," said Helen, "one's only got to use one's eye. 
+There's everything here--everything," she repeated in a drowsy
+tone of voice.  "What will you gain by walking?"
+
+"You'll be hot and disagreeable by tea-time, we shall be cool and sweet,"
+put in Hirst.  Into his eyes as he looked up at them had come yellow
+and green reflections from the sky and the branches, robbing them
+of their intentness, and he seemed to think what he did not say. 
+It was thus taken for granted by them both that Terence and Rachel
+proposed to walk into the woods together; with one look at each
+other they turned away.
+
+"Good-bye!" cried Rachel.
+
+"Good-by. Beware of snakes," Hirst replied.  He settled himself
+still more comfortably under the shade of the fallen tree and
+Helen's figure.  As they went, Mr. Flushing called after them,
+"We must start in an hour.  Hewet, please remember that.  An hour."
+
+Whether made by man, or for some reason preserved by nature,
+there was a wide pathway striking through the forest at right
+angles to the river.  It resembled a drive in an English forest,
+save that tropical bushes with their sword-like leaves grew at
+the side, and the ground was covered with an unmarked springy
+moss instead of grass, starred with little yellow flowers. 
+As they passed into the depths of the forest the light grew dimmer,
+and the noises of the ordinary world were replaced by those creaking
+and sighing sounds which suggest to the traveller in a forest that he
+is walking at the bottom of the sea.  The path narrowed and turned;
+it was hedged in by dense creepers which knotted tree to tree,
+and burst here and there into star-shaped crimson blossoms. 
+The sighing and creaking up above were broken every now and then
+by the jarring cry of some startled animal.  The atmosphere was close
+and the air came at them in languid puffs of scent.  The vast green
+light was broken here and there by a round of pure yellow sunlight
+which fell through some gap in the immense umbrella of green above,
+and in these yellow spaces crimson and black butterflies were circling
+and settling.  Terence and Rachel hardly spoke.
+
+Not only did the silence weigh upon them, but they were both unable
+to frame any thoughts.  There was something between them which had to be
+spoken of.  One of them had to begin, but which of them was it to be? 
+Then Hewet picked up a red fruit and threw it as high as he could. 
+When it dropped, he would speak.  They heard the flapping of
+great wings; they heard the fruit go pattering through the leaves
+and eventually fall with a thud.  The silence was again profound.
+
+"Does this frighten you?"  Terence asked when the sound of the fruit
+falling had completely died away.
+
+"No," she answered.  "I like it."
+
+She repeated "I like it."  She was walking fast, and holding herself
+more erect than usual.  There was another pause.
+
+"You like being with me?"  Terence asked.
+
+"Yes, with you," she replied.
+
+He was silent for a moment.  Silence seemed to have fallen upon
+the world.
+
+"That is what I have felt ever since I knew you," he replied. 
+"We are happy together."  He did not seem to be speaking, or she
+to be hearing.
+
+"Very happy," she answered.
+
+They continued to walk for some time in silence.  Their steps
+unconsciously quickened.
+
+"We love each other," Terence said.
+
+"We love each other," she repeated.
+
+The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones
+of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words.  Faster and
+faster they walked; simultaneously they stopped, clasped each other
+in their arms, then releasing themselves, dropped to the earth. 
+They sat side by side.  Sounds stood out from the background making
+a bridge across their silence; they heard the swish of the trees
+and some beast croaking in a remote world.
+
+"We love each other," Terence repeated, searching into her face. 
+Their faces were both very pale and quiet, and they said nothing. 
+He was afraid to kiss her again.  By degrees she drew close to him,
+and rested against him.  In this position they sat for some time. 
+She said "Terence" once; he answered "Rachel."
+
+"Terrible--terrible," she murmured after another pause,
+but in saying this she was thinking as much of the persistent
+churning of the water as of her own feeling.  On and on it went
+in the distance, the senseless and cruel churning of the water. 
+She observed that the tears were running down Terence's cheeks.
+
+The next movement was on his part.  A very long time seemed
+to have passed.  He took out his watch.
+
+"Flushing said an hour.  We've been gone more than half an hour."
+
+"And it takes that to get back," said Rachel.  She raised herself
+very slowly.  When she was standing up she stretched her arms
+and drew a deep breath, half a sigh, half a yawn.  She appeared
+to be very tired.  Her cheeks were white.  "Which way?" she asked.
+
+"There," said Terence.
+
+They began to walk back down the mossy path again.  The sighing and
+creaking continued far overhead, and the jarring cries of animals. 
+The butterflies were circling still in the patches of yellow sunlight. 
+At first Terence was certain of his way, but as they walked he
+became doubtful.  They had to stop to consider, and then to return
+and start once more, for although he was certain of the direction
+of the river he was not certain of striking the point where they
+had left the others.  Rachel followed him, stopping where he stopped,
+turning where he turned, ignorant of the way, ignorant why he stopped
+or why he turned.
+
+"I don't want to be late," he said, "because--" He put a flower into
+her hand and her fingers closed upon it quietly.  "We're so late--
+so late--so horribly late," he repeated as if he were talking
+in his sleep.  "Ah--this is right.  We turn here."
+
+They found themselves again in the broad path, like the drive in
+the English forest, where they had started when they left the others. 
+They walked on in silence as people walking in their sleep,
+and were oddly conscious now and again of the mass of their bodies. 
+Then Rachel exclaimed suddenly, "Helen!"
+
+In the sunny space at the edge of the forest they saw Helen
+still sitting on the tree-trunk, her dress showing very white
+in the sun, with Hirst still propped on his elbow by her side. 
+They stopped instinctively.  At the sight of other people they could
+not go on.  They stood hand in hand for a minute or two in silence. 
+They could not bear to face other people.
+
+"But we must go on," Rachel insisted at last, in the curious dull
+tone of voice in which they had both been speaking, and with a
+great effort they forced themselves to cover the short distance
+which lay between them and the pair sitting on the tree-trunk.
+
+As they approached, Helen turned round and looked at them. 
+She looked at them for some time without speaking, and when they
+were close to her she said quietly:
+
+"Did you meet Mr. Flushing?  He has gone to find you.  He thought
+you must be lost, though I told him you weren't lost."
+
+Hirst half turned round and threw his head back so that he looked
+at the branches crossing themselves in the air above him.
+
+"Well, was it worth the effort?" he enquired dreamily.
+
+Hewet sat down on the grass by his side and began to fan himself.
+
+Rachel had balanced herself near Helen on the end of the tree trunk.
+
+"Very hot," she said.
+
+"You look exhausted anyhow," said Hirst.
+
+"It's fearfully close in those trees," Helen remarked, picking up
+her book and shaking it free from the dried blades of grass
+which had fallen between the leaves.  Then they were all silent,
+looking at the river swirling past in front of them between the
+trunks of the trees until Mr. Flushing interrupted them.  He broke
+out of the trees a hundred yards to the left, exclaiming sharply:
+
+"Ah, so you found the way after all.  But it's late--much later
+than we arranged, Hewet."
+
+He was slightly annoyed, and in his capacity as leader of the expedition,
+inclined to be dictatorial.  He spoke quickly, using curiously sharp,
+meaningless words.
+
+"Being late wouldn't matter normally, of course," he said,
+"but when it's a question of keeping the men up to time--"
+
+He gathered them together and made them come down to the river-bank,
+where the boat was waiting to row them out to the steamer.
+
+The heat of the day was going down, and over their cups of tea
+the Flushings tended to become communicative.  It seemed to
+Terence as he listened to them talking, that existence now went
+on in two different layers.  Here were the Flushings talking,
+talking somewhere high up in the air above him, and he and Rachel
+had dropped to the bottom of the world together.  But with something
+of a child's directness, Mrs. Flushing had also the instinct which
+leads a child to suspect what its elders wish to keep hidden. 
+She fixed Terence with her vivid blue eyes and addressed herself
+to him in particular.  What would he do, she wanted to know,
+if the boat ran upon a rock and sank.
+
+"Would you care for anythin' but savin' yourself?  Should I? 
+No, no," she laughed, "not one scrap--don't tell me.  There's only
+two creatures the ordinary woman cares about," she continued,
+"her child and her dog; and I don't believe it's even two with men. 
+One reads a lot about love--that's why poetry's so dull. 
+But what happens in real life, he?  It ain't love!" she cried.
+
+Terence murmured something unintelligible.  Mr. Flushing,
+however, had recovered his urbanity.  He was smoking a cigarette,
+and he now answered his wife.
+
+"You must always remember, Alice," he said, "that your upbringing
+was very unnatural--unusual, I should say.  They had no mother,"
+he explained, dropping something of the formality of his tone;
+"and a father--he was a very delightful man, I've no doubt,
+but he cared only for racehorses and Greek statues.  Tell them about
+the bath, Alice."
+
+"In the stable-yard," said Mrs. Flushing.  "Covered with ice in winter. 
+We had to get in; if we didn't, we were whipped.  The strong
+ones lived--the others died.  What you call survival of the fittest--
+a most excellent plan, I daresay, if you've thirteen children!"
+
+"And all this going on in the heart of England,
+in the nineteenth century!"  Mr. Flushing exclaimed, turning to Helen.
+
+"I'd treat my children just the same if I had any," said Mrs. Flushing.
+
+Every word sounded quite distinctly in Terence's ears; but what
+were they saying, and who were they talking to, and who were they,
+these fantastic people, detached somewhere high up in the air? 
+Now that they had drunk their tea, they rose and leant over the bow of
+the boat.  The sun was going down, and the water was dark and crimson. 
+The river had widened again, and they were passing a little island
+set like a dark wedge in the middle of the stream.  Two great white
+birds with red lights on them stood there on stilt-like legs,
+and the beach of the island was unmarked, save by the skeleton
+print of birds' feet.  The branches of the trees on the bank looked
+more twisted and angular than ever, and the green of the leaves
+was lurid and splashed with gold.  Then Hirst began to talk,
+leaning over the bow.
+
+"It makes one awfully queer, don't you find?" he complained. 
+"These trees get on one's nerves--it's all so crazy. 
+God's undoubtedly mad.  What sane person could have conceived
+a wilderness like this, and peopled it with apes and alligators? 
+I should go mad if I lived here--raving mad."
+
+Terence attempted to answer him, but Mrs. Ambrose replied instead. 
+She bade him look at the way things massed themselves--look at
+the amazing colours, look at the shapes of the trees.  She seemed
+to be protecting Terence from the approach of the others.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Flushing.  "And in my opinion," he continued,
+"the absence of population to which Hirst objects is precisely
+the significant touch.  You must admit, Hirst, that a little Italian
+town even would vulgarise the whole scene, would detract from
+the vastness--the sense of elemental grandeur."  He swept his hands
+towards the forest, and paused for a moment, looking at the great
+green mass, which was now falling silent.  "I own it makes us seem
+pretty small--us, not them."  He nodded his head at a sailor who
+leant over the side spitting into the river.  "And that, I think,
+is what my wife feels, the essential superiority of the peasant--"
+Under cover of Mr. Flushing's words, which continued now gently
+reasoning with St. John and persuading him, Terence drew Rachel
+to the side, pointing ostensibly to a great gnarled tree-trunk
+which had fallen and lay half in the water.  He wished, at any rate,
+to be near her, but he found that he could say nothing.  They could
+hear Mr. Flushing flowing on, now about his wife, now about art,
+now about the future of the country, little meaningless words
+floating high in air.  As it was becoming cold he began to pace
+the deck with Hirst.  Fragments of their talk came out distinctly
+as they passed--art, emotion, truth, reality.
+
+"Is it true, or is it a dream?"  Rachel murmured, when they had passed.
+
+"It's true, it's true," he replied.
+
+But the breeze freshened, and there was a general desire for movement. 
+When the party rearranged themselves under cover of rugs and cloaks,
+Terence and Rachel were at opposite ends of the circle, and could
+not speak to each other.  But as the dark descended, the words of
+the others seemed to curl up and vanish as the ashes of burnt paper,
+and left them sitting perfectly silent at the bottom of the world. 
+Occasional starts of exquisite joy ran through them, and then they
+were peaceful again.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI
+
+
+
+Thanks to Mr. Flushing's discipline, the right stages of the river
+were reached at the right hours, and when next morning after
+breakfast the chairs were again drawn out in a semicircle in the bow,
+the launch was within a few miles of the native camp which was
+the limit of the journey.  Mr. Flushing, as he sat down, advised them
+to keep their eyes fixed on the left bank, where they would soon
+pass a clearing, and in that clearing, was a hut where Mackenzie,
+the famous explorer, had died of fever some ten years ago,
+almost within reach of civilisation--Mackenzie, he repeated,
+the man who went farther inland than any one's been yet.  Their eyes
+turned that way obediently.  The eyes of Rachel saw nothing. 
+Yellow and green shapes did, it is true, pass before them, but she
+only knew that one was large and another small; she did not know
+that they were trees.  These directions to look here and there
+irritated her, as interruptions irritate a person absorbed in thought,
+although she was not thinking of anything.  She was annoyed with all
+that was said, and with the aimless movements of people's bodies,
+because they seemed to interfere with her and to prevent her from
+speaking to Terence.  Very soon Helen saw her staring moodily
+at a coil of rope, and making no effort to listen.  Mr. Flushing
+and St. John were engaged in more or less continuous conversation
+about the future of the country from a political point of view,
+and the degree to which it had been explored; the others, with their
+legs stretched out, or chins poised on the hands, gazed in silence.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose looked and listened obediently enough, but inwardly
+she was prey to an uneasy mood not readily to be ascribed to any
+one cause.  Looking on shore as Mr. Flushing bade her, she thought
+the country very beautiful, but also sultry and alarming. 
+She did not like to feel herself the victim of unclassified emotions,
+and certainly as the launch slipped on and on, in the hot morning sun,
+she felt herself unreasonably moved.  Whether the unfamiliarity
+of the forest was the cause of it, or something less definite,
+she could not determine.  Her mind left the scene and occupied itself
+with anxieties for Ridley, for her children, for far-off things,
+such as old age and poverty and death.  Hirst, too, was depressed. 
+He had been looking forward to this expedition as to a holiday, for,
+once away from the hotel, surely wonderful things would happen,
+instead of which nothing happened, and here they were as uncomfortable,
+as restrained, as self-conscious as ever.  That, of course, was what
+came of looking forward to anything; one was always disappointed. 
+He blamed Wilfrid Flushing, who was so well dressed and so formal;
+he blamed Hewet and Rachel.  Why didn't they talk?  He looked at
+them sitting silent and self-absorbed, and the sight annoyed him. 
+He supposed that they were engaged, or about to become engaged,
+but instead of being in the least romantic or exciting, that was as dull
+as everything else; it annoyed him, too, to think that they were in love. 
+He drew close to Helen and began to tell her how uncomfortable his night
+had been, lying on the deck, sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold,
+and the stars so bright that he couldn't get to sleep.  He had lain
+awake all night thinking, and when it was light enough to see,
+he had written twenty lines of his poem on God, and the awful thing
+was that he'd practically proved the fact that God did not exist. 
+He did not see that he was teasing her, and he went on to wonder
+what would happen if God did exist--"an old gentleman in a beard and
+a long blue dressing gown, extremely testy and disagreeable as he's
+bound to be?  Can you suggest a rhyme?  God, rod, sod--all used;
+any others?"
+
+Although he spoke much as usual, Helen could have seen, had she looked,
+that he was also impatient and disturbed.  But she was not called upon
+to answer, for Mr. Flushing now exclaimed "There!"  They looked at the hut
+on the bank, a desolate place with a large rent in the roof, and the
+ground round it yellow, scarred with fires and scattered with rusty open tins.
+
+"Did they find his dead body there?"  Mrs. Flushing exclaimed,
+leaning forward in her eagerness to see the spot where the explorer
+had died.
+
+"They found his body and his skins and a notebook," her husband replied. 
+But the boat had soon carried them on and left the place behind.
+
+It was so hot that they scarcely moved, except now to change
+a foot, or, again, to strike a match.  Their eyes, concentrated upon
+the bank, were full of the same green reflections, and their lips
+were slightly pressed together as though the sights they were passing
+gave rise to thoughts, save that Hirst's lips moved intermittently
+as half consciously he sought rhymes for God.  Whatever the thoughts
+of the others, no one said anything for a considerable space. 
+They had grown so accustomed to the wall of trees on either side
+that they looked up with a start when the light suddenly widened
+out and the trees came to an end.
+
+"It almost reminds one of an English park," said Mr. Flushing.
+
+Indeed no change could have been greater.  On both banks of the river lay
+an open lawn-like space, grass covered and planted, for the gentleness
+and order of the place suggested human care, with graceful trees
+on the top of little mounds.  As far as they could gaze, this lawn
+rose and sank with the undulating motion of an old English park. 
+The change of scene naturally suggested a change of position,
+grateful to most of them.  They rose and leant over the rail.
+
+"It might be Arundel or Windsor," Mr. Flushing continued, "if you
+cut down that bush with the yellow flowers; and, by Jove, look!"
+
+Rows of brown backs paused for a moment and then leapt with a motion
+as if they were springing over waves out of sight.
+
+for a moment no one of them could believe that they had really
+seen live animals in the open--a herd of wild deer, and the sight
+aroused a childlike excitement in them, dissipating their gloom.
+
+"I've never in my life seen anything bigger than a hare!" 
+Hirst exclaimed with genuine excitement.  "What an ass I was not
+to bring my Kodak!"
+
+Soon afterwards the launch came gradually to a standstill,
+and the captain explained to Mr. Flushing that it would be pleasant
+for the passengers if they now went for a stroll on shore; if they
+chose to return within an hour, he would take them on to the village;
+if they chose to walk--it was only a mile or two farther on--
+he would meet them at the landing-place.
+
+The matter being settled, they were once more put on shore: 
+the sailors, producing raisins and tobacco, leant upon the rail
+and watched the six English, whose coats and dresses looked so
+strange upon the green, wander off.  A joke that was by no means
+proper set them all laughing, and then they turned round and lay
+at their ease upon the deck.
+
+Directly they landed, Terence and Rachel drew together slightly
+in advance of the others.
+
+"Thank God!"  Terence exclaimed, drawing a long breath.  "At last
+we're alone."
+
+"And if we keep ahead we can talk," said Rachel.
+
+Nevertheless, although their position some yards in advance of
+the others made it possible for them to say anything they chose,
+they were both silent.
+
+"You love me?"  Terence asked at length, breaking the silence painfully. 
+To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they
+were silent they were keenly conscious of each other's presence,
+and yet words were either too trivial or too large.
+
+She murmured inarticulately, ending, "And you?"
+
+"Yes, yes," he replied; but there were so many things to be said,
+and now that they were alone it seemed necessary to bring themselves
+still more near, and to surmount a barrier which had grown up
+since they had last spoken.  It was difficult, frightening even,
+oddly embarrassing.  At one moment he was clear-sighted, and,
+at the next, confused.
+
+"Now I'm going to begin at the beginning," he said resolutely. 
+"I'm going to tell you what I ought to have told you before. 
+In the first place, I've never been in love with other women,
+but I've had other women.  Then I've great faults.  I'm very lazy,
+I'm moody--" He persisted, in spite of her exclamation, "You've got
+to know the worst of me.  I'm lustful.  I'm overcome by a sense
+of futility--incompetence.  I ought never to have asked you to marry me,
+I expect.  I'm a bit of a snob; I'm ambitious--"
+
+"Oh, our faults!" she cried.  "What do they matter?"  Then she demanded,
+"Am I in love--is this being in love--are we to marry each other?"
+
+Overcome by the charm of her voice and her presence, he exclaimed,
+"Oh, you're free, Rachel.  To you, time will make no difference,
+or marriage or--"
+
+The voices of the others behind them kept floating, now farther,
+now nearer, and Mrs. Flushing's laugh rose clearly by itself.
+
+"Marriage?"  Rachel repeated.
+
+The shouts were renewed behind, warning them that they were bearing
+too far to the left.  Improving their course, he continued,
+"Yes, marriage."  The feeling that they could not be united until
+she knew all about him made him again endeavour to explain.
+
+"All that's been bad in me, the things I've put up with--
+the second best--"
+
+She murmured, considered her own life, but could not describe
+how it looked to her now.
+
+"And the loneliness!" he continued.  A vision of walking with her
+through the streets of London came before his eyes.  "We will go for
+walks together," he said.  The simplicity of the idea relieved them,
+and for the first time they laughed.  They would have liked had
+they dared to take each other by the hand, but the consciousness
+of eyes fixed on them from behind had not yet deserted them.
+
+"Books, people, sights--Mrs. Nutt, Greeley, Hutchinson," Hewet murmured.
+
+With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them
+seem unreal to each other, since the previous afternoon melted
+a little further, and their contact became more and more natural. 
+Up through the sultry southern landscape they saw the world they knew
+appear clearer and more vividly than it had ever appeared before As
+upon that occasion at the hotel when she had sat in the window,
+the world once more arranged itself beneath her gaze very vividly
+and in its true proportions.  She glanced curiously at Terence
+from time to time, observing his grey coat and his purple tie;
+observing the man with whom she was to spend the rest of her life.
+
+After one of these glances she murmured, "Yes, I'm in love. 
+There's no doubt; I'm in love with you."
+
+Nevertheless, they remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so
+close together, as she spoke, that there seemed no division
+between them, and the next moment separate and far away again. 
+Feeling this painfully, she exclaimed, "It will be a fight."
+
+But as she looked at him she perceived from the shape of his eyes,
+the lines about his mouth, and other peculiarities that he pleased her,
+and she added:
+
+"Where I want to fight, you have compassion.  You're finer than I am;
+you're much finer."
+
+He returned her glance and smiled, perceiving, much as she had done,
+the very small individual things about her which made her delightful
+to him.  She was his for ever.  This barrier being surmounted,
+innumerable delights lay before them both.
+
+"I'm not finer," he answered.  "I'm only older, lazier; a man,
+not a woman."
+
+"A man," she repeated, and a curious sense of possession coming
+over her, it struck her that she might now touch him; she put out
+her hand and lightly touched his cheek.  His fingers followed where
+hers had been, and the touch of his hand upon his face brought back
+the overpowering sense of unreality.  This body of his was unreal;
+the whole world was unreal.
+
+"What's happened?" he began.  "Why did I ask you to marry me? 
+How did it happen?"
+
+"Did you ask me to marry you?" she wondered.  They faded far away
+from each other, and neither of them could remember what had been said.
+
+"We sat upon the ground," he recollected.
+
+"We sat upon the ground," she confirmed him.  The recollection of sitting
+upon the ground, such as it was, seemed to unite them again, and they
+walked on in silence, their minds sometimes working with difficulty
+and sometimes ceasing to work, their eyes alone perceiving the things
+round them.  Now he would attempt again to tell her his faults,
+and why he loved her; and she would describe what she had felt at this
+time or at that time, and together they would interpret her feeling. 
+So beautiful was the sound of their voices that by degrees they
+scarcely listened to the words they framed.  Long silences came between
+their words, which were no longer silences of struggle and confusion
+but refreshing silences, in which trivial thoughts moved easily. 
+They began to speak naturally of ordinary things, of the flowers
+and the trees, how they grew there so red, like garden flowers
+at home, and there bent and crooked like the arm of a twisted old man.
+
+Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing
+in her veins, or the water of the stream running over stones,
+Rachel became conscious of a new feeling within her.  She wondered
+for a moment what it was, and then said to herself, with a little
+surprise at recognising in her own person so famous a thing:
+
+"This is happiness, I suppose."  And aloud to Terence she spoke,
+"This is happiness."
+
+On the heels of her words he answered, "This is happiness,"
+upon which they guessed that the feeling had sprung in both of them
+the same time.  They began therefore to describe how this felt
+and that felt, how like it was and yet how different; for they
+were very different.
+
+Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which
+they were now sunk.  The repetition of Hewet's name in short,
+dissevered syllables was to them the crack of a dry branch
+or the laughter of a bird.  The grasses and breezes sounding and
+murmuring all round them, they never noticed that the swishing of
+the grasses grew louder and louder, and did not cease with the lapse
+of the breeze.  A hand dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel's shoulder;
+it might have been a bolt from heaven.  She fell beneath it,
+and the grass whipped across her eyes and filled her mouth and ears. 
+Through the waving stems she saw a figure, large and shapeless
+against the sky.  Helen was upon her.  Rolled this way and that,
+now seeing only forests of green, and now the high blue heaven;
+she was speechless and almost without sense.  At last she lay still,
+all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting. 
+Over her loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman,
+of Terence and Helen.
+
+Both were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving;
+they came together and kissed in the air above her.  Broken fragments
+of speech came down to her on the ground.  She thought she heard them
+speak of love and then of marriage.  Raising herself and sitting up,
+she too realised Helen's soft body, the strong and hospitable arms,
+and happiness swelling and breaking in one vast wave.  When this
+fell away, and the grasses once more lay low, and the sky
+became horizontal, and the earth rolled out flat on each side,
+and the trees stood upright, she was the first to perceive a
+little row of human figures standing patiently in the distance. 
+For the moment she could not remember who they were.
+
+"Who are they?" she asked, and then recollected.
+
+Falling into line behind Mr. Flushing, they were careful to leave
+at least three yards' distance between the toe of his boot
+and the rim of her skirt.
+
+He led them across a stretch of green by the river-bank and then
+through a grove of trees, and bade them remark the signs of human
+habitation, the blackened grass, the charred tree-stumps, and there,
+through the trees, strange wooden nests, drawn together in an arch
+where the trees drew apart, the village which was the goal of their journey.
+
+Stepping cautiously, they observed the women, who were squatting on
+the ground in triangular shapes, moving their hands, either plaiting
+straw or in kneading something in bowls.  But when they had looked
+for a moment undiscovered, they were seen, and Mr. Flushing,
+advancing into the centre of the clearing, was engaged in talk
+with a lean majestic man, whose bones and hollows at once made
+the shapes of the Englishman's body appear ugly and unnatural. 
+The women took no notice of the strangers, except that their hands
+paused for a moment and their long narrow eyes slid round and fixed
+upon them with the motionless inexpensive gaze of those removed
+from each other far far beyond the plunge of speech.  Their hands
+moved again, but the stare continued.  It followed them as they walked,
+as they peered into the huts where they could distinguish guns leaning
+in the corner, and bowls upon the floor, and stacks of rushes;
+in the dusk the solemn eyes of babies regarded them, and old women
+stared out too.  As they sauntered about, the stare followed them,
+passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously not
+without hostility, like the crawl of a winter fly.  As she drew
+apart her shawl and uncovered her breast to the lips of her baby,
+the eyes of a woman never left their faces, although they moved
+uneasily under her stare, and finally turned away, rather than stand
+there looking at her any longer.  When sweetmeats were offered them,
+they put out great red hands to take them, and felt themselves
+treading cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers among these soft
+instinctive people.  But soon the life of the village took no notice
+of them; they had become absorbed in it.  The women's hands became
+busy again with the straw; their eyes dropped.  If they moved,
+it was to fetch something from the hut, or to catch a straying child,
+or to cross the space with a jar balanced on their heads;
+if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh unintelligible cry. 
+Voices rose when a child was beaten, and fell again; voices rose
+in song, which slid up a little way and down a little way,
+and settled again upon the same low and melancholy note. 
+Seeking each other, Terence and Rachel drew together under a tree. 
+Peaceful, and even beautiful at first, the sight of the women,
+who had given up looking at them, made them now feel very cold
+and melancholy.
+
+"Well," Terence sighed at length, "it makes us seem insignificant,
+doesn't it?"
+
+Rachel agreed.  So it would go on for ever and ever, she said,
+those women sitting under the trees, the trees and the river. 
+They turned away and began to walk through the trees, leaning, without fear
+of discovery, upon each other's arms.  They had not gone far before
+they began to assure each other once more that they were in love,
+were happy, were content; but why was it so painful being in love,
+why was there so much pain in happiness?
+
+The sight of the village indeed affected them all curiously though
+all differently.  St. John had left the others and was walking slowly
+down to the river, absorbed in his own thoughts, which were bitter
+and unhappy, for he felt himself alone; and Helen, standing by herself
+in the sunny space among the native women, was exposed to presentiments
+of disaster.  The cries of the senseless beasts rang in her ears
+high and low in the air, as they ran from tree-trunk to tree-top.
+How small the little figures looked wandering through the trees! 
+She became acutely conscious of the little limbs, the thin veins,
+the delicate flesh of men and women, which breaks so easily and lets
+the life escape compared with these great trees and deep waters. 
+A falling branch, a foot that slips, and the earth has crushed them
+or the water drowned them.  Thus thinking, she kept her eyes anxiously
+fixed upon the lovers, as if by doing so she could protect them
+from their fate.  Turning, she found the Flushings by her side.
+
+They were talking about the things they had bought and arguing
+whether they were really old, and whether there were not signs
+here and there of European influence.  Helen was appealed to. 
+She was made to look at a brooch, and then at a pair of ear-rings.
+But all the time she blamed them for having come on this expedition,
+for having ventured too far and exposed themselves.  Then she roused
+herself and tried to talk, but in a few moments she caught herself
+seeing a picture of a boat upset on the river in England, at midday. 
+It was morbid, she knew, to imagine such things; nevertheless she
+sought out the figures of the others between the trees, and whenever
+she saw them she kept her eyes fixed on them, so that she might be
+able to protect them from disaster.
+
+But when the sun went down and the steamer turned and began
+to steam back towards civilisation, again her fears were calmed. 
+In the semi-darkness the chairs on deck and the people sitting
+in them were angular shapes, the mouth being indicated by a tiny
+burning spot, and the arm by the same spot moving up or down as the
+cigar or cigarette was lifted to and from the lips.  Words crossed
+the darkness, but, not knowing where they fell, seemed to lack energy
+and substance.  Deep sights proceeded regularly, although with some
+attempt at suppression, from the large white mound which represented
+the person of Mrs. Flushing.  The day had been long and very hot,
+and now that all the colours were blotted out the cool night air
+seemed to press soft fingers upon the eyelids, sealing them down. 
+Some philosophical remark directed, apparently, at St. John Hirst
+missed its aim, and hung so long suspended in the air until it
+was engulfed by a yawn, that it was considered dead, and this
+gave the signal for stirring of legs and murmurs about sleep. 
+The white mound moved, finally lengthened itself and disappeared,
+and after a few turns and paces St. John and Mr. Flushing withdrew,
+leaving the three chairs still occupied by three silent bodies. 
+The light which came from a lamp high on the mast and a sky pale
+with stars left them with shapes but without features; but even
+in this darkness the withdrawal of the others made them feel each
+other very near, for they were all thinking of the same thing. 
+For some time no one spoke, then Helen said with a sigh, "So you're both
+very happy?"
+
+As if washed by the air her voice sounded more spiritual and softer
+than usual.  Voices at a little distance answered her, "Yes."
+
+Through the darkness she was looking at them both, and trying to
+distinguish him.  What was there for her to say?  Rachel had passed
+beyond her guardianship.  A voice might reach her ears, but never
+again would it carry as far as it had carried twenty-four hours ago. 
+Nevertheless, speech seemed to be due from her before she went to bed. 
+She wished to speak, but she felt strangely old and depressed.
+
+"D'you realise what you're doing?" she demanded.  "She's young,
+you're both young; and marriage--" Here she ceased.  They begged
+her, however, to continue, with such earnestness in their voices,
+as if they only craved advice, that she was led to add:
+
+"Marriage! well, it's not easy."
+
+"That's what we want to know," they answered, and she guessed
+that now they were looking at each other.
+
+"It depends on both of you," she stated.  Her face was turned
+towards Terence, and although he could hardly see her, he believed
+that her words really covered a genuine desire to know more about him. 
+He raised himself from his semi-recumbent position and proceeded
+to tell her what she wanted to know.  He spoke as lightly as he
+could in order to take away her depression.
+
+"I'm twenty-seven, and I've about seven hundred a year," he began. 
+"My temper is good on the whole, and health excellent, though Hirst
+detects a gouty tendency.  Well, then, I think I'm very intelligent." 
+He paused as if for confirmation.
+
+Helen agreed.
+
+"Though, unfortunately, rather lazy.  I intend to allow Rachel
+to be a fool if she wants to, and--Do you find me on the whole
+satisfactory in other respects?" he asked shyly.
+
+"Yes, I like what I know of you," Helen replied.
+
+"But then--one knows so little."
+
+"We shall live in London," he continued, "and--" With one voice
+they suddenly enquired whether she did not think them the happiest
+people that she had ever known.
+
+"Hush," she checked them, "Mrs. Flushing, remember.  She's behind us."
+
+Then they fell silent, and Terence and Rachel felt instinctively
+that their happiness had made her sad, and, while they were anxious
+to go on talking about themselves, they did not like to.
+
+"We've talked too much about ourselves," Terence said.  "Tell us--"
+
+"Yes, tell us--" Rachel echoed.  They were both in the mood to believe
+that every one was capable of saying something very profound.
+
+"What can I tell you?"  Helen reflected, speaking more to herself
+in a rambling style than as a prophetess delivering a message. 
+She forced herself to speak.
+
+"After all, though I scold Rachel, I'm not much wiser myself. 
+I'm older, of course, I'm half-way through, and you're just beginning. 
+It's puzzling--sometimes, I think, disappointing; the great things
+aren't as great, perhaps, as one expects--but it's interesting--
+Oh, yes, you're certain to find it interesting--And so it goes on,"
+they became conscious here of the procession of dark trees into which,
+as far as they could see, Helen was now looking, "and there are
+pleasures where one doesn't expect them (you must write to your father),
+and you'll be very happy, I've no doubt.  But I must go to bed,
+and if you are sensible you will follow in ten minutes, and so,"
+she rose and stood before them, almost featureless and very large,
+"Good-night." She passed behind the curtain.
+
+After sitting in silence for the greater part of the ten minutes
+she allowed them, they rose and hung over the rail.  Beneath them
+the smooth black water slipped away very fast and silently. 
+The spark of a cigarette vanished behind them.  "A beautiful voice,"
+Terence murmured.
+
+Rachel assented.  Helen had a beautiful voice.
+
+After a silence she asked, looking up into the sky, "Are we on
+the deck of a steamer on a river in South America?  Am I Rachel,
+are you Terence?"
+
+The great black world lay round them.  As they were drawn smoothly
+along it seemed possessed of immense thickness and endurance. 
+They could discern pointed tree-tops and blunt rounded tree-tops.
+Raising their eyes above the trees, they fixed them on the stars
+and the pale border of sky above the trees.  The little points of
+frosty light infinitely far away drew their eyes and held them fixed,
+so that it seemed as if they stayed a long time and fell a great
+distance when once more they realised their hands grasping the rail
+and their separate bodies standing side by side.
+
+"You'd forgotten completely about me," Terence reproached her,
+taking her arm and beginning to pace the deck, "and I never forget you."
+
+"Oh, no," she whispered, she had not forgotten, only the stars--
+the night--the dark--
+
+"You're like a bird half asleep in its nest, Rachel.  You're asleep. 
+You're talking in your sleep."
+
+Half asleep, and murmuring broken words, they stood in the angle
+made by the bow of the boat.  It slipped on down the river. 
+Now a bell struck on the bridge, and they heard the lapping of water
+as it rippled away on either side, and once a bird startled in its
+sleep creaked, flew on to the next tree, and was silent again. 
+The darkness poured down profusely, and left them with scarcely
+any feeling of life, except that they were standing there together
+in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII
+
+
+
+The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely
+over the earth and parted them from the strange day in the forest
+when they had been forced to tell each other what they wanted,
+this wish of theirs was revealed to other people, and in the process
+became slightly strange to themselves.  Apparently it was not anything
+unusual that had happened; it was that they had become engaged
+to marry each other.  The world, which consisted for the most part
+of the hotel and the villa, expressed itself glad on the whole
+that two people should marry, and allowed them to see that they were
+not expected to take part in the work which has to be done in order
+that the world shall go on, but might absent themselves for a time. 
+They were accordingly left alone until they felt the silence as if,
+playing in a vast church, the door had been shut on them. 
+They were driven to walk alone, and sit alone, to visit secret places
+where the flowers had never been picked and the trees were solitary. 
+In solitude they could express those beautiful but too vast desires
+which were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other men and women--
+desires for a world, such as their own world which contained two
+people seemed to them to be, where people knew each other intimately
+and thus judged each other by what was good, and never quarrelled,
+because that was waste of time.
+
+They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun,
+or sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed.  They were no
+longer embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not
+express itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers
+down a twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner
+is turned; the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable,
+and in many ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious,
+for it was refreshingly solid, and called out effort, and effort
+under such circumstances was not effort but delight.
+
+While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged,
+as far as the occasional writing of a word in pencil testified,
+in shaping the world as it appeared to him now that he and Rachel
+were going to be married.  It was different certainly.  The book
+called _Silence_ would not now be the same book that it would
+have been.  He would then put down his pencil and stare in front
+of him, and wonder in what respects the world was different--
+it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence, more importance,
+greater depth.  Why, even the earth sometimes seemed to him very deep;
+not carved into hills and cities and fields, but heaped in great masses. 
+He would look out of the window for ten minutes at a time; but no, he did
+not care for the earth swept of human beings.  He liked human beings--
+he liked them, he suspected, better than Rachel did.  There she was,
+swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful of him,--
+but he liked that quality in her.  He liked the impersonality
+which it produced in her.  At last, having written down a series
+of little sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them,
+he observed aloud, "'Women--'under the heading Women I've written:
+
+"'Not really vainer than men.  Lack of self-confidence at the base
+of most serious faults.  Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded
+on fact?  Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist,
+because they don't think.'  What do you say, Rachel?"  He paused
+with his pencil in his hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.
+
+Rachel said nothing.  Up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven
+sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined staircase,
+energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her feet
+with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run
+to begin at the very bottom again.
+
+"'Again, it's the fashion now to say that women are more practical
+and less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable
+organising ability but no sense of honour'--query, what is meant
+by masculine term, honour?--what corresponds to it in your sex?  Eh?"
+
+Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected
+this opportunity of revealing the secrets of her sex. 
+She had, indeed, advanced so far in the pursuit of wisdom
+that she allowed these secrets to rest undisturbed; it seemed
+to be reserved for a later generation to discuss them philosophically.
+
+Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she exclaimed at last,
+swinging round upon him:
+
+"No, Terence, it's no good; here am I, the best musician in
+South America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can't play
+a note because of you in the room interrupting me every other second."
+
+"You don't seem to realise that that's what I've been aiming
+at for the last half-hour," he remarked.  "I've no objection
+to nice simple tunes--indeed, I find them very helpful
+to my literary composition, but that kind of thing is merely
+like an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain."
+
+He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which were
+scattered on the table, conveying the congratulations of their friends.
+
+"'--all possible wishes for all possible happiness,'" he read;
+"correct, but not very vivid, are they?"
+
+"They're sheer nonsense!"  Rachel exclaimed.  "Think of words
+compared with sounds!" she continued.  "Think of novels and plays
+and histories--" Perched on the edge of the table, she stirred
+the red and yellow volumes contemptuously.  She seemed to herself
+to be in a position where she could despise all human learning. 
+Terence looked at them too.
+
+"God, Rachel, you do read trash!" he exclaimed.  "And you're
+behind the times too, my dear.  No one dreams of reading this kind
+of thing now--antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions
+of life in the east end--oh, no, we've exploded all that. 
+Read poetry, Rachel, poetry, poetry, poetry!"
+
+Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his intention
+being to satirise the short sharp bark of the writer's English;
+but she paid no attention, and after an interval of meditation exclaimed:
+
+"Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed
+entirely of vast blocks of matter, and that we're nothing but
+patches of light--" she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering
+over the carpet and up the wall--"like that?"
+
+"No," said Terence, "I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my
+chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth.  But at Cambridge,
+I can remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states
+of semi-coma about five o'clock in the morning.  Hirst does now,
+I expect--oh, no, Hirst wouldn't."
+
+Rachel continued, "The day your note came, asking us to go on
+the picnic, I was sitting where you're sitting now, thinking that;
+I wonder if I could think that again?  I wonder if the world's changed?
+and if so, when it'll stop changing, and which is the real world?"
+
+"When I first saw you," he began, "I thought you were like a
+creature who'd lived all its life among pearls and old bones. 
+Your hands were wet, d'you remember, and you never said a word until
+I gave you a bit of bread, and then you said, 'Human Beings!'"
+
+"And I thought you--a prig," she recollected.  "No; that's not quite it. 
+There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and
+St. John were like those ants--very big, very ugly, very energetic,
+with all your virtues on your backs.  However, when I talked to you
+I liked you--"
+
+"You fell in love with me," he corrected her.  "You were in love
+with me all the time, only you didn't know it."
+
+"No, I never fell in love with you," she asserted.
+
+"Rachel--what a lie--didn't you sit here looking at my window--
+didn't you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun--?"
+
+"No," she repeated, "I never fell in love, if falling in love
+is what people say it is, and it's the world that tells the lies
+and I tell the truth.  Oh, what lies--what lies!"
+
+She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from
+Mr. Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. 
+It was strange, considering how very different these people were,
+that they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to
+congratulate her upon her engagement.
+
+That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could
+ever feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second
+that they were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church
+service had done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done;
+and if they didn't feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? 
+The simplicity and arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated
+into a single spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence;
+being engaged had not that effect on him; the world was different,
+but not in that way; he still wanted the things he had always wanted,
+and in particular he wanted the companionship of other people
+more than ever perhaps.  He took the letters out of her hand,
+and protested:
+
+"Of course they're absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just
+because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss
+Allan is; you can't deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she's got
+too many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone
+to the bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees--
+hasn't she a kind of beauty--of elemental simplicity as Flushing
+would say?  Isn't she rather like a large old tree murmuring
+in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on?  By the way,
+Ralph's been made governor of the Carroway Islands--the youngest
+governor in the service; very good, isn't it?"
+
+But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority
+of the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread
+with her own destiny.
+
+"I won't have eleven children," she asserted; "I won't have the eyes
+of an old woman.  She looks at one up and down, up and down,
+as if one were a horse."
+
+"We must have a son and we must have a daughter," said Terence,
+putting down the letters, "because, let alone the inestimable
+advantage of being our children, they'd be so well brought up." 
+They went on to sketch an outline of the ideal education--
+how their daughter should be required from infancy to gaze at a large
+square of cardboard painted blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity,
+for women were grown too practical; and their son--he should be taught
+to laugh at great men, that is, at distinguished successful men,
+at men who wore ribands and rose to the tops of their trees. 
+He should in no way resemble (Rachel added) St. John Hirst.
+
+At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst. 
+Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them;
+he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. 
+Where should we all be without him and his like?  Choked in weeds;
+Christians, bigots,--why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan
+to sing songs to men when they felt drowsy.
+
+"But you'll never see it!" he exclaimed; "because with all your virtues
+you don't, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being
+for the pursuit of truth!  You've no respect for facts, Rachel;
+you're essentially feminine."  She did not trouble to deny it,
+nor did she think good to produce the one unanswerable argument
+against the merits which Terence admired.  St. John Hirst said
+that she was in love with him; she would never forgive that;
+but the argument was not one to appeal to a man.
+
+"But I like him," she said, and she thought to herself that she also
+pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the warm
+mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we ourselves
+move about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St. John Hirst.
+
+She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would
+not kiss him supposing he wished it, which was not likely.
+
+As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then
+bestowed upon him, Terence protested:
+
+"And compared with Hirst I'm a perfect Zany."
+
+The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.
+
+"We're wasting the morning--I ought to be writing my book, and you
+ought to be answering these."
+
+"We've only got twenty-one whole mornings left," said Rachel. 
+"And my father'll be here in a day or two."
+
+However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write laboriously,
+
+"My dear Evelyn--"
+
+Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had written,
+a process which he found essential to the composition of his own. 
+For a considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking
+of the clock and the fitful scratch of Rachel's pen, as she produced
+phrases which bore a considerable likeness to those which she
+had condemned.  She was struck by it herself, for she stopped writing
+and looked up; looked at Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked
+at the different pieces of furniture, at her bed in the corner,
+at the window-pane which showed the branches of a tree filled
+in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and was amazed at the gulf
+which lay between all that and her sheet of paper.  Would there
+ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible?  Even with
+Terence himself--how far apart they could be, how little she knew
+what was passing in his brain now!  She then finished her sentence,
+which was awkward and ugly, and stated that they were "both very happy,
+and going to be married in the autumn probably and hope to live
+in London, where we hope you will come and see us when we get back." 
+Choosing "affectionately," after some further speculation,
+rather than sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly
+beginning on another when Terence remarked, quoting from his book:
+
+"Listen to this, Rachel.  'It is probable that Hugh' (he's the hero,
+a literary man), 'had not realised at the time of his marriage,
+any more than the young man of parts and imagination usually
+does realise, the nature of the gulf which separates the needs
+and desires of the male from the needs and desires of the female. 
+. . . At first they had been very happy.  The walking tour in Switzerland
+had been a time of jolly companionship and stimulating revelations
+for both of them.  Betty had proved herself the ideal comrade. 
+. . . They had shouted _Love_ _in_ _the_ _Valley_ to each other across
+the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn' (and so on, and so on--I'll skip
+the descriptions). . . . 'But in London, after the boy's birth,
+all was changed.  Betty was an admirable mother; but it did not
+take her long to find out that motherhood, as that function is
+understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did not absorb
+the whole of her energies.  She was young and strong, with healthy
+limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise. 
+. . .' (In short she began to give tea-parties.) . . . 'Coming
+in late from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky,
+book-lined room, where the two men had each unloosened his soul
+to the other, with the sound of the traffic humming in his ears,
+and the foggy London sky slung tragically across his mind . . . he
+found women's hats dotted about among his papers.  Women's wraps
+and absurd little feminine shoes and umbrellas were in the hall. 
+. . . Then the bills began to come in.  . . . He tried to speak
+frankly to her.  He found her lying on the great polar-bear skin
+in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining with the Greens
+in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the diamonds wink
+and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve of her breast--
+a vision of adorable femininity.  He forgave her all.'  (Well, this
+goes from bad to worse, and finally about fifty pages later,
+Hugh takes a week-end ticket to Swanage and 'has it out with himself
+on the downs above Corfe.'  . . . Here there's fifteen pages or so
+which we'll skip.  The conclusion is . . .) 'They were different. 
+Perhaps, in the far future, when generations of men had struggled
+and failed as he must now struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed,
+what she now made a pretence of being--the friend and companion--
+not the enemy and parasite of man.'
+
+"The end of it is, you see, Hugh went back to his wife, poor fellow. 
+It was his duty, as a married man.  Lord, Rachel," he concluded,
+"will it be like that when we're married?"
+
+Instead of answering him she asked,
+
+"Why don't people write about the things they do feel?"
+
+"Ah, that's the difficulty!" he sighed, tossing the book away.
+
+"Well, then, what will it be like when we're married?  What are
+the things people do feel?"
+
+She seemed doubtful.
+
+"Sit on the floor and let me look at you," he commanded. 
+Resting her chin on his knee, she looked straight at him.
+
+He examined her curiously.
+
+"You're not beautiful," he began, "but I like your face. 
+I like the way your hair grows down in a point, and your eyes too--
+they never see anything.  Your mouth's too big, and your cheeks
+would be better if they had more colour in them.  But what I like
+about your face is that it makes one wonder what the devil you're
+thinking about--it makes me want to do that--" He clenched his fist
+and shook it so near her that she started back, "because now you look
+as if you'd blow my brains out.  There are moments," he continued,
+"when, if we stood on a rock together, you'd throw me into the sea."
+
+Hypnotised by the force of his eyes in hers, she repeated, "If we
+stood on a rock together--"
+
+To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven
+about the roots of the world--the idea was incoherently delightful. 
+She sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting
+aside the chairs and tables as if she were indeed striking through
+the waters.  He watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving
+a passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles
+which would hinder their passage through life.
+
+"It does seem possible!" he exclaimed, "though I've always thought
+it the most unlikely thing in the world--I shall be in love
+with you all my life, and our marriage will be the most exciting
+thing that's ever been done!  We'll never have a moment's peace--"
+He caught her in his arms as she passed him, and they fought
+for mastery, imagining a rock, and the sea heaving beneath them. 
+At last she was thrown to the floor, where she lay gasping,
+and crying for mercy.
+
+"I'm a mermaid!  I can swim," she cried, "so the game's up." 
+Her dress was torn across, and peace being established, she fetched
+a needle and thread and began to mend the tear.
+
+"And now," she said, "be quiet and tell me about the world;
+tell me about everything that's ever happened, and I'll tell you--
+let me see, what can I tell you?--I'll tell you about Miss Montgomerie
+and the river party.  She was left, you see, with one foot in the boat,
+and the other on shore."
+
+They had spent much time already in thus filling out for the other
+the course of their past lives, and the characters of their friends
+and relations, so that very soon Terence knew not only what Rachel's
+aunts might be expected to say upon every occasion, but also how
+their bedrooms were furnished, and what kind of bonnets they wore. 
+He could sustain a conversation between Mrs. Hunt and Rachel, and carry
+on a tea-party including the Rev. William Johnson and Miss Macquoid,
+the Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth. 
+But he had known many more people, and was far more highly skilled
+in the art of narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were,
+for the most part, of a curiously childlike and humorous kind,
+so that it generally fell to her lot to listen and ask questions.
+
+He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and felt,
+and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other men
+and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she
+became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people,
+where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them. 
+According to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made
+life reasonable, or if that word was foolish, made it of deep
+interest anyhow, for sometimes it seemed possible to understand
+why things happened as they did.  Nor were people so solitary
+and uncommunicative as she believed.  She should look for vanity--
+for vanity was a common quality--first in herself, and then
+in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they all had their share of it--
+and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve she met;
+and once linked together by one such tie she would find them
+not separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable,
+and she would come to love them when she found that they were
+like herself.
+
+If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings
+were as various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes
+and manes, and horns and humps; and so, wrestling over the entire
+list of their acquaintances, and diverging into anecdote
+and theory and speculation, they came to know each other. 
+The hours passed quickly, and seemed to them full to leaking-point.
+After a night's solitude they were always ready to begin again.
+
+The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist
+in free talk between men and women did in truth exist for both
+of them, although not quite in the measure she prescribed. 
+Far more than upon the nature of sex they dwelt upon the nature
+of poetry, but it was true that talk which had no boundaries
+deepened and enlarged the strangely small bright view of a girl. 
+In return for what he could tell her she brought him such curiosity
+and sensitiveness of perception, that he was led to doubt
+whether any gift bestowed by much reading and living was quite
+the equal of that for pleasure and pain.  What would experience
+give her after all, except a kind of ridiculous formal balance,
+like that of a drilled dog in the street?  He looked at her face
+and wondered how it would look in twenty years' time, when the eyes
+had dulled, and the forehead wore those little persistent wrinkles
+which seem to show that the middle-aged are facing something hard
+which the young do not see?  What would the hard thing be for them,
+he wondered?  Then his thoughts turned to their life in England.
+
+The thought of England was delightful, for together they would see
+the old things freshly; it would be England in June, and there would be
+June nights in the country; and the nightingales singing in the lanes,
+into which they could steal when the room grew hot; and there would
+be English meadows gleaming with water and set with stolid cows,
+and clouds dipping low and trailing across the green hills. 
+As he sat in the room with her, he wished very often to be back
+again in the thick of life, doing things with Rachel.
+
+He crossed to the window and exclaimed, "Lord, how good it is to
+think of lanes, muddy lanes, with brambles and nettles, you know,
+and real grass fields, and farmyards with pigs and cows, and men
+walking beside carts with pitchforks--there's nothing to compare
+with that here--look at the stony red earth, and the bright blue sea,
+and the glaring white houses--how tired one gets of it!  And the air,
+without a stain or a wrinkle.  I'd give anything for a sea mist."
+
+Rachel, too, had been thinking of the English country:  the flat land
+rolling away to the sea, and the woods and the long straight roads,
+where one can walk for miles without seeing any one, and the great
+church towers and the curious houses clustered in the valleys,
+and the birds, and the dusk, and the rain falling against the windows.
+
+"But London, London's the place," Terence continued.  They looked
+together at the carpet, as though London itself were to be seen
+there lying on the floor, with all its spires and pinnacles pricking
+through the smoke.
+
+"On the whole, what I should like best at this moment,"
+Terence pondered, "would be to find myself walking down Kingsway,
+by those big placards, you know, and turning into the Strand. 
+Perhaps I might go and look over Waterloo Bridge for a moment. 
+Then I'd go along the Strand past the shops with all the new
+books in them, and through the little archway into the Temple. 
+I always like the quiet after the uproar.  You hear your own footsteps
+suddenly quite loud.  The Temple's very pleasant.  I think I should
+go and see if I could find dear old Hodgkin--the man who writes
+books about Van Eyck, you know.  When I left England he was very sad
+about his tame magpie.  He suspected that a man had poisoned it. 
+And then Russell lives on the next staircase.  I think you'd
+like him.  He's a passion for Handel.  Well, Rachel," he concluded,
+dismissing the vision of London, "we shall be doing that together
+in six weeks' time, and it'll be the middle of June then--and June
+in London--my God! how pleasant it all is!"
+
+"And we're certain to have it too," she said.  "It isn't as if we
+were expecting a great deal--only to walk about and look at things."
+
+"Only a thousand a year and perfect freedom," he replied. 
+"How many people in London d'you think have that?"
+
+"And now you've spoilt it," she complained.  "Now we've got to think
+of the horrors."  She looked grudgingly at the novel which had once
+caused her perhaps an hour's discomfort, so that she had never opened
+it again, but kept it on her table, and looked at it occasionally,
+as some medieval monk kept a skull, or a crucifix to remind him
+of the frailty of the body.
+
+"Is it true, Terence," she demanded, "that women die with bugs
+crawling across their faces?"
+
+"I think it's very probable," he said.  "But you must admit,
+Rachel, that we so seldom think of anything but ourselves
+that an occasional twinge is really rather pleasant."
+
+Accusing him of an affection of cynicism which was just as bad as
+sentimentality itself, she left her position by his side and knelt upon
+the window sill, twisting the curtain tassels between her fingers. 
+A vague sense of dissatisfaction filled her.
+
+"What's so detestable in this country," she exclaimed, "is the blue--
+always blue sky and blue sea.  It's like a curtain--all the things
+one wants are on the other side of that.  I want to know what's going
+on behind it.  I hate these divisions, don't you, Terence?  One person
+all in the dark about another person.  Now I liked the Dalloways,"
+she continued, "and they're gone.  I shall never see them again. 
+Just by going on a ship we cut ourselves off entirely from the rest
+of the world.  I want to see England there--London there--all sorts
+of people--why shouldn't one? why should one be shut up all by oneself
+in a room?"
+
+While she spoke thus half to herself and with increasing vagueness,
+because her eye was caught by a ship that had just come into the bay,
+she did not see that Terence had ceased to stare contentedly in front
+of him, and was looking at her keenly and with dissatisfaction. 
+She seemed to be able to cut herself adrift from him, and to pass away
+to unknown places where she had no need of him.  The thought roused
+his jealousy.
+
+"I sometimes think you're not in love with me and never will be,"
+he said energetically.  She started and turned round at his words.
+
+"I don't satisfy you in the way you satisfy me," he continued. 
+"There's something I can't get hold of in you.  You don't want me
+as I want you--you're always wanting something else."
+
+He began pacing up and down the room.
+
+"Perhaps I ask too much," he went on.  "Perhaps it isn't really
+possible to have what I want.  Men and women are too different. 
+You can't understand--you don't understand--"
+
+He came up to where she stood looking at him in silence.
+
+It seemed to her now that what he was saying was perfectly true,
+and that she wanted many more things than the love of one human being--
+the sea, the sky.  She turned again the looked at the distant blue,
+which was so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could
+not possibly want only one human being.
+
+"Or is it only this damnable engagement?" he continued.  "Let's be
+married here, before we go back--or is it too great a risk? 
+Are we sure we want to marry each other?"
+
+They began pacing up and down the room, but although they came
+very near each other in their pacing, they took care not to touch
+each other.  The hopelessness of their position overcame them both. 
+They were impotent; they could never love each other sufficiently
+to overcome all these barriers, and they could never be satisfied
+with less.  Realising this with intolerable keenness she stopped
+in front of him and exclaimed:
+
+"Let's break it off, then."
+
+The words did more to unite them than any amount of argument. 
+As if they stood on the edge of a precipice they clung together. 
+They knew that they could not separate; painful and terrible it
+might be, but they were joined for ever.  They lapsed into silence,
+and after a time crept together in silence.  Merely to be so close
+soothed them, and sitting side by side the divisions disappeared,
+and it seemed as if the world were once more solid and entire, and as if,
+in some strange way, they had grown larger and stronger.
+
+It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with
+great reluctance.  They stood together in front of the looking-glass,
+and with a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been
+feeling nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. 
+But it chilled them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of
+being vast and indivisible they were really very small and separate,
+the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection
+of other things.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII
+
+
+
+But no brush was able to efface completely the expression of happiness,
+so that Mrs. Ambrose could not treat them when they came downstairs as if
+they had spent the morning in a way that could be discussed naturally. 
+This being so, she joined in the world's conspiracy to consider
+them for the time incapacitated from the business of life,
+struck by their intensity of feeling into enmity against life,
+and almost succeeded in dismissing them from her thoughts.
+
+She reflected that she had done all that it was necessary to do in
+practical matters.  She had written a great many letters, and had obtained
+Willoughby's consent.  She had dwelt so often upon Mr. Hewet's prospects,
+his profession, his birth, appearance, and temperament, that she had
+almost forgotten what he was really like.  When she refreshed herself
+by a look at him, she used to wonder again what he was like, and then,
+concluding that they were happy at any rate, thought no more about it.
+
+She might more profitably consider what would happen in three years'
+time, or what might have happened if Rachel had been left
+to explore the world under her father's guidance.  The result,
+she was honest enough to own, might have been better--who knows? 
+She did not disguise from herself that Terence had faults.  She was
+inclined to think him too easy and tolerant, just as he was inclined
+to think her perhaps a trifle hard--no, it was rather that she
+was uncompromising.  In some ways she found St. John preferable;
+but then, of course, he would never have suited Rachel. 
+Her friendship with St. John was established, for although she
+fluctuated between irritation and interest in a way that did credit
+to the candour of her disposition, she liked his company on the whole. 
+He took her outside this little world of love and emotion. 
+He had a grasp of facts.  Supposing, for instance, that England made
+a sudden move towards some unknown port on the coast of Morocco,
+St. John knew what was at the back of it, and to hear him engaged
+with her husband in argument about finance and the balance of power,
+gave her an odd sense of stability.  She respected their arguments
+without always listening to them, much as she respected a solid
+brick wall, or one of those immense municipal buildings which,
+although they compose the greater part of our cities, have been built
+day after day and year after year by unknown hands.  She liked to sit
+and listen, and even felt a little elated when the engaged couple,
+after showing their profound lack of interest, slipped from the room,
+and were seen pulling flowers to pieces in the garden.  It was not
+that she was jealous of them, but she did undoubtedly envy them
+their great unknown future that lay before them.  Slipping from
+one such thought to another, she was at the dining-room with fruit
+in her hands.  Sometimes she stopped to straighten a candle stooping
+with the heat, or disturbed some too rigid arrangement of the chairs. 
+She had reason to suspect that Chailey had been balancing herself
+on the top of a ladder with a wet duster during their absence,
+and the room had never been quite like itself since.  Returning from
+the dining-room for the third time, she perceived that one of
+the arm-chairs was now occupied by St. John.  He lay back in it,
+with his eyes half shut, looking, as he always did, curiously buttoned
+up in a neat grey suit and fenced against the exuberance of a foreign
+climate which might at any moment proceed to take liberties with him. 
+Her eyes rested on him gently and then passed on over his head. 
+Finally she took the chair opposite.
+
+"I didn't want to come here," he said at last, "but I was positively
+driven to it.  . . . Evelyn M.," he groaned.
+
+He sat up, and began to explain with mock solemnity how the detestable
+woman was set upon marrying him.
+
+"She pursues me about the place.  This morning she appeared
+in the smoking-room. All I could do was to seize my hat and fly. 
+I didn't want to come, but I couldn't stay and face another meal
+with her."
+
+"Well, we must make the best of it," Helen replied philosophically. 
+It was very hot, and they were indifferent to any amount of silence,
+so that they lay back in their chairs waiting for something to happen. 
+The bell rang for luncheon, but there was no sound of movement in
+the house.  Was there any news?  Helen asked; anything in the papers? 
+St. John shook his head.  O yes, he had a letter from home, a letter
+from his mother, describing the suicide of the parlour-maid. She
+was called Susan Jane, and she came into the kitchen one afternoon,
+and said that she wanted cook to keep her money for her; she had
+twenty pounds in gold.  Then she went out to buy herself a hat. 
+She came in at half-past five and said that she had taken poison. 
+They had only just time to get her into bed and call a doctor before
+she died.
+
+"Well?"  Helen enquired.
+
+"There'll have to be an inquest," said St. John.
+
+Why had she done it?  He shrugged his shoulders.  Why do people
+kill themselves?  Why do the lower orders do any of the things
+they do do?  Nobody knows.  They sat in silence.
+
+"The bell's run fifteen minutes and they're not down," said Helen
+at length.
+
+When they appeared, St. John explained why it had been necessary
+for him to come to luncheon.  He imitated Evelyn's enthusiastic
+tone as she confronted him in the smoking-room. "She thinks there
+can be nothing _quite_ so thrilling as mathematics, so I've lent
+her a large work in two volumes.  It'll be interesting to see
+what she makes of it."
+
+Rachel could now afford to laugh at him.  She reminded him of Gibbon;
+she had the first volume somewhere still; if he were undertaking
+the education of Evelyn, that surely was the test; or she had heard
+that Burke, upon the American Rebellion--Evelyn ought to read them
+both simultaneously.  When St. John had disposed of her argument
+and had satisfied his hunger, he proceeded to tell them that the
+hotel was seething with scandals, some of the most appalling kind,
+which had happened in their absence; he was indeed much given
+to the study of his kind.
+
+"Evelyn M., for example--but that was told me in confidence."
+
+"Nonsense!"  Terence interposed.
+
+"You've heard about poor Sinclair, too?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I've heard about Sinclair.  He's retired to his mine
+with a revolver.  He writes to Evelyn daily that he's thinking of
+committing suicide.  I've assured her that he's never been so happy
+in his life, and, on the whole, she's inclined to agree with me."
+
+"But then she's entangled herself with Perrott," St. John continued;
+"and I have reason to think, from something I saw in the passage,
+that everything isn't as it should be between Arthur and Susan. 
+There's a young female lately arrived from Manchester.  A very good
+thing if it were broken off, in my opinion.  Their married life is
+something too horrible to contemplate.
+
+Oh, and I distinctly heard old Mrs. Paley rapping out the most
+fearful oaths as I passed her bedroom door.  It's supposed that she
+tortures her maid in private--it's practically certain she does. 
+One can tell it from the look in her eyes."
+
+"When you're eighty and the gout tweezes you, you'll be swearing
+like a trooper," Terence remarked.  "You'll be very fat, very testy,
+very disagreeable.  Can't you imagine him--bald as a coot, with a pair
+of sponge-bag trousers, a little spotted tie, and a corporation?"
+
+After a pause Hirst remarked that the worst infamy had still
+to be told.  He addressed himself to Helen.
+
+"They've hoofed out the prostitute.  One night while we were away that
+old numskull Thornbury was doddering about the passages very late. 
+(Nobody seems to have asked him what _he_ was up to.) He saw
+the Signora Lola Mendoza, as she calls herself, cross the passage
+in her nightgown.  He communicated his suspicions next morning
+to Elliot, with the result that Rodriguez went to the woman and
+gave her twenty-four hours in which to clear out of the place. 
+No one seems to have enquired into the truth of the story, or to
+have asked Thornbury and Elliot what business it was of theirs;
+they had it entirely their own way.  I propose that we should all
+sign a Round Robin, go to Rodriguez in a body, and insist upon
+a full enquiry.  Something's got to be done, don't you agree?"
+
+Hewet remarked that there could be no doubt as to the lady's profession.
+
+"Still," he added, "it's a great shame, poor woman; only I don't
+see what's to be done--"
+
+"I quite agree with you, St. John," Helen burst out.  "It's monstrous. 
+The hypocritical smugness of the English makes my blood boil. 
+A man who's made a fortune in trade as Mr. Thornbury has is bound
+to be twice as bad as any prostitute."
+
+She respected St. John's morality, which she took far more seriously
+than any one else did, and now entered into a discussion with him
+as to the steps that were to be taken to enforce their peculiar
+view of what was right.  The argument led to some profoundly
+gloomy statements of a general nature.  Who were they, after all--
+what authority had they--what power against the mass of superstition
+and ignorance?  It was the English, of course; there must be something
+wrong in the English blood.  Directly you met an English person,
+of the middle classes, you were conscious of an indefinable sensation
+of loathing; directly you saw the brown crescent of houses above Dover,
+the same thing came over you.  But unfortunately St. John added,
+you couldn't trust these foreigners--
+
+They were interrupted by sounds of strife at the further end
+of the table.  Rachel appealed to her aunt.
+
+"Terence says we must go to tea with Mrs. Thornbury because she's
+been so kind, but I don't see it; in fact, I'd rather have my right
+hand sawn in pieces--just imagine! the eyes of all those women!"
+
+"Fiddlesticks, Rachel," Terence replied.  "Who wants to look at you? 
+You're consumed with vanity!  You're a monster of conceit! 
+Surely, Helen, you ought to have taught her by this time that she's
+a person of no conceivable importance whatever--not beautiful,
+or well dressed, or conspicuous for elegance or intellect,
+or deportment.  A more ordinary sight than you are," he concluded,
+"except for the tear across your dress has never been seen. 
+However, stay at home if you want to.  I'm going."
+
+She appealed again to her aunt.  It wasn't the being looked at, she explained,
+but the things people were sure to say.  The women in particular. 
+She liked women, but where emotion was concerned they were as flies
+on a lump of sugar.  They would be certain to ask her questions. 
+Evelyn M. would say:  "Are you in love?  Is it nice being in love?" 
+And Mrs. Thornbury--her eyes would go up and down, up and down--
+she shuddered at the thought of it.  Indeed, the retirement
+of their life since their engagement had made her so sensitive,
+that she was not exaggerating her case.
+
+She found an ally in Helen, who proceeded to expound her views
+of the human race, as she regarded with complacency the pyramid
+of variegated fruits in the centre of the table.  It wasn't
+that they were cruel, or meant to hurt, or even stupid exactly;
+but she had always found that the ordinary person had so little
+emotion in his own life that the scent of it in the lives of others
+was like the scent of blood in the nostrils of a bloodhound. 
+Warming to the theme, she continued:
+
+"Directly anything happens--it may be a marriage, or a birth,
+or a death--on the whole they prefer it to be a death--every one
+wants to see you.  They insist upon seeing you.  They've got
+nothing to say; they don't care a rap for you; but you've got to go
+to lunch or to tea or to dinner, and if you don't you're damned. 
+It's the smell of blood," she continued; "I don't blame 'em; only
+they shan't have mind if I know it!"
+
+She looked about her as if she had called up a legion of human beings,
+all hostile and all disagreeable, who encircled the table,
+with mouths gaping for blood, and made it appear a little island
+of neutral country in the midst of the enemy's country.
+
+Her words roused her husband, who had been muttering rhythmically
+to himself, surveying his guests and his food and his wife with eyes
+that were now melancholy and now fierce, according to the fortunes
+of the lady in his ballad.  He cut Helen short with a protest. 
+He hated even the semblance of cynicism in women.  "Nonsense, nonsense,"
+he remarked abruptly.
+
+Terence and Rachel glanced at each other across the table, which meant
+that when they were married they would not behave like that. 
+The entrance of Ridley into the conversation had a strange effect. 
+It became at once more formal and more polite.  It would have been
+impossible to talk quite easily of anything that came into their heads,
+and to say the word prostitute as simply as any other word. 
+The talk now turned upon literature and politics, and Ridley told
+stories of the distinguished people he had known in his youth. 
+Such talk was of the nature of an art, and the personalities
+and informalities of the young were silenced.  As they rose to go,
+Helen stopped for a moment, leaning her elbows on the table.
+
+"You've all been sitting here," she said, "for almost an hour,
+and you haven't noticed my figs, or my flowers, or the way
+the light comes through, or anything.  I haven't been listening,
+because I've been looking at you.  You looked very beautiful;
+I wish you'd go on sitting for ever."
+
+She led the way to the drawing-room, where she took up her embroidery,
+and began again to dissuade Terence from walking down to the
+hotel in this heat.  But the more she dissuaded, the more he
+was determined to go.  He became irritated and obstinate. 
+There were moments when they almost disliked each other. 
+He wanted other people; he wanted Rachel, to see them with him. 
+He suspected that Mrs. Ambrose would now try to dissuade her
+from going.  He was annoyed by all this space and shade and beauty,
+and Hirst, recumbent, drooping a magazine from his wrist.
+
+"I'm going," he repeated.  "Rachel needn't come unless she wants to."
+
+"If you go, Hewet, I wish you'd make enquiries about the prostitute,"
+said Hirst.  "Look here," he added, "I'll walk half the way with you."
+
+Greatly to their surprise he raised himself, looked at his watch,
+and remarked that, as it was now half an hour since luncheon,
+the gastric juices had had sufficient time to secrete; he was trying
+a system, he explained, which involved short spells of exercise
+interspaced by longer intervals of rest.
+
+"I shall be back at four," he remarked to Helen, "when I shall lie
+down on the sofa and relax all my muscles completely."
+
+"So you're going, Rachel?"  Helen asked.  "You won't stay with me?"
+
+She smiled, but she might have been sad.
+
+Was she sad, or was she really laughing?  Rachel could not tell, and she
+felt for the moment very uncomfortable between Helen and Terence. 
+Then she turned away, saying merely that she would go with Terence,
+on condition that he did all the talking.
+
+A narrow border of shadow ran along the road, which was broad
+enough for two, but not broad enough for three.  St. John therefore
+dropped a little behind the pair, and the distance between
+them increased by degrees.  Walking with a view to digestion,
+and with one eye upon his watch, he looked from time to time at
+the pair in front of him.  They seemed to be so happy, so intimate,
+although they were walking side by side much as other people walk. 
+They turned slightly toward each other now and then, and said
+something which he thought must be something very private. 
+They were really disputing about Helen's character, and Terence was
+trying to explain why it was that she annoyed him so much sometimes. 
+But St. John thought that they were saying things which they did
+not want him to hear, and was led to think of his own isolation. 
+These people were happy, and in some ways he despised them for
+being made happy so simply, and in other ways he envied them. 
+He was much more remarkable than they were, but he was not happy. 
+People never liked him; he doubted sometimes whether even Helen
+liked him.  To be simple, to be able to say simply what one felt,
+without the terrific self-consciousness which possessed him,
+and showed him his own face and words perpetually in a mirror,
+that would be worth almost any other gift, for it made one happy. 
+Happiness, happiness, what was happiness?  He was never happy. 
+He saw too clearly the little vices and deceits and flaws
+of life, and, seeing them, it seemed to him honest to take notice
+of them.  That was the reason, no doubt, why people generally
+disliked him, and complained that he was heartless and bitter. 
+Certainly they never told him the things he wanted to be told,
+that he was nice and kind, and that they liked him.  But it was
+true that half the sharp things that he said about them were said
+because he was unhappy or hurt himself.  But he admitted that he
+had very seldom told any one that he cared for them, and when he
+had been demonstrative, he had generally regretted it afterwards. 
+His feelings about Terence and Rachel were so complicated that he
+had never yet been able to bring himself to say that he was glad
+that they were going to be married.  He saw their faults so clearly,
+and the inferior nature of a great deal of their feeling for
+each other, and he expected that their love would not last. 
+He looked at them again, and, very strangely, for he was so used
+to thinking that he seldom saw anything, the look of them filled him
+with a simple emotion of affection in which there were some traces
+of pity also.  What, after all, did people's faults matter in comparison
+with what was good in them?  He resolved that he would now tell them
+what he felt.  He quickened his pace and came up with them just
+as they reached the corner where the lane joined the main road. 
+They stood still and began to laugh at him, and to ask him whether
+the gastric juices--but he stopped them and began to speak very quickly
+and stiffly.
+
+"D'you remember the morning after the dance?" he demanded. 
+"It was here we sat, and you talked nonsense, and Rachel made little
+heaps of stones.  I, on the other hand, had the whole meaning
+of life revealed to me in a flash."  He paused for a second,
+and drew his lips together in a tight little purse.  "Love," he said. 
+"It seems to me to explain everything.  So, on the whole, I'm very glad
+that you two are going to be married."  He then turned round abruptly,
+without looking at them, and walked back to the villa.  He felt both
+exalted and ashamed of himself for having thus said what he felt. 
+Probably they were laughing at him, probably they thought him
+a fool, and, after all, had he really said what he felt?
+
+It was true that they laughed when he was gone; but the dispute
+about Helen which had become rather sharp, ceased, and they became
+peaceful and friendly.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIV
+
+
+
+They reached the hotel rather early in the afternoon, so that most
+people were still lying down, or sitting speechless in their bedrooms,
+and Mrs. Thornbury, although she had asked them to tea, was nowhere
+to be seen.  They sat down, therefore, in the shady hall,
+which was almost empty, and full of the light swishing sounds of
+air going to and fro in a large empty space.  Yes, this arm-chair
+was the same arm-chair in which Rachel had sat that afternoon when
+Evelyn came up, and this was the magazine she had been looking at,
+and this the very picture, a picture of New York by lamplight. 
+How odd it seemed--nothing had changed.
+
+By degrees a certain number of people began to come down the stairs
+and to pass through the hall, and in this dim light their figures
+possessed a sort of grace and beauty, although they were all
+unknown people.  Sometimes they went straight through and out into
+the garden by the swing door, sometimes they stopped for a few minutes
+and bent over the tables and began turning over the newspapers. 
+Terence and Rachel sat watching them through their half-closed eyelids--
+the Johnsons, the Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons', the Lees,
+the Morleys, the Campbells, the Gardiners.  Some were dressed
+in white flannels and were carrying racquets under their arms,
+some were short, some tall, some were only children, and some perhaps
+were servants, but they all had their standing, their reason for
+following each other through the hall, their money, their position,
+whatever it might be.  Terence soon gave up looking at them,
+for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he fell half asleep
+in his chair.  Rachel watched the people for some time longer;
+she was fascinated by the certainty and the grace of their movements,
+and by the inevitable way in which they seemed to follow each other,
+and loiter and pass on and disappear.  But after a time her thoughts
+wandered, and she began to think of the dance, which had been held
+in this room, only then the room itself looked quite different. 
+Glancing round, she could hardly believe that it was the same room. 
+It had looked so bare and so bright and formal on that night
+when they came into it out of the darkness; it had been filled,
+too, with little red, excited faces, always moving, and people so
+brightly dressed and so animated that they did not seem in the least
+like real people, nor did you feel that you could talk to them. 
+And now the room was dim and quiet, and beautiful silent people
+passed through it, to whom you could go and say anything you liked. 
+She felt herself amazingly secure as she sat in her arm-chair, and
+able to review not only the night of the dance, but the entire past,
+tenderly and humorously, as if she had been turning in a fog
+for a long time, and could now see exactly where she had turned. 
+For the methods by which she had reached her present position,
+seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about them
+was that she had not known where they were leading her.  That was
+the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going,
+or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret,
+always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led
+to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing,
+and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty,
+and it was this process that people called living.  Perhaps, then,
+every one really knew as she knew now where they were going;
+and things formed themselves into a pattern not only for her,
+but for them, and in that pattern lay satisfaction and meaning. 
+When she looked back she could see that a meaning of some kind
+was apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the brief visit
+of the Dalloways whom she would never see again, and in the life of
+her father.
+
+The sound of Terence, breathing deep in his slumber, confirmed her
+in her calm.  She was not sleepy although she did not see anything
+very distinctly, but although the figures passing through the hall
+became vaguer and vaguer, she believed that they all knew exactly
+where they were going, and the sense of their certainty filled her
+with comfort.  For the moment she was as detached and disinterested
+as if she had no longer any lot in life, and she thought that she
+could now accept anything that came to her without being perplexed
+by the form in which it appeared.  What was there to frighten or
+to perplex in the prospect of life?  Why should this insight ever
+again desert her?  The world was in truth so large, so hospitable,
+and after all it was so simple.  "Love," St. John had said, "that seems
+to explain it all."  Yes, but it was not the love of man for woman,
+of Terence for Rachel.  Although they sat so close together, they had
+ceased to be little separate bodies; they had ceased to struggle
+and desire one another.  There seemed to be peace between them. 
+It might be love, but it was not the love of man for woman.
+
+Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying back
+in his chair, and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth was,
+and his chin so small, and his nose curved like a switchback
+with a knob at the end.  Naturally, looking like that he was lazy,
+and ambitious, and full of moods and faults.  She remembered
+their quarrels, and in particular how they had been quarreling about
+Helen that very afternoon, and she thought how often they would
+quarrel in the thirty, or forty, or fifty years in which they would
+be living in the same house together, catching trains together,
+and getting annoyed because they were so different.  But all this
+was superficial, and had nothing to do with the life that went
+on beneath the eyes and the mouth and the chin, for that life
+was independent of her, and independent of everything else. 
+So too, although she was going to marry him and to live with him
+for thirty, or forty, or fifty years, and to quarrel, and to be
+so close to him, she was independent of him; she was independent
+of everything else.  Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love that
+made her understand this, for she had never felt this independence,
+this calm, and this certainty until she fell in love with him,
+and perhaps this too was love.  She wanted nothing else.
+
+For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little distance
+looking at the couple lying back so peacefully in their arm-chairs.
+She could not make up her mind whether to disturb them or not,
+and then, seeming to recollect something, she came across the hall. 
+The sound of her approach woke Terence, who sat up and rubbed his eyes. 
+He heard Miss Allan talking to Rachel.
+
+"Well," she was saying, "this is very nice.  It is very nice indeed. 
+Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion.  It cannot often
+happen that two couples who have never seen each other before meet
+in the same hotel and decide to get married."  Then she paused
+and smiled, and seemed to have nothing more to say, so that Terence
+rose and asked her whether it was true that she had finished her book. 
+Some one had said that she had really finished it.  Her face lit up;
+she turned to him with a livelier expression than usual.
+
+"Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it," she said. 
+"That is, omitting Swinburne--Beowulf to Browning--I rather
+like the two B's myself.  Beowulf to Browning," she repeated,
+"I think that is the kind of title which might catch one's eye on
+a railway book-stall."
+
+She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book, for no one
+knew what an amount of determination had gone to the making of it. 
+Also she thought that it was a good piece of work, and, considering
+what anxiety she had been in about her brother while she wrote it,
+she could not resist telling them a little more about it.
+
+"I must confess," she continued, "that if I had known how many
+classics there are in English literature, and how verbose the best
+of them contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work. 
+They only allow one seventy thousand words, you see."
+
+"Only seventy thousand words!"  Terence exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, and one has to say something about everybody," Miss Allan added. 
+"That is what I find so difficult, saying something different
+about everybody."  Then she thought that she had said enough
+about herself, and she asked whether they had come down to join
+the tennis tournament.  "The young people are very keen about it. 
+It begins again in half an hour."
+
+Her gaze rested benevolently upon them both, and, after a momentary
+pause, she remarked, looking at Rachel as if she had remembered
+something that would serve to keep her distinct from other people.
+
+"You're the remarkable person who doesn't like ginger."  But the
+kindness of the smile in her rather worn and courageous face made them
+feel that although she would scarcely remember them as individuals,
+she had laid upon them the burden of the new generation.
+
+"And in that I quite agree with her," said a voice behind;
+Mrs. Thornbury had overheard the last few words about not liking ginger. 
+"It's associated in my mind with a horrid old aunt of ours (poor thing,
+she suffered dreadfully, so it isn't fair to call her horrid)
+who used to give it to us when we were small, and we never had
+the courage to tell her we didn't like it.  We just had to put
+it out in the shrubbery--she had a big house near Bath."
+
+They began moving slowly across the hall, when they were stopped
+by the impact of Evelyn, who dashed into them, as though in running
+downstairs to catch them her legs had got beyond her control.
+
+"Well," she exclaimed, with her usual enthusiasm, seizing Rachel
+by the arm, "I call this splendid!  I guessed it was going to happen
+from the very beginning!  I saw you two were made for each other. 
+Now you've just got to tell me all about it--when's it to be,
+where are you going to live--are you both tremendously happy?"
+
+But the attention of the group was diverted to Mrs. Elliot,
+who was passing them with her eager but uncertain movement,
+carrying in her hands a plate and an empty hot-water bottle. 
+She would have passed them, but Mrs. Thornbury went up and stopped her.
+
+"Thank you, Hughling's better," she replied, in answer to Mrs. Thornbury's
+enquiry, "but he's not an easy patient.  He wants to know what his
+temperature is, and if I tell him he gets anxious, and if I don't
+tell him he suspects.  You know what men are when they're ill! 
+And of course there are none of the proper appliances, and, though he
+seems very willing and anxious to help" (here she lowered her voice
+mysteriously), "one can't feel that Dr. Rodriguez is the same
+as a proper doctor.  If you would come and see him, Mr. Hewet,"
+she added, "I know it would cheer him up--lying there in bed all day--
+and the flies--But I must go and find Angelo--the food here--
+of course, with an invalid, one wants things particularly nice." 
+And she hurried past them in search of the head waiter.  The worry
+of nursing her husband had fixed a plaintive frown upon her forehead;
+she was pale and looked unhappy and more than usually inefficient,
+and her eyes wandered more vaguely than ever from point to point.
+
+"Poor thing!"  Mrs. Thornbury exclaimed.  She told them that for some
+days Hughling Elliot had been ill, and the only doctor available
+was the brother of the proprietor, or so the proprietor said,
+whose right to the title of doctor was not above suspicion.
+
+"I know how wretched it is to be ill in a hotel," Mrs. Thornbury
+remarked, once more leading the way with Rachel to the garden. 
+"I spent six weeks on my honeymoon in having typhoid at Venice,"
+she continued.  "But even so, I look back upon them as some of the
+happiest weeks in my life.  Ah, yes," she said, taking Rachel's arm,
+"you think yourself happy now, but it's nothing to the happiness
+that comes afterwards.  And I assure you I could find it in my heart
+to envy you young people!  You've a much better time than we had,
+I may tell you.  When I look back upon it, I can hardly believe
+how things have changed.  When we were engaged I wasn't allowed to go
+for walks with William alone--some one had always to be in the room
+with us--I really believe I had to show my parents all his letters!--
+though they were very fond of him too.  Indeed, I may say they
+looked upon him as their own son.  It amuses me," she continued,
+"to think how strict they were to us, when I see how they spoil
+their grand-children!"
+
+The table was laid under the tree again, and taking her place
+before the teacups, Mrs. Thornbury beckoned and nodded until she had
+collected quite a number of people, Susan and Arthur and Mr. Pepper,
+who were strolling about, waiting for the tournament to begin. 
+A murmuring tree, a river brimming in the moonlight, Terence's words
+came back to Rachel as she sat drinking the tea and listening
+to the words which flowed on so lightly, so kindly, and with such
+silvery smoothness.  This long life and all these children had
+left her very smooth; they seemed to have rubbed away the marks
+of individuality, and to have left only what was old and maternal.
+
+"And the things you young people are going to see!" 
+Mrs. Thornbury continued.  She included them all in her forecast,
+she included them all in her maternity, although the party
+comprised William Pepper and Miss Allan, both of whom might
+have been supposed to have seen a fair share of the panorama. 
+"When I see how the world has changed in my lifetime," she went on,
+"I can set no limit to what may happen in the next fifty years. 
+Ah, no, Mr. Pepper, I don't agree with you in the least," she laughed,
+interrupting his gloomy remark about things going steadily
+from bad to worse.  "I know I ought to feel that, but I don't,
+I'm afraid.  They're going to be much better people than we were. 
+Surely everything goes to prove that.  All round me I see women,
+young women, women with household cares of every sort, going out
+and doing things that we should not have thought it possible to do."
+
+Mr. Pepper thought her sentimental and irrational like all old women,
+but her manner of treating him as if he were a cross old baby baffled
+him and charmed him, and he could only reply to her with a curious
+grimace which was more a smile than a frown.
+
+"And they remain women," Mrs. Thornbury added.  "They give a great
+deal to their children."
+
+As she said this she smiled slightly in the direction of Susan
+and Rachel.  They did not like to be included in the same lot,
+but they both smiled a little self-consciously, and Arthur and Terence
+glanced at each other too.  She made them feel that they were all in
+the same boat together, and they looked at the women they were going
+to marry and compared them.  It was inexplicable how any one could
+wish to marry Rachel, incredible that any one should be ready to spend
+his life with Susan; but singular though the other's taste must be,
+they bore each other no ill-will on account of it; indeed, they liked
+each other rather the better for the eccentricity of their choice.
+
+"I really must congratulate you," Susan remarked, as she leant
+across the table for the jam.
+
+There seemed to be no foundation for St. John's gossip about Arthur
+and Susan.  Sunburnt and vigorous they sat side by side, with their
+racquets across their knees, not saying much but smiling slightly
+all the time.  Through the thin white clothes which they wore, it was
+possible to see the lines of their bodies and legs, the beautiful
+curves of their muscles, his leanness and her flesh, and it was
+natural to think of the firm-fleshed sturdy children that would
+be theirs.  Their faces had too little shape in them to be beautiful,
+but they had clear eyes and an appearance of great health and power
+of endurance, for it seemed as if the blood would never cease
+to run in his veins, or to lie deeply and calmly in her cheeks. 
+Their eyes at the present moment were brighter than usual, and wore
+the peculiar expression of pleasure and self-confidence which is
+seen in the eyes of athletes, for they had been playing tennis,
+and they were both first-rate at the game.
+
+Evelyn had not spoken, but she had been looking from Susan
+to Rachel.  Well--they had both made up their minds very easily,
+they had done in a very few weeks what it sometimes seemed to her
+that she would never be able to do.  Although they were so different,
+she thought that she could see in each the same look of satisfaction
+and completion, the same calmness of manner, and the same slowness
+of movement.  It was that slowness, that confidence, that content
+which she hated, she thought to herself.  They moved so slowly
+because they were not single but double, and Susan was attached
+to Arthur, and Rachel to Terence, and for the sake of this one man
+they had renounced all other men, and movement, and the real things
+of life.  Love was all very well, and those snug domestic houses,
+with the kitchen below and the nursery above, which were so secluded
+and self-contained, like little islands in the torrents of the world;
+but the real things were surely the things that happened, the causes,
+the wars, the ideals, which happened in the great world outside,
+and went so independently of these women, turning so quietly and
+beautifully towards the men.  She looked at them sharply.  Of course
+they were happy and content, but there must be better things than that. 
+Surely one could get nearer to life, one could get more out of life,
+one could enjoy more and feel more than they would ever do. 
+Rachel in particular looked so young--what could she know of life? 
+She became restless, and getting up, crossed over to sit beside Rachel. 
+She reminded her that she had promised to join her club.
+
+"The bother is," she went on, "that I mayn't be able to start work
+seriously till October.  I've just had a letter from a friend of mine
+whose brother is in business in Moscow.  They want me to stay with them,
+and as they're in the thick of all the conspiracies and anarchists,
+I've a good mind to stop on my way home.  It sounds too thrilling." 
+She wanted to make Rachel see how thrilling it was.  "My friend
+knows a girl of fifteen who's been sent to Siberia for life merely
+because they caught her addressing a letter to an anarchist. 
+And the letter wasn't from her, either.  I'd give all I have in
+the world to help on a revolution against the Russian government,
+and it's bound to come."
+
+She looked from Rachel to Terence.  They were both a little touched
+by the sight of her remembering how lately they had been listening
+to evil words about her, and Terence asked her what her scheme was,
+and she explained that she was going to found a club--a club for
+doing things, really doing them.  She became very animated, as she
+talked on and on, for she professed herself certain that if once
+twenty people--no, ten would be enough if they were keen--set about
+doing things instead of talking about doing them, they could abolish
+almost every evil that exists.  It was brains that were needed. 
+If only people with brains--of course they would want a room,
+a nice room, in Bloomsbury preferably, where they could meet once
+a week.  . . .
+
+As she talked Terence could see the traces of fading youth in her face,
+the lines that were being drawn by talk and excitement round her mouth
+and eyes, but he did not pity her; looking into those bright, rather hard,
+and very courageous eyes, he saw that she did not pity herself,
+or feel any desire to exchange her own life for the more refined
+and orderly lives of people like himself and St. John, although,
+as the years went by, the fight would become harder and harder. 
+Perhaps, though, she would settle down; perhaps, after all,
+she would marry Perrott.  While his mind was half occupied with
+what she was saying, he thought of her probable destiny, the light
+clouds of tobacco smoke serving to obscure his face from her eyes.
+
+Terence smoked and Arthur smoked and Evelyn smoked, so that the air
+was full of the mist and fragrance of good tobacco.  In the intervals
+when no one spoke, they heard far off the low murmur of the sea,
+as the waves quietly broke and spread the beach with a film of water,
+and withdrew to break again.  The cool green light fell through
+the leaves of the tree, and there were soft crescents and diamonds
+of sunshine upon the plates and the tablecloth.  Mrs. Thornbury,
+after watching them all for a time in silence, began to ask Rachel
+kindly questions--When did they all go back?  Oh, they expected
+her father.  She must want to see her father--there would be a
+great deal to tell him, and (she looked sympathetically at Terence)
+he would be so happy, she felt sure.  Years ago, she continued,
+it might have been ten or twenty years ago, she remembered meeting
+Mr. Vinrace at a party, and, being so much struck by his face,
+which was so unlike the ordinary face one sees at a party, that she
+had asked who he was, and she was told that it was Mr. Vinrace,
+and she had always remembered the name,--an uncommon name,--and he
+had a lady with him, a very sweet-looking woman, but it was one of
+those dreadful London crushes, where you don't talk,--you only look
+at each other,--and although she had shaken hands with Mr. Vinrace,
+she didn't think they had said anything.  She sighed very slightly,
+remembering the past.
+
+Then she turned to Mr. Pepper, who had become very dependent on her,
+so that he always chose a seat near her, and attended to what she
+was saying, although he did not often make any remark of his own.
+
+"You who know everything, Mr. Pepper," she said, "tell us how did
+those wonderful French ladies manage their salons?  Did we ever
+do anything of the same kind in England, or do you think that there
+is some reason why we cannot do it in England?"
+
+Mr. Pepper was pleased to explain very accurately why there has
+never been an English salon.  There were three reasons, and they were
+very good ones, he said.  As for himself, when he went to a party,
+as one was sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence--
+his niece, for example, had been married the other day--he walked
+into the middle of the room, said "Ha! ha!" as loud as ever he could,
+considered that he had done his duty, and walked away again. 
+Mrs. Thornbury protested.  She was going to give a party directly
+she got back, and they were all to be invited, and she should set
+people to watch Mr. Pepper, and if she heard that he had been caught
+saying "Ha! ha!" she would--she would do something very dreadful
+indeed to him.  Arthur Venning suggested that what she must do
+was to rig up something in the nature of a surprise--a portrait,
+for example, of a nice old lady in a lace cap, concealing a bath
+of cold water, which at a signal could be sprung on Pepper's head;
+or they'd have a chair which shot him twenty feet high directly he sat
+on it.
+
+Susan laughed.  She had done her tea; she was feeling very well
+contented, partly because she had been playing tennis brilliantly,
+and then every one was so nice; she was beginning to find it so much
+easier to talk, and to hold her own even with quite clever people,
+for somehow clever people did not frighten her any more. 
+Even Mr. Hirst, whom she had disliked when she first met him,
+really wasn't disagreeable; and, poor man, he always looked so ill;
+perhaps he was in love; perhaps he had been in love with Rachel--
+she really shouldn't wonder; or perhaps it was Evelyn--she was of
+course very attractive to men.  Leaning forward, she went on with
+the conversation.  She said that she thought that the reason why
+parties were so dull was mainly because gentlemen will not dress: 
+even in London, she stated, it struck her very much how people
+don't think it necessary to dress in the evening, and of course
+if they don't dress in London they won't dress in the country. 
+It was really quite a treat at Christmas-time when there were
+the Hunt balls, and the gentlemen wore nice red coats, but Arthur
+didn't care for dancing, so she supposed that they wouldn't go
+even to the ball in their little country town.  She didn't think
+that people who were fond of one sport often care for another,
+although her father was an exception.  But then he was an exception
+in every way--such a gardener, and he knew all about birds and animals,
+and of course he was simply adored by all the old women in the village,
+and at the same time what he really liked best was a book. 
+You always knew where to find him if he were wanted; he would be
+in his study with a book.  Very likely it would be an old, old book,
+some fusty old thing that no one else would dream of reading. 
+She used to tell him that he would have made a first-rate old bookworm
+if only he hadn't had a family of six to support, and six children,
+she added, charmingly confident of universal sympathy, didn't leave
+one much time for being a bookworm.
+
+Still talking about her father, of whom she was very proud, she rose,
+for Arthur upon looking at his watch found that it was time they
+went back again to the tennis court.  The others did not move.
+
+"They're very happy!" said Mrs. Thornbury, looking benignantly
+after them.  Rachel agreed; they seemed to be so certain of themselves;
+they seemed to know exactly what they wanted.
+
+"D'you think they _are_ happy?"  Evelyn murmured to Terence in
+an undertone, and she hoped that he would say that he did not think
+them happy; but, instead, he said that they must go too--go home,
+for they were always being late for meals, and Mrs. Ambrose,
+who was very stern and particular, didn't like that.  Evelyn laid
+hold of Rachel's skirt and protested.  Why should they go? 
+It was still early, and she had so many things to say to them. 
+"No," said Terence, "we must go, because we walk so slowly.  We stop
+and look at things, and we talk."
+
+"What d'you talk about?"  Evelyn enquired, upon which he laughed
+and said that they talked about everything.
+
+Mrs. Thornbury went with them to the gate, trailing very slowly
+and gracefully across the grass and the gravel, and talking all
+the time about flowers and birds.  She told them that she had taken up
+the study of botany since her daughter married, and it was wonderful
+what a number of flowers there were which she had never seen,
+although she had lived in the country all her life and she was now
+seventy-two. It was a good thing to have some occupation which was
+quite independent of other people, she said, when one got old. 
+But the odd thing was that one never felt old.  She always felt that
+she was twenty-five, not a day more or a day less, but, of course,
+one couldn't expect other people to agree to that.
+
+"It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to
+imagine that you're twenty-five," she said, looking from one to the
+other with her smooth, bright glance.  "It must be very wonderful,
+very wonderful indeed."  She stood talking to them at the gate
+for a long time; she seemed reluctant that they should go.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXV
+
+
+The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on
+the shore sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature,
+and even on the terrace under an awning the bricks were hot,
+and the air danced perpetually over the short dry grass. 
+The red flowers in the stone basins were drooping with the heat,
+and the white blossoms which had been so smooth and thick only a few
+weeks ago were now dry, and their edges were curled and yellow. 
+Only the stiff and hostile plants of the south, whose fleshy leaves
+seemed to be grown upon spines, still remained standing upright
+and defied the sun to beat them down.  It was too hot to talk,
+and it was not easy to find any book that would withstand the power
+of the sun.  Many books had been tried and then let fall, and now
+Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the words of Milton
+had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary to understand
+what he was saying; one could merely listen to his words; one could
+almost handle them.
+
+There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,
+
+he read,
+
+   That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.
+   Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;
+   Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,
+
+That had the sceptre from his father Brute.
+
+The words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be laden
+with meaning, and perhaps it was for this reason that it was painful
+to listen to them; they sounded strange; they meant different things
+from what they usually meant.  Rachel at any rate could not keep
+her attention fixed upon them, but went off upon curious trains of
+thought suggested by words such as "curb" and "Locrine" and "Brute,"
+which brought unpleasant sights before her eyes, independently of
+their meaning.  Owing to the heat and the dancing air the garden
+too looked strange--the trees were either too near or too far,
+and her head almost certainly ached.  She was not quite certain,
+and therefore she did not know, whether to tell Terence now,
+or to let him go on reading.  She decided that she would wait until
+he came to the end of a stanza, and if by that time she had turned
+her head this way and that, and it ached in every position undoubtedly,
+she would say very calmly that her head ached.
+
+   Sabrina fair,
+     Listen where thou art sitting
+   Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
+     In twisted braids of lilies knitting
+   The loose train of thy amber dropping hair,
+   Listen for dear honour's sake,
+     Goddess of the silver lake,
+     Listen and save!
+
+But her head ached; it ached whichever way she turned it.
+
+She sat up and said as she had determined, "My head aches so that
+I shall go indoors."  He was half-way through the next verse,
+but he dropped the book instantly.
+
+"Your head aches?" he repeated.
+
+For a few moments they sat looking at one another in silence,
+holding each other's hands.  During this time his sense of dismay
+and catastrophe were almost physically painful; all round him he
+seemed to hear the shiver of broken glass which, as it fell to earth,
+left him sitting in the open air.  But at the end of two minutes,
+noticing that she was not sharing his dismay, but was only rather
+more languid and heavy-eyed than usual, he recovered, fetched Helen,
+and asked her to tell him what they had better do, for Rachel had
+a headache.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose was not discomposed, but advised that she should go
+to bed, and added that she must expect her head to ache if she sat up
+to all hours and went out in the heat, but a few hours in bed would
+cure it completely.  Terence was unreasonably reassured by her words,
+as he had been unreasonably depressed the moment before.  Helen's sense
+seemed to have much in common with the ruthless good sense of nature,
+which avenged rashness by a headache, and, like nature's good sense,
+might be depended upon.
+
+Rachel went to bed; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her,
+for a very long time, but at length, waking from a transparent
+kind of sleep, she saw the windows white in front of her,
+and recollected that some time before she had gone to bed with
+a headache, and that Helen had said it would be gone when she woke. 
+She supposed, therefore, that she was now quite well again. 
+At the same time the wall of her room was painfully white,
+and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat.  Turning her
+eyes to the window, she was not reassured by what she saw there. 
+The movement of the blind as it filled with air and blew slowly out,
+drawing the cord with a little trailing sound along the floor, seemed to
+her terrifying, as if it were the movement of an animal in the room. 
+She shut her eyes, and the pulse in her head beat so strongly
+that each thump seemed to tread upon a nerve, piercing her forehead
+with a little stab of pain.  It might not be the same headache,
+but she certainly had a headache.  She turned from side to side,
+in the hope that the coolness of the sheets would cure her, and that
+when she next opened her eyes to look the room would be as usual. 
+After a considerable number of vain experiments, she resolved to put
+the matter beyond a doubt.  She got out of bed and stood upright,
+holding on to the brass ball at the end of the bedstead. 
+Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of her hand,
+and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of the floor
+proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and walk
+than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change
+was refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great
+as the discomfort of standing up.  She accepted the idea that she
+would have to stay in bed all day long, and as she laid her head
+on the pillow, relinquished the happiness of the day.
+
+When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped her
+cheerful words, looked startled for a second and then unnaturally calm,
+the fact that she was ill was put beyond a doubt.  It was confirmed
+when the whole household knew of it, when the song that some
+one was singing in the garden stopped suddenly, and when Maria,
+as she brought water, slipped past the bed with averted eyes. 
+There was all the morning to get through, and then all the afternoon,
+and at intervals she made an effort to cross over into the ordinary world,
+but she found that her heat and discomfort had put a gulf between
+her world and the ordinary world which she could not bridge. 
+At one point the door opened, and Helen came in with a little
+dark man who had--it was the chief thing she noticed about him--
+very hairy hands.  She was drowsy and intolerably hot, and as he
+seemed shy and obsequious she scarcely troubled to answer him,
+although she understood that he was a doctor.  At another point
+the door opened and Terence came in very gently, smiling too steadily,
+as she realised, for it to be natural.  He sat down and talked to her,
+stroking her hands until it became irksome to her to lie any more
+in the same position and she turned round, and when she looked up
+again Helen was beside her and Terence had gone.  It did not matter;
+she would see him to-morrow when things would be ordinary again. 
+Her chief occupation during the day was to try to remember how the
+lines went:
+
+   Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
+     In twisted braids of lilies knitting
+   The loose train of thy amber dropping hair;
+
+and the effort worried her because the adjectives persisted
+in getting into the wrong places.
+
+The second day did not differ very much from the first day,
+except that her bed had become very important, and the world outside,
+when she tried to think of it, appeared distinctly further off. 
+The glassy, cool, translucent wave was almost visible before her,
+curling up at the end of the bed, and as it was refreshingly cool
+she tried to keep her mind fixed upon it.  Helen was here, and Helen
+was there all day long; sometimes she said that it was lunchtime,
+and sometimes that it was teatime; but by the next day all landmarks
+were obliterated, and the outer world was so far away that the
+different sounds, such as the sounds of people moving overhead,
+could only be ascribed to their cause by a great effort of memory. 
+The recollection of what she had felt, or of what she had been
+doing and thinking three days before, had faded entirely. 
+On the other hand, every object in the room, and the bed itself,
+and her own body with its various limbs and their different sensations
+were more and more important each day.  She was completely cut off,
+and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated alone
+with her body.
+
+Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through
+the morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to
+the depths of the night.  One evening when the room appeared very dim,
+either because it was evening or because the blinds were drawn,
+Helen said to her, "Some one is going to sit here to-night. You
+won't mind?"
+
+Opening her eyes, Rachel saw not only Helen but a nurse in spectacles,
+whose face vaguely recalled something that she had once seen. 
+She had seen her in the chapel.  "Nurse McInnis," said Helen,
+and the nurse smiled steadily as they all did, and said that she
+did not find many people who were frightened of her.  After waiting
+for a moment they both disappeared, and having turned on her pillow
+Rachel woke to find herself in the midst of one of those interminable
+nights which do not end at twelve, but go on into the double figures--
+thirteen, fourteen, and so on until they reach the twenties,
+and then the thirties, and then the forties.  She realised that
+there is nothing to prevent nights from doing this if they choose. 
+At a great distance an elderly woman sat with her head bent down;
+Rachel raised herself slightly and saw with dismay that she was playing
+cards by the light of a candle which stood in the hollow of a newspaper. 
+The sight had something inexplicably sinister about it, and she
+was terrified and cried out, upon which the woman laid down her
+cards and came across the room, shading the candle with her hands. 
+Coming nearer and nearer across the great space of the room,
+she stood at last above Rachel's head and said, "Not asleep? 
+Let me make you comfortable."
+
+She put down the candle and began to arrange the bedclothes. 
+It struck Rachel that a woman who sat playing cards in a cavern all
+night long would have very cold hands, and she shrunk from the touch
+of them.
+
+"Why, there's a toe all the way down there!" the woman said,
+proceeding to tuck in the bedclothes.  Rachel did not realise
+that the toe was hers.
+
+"You must try and lie still," she proceeded, "because if you lie still
+you will be less hot, and if you toss about you will make yourself
+more hot, and we don't want you to be any hotter than you are." 
+She stood looking down upon Rachel for an enormous length of time.
+
+"And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well," she repeated.
+
+Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling,
+and all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow
+should move.  But the shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed
+above her.  She shut her eyes.  When she opened them again several
+more hours had passed, but the night still lasted interminably. 
+The woman was still playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel
+under a river, and the light stood in a little archway in the wall
+above her.  She cried "Terence!" and the peaked shadow again moved
+across the ceiling, as the woman with an enormous slow movement rose,
+and they both stood still above her.
+
+"It's just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep
+Mr. Forrest in bed," the woman said, "and he was such a tall gentleman."
+
+In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again
+shut her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under
+the Thames, where there were little deformed women sitting in archways
+playing cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed
+with damp, which collected into drops and slid down the wall. 
+But the little old women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time,
+standing in the window together whispering, whispering incessantly.
+
+Meanwhile outside her room the sounds, the movements, and the lives of
+the other people in the house went on in the ordinary light of the sun,
+throughout the usual succession of hours.  When, on the first day
+of her illness, it became clear that she would not be absolutely well,
+for her temperature was very high, until Friday, that day
+being Tuesday, Terence was filled with resentment, not against her,
+but against the force outside them which was separating them. 
+He counted up the number of days that would almost certainly be
+spoilt for them.  He realised, with an odd mixture of pleasure
+and annoyance, that, for the first time in his life, he was so
+dependent upon another person that his happiness was in her keeping. 
+The days were completely wasted upon trifling, immaterial things,
+for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity all the usual
+occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point.  The least
+intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel's illness,
+and to discuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this subject
+was exhausted, to discuss illness of all kinds, and what caused them,
+and what cured them.
+
+Twice every day he went in to sit with Rachel, and twice
+every day the same thing happened.  On going into her room,
+which was not very dark, where the music was lying about as usual,
+and her books and letters, his spirits rose instantly.  When he
+saw her he felt completely reassured.  She did not look very ill. 
+Sitting by her side he would tell her what he had been doing,
+using his natural voice to speak to her, only a few tones lower
+down than usual; but by the time he had sat there for five minutes
+he was plunged into the deepest gloom.  She was not the same;
+he could not bring them back to their old relationship; but although
+he knew that it was foolish he could not prevent himself from
+endeavouring to bring her back, to make her remember, and when this
+failed he was in despair.  He always concluded as he left her room
+that it was worse to see her than not to see her, but by degrees,
+as the day wore on, the desire to see her returned and became almost
+too great to be borne.
+
+On Thursday morning when Terence went into her room he felt the usual
+increase of confidence.  She turned round and made an effort to remember
+certain facts from the world that was so many millions of miles away.
+
+"You have come up from the hotel?" she asked.
+
+"No; I'm staying here for the present," he said.  "We've just
+had luncheon," he continued, "and the mail has come in. 
+There's a bundle of letters for you--letters from England."
+
+Instead of saying, as he meant her to say, that she wished to see them,
+she said nothing for some time.
+
+"You see, there they go, rolling off the edge of the hill,"
+she said suddenly.
+
+"Rolling, Rachel?  What do you see rolling?  There's nothing rolling."
+
+"The old woman with the knife," she replied, not speaking to Terence
+in particular, and looking past him.  As she appeared to be looking
+at a vase on the shelf opposite, he rose and took it down.
+
+"Now they can't roll any more," he said cheerfully.  Nevertheless she
+lay gazing at the same spot, and paid him no further attention
+although he spoke to her.  He became so profoundly wretched that he
+could not endure to sit with her, but wandered about until he
+found St. John, who was reading _The_ _Times_ in the verandah. 
+He laid it aside patiently, and heard all that Terence had to say
+about delirium.  He was very patient with Terence.  He treated him
+like a child.
+
+By Friday it could not be denied that the illness was no longer
+an attack that would pass off in a day or two; it was a real illness
+that required a good deal of organisation, and engrossed the attention
+of at least five people, but there was no reason to be anxious. 
+Instead of lasting five days it was going to last ten days. 
+Rodriguez was understood to say that there were well-known varieties
+of this illness.  Rodriguez appeared to think that they were treating
+the illness with undue anxiety.  His visits were always marked
+by the same show of confidence, and in his interviews with Terence
+he always waved aside his anxious and minute questions with a kind
+of flourish which seemed to indicate that they were all taking it
+much too seriously.  He seemed curiously unwilling to sit down.
+
+"A high temperature," he said, looking furtively about the room,
+and appearing to be more interested in the furniture and in Helen's
+embroidery than in anything else.  "In this climate you must
+expect a high temperature.  You need not be alarmed by that. 
+It is the pulse we go by" (he tapped his own hairy wrist), "and
+the pulse continues excellent."
+
+Thereupon he bowed and slipped out.  The interview was conducted
+laboriously upon both sides in French, and this, together with the fact
+that he was optimistic, and that Terence respected the medical
+profession from hearsay, made him less critical than he would
+have been had he encountered the doctor in any other capacity. 
+Unconsciously he took Rodriguez' side against Helen, who seemed
+to have taken an unreasonable prejudice against him.
+
+When Saturday came it was evident that the hours of the day must
+be more strictly organised than they had been.  St. John offered
+his services; he said that he had nothing to do, and that he might
+as well spend the day at the villa if he could be of use.  As if they
+were starting on a difficult expedition together, they parcelled out
+their duties between them, writing out an elaborate scheme of hours
+upon a large sheet of paper which was pinned to the drawing-room door. 
+Their distance from the town, and the difficulty of procuring
+rare things with unknown names from the most unexpected places,
+made it necessary to think very carefully, and they found it
+unexpectedly difficult to do the simple but practical things that
+were required of them, as if they, being very tall, were asked
+to stoop down and arrange minute grains of sand in a pattern on the ground.
+
+It was St. John's duty to fetch what was needed from the town,
+so that Terence would sit all through the long hot hours alone in the
+drawing-room, near the open door, listening for any movement upstairs,
+or call from Helen.  He always forgot to pull down the blinds,
+so that he sat in bright sunshine, which worried him without his
+knowing what was the cause of it.  The room was terribly stiff
+and uncomfortable.  There were hats in the chairs, and medicine bottles
+among the books.  He tried to read, but good books were too good,
+and bad books were too bad, and the only thing he could tolerate
+was the newspaper, which with its news of London, and the movements
+of real people who were giving dinner-parties and making speeches,
+seemed to give a little background of reality to what was otherwise
+mere nightmare.  Then, just as his attention was fixed on the print,
+a soft call would come from Helen, or Mrs. Chailey would bring
+in something which was wanted upstairs, and he would run up
+very quietly in his socks, and put the jug on the little table
+which stood crowded with jugs and cups outside the bedroom door;
+or if he could catch Helen for a moment he would ask, "How is she?"
+
+"Rather restless.  . . . On the whole, quieter, I think."
+
+The answer would be one or the other.
+
+As usual she seemed to reserve something which she did not say,
+and Terence was conscious that they disagreed, and, without saying
+it aloud, were arguing against each other.  But she was too hurried
+and pre-occupied to talk.
+
+The strain of listening and the effort of making practical arrangements
+and seeing that things worked smoothly, absorbed all Terence's power. 
+Involved in this long dreary nightmare, he did not attempt to think
+what it amounted to.  Rachel was ill; that was all; he must see that
+there was medicine and milk, and that things were ready when they
+were wanted.  Thought had ceased; life itself had come to a standstill. 
+Sunday was rather worse than Saturday had been, simply because
+the strain was a little greater every day, although nothing else
+had changed.  The separate feelings of pleasure, interest, and pain,
+which combine to make up the ordinary day, were merged in one long-drawn
+sensation of sordid misery and profound boredom.  He had never been
+so bored since he was shut up in the nursery alone as a child. 
+The vision of Rachel as she was now, confused and heedless,
+had almost obliterated the vision of her as she had been once
+long ago; he could hardly believe that they had ever been happy,
+or engaged to be married, for what were feelings, what was there
+to be felt?  Confusion covered every sight and person, and he
+seemed to see St. John, Ridley, and the stray people who came up
+now and then from the hotel to enquire, through a mist; the only
+people who were not hidden in this mist were Helen and Rodriguez,
+because they could tell him something definite about Rachel.
+
+Nevertheless the day followed the usual forms.  At certain hours
+they went into the dining-room, and when they sat round the table
+they talked about indifferent things.  St. John usually made it
+his business to start the talk and to keep it from dying out.
+
+"I've discovered the way to get Sancho past the white house,"
+said St. John on Sunday at luncheon.  "You crackle a piece of paper
+in his ear, then he bolts for about a hundred yards, but he goes
+on quite well after that."
+
+"Yes, but he wants corn.  You should see that he has corn."
+
+"I don't think much of the stuff they give him; and Angelo seems
+a dirty little rascal."
+
+There was then a long silence.  Ridley murmured a few lines of
+poetry under his breath, and remarked, as if to conceal the fact
+that he had done so, "Very hot to-day."
+
+"Two degrees higher than it was yesterday," said St. John. 
+"I wonder where these nuts come from," he observed, taking a nut
+out of the plate, turning it over in his fingers, and looking at
+it curiously.
+
+"London, I should think," said Terence, looking at the nut too.
+
+"A competent man of business could make a fortune here in no time,"
+St. John continued.  "I suppose the heat does something funny to
+people's brains.  Even the English go a little queer.  Anyhow they're
+hopeless people to deal with.  They kept me three-quarters of an hour
+waiting at the chemist's this morning, for no reason whatever."
+
+There was another long pause.  Then Ridley enquired, "Rodriguez
+seems satisfied?"
+
+"Quite," said Terence with decision.  "It's just got to run its course." 
+Whereupon Ridley heaved a deep sigh.  He was genuinely sorry
+for every one, but at the same time he missed Helen considerably,
+and was a little aggrieved by the constant presence of the two
+young men.
+
+They moved back into the drawing-room.
+
+"Look here, Hirst," said Terence, "there's nothing to be done
+for two hours."  He consulted the sheet pinned to the door. 
+"You go and lie down.  I'll wait here.  Chailey sits with Rachel
+while Helen has her luncheon."
+
+It was asking a good deal of Hirst to tell him to go without waiting
+for a sight of Helen.  These little glimpses of Helen were the only
+respites from strain and boredom, and very often they seemed to make
+up for the discomfort of the day, although she might not have anything
+to tell them.  However, as they were on an expedition together,
+he had made up his mind to obey.
+
+Helen was very late in coming down.  She looked like a person who has
+been sitting for a long time in the dark.  She was pale and thinner,
+and the expression of her eyes was harassed but determined. 
+She ate her luncheon quickly, and seemed indifferent to what she
+was doing.  She brushed aside Terence's enquiries, and at last,
+as if he had not spoken, she looked at him with a slight frown
+and said:
+
+"We can't go on like this, Terence.  Either you've got to find
+another doctor, or you must tell Rodriguez to stop coming, and I'll
+manage for myself.  It's no use for him to say that Rachel's better;
+she's not better; she's worse."
+
+Terence suffered a terrific shock, like that which he had suffered
+when Rachel said, "My head aches."  He stilled it by reflecting
+that Helen was overwrought, and he was upheld in this opinion
+by his obstinate sense that she was opposed to him in the argument.
+
+"Do you think she's in danger?" he asked.
+
+"No one can go on being as ill as that day after day--" Helen replied. 
+She looked at him, and spoke as if she felt some indignation
+with somebody.
+
+"Very well, I'll talk to Rodriguez this afternoon," he replied.
+
+Helen went upstairs at once.
+
+Nothing now could assuage Terence's anxiety.  He could not read,
+nor could he sit still, and his sense of security was shaken, in spite
+of the fact that he was determined that Helen was exaggerating,
+and that Rachel was not very ill.  But he wanted a third person
+to confirm him in his belief.
+
+Directly Rodriguez came down he demanded, "Well, how is she? 
+Do you think her worse?"
+
+"There is no reason for anxiety, I tell you--none," Rodriguez replied
+in his execrable French, smiling uneasily, and making little
+movements all the time as if to get away.
+
+Hewet stood firmly between him and the door.  He was determined
+to see for himself what kind of man he was.  His confidence in
+the man vanished as he looked at him and saw his insignificance,
+his dirty appearance, his shiftiness, and his unintelligent,
+hairy face.  It was strange that he had never seen this before.
+
+"You won't object, of course, if we ask you to consult another doctor?"
+he continued.
+
+At this the little man became openly incensed.
+
+"Ah!" he cried.  "You have not confidence in me?  You object
+to my treatment?  You wish me to give up the case?"
+
+"Not at all," Terence replied, "but in serious illness of this kind--"
+
+Rodriguez shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"It is not serious, I assure you.  You are overanxious.  The young
+lady is not seriously ill, and I am a doctor.  The lady of course
+is frightened," he sneered.  "I understand that perfectly."
+
+"The name and address of the doctor is--?" Terence continued.
+
+"There is no other doctor," Rodriguez replied sullenly.  "Every one
+has confidence in me.  Look!  I will show you."
+
+He took out a packet of old letters and began turning them over
+as if in search of one that would confute Terence's suspicions. 
+As he searched, he began to tell a story about an English lord
+who had trusted him--a great English lord, whose name he had,
+unfortunately, forgotten.
+
+"There is no other doctor in the place," he concluded, still turning
+over the letters.
+
+"Never mind," said Terence shortly.  "I will make enquiries for myself." 
+Rodriguez put the letters back in his pocket.
+
+"Very well," he remarked.  "I have no objection."
+
+He lifted his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, as if to repeat
+that they took the illness much too seriously and that there was
+no other doctor, and slipped out, leaving behind him an impression
+that he was conscious that he was distrusted, and that his malice
+was aroused.
+
+After this Terence could no longer stay downstairs.  He went up,
+knocked at Rachel's door, and asked Helen whether he might see
+her for a few minutes.  He had not seen her yesterday.  She made
+no objection, and went and sat at a table in the window.
+
+Terence sat down by the bedside.  Rachel's face was changed. 
+She looked as though she were entirely concentrated upon the effort
+of keeping alive.  Her lips were drawn, and her cheeks were sunken
+and flushed, though without colour.  Her eyes were not entirely shut,
+the lower half of the white part showing, not as if she saw,
+but as if they remained open because she was too much exhausted
+to close them.  She opened them completely when he kissed her. 
+But she only saw an old woman slicing a man's head off with a knife.
+
+"There it falls!" she murmured.  She then turned to Terence and
+asked him anxiously some question about a man with mules, which he
+could not understand.  "Why doesn't he come?  Why doesn't he come?"
+she repeated.  He was appalled to think of the dirty little man downstairs
+in connection with illness like this, and turning instinctively
+to Helen, but she was doing something at a table in the window,
+and did not seem to realise how great the shock to him must be. 
+He rose to go, for he could not endure to listen any longer;
+his heart beat quickly and painfully with anger and misery. 
+As he passed Helen she asked him in the same weary, unnatural,
+but determined voice to fetch her more ice, and to have the jug
+outside filled with fresh milk.
+
+When he had done these errands he went to find Hirst.  Exhausted and
+very hot, St. John had fallen asleep on a bed, but Terence woke
+him without scruple.
+
+"Helen thinks she's worse," he said.  "There's no doubt she's
+frightfully ill.  Rodriguez is useless.  We must get another doctor."
+
+"But there is no other doctor," said Hirst drowsily, sitting up
+and rubbing his eyes.
+
+"Don't be a damned fool!"  Terence exclaimed.  "Of course there's
+another doctor, and, if there isn't, you've got to find one.  It ought
+to have been done days ago.  I'm going down to saddle the horse." 
+He could not stay still in one place.
+
+In less than ten minutes St. John was riding to the town in the
+scorching heat in search of a doctor, his orders being to find
+one and bring him back if he had to be fetched in a special train.
+
+"We ought to have done it days ago," Hewet repeated angrily.
+
+When he went back into the drawing-room he found that Mrs. Flushing
+was there, standing very erect in the middle of the room,
+having arrived, as people did in these days, by the kitchen
+or through the garden unannounced.
+
+"She's better?"  Mrs. Flushing enquired abruptly; they did not
+attempt to shake hands.
+
+"No," said Terence.  "If anything, they think she's worse."
+
+Mrs. Flushing seemed to consider for a moment or two, looking straight
+at Terence all the time.
+
+"Let me tell you," she said, speaking in nervous jerks, "it's always
+about the seventh day one begins to get anxious.  I daresay you've
+been sittin' here worryin' by yourself.  You think she's bad,
+but any one comin' with a fresh eye would see she was better. 
+Mr. Elliot's had fever; he's all right now," she threw out. 
+"It wasn't anythin' she caught on the expedition.  What's it matter--
+a few days' fever?  My brother had fever for twenty-six days once. 
+And in a week or two he was up and about.  We gave him nothin' but milk
+and arrowroot--"
+
+Here Mrs. Chailey came in with a message.
+
+"I'm wanted upstairs," said Terence.
+
+"You see--she'll be better," Mrs. Flushing jerked out as he
+left the room.  Her anxiety to persuade Terence was very great,
+and when he left her without saying anything she felt dissatisfied
+and restless; she did not like to stay, but she could not bear to go. 
+She wandered from room to room looking for some one to talk to,
+but all the rooms were empty.
+
+Terence went upstairs, stood inside the door to take Helen's directions,
+looked over at Rachel, but did not attempt to speak to her. 
+She appeared vaguely conscious of his presence, but it seemed to
+disturb her, and she turned, so that she lay with her back to him.
+
+For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside,
+because it needed all her attention to follow the hot, red,
+quick sights which passed incessantly before her eyes. 
+She knew that it was of enormous importance that she should attend
+to these sights and grasp their meaning, but she was always being
+just too late to hear or see something which would explain it all. 
+For this reason, the faces,--Helen's face, the nurse's, Terence's,
+the doctor's,--which occasionally forced themselves very close to her,
+were worrying because they distracted her attention and she might
+miss the clue.  However, on the fourth afternoon she was suddenly
+unable to keep Helen's face distinct from the sights themselves;
+her lips widened as she bent down over the bed, and she began to
+gabble unintelligibly like the rest.  The sights were all concerned
+in some plot, some adventure, some escape.  The nature of what
+they were doing changed incessantly, although there was always
+a reason behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp.  Now they
+were among trees and savages, now they were on the sea, now they
+were on the tops of high towers; now they jumped; now they flew. 
+But just as the crisis was about to happen, something invariably slipped
+in her brain, so that the whole effort had to begin over again. 
+The heat was suffocating.  At last the faces went further away;
+she fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed
+over her head.  She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint
+booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. 
+While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was
+not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea.  There she lay,
+sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then
+some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea.
+
+
+
+After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun wrangling
+with evasive and very garrulous natives, he extracted the information
+that there was a doctor, a French doctor, who was at present away
+on a holiday in the hills.  It was quite impossible, so they said,
+to find him.  With his experience of the country, St. John thought it
+unlikely that a telegram would either be sent or received; but having
+reduced the distance of the hill town, in which he was staying,
+from a hundred miles to thirty miles, and having hired a carriage
+and horses, he started at once to fetch the doctor himself. 
+He succeeded in finding him, and eventually forced the unwilling
+man to leave his young wife and return forthwith.  They reached
+the villa at midday on Tuesday.
+
+Terence came out to receive them, and St. John was struck by the fact
+that he had grown perceptibly thinner in the interval; he was white too;
+his eyes looked strange.  But the curt speech and the sulky masterful
+manner of Dr. Lesage impressed them both favourably, although at
+the same time it was obvious that he was very much annoyed at the
+whole affair.  Coming downstairs he gave his directions emphatically,
+but it never occurred to him to give an opinion either because of
+the presence of Rodriguez who was now obsequious as well as malicious,
+or because he took it for granted that they knew already what was to be known.
+
+"Of course," he said with a shrug of his shoulders, when Terence
+asked him, "Is she very ill?"
+
+They were both conscious of a certain sense of relief when Dr. Lesage
+was gone, leaving explicit directions, and promising another visit
+in a few hours' time; but, unfortunately, the rise of their spirits
+led them to talk more than usual, and in talking they quarrelled. 
+They quarrelled about a road, the Portsmouth Road.  St. John said that
+it is macadamised where it passes Hindhead, and Terence knew as well
+as he knew his own name that it is not macadamised at that point. 
+In the course of the argument they said some very sharp things
+to each other, and the rest of the dinner was eaten in silence,
+save for an occasional half-stifled reflection from Ridley.
+
+When it grew dark and the lamps were brought in, Terence felt
+unable to control his irritation any longer.  St. John went to bed
+in a state of complete exhaustion, bidding Terence good-night
+with rather more affection than usual because of their quarrel,
+and Ridley retired to his books.  Left alone, Terence walked up
+and down the room; he stood at the open window.
+
+The lights were coming out one after another in the town beneath,
+and it was very peaceful and cool in the garden, so that he stepped
+out on to the terrace.  As he stood there in the darkness, able only
+to see the shapes of trees through the fine grey light, he was overcome
+by a desire to escape, to have done with this suffering, to forget
+that Rachel was ill.  He allowed himself to lapse into forgetfulness
+of everything.  As if a wind that had been raging incessantly suddenly
+fell asleep, the fret and strain and anxiety which had been pressing
+on him passed away.  He seemed to stand in an unvexed space of air,
+on a little island by himself; he was free and immune from pain. 
+It did not matter whether Rachel was well or ill; it did not matter
+whether they were apart or together; nothing mattered--nothing mattered. 
+The waves beat on the shore far away, and the soft wind passed
+through the branches of the trees, seeming to encircle him with
+peace and security, with dark and nothingness.  Surely the world
+of strife and fret and anxiety was not the real world, but this was
+the real world, the world that lay beneath the superficial world,
+so that, whatever happened, one was secure.  The quiet and peace
+seemed to lap his body in a fine cool sheet, soothing every nerve;
+his mind seemed once more to expand, and become natural.
+
+But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house roused him;
+he turned instinctively and went into the drawing-room. The
+sight of the lamp-lit room brought back so abruptly all that he
+had forgotten that he stood for a moment unable to move. 
+He remembered everything, the hour, the minute even, what point they
+had reached, and what was to come.  He cursed himself for making
+believe for a minute that things were different from what they are. 
+The night was now harder to face than ever.
+
+Unable to stay in the empty drawing-room, he wandered out and sat
+on the stairs half-way up to Rachel's room.  He longed for some
+one to talk to, but Hirst was asleep, and Ridley was asleep;
+there was no sound in Rachel's room.  The only sound in the house
+was the sound of Chailey moving in the kitchen.  At last there was a
+rustling on the stairs overhead, and Nurse McInnis came down fastening
+the links in her cuffs, in preparation for the night's watch. 
+Terence rose and stopped her.  He had scarcely spoken to her,
+but it was possible that she might confirm him in the belief which
+still persisted in his own mind that Rachel was not seriously ill. 
+He told her in a whisper that Dr. Lesage had been and what he
+had said.
+
+"Now, Nurse," he whispered, "please tell me your opinion.  Do you
+consider that she is very seriously ill?  Is she in any danger?"
+
+"The doctor has said--" she began.
+
+"Yes, but I want your opinion.  You have had experience of many
+cases like this?"
+
+"I could not tell you more than Dr. Lesage, Mr. Hewet," she replied
+cautiously, as though her words might be used against her.  "The case
+is serious, but you may feel quite certain that we are doing all we can
+for Miss Vinrace."  She spoke with some professional self-approbation.
+But she realised perhaps that she did not satisfy the young man,
+who still blocked her way, for she shifted her feet slightly upon the
+stair and looked out of the window where they could see the moon over the sea.
+
+"If you ask me," she began in a curiously stealthy tone, "I never
+like May for my patients."
+
+"May?"  Terence repeated.
+
+"It may be a fancy, but I don't like to see anybody fall ill in May,"
+she continued.  "Things seem to go wrong in May.  Perhaps it's the moon. 
+They say the moon affects the brain, don't they, Sir?"
+
+He looked at her but he could not answer her; like all the others,
+when one looked at her she seemed to shrivel beneath one's eyes
+and become worthless, malicious, and untrustworthy.
+
+She slipped past him and disappeared.
+
+Though he went to his room he was unable even to take his clothes off. 
+For a long time he paced up and down, and then leaning out of
+the window gazed at the earth which lay so dark against the paler
+blue of the sky.  With a mixture of fear and loathing he looked at
+the slim black cypress trees which were still visible in the garden,
+and heard the unfamiliar creaking and grating sounds which show
+that the earth is still hot.  All these sights and sounds appeared
+sinister and full of hostility and foreboding; together with
+the natives and the nurse and the doctor and the terrible force
+of the illness itself they seemed to be in conspiracy against him. 
+They seemed to join together in their effort to extract the greatest
+possible amount of suffering from him.  He could not get used to
+his pain, it was a revelation to him.  He had never realised before
+that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day,
+pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able
+to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges
+of all action, eating away the lives of men and women.  He thought
+for the first time with understanding of words which had before
+seemed to him empty:  the struggle of life; the hardness of life. 
+Now he knew for himself that life is hard and full of suffering. 
+He looked at the scattered lights in the town beneath, and thought
+of Arthur and Susan, or Evelyn and Perrott venturing out unwittingly,
+and by their happiness laying themselves open to suffering such
+as this.  How did they dare to love each other, he wondered; how had
+he himself dared to live as he had lived, rapidly and carelessly,
+passing from one thing to another, loving Rachel as he had loved her? 
+Never again would he feel secure; he would never believe in the stability
+of life, or forget what depths of pain lie beneath small happiness
+and feelings of content and safety.  It seemed to him as he looked back
+that their happiness had never been so great as his pain was now. 
+There had always been something imperfect in their happiness,
+something they had wanted and had not been able to get.  It had been
+fragmentary and incomplete, because they were so young and had not
+known what they were doing.
+
+The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree
+outside the window, and as the branch swayed in the darkness there
+came before his mind a picture of all the world that lay outside
+his window; he thought of the immense river and the immense forest,
+the vast stretches of dry earth and the plains of the sea that
+encircled the earth; from the sea the sky rose steep and enormous,
+and the air washed profoundly between the sky and the sea. 
+How vast and dark it must be tonight, lying exposed to the wind;
+and in all this great space it was curious to think how few
+the towns were, and how small little rings of light, or single
+glow-worms he figured them, scattered here and there, among the
+swelling uncultivated folds of the world.  And in those towns
+were little men and women, tiny men and women.  Oh, it was absurd,
+when one thought of it, to sit here in a little room suffering
+and caring.  What did anything matter?  Rachel, a tiny creature,
+lay ill beneath him, and here in his little room he suffered on
+her account.  The nearness of their bodies in this vast universe,
+and the minuteness of their bodies, seemed to him absurd and laughable. 
+Nothing mattered, he repeated; they had no power, no hope. 
+He leant on the window-sill, thinking, until he almost forgot the time
+and the place.  Nevertheless, although he was convinced that it
+was absurd and laughable, and that they were small and hopeless,
+he never lost the sense that these thoughts somehow formed part
+of a life which he and Rachel would live together.
+
+Owing perhaps to the change of doctor, Rachel appeared to be rather
+better next day.  Terribly pale and worn though Helen looked,
+there was a slight lifting of the cloud which had hung all these
+days in her eyes.
+
+"She talked to me," she said voluntarily.  "She asked me what day
+of the week it was, like herself."
+
+Then suddenly, without any warning or any apparent reason,
+the tears formed in her eyes and rolled steadily down her cheeks. 
+She cried with scarcely any attempt at movement of her features,
+and without any attempt to stop herself, as if she did not know
+that she was crying.  In spite of the relief which her words
+gave him, Terence was dismayed by the sight; had everything
+given way?  Were there no limits to the power of this illness? 
+Would everything go down before it?  Helen had always seemed
+to him strong and determined, and now she was like a child. 
+He took her in his arms, and she clung to him like a child,
+crying softly and quietly upon his shoulder.  Then she roused herself
+and wiped her tears away; it was silly to behave like that, she said;
+very silly, she repeated, when there could be no doubt that Rachel
+was better.  She asked Terence to forgive her for her folly. 
+She stopped at the door and came back and kissed him without
+saying anything.
+
+On this day indeed Rachel was conscious of what went on round her. 
+She had come to the surface of the dark, sticky pool, and a wave
+seemed to bear her up and down with it; she had ceased to have
+any will of her own; she lay on the top of the wave conscious
+of some pain, but chiefly of weakness.  The wave was replaced by
+the side of a mountain.  Her body became a drift of melting snow,
+above which her knees rose in huge peaked mountains of bare bone. 
+It was true that she saw Helen and saw her room, but everything
+had become very pale and semi-transparent. Sometimes she could see
+through the wall in front of her.  Sometimes when Helen went away
+she seemed to go so far that Rachel's eyes could hardly follow her. 
+The room also had an odd power of expanding, and though she pushed
+her voice out as far as possible until sometimes it became a bird
+and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever reached the
+person she was talking to.  There were immense intervals or chasms,
+for things still had the power to appear visibly before her,
+between one moment and the next; it sometimes took an hour for Helen
+to raise her arm, pausing long between each jerky movement, and pour
+out medicine.  Helen's form stooping to raise her in bed appeared
+of gigantic size, and came down upon her like the ceiling falling. 
+But for long spaces of time she would merely lie conscious of her body
+floating on the top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote
+corner of her body, or escaped and gone flitting round the room. 
+All sights were something of an effort, but the sight of Terence
+was the greatest effort, because he forced her to join mind to body
+in the desire to remember something.  She did not wish to remember;
+it troubled her when people tried to disturb her loneliness;
+she wished to be alone.  She wished for nothing else in the world.
+
+Although she had cried, Terence observed Helen's greater hopefulness
+with something like triumph; in the argument between them she had
+made the first sign of admitting herself in the wrong.  He waited
+for Dr. Lesage to come down that afternoon with considerable anxiety,
+but with the same certainty at the back of his mind that he would
+in time force them all to admit that they were in the wrong.
+
+As usual, Dr. Lesage was sulky in his manner and very short
+in his answers.  To Terence's demand, "She seems to be better?"
+he replied, looking at him in an odd way, "She has a chance of life."
+
+The door shut and Terence walked across to the window.  He leant
+his forehead against the pane.
+
+"Rachel," he repeated to himself.  "She has a chance of life.  Rachel."
+
+How could they say these things of Rachel?  Had any one yesterday
+seriously believed that Rachel was dying?  They had been engaged
+for four weeks.  A fortnight ago she had been perfectly well. 
+What could fourteen days have done to bring her from that state to this? 
+To realise what they meant by saying that she had a chance of life
+was beyond him, knowing as he did that they were engaged.  He turned,
+still enveloped in the same dreary mist, and walked towards the door. 
+Suddenly he saw it all.  He saw the room and the garden, and the trees
+moving in the air, they could go on without her; she could die. 
+For the first time since she fell ill he remembered exactly what
+she looked like and the way in which they cared for each other. 
+The immense happiness of feeling her close to him mingled with a more
+intense anxiety than he had felt yet.  He could not let her die;
+he could not live without her.  But after a momentary struggle,
+the curtain fell again, and he saw nothing and felt nothing clearly. 
+It was all going on--going on still, in the same way as before. 
+Save for a physical pain when his heart beat, and the fact that
+his fingers were icy cold, he did not realise that he was anxious
+about anything.  Within his mind he seemed to feel nothing about Rachel
+or about any one or anything in the world.  He went on giving orders,
+arranging with Mrs. Chailey, writing out lists, and every now and then
+he went upstairs and put something quietly on the table outside
+Rachel's door.  That night Dr. Lesage seemed to be less sulky than usual. 
+He stayed voluntarily for a few moments, and, addressing St. John and
+Terence equally, as if he did not remember which of them was engaged
+to the young lady, said, "I consider that her condition to-night is
+very grave."
+
+Neither of them went to bed or suggested that the other should go to bed. 
+They sat in the drawing-room playing picquet with the door open. 
+St. John made up a bed upon the sofa, and when it was ready insisted
+that Terence should lie upon it.  They began to quarrel as to who should
+lie on the sofa and who should lie upon a couple of chairs covered
+with rugs.  St. John forced Terence at last to lie down upon the sofa.
+
+"Don't be a fool, Terence," he said.  "You'll only get ill if you
+don't sleep."
+
+"Old fellow," he began, as Terence still refused, and stopped abruptly,
+fearing sentimentality; he found that he was on the verge of tears.
+
+He began to say what he had long been wanting to say, that he was
+sorry for Terence, that he cared for him, that he cared for Rachel. 
+Did she know how much he cared for her--had she said anything,
+asked perhaps?  He was very anxious to say this, but he refrained,
+thinking that it was a selfish question after all, and what
+was the use of bothering Terence to talk about such things? 
+He was already half asleep.  But St. John could not sleep at once. 
+If only, he thought to himself, as he lay in the darkness,
+something would happen--if only this strain would come to an end. 
+He did not mind what happened, so long as the succession of these
+hard and dreary days was broken; he did not mind if she died. 
+He felt himself disloyal in not minding it, but it seemed to him that
+he had no feelings left.
+
+All night long there was no call or movement, except the opening
+and shutting of the bedroom door once.  By degrees the light
+returned into the untidy room.  At six the servants began to move;
+at seven they crept downstairs into the kitchen; and half an hour
+later the day began again.
+
+Nevertheless it was not the same as the days that had gone before,
+although it would have been hard to say in what the difference consisted. 
+Perhaps it was that they seemed to be waiting for something. 
+There were certainly fewer things to be done than usual.  People drifted
+through the drawing-room--Mr. Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury. 
+They spoke very apologetically in low tones, refusing to sit down,
+but remaining for a considerable time standing up, although the only
+thing they had to say was, "Is there anything we can do?" and there
+was nothing they could do.
+
+Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how Helen had said
+that whenever anything happened to you this was how people behaved. 
+Was she right, or was she wrong?  He was too little interested
+to frame an opinion of his own.  He put things away in his mind,
+as if one of these days he would think about them, but not now. 
+The mist of unreality had deepened and deepened until it had
+produced a feeling of numbness all over his body.  Was it his body? 
+Were those really his own hands?
+
+This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossible
+to sit alone in his room.  He was very uncomfortable downstairs,
+and, as he did not know what was going on, constantly in the way;
+but he would not leave the drawing-room. Too restless to read,
+and having nothing to do, he began to pace up and down reciting poetry
+in an undertone.  Occupied in various ways--now in undoing parcels,
+now in uncorking bottles, now in writing directions, the sound
+of Ridley's song and the beat of his pacing worked into the minds
+of Terence and St. John all the morning as a half comprehended refrain.
+
+   They wrestled up, they wrestled down,
+     They wrestled sore and still:
+   The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,
+     That night he had his will.
+
+   Like stags full spent, among the bent
+     They dropped awhile to rest--
+
+"Oh, it's intolerable!"  Hirst exclaimed, and then checked himself,
+as if it were a breach of their agreement.  Again and again Terence
+would creep half-way up the stairs in case he might be able to glean
+news of Rachel.  But the only news now was of a very fragmentary kind;
+she had drunk something; she had slept a little; she seemed quieter. 
+In the same way, Dr. Lesage confined himself to talking about details,
+save once when he volunteered the information that he had just been
+called in to ascertain, by severing a vein in the wrist, that an old
+lady of eighty-five was really dead.  She had a horror of being
+buried alive.
+
+"It is a horror," he remarked, "that we generally find in the very old,
+and seldom in the young."  They both expressed their interest in what
+he told them; it seemed to them very strange.  Another strange thing
+about the day was that the luncheon was forgotten by all of them until
+it was late in the afternoon, and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them,
+and looked strange too, because she wore a stiff print dress,
+and her sleeves were rolled up above her elbows.  She seemed
+as oblivious of her appearance, however, as if she had been called
+out of her bed by a midnight alarm of fire, and she had forgotten,
+too, her reserve and her composure; she talked to them quite
+familiarly as if she had nursed them and held them naked on her knee. 
+She assured them over and over again that it was their duty to eat.
+
+The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly than
+they expected.  Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but on seeing
+them shut it again quickly; once Helen came down to fetch something,
+but she stopped as she left the room to look at a letter addressed
+to her.  She stood for a moment turning it over, and the extraordinary
+and mournful beauty of her attitude struck Terence in the way
+things struck him now--as something to be put away in his mind
+and to be thought about afterwards.  They scarcely spoke,
+the argument between them seeming to be suspended or forgotten.
+
+Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house,
+Ridley paced up and down the terrace repeating stanzas of a long poem,
+in a subdued but suddenly sonorous voice.  Fragments of the poem
+were wafted in at the open window as he passed and repassed.
+
+   Peor and Baalim
+   Forsake their Temples dim,
+     With that twice batter'd God of Palestine
+   And mooned Astaroth--
+
+The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to both the
+young men, but they had to be borne.  As the evening drew on and the red
+light of the sunset glittered far away on the sea, the same sense
+of desperation attacked both Terence and St. John at the thought
+that the day was nearly over, and that another night was at hand. 
+The appearance of one light after another in the town beneath them
+produced in Hirst a repetition of his terrible and disgusting desire
+to break down and sob.  Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey. 
+She explained that Maria, in opening a bottle, had been so foolish
+as to cut her arm badly, but she had bound it up; it was unfortunate
+when there was so much work to be done.  Chailey herself limped
+because of the rheumatism in her feet, but it appeared to her mere
+waste of time to take any notice of the unruly flesh of servants. 
+The evening went on.  Dr. Lesage arrived unexpectedly, and stayed
+upstairs a very long time.  He came down once and drank a cup
+of coffee.
+
+"She is very ill," he said in answer to Ridley's question. 
+All the annoyance had by this time left his manner, he was grave
+and formal, but at the same time it was full of consideration,
+which had not marked it before.  He went upstairs again. 
+The three men sat together in the drawing-room. Ridley was quite
+quiet now, and his attention seemed to be thoroughly awakened. 
+Save for little half-voluntary movements and exclamations
+that were stifled at once, they waited in complete silence. 
+It seemed as if they were at last brought together face to face
+with something definite.
+
+It was nearly eleven o'clock when Dr. Lesage again appeared in the room. 
+He approached them very slowly, and did not speak at once. 
+He looked first at St. John and then at Terence, and said to Terence,
+"Mr. Hewet, I think you should go upstairs now."
+
+Terence rose immediately, leaving the others seated with Dr. Lesage
+standing motionless between them.
+
+Chailey was in the passage outside, repeating over and over again,
+"It's wicked--it's wicked."
+
+Terence paid her no attention; he heard what she was saying,
+but it conveyed no meaning to his mind.  All the way upstairs he
+kept saying to himself, "This has not happened to me.  It is not
+possible that this has happened to me."
+
+He looked curiously at his own hand on the banisters.  The stairs were
+very steep, and it seemed to take him a long time to surmount them. 
+Instead of feeling keenly, as he knew that he ought to feel,
+he felt nothing at all.  When he opened the door he saw Helen sitting
+by the bedside.  There were shaded lights on the table, and the room,
+though it seemed to be full of a great many things, was very tidy. 
+There was a faint and not unpleasant smell of disinfectants. 
+Helen rose and gave up her chair to him in silence.  As they passed
+each other their eyes met in a peculiar level glance, he wondered
+at the extraordinary clearness of his eyes, and at the deep calm
+and sadness that dwelt in them.  He sat down by the bedside,
+and a moment afterwards heard the door shut gently behind her. 
+He was alone with Rachel, and a faint reflection of the sense of relief
+that they used to feel when they were left alone possessed him. 
+He looked at her.  He expected to find some terrible change in her,
+but there was none.  She looked indeed very thin, and, as far as he
+could see, very tired, but she was the same as she had always been. 
+Moreover, she saw him and knew him.  She smiled at him and said,
+"Hullo, Terence."
+
+The curtain which had been drawn between them for so long
+vanished immediately.
+
+"Well, Rachel," he replied in his usual voice, upon which she
+opened her eyes quite widely and smiled with her familiar smile. 
+He kissed her and took her hand.
+
+"It's been wretched without you," he said.
+
+She still looked at him and smiled, but soon a slight look of fatigue
+or perplexity came into her eyes and she shut them again.
+
+"But when we're together we're perfectly happy," he said. 
+He continued to hold her hand.
+
+The light being dim, it was impossible to see any change in her face. 
+An immense feeling of peace came over Terence, so that he had no
+wish to move or to speak.  The terrible torture and unreality
+of the last days were over, and he had come out now into perfect
+certainty and peace.  His mind began to work naturally again
+and with great ease.  The longer he sat there the more profoundly
+was he conscious of the peace invading every corner of his soul. 
+Once he held his breath and listened acutely; she was still breathing;
+he went on thinking for some time; they seemed to be thinking together;
+he seemed to be Rachel as well as himself; and then he listened again;
+no, she had ceased to breathe.  So much the better--this was death. 
+It was nothing; it was to cease to breathe.  It was happiness,
+it was perfect happiness.  They had now what they had always wanted
+to have, the union which had been impossible while they lived. 
+Unconscious whether he thought the words or spoke them aloud,
+he said, "No two people have ever been so happy as we have been. 
+No one has ever loved as we have loved."
+
+It seemed to him that their complete union and happiness filled
+the room with rings eddying more and more widely.  He had no wish
+in the world left unfulfilled.  They possessed what could never
+be taken from them.
+
+He was not conscious that any one had come into the room, but later,
+moments later, or hours later perhaps, he felt an arm behind him. 
+The arms were round him.  He did not want to have arms round him,
+and the mysterious whispering voices annoyed him.  He laid Rachel's hand,
+which was now cold, upon the counterpane, and rose from his chair,
+and walked across to the window.  The windows were uncurtained,
+and showed the moon, and a long silver pathway upon the surface of
+the waves.
+
+"Why," he said, in his ordinary tone of voice, "look at the moon. 
+There's a halo round the moon.  We shall have rain to-morrow."
+
+The arms, whether they were the arms of man or of woman, were round
+him again; they were pushing him gently towards the door.  He turned
+of his own accord and walked steadily in advance of the arms,
+conscious of a little amusement at the strange way in which people
+behaved merely because some one was dead.  He would go if they
+wished it, but nothing they could do would disturb his happiness.
+
+As he saw the passage outside the room, and the table with the cups
+and the plates, it suddenly came over him that here was a world
+in which he would never see Rachel again.
+
+"Rachel!  Rachel!" he shrieked, trying to rush back to her. 
+But they prevented him, and pushed him down the passage and into
+a bedroom far from her room.  Downstairs they could hear the thud
+of his feet on the floor, as he struggled to break free; and twice
+they heard him shout, "Rachel, Rachel!"
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVI
+
+
+
+For two or three hours longer the moon poured its light through
+the empty air.  Unbroken by clouds it fell straightly, and lay
+almost like a chill white frost over the sea and the earth. 
+During these hours the silence was not broken, and the only movement
+was caused by the movement of trees and branches which stirred slightly,
+and then the shadows that lay across the white spaces of the land
+moved too.  In this profound silence one sound only was audible,
+the sound of a slight but continuous breathing which never ceased,
+although it never rose and never fell.  It continued after the birds
+had begun to flutter from branch to branch, and could be heard
+behind the first thin notes of their voices.  It continued
+all through the hours when the east whitened, and grew red,
+and a faint blue tinged the sky, but when the sun rose it ceased,
+and gave place to other sounds.
+
+The first sounds that were heard were little inarticulate cries,
+the cries, it seemed, of children or of the very poor, of people who
+were very weak or in pain.  But when the sun was above the horizon,
+the air which had been thin and pale grew every moment richer
+and warmer, and the sounds of life became bolder and more full
+of courage and authority.  By degrees the smoke began to ascend
+in wavering breaths over the houses, and these slowly thickened,
+until they were as round and straight as columns, and instead of
+striking upon pale white blinds, the sun shone upon dark windows,
+beyond which there was depth and space.
+
+The sun had been up for many hours, and the great dome of air was
+warmed through and glittering with thin gold threads of sunlight,
+before any one moved in the hotel.  White and massive it stood
+in the early light, half asleep with its blinds down.
+
+At about half-past nine Miss Allan came very slowly into the hall,
+and walked very slowly to the table where the morning papers
+were laid, but she did not put out her hand to take one; she stood
+still, thinking, with her head a little sunk upon her shoulders. 
+She looked curiously old, and from the way in which she stood,
+a little hunched together and very massive, you could see what
+she would be like when she was really old, how she would sit
+day after day in her chair looking placidly in front of her. 
+Other people began to come into the room, and to pass her, but she
+did not speak to any of them or even look at them, and at last,
+as if it were necessary to do something, she sat down in a chair,
+and looked quietly and fixedly in front of her.  She felt
+very old this morning, and useless too, as if her life had been
+a failure, as if it had been hard and laborious to no purpose. 
+She did not want to go on living, and yet she knew that she would. 
+She was so strong that she would live to be a very old woman. 
+She would probably live to be eighty, and as she was now fifty,
+that left thirty years more for her to live.  She turned her hands
+over and over in her lap and looked at them curiously; her old hands,
+that had done so much work for her.  There did not seem to be much
+point in it all; one went on, of course one went on.  . . . She
+looked up to see Mrs. Thornbury standing beside her, with lines drawn
+upon her forehead, and her lips parted as if she were about to ask
+a question.
+
+Miss Allan anticipated her.
+
+"Yes," she said.  "She died this morning, very early, about three o'clock."
+
+Mrs. Thornbury made a little exclamation, drew her lips together,
+and the tears rose in her eyes.  Through them she looked at
+the hall which was now laid with great breadths of sunlight,
+and at the careless, casual groups of people who were standing
+beside the solid arm-chairs and tables.  They looked to her unreal,
+or as people look who remain unconscious that some great explosion
+is about to take place beside them.  But there was no explosion,
+and they went on standing by the chairs and the tables.  Mrs. Thornbury
+no longer saw them, but, penetrating through them as though they
+were without substance, she saw the house, the people in the house,
+the room, the bed in the room, and the figure of the dead lying still
+in the dark beneath the sheets.  She could almost see the dead. 
+She could almost hear the voices of the mourners.
+
+"They expected it?" she asked at length.
+
+Miss Allan could only shake her head.
+
+"I know nothing," she replied, "except what Mrs. Flushing's maid
+told me.  She died early this morning."
+
+The two women looked at each other with a quiet significant gaze,
+and then, feeling oddly dazed, and seeking she did not know
+exactly what, Mrs. Thornbury went slowly upstairs and walked
+quietly along the passages, touching the wall with her fingers
+as if to guide herself.  Housemaids were passing briskly from room
+to room, but Mrs. Thornbury avoided them; she hardly saw them;
+they seemed to her to be in another world.  She did not even look
+up directly when Evelyn stopped her.  It was evident that Evelyn
+had been lately in tears, and when she looked at Mrs. Thornbury she
+began to cry again.  Together they drew into the hollow of a window,
+and stood there in silence.  Broken words formed themselves at last
+among Evelyn's sobs.  "It was wicked," she sobbed, "it was cruel--
+they were so happy."
+
+Mrs. Thornbury patted her on the shoulder.
+
+"It seems hard--very hard," she said.  She paused and looked out
+over the slope of the hill at the Ambroses' villa; the windows were
+blazing in the sun, and she thought how the soul of the dead had
+passed from those windows.  Something had passed from the world. 
+It seemed to her strangely empty.
+
+"And yet the older one grows," she continued, her eyes regaining
+more than their usual brightness, "the more certain one becomes that
+there is a reason.  How could one go on if there were no reason?"
+she asked.
+
+She asked the question of some one, but she did not ask it of Evelyn. 
+Evelyn's sobs were becoming quieter.  "There must be a reason,"
+she said.  "It can't only be an accident.  For it was an accident--
+it need never have happened."
+
+Mrs. Thornbury sighed deeply.
+
+"But we must not let ourselves think of that," she added, "and let
+us hope that they don't either.  Whatever they had done it might
+have been the same.  These terrible illnesses--"
+
+"There's no reason--I don't believe there's any reason at all!" 
+Evelyn broke out, pulling the blind down and letting it fly back
+with a little snap.
+
+"Why should these things happen?  Why should people suffer? 
+I honestly believe," she went on, lowering her voice slightly,
+"that Rachel's in Heaven, but Terence.  . . ."
+
+"What's the good of it all?" she demanded.
+
+Mrs. Thornbury shook her head slightly but made no reply,
+and pressing Evelyn's hand she went on down the passage. 
+Impelled by a strong desire to hear something, although she did
+not know exactly what there was to hear, she was making her way
+to the Flushings' room.  As she opened their door she felt that
+she had interrupted some argument between husband and wife. 
+Mrs. Flushing was sitting with her back to the light, and Mr. Flushing
+was standing near her, arguing and trying to persuade her of something.
+
+"Ah, here is Mrs. Thornbury," he began with some relief in his voice. 
+"You have heard, of course.  My wife feels that she was in some
+way responsible.  She urged poor Miss Vinrace to come on the expedition. 
+I'm sure you will agree with me that it is most unreasonable to feel that. 
+We don't even know--in fact I think it most unlikely--that she caught
+her illness there.  These diseases--Besides, she was set on going. 
+She would have gone whether you asked her or not, Alice."
+
+"Don't, Wilfrid," said Mrs. Flushing, neither moving nor taking
+her eyes off the spot on the floor upon which they rested. 
+"What's the use of talking?  What's the use--?" She ceased.
+
+"I was coming to ask you," said Mrs. Thornbury, addressing Wilfrid,
+for it was useless to speak to his wife.  "Is there anything you
+think that one could do?  Has the father arrived?  Could one go
+and see?"
+
+The strongest wish in her being at this moment was to be able to
+do something for the unhappy people--to see them--to assure them--
+to help them.  It was dreadful to be so far away from them. 
+But Mr. Flushing shook his head; he did not think that now--
+later perhaps one might be able to help.  Here Mrs. Flushing rose stiffly,
+turned her back to them, and walked to the dressing-room opposite. 
+As she walked, they could see her breast slowly rise and slowly fall. 
+But her grief was silent.  She shut the door behind her.
+
+When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists together, and began
+beating the back of a chair with them.  She was like a wounded animal. 
+She hated death; she was furious, outraged, indignant with death,
+as if it were a living creature.  She refused to relinquish her
+friends to death.  She would not submit to dark and nothingness. 
+She began to pace up and down, clenching her hands, and making
+no attempt to stop the quick tears which raced down her cheeks. 
+She sat still at last, but she did not submit.  She looked stubborn
+and strong when she had ceased to cry.
+
+
+
+In the next room, meanwhile, Wilfrid was talking to Mrs. Thornbury
+with greater freedom now that his wife was not sitting there.
+
+"That's the worst of these places," he said.  "People will behave
+as though they were in England, and they're not.  I've no doubt myself
+that Miss Vinrace caught the infection up at the villa itself. 
+She probably ran risks a dozen times a day that might have given
+her the illness.  It's absurd to say she caught it with us."
+
+If he had not been sincerely sorry for them he would have been annoyed. 
+"Pepper tells me," he continued, "that he left the house because
+he thought them so careless.  He says they never washed their
+vegetables properly.  Poor people!  It's a fearful price to pay. 
+But it's only what I've seen over and over again--people seem
+to forget that these things happen, and then they do happen,
+and they're surprised.
+
+Mrs. Thornbury agreed with him that they had been very careless,
+and that there was no reason whatever to think that she had caught
+the fever on the expedition; and after talking about other things
+for a short time, she left him and went sadly along the passage
+to her own room.  There must be some reason why such things happen,
+she thought to herself, as she shut the door.  Only at first it
+was not easy to understand what it was.  It seemed so strange--
+so unbelievable.  Why, only three weeks ago--only a fortnight ago,
+she had seen Rachel; when she shut her eyes she could almost
+see her now, the quiet, shy girl who was going to be married. 
+She thought of all that she would have missed had she died at
+Rachel's age, the children, the married life, the unimaginable
+depths and miracles that seemed to her, as she looked back,
+to have lain about her, day after day, and year after year. 
+The stunned feeling, which had been making it difficult for her
+to think, gradually gave way to a feeling of the opposite nature;
+she thought very quickly and very clearly, and, looking back over
+all her experiences, tried to fit them into a kind of order. 
+There was undoubtedly much suffering, much struggling, but, on the whole,
+surely there was a balance of happiness--surely order did prevail. 
+Nor were the deaths of young people really the saddest things in life--
+they were saved so much; they kept so much.  The dead--she called
+to mind those who had died early, accidentally--were beautiful;
+she often dreamt of the dead.  And in time Terence himself would
+come to feel--She got up and began to wander restlessly about
+the room.
+
+For an old woman of her age she was very restless, and for one of
+her clear, quick mind she was unusually perplexed.  She could not
+settle to anything, so that she was relieved when the door opened. 
+She went up to her husband, took him in her arms, and kissed him
+with unusual intensity, and then as they sat down together she began
+to pat him and question him as if he were a baby, an old, tired,
+querulous baby.  She did not tell him about Miss Vinrace's death,
+for that would only disturb him, and he was put out already. 
+She tried to discover why he was uneasy.  Politics again? 
+What were those horrid people doing?  She spent the whole morning
+in discussing politics with her husband, and by degrees she became
+deeply interested in what they were saying.  But every now and then
+what she was saying seemed to her oddly empty of meaning.
+
+At luncheon it was remarked by several people that the visitors
+at the hotel were beginning to leave; there were fewer every day. 
+There were only forty people at luncheon, instead of the sixty that
+there had been.  So old Mrs. Paley computed, gazing about her with her
+faded eyes, as she took her seat at her own table in the window. 
+Her party generally consisted of Mr. Perrott as well as Arthur
+and Susan, and to-day Evelyn was lunching with them also.
+
+She was unusually subdued.  Having noticed that her eyes were red,
+and guessing the reason, the others took pains to keep up
+an elaborate conversation between themselves.  She suffered it
+to go on for a few minutes, leaning both elbows on the table,
+and leaving her soup untouched, when she exclaimed suddenly,
+"I don't know how you feel, but I can simply think of nothing else!"
+
+The gentlemen murmured sympathetically, and looked grave.
+
+Susan replied, "Yes--isn't it perfectly awful?  When you think
+what a nice girl she was--only just engaged, and this need
+never have happened--it seems too tragic."  She looked at Arthur
+as though he might be able to help her with something more suitable.
+
+"Hard lines," said Arthur briefly.  "But it was a foolish thing
+to do--to go up that river."  He shook his head.  "They should have
+known better.  You can't expect Englishwomen to stand roughing
+it as the natives do who've been acclimatised.  I'd half a mind
+to warn them at tea that day when it was being discussed.  But it's
+no good saying these sort of things--it only puts people's backs up--
+it never makes any difference."
+
+Old Mrs. Paley, hitherto contented with her soup, here intimated,
+by raising one hand to her ear, that she wished to know what was
+being said.
+
+"You heard, Aunt Emma, that poor Miss Vinrace has died of the fever,"
+Susan informed her gently.  She could not speak of death loudly
+or even in her usual voice, so that Mrs. Paley did not catch a word. 
+Arthur came to the rescue.
+
+"Miss Vinrace is dead," he said very distinctly.
+
+Mrs. Paley merely bent a little towards him and asked, "Eh?"
+
+"Miss Vinrace is dead," he repeated.  It was only by stiffening all
+the muscles round his mouth that he could prevent himself from bursting
+into laughter, and forced himself to repeat for the third time,
+"Miss Vinrace.  . . . She's dead."
+
+Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that
+were outside her daily experience took some time to reach
+Mrs. Paley's consciousness.  A weight seemed to rest upon
+her brain, impeding, though not damaging its action.  She sat
+vague-eyed for at least a minute before she realised what Arthur meant.
+
+"Dead?" she said vaguely.  "Miss Vinrace dead?  Dear me . . . that's
+very sad.  But I don't at the moment remember which she was. 
+We seem to have made so many new acquaintances here."  She looked at
+Susan for help.  "A tall dark girl, who just missed being handsome,
+with a high colour?"
+
+"No," Susan interposed.  "She was--" then she gave it up in despair. 
+There was no use in explaining that Mrs. Paley was thinking of
+the wrong person.
+
+"She ought not to have died," Mrs. Paley continued.  "She looked
+so strong.  But people will drink the water.  I can never make out why. 
+It seems such a simple thing to tell them to put a bottle of Seltzer
+water in your bedroom.  That's all the precaution I've ever taken,
+and I've been in every part of the world, I may say--Italy a dozen
+times over.  . . . But young people always think they know better,
+and then they pay the penalty.  Poor thing--I am very sorry for her." 
+But the difficulty of peering into a dish of potatoes and helping
+herself engrossed her attention.
+
+Arthur and Susan both secretly hoped that the subject was now disposed of,
+for there seemed to them something unpleasant in this discussion. 
+But Evelyn was not ready to let it drop.  Why would people never
+talk about the things that mattered?
+
+"I don't believe you care a bit!" she said, turning savagely upon
+Mr. Perrott, who had sat all this time in silence.
+
+"I?  Oh, yes, I do," he answered awkwardly, but with obvious sincerity. 
+Evelyn's questions made him too feel uncomfortable.
+
+"It seems so inexplicable," Evelyn continued.  "Death, I mean. 
+Why should she be dead, and not you or I?  It was only a fortnight
+ago that she was here with the rest of us.  What d'you believe?"
+she demanded of mr.  Perrott.  "D'you believe that things go on,
+that she's still somewhere--or d'you think it's simply a game--
+we crumble up to nothing when we die?  I'm positive Rachel's
+not dead."
+
+Mr. Perrott would have said almost anything that Evelyn wanted him
+to say, but to assert that he believed in the immortality of the soul
+was not in his power.  He sat silent, more deeply wrinkled than usual,
+crumbling his bread.
+
+Lest Evelyn should next ask him what he believed, Arthur, after making
+a pause equivalent to a full stop, started a completely different topic.
+
+"Supposing," he said, "a man were to write and tell you that he wanted
+five pounds because he had known your grandfather, what would you do? 
+It was this way.  My grandfather--"
+
+"Invented a stove," said Evelyn.  "I know all about that. 
+We had one in the conservatory to keep the plants warm."
+
+"Didn't know I was so famous," said Arthur.  "Well," he continued,
+determined at all costs to spin his story out at length, "the old chap,
+being about the second best inventor of his day, and a capable
+lawyer too, died, as they always do, without making a will. 
+Now Fielding, his clerk, with how much justice I don't know,
+always claimed that he meant to do something for him.  The poor old boy's
+come down in the world through trying inventions on his own account,
+lives in Penge over a tobacconist's shop.  I've been to see him there. 
+The question is--must I stump up or not?  What does the abstract
+spirit of justice require, Perrott?  Remember, I didn't benefit
+under my grandfather's will, and I've no way of testing the truth
+of the story."
+
+"I don't know much about the abstract spirit of justice," said Susan,
+smiling complacently at the others, "but I'm certain of one thing--
+he'll get his five pounds!"
+
+As Mr. Perrott proceeded to deliver an opinion, and Evelyn insisted
+that he was much too stingy, like all lawyers, thinking of the letter
+and not of the spirit, while Mrs. Paley required to be kept informed
+between the courses as to what they were all saying, the luncheon
+passed with no interval of silence, and Arthur congratulated himself
+upon the tact with which the discussion had been smoothed over.
+
+As they left the room it happened that Mrs. Paley's wheeled
+chair ran into the Elliots, who were coming through the door,
+as she was going out.  Brought thus to a standstill for a moment,
+Arthur and Susan congratulated Hughling Elliot upon his convalescence,--
+he was down, cadaverous enough, for the first time,--and Mr. Perrott
+took occasion to say a few words in private to Evelyn.
+
+"Would there be any chance of seeing you this afternoon,
+about three-thirty say?  I shall be in the garden, by the fountain."
+
+The block dissolved before Evelyn answered.  But as she left them
+in the hall, she looked at him brightly and said, "Half-past three,
+did you say?  That'll suit me."
+
+She ran upstairs with the feeling of spiritual exaltation and quickened
+life which the prospect of an emotional scene always aroused in her. 
+That Mr. Perrott was again about to propose to her, she had no doubt,
+and she was aware that on this occasion she ought to be prepared
+with a definite answer, for she was going away in three days' time. 
+But she could not bring her mind to bear upon the question.  To come
+to a decision was very difficult to her, because she had a natural
+dislike of anything final and done with; she liked to go on and on--
+always on and on.  She was leaving, and, therefore, she occupied
+herself in laying her clothes out side by side upon the bed. 
+She observed that some were very shabby.  She took the photograph
+of her father and mother, and, before she laid it away in her box,
+she held it for a minute in her hand.  Rachel had looked at it. 
+Suddenly the keen feeling of some one's personality, which things that
+they have owned or handled sometimes preserves, overcame her; she felt
+Rachel in the room with her; it was as if she were on a ship at sea,
+and the life of the day was as unreal as the land in the distance. 
+But by degrees the feeling of Rachel's presence passed away,
+and she could no longer realise her, for she had scarcely known her. 
+But this momentary sensation left her depressed and fatigued. 
+What had she done with her life?  What future was there before her? 
+What was make-believe, and what was real?  Were these proposals and
+intimacies and adventures real, or was the contentment which she had
+seen on the faces of Susan and Rachel more real than anything she had
+ever felt?
+
+She made herself ready to go downstairs, absentmindedly, but her fingers
+were so well trained that they did the work of preparing her almost
+of their own accord.  When she was actually on the way downstairs,
+the blood began to circle through her body of its own accord too,
+for her mind felt very dull.
+
+Mr. Perrott was waiting for her.  Indeed, he had gone straight
+into the garden after luncheon, and had been walking up and down
+the path for more than half an hour, in a state of acute suspense.
+
+"I'm late as usual!" she exclaimed, as she caught sight of him. 
+"Well, you must forgive me; I had to pack up.  . . . My word! 
+It looks stormy!  And that's a new steamer in the bay, isn't it?"
+
+She looked at the bay, in which a steamer was just dropping anchor,
+the smoke still hanging about it, while a swift black shudder ran
+through the waves.  "One's quite forgotten what rain looks like,"
+she added.
+
+But Mr. Perrott paid no attention to the steamer or to the weather.
+
+"Miss Murgatroyd," he began with his usual formality, "I asked you
+to come here from a very selfish motive, I fear.  I do not think
+you need to be assured once more of my feelings; but, as you are
+leaving so soon, I felt that I could not let you go without asking
+you to tell me--have I any reason to hope that you will ever come
+to care for me?"
+
+He was very pale, and seemed unable to say any more.
+
+The little gush of vitality which had come into Evelyn as she
+ran downstairs had left her, and she felt herself impotent. 
+There was nothing for her to say; she felt nothing.  Now that he
+was actually asking her, in his elderly gentle words, to marry him,
+she felt less for him than she had ever felt before.
+
+"Let's sit down and talk it over," she said rather unsteadily.
+
+Mr. Perrott followed her to a curved green seat under a tree. 
+They looked at the fountain in front of them, which had long ceased
+to play.  Evelyn kept looking at the fountain instead of thinking
+of what she was saying; the fountain without any water seemed to be
+the type of her own being.
+
+"Of course I care for you," she began, rushing her words out in
+a hurry; "I should be a brute if I didn't. I think you're quite one
+of the nicest people I've ever known, and one of the finest too. 
+But I wish . . . I wish you didn't care for me in that way. 
+Are you sure you do?"  For the moment she honestly desired that he
+should say no.
+
+"Quite sure," said Mr. Perrott.
+
+"You see, I'm not as simple as most women," Evelyn continued. 
+"I think I want more.  I don't know exactly what I feel."
+
+He sat by her, watching her and refraining from speech.
+
+"I sometimes think I haven't got it in me to care very much for
+one person only.  Some one else would make you a better wife. 
+I can imagine you very happy with some one else."
+
+"If you think that there is any chance that you will come to care
+for me, I am quite content to wait," said Mr. Perrott.
+
+"Well--there's no hurry, is there?" said Evelyn.  "Suppose I thought
+it over and wrote and told you when I get back?  I'm going to Moscow;
+I'll write from Moscow."
+
+But Mr. Perrott persisted.
+
+"You cannot give me any kind of idea.  I do not ask for a date .
+. . that would be most unreasonable."  He paused, looking down
+at the gravel path.
+
+As she did not immediately answer, he went on.
+
+"I know very well that I am not--that I have not much to offer you
+either in myself or in my circumstances.  And I forget; it cannot
+seem the miracle to you that it does to me.  Until I met you I
+had gone on in my own quiet way--we are both very quiet people,
+my sister and I--quite content with my lot.  My friendship with Arthur
+was the most important thing in my life.  Now that I know you,
+all that has changed.  You seem to put such a spirit into everything. 
+Life seems to hold so many possibilities that I had never dreamt of."
+
+"That's splendid!"  Evelyn exclaimed, grasping his hand. 
+"Now you'll go back and start all kinds of things and make a great
+name in the world; and we'll go on being friends, whatever happens
+. . . we'll be great friends, won't we?"
+
+"Evelyn!" he moaned suddenly, and took her in his arms, and kissed her. 
+She did not resent it, although it made little impression on her.
+
+As she sat upright again, she said, "I never see why one shouldn't
+go on being friends--though some people do.  And friendships do make
+a difference, don't they?  They are the kind of things that matter
+in one's life?"
+
+He looked at her with a bewildered expression as if he did not really
+understand what she was saying.  With a considerable effort he
+collected himself, stood up, and said, "Now I think I have told you
+what I feel, and I will only add that I can wait as long as ever you wish."
+
+Left alone, Evelyn walked up and down the path.  What did matter than? 
+What was the meaning of it all?
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVII
+
+
+
+All that evening the clouds gathered, until they closed entirely over
+the blue of the sky.  They seemed to narrow the space between earth
+and heaven, so that there was no room for the air to move in freely;
+and the waves, too, lay flat, and yet rigid, as if they were restrained. 
+The leaves on the bushes and trees in the garden hung closely together,
+and the feeling of pressure and restraint was increased by the short
+chirping sounds which came from birds and insects.
+
+So strange were the lights and the silence that the busy hum
+of voices which usually filled the dining-room at meal times
+had distinct gaps in it, and during these silences the clatter
+of the knives upon plates became audible.  The first roll of thunder
+and the first heavy drop striking the pane caused a little stir.
+
+"It's coming!" was said simultaneously in many different languages.
+
+There was then a profound silence, as if the thunder had withdrawn
+into itself.  People had just begun to eat again, when a gust of cold
+air came through the open windows, lifting tablecloths and skirts,
+a light flashed, and was instantly followed by a clap of thunder
+right over the hotel.  The rain swished with it, and immediately
+there were all those sounds of windows being shut and doors slamming
+violently which accompany a storm.
+
+The room grew suddenly several degrees darker, for the wind
+seemed to be driving waves of darkness across the earth.  No one
+attempted to eat for a time, but sat looking out at the garden,
+with their forks in the air.  The flashes now came frequently,
+lighting up faces as if they were going to be photographed,
+surprising them in tense and unnatural expressions.  The clap
+followed close and violently upon them.  Several women half rose
+from their chairs and then sat down again, but dinner was continued
+uneasily with eyes upon the garden.  The bushes outside were
+ruffled and whitened, and the wind pressed upon them so that they
+seemed to stoop to the ground.  The waiters had to press dishes
+upon the diners' notice; and the diners had to draw the attention
+of waiters, for they were all absorbed in looking at the storm. 
+As the thunder showed no signs of withdrawing, but seemed massed
+right overhead, while the lightning aimed straight at the garden
+every time, an uneasy gloom replaced the first excitement.
+
+Finishing the meal very quickly, people congregated in the hall,
+where they felt more secure than in any other place because they could
+retreat far from the windows, and although they heard the thunder,
+they could not see anything.  A little boy was carried away sobbing
+in the arms of his mother.
+
+While the storm continued, no one seemed inclined to sit down,
+but they collected in little groups under the central skylight,
+where they stood in a yellow atmosphere, looking upwards. 
+Now and again their faces became white, as the lightning flashed,
+and finally a terrific crash came, making the panes of the skylight
+lift at the joints.
+
+"Ah!" several voices exclaimed at the same moment.
+
+"Something struck," said a man's voice.
+
+The rain rushed down.  The rain seemed now to extinguish the lightning
+and the thunder, and the hall became almost dark.
+
+After a minute or two, when nothing was heard but the rattle of water
+upon the glass, there was a perceptible slackening of the sound,
+and then the atmosphere became lighter.
+
+"It's over," said another voice.
+
+At a touch, all the electric lights were turned on, and revealed
+a crowd of people all standing, all looking with rather strained faces
+up at the skylight, but when they saw each other in the artificial
+light they turned at once and began to move away.  For some minutes
+the rain continued to rattle upon the skylight, and the thunder
+gave another shake or two; but it was evident from the clearing
+of the darkness and the light drumming of the rain upon the roof,
+that the great confused ocean of air was travelling away from them,
+and passing high over head with its clouds and its rods of fire,
+out to sea.  The building, which had seemed so small in the tumult
+of the storm, now became as square and spacious as usual.
+
+As the storm drew away, the people in the hall of the hotel sat down;
+and with a comfortable sense of relief, began to tell each other stories
+about great storms, and produced in many cases their occupations
+for the evening.  The chess-board was brought out, and Mr. Elliot,
+who wore a stock instead of a collar as a sign of convalescence, but was
+otherwise much as usual, challenged Mr. Pepper to a final contest. 
+Round them gathered a group of ladies with pieces of needlework,
+or in default of needlework, with novels, to superintend the game,
+much as if they were in charge of two small boys playing marbles. 
+Every now and then they looked at the board and made some encouraging
+remark to the gentlemen.
+
+Mrs. Paley just round the corner had her cards arranged in long ladders
+before her, with Susan sitting near to sympathise but not to correct,
+and the merchants and the miscellaneous people who had never been
+discovered to possess names were stretched in their arm-chairs
+with their newspapers on their knees.  The conversation in these
+circumstances was very gentle, fragmentary, and intermittent,
+but the room was full of the indescribable stir of life.  Every now
+and then the moth, which was now grey of wing and shiny of thorax,
+whizzed over their heads, and hit the lamps with a thud.
+
+A young woman put down her needlework and exclaimed, "Poor creature!
+it would be kinder to kill it."  But nobody seemed disposed to rouse
+himself in order to kill the moth.  They watched it dash from lamp
+to lamp, because they were comfortable, and had nothing to do.
+
+On the sofa, beside the chess-players, Mrs. Elliot was imparting
+a new stitch in knitting to Mrs. Thornbury, so that their heads
+came very near together, and were only to be distinguished
+by the old lace cap which Mrs. Thornbury wore in the evening. 
+Mrs. Elliot was an expert at knitting, and disclaimed a compliment
+to that effect with evident pride.
+
+"I suppose we're all proud of something," she said, "and I'm proud of
+my knitting.  I think things like that run in families.  We all knit well. 
+I had an uncle who knitted his own socks to the day of his death--
+and he did it better than any of his daughters, dear old gentleman. 
+Now I wonder that you, Miss Allan, who use your eyes so much,
+don't take up knitting in the evenings.  You'd find it such a relief,
+I should say--such a rest to the eyes--and the bazaars are so glad
+of things."  Her voice dropped into the smooth half-conscious tone
+of the expert knitter; the words came gently one after another. 
+"As much as I do I can always dispose of, which is a comfort, for then
+I feel that I am not wasting my time--"
+
+Miss Allan, being thus addressed, shut her novel and observed
+the others placidly for a time.  At last she said, "It is surely
+not natural to leave your wife because she happens to be in love
+with you.  But that--as far as I can make out--is what the gentleman
+in my story does."
+
+"Tut, tut, that doesn't sound good--no, that doesn't sound
+at all natural," murmured the knitters in their absorbed voices.
+
+"Still, it's the kind of book people call very clever," Miss Allan added.
+
+"_Maternity_--by Michael Jessop--I presume," Mr. Elliot put in,
+for he could never resist the temptation of talking while he
+played chess.
+
+"D'you know," said Mrs. Elliot, after a moment, "I don't think people
+_do_ write good novels now--not as good as they used to, anyhow."
+
+No one took the trouble to agree with her or to disagree with her. 
+Arthur Venning who was strolling about, sometimes looking at the game,
+sometimes reading a page of a magazine, looked at Miss Allan,
+who was half asleep, and said humorously, "A penny for your thoughts,
+Miss Allan."
+
+The others looked up.  They were glad that he had not spoken to them. 
+But Miss Allan replied without any hesitation, "I was thinking
+of my imaginary uncle.  Hasn't every one got an imaginary uncle?"
+she continued.  "I have one--a most delightful old gentleman. 
+He's always giving me things.  Sometimes it's a gold watch;
+sometimes it's a carriage and pair; sometimes it's a beautiful little
+cottage in the New Forest; sometimes it's a ticket to the place I most
+want to see."
+
+She set them all thinking vaguely of the things they wanted. 
+Mrs. Elliot knew exactly what she wanted; she wanted a child;
+and the usual little pucker deepened on her brow.
+
+"We're such lucky people," she said, looking at her husband. 
+"We really have no wants."  She was apt to say this, partly in order
+to convince herself, and partly in order to convince other people. 
+But she was prevented from wondering how far she carried conviction
+by the entrance of Mr. and Mrs. Flushing, who came through the hall
+and stopped by the chess-board. Mrs. Flushing looked wilder than ever. 
+A great strand of black hair looped down across her brow, her cheeks
+were whipped a dark blood red, and drops of rain made wet marks
+upon them.
+
+Mr. Flushing explained that they had been on the roof watching
+the storm.
+
+"It was a wonderful sight," he said.  "The lightning went right
+out over the sea, and lit up the waves and the ships far away. 
+You can't think how wonderful the mountains looked too, with the lights
+on them, and the great masses of shadow.  It's all over now."
+
+He slid down into a chair, becoming interested in the final struggle
+of the game.
+
+"And you go back to-morrow?" said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at
+Mrs. Flushing.
+
+"Yes," she replied.
+
+"And indeed one is not sorry to go back," said Mrs. Elliot,
+assuming an air of mournful anxiety, "after all this illness."
+
+"Are you afraid of dyin'?" Mrs. Flushing demanded scornfully.
+
+"I think we are all afraid of that," said Mrs. Elliot with dignity.
+
+"I suppose we're all cowards when it comes to the point,"
+said Mrs. Flushing, rubbing her cheek against the back of the chair. 
+"I'm sure I am."
+
+"Not a bit of it!" said Mr. Flushing, turning round, for Mr. Pepper
+took a very long time to consider his move.  "It's not cowardly
+to wish to live, Alice.  It's the very reverse of cowardly. 
+Personally, I'd like to go on for a hundred years--granted, of course,
+that I had the full use of my faculties.  Think of all the things that
+are bound to happen!"  "That is what I feel," Mrs. Thornbury rejoined. 
+"The changes, the improvements, the inventions--and beauty. 
+D'you know I feel sometimes that I couldn't bear to die and cease
+to see beautiful things about me?"
+
+"It would certainly be very dull to die before they have discovered
+whether there is life in Mars," Miss Allan added.
+
+"Do you really believe there's life in Mars?" asked Mrs. Flushing,
+turning to her for the first time with keen interest.  "Who tells
+you that?  Some one who knows?  D'you know a man called--?"
+
+Here Mrs. Thornbury laid down her knitting, and a look of extreme
+solicitude came into her eyes.
+
+"There is Mr. Hirst," she said quietly.
+
+St. John had just come through the swing door.  He was rather
+blown about by the wind, and his cheeks looked terribly pale,
+unshorn, and cavernous.  After taking off his coat he was going
+to pass straight through the hall and up to his room, but he could
+not ignore the presence of so many people he knew, especially as
+Mrs. Thornbury rose and went up to him, holding out her hand. 
+But the shock of the warm lamp-lit room, together with the sight
+of so many cheerful human beings sitting together at their ease,
+after the dark walk in the rain, and the long days of strain
+and horror, overcame him completely.  He looked at Mrs. Thornbury
+and could not speak.
+
+Every one was silent.  Mr. Pepper's hand stayed upon his Knight. 
+Mrs. Thornbury somehow moved him to a chair, sat herself beside him,
+and with tears in her own eyes said gently, "You have done everything
+for your friend."
+
+Her action set them all talking again as if they had never stopped,
+and Mr. Pepper finished the move with his Knight.
+
+"There was nothing to be done," said St. John.  He spoke very slowly. 
+"It seems impossible--"
+
+He drew his hand across his eyes as if some dream came between him
+and the others and prevented him from seeing where he was.
+
+"And that poor fellow," said Mrs. Thornbury, the tears falling
+again down her cheeks.
+
+"Impossible," St. John repeated.
+
+"Did he have the consolation of knowing--?" Mrs. Thornbury began
+very tentatively.
+
+But St. John made no reply.  He lay back in his chair, half-seeing
+the others, half-hearing what they said.  He was terribly tired,
+and the light and warmth, the movements of the hands, and the soft
+communicative voices soothed him; they gave him a strange sense
+of quiet and relief.  As he sat there, motionless, this feeling
+of relief became a feeling of profound happiness.  Without any
+sense of disloyalty to Terence and Rachel he ceased to think
+about either of them.  The movements and the voices seemed to draw
+together from different parts of the room, and to combine themselves
+into a pattern before his eyes; he was content to sit silently
+watching the pattern build itself up, looking at what he hardly saw.
+
+The game was really a good one, and Mr. Pepper and Mr. Elliot were
+becoming more and more set upon the struggle.  Mrs. Thornbury,
+seeing that St. John did not wish to talk, resumed her knitting.
+
+"Lightning again!"  Mrs. Flushing suddenly exclaimed.  A yellow
+light flashed across the blue window, and for a second they saw
+the green trees outside.  She strode to the door, pushed it open,
+and stood half out in the open air.
+
+But the light was only the reflection of the storm which was over. 
+The rain had ceased, the heavy clouds were blown away, and the air
+was thin and clear, although vapourish mists were being driven swiftly
+across the moon.  The sky was once more a deep and solemn blue,
+and the shape of the earth was visible at the bottom of the air,
+enormous, dark, and solid, rising into the tapering mass of the mountain,
+and pricked here and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of villas. 
+The driving air, the drone of the trees, and the flashing light
+which now and again spread a broad illumination over the earth
+filled Mrs. Flushing with exultation.  Her breasts rose and fell.
+
+"Splendid!  Splendid!" she muttered to herself.  Then she turned back
+into the hall and exclaimed in a peremptory voice, "Come outside
+and see, Wilfrid; it's wonderful."
+
+Some half-stirred; some rose; some dropped their balls of wool
+and began to stoop to look for them.
+
+"To bed--to bed," said Miss Allan.
+
+"It was the move with your Queen that gave it away, Pepper,"
+exclaimed Mr. Elliot triumphantly, sweeping the pieces together
+and standing up.  He had won the game.
+
+"What?  Pepper beaten at last?  I congratulate you!" said Arthur
+Venning, who was wheeling old Mrs. Paley to bed.
+
+All these voices sounded gratefully in St. John's ears as he lay
+half-asleep, and yet vividly conscious of everything around him. 
+Across his eyes passed a procession of objects, black and indistinct,
+the figures of people picking up their books, their cards, their balls
+of wool, their work-baskets, and passing him one after another on
+their way to bed.
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Voyage Out
+
+
+
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+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE VOYAGE OUT
+(1915)
+
+
+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 wheezing for some minutes like an old
+man preparing to cough, now struck nine.  The sound slightly
+disturbed certain somnolent merchants, government officials,
+and men of independent means who were lying back in their chairs,
+chatting, smoking, ruminating about their affairs, with their eyes
+half shut; they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and then
+closed them again.  They had the appearance of crocodiles so fully
+gorged by their last meal that the future of the world gives them
+no anxiety whatever.  The only disturbance in the placid bright
+room was caused by a large moth which shot from light to light,
+whizzing over elaborate heads of hair, and causing several young women
+to raise their hands nervously and exclaim, "Some one ought to kill it!"
+
+Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not spoken
+for a long time.
+
+When the clock struck, Hirst said:
+
+"Ah, the creatures begin to stir.  . . ." He watched them
+raise themselves, look about them, and settle down again. 
+"What I abhor most of all," he concluded, "is the female breast. 
+Imagine being Venning and having to get into bed with Susan! 
+But the really repulsive thing is that they feel nothing at all--
+about what I do when I have a hot bath.  They're gross, they're absurd,
+they're utterly intolerable!"
+
+So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded to think
+about himself, about science, about Cambridge, about the Bar,
+about Helen and what she thought of him, until, being very tired,
+he was nodding off to sleep.
+
+Suddenly Hewet woke him up.
+
+"How d'you know what you feel, Hirst?"
+
+"Are you in love?" asked Hirst.  He put in his eyeglass.
+
+"Don't be a fool," said Hewet.
+
+"Well, I'll sit down and think about it," said Hirst.  "One really
+ought to.  If these people would only think about things,
+the world would be a far better place for us all to live in. 
+Are you trying to think?"
+
+That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour,
+but he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.
+
+"I shall go for a walk," he said.
+
+"Remember we weren't in bed last night," said Hirst with a prodigious yawn.
+
+Hewet rose and stretched himself.
+
+"I want to go and get a breath of air," he said.
+
+An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and forbidding
+him to settle into any one train of thought.  It was precisely as if he
+had been in the middle of a talk which interested him profoundly when
+some one came up and interrupted him.  He could not finish the talk,
+and the longer he sat there the more he wanted to finish it. 
+As the talk that had been interrupted was a talk with Rachel,
+he had to ask himself why he felt this, and why he wanted to go on
+talking to her.  Hirst would merely say that he was in love with her. 
+But he was not in love with her.  Did love begin in that way,
+with the wish to go on talking?  No. It always began in his case with
+definite physical sensations, and these were now absent, he did not
+even find her physically attractive.  There was something, of course,
+unusual about her--she was young, inexperienced, and inquisitive,
+they had been more open with each other than was usually possible. 
+He always found girls interesting to talk to, and surely these
+were good reasons why he should wish to go on talking to her;
+and last night, what with the crowd and the confusion, he had
+only been able to begin to talk to her.  What was she doing now? 
+Lying on a sofa and looking at the ceiling, perhaps.  He could
+imagine her doing that, and Helen in an arm-chair, with her hands
+on the arm of it, so--looking ahead of her, with her great big eyes--
+oh no, they'd be talking, of course, about the dance.  But suppose
+Rachel was going away in a day or two, suppose this was the end
+of her visit, and her father had arrived in one of the steamers
+anchored in the bay,--it was intolerable to know so little. 
+Therefore he exclaimed, "How d'you know what you feel, Hirst?" to stop
+himself from thinking.
+
+But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their aimless
+movements and their unknown lives were disturbing, so that he longed
+for the empty darkness.  The first thing he looked for when he stepped
+out of the hall door was the light of the Ambroses' villa.  When he
+had definitely decided that a certain light apart from the others
+higher up the hill was their light, he was considerably reassured. 
+There seemed to be at once a little stability in all this incoherence. 
+Without any definite plan in his head, he took the turning to the right
+and walked through the town and came to the wall by the meeting
+of the roads, where he stopped.  The booming of the sea was audible. 
+The dark-blue mass of the mountains rose against the paler blue
+of the sky.  There was no moon, but myriads of stars, and lights
+were anchored up and down in the dark waves of earth all round him. 
+He had meant to go back, but the single light of the Ambroses'
+villa had now become three separate lights, and he was tempted to go on. 
+He might as well make sure that Rachel was still there.  Walking fast,
+he soon stood by the iron gate of their garden, and pushed it open;
+the outline of the house suddenly appeared sharply before his eyes,
+and the thin column of the verandah cutting across the palely lit
+gravel of the terrace.  He hesitated.  At the back of the house
+some one was rattling cans.  He approached the front; the light on
+the terrace showed him that the sitting-rooms were on that side. 
+He stood as near the light as he could by the corner of the house,
+the leaves of a creeper brushing his face.  After a moment he could
+hear a voice.  The voice went on steadily; it was not talking,
+but from the continuity of the sound it was a voice reading aloud. 
+He crept a little closer; he crumpled the leaves together so as to
+stop their rustling about his ears.  It might be Rachel's voice. 
+He left the shadow and stepped into the radius of the light, and then
+heard a sentence spoken quite distinctly.
+
+"And there we lived from the year 1860 to 1895, the happiest years
+of my parents' lives, and there in 1862 my brother Maurice was born,
+to the delight of his parents, as he was destined to be the delight
+of all who knew him."
+
+The voice quickened, and the tone became conclusive rising slightly
+in pitch, as if these words were at the end of the chapter. 
+Hewet drew back again into the shadow.  There was a long silence. 
+He could just hear chairs being moved inside.  He had almost decided
+to go back, when suddenly two figures appeared at the window, not six
+feet from him.
+
+"It was Maurice Fielding, of course, that your mother was engaged to,"
+said Helen's voice.  She spoke reflectively, looking out into
+the dark garden, and thinking evidently as much of the look
+of the night as of what she was saying.
+
+"Mother?" said Rachel.  Hewet's heart leapt, and he noticed the fact. 
+Her voice, though low, was full of surprise.
+
+"You didn't know that?" said Helen.
+
+"I never knew there'd been any one else," said Rachel.  She was
+clearly surprised, but all they said was said low and inexpressively,
+because they were speaking out into the cool dark night.
+
+"More people were in love with her than with any one I've ever known,"
+Helen stated.  She had that power--she enjoyed things.  She wasn't
+beautiful, but--I was thinking of her last night at the dance. 
+She got on with every kind of person, and then she made it all
+so amazingly--funny."
+
+It appeared that Helen was going back into the past, choosing her
+words deliberately, comparing Theresa with the people she had known
+since Theresa died.
+
+"I don't know how she did it," she continued, and ceased, and there
+was a long pause, in which a little owl called first here, then there,
+as it moved from tree to tree in the garden.
+
+"That's so like Aunt Lucy and Aunt Katie," said Rachel at last. 
+"They always make out that she was very sad and very good."
+
+"Then why, for goodness' sake, did they do nothing but criticize her
+when she was alive?" said Helen.  Very gentle their voices sounded,
+as if they fell through the waves of the sea.
+
+"If I were to die to-morrow . . ." she began.
+
+The broken sentences had an extraordinary beauty and detachment
+in Hewet's ears, and a kind of mystery too, as though they were
+spoken by people in their sleep.
+
+"No, Rachel," Helen's voice continued, "I'm not going to walk
+in the garden; it's damp--it's sure to be damp; besides, I see
+at least a dozen toads."
+
+"Toads?  Those are stones, Helen.  Come out.  It's nicer out. 
+The flowers smell," Rachel replied.
+
+Hewet drew still farther back.  His heart was beating very quickly. 
+Apparently Rachel tried to pull Helen out on to the terrace,
+and helen resisted.  There was a certain amount of scuffling,
+entreating, resisting, and laughter from both of them.  Then a man's
+form appeared.  Hewet could not hear what they were all saying. 
+In a minute they had gone in; he could hear bolts grating then;
+there was dead silence, and all the lights went out.
+
+He turned away, still crumpling and uncrumpling a handful of leaves
+which he had torn from the wall.  An exquisite sense of pleasure
+and relief possessed him; it was all so solid and peaceful after
+the ball at the hotel, whether he was in love with them or not,
+and he was not in love with them; no, but it was good that they
+should be alive.
+
+After standing still for a minute or two he turned and began to walk
+towards the gate.  With the movement of his body, the excitement,
+the romance and the richness of life crowded into his brain. 
+He shouted out a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he
+stumbled among lines and fragments of lines which had no meaning
+at all except for the beauty of the words.  He shut the gate,
+and ran swinging from side to side down the hill, shouting any
+nonsense that came into his head.  "Here am I," he cried rhythmically,
+as his feet pounded to the left and to the right, "plunging along,
+like an elephant in the jungle, stripping the branches as I go
+(he snatched at the twigs of a bush at the roadside), roaring
+innumerable words, lovely words about innumerable things, running
+downhill and talking nonsense aloud to myself about roads and leaves
+and lights and women coming out into the darkness--about women--
+about Rachel, about Rachel."  He stopped and drew a deep breath. 
+The night seemed immense and hospitable, and although so dark there
+seemed to be things moving down there in the harbour and movement out
+at sea.  He gazed until the darkness numbed him, and then he walked
+on quickly, still murmuring to himself.  "And I ought to be in bed,
+snoring and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming.  Dreams and realities,
+dreams and realities, dreams and realities," he repeated all the way
+up the avenue, scarcely knowing what he said, until he reached
+the front door.  Here he paused for a second, and collected himself
+before he opened the door.
+
+His eyes were dazed, his hands very cold, and his brain excited
+and yet half asleep.  Inside the door everything was as he had left
+it except that the hall was now empty.  There were the chairs turning
+in towards each other where people had sat talking, and the empty
+glasses on little tables, and the newspapers scattered on the floor. 
+As he shut the door he felt as if he were enclosed in a square box,
+and instantly shrivelled up.  It was all very bright and very small. 
+He stopped for a minute by the long table to find a paper which he
+had meant to read, but he was still too much under the influence
+of the dark and the fresh air to consider carefully which paper it
+was or where he had seen it.
+
+As he fumbled vaguely among the papers he saw a figure cross the tail
+of his eye, coming downstairs.  He heard the swishing sound of skirts,
+and to his great surprise, Evelyn M. came up to him, laid her hand
+on the table as if to prevent him from taking up a paper, and said:
+
+"You're just the person I wanted to talk to."  Her voice was
+a little unpleasant and metallic, her eyes were very bright,
+and she kept them fixed upon him.
+
+"To talk to me?" he repeated.  "But I'm half asleep."
+
+"But I think you understand better than most people," she answered,
+and sat down on a little chair placed beside a big leather chair
+so that Hewet had to sit down beside her.
+
+"Well?" he said.  He yawned openly, and lit a cigarette. 
+He could not believe that this was really happening to him. 
+"What is it?"
+
+"Are you really sympathetic, or is it just a pose?" she demanded.
+
+"It's for you to say," he replied.  "I'm interested, I think." 
+He still felt numb all over and as if she was much too close
+to him.
+
+"Any one can be interested!" she cried impatiently.  "Your friend
+Mr. Hirst's interested, I daresay.  however, I do believe in you. 
+You look as if you'd got a nice sister, somehow."  She paused,
+picking at some sequins on her knees, and then, as if she had made up
+her mind, she started off, "Anyhow, I'm going to ask your advice. 
+D'you ever get into a state where you don't know your own mind? 
+That's the state I'm in now.  You see, last night at the dance
+Raymond Oliver,--he's the tall dark boy who looks as if he had Indian
+blood in him, but he says he's not really,--well, we were sitting
+out together, and he told me all about himself, how unhappy he is
+at home, and how he hates being out here.  They've put him into some
+beastly mining business.  He says it's beastly--I should like it,
+I know, but that's neither here nor there.  And I felt awfully sorry
+for him, one couldn't help being sorry for him, and when he asked me
+to let him kiss me, I did.  I don't see any harm in that, do you? 
+And then this morning he said he'd thought I meant something more,
+and I wasn't the sort to let any one kiss me.  And we talked
+and talked.  I daresay I was very silly, but one can't help liking
+people when one's sorry for them.  I do like him most awfully--"
+She paused.  "So I gave him half a promise, and then, you see,
+there's Alfred Perrott."
+
+"Oh, Perrott," said Hewet.
+
+"We got to know each other on that picnic the other day," she continued. 
+"He seemed so lonely, especially as Arthur had gone off with Susan,
+and one couldn't help guessing what was in his mind.  So we had quite
+a long talk when you were looking at the ruins, and he told me all
+about his life, and his struggles, and how fearfully hard it had been. 
+D'you know, he was a boy in a grocer's shop and took parcels to
+people's houses in a basket?  That interested me awfully, because I
+always say it doesn't matter how you're born if you've got the right
+stuff in you.  And he told me about his sister who's paralysed,
+poor girl, and one can see she's a great trial, though he's evidently
+very devoted to her.  I must say I do admire people like that! 
+I don't expect you do because you're so clever.  Well, last night
+we sat out in the garden together, and I couldn't help seeing
+what he wanted to say, and comforting him a little, and telling
+him I did care--I really do--only, then, there's Raymond Oliver. 
+What I want you to tell me is, can one be in love with two people
+at once, or can't one?"
+
+She became silent, and sat with her chin on her hands, looking very intent,
+as if she were facing a real problem which had to be discussed between them.
+
+"I think it depends what sort of person you are," said Hewet. 
+He looked at her.  She was small and pretty, aged perhaps
+twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but though dashing and sharply cut,
+her features expressed nothing very clearly, except a great deal
+of spirit and good health.
+
+"Who are you, what are you; you see, I know nothing about you,"
+he continued.
+
+"Well, I was coming to that," said Evelyn M. She continued to
+rest her chin on her hands and to look intently ahead of her. 
+"I'm the daughter of a mother and no father, if that interests you,"
+she said.  "It's not a very nice thing to be.  It's what often happens
+in the country.  She was a farmer's daughter, and he was rather a swell--
+the young man up at the great house.  He never made things straight--
+never married her--though he allowed us quite a lot of money. 
+His people wouldn't let him.  Poor father!  I can't help liking him. 
+Mother wasn't the sort of woman who could keep him straight, anyhow. 
+He was killed in the war.  I believe his men worshipped him. 
+They say great big troopers broke down and cried over his body
+on the battlefield.  I wish I'd known him.  Mother had all the
+life crushed out of her.  The world--" She clenched her fist. 
+"Oh, people can be horrid to a woman like that!"  She turned
+upon Hewet.
+
+"Well," she said, "d'you want to know any more about me?"
+
+"But you?" he asked, "Who looked after you?"
+
+"I've looked after myself mostly," she laughed.  "I've had
+splendid friends.  I do like people!  That's the trouble. 
+What would you do if you liked two people, both of them tremendously,
+and you couldn't tell which most?"
+
+"I should go on liking them--I should wait and see.  Why not?"
+
+"But one has to make up one's mind," said Evelyn.  "Or are you
+one of the people who doesn't believe in marriages and all that? 
+Look here--this isn't fair, I do all the telling, and you tell nothing. 
+Perhaps you're the same as your friend"--she looked at him suspiciously;
+"perhaps you don't like me?"
+
+"I don't know you," said Hewet.
+
+"I know when I like a person directly I see them!  I knew I liked you
+the very first night at dinner.  Oh dear," she continued impatiently,
+"what a lot of bother would be saved if only people would say the
+things they think straight out!  I'm made like that.  I can't help it."
+
+"But don't you find it leads to difficulties?"  Hewet asked.
+
+"That's men's fault," she answered.  "They always drag it in-love,
+I mean."
+
+"And so you've gone on having one proposal after another,"
+said Hewet.
+
+"I don't suppose I've had more proposals than most women,"
+said Evelyn, but she spoke without conviction.
+
+"Five, six, ten?"  Hewet ventured.
+
+Evelyn seemed to intimate that perhaps ten was the right figure,
+but that it really was not a high one.
+
+"I believe you're thinking me a heartless flirt," she protested. 
+"But I don't care if you are.  I don't care what any one thinks of me. 
+Just because one's interested and likes to be friends with men,
+and talk to them as one talks to women, one's called a flirt."
+
+"But Miss Murgatroyd--"
+
+"I wish you'd call me Evelyn," she interrupted.
+
+"After ten proposals do you honestly think that men are the same
+as women?"
+
+"Honestly, honestly,--how I hate that word!  It's always used by prigs,"
+cried Evelyn.  "Honestly I think they ought to be.  That's what's
+so disappointing.  Every time one thinks it's not going to happen,
+and every time it does."
+
+"The pursuit of Friendship," said Hewet.  "The title of a comedy."
+
+"You're horrid," she cried.  "You don't care a bit really. 
+You might be Mr. Hirst."
+
+"Well," said Hewet, "let's consider.  Let us consider--" He paused,
+because for the moment he could not remember what it was that they
+had to consider.  He was far more interested in her than in her story,
+for as she went on speaking his numbness had disappeared,
+and he was conscious of a mixture of liking, pity, and distrust. 
+"You've promised to marry both Oliver and Perrott?" he concluded.
+
+"Not exactly promised," said Evelyn.  "I can't make up my mind which I
+really like best.  Oh how I detest modern life!" she flung off. 
+"It must have been so much easier for the Elizabethans!  I thought
+the other day on that mountain how I'd have liked to be one of
+those colonists, to cut down trees and make laws and all that,
+instead of fooling about with all these people who think one's just
+a pretty young lady.  Though I'm not.  I really might _do_ something." 
+She reflected in silence for a minute.  Then she said:
+
+"I'm afraid right down in my heart that Alfred Perrot _won't_ do. 
+He's not strong, is he?"
+
+"Perhaps he couldn't cut down a tree," said Hewet.  "Have you
+never cared for anybody?" he asked.
+
+"I've cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them," she said. 
+"I suppose I'm too fastidious.  All my life I've wanted somebody I
+could look up to, somebody great and big and splendid.  Most men are
+so small."
+
+"What d'you mean by splendid?"  Hewet asked.  "People are--
+nothing more."
+
+Evelyn was puzzled.
+
+"We don't care for people because of their qualities,"
+he tried to explain.  "It's just them that we care for,"--
+he struck a match--"just that," he said, pointing to the flames.
+
+"I see what you mean," she said, "but I don't agree.  I do know why
+I care for people, and I think I'm hardly ever wrong.  I see at once
+what they've got in them.  Now I think you must be rather splendid;
+but not Mr. Hirst."
+
+Hewlet shook his head.
+
+"He's not nearly so unselfish, or so sympathetic, or so big,
+or so understanding," Evelyn continued.
+
+Hewet sat silent, smoking his cigarette.
+
+"I should hate cutting down trees," he remarked.
+
+"I'm not trying to flirt with you, though I suppose you think I am!" 
+Evelyn shot out.  "I'd never have come to you if I'd thought you'd
+merely think odious things of me!"  The tears came into her eyes.
+
+"Do you never flirt?" he asked.
+
+"Of course I don't," she protested.  "Haven't I told you? 
+I want friendship; I want to care for some one greater and nobler
+than I am, and if they fall in love with me it isn't my fault;
+I don't want it; I positively hate it."
+
+Hewet could see that there was very little use in going on with
+the conversation, for it was obvious that Evelyn did not wish to say
+anything in particular, but to impress upon him an image of herself,
+being, for some reason which she would not reveal, unhappy, or insecure. 
+He was very tired, and a pale waiter kept walking ostentatiously
+into the middle of the room and looking at them meaningly.
+
+"They want to shut up," he said.  "My advice is that you should tell
+Oliver and Perrott to-morrow that you've made up your mind that you don't
+mean to marry either of them.  I'm certain you don't. If you change
+your mind you can always tell them so.  They're both sensible men;
+they'll understand.  And then all this bother will be over." 
+He got up.
+
+But Evelyn did not move.  She sat looking up at him with her
+bright eager eyes, in the depths of which he thought he detected
+some disappointment, or dissatisfaction.
+
+"Good-night," he said.
+
+"There are heaps of things I want to say to you still," she said. 
+"And I'm going to, some time.  I suppose you must go to bed now?"
+
+"Yes," said Hewet.  "I'm half asleep."  He left her still sitting
+by herself in the empty hall.
+
+"Why is it that they _won't_ be honest?" he muttered to himself as he
+went upstairs.  Why was it that relations between different people
+were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words
+so dangerous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being
+was an instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed? 
+What had Evelyn really wished to say to him?  What was she feeling left
+alone in the empty hall?  The mystery of life and the unreality even
+of one's own sensations overcame him as he walked down the corridor
+which led to his room.  It was dimly lighted, but sufficiently
+for him to see a figure in a bright dressing-gown pass swiftly
+in front of him, the figure of a woman crossing from one room to another.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+
+
+Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually
+meeting in a hotel at midnight, they possess one advantage at least
+over the bonds which unite the elderly, who have lived together
+once and so must live for ever.  Slight they may be, but vivid
+and genuine, merely because the power to break them is within
+the grasp of each, and there is no reason for continuance except
+a true desire that continue they shall.  When two people have been
+married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's
+bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things
+which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem
+to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness. 
+The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this stage
+of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to
+recall with an effort whether a thing had been said or only thought,
+shared or dreamt in private.  At four o'clock in the afternoon two
+or three days later Mrs. Ambrose was standing brushing her hair,
+while her husband was in the dressing-room which opened out of her room,
+and occasionally, through the cascade of water--he was washing
+his face--she caught exclamations, "So it goes on year after year;
+I wish, I wish, I wish I could make an end of it," to which she
+paid no attention.
+
+"It's white?  Or only brown?"  Thus she herself murmured,
+examining a hair which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. 
+She pulled it out and laid it on the dressing-table. She was
+criticising her own appearance, or rather approving of it,
+standing a little way back from the glass and looking at her own
+face with superb pride and melancholy, when her husband appeared
+in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half obscured by a towel.
+
+"You often tell me I don't notice things," he remarked.
+
+"Tell me if this is a white hair, then?" she replied.  She laid
+the hair on his hand.
+
+"There's not a white hair on your head," he exclaimed.
+
+"Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt," she sighed; and bowed her head
+under his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced
+only a kiss where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife
+then proceeded to move about the room, casually murmuring.
+
+"What was that you were saying?"  Helen remarked, after an interval
+of conversation which no third person could have understood.
+
+"Rachel--you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel," he observed significantly,
+and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked at him. 
+His observations were apt to be true.
+
+"Young gentlemen don't interest themselves in young women's education
+without a motive," he remarked.
+
+"Oh, Hirst," said Helen.
+
+"Hirst and Hewet, they're all the same to me--all covered with spots,"
+he replied.  "He advises her to read Gibbon.  Did you know that?"
+
+Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior
+to her husband in powers of observation.  She merely said:
+
+"Nothing would surprise me.  Even that dreadful flying man we met
+at the dance--even Mr. Dalloway--even--"
+
+"I advise you to be circumspect," said Ridley.  "There's Willoughby,
+remember--Willoughby"; he pointed at a letter.
+
+Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her dressing-table.
+Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive, perpetually jocular,
+robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring after his daughter's
+manners and morals--hoping she wasn't a bore, and bidding them
+pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she were--
+and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion,
+and then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little
+natives who went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he
+roared English oaths at them, "popping my head out of the window
+just as I was, in my shirt sleeves.  The beggars had the sense to scatter."
+
+"If Theresa married Willoughby," she remarked, turning the page
+with a hairpin, "one doesn't see what's to prevent Rachel--"
+
+But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with
+the washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits
+of Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man,
+and yet Ridley couldn't simply point at the door and tell him to go. 
+The truth of it was, they saw too many people.  And so on and so on,
+more conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they
+were both ready to go down to tea.
+
+The first thing that caught Helen's eye as she came downstairs
+was a carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding
+on the tops of hats.  She had only time to gain the drawing-room
+before two names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid,
+and Mrs. Thornbury came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.
+
+"Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing," said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand. 
+"A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry."
+
+Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically.  She was a woman of
+forty perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust,
+though not as tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.
+
+She looked Helen straight in the face and said, "You have a charmin' house."
+
+She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you,
+and though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous
+at the same time.  Mrs. Thornbury acted as interpreter, making things
+smooth all round by a series of charming commonplace remarks.
+
+"I've taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose," she said, "to promise
+that you will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the benefit
+of your experience.  I'm sure no one here knows the country as
+well as you do.  No one takes such wonderful long walks.  No one,
+I'm sure, has your encyclopaedic knowledge upon every subject. 
+Mr. Wilfrid Flushing is a collector.  He has discovered really beautiful
+things already.  I had no notion that the peasants were so artistic--
+though of course in the past--"
+
+"Not old things--new things," interrupted Mrs. Flushing curtly. 
+"That is, if he takes my advice."
+
+The Ambroses had not lived for many years in London without knowing
+something of a good many people, by name at least, and Helen remembered
+hearing of the Flushings.  Mr. Flushing was a man who kept an old
+furniture shop; he had always said he would not marry because most
+women have red cheeks, and would not take a house because most houses
+have narrow staircases, and would not eat meat because most animals
+bleed when they are killed; and then he had married an eccentric
+aristocratic lady, who certainly was not pale, who looked as if she
+ate meat, who had forced him to do all the things he most disliked--
+and this then was the lady.  Helen looked at her with interest. 
+They had moved out into the garden, where the tea was laid under
+a tree, and Mrs. Flushing was helping herself to cherry jam. 
+She had a peculiar jerking movement of the body when she spoke,
+which caused the canary-coloured plume on her hat to jerk too. 
+Her small but finely-cut and vigorous features, together with the deep
+red of lips and cheeks, pointed to many generations of well-trained
+and well-nourished ancestors behind her.
+
+"Nothin' that's more than twenty years old interests me,"
+she continued.  "Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they stick
+'em in museums when they're only fit for burnin'."
+
+"I quite agree," Helen laughed.  "But my husband spends his life
+in digging up manuscripts which nobody wants."  She was amused
+by Ridley's expression of startled disapproval.
+
+"There's a clever man in London called John who paints ever
+so much better than the old masters," Mrs. Flushing continued. 
+"His pictures excite me--nothin' that's old excites me."
+
+"But even his pictures will become old," Mrs. Thornbury intervened.
+
+"Then I'll have 'em burnt, or I'll put it in my will," said Mrs. Flushing.
+
+"And Mrs. Flushing lived in one of the most beautiful old houses
+in England--Chillingley," Mrs. Thornbury explained to the rest
+of them.
+
+"If I'd my way I'd burn that to-morrow," Mrs. Flushing laughed. 
+She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless.
+
+"What does any sane person want with those great big houses?"
+she demanded.  "If you go downstairs after dark you're covered
+with black beetles, and the electric lights always goin' out. 
+What would you do if spiders came out of the tap when you turned
+on the hot water?" she demanded, fixing her eye on Helen.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose shrugged her shoulders with a smile.
+
+"This is what I like," said Mrs. Flushing.  She jerked her head at
+the Villa.  "A little house in a garden.  I had one once in Ireland. 
+One could lie in bed in the mornin' and pick roses outside the window
+with one's toes."
+
+"And the gardeners, weren't they surprised?"  Mrs. Thornbury enquired.
+
+"There were no gardeners," Mrs. Flushing chuckled.  "Nobody but me
+and an old woman without any teeth.  You know the poor in Ireland
+lose their teeth after they're twenty.  But you wouldn't expect
+a politician to understand that--Arthur Balfour wouldn't understand that."
+
+Ridley sighed that he never expected any one to understand anything,
+least of all politicians.
+
+"However," he concluded, "there's one advantage I find in extreme
+old age--nothing matters a hang except one's food and one's digestion. 
+All I ask is to be left alone to moulder away in solitude.  It's obvious
+that the world's going as fast as it can to--the Nethermost Pit,
+and all I can do is to sit still and consume as much of my own
+smoke as possible."  He groaned, and with a melancholy glance laid
+the jam on his bread, for he felt the atmosphere of this abrupt
+lady distinctly unsympathetic.
+
+"I always contradict my husband when he says that," said Mrs. Thornbury
+sweetly.  "You men!  Where would you be if it weren't for the women!"
+
+"Read the _Symposium_," said Ridley grimly.
+
+"_Symposium_?" cried Mrs. Flushing.  "That's Latin or Greek? 
+Tell me, is there a good translation?"
+
+"No," said Ridley.  "You will have to learn Greek."
+
+Mrs. Flushing cried, "Ah, ah, ah!  I'd rather break stones in the road. 
+I always envy the men who break stones and sit on those nice little
+heaps all day wearin' spectacles.  I'd infinitely rather break
+stones than clean out poultry runs, or feed the cows, or--"
+
+Here Rachel came up from the lower garden with a book in her hand.
+
+"What's that book?" said Ridley, when she had shaken hands.
+
+"It's Gibbon," said Rachel as she sat down.
+
+"_The_ _Decline_ _and_ _Fall_ _of_ _the_ _Roman_ _Empire_?"
+said Mrs. Thornbury.  "A very wonderful book, I know.  My dear
+father was always quoting it at us, with the result that we resolved
+never to read a line."
+
+"Gibbon the historian?" enquired Mrs. Flushing.  "I connect him
+with some of the happiest hours of my life.  We used to lie in bed
+and read Gibbon--about the massacres of the Christians, I remember--
+when we were supposed to be asleep.  It's no joke, I can tell you,
+readin' a great big book, in double columns, by a night-light,
+and the light that comes through a chink in the door.  Then there
+were the moths--tiger moths, yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. 
+Louisa, my sister, would have the window open.  I wanted it shut. 
+We fought every night of our lives over that window.  Have you ever
+seen a moth dyin' in a night-light?" she enquired.
+
+Again there was an interruption.  Hewet and Hirst appeared
+at the drawing-room window and came up to the tea-table.
+
+Rachel's heart beat hard.  She was conscious of an extraordinary
+intensity in everything, as though their presence stripped some cover
+off the surface of things; but the greetings were remarkably commonplace.
+
+"Excuse me," said Hirst, rising from his chair directly he
+had sat down.  He went into the drawing-room, and returned
+with a cushion which he placed carefully upon his seat.
+
+"Rheumatism," he remarked, as he sat down for the second time.
+
+"The result of the dance?"  Helen enquired.
+
+"Whenever I get at all run down I tend to be rheumatic," Hirst stated. 
+He bent his wrist back sharply.  "I hear little pieces of chalk
+grinding together!"
+
+Rachel looked at him.  She was amused, and yet she was respectful;
+if such a thing could be, the upper part of her face seemed to laugh,
+and the lower part to check its laughter.
+
+Hewet picked up the book that lay on the ground.
+
+"You like this?" he asked in an undertone.
+
+"No, I don't like it," she replied.  She had indeed been trying
+all the afternoon to read it, and for some reason the glory which
+she had perceived at first had faded, and, read as she would,
+she could not grasp the meaning with her mind.
+
+"It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth," she hazarded. 
+Evidently she meant Hewet alone to hear her words, but Hirst demanded,
+"What d'you mean?"
+
+She was instantly ashamed of her figure of speech, for she could
+not explain it in words of sober criticism.
+
+"Surely it's the most perfect style, so far as style goes, that's ever
+been invented," he continued.  "Every sentence is practically perfect,
+and the wit--"
+
+"Ugly in body, repulsive in mind," she thought, instead of thinking
+about Gibbon's style.  "Yes, but strong, searching, unyielding in mind." 
+She looked at his big head, a disproportionate part of which was
+occupied by the forehead, and at the direct, severe eyes.
+
+"I give you up in despair," he said.  He meant it lightly, but she
+took it seriously, and believed that her value as a human being was
+lessened because she did not happen to admire the style of Gibbon. 
+The others were talking now in a group about the native villages
+which Mrs. Flushing ought to visit.
+
+"I despair too," she said impetuously.  "How are you going to judge
+people merely by their minds?"
+
+"You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect," said St. John in his
+jaunty manner, which was always irritating because it made the person
+he talked to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest.  "'Be good,
+sweet maid'--I thought Mr. Kingsley and my Aunt were now obsolete."
+
+"One can be very nice without having read a book," she asserted. 
+Very silly and simple her words sounded, and laid her open
+to derision.
+
+"Did I ever deny it?"  Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.
+
+Most unexpectedly Mrs. Thornbury here intervened, either because it
+was her mission to keep things smooth or because she had long
+wished to speak to Mr. Hirst, feeling as she did that young men
+were her sons.
+
+"I have lived all my life with people like your Aunt, Mr. Hirst,"
+she said, leaning forward in her chair.  Her brown squirrel-like
+eyes became even brighter than usual.  "They have never heard
+of Gibbon.  They only care for their pheasants and their peasants. 
+They are great big men who look so fine on horseback, as people
+must have done, I think, in the days of the great wars.  Say what
+you like against them--they are animal, they are unintellectual;
+they don't read themselves, and they don't want others to read,
+but they are some of the finest and the kindest human beings on
+the face of the earth!  You would be surprised at some of the stories
+I could tell.  You have never guessed, perhaps, at all the romances
+that go on in the heart of the country.  There are the people, I feel,
+among whom Shakespeare will be born if he is ever born again. 
+In those old houses, up among the Downs--"
+
+"My Aunt," Hirst interrupted, "spends her life in East Lambeth
+among the degraded poor.  I only quoted my Aunt because she is
+inclined to persecute people she calls 'intellectual,' which is
+what I suspect Miss Vinrace of doing.  It's all the fashion now. 
+If you're clever it's always taken for granted that you're completely
+without sympathy, understanding, affection--all the things that
+really matter.  Oh, you Christians!  You're the most conceited,
+patronising, hypocritical set of old humbugs in the kingdom!  Of course,"
+he continued, "I'm the first to allow your country gentlemen great merits. 
+For one thing, they're probably quite frank about their passions,
+which we are not.  My father, who is a clergyman in Norfolk,
+says that there is hardly a squire in the country who does not--"
+
+"But about Gibbon?"  Hewet interrupted.  The look of nervous tension
+which had come over every face was relaxed by the interruption.
+
+"You find him monotonous, I suppose.  But you know--" He opened
+the book, and began searching for passages to read aloud, and in
+a little time he found a good one which he considered suitable. 
+But there was nothing in the world that bored Ridley more than being
+read aloud to, and he was besides scrupulously fastidious as to
+the dress and behaviour of ladies.  In the space of fifteen minutes
+he had decided against Mrs. Flushing on the ground that her orange
+plume did not suit her complexion, that she spoke too loud, that she
+crossed her legs, and finally, when he saw her accept a cigarette
+that Hewet offered her, he jumped up, exclaiming something about
+"bar parlours," and left them.  Mrs. Flushing was evidently relieved
+by his departure.  She puffed her cigarette, stuck her legs out,
+and examined Helen closely as to the character and reputation
+of their common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry.  By a series of little
+strategems she drove her to define Mrs. Parry as somewhat elderly,
+by no means beautiful, very much made up--an insolent old harridan,
+in short, whose parties were amusing because one met odd people;
+but Helen herself always pitied poor Mr. Parry, who was understood
+to be shut up downstairs with cases full of gems, while his
+wife enjoyed herself in the drawing-room. "Not that I believe
+what people say against her--although she hints, of course--"
+Upon which Mrs. Flushing cried out with delight:
+
+"She's my first cousin!  Go on--go on!"
+
+When Mrs. Flushing rose to go she was obviously delighted with
+her new acquaintances.  She made three or four different plans
+for meeting or going on an expedition, or showing Helen the things
+they had bought, on her way to the carriage.  She included them
+all in a vague but magnificent invitation.
+
+As Helen returned to the garden again, Ridley's words of warning
+came into her head, and she hesitated a moment and looked at Rachel
+sitting between Hirst and Hewet.  But she could draw no conclusions,
+for Hewet was still reading Gibbon aloud, and Rachel, for all
+the expression she had, might have been a shell, and his words
+water rubbing against her ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge
+of a rock.
+
+Hewet's voice was very pleasant.  When he reached the end
+of the period Hewet stopped, and no one volunteered any criticism.
+
+"I do adore the aristocracy!"  Hirst exclaimed after a moment's pause. 
+"They're so amazingly unscrupulous.  None of us would dare to behave
+as that woman behaves."
+
+"What I like about them," said Helen as she sat down, "is that they're
+so well put together.  Naked, Mrs. Flushing would be superb. 
+Dressed as she dresses, it's absurd, of course."
+
+"Yes," said Hirst.  A shade of depression crossed his face. 
+"I've never weighed more than ten stone in my life," he said,
+"which is ridiculous, considering my height, and I've actually
+gone down in weight since we came here.  I daresay that accounts
+for the rheumatism."  Again he jerked his wrist back sharply,
+so that Helen might hear the grinding of the chalk stones. 
+She could not help smiling.
+
+"It's no laughing matter for me, I assure you," he protested. 
+"My mother's a chronic invalid, and I'm always expecting to be
+told that I've got heart disease myself.  Rheumatism always goes
+to the heart in the end."
+
+"For goodness' sake, Hirst," Hewet protested; "one might think
+you were an old cripple of eighty.  If it comes to that, I had
+an aunt who died of cancer myself, but I put a bold face on it--"
+He rose and began tilting his chair backwards and forwards
+on its hind legs.  "Is any one here inclined for a walk?"
+he said.  "There's a magnificent walk, up behind the house. 
+You come out on to a cliff and look right down into the sea. 
+The rocks are all red; you can see them through the water. 
+The other day I saw a sight that fairly took my breath away--
+about twenty jelly-fish, semi-transparent, pink, with long streamers,
+floating on the top of the waves."
+
+"Sure they weren't mermaids?" said Hirst.  "It's much too hot
+to climb uphill."  He looked at Helen, who showed no signs of moving.
+
+"Yes, it's too hot," Helen decided.
+
+There was a short silence.
+
+"I'd like to come," said Rachel.
+
+"But she might have said that anyhow," Helen thought to herself
+as Hewet and Rachel went away together, and Helen was left alone
+with St. John, to St. John's obvious satisfaction.
+
+He may have been satisfied, but his usual difficulty in deciding
+that one subject was more deserving of notice than another prevented
+him from speaking for some time.  He sat staring intently at the head
+of a dead match, while Helen considered--so it seemed from the expression
+of her eyes--something not closely connected with the present moment.
+
+At last St. John exclaimed, "Damn!  Damn everything!  Damn everybody!"
+he added.  "At Cambridge there are people to talk to."
+
+"At Cambridge there are people to talk to," Helen echoed him,
+rhythmically and absent-mindedly. Then she woke up.  "By the way,
+have you settled what you're going to do--is it to be Cambridge or
+the Bar?"
+
+He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for Helen was
+still slightly inattentive.  She had been thinking about Rachel
+and which of the two young men she was likely to fall in love with,
+and now sitting opposite to Hirst she thought, "He's ugly. 
+It's a pity they're so ugly."
+
+She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking
+of the clever, honest, interesting young men she knew, of whom
+Hirst was a good example, and wondering whether it was necessary
+that thought and scholarship should thus maltreat their bodies,
+and should thus elevate their minds to a very high tower from which
+the human race appeared to them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.
+
+"And the future?" she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men
+becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming
+more and more like Rachel.  "Oh no," she concluded, glancing at him,
+"one wouldn't marry you.  Well, then, the future of the race
+is in the hands of Susan and Arthur; no--that's dreadful. 
+Of farm labourers; no--not of the English at all, but of Russians
+and Chinese."  This train of thought did not satisfy her, and was
+interrupted by St. John, who began again:
+
+"I wish you knew Bennett.  He's the greatest man in the world."
+
+"Bennett?" she enquired.  Becoming more at ease, St. John dropped
+the concentrated abruptness of his manner, and explained that Bennett
+was a man who lived in an old windmill six miles out of Cambridge. 
+He lived the perfect life, according to St. John, very lonely,
+very simple, caring only for the truth of things, always ready to talk,
+and extraordinarily modest, though his mind was of the greatest.
+
+"Don't you think," said St. John, when he had done describing him,
+"that kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather flimsy?  Did you
+notice at tea how poor old Hewet had to change the conversation? 
+How they were all ready to pounce upon me because they thought I
+was going to say something improper?  It wasn't anything, really. 
+If Bennett had been there he'd have said exactly what he meant to say,
+or he'd have got up and gone.  But there's something rather bad for
+the character in that--I mean if one hasn't got Bennett's character. 
+It's inclined to make one bitter.  Should you say that I was bitter?"
+
+Helen did not answer, and he continued:
+
+"Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it's a beastly thing to be. 
+But the worst of me is that I'm so envious.  I envy every one. 
+I can't endure people who do things better than I do--perfectly absurd
+things too--waiters balancing piles of plates--even Arthur,
+because Susan's in love with him.  I want people to like me,
+and they don't. It's partly my appearance, I expect," he continued,
+"though it's an absolute lie to say I've Jewish blood in me--
+as a matter of fact we've been in Norfolk, Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall,
+for three centuries at least.  It must be awfully soothing to be like you--
+every one liking one at once."
+
+"I assure you they don't," Helen laughed.
+
+"They do," said Hirst with conviction.  "In the first place,
+you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen; in the second,
+you have an exceptionally nice nature."
+
+If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his teacup
+he would have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure, partly with
+an impulse of affection towards the young man who had seemed,
+and would seem again, so ugly and so limited.  She pitied him,
+for she suspected that he suffered, and she was interested in him,
+for many of the things he said seemed to her true; she admired
+the morality of youth, and yet she felt imprisoned.  As if her
+instinct were to escape to something brightly coloured and impersonal,
+which she could hold in her hands, she went into the house and returned
+with her embroidery.  But he was not interested in her embroidery;
+he did not even look at it.
+
+"About Miss Vinrace," he began,--"oh, look here, do let's be St. John
+and Helen, and Rachel and Terence--what's she like?  Does she reason,
+does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool?"
+
+"Oh no," said Helen, with great decision.  From her observations
+at tea she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to
+educate Rachel.  She had gradually come to be interested in her niece,
+and fond of her; she disliked some things about her very much,
+she was amused by others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live
+if unformed human being, experimental, and not always fortunate
+in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a capacity
+for feeling.  Somewhere in the depths of her, too, she was bound
+to Rachel by the indestructible if inexplicable ties of sex. 
+"She seems vague, but she's a will of her own," she said, as if in
+the interval she had run through her qualities.
+
+The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being
+difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses
+into the dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in her skeins
+of silk, or, with head a little drawn back and eyes narrowed,
+considered the effect of the whole.  Thus she merely said, "Um-m-m" to
+St. John's next remark, "I shall ask her to go for a walk with me."
+
+Perhaps he resented this division of attention.  He sat silent
+watching Helen closely.
+
+"You're absolutely happy," he proclaimed at last.
+
+"Yes?"  Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.
+
+"Marriage, I suppose," said St. John.
+
+"Yes," said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.
+
+"Children?"  St. John enquired.
+
+"Yes," said Helen, sticking her needle in again.  "I don't know why
+I'm happy," she suddenly laughed, looking him full in the face. 
+There was a considerable pause.
+
+"There's an abyss between us," said St. John.  His voice sounded
+as if it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks. 
+"You're infinitely simpler than I am.  Women always are, of course. 
+That's the difficulty.  One never knows how a woman gets there. 
+Supposing all the time you're thinking, 'Oh, what a morbid
+young man!'"
+
+Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand. 
+From her position she saw his head in front of the dark pyramid
+of a magnolia-tree. With one foot raised on the rung of a chair,
+and her elbow out in the attitude for sewing, her own figure possessed
+the sublimity of a woman's of the early world, spinning the thread
+of fate--the sublimity possessed by many women of the present
+day who fall into the attitude required by scrubbing or sewing. 
+St. John looked at her.
+
+"I suppose you've never paid any a compliment in the course
+of your life," he said irrelevantly.
+
+"I spoil Ridley rather," Helen considered.
+
+"I'm going to ask you point blank--do you like me?"
+
+After a certain pause, she replied, "Yes, certainly."
+
+"Thank God!" he exclaimed.  "That's one mercy.  You see," he continued
+with emotion, "I'd rather you liked me than any one I've ever met."
+
+"What about the five philosophers?" said Helen, with a laugh,
+stitching firmly and swiftly at her canvas.  "I wish you'd
+describe them."
+
+Hirst had no particular wish to describe them, but when he began
+to consider them he found himself soothed and strengthened.  Far away
+to the other side of the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey
+medieval courts, they appeared remarkable figures, free-spoken men
+with whom one could be at ease; incomparably more subtle in emotion
+than the people here.  They gave him, certainly, what no woman
+could give him, not Helen even.  Warming at the thought of them,
+he went on to lay his case before Mrs. Ambrose.  Should he stay
+on at Cambridge or should he go to the Bar?  One day he thought
+one thing, another day another.  Helen listened attentively. 
+At last, without any preface, she pronounced her decision.
+
+"Leave Cambridge and go to the Bar," she said.  He pressed her
+for her reasons.
+
+"I think you'd enjoy London more," she said.  It did not seem
+a very subtle reason, but she appeared to think it sufficient. 
+She looked at him against the background of flowering magnolia. 
+There was something curious in the sight.  Perhaps it was that the heavy
+wax-like flowers were so smooth and inarticulate, and his face--
+he had thrown his hat away, his hair was rumpled, he held his
+eye-glasses in his hand, so that a red mark appeared on either side
+of his nose--was so worried and garrulous.  It was a beautiful bush,
+spreading very widely, and all the time she had sat there talking she
+had been noticing the patches of shade and the shape of the leaves,
+and the way the great white flowers sat in the midst of the green. 
+She had noticed it half-consciously, nevertheless the pattern had
+become part of their talk.  She laid down her sewing, and began to walk
+up and down the garden, and Hirst rose too and paced by her side. 
+He was rather disturbed, uncomfortable, and full of thought. 
+Neither of them spoke.
+
+The sun was beginning to go down, and a change had come over the mountains,
+as if they were robbed of their earthly substance, and composed merely
+of intense blue mist.  Long thin clouds of flamingo red, with edges
+like the edges of curled ostrich feathers, lay up and down the sky
+at different altitudes.  The roofs of the town seemed to have sunk
+lower than usual; the cypresses appeared very black between the roofs,
+and the roofs themselves were brown and white.  As usual in the evening,
+single cries and single bells became audible rising from beneath.
+
+St. John stopped suddenly.
+
+"Well, you must take the responsibility," he said.  "I've made up
+my mind; I shall go to the Bar."
+
+His words were very serious, almost emotional; they recalled Helen
+after a second's hesitation.
+
+"I'm sure you're right," she said warmly, and shook the hand he
+held out.  "You'll be a great man, I'm certain."
+
+Then, as if to make him look at the scene, she swept her hand round
+the immense circumference of the view.  From the sea, over the roofs
+of the town, across the crests of the mountains, over the river
+and the plain, and again across the crests of the mountains it
+swept until it reached the villa, the garden, the magnolia-tree,
+and the figures of Hirst and herself standing together, when it
+dropped to her side.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+
+
+Hewet and Rachel had long ago reached the particular place on
+the edge of the cliff where, looking down into the sea, you might
+chance on jelly-fish and dolphins.  Looking the other way, the vast
+expanse of land gave them a sensation which is given by no view,
+however extended, in England; the villages and the hills there
+having names, and the farthest horizon of hills as often as not
+dipping and showing a line of mist which is the sea; here the view
+was one of infinite sun-dried earth, earth pointed in pinnacles,
+heaped in vast barriers, earth widening and spreading away and away
+like the immense floor of the sea, earth chequered by day and by night,
+and partitioned into different lands, where famous cities were founded,
+and the races of men changed from dark savages to white civilised men,
+and back to dark savages again.  Perhaps their English blood
+made this prospect uncomfortably impersonal and hostile to them,
+for having once turned their faces that way they next turned them
+to the sea, and for the rest of the time sat looking at the sea. 
+The sea, though it was a thin and sparkling water here, which seemed
+incapable of surge or anger, eventually narrowed itself, clouded its
+pure tint with grey, and swirled through narrow channels and dashed
+in a shiver of broken waters against massive granite rocks. 
+It was this sea that flowed up to the mouth of the Thames;
+and the Thames washed the roots of the city of London.
+
+Hewet's thoughts had followed some such course as this, for the
+first thing he said as they stood on the edge of the cliff was--
+
+"I'd like to be in England!"
+
+Rachel lay down on her elbow, and parted the tall grasses which grew
+on the edge, so that she might have a clear view.  The water was
+very calm; rocking up and down at the base of the cliff, and so clear
+that one could see the red of the stones at the bottom of it. 
+So it had been at the birth of the world, and so it had remained
+ever since.  Probably no human being had ever broken that water
+with boat or with body.  Obeying some impulse, she determined to mar
+that eternity of peace, and threw the largest pebble she could find. 
+It struck the water, and the ripples spread out and out. 
+Hewet looked down too.
+
+"It's wonderful," he said, as they widened and ceased.  The freshness
+and the newness seemed to him wonderful.  He threw a pebble next. 
+There was scarcely any sound.
+
+"But England," Rachel murmured in the absorbed tone of one whose eyes
+are concentrated upon some sight.  "What d'you want with England?"
+
+"My friends chiefly," he said, "and all the things one does."
+
+He could look at Rachel without her noticing it.  She was still
+absorbed in the water and the exquisitely pleasant sensations
+which a little depth of the sea washing over rocks suggests. 
+He noticed that she was wearing a dress of deep blue colour, made of
+a soft thin cotton stuff, which clung to the shape of her body. 
+It was a body with the angles and hollows of a young woman's body
+not yet developed, but in no way distorted, and thus interesting
+and even lovable.  Raising his eyes Hewet observed her head;
+she had taken her hat off, and the face rested on her hand. 
+As she looked down into the sea, her lips were slightly parted. 
+The expression was one of childlike intentness, as if she were
+watching for a fish to swim past over the clear red rocks. 
+Nevertheless her twenty-four years of life had given her a look
+of reserve.  Her hand, which lay on the ground, the fingers curling
+slightly in, was well shaped and competent; the square-tipped
+and nervous fingers were the fingers of a musician.  With something
+like anguish Hewet realised that, far from being unattractive,
+her body was very attractive to him.  She looked up suddenly. 
+Her eyes were full of eagerness and interest.
+
+"You write novels?" she asked.
+
+For the moment he could not think what he was saying.  He was
+overcome with the desire to hold her in his arms.
+
+"Oh yes," he said.  "That is, I want to write them."
+
+She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.
+
+"Novels," she repeated.  "Why do you write novels?  You ought
+to write music.  Music, you see"--she shifted her eyes, and became
+less desirable as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain
+change upon her face--"music goes straight for things.  It says
+all there is to say at once.  With writing it seems to me there's
+so much"--she paused for an expression, and rubbed her fingers
+in the earth--"scratching on the matchbox.  Most of the time when I
+was reading Gibbon this afternoon I was horribly, oh infernally,
+damnably bored!"  She gave a shake of laughter, looking at Hewet,
+who laughed too.
+
+"_I_ shan't lend you books," he remarked.
+
+"Why is it," Rachel continued, "that I can laugh at Mr. Hirst
+to you, but not to his face?  At tea I was completely overwhelmed,
+not by his ugliness--by his mind."  She enclosed a circle in the air
+with her hands.  She realised with a great sense of comfort who
+easily she could talk to Hewet, those thorns or ragged corners
+which tear the surface of some relationships being smoothed away.
+
+"So I observed," said Hewet.  "That's a thing that never ceases
+to amaze me."  He had recovered his composure to such an extent
+that he could light and smoke a cigarette, and feeling her ease,
+became happy and easy himself.
+
+"The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women,
+have for men," he went on.  "I believe we must have the sort of power
+over you that we're said to have over horses.  They see us three times
+as big as we are or they'd never obey us.  For that very reason,
+I'm inclined to doubt that you'll ever do anything even when you
+have the vote."  He looked at her reflectively.  She appeared very
+smooth and sensitive and young.  "It'll take at least six generations
+before you're sufficiently thick-skinned to go into law courts
+and business offices.  Consider what a bully the ordinary man is,"
+he continued, "the ordinary hard-working, rather ambitious solicitor
+or man of business with a family to bring up and a certain position
+to maintain.  And then, of course, the daughters have to give way
+to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have to bully and
+shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes over again. 
+And meanwhile there are the women in the background.  . . . Do you
+really think that the vote will do you any good?"
+
+"The vote?"  Rachel repeated.  She had to visualise it as a little
+bit of paper which she dropped into a box before she understood
+his question, and looking at each other they smiled at something
+absurd in the question.
+
+"Not to me," she said.  "But I play the piano.  . . . Are men really
+like that?" she asked, returning to the question that interested her. 
+"I'm not afraid of you."  She looked at him easily.
+
+"Oh, I'm different," Hewet replied.  "I've got between six and seven
+hundred a year of my own.  And then no one takes a novelist seriously,
+thank heavens.  There's no doubt it helps to make up for the drudgery
+of a profession if a man's taken very, very seriously by every one--
+if he gets appointments, and has offices and a title, and lots
+of letters after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees. 
+I don't grudge it 'em, though sometimes it comes over me--what an
+amazing concoction!  What a miracle the masculine conception of
+life is--judges, civil servants, army, navy, Houses of Parliament,
+lord mayors--what a world we've made of it!  Look at Hirst now. 
+I assure you," he said, "not a day's passed since we came here without
+a discussion as to whether he's to stay on at Cambridge or to go
+to the Bar.  It's his career--his sacred career.  And if I've
+heard it twenty times, I'm sure his mother and sister have heard
+it five hundred times.  Can't you imagine the family conclaves,
+and the sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St. John
+must have the school-room to himself--'St. John's working,' 'St. John
+wants his tea brought to him.'  Don't you know the kind of thing? 
+No wonder that St. John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. 
+It is too.  He has to earn his living.  But St. John's sister--"
+Hewet puffed in silence.  "No one takes her seriously, poor dear. 
+She feeds the rabbits."
+
+"Yes," said Rachel.  "I've fed rabbits for twenty-four years; it seems
+odd now."  She looked meditative, and Hewet, who had been talking
+much at random and instinctively adopting the feminine point of view,
+saw that she would now talk about herself, which was what he wanted,
+for so they might come to know each other.
+
+She looked back meditatively upon her past life.
+
+"How do you spend your day?" he asked.
+
+She meditated still.  When she thought of their day it seemed
+to her it was cut into four pieces by their meals.  These divisions
+were absolutely rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate
+themselves within the four rigid bars.  Looking back at her life,
+that was what she saw.
+
+"Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight," she said.
+
+"Well," said Hewet, "what d'you do in the morning?"
+
+"I need to play the piano for hours and hours."
+
+"And after luncheon?"
+
+"Then I went shopping with one of my aunts.  Or we went to see some one,
+or we took a message; or we did something that had to be done--
+the taps might be leaking.  They visit the poor a good deal--
+old char-women with bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. 
+Or I used to walk in the park by myself.  And after tea people
+sometimes called; or in summer we sat in the garden or played croquet;
+in winter I read aloud, while they worked; after dinner I played
+the piano and they wrote letters.  If father was at home we had friends
+of his to dinner, and about once a month we went up to the play. 
+Every now and then we dined out; sometimes I went to a dance
+in London, but that was difficult because of getting back. 
+The people we saw were old family friends, and relations, but we
+didn't see many people.  There was the clergyman, Mr. Pepper,
+and the Hunts.  Father generally wanted to be quiet when he
+came home, because he works very hard at Hull.  Also my aunts aren't
+very strong.  A house takes up a lot of time if you do it properly. 
+Our servants were always bad, and so Aunt Lucy used to do a good deal
+in the kitchen, and Aunt Clara, I think, spent most of the morning
+dusting the drawing-room and going through the linen and silver. 
+Then there were the dogs.  They had to be exercised, besides being
+washed and brushed.  Now Sandy's dead, but Aunt Clara has a very
+old cockatoo that came from India.  Everything in our house,"
+she exclaimed, "comes from somewhere!  It's full of old furniture,
+not really old, Victorian, things mother's family had or father's
+family had, which they didn't like to get rid of, I suppose,
+though we've really no room for them.  It's rather a nice house,"
+she continued, "except that it's a little dingy--dull I should say." 
+She called up before her eyes a vision of the drawing-room at home;
+it was a large oblong room, with a square window opening on the garden. 
+Green plush chairs stood against the wall; there was a heavy carved
+book-case, with glass doors, and a general impression of faded
+sofa covers, large spaces of pale green, and baskets with pieces
+of wool-work dropping out of them.  Photographs from old Italian
+masterpieces hung on the walls, and views of Venetian bridges and
+Swedish waterfalls which members of the family had seen years ago. 
+There were also one or two portraits of fathers and grandmothers,
+and an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after the picture by Watts. 
+It was a room without definite character, being neither typically
+and openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor really comfortable. 
+Rachel roused herself from the contemplation of this familiar
+picture.
+
+"But this isn't very interesting for you," she said, looking up.
+
+"Good Lord!"  Hewet exclaimed.  "I've never been so much interested
+in my life."  She then realised that while she had been thinking
+of Richmond, his eyes had never left her face.  The knowledge
+of this excited her.
+
+"Go on, please go on," he urged.  "Let's imagine it's a Wednesday. 
+You're all at luncheon.  You sit there, and Aunt Lucy there,
+and Aunt Clara here"; he arranged three pebbles on the grass
+between them.
+
+"Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb," Rachel continued. 
+She fixed her gaze upon the pebbles.  "There's a very ugly yellow
+china stand in front of me, called a dumb waiter, on which are
+three dishes, one for biscuits, one for butter, and one for cheese. 
+There's a pot of ferns.  Then there's Blanche the maid, who snuffles
+because of her nose.  We talk--oh yes, it's Aunt Lucy's afternoon
+at Walworth, so we're rather quick over luncheon.  She goes off. 
+She has a purple bag, and a black notebook.  Aunt Clara has
+what they call a G.F.S. meeting in the drawing-room on Wednesday,
+so I take the dogs out.  I go up Richmond Hill, along the terrace,
+into the park.  It's the 18th of April--the same day as it is here. 
+It's spring in England.  The ground is rather damp.  However, I cross
+the road and get on to the grass and we walk along, and I sing
+as I always do when I'm alone, until we come to the open place
+where you can see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day. 
+Hampstead Church spire there, Westminster Cathedral over there,
+and factory chimneys about here.  There's generally a haze over the low
+parts of London; but it's often blue over the park when London's
+in a mist.  It's the open place that the balloons cross going over
+to Hurlingham.  They're pale yellow.  Well, then, it smells very good,
+particularly if they happen to be burning wood in the keeper's lodge
+which is there.  I could tell you now how to get from place to place,
+and exactly what trees you'd pass, and where you'd cross the roads. 
+You see, I played there when I was small.  Spring is good, but it's
+best in the autumn when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky,
+and I go back through the streets, and you can't see people properly;
+they come past very quick, you just see their faces and then
+they're gone--that's what I like--and no one knows in the least what
+you're doing--"
+
+"But you have to be back for tea, I suppose?"  Hewet checked her.
+
+"Tea?  Oh yes.  Five o'clock. Then I say what I've done, and my
+aunts say what they've done, and perhaps some one comes in: 
+Mrs. Hunt, let's suppose.  She's an old lady with a lame leg. 
+She has or she once had eight children; so we ask after them. 
+They're all over the world; so we ask where they are, and sometimes
+they're ill, or they're stationed in a cholera district, or in
+some place where it only rains once in five months.  Mrs. Hunt,"
+she said with a smile, "had a son who was hugged to death by
+a bear."
+
+Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused
+by the same things that amused her.  She was reassured.  But she
+thought it necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.
+
+"You can't conceive how it interests me," he said. 
+Indeed, his cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another.
+
+"Why does it interest you?" she asked.
+
+"Partly because you're a woman," he replied.  When he said this,
+Rachel, who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a
+childlike state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became
+self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under observation,
+as she felt with St. John Hirst.  She was about to launch into an argument
+which would have made them both feel bitterly against each other,
+and to define sensations which had no such importance as words
+were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a different direction.
+
+"I've often walked along the streets where people live all in a row,
+and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on
+earth the women were doing inside," he said.  "Just consider: 
+it's the beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years
+ago no woman had ever come out by herself and said things at all. 
+There it was going on in the background, for all those thousands
+of years, this curious silent unrepresented life.  Of course we're
+always writing about women--abusing them, or jeering at them,
+or worshipping them; but it's never come from women themselves. 
+I believe we still don't know in the least how they live,
+or what they feel, or what they do precisely.  If one's a man,
+the only confidences one gets are from young women about their
+love affairs.  But the lives of women of forty, of unmarried women,
+of working women, of women who keep shops and bring up children,
+of women like your aunts or Mrs. Thornbury or Miss Allan--
+one knows nothing whatever about them.  They won't tell you. 
+Either they're afraid, or they've got a way of treating men. 
+It's the man's view that's represented, you see.  Think of a
+railway train:  fifteen carriages for men who want to smoke. 
+Doesn't it make your blood boil?  If I were a woman I'd blow
+some one's brains out.  Don't you laugh at us a great deal? 
+Don't you think it all a great humbug?  You, I mean--how does it
+all strike you?"
+
+His determination to know, while it gave meaning to their talk,
+hampered her; he seemed to press further and further, and made it
+appear so important.  She took some time to answer, and during that
+time she went over and over the course of her twenty-four years,
+lighting now on one point, now on another--on her aunts, her mother,
+her father, and at last her mind fixed upon her aunts and her father,
+and she tried to describe them as at this distance they appeared
+to her.
+
+They were very much afraid of her father.  He was a great dim force
+in the house, by means of which they held on to the great world
+which is represented every morning in the _Times_.  But the real
+life of the house was something quite different from this. 
+It went on independently of Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself
+from him.  He was good-humoured towards them, but contemptuous. 
+She had always taken it for granted that his point of view was just,
+and founded upon an ideal scale of things where the life of one
+person was absolutely more important than the life of another,
+and that in that scale they were much less importance than he was. 
+But did she really believe that?  Hewet's words made her think. 
+She always submitted to her father, just as they did, but it was her
+aunts who influenced her really; her aunts who built up the fine,
+closely woven substance of their life at home.  They were less
+splendid but more natural than her father was.  All her rages
+had been against them; it was their world with its four meals,
+its punctuality, and servants on the stairs at half-past ten, that she
+examined so closely and wanted so vehemently to smash to atoms. 
+Following these thoughts she looked up and said:
+
+"And there's a sort of beauty in it--there they are at Richmond
+at this very moment building things up.  They're all wrong,
+perhaps, but there's a sort of beauty in it," she repeated. 
+"It's so unconscious, so modest.  And yet they feel things. 
+They do mind if people die.  Old spinsters are always doing things. 
+I don't quite know what they do.  Only that was what I felt when I
+lived with them.  It was very real."
+
+She reviewed their little journeys to and fro, to Walworth,
+to charwomen with bad legs, to meetings for this and that,
+their minute acts of charity and unselfishness which flowered
+punctually from a definite view of what they ought to do,
+their friendships, their tastes and habits; she saw all these things
+like grains of sand falling, falling through innumerable days,
+making an atmosphere and building up a solid mass, a background. 
+Hewet observed her as she considered this.
+
+"Were you happy?" he demanded.
+
+Again she had become absorbed in something else, and he called
+her back to an unusually vivid consciousness of herself.
+
+"I was both," she replied.  "I was happy and I was miserable. 
+You've no conception what it's like--to be a young woman." 
+She looked straight at him.  "There are terrors and agonies,"
+she said, keeping her eye on him as if to detect the slightest hint
+of laughter.
+
+"I can believe it," he said.  He returned her look with perfect sincerity.
+
+"Women one sees in the streets," she said.
+
+"Prostitutes?"
+
+"Men kissing one."
+
+He nodded his head.
+
+"You were never told?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"And then," she began and stopped.  Here came in the great space
+of life into which no one had ever penetrated.  All that she had been
+saying about her father and her aunts and walks in Richmond Park,
+and what they did from hour to hour, was merely on the surface. 
+Hewet was watching her.  Did he demand that she should describe
+that also?  Why did he sit so near and keep his eye on her? 
+Why did they not have done with this searching and agony?  Why did
+they not kiss each other simply?  She wished to kiss him.  But all
+the time she went on spinning out words.
+
+"A girl is more lonely than a boy.  No one cares in the least what
+she does.  Nothing's expected of her.  Unless one's very pretty
+people don't listen to what you say.  . . . And that is what I like,"
+she added energetically, as if the memory were very happy. 
+"I like walking in Richmond Park and singing to myself and
+knowing it doesn't matter a damn to anybody.  I like seeing
+things go on--as we saw you that night when you didn't see us--
+I love the freedom of it--it's like being the wind or the sea." 
+She turned with a curious fling of her hands and looked at the sea. 
+It was still very blue, dancing away as far as the eye could reach,
+but the light on it was yellower, and the clouds were turning
+flamingo red.
+
+A feeling of intense depression crossed Hewet's mind as she spoke. 
+It seemed plain that she would never care for one person rather
+than another; she was evidently quite indifferent to him; they seemed
+to come very near, and then they were as far apart as ever again;
+and her gesture as she turned away had been oddly beautiful.
+
+"Nonsense," he said abruptly.  "You like people.  You like admiration. 
+Your real grudge against Hirst is that he doesn't admire you."
+
+She made no answer for some time.  Then she said:
+
+"That's probably true.  Of course I like people--I like almost
+every one I've ever met."
+
+She turned her back on the sea and regarded Hewet with friendly
+if critical eyes.  He was good-looking in the sense that he had
+always had a sufficiency of beef to eat and fresh air to breathe. 
+His head was big; the eyes were also large; though generally
+vague they could be forcible; and the lips were sensitive. 
+One might account him a man of considerable passion and fitful energy,
+likely to be at the mercy of moods which had little relation to facts;
+at once tolerant and fastidious.  The breadth of his forehead showed
+capacity for thought.  The interest with which Rachel looked at him
+was heard in her voice.
+
+"What novels do you write?" she asked.
+
+"I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; "the things people
+don't say.  But the difficulty is immense."  He sighed.  "However, you
+don't care," he continued.  He looked at her almost severely. 
+"Nobody cares.  All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person
+the writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he's put in. 
+As for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one's seen
+the thing, felt about it, make it stand in relation to other things,
+not one in a million cares for that.  And yet I sometimes wonder
+whether there's anything else in the whole world worth doing. 
+These other people," he indicated the hotel, "are always wanting
+something they can't get.  But there's an extraordinary satisfaction
+in writing, even in the attempt to write.  What you said just now
+is true:  one doesn't want to be things; one wants merely to be
+allowed to see them."
+
+Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he
+gazed out to sea.
+
+It was Rachel's turn now to feel depressed.  As he talked of writing
+he had become suddenly impersonal.  He might never care for any one;
+all that desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt
+pressing on her almost painfully, had completely vanished.
+
+"Are you a good writer?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," he said.  "I'm not first-rate, of course; I'm good second-rate;
+about as good as Thackeray, I should say."
+
+Rachel was amazed.  For one thing it amazed her to hear Thackeray
+called second-rate; and then she could not widen her point of
+view to believe that there could be great writers in existence
+at the present day, or if there were, that any one she knew
+could be a great writer, and his self-confidence astounded her,
+and he became more and more remote.
+
+"My other novel," Hewet continued, "is about a young man
+who is obsessed by an idea--the idea of being a gentleman. 
+He manages to exist at Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year. 
+He has a coat; it was once a very good coat.  But the trousers--
+they're not so good.  Well, he goes up to London, gets into
+good society, owing to an early-morning adventure on the banks
+of the Serpentine.  He is led into telling lies--my idea, you see,
+is to show the gradual corruption of the soul--calls himself the son
+of some great landed proprietor in Devonshire.  Meanwhile the coat
+becomes older and older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers. 
+Can't you imagine the wretched man, after some splendid evening
+of debauchery, contemplating these garments--hanging them over
+the end of the bed, arranging them now in full light, now in shade,
+and wondering whether they will survive him, or he will survive them? 
+Thoughts of suicide cross his mind.  He has a friend, too, a man
+who somehow subsists upon selling small birds, for which he sets
+traps in the fields near Uxbridge.  They're scholars, both of them. 
+I know one or two wretched starving creatures like that who quote
+Aristotle at you over a fried herring and a pint of porter. 
+Fashionable life, too, I have to represent at some length,
+in order to show my hero under all circumstances.  Lady Theo
+Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the good fortune to stop,
+is the daughter of a very fine old Tory peer.  I'm going to describe
+the kind of parties I once went to--the fashionable intellectuals,
+you know, who like to have the latest book on their tables. 
+They give parties, river parties, parties where you play games. 
+There's no difficulty in conceiving incidents; the difficulty is
+to put them into shape--not to get run away with, as Lady Theo was. 
+It ended disastrously for her, poor woman, for the book, as I
+planned it, was going to end in profound and sordid respectability. 
+Disowned by her father, she marries my hero, and they live in a snug
+little villa outside Croydon, in which town he is set up as a
+house agent.  He never succeeds in becoming a real gentleman after all. 
+That's the interesting part of it.  Does it seem to you the kind of book
+you'd like to read?" he enquired; "or perhaps you'd like my Stuart
+tragedy better," he continued, without waiting for her to answer him. 
+"My idea is that there's a certain quality of beauty in the past,
+which the ordinary historical novelist completely ruins by his
+absurd conventions.  The moon becomes the Regent of the Skies. 
+People clap spurs to their horses, and so on.  I'm going to treat
+people as though they were exactly the same as we are.  The advantage
+is that, detached from modern conditions, one can make them more
+intense and more abstract then people who live as we do."
+
+Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a certain
+amount of bewilderment.  They both sat thinking their own thoughts.
+
+"I'm not like Hirst," said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke meditatively;
+"I don't see circles of chalk between people's feet.  I sometimes wish
+I did.  It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused. 
+One can't come to any decision at all; one's less and less capable
+of making judgments.  D'you find that?  And then one never knows
+what any one feels.  We're all in the dark.  We try to find out,
+but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's
+opinion of another person?  One goes along thinking one knows;
+but one really doesn't know."
+
+As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and rearranging
+in the grass the stones which had represented Rachel and her aunts
+at luncheon.  He was speaking as much to himself as to Rachel. 
+He was reasoning against the desire, which had returned with intensity,
+to take her in his arms; to have done with indirectness; to explain
+exactly what he felt.  What he said was against his belief;
+all the things that were important about her he knew; he felt them
+in the air around them; but he said nothing; he went on arranging
+the stones.
+
+"I like you; d'you like me?"  Rachel suddenly observed.
+
+"I like you immensely," Hewet replied, speaking with the relief
+of a person who is unexpectedly given an opportunity of saying
+what he wants to say.  He stopped moving the pebbles.
+
+"Mightn't we call each other Rachel and Terence?" he asked.
+
+"Terence," Rachel repeated.  "Terence--that's like the cry of an owl."
+
+She looked up with a sudden rush of delight, and in looking at
+Terence with eyes widened by pleasure she was struck by the change
+that had come over the sky behind them.  The substantial blue day
+had faded to a paler and more ethereal blue; the clouds were pink,
+far away and closely packed together; and the peace of evening
+had replaced the heat of the southern afternoon, in which they
+had started on their walk.
+
+"It must be late!" she exclaimed.
+
+It was nearly eight o'clock.
+
+"But eight o'clock doesn't count here, does it?"  Terence asked,
+as they got up and turned inland again.  They began to walk rather
+quickly down the hill on a little path between the olive trees.
+
+They felt more intimate because they shared the knowledge of
+what eight o'clock in Richmond meant.  Terence walked in front,
+for there was not room for them side by side.
+
+"What I want to do in writing novels is very much what you want to do
+when you play the piano, I expect," he began, turning and speaking over
+his shoulder.  "We want to find out what's behind things, don't we?--
+Look at the lights down there," he continued, "scattered about anyhow. 
+Things I feel come to me like lights.  . . . I want to combine them. 
+. . . Have you ever seen fireworks that make figures? . . . I want
+to make figures.  . . . Is that what you want to do?"
+
+Now they were out on the road and could walk side by side.
+
+"When I play the piano?  Music is different.  . . . But I see what you mean." 
+They tried to invent theories and to make their theories agree. 
+As Hewet had no knowledge of music, Rachel took his stick and drew
+figures in the thin white dust to explain how Bach wrote his fugues.
+
+"My musical gift was ruined," he explained, as they walked on after
+one of these demonstrations, "by the village organist at home,
+who had invented a system of notation which he tried to teach me,
+with the result that I never got to the tune-playing at all. 
+My mother thought music wasn't manly for boys; she wanted me to
+kill rats and birds--that's the worst of living in the country. 
+We live in Devonshire.  It's the loveliest place in the world. 
+Only--it's always difficult at home when one's grown up.  I'd like
+you to know one of my sisters.  . . . Oh, here's your gate--"
+He pushed it open.  They paused for a moment.  She could not ask him
+to come in.  She could not say that she hoped they would meet again;
+there was nothing to be said, and so without a word she went through
+the gate, and was soon invisible.  Directly Hewet lost sight of her,
+he felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly than before. 
+Their talk had been interrupted in the middle, just as he
+was beginning to say the things he wanted to say.  After all,
+what had they been able to say?  He ran his mind over the things
+they had said, the random, unnecessary things which had eddied round
+and round and used up all the time, and drawn them so close together
+and flung them so far apart, and left him in the end unsatisfied,
+ignorant still of what she felt and of what she was like.  What was
+the use of talking, talking, merely talking?
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+
+
+It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came from
+England left a few people on the shores of Santa Marina who drove
+up to the hotel.  The fact that the Ambroses had a house where one
+could escape momentarily from the slightly inhuman atmosphere of an
+hotel was a source of genuine pleasure not only to Hirst and Hewet,
+but to the Elliots, the Thornburys, the Flushings, Miss Allan,
+Evelyn M., together with other people whose identity was so little
+developed that the Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names. 
+By degrees there was established a kind of correspondence between
+the two houses, the big and the small, so that at most hours
+of the day one house could guess what was going on in the other,
+and the words "the villa" and "the hotel" called up the idea of two
+separate systems of life.  Acquaintances showed signs of developing
+into friends, for that one tie to Mrs. Parry's drawing-room had
+inevitably split into many other ties attached to different parts
+of England, and sometimes these alliances seemed cynically fragile,
+and sometimes painfully acute, lacking as they did the supporting
+background of organised English life.  One night when the moon was
+round between the trees, Evelyn M. told Helen the story of her life,
+and claimed her everlasting friendship; or another occasion,
+merely because of a sigh, or a pause, or a word thoughtlessly dropped,
+poor Mrs. Elliot left the villa half in tears, vowing never again
+to meet the cold and scornful woman who had insulted her, and in truth,
+meet again they never did.  It did not seem worth while to piece
+together so slight a friendship.
+
+Hewet, indeed, might have found excellent material at this time up
+at the villa for some chapters in the novel which was to be called
+"Silence, or the Things People don't say."  Helen and Rachel had
+become very silent.  Having detected, as she thought, a secret,
+and judging that Rachel meant to keep it from her, Mrs. Ambrose
+respected it carefully, but from that cause, though unintentionally,
+a curious atmosphere of reserve grew up between them.  Instead of
+sharing their views upon all subjects, and plunging after an idea
+wherever it might lead, they spoke chiefly in comment upon
+the people they saw, and the secret between them made itself felt
+in what they said even of Thornburys and Elliots.  Always calm
+and unemotional in her judgments, Mrs. Ambrose was now inclined
+to be definitely pessimistic.  She was not severe upon individuals
+so much as incredulous of the kindness of destiny, fate, what happens
+in the long run, and apt to insist that this was generally adverse
+to people in proportion as they deserved well.  Even this theory she
+was ready to discard in favour of one which made chaos triumphant,
+things happening for no reason at all, and every one groping about
+in illusion and ignorance.  With a certain pleasure she developed
+these views to her niece, taking a letter from home as her test: 
+which gave good news, but might just as well have given bad. 
+How did she know that at this very moment both her children were
+not lying dead, crushed by motor omnibuses?  "It's happening
+to somebody:  why shouldn't it happen to me?" she would argue,
+her face taking on the stoical expression of anticipated sorrow. 
+however sincere these views may have been, they were undoubtedly
+called forth by the irrational state of her niece's mind. 
+It was so fluctuating, and went so quickly from joy to despair,
+that it seemed necessary to confront it with some stable opinion
+which naturally became dark as well as stable.  Perhaps Mrs. Ambrose
+had some idea that in leading the talk into these quarters she might
+discover what was in Rachel's mind, but it was difficult to judge,
+for sometimes she would agree with the gloomiest thing that was said,
+at other times she refused to listen, and rammed Helen's theories
+down her throat with laughter, chatter, ridicule of the wildest,
+and fierce bursts of anger even at what she called the "croaking of a
+raven in the mud."
+
+"It's hard enough without that," she asserted.
+
+"What's hard?"  Helen demanded.
+
+"Life," she replied, and then they both became silent.
+
+Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why
+an hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid
+that the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating
+to a spectator.  True to her creed, she did not attempt to interfere,
+although there were enough of those weak moments of depression
+to make it perfectly easy for a less scrupulous person to press
+through and know all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did
+not choose.  All these moods ran themselves into one general effect,
+which Helen compared to the sliding of a river, quick, quicker,
+quicker still, as it races to a waterfall.  Her instinct was to cry
+out Stop! but even had there been any use in crying Stop! she would
+have refrained, thinking it best that things should take their way,
+the water racing because the earth was shaped to make it race.
+
+It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was watched,
+or that there was anything in her manner likely to draw attention to her. 
+What had happened to her she did not know.  Her mind was very much
+in the condition of the racing water to which Helen compared it. 
+She wanted to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to see
+him when he was not there; it was an agony to miss seeing him;
+agonies were strewn all about her day on account of him, but she never
+asked herself what this force driving through her life arose from. 
+She thought of no result any more than a tree perpetually pressed
+downwards by the wind considers the result of being pressed downwards
+by the wind.
+
+During the two or three weeks which had passed since their walk,
+half a dozen notes from him had accumulated in her drawer.  She would
+read them, and spend the whole morning in a daze of happiness;
+the sunny land outside the window being no less capable of analysing
+its own colour and heat than she was of analysing hers.  In these moods
+she found it impossible to read or play the piano, even to move being
+beyond her inclination.  The time passed without her noticing it. 
+When it was dark she was drawn to the window by the lights of the hotel. 
+A light that went in and out was the light in Terence's window: 
+there he sat, reading perhaps, or now he was walking up and down
+pulling out one book after another; and now he was seated in his
+chair again, and she tried to imagine what he was thinking about. 
+The steady lights marked the rooms where Terence sat with people
+moving round him.  Every one who stayed in the hotel had a peculiar
+romance and interest about them.  They were not ordinary people. 
+She would attribute wisdom to Mrs. Elliot, beauty to Susan Warrington,
+a splendid vitality to Evelyn M., because Terence spoke to them. 
+As unreflecting and pervasive were the moods of depression. 
+Her mind was as the landscape outside when dark beneath clouds
+and straitly lashed by wind and hail.  Again she would sit passive
+in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen's fantastical or gloomy
+words were like so many darts goading her to cry out against the
+hardness of life.  Best of all were the moods when for no reason
+again this stress of feeling slackened, and life went on as usual,
+only with a joy and colour in its events that was unknown before;
+they had a significance like that which she had seen in the tree: 
+the nights were black bars separating her from the days;
+she would have liked to run all the days into one long continuity
+of sensation.  Although these moods were directly or indirectly
+caused by the presence of Terence or the thought of him, she never
+said to herself that she was in love with him, or considered
+what was to happen if she continued to feel such things, so that
+Helen's image of the river sliding on to the waterfall had a great
+likeness to the facts, and the alarm which Helen sometimes felt
+was justified.
+
+In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was incapable
+of making a plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind. 
+She abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day,
+meeting him the next, receiving his letters always with a start
+of surprise.  Any woman experienced in the progress of courtship
+would have come by certain opinions from all this which would have
+given her at least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever been
+in love with Rachel, and she had never been in love with any one. 
+Moreover, none of the books she read, from _Wuthering_ _Heights_
+to _Man_ _and_ _Superman_, and the plays of Ibsen, suggested from
+their analysis of love that what their heroines felt was what she
+was feeling now.  It seemed to her that her sensations had no name.
+
+She met Terence frequently.  When they did not meet, he was apt
+to send a note with a book or about a book, for he had not been
+able after all to neglect that approach to intimacy.  But sometimes
+he did not come or did not write for several days at a time. 
+Again when they met their meeting might be one of inspiriting joy
+or of harassing despair.  Over all their partings hung the sense
+of interruption, leaving them both unsatisfied, though ignorant
+that the other shared the feeling.
+
+If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even more
+completely ignorant of his.  At first he moved as a god;
+as she came to know him better he was still the centre of light,
+but combined with this beauty a wonderful power of making her daring
+and confident of herself.  She was conscious of emotions and powers
+which she had never suspected in herself, and of a depth in the world
+hitherto unknown.  When she thought of their relationship she saw
+rather than reasoned, representing her view of what Terence felt
+by a picture of him drawn across the room to stand by her side. 
+This passage across the room amounted to a physical sensation,
+but what it meant she did not know.
+
+Thus the time went on, wearing a calm, bright look upon its surface. 
+Letters came from England, letters came from Willoughby,
+and the days accumulated their small events which shaped the year. 
+Superficially, three odes of Pindar were mended, Helen covered about
+five inches of her embroidery, and St. John completed the first
+two acts of a play.  He and Rachel being now very good friends,
+he read them aloud to her, and she was so genuinely impressed
+by the skill of his rhythms and the variety of his adjectives,
+as well as by the fact that he was Terence's friend, that he began
+to wonder whether he was not intended for literature rather than
+for law.  It was a time of profound thought and sudden revelations
+for more than one couple, and several single people.
+
+A Sunday came, which no one in the villa with the exception of
+Rachel and the Spanish maid proposed to recognise.  Rachel still
+went to church, because she had never, according to Helen,
+taken the trouble to think about it.  Since they had celebrated
+the service at the hotel she went there expecting to get some
+pleasure from her passage across the garden and through the hall
+of the hotel, although it was very doubtful whether she would
+see Terence, or at any rate have the chance of speaking to him.
+
+As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English,
+there was almost as much difference between Sunday and Wednesday
+as there is in England, and Sunday appeared here as there, the mute
+black ghost or penitent spirit of the busy weekday.  The English
+could not pale the sunshine, but they could in some miraculous way
+slow down the hours, dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and make
+even the servants and page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. 
+The best clothes which every one put on helped the general effect;
+it seemed that no lady could sit down without bending a clean starched
+petticoat, and no gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle
+from a stiff shirt-front. As the hands of the clock neared eleven,
+on this particular Sunday, various people tended to draw together
+in the hall, clasping little redleaved books in their hands. 
+The clock marked a few minutes to the hour when a stout black figure
+passed through the hall with a preoccupied expression, as though
+he would rather not recognise salutations, although aware of them,
+and disappeared down the corridor which led from it.
+
+"Mr. Bax," Mrs. Thornbury whispered.
+
+The little group of people then began to move off in the same
+direction as the stout black figure.  Looked at in an odd
+way by people who made no effort to join them, they moved
+with one exception slowly and consciously towards the stairs. 
+Mrs. Flushing was the exception.  She came running downstairs,
+strode across the hall, joined the procession much out of breath,
+demanding of Mrs. Thornbury in an agitated whisper, "Where, where?"
+
+"We are all going," said Mrs. Thornbury gently, and soon they
+were descending the stairs two by two.  Rachel was among
+the first to descend.  She did not see that Terence and Hirst
+came in at the rear possessed of no black volume, but of one
+thin book bound in light-blue cloth, which St. John carried under his arm.
+
+The chapel was the old chapel of the monks.  It was a profound cool
+place where they had said Mass for hundreds of years, and done penance
+in the cold moonlight, and worshipped old brown pictures and carved
+saints which stood with upraised hands of blessing in the hollows
+in the walls.  The transition from Catholic to Protestant worship
+had been bridged by a time of disuse, when there were no services,
+and the place was used for storing jars of oil, liqueur, and deck-chairs;
+the hotel flourishing, some religious body had taken the place in hand,
+and it was now fitted out with a number of glazed yellow benches,
+claret-coloured footstools; it had a small pulpit, and a brass eagle
+carrying the Bible on its back, while the piety of different women
+had supplied ugly squares of carpet, and long strips of embroidery
+heavily wrought with monograms in gold.
+
+As the congregation entered they were met by mild sweet chords
+issuing from a harmonium, where Miss Willett, concealed from view
+by a baize curtain, struck emphatic chords with uncertain fingers. 
+The sound spread through the chapel as the rings of water spread
+from a fallen stone.  The twenty or twenty-five people who composed
+the congregation first bowed their heads and then sat up and looked
+about them.  It was very quiet, and the light down here seemed paler
+than the light above.  The usual bows and smiles were dispensed with,
+but they recognised each other.  The Lord's Prayer was read over them. 
+As the childlike battle of voices rose, the congregation,
+many of whom had only met on the staircase, felt themselves
+pathetically united and well-disposed towards each other. 
+As if the prayer were a torch applied to fuel, a smoke seemed to rise
+automatically and fill the place with the ghosts of innumerable
+services on innumerable Sunday mornings at home.  Susan Warrington
+in particular was conscious of the sweetest sense of sisterhood,
+as she covered her face with her hands and saw slips of bent backs
+through the chinks between her fingers.  Her emotions rose calmly
+and evenly, approving of herself and of life at the same time. 
+It was all so quiet and so good.  But having created this peaceful
+atmosphere Mr. Bax suddenly turned the page and read a psalm. 
+Though he read it with no change of voice the mood was broken.
+
+"Be merciful unto me, O God," he read, "for man goeth about to devour me: 
+he is daily fighting and troubling me.  . . . They daily mistake
+my words:  all that they imagine is to do me evil.  They hold
+all together and keep themselves close.  . . . Break their teeth,
+O God, in their mouths; smite the jaw-bones of the lions, O Lord: 
+let them fall away like water that runneth apace; and when they shoot
+their arrows let them be rooted out."
+
+Nothing in Susan's experience at all corresponded with this,
+and as she had no love of language she had long ceased to attend
+to such remarks, although she followed them with the same kind
+of mechanical respect with which she heard many of Lear's speeches
+read aloud.  Her mind was still serene and really occupied with
+praise of her own nature and praise of God, that is of the solemn
+and satisfactory order of the world.
+
+But it could be seen from a glance at their faces that most of the others,
+the men in particular, felt the inconvenience of the sudden intrusion
+of this old savage.  They looked more secular and critical as then
+listened to the ravings of the old black man with a cloth round his
+loins cursing with vehement gesture by a camp-fire in the desert. 
+After that there was a general sound of pages being turned as if
+they were in class, and then they read a little bit of the Old
+Testament about making a well, very much as school boys translate
+an easy passage from the _Anabasis_ when they have shut up their
+French grammar.  Then they returned to the New Testament and the sad
+and beautiful figure of Christ.  While Christ spoke they made
+another effort to fit his interpretation of life upon the lives
+they lived, but as they were all very different, some practical,
+some ambitious, some stupid, some wild and experimental, some in love,
+and others long past any feeling except a feeling of comfort,
+they did very different things with the words of Christ.
+
+From their faces it seemed that for the most part they made
+no effort at all, and, recumbent as it were, accepted the ideas
+the words gave as representing goodness, in the same way, no doubt,
+as one of those industrious needlewomen had accepted the bright
+ugly pattern on her mat as beauty.
+
+Whatever the reason might be, for the first time in her life,
+instead of slipping at once into some curious pleasant cloud
+of emotion, too familiar to be considered, Rachel listened critically
+to what was being said.  By the time they had swung in an irregular
+way from prayer to psalm, from psalm to history, from history
+to poetry, and Mr. Bax was giving out his text, she was in a state
+of acute discomfort.  Such was the discomfort she felt when forced
+to sit through an unsatisfactory piece of music badly played. 
+Tantalised, enraged by the clumsy insensitiveness of the conductor,
+who put the stress on the wrong places, and annoyed by the vast
+flock of the audience tamely praising and acquiescing without
+knowing or caring, so she was not tantalized and enraged, only here,
+with eyes half-shut and lips pursed together, the atmosphere of
+forced solemnity increased her anger.  All round her were people
+pretending to feel what they did not feel, while somewhere above
+her floated the idea which they could none of them grasp, which they
+pretended to grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful idea,
+an idea like a butterfly.  One after another, vast and hard and cold,
+appeared to her the churches all over the world where this blundering
+effort and misunderstanding were perpetually going on, great buildings,
+filled with innumerable men and women, not seeing clearly,
+who finally gave up the effort to see, and relapsed tamely into praise
+and acquiescence, half-shutting their eyes and pursing up their lips. 
+The thought had the same sort of physical discomfort as is caused
+by a film of mist always coming between the eyes and the printed page. 
+She did her best to brush away the film and to conceive something
+to be worshipped as the service went on, but failed, always misled
+by the voice of Mr. Bax saying things which misrepresented the idea,
+and by the patter of baaing inexpressive human voices falling round
+her like damp leaves.  The effort was tiring and dispiriting. 
+She ceased to listen, and fixed her eyes on the face of a woman
+near her, a hospital nurse, whose expression of devout attention
+seemed to prove that she was at any rate receiving satisfaction. 
+But looking at her carefully she came to the conclusion that the
+hospital nurse was only slavishly acquiescent, and that the look of
+satisfaction was produced by no splendid conception of God within her. 
+How indeed, could she conceive anything far outside her own experience,
+a woman with a commonplace face like hers, a little round red face,
+upon which trivial duties and trivial spites had drawn lines, whose weak
+blue eyes saw without intensity or individuality, whose features
+were blurred, insensitive, and callous?  She was adoring something
+shallow and smug, clinging to it, so the obstinate mouth witnessed,
+with the assiduity of a limpet; nothing would tear her from her
+demure belief in her own virtue and the virtues of her religion. 
+She was a limpet, with the sensitive side of her stuck to a rock,
+for ever dead to the rush of fresh and beautiful things past her. 
+The face of this single worshipper became printed on Rachel's mind
+with an impression of keen horror, and she had it suddenly revealed
+to her what Helen meant and St. John meant when they proclaimed their
+hatred of Christianity.  With the violence that now marked her feelings,
+she rejected all that she had implicitly believed.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Bax was half-way through the second lesson. 
+She looked at him.  He was a man of the world with supple lips
+and an agreeable manner, he was indeed a man of much kindliness
+and simplicity, though by no means clever, but she was not in
+the mood to give any one credit for such qualities, and examined
+him as though he were an epitome of all the vices of his service.
+
+Right at the back of the chapel Mrs. Flushing, Hirst, and Hewet
+sat in a row in a very different frame of mind.  Hewet was staring
+at the roof with his legs stuck out in front of him, for as he
+had never tried to make the service fit any feeling or idea of his,
+he was able to enjoy the beauty of the language without hindrance. 
+His mind was occupied first with accidental things, such as the
+women's hair in front of him, the light on the faces, then with
+the words which seemed to him magnificent, and then more vaguely
+with the characters of the other worshippers.  But when he suddenly
+perceived Rachel, all these thoughts were driven out of his head,
+and he thought only of her.  The psalms, the prayers, the Litany,
+and the sermon were all reduced to one chanting sound which paused,
+and then renewed itself, a little higher or a little lower. 
+He stared alternately at Rachel and at the ceiling, but his expression
+was now produced not by what he saw but by something in his mind. 
+He was almost as painfully disturbed by his thoughts as she was
+by hers.
+
+Early in the service Mrs. Flushing had discovered that she had taken up
+a Bible instead of a prayer-book, and, as she was sitting next to Hirst,
+she stole a glance over his shoulder.  He was reading steadily in
+the thin pale-blue volume.  Unable to understand, she peered closer,
+upon which Hirst politely laid the book before her, pointing to
+the first line of a Greek poem and then to the translation opposite.
+
+"What's that?" she whispered inquisitively.
+
+"Sappho," he replied.  "The one Swinburne did--the best thing
+that's ever been written."
+
+Mrs. Flushing could not resist such an opportunity.  She gulped
+down the Ode to Aphrodite during the Litany, keeping herself with
+difficulty from asking when Sappho lived, and what else she wrote
+worth reading, and contriving to come in punctually at the end
+with "the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body,
+and the life everlastin'. Amen."
+
+Meanwhile Hirst took out an envelope and began scribbling on the back
+of it.  When Mr. Bax mounted the pulpit he shut up Sappho with his
+envelope between the pages, settled his spectacles, and fixed his
+gaze intently upon the clergyman.  Standing in the pulpit he looked
+very large and fat; the light coming through the greenish unstained
+window-glass made his face appear smooth and white like a very large egg.
+
+He looked round at all the faces looking mildly up at him,
+although some of them were the faces of men and women old enough to be
+his grandparents, and gave out his text with weighty significance. 
+The argument of the sermon was that visitors to this beautiful land,
+although they were on a holiday, owed a duty to the natives. 
+It did not, in truth, differ very much from a leading article upon
+topics of general interest in the weekly newspapers.  It rambled
+with a kind of amiable verbosity from one heading to another,
+suggesting that all human beings are very much the same under
+their skins, illustrating this by the resemblance of the games
+which little Spanish boys play to the games little boys in London
+streets play, observing that very small things do influence people,
+particularly natives; in fact, a very dear friend of Mr. Bax's had
+told him that the success of our rule in India, that vast country,
+largely depended upon the strict code of politeness which the
+English adopted towards the natives, which led to the remark
+that small things were not necessarily small, and that somehow
+to the virtue of sympathy, which was a virtue never more needed
+than to-day, when we lived in a time of experiment and upheaval--
+witness the aeroplane and wireless telegraph, and there were
+other problems which hardly presented themselves to our fathers,
+but which no man who called himself a man could leave unsettled. 
+Here Mr. Bax became more definitely clerical, if it were possible,
+he seemed to speak with a certain innocent craftiness, as he pointed
+out that all this laid a special duty upon earnest Christians. 
+What men were inclined to say now was, "Oh, that fellow--he's a parson." 
+What we want them to say is, "He's a good fellow"--in other words,
+"He is my brother."  He exhorted them to keep in touch with men
+of the modern type; they must sympathise with their multifarious
+interests in order to keep before their eyes that whatever discoveries
+were made there was one discovery which could not be superseded,
+which was indeed as much of a necessity to the most successful
+and most brilliant of them all as it had been to their fathers. 
+The humblest could help; the least important things had an influence
+(here his manner became definitely priestly and his remarks seemed
+to be directed to women, for indeed Mr. Bax's congregations were
+mainly composed of women, and he was used to assigning them their
+duties in his innocent clerical campaigns). Leaving more definite
+instruction, he passed on, and his theme broadened into a peroration
+for which he drew a long breath and stood very upright,--"As a drop
+of water, detached, alone, separate from others, falling from
+the cloud and entering the great ocean, alters, so scientists
+tell us, not only the immediate spot in the ocean where it falls,
+but all the myriad drops which together compose the great universe
+of waters, and by this means alters the configuration of the globe
+and the lives of millions of sea creatures, and finally the lives
+of the men and women who seek their living upon the shores--
+as all this is within the compass of a single drop of water,
+such as any rain shower sends in millions to lose themselves
+in the earth, to lose themselves we say, but we know very well
+that the fruits of the earth could not flourish without them--
+so is a marvel comparable to this within the reach of each one
+of us, who dropping a little word or a little deed into the great
+universe alters it; yea, it is a solemn thought, _alters_ it,
+for good or for evil, not for one instant, or in one vicinity,
+but throughout the entire race, and for all eternity."  Whipping round
+as though to avoid applause, he continued with the same breath,
+but in a different tone of voice,--"And now to God the Father . .
+."
+
+He gave his blessing, and then, while the solemn chords again issued
+from the harmonium behind the curtain, the different people began
+scraping and fumbling and moving very awkwardly and consciously
+towards the door.  Half-way upstairs, at a point where the light and
+sounds of the upper world conflicted with the dimness and the dying
+hymn-tune of the under, Rachel felt a hand drop upon her shoulder.
+
+"Miss Vinrace," Mrs. Flushing whispered peremptorily, "stay to luncheon. 
+It's such a dismal day.  They don't even give one beef for luncheon. 
+Please stay."
+
+Here they came out into the hall, where once more the little
+band was greeted with curious respectful glances by the people
+who had not gone to church, although their clothing made it clear
+that they approved of Sunday to the very verge of going to church. 
+Rachel felt unable to stand any more of this particular atmosphere,
+and was about to say she must go back, when Terence passed them,
+drawn along in talk with Evelyn M. Rachel thereupon contented
+herself with saying that the people looked very respectable,
+which negative remark Mrs. Flushing interpreted to mean that she
+would stay.
+
+"English people abroad!" she returned with a vivid flash of malice. 
+"Ain't they awful!  But we won't stay here," she continued,
+plucking at Rachel's arm.  "Come up to my room."
+
+She bore her past Hewet and Evelyn and the Thornburys and the Elliots. 
+Hewet stepped forward.
+
+"Luncheon--" he began.
+
+"Miss Vinrace has promised to lunch with me," said Mrs. Flushing,
+and began to pound energetically up the staircase, as though
+the middle classes of England were in pursuit.  She did not stop
+until she had slammed her bedroom door behind them.
+
+"Well, what did you think of it?" she demanded, panting slightly.
+
+All the disgust and horror which Rachel had been accumulating burst
+forth beyond her control.
+
+"I thought it the most loathsome exhibition I'd ever seen!"
+she broke out.  "How can they--how dare they--what do you mean by it--
+Mr. Bax, hospital nurses, old men, prostitutes, disgusting--"
+
+She hit off the points she remembered as fast as she could, but she
+was too indignant to stop to analyse her feelings.  Mrs. Flushing
+watched her with keen gusto as she stood ejaculating with emphatic
+movements of her head and hands in the middle of the room.
+
+"Go on, go on, do go on," she laughed, clapping her hands. 
+"It's delightful to hear you!"
+
+"But why do you go?"  Rachel demanded.
+
+"I've been every Sunday of my life ever since I can remember,"
+Mrs. Flushing chuckled, as though that were a reason by itself.
+
+Rachel turned abruptly to the window.  She did not know what it
+was that had put her into such a passion; the sight of Terence in
+the hall had confused her thoughts, leaving her merely indignant. 
+She looked straight at their own villa, half-way up the side of
+the mountain.  The most familiar view seen framed through glass has
+a certain unfamiliar distinction, and she grew calm as she gazed. 
+Then she remembered that she was in the presence of some one she
+did not know well, and she turned and looked at Mrs. Flushing. 
+Mrs. Flushing was still sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up,
+with her lips parted, so that her strong white teeth showed in
+two rows.
+
+"Tell me," she said, "which d'you like best, Mr. Hewet or Mr. Hirst?"
+
+"Mr. Hewet," Rachel replied, but her voice did not sound natural.
+
+"Which is the one who reads Greek in church?"  Mrs. Flushing demanded.
+
+It might have been either of them and while Mrs. Flushing proceeded
+to describe them both, and to say that both frightened her, but one
+frightened her more than the other, Rachel looked for a chair. 
+The room, of course, was one of the largest and most luxurious
+in the hotel.  There were a great many arm-chairs and settees
+covered in brown holland, but each of these was occupied by a large
+square piece of yellow cardboard, and all the pieces of cardboard
+were dotted or lined with spots or dashes of bright oil paint.
+
+"But you're not to look at those," said Mrs. Flushing as she saw
+Rachel's eye wander.  She jumped up, and turned as many as she could,
+face downwards, upon the floor.  Rachel, however, managed to
+possess herself of one of them, and, with the vanity of an artist,
+Mrs. Flushing demanded anxiously, "Well, well?"
+
+"It's a hill," Rachel replied.  There could be no doubt that
+Mrs. Flushing had represented the vigorous and abrupt fling of the
+earth up into the air; you could almost see the clods flying as it whirled.
+
+Rachel passed from one to another.  They were all marked by something
+of the jerk and decision of their maker; they were all perfectly untrained
+onslaughts of the brush upon some half-realised idea suggested by
+hill or tree; and they were all in some way characteristic of Mrs. Flushing.
+
+"I see things movin'," Mrs. Flushing explained.  "So"--she
+swept her hand through a yard of the air.  She then took up one
+of the cardboards which Rachel had laid aside, seated herself
+on a stool, and began to flourish a stump of charcoal.  While she
+occupied herself in strokes which seemed to serve her as speech
+serves others, Rachel, who was very restless, looked about her.
+
+"Open the wardrobe," said Mrs. Flushing after a pause, speaking
+indistinctly because of a paint-brush in her mouth, "and look at the things."
+
+As Rachel hesitated, Mrs. Flushing came forward, still with a paint-brush
+in her mouth, flung open the wings of her wardrobe, and tossed
+a quantity of shawls, stuffs, cloaks, embroideries, on to the bed. 
+Rachel began to finger them.  Mrs. Flushing came up once more,
+and dropped a quantity of beads, brooches, earrings, bracelets, tassels,
+and combs among the draperies.  Then she went back to her stool
+and began to paint in silence.  The stuffs were coloured and dark
+and pale; they made a curious swarm of lines and colours upon
+the counterpane, with the reddish lumps of stone and peacocks'
+feathers and clear pale tortoise-shell combs lying among them.
+
+"The women wore them hundreds of years ago, they wear 'em still,"
+Mrs. Flushing remarked.  "My husband rides about and finds 'em;
+they don't know what they're worth, so we get 'em cheap.  And we
+shall sell 'em to smart women in London," she chuckled, as though
+the thought of these ladies and their absurd appearance amused her. 
+After painting for some minutes, she suddenly laid down her brush and
+fixed her eyes upon Rachel.
+
+"I tell you what I want to do," she said.  "I want to go up there
+and see things for myself.  It's silly stayin' here with a pack
+of old maids as though we were at the seaside in England.  I want
+to go up the river and see the natives in their camps.  It's only
+a matter of ten days under canvas.  My husband's done it.  One would
+lie out under the trees at night and be towed down the river by day,
+and if we saw anythin' nice we'd shout out and tell 'em to stop." 
+She rose and began piercing the bed again and again with a long
+golden pin, as she watched to see what effect her suggestion had
+upon Rachel.
+
+"We must make up a party," she went on.  "Ten people could hire
+a launch.  Now you'll come, and Mrs. Ambrose'll come, and will
+Mr. Hirst and t'other gentleman come?  Where's a pencil?"
+
+She became more and more determined and excited as she evolved her plan. 
+She sat on the edge of the bed and wrote down a list of surnames,
+which she invariably spelt wrong.  Rachel was enthusiastic, for indeed
+the idea was immeasurably delightful to her.  She had always had a
+great desire to see the river, and the name of Terence threw a lustre
+over the prospect, which made it almost too good to come true. 
+She did what she could to help Mrs. Flushing by suggesting names,
+helping her to spell them, and counting up the days of the week upon
+her fingers.  As Mrs. Flushing wanted to know all she could tell
+her about the birth and pursuits of every person she suggested,
+and threw in wild stories of her own as to the temperaments and
+habits of artists, and people of the same name who used to come
+to Chillingley in the old days, but were doubtless not the same,
+though they too were very clever men interested in Egyptology,
+the business took some time.
+
+At last Mrs. Flushing sought her diary for help, the method
+of reckoning dates on the fingers proving unsatisfactory. 
+She opened and shut every drawer in her writing-table, and then
+cried furiously, "Yarmouth!  Yarmouth!  Drat the woman! 
+She's always out of the way when she's wanted!"
+
+At this moment the luncheon gong began to work itself into its
+midday frenzy.  Mrs. Flushing rang her bell violently.  The door
+was opened by a handsome maid who was almost as upright as her mistress.
+
+"Oh, Yarmouth," said Mrs. Flushing, "just find my diary and see
+where ten days from now would bring us to, and ask the hall porter
+how many men 'ud be wanted to row eight people up the river for a week,
+and what it 'ud cost, and put it on a slip of paper and leave it
+on my dressing-table. Now--" she pointed at the door with a superb
+forefinger so that Rachel had to lead the way.
+
+"Oh, and Yarmouth," Mrs. Flushing called back over her shoulder. 
+"Put those things away and hang 'em in their right places, there's a
+good girl, or it fusses Mr. Flushin'."
+
+To all of which Yarmouth merely replied, "Yes, ma'am."
+
+As they entered the long dining-room it was obvious that the day
+was still Sunday, although the mood was slightly abating. 
+The Flushings' table was set by the side in the window,
+so that Mrs. Flushing could scrutinise each figure as it entered,
+and her curiosity seemed to be intense.
+
+"Old Mrs. Paley," she whispered as the wheeled chair slowly made its
+way through the door, Arthur pushing behind.  "Thornburys" came next. 
+"That nice woman," she nudged Rachel to look at Miss Allan. 
+"What's her name?"  The painted lady who always came in late,
+tripping into the room with a prepared smile as though she came out
+upon a stage, might well have quailed before Mrs. Flushing's stare,
+which expressed her steely hostility to the whole tribe of painted ladies. 
+Next came the two young men whom Mrs. Flushing called collectively
+the Hirsts.  They sat down opposite, across the gangway.
+
+Mr. Flushing treated his wife with a mixture of admiration and indulgence,
+making up by the suavity and fluency of his speech for the abruptness
+of hers.  While she darted and ejaculated he gave Rachel a sketch
+of the history of South American art.  He would deal with one of his
+wife's exclamations, and then return as smoothly as ever to his theme. 
+He knew very well how to make a luncheon pass agreeably, without being
+dull or intimate.  He had formed the opinion, so he told Rachel,
+that wonderful treasures lay hid in the depths of the land;
+the things Rachel had seen were merely trifles picked up in the course
+of one short journey.  He thought there might be giant gods hewn
+out of stone in the mountain-side; and colossal figures standing
+by themselves in the middle of vast green pasture lands, where none
+but natives had ever trod.  Before the dawn of European art he
+believed that the primitive huntsmen and priests had built temples
+of massive stone slabs, had formed out of the dark rocks and the great
+cedar trees majestic figures of gods and of beasts, and symbols
+of the great forces, water, air, and forest among which they lived. 
+There might be prehistoric towns, like those in Greece and Asia,
+standing in open places among the trees, filled with the works of this
+early race.  Nobody had been there; scarcely anything was known. 
+Thus talking and displaying the most picturesque of his theories,
+Rachel's attention was fixed upon him.
+
+She did not see that Hewet kept looking at her across the gangway,
+between the figures of waiters hurrying past with plates. 
+He was inattentive, and Hirst was finding him also very cross
+and disagreeable.  They had touched upon all the usual topics--
+upon politics and literature, gossip and Christianity.  They had
+quarrelled over the service, which was every bit as fine as Sappho,
+according to Hewet; so that Hirst's paganism was mere ostentation. 
+Why go to church, he demanded, merely in order to read Sappho? 
+Hirst observed that he had listened to every word of the sermon,
+as he could prove if Hewet would like a repetition of it; and he went
+to church in order to realise the nature of his Creator, which he had
+done very vividly that morning, thanks to Mr. Bax, who had inspired
+him to write three of the most superb lines in English literature,
+an invocation to the Deity.
+
+"I wrote 'em on the back of the envelope of my aunt's last letter,"
+he said, and pulled it from between the pages of Sappho.
+
+"Well, let's hear them," said Hewet, slightly mollified
+by the prospect of a literary discussion.
+
+"My dear Hewet, do you wish us both to be flung out of the hotel
+by an enraged mob of Thornburys and Elliots?"  Hirst enquired. 
+"The merest whisper would be sufficient to incriminate me
+for ever.  God!" he broke out, "what's the use of attempting to write
+when the world's peopled by such damned fools?  Seriously, Hewet,
+I advise you to give up literature.  What's the good of it? 
+There's your audience."
+
+He nodded his head at the tables where a very miscellaneous collection
+of Europeans were now engaged in eating, in some cases in gnawing,
+the stringy foreign fowls.  Hewet looked, and grew more out of
+temper than ever.  Hirst looked too.  His eyes fell upon Rachel,
+and he bowed to her.
+
+"I rather think Rachel's in love with me," he remarked, as his
+eyes returned to his plate.  "That's the worst of friendships
+with young women--they tend to fall in love with one."
+
+To that Hewet made no answer whatever, and sat singularly still. 
+Hirst did not seem to mind getting no answer, for he returned
+to Mr. Bax again, quoting the peroration about the drop of water;
+and when Hewet scarcely replied to these remarks either, he merely
+pursed his lips, chose a fig, and relapsed quite contentedly into
+his own thoughts, of which he always had a very large supply. 
+When luncheon was over they separated, taking their cups of coffee to
+different parts of the hall.
+
+From his chair beneath the palm-tree Hewet saw Rachel come out of
+the dining-room with the Flushings; he saw them look round for chairs,
+and choose three in a corner where they could go on talking
+in private.  Mr. Flushing was now in the full tide of his discourse. 
+He produced a sheet of paper upon which he made drawings as he went
+on with his talk.  He saw Rachel lean over and look, pointing to this
+and that with her finger.  Hewet unkindly compared Mr. Flushing,
+who was extremely well dressed for a hot climate, and rather
+elaborate in his manner, to a very persuasive shop-keeper. Meanwhile,
+as he sat looking at them, he was entangled in the Thornburys
+and Miss Allan, who, after hovering about for a minute or two,
+settled in chairs round him, holding their cups in their hands. 
+They wanted to know whether he could tell them anything about Mr. Bax. 
+Mr. Thornbury as usual sat saying nothing, looking vaguely ahead
+of him, occasionally raising his eye-glasses, as if to put them on,
+but always thinking better of it at the last moment, and letting
+them fall again.  After some discussion, the ladies put it
+beyond a doubt that Mr. Bax was not the son of Mr. William Bax. 
+There was a pause.  Then Mrs. Thornbury remarked that she was still
+in the habit of saying Queen instead of King in the National Anthem. 
+There was another pause.  Then Miss Allan observed reflectively that
+going to church abroad always made her feel as if she had been to a
+sailor's funeral.
+
+There was then a very long pause, which threatened to be final,
+when, mercifully, a bird about the size of a magpie, but of a metallic
+blue colour, appeared on the section of the terrace that could
+be seen from where they sat.  Mrs. Thornbury was led to enquire
+whether we should like it if all our rooks were blue--"What
+do _you_ think, William?" she asked, touching her husband on the knee.
+
+"If all our rooks were blue," he said,--he raised his glasses;
+he actually placed them on his nose--"they would not live long
+in Wiltshire," he concluded; he dropped his glasses to his side again. 
+The three elderly people now gazed meditatively at the bird,
+which was so obliging as to stay in the middle of the view for a
+considerable space of time, thus making it unnecessary for them to
+speak again.  Hewet began to wonder whether he might not cross over
+to the Flushings' corner, when Hirst appeared from the background,
+slipped into a chair by Rachel's side, and began to talk to her with
+every appearance of familiarity.  Hewet could stand it no longer. 
+He rose, took his hat and dashed out of doors.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+
+
+Everything he saw was distasteful to him.  He hated the blue and white,
+the intensity and definiteness, the hum and heat of the south;
+the landscape seemed to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard
+background on the stage, and the mountain but a wooden screen
+against a sheet painted blue.  He walked fast in spite of the heat
+of the sun.
+
+Two roads led out of the town on the eastern side; one branched off
+towards the Ambroses' villa, the other struck into the country,
+eventually reaching a village on the plain, but many footpaths,
+which had been stamped in the earth when it was wet, led off from it,
+across great dry fields, to scattered farm-houses, and the villas
+of rich natives.  Hewet stepped off the road on to one of these,
+in order to avoid the hardness and heat of the main road,
+the dust of which was always being raised in small clouds by carts
+and ramshackle flies which carried parties of festive peasants,
+or turkeys swelling unevenly like a bundle of air balls beneath
+a net, or the brass bedstead and black wooden boxes of some newly
+wedded pair.
+
+The exercise indeed served to clear away the superficial irritations
+of the morning, but he remained miserable.  It seemed proved beyond
+a doubt that Rachel was indifferent to him, for she had scarcely
+looked at him, and she had talked to Mr. Flushing with just the same
+interest with which she talked to him.  Finally, Hirst's odious
+words flicked his mind like a whip, and he remembered that he had
+left her talking to Hirst.  She was at this moment talking to him,
+and it might be true, as he said, that she was in love with him. 
+He went over all the evidence for this supposition--her sudden interest
+in Hirst's writing, her way of quoting his opinions respectfully,
+or with only half a laugh; her very nickname for him, "the great Man,"
+might have some serious meaning in it.  Supposing that there were
+an understanding between them, what would it mean to him?
+
+"Damn it all!" he demanded, "am I in love with her?"  To that he could
+only return himself one answer.  He certainly was in love with her,
+if he knew what love meant.  Ever since he had first seen her he had
+been interested and attracted, more and more interested and attracted,
+until he was scarcely able to think of anything except Rachel. 
+But just as he was sliding into one of the long feasts of meditation about
+them both, he checked himself by asking whether he wanted to marry her? 
+That was the real problem, for these miseries and agonies could not
+be endured, and it was necessary that he should make up his mind. 
+He instantly decided that he did not want to marry any one. 
+Partly because he was irritated by Rachel the idea of marriage
+irritated him.  It immediately suggested the picture of two people
+sitting alone over the fire; the man was reading, the woman sewing. 
+There was a second picture.  He saw a man jump up, say good-night,
+leave the company and hasten away with the quiet secret look of one
+who is stealing to certain happiness.  Both these pictures were
+very unpleasant, and even more so was a third picture, of husband
+and wife and friend; and the married people glancing at each other
+as though they were content to let something pass unquestioned,
+being themselves possessed of the deeper truth.  Other pictures--
+he was walking very fast in his irritation, and they came before
+him without any conscious effort, like pictures on a sheet--
+succeeded these.  Here were the worn husband and wife sitting
+with their children round them, very patient, tolerant, and wise. 
+But that too, was an unpleasant picture.  He tried all sorts
+of pictures, taking them from the lives of friends of his, for he knew
+many different married couples; but he saw them always, walled up
+in a warm firelit room.  When, on the other hand, he began to think
+of unmarried people, he saw them active in an unlimited world;
+above all, standing on the same ground as the rest, without shelter
+or advantage.  All the most individual and humane of his friends
+were bachelors and spinsters; indeed he was surprised to find
+that the women he most admired and knew best were unmarried women. 
+Marriage seemed to be worse for them than it was for men. 
+Leaving these general pictures he considered the people whom he
+had been observing lately at the hotel.  He had often revolved
+these questions in his mind, as he watched Susan and Arthur,
+or Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury, or Mr. and Mrs. Elliot.  He had observed
+how the shy happiness and surprise of the engaged couple had gradually
+been replaced by a comfortable, tolerant state of mind, as if they
+had already done with the adventure of intimacy and were taking up
+their parts.  Susan used to pursue Arthur about with a sweater,
+because he had one day let slip that a brother of his had died
+of pneumonia.  The sight amused him, but was not pleasant if you
+substituted Terence and Rachel for Arthur and Susan; and Arthur
+was far less eager to get you in a corner and talk about flying and
+the mechanics of aeroplanes.  They would settle down.  He then looked
+at the couples who had been married for several years.  It was true
+that Mrs. Thornbury had a husband, and that for the most part she
+was wonderfully successful in bringing him into the conversation,
+but one could not imagine what they said to each other when they
+were alone.  There was the same difficulty with regard to the Elliots,
+except that they probably bickered openly in private.  They sometimes
+bickered in public, though these disagreements were painfully
+covered over by little insincerities on the part of the wife,
+who was afraid of public opinion, because she was much stupider
+than her husband, and had to make efforts to keep hold of him. 
+There could be no doubt, he decided, that it would have been far better
+for the world if these couples had separated.  Even the Ambroses,
+whom he admired and respected profoundly--in spite of all
+the love between them, was not their marriage too a compromise? 
+She gave way to him; she spoilt him; she arranged things for him;
+she who was all truth to others was not true to her husband, was not
+true to her friends if they came in conflict with her husband. 
+It was a strange and piteous flaw in her nature.  Perhaps Rachel had
+been right, then, when she said that night in the garden, "We bring
+out what's worst in each other--we should live separate."
+
+No Rachel had been utterly wrong!  Every argument seemed to be against
+undertaking the burden of marriage until he came to Rachel's argument,
+which was manifestly absurd.  From having been the pursued, he turned
+and became the pursuer.  Allowing the case against marriage to lapse,
+he began to consider the peculiarities of character which had led
+to her saying that.  Had she meant it?  Surely one ought to know
+the character of the person with whom one might spend all one's life;
+being a novelist, let him try to discover what sort of person she was. 
+When he was with her he could not analyse her qualities, because he
+seemed to know them instinctively, but when he was away from her it
+sometimes seemed to him that he did not know her at all.  She was young,
+but she was also old; she had little self-confidence, and yet she
+was a good judge of people.  She was happy; but what made her happy? 
+If they were alone and the excitement had worn off, and they had
+to deal with the ordinary facts of the day, what would happen? 
+Casting his eye upon his own character, two things appeared to him: 
+that he was very unpunctual, and that he disliked answering notes. 
+As far as he knew Rachel was inclined to be punctual, but he could
+not remember that he had ever seen her with a pen in her hand. 
+Let him next imagine a dinner-party, say at the Crooms, and Wilson,
+who had taken her down, talking about the state of the Liberal party. 
+She would say--of course she was absolutely ignorant of politics. 
+Nevertheless she was intelligent certainly, and honest too. 
+Her temper was uncertain--that he had noticed--and she was not domestic,
+and she was not easy, and she was not quiet, or beautiful,
+except in some dresses in some lights.  But the great gift she
+had was that she understood what was said to her; there had never
+been any one like her for talking to.  You could say anything--
+you could say everything, and yet she was never servile.  Here he
+pulled himself up, for it seemed to him suddenly that he knew less
+about her than about any one.  All these thoughts had occurred
+to him many times already; often had he tried to argue and reason;
+and again he had reached the old state of doubt.  He did not know her,
+and he did not know what she felt, or whether they could live together,
+or whether he wanted to marry her, and yet he was in love with
+her.
+
+Supposing he went to her and said (he slackened his pace and began
+to speak aloud, as if he were speaking to Rachel):
+
+"I worship you, but I loathe marriage, I hate its smugness, its safety,
+its compromise, and the thought of you interfering in my work,
+hindering me; what would you answer?"
+
+He stopped, leant against the trunk of a tree, and gazed without
+seeing them at some stones scattered on the bank of the dry
+river-bed. He saw Rachel's face distinctly, the grey eyes, the hair,
+the mouth; the face that could look so many things--plain, vacant,
+almost insignificant, or wild, passionate, almost beautiful,
+yet in his eyes was always the same because of the extraordinary
+freedom with which she looked at him, and spoke as she felt. 
+What would she answer?  What did she feel?  Did she love him,
+or did she feel nothing at all for him or for any other man, being,
+as she had said that afternoon, free, like the wind or the sea?
+
+"Oh, you're free!" he exclaimed, in exultation at the thought
+of her, "and I'd keep you free.  We'd be free together. 
+We'd share everything together.  No happiness would be like ours. 
+No lives would compare with ours."  He opened his arms wide
+as if to hold her and the world in one embrace.
+
+No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what
+her nature was, or how it would be if they lived together,
+he dropped to the ground and sat absorbed in the thought of her,
+and soon tormented by the desire to be in her presence again.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX
+
+
+
+But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that
+Hirst was still talking to Rachel.  The party very soon broke up,
+the Flushings going in one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel
+remaining in the hall, pulling the illustrated papers about,
+turning from one to another, her movements expressing the unformed
+restless desire in her mind.  She did not know whether to go or
+to stay, though Mrs. Flushing had commanded her to appear at tea. 
+The hall was empty, save for Miss Willett who was playing scales with
+her fingers upon a sheet of sacred music, and the Carters, an opulent
+couple who disliked the girl, because her shoe laces were untied,
+and she did not look sufficiently cheery, which by some indirect
+process of thought led them to think that she would not like them. 
+Rachel certainly would not have liked them, if she had seen them,
+for the excellent reason that Mr. Carter waxed his moustache,
+and Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they were evidently the kind
+of people who would not like her; but she was too much absorbed
+by her own restlessness to think or to look.
+
+She was turning over the slippery pages of an American magazine,
+when the hall door swung, a wedge of light fell upon the floor,
+and a small white figure upon whom the light seemed focussed,
+made straight across the room to her.
+
+"What!  You here?"  Evelyn exclaimed.  "Just caught a glimpse
+of you at lunch; but you wouldn't condescend to look at _me_."
+
+It was part of Evelyn's character that in spite of many snubs
+which she received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit
+of people she wanted to know, and in the long run generally
+succeeded in knowing them and even in making them like her.
+
+She looked round her.  "I hate this place.  I hate these people,"
+she said.  "I wish you'd come up to my room with me.  I do want to
+talk to you."
+
+As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evelyn took her by the wrist
+and drew her out of the hall and up the stairs.  As they went upstairs
+two steps at a time, Evelyn, who still kept hold of Rachel's hand,
+ejaculated broken sentences about not caring a hang what people said. 
+"Why should one, if one knows one's right?  And let 'em all go
+to blazes!  Them's my opinions!"
+
+She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms
+were twitching nervously.  It was evident that she was only waiting
+for the door to shut to tell Rachel all about it.  Indeed, directly they
+were inside her room, she sat on the end of the bed and said,
+"I suppose you think I'm mad?"
+
+Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about any one's state
+of mind.  She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever
+occurred to her without fear of the consequences.
+
+"Somebody's proposed to you," she remarked.
+
+"How on earth did you guess that?"  Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure
+mingling with her surprise.  "Do as I look as if I'd just had
+a proposal?"
+
+"You look as if you had them every day," Rachel replied.
+
+"But I don't suppose I've had more than you've had," Evelyn laughed
+rather insincerely.
+
+"I've never had one."
+
+"But you will--lots--it's the easiest thing in the world--But that's
+not what's happened this afternoon exactly.  It's--Oh, it's a muddle,
+a detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!"
+
+She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold water;
+for they were burning hot.  Still sponging them and trembling slightly she
+turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous excitement: 
+"Alfred Perrott says I've promised to marry him, and I say I never did. 
+Sinclair says he'll shoot himself if I don't marry him, and I say,
+'Well, shoot yourself!'  But of course he doesn't--they never do. 
+And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me
+to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott,
+and told me I'd no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities
+of pleasant things like that.  So at last I said to him,
+'Well, Sinclair, you've said enough now.  You can just let me go.' 
+And then he caught me and kissed me--the disgusting brute--I can
+still feel his nasty hairy face just there--as if he'd any right to,
+after what he'd said!"
+
+She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.
+
+"I've never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!"
+she cried; "they've no dignity, they've no courage, they've nothing
+but their beastly passions and their brute strength!  Would any
+woman have behaved like that--if a man had said he didn't want her? 
+We've too much self-respect; we're infinitely finer than they are."
+
+She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. 
+Tears were now running down with the drops of cold water.
+
+"It makes me angry," she explained, drying her eyes.
+
+Rachel sat watching her.  She did not think of Evelyn's position;
+she only thought that the world was full or people in torment.
+
+"There's only one man here I really like," Evelyn continued;
+"Terence Hewet.  One feels as if one could trust him."
+
+At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart
+seemed to be pressed together by cold hands.
+
+"Why?" she asked.  "Why can you trust him?"
+
+"I don't know," said Evelyn.  "Don't you have feelings about people? 
+Feelings you're absolutely certain are right?  I had a long talk with
+Terence the other night.  I felt we were really friends after that. 
+There's something of a woman in him--" She paused as though she
+were thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her,
+so at least Rachel interpreted her gaze.
+
+She tried to force herself to say, "Has to be proposed to you?"
+but the question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn
+was saying that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler
+than men--for example, one couldn't imagine a woman like Lillah
+Harrison thinking a mean thing or having anything base about her.
+
+"How I'd like you to know her!" she exclaimed.
+
+She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. 
+Her eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality,
+and she seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. 
+"Lillah runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,"
+she continued.  "She started it, managed it, did everything off
+her own bat, and it's now the biggest of its kind in England. 
+You can't think what those women are like--and their homes. 
+But she goes among them at all hours of the day and night. 
+I've often been with her.  . . . That's what's the matter with us. 
+. . . We don't _do_ things.  What do you _do_?" she demanded,
+looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile.  Rachel had scarcely
+listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and unhappy. 
+She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her work
+in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love
+affairs.
+
+"I play," she said with an affection of stolid composure.
+
+"That's about it!"  Evelyn laughed.  "We none of us do anything
+but play.  And that's why women like Lillah Harrison, who's worth
+twenty of you and me, have to work themselves to the bone. 
+But I'm tired of playing," she went on, lying flat on the bed,
+and raising her arms above her head.  Thus stretched out, she looked
+more diminutive than ever.
+
+"I'm going to do something.  I've got a splendid idea.  Look here,
+you must join.  I'm sure you've got any amount of stuff in you,
+though you look--well, as if you'd lived all your life in a garden." 
+She sat up, and began to explain with animation.  "I belong to a club
+in London.  It meets every Saturday, so it's called the Saturday Club. 
+We're supposed to talk about art, but I'm sick of talking about art--
+what's the good of it?  With all kinds of real things going on round one? 
+It isn't as if they'd got anything to say about art, either. 
+So what I'm going to tell 'em is that we've talked enough about art,
+and we'd better talk about life for a change.  Questions that really
+matter to people's lives, the White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage,
+the Insurance Bill, and so on.  And when we've made up our mind what
+we want to do we could form ourselves into a society for doing it. 
+. . . I'm certain that if people like ourselves were to take
+things in hand instead of leaving it to policemen and magistrates,
+we could put a stop to--prostitution"--she lowered her voice
+at the ugly word--"in six months.  My idea is that men and women
+ought to join in these matters.  We ought to go into Piccadilly
+and stop one of these poor wretches and say:  'Now, look here,
+I'm no better than you are, and I don't pretend to be any better,
+but you're doing what you know to be beastly, and I won't have
+you doing beastly things, because we're all the same under
+our skins, and if you do a beastly thing it does matter to me.' 
+That's what Mr. Bax was saying this morning, and it's true,
+though you clever people--you're clever too, aren't you?--
+don't believe it."
+
+When Evelyn began talking--it was a fact she often regretted--
+her thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen
+to other people's thoughts.  She continued without more pause than
+was needed for taking breath.
+
+"I don't see why the Saturday club people shouldn't do a really great
+work in that way," she went on.  "Of course it would want organisation,
+some one to give their life to it, but I'm ready to do that.  My notion's
+to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care
+of themselves.  What's wrong with Lillah--if there is anything wrong--
+is that she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards. 
+Now there's one thing I'll say to my credit," she continued;
+"I'm not intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort,
+but I'm jolly human."  She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor,
+looking up at Rachel.  She searched up into her face as if she were
+trying to read what kind of character was concealed behind the face. 
+She put her hand on Rachel's knee.
+
+"It _is_ being human that counts, isn't it?" she continued. 
+"Being real, whatever Mr. Hirst may say.  Are you real?"
+
+Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close
+to her, and that there was something exciting in this closeness,
+although it was also disagreeable.  She was spared the need of
+finding an answer to the question, for Evelyn proceeded, "Do you
+_believe_ in anything?"
+
+In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes,
+and to relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back
+her chair and exclaimed, "In everything!" and began to finger
+different objects, the books on the table, the photographs,
+the freshly leaved plant with the stiff bristles, which stood
+in a large earthenware pot in the window.
+
+"I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony,
+in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing," she remarked, still speaking recklessly,
+with something at the back of her mind forcing her to say the things
+that one usually does not say.  "But I don't believe in God,
+I don't believe in Mr. Bax, I don't believe in the hospital nurse. 
+I don't believe--" She took up a photograph and, looking at it,
+did not finish her sentence.
+
+"That's my mother," said Evelyn, who remained sitting on the floor
+binding her knees together with her arms, and watching Rachel curiously.
+
+Rachel considered the portrait.  "Well, I don't much believe in her,"
+she remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.
+
+Mrs. Murgatroyd looked indeed as if the life had been crushed
+out of her; she knelt on a chair, gazing piteously from behind
+the body of a Pomeranian dog which she clasped to her cheek,
+as if for protection.
+
+"And that's my dad," said Evelyn, for there were two photographs
+in one frame.  The second photograph represented a handsome
+soldier with high regular features and a heavy black moustache;
+his hand rested on the hilt of his sword; there was a decided
+likeness between him and Evelyn.
+
+"And it's because of them," said Evelyn, "that I'm going
+to help the other women.  You've heard about me, I suppose? 
+They weren't married, you see; I'm not anybody in particular. 
+I'm not a bit ashamed of it.  They loved each other anyhow,
+and that's more than most people can say of their parents."
+
+Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her hands,
+and compared them--the man and the woman who had, so Evelyn said,
+loved each other.  That fact interested her more than the campaign
+on behalf of unfortunate women which Evelyn was once more beginning
+to describe.  She looked again from one to the other.
+
+"What d'you think it's like," she asked, as Evelyn paused for a minute,
+"being in love?"
+
+"Have you never been in love?"  Evelyn asked.  "Oh no--one's only
+got to look at you to see that," she added.  She considered. 
+"I really was in love once," she said.  She fell into reflection,
+her eyes losing their bright vitality and approaching something like
+an expression of tenderness.  "It was heavenly!--while it lasted. 
+The worst of it is it don't last, not with me.  That's the bother."
+
+She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sinclair
+about which she had pretended to ask Rachel's advice.  But she did
+not want advice; she wanted intimacy.  When she looked at Rachel,
+who was still looking at the photographs on the bed, she could not
+help seeing that Rachel was not thinking about her.  What was she
+thinking about, then?  Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of
+life in her which was always trying to work through to other people,
+and was always being rebuffed.  Falling silent she looked at
+her visitor, her shoes, her stockings, the combs in her hair,
+all the details of her dress in short, as though by seizing every
+detail she might get closer to the life within.
+
+Rachel at last put down the photographs, walked to the window
+and remarked, "It's odd.  People talk as much about love as they
+do about religion."
+
+"I wish you'd sit down and talk," said Evelyn impatiently.
+
+Instead Rachel opened the window, which was made in two long panes,
+and looked down into the garden below.
+
+"That's where we got lost the first night," she said.  "It must
+have been in those bushes."
+
+"They kill hens down there," said Evelyn.  "They cut their heads
+off with a knife--disgusting!  But tell me--what--"
+
+"I'd like to explore the hotel," Rachel interrupted.  She drew
+her head in and looked at Evelyn, who still sat on the floor.
+
+"It's just like other hotels," said Evelyn.
+
+That might be, although every room and passage and chair
+in the place had a character of its own in Rachel's eyes;
+but she could not bring herself to stay in one place any longer. 
+She moved slowly towards the door.
+
+"What is it you want?" said Evelyn.  "You make me feel as if you
+were always thinking of something you don't say.  . . . Do say it!"
+
+But Rachel made no response to this invitation either.  She stopped
+with her fingers on the handle of the door, as if she remembered
+that some sort of pronouncement was due from her.
+
+"I suppose you'll marry one of them," she said, and then turned
+the handle and shut the door behind her.  She walked slowly
+down the passage, running her hand along the wall beside her. 
+She did not think which way she was going, and therefore walked
+down a passage which only led to a window and a balcony.  She looked
+down at the kitchen premises, the wrong side of the hotel life,
+which was cut off from the right side by a maze of small bushes. 
+The ground was bare, old tins were scattered about, and the bushes
+wore towels and aprons upon their heads to dry.  Every now and then
+a waiter came out in a white apron and threw rubbish on to a heap. 
+Two large women in cotton dresses were sitting on a bench with
+blood-smeared tin trays in front of them and yellow bodies across
+their knees.  They were plucking the birds, and talking as they plucked. 
+Suddenly a chicken came floundering, half flying, half running
+into the space, pursued by a third woman whose age could hardly be
+under eighty.  Although wizened and unsteady on her legs she kept
+up the chase, egged on by the laughter of the others; her face was
+expressive of furious rage, and as she ran she swore in Spanish. 
+Frightened by hand-clapping here, a napkin there, the bird ran
+this way and that in sharp angles, and finally fluttered straight
+at the old woman, who opened her scanty grey skirts to enclose it,
+dropped upon it in a bundle, and then holding it out cut its head
+off with an expression of vindictive energy and triumph combined. 
+The blood and the ugly wriggling fascinated Rachel, so that although
+she knew that some one had come up behind and was standing beside her,
+she did not turn round until the old woman had settled down on
+the bench beside the others.  Then she looked up sharply, because of
+the ugliness of what she had seen.  It was Miss Allan who stood
+beside her.
+
+"Not a pretty sight," said Miss Allan, "although I daresay it's
+really more humane than our method.  . . . I don't believe you've
+ever been in my room," she added, and turned away as if she meant
+Rachel to follow her.  Rachel followed, for it seemed possible
+that each new person might remove the mystery which burdened her.
+
+The bedrooms at the hotel were all on the same pattern, save that some
+were larger and some smaller; they had a floor of dark red tiles;
+they had a high bed, draped in mosquito curtains; they had each
+a writing-table and a dressing-table, and a couple of arm-chairs.
+But directly a box was unpacked the rooms became very different,
+so that Miss Allan's room was very unlike Evelyn's room. 
+There were no variously coloured hatpins on her dressing-table;
+no scent-bottles; no narrow curved pairs of scissors; no great variety
+of shoes and boots; no silk petticoats lying on the chairs.  The room
+was extremely neat.  There seemed to be two pairs of everything. 
+The writing-table, however, was piled with manuscript, and a table
+was drawn out to stand by the arm-chair on which were two separate
+heaps of dark library books, in which there were many slips of paper
+sticking out at different degrees of thickness.  Miss Allan had asked
+Rachel to come in out of kindness, thinking that she was waiting
+about with nothing to do.  Moreover, she liked young women, for she
+had taught many of them, and having received so much hospitality from
+the Ambroses she was glad to be able to repay a minute part of it. 
+She looked about accordingly for something to show her.  The room
+did not provide much entertainment.  She touched her manuscript. 
+"Age of Chaucer; Age of Elizabeth; Age of Dryden," she reflected;
+"I'm glad there aren't many more ages.  I'm still in the middle of
+the eighteenth century.  Won't you sit down, Miss Vinrace?  The chair,
+though small, is firm.  . . . Euphues.  The germ of the English novel,"
+she continued, glancing at another page.  "Is that the kind of thing
+that interests you?"
+
+She looked at Rachel with great kindness and simplicity, as though
+she would do her utmost to provide anything she wished to have. 
+This expression had a remarkable charm in a face otherwise much lined
+with care and thought.
+
+"Oh no, it's music with you, isn't it?" she continued,
+recollecting, "and I generally find that they don't go together. 
+Sometimes of course we have prodigies--" She was looking about her
+for something and now saw a jar on the mantelpiece which she reached
+down and gave to Rachel.  "If you put your finger into this jar
+you may be able to extract a piece of preserved ginger.  Are you a prodigy?"
+
+But the ginger was deep and could not be reached.
+
+"Don't bother," she said, as Miss Allan looked about for some
+other implement.  "I daresay I shouldn't like preserved ginger."
+
+"You've never tried?" enquired Miss Allan.  "Then I consider that it
+is your duty to try now.  Why, you may add a new pleasure to life,
+and as you are still young--" She wondered whether a button-hook
+would do.  "I make it a rule to try everything," she said.  "Don't you
+think it would be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first
+time on your death-bed, and found you never liked anything so much? 
+I should be so exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well
+on that account alone."
+
+She was now successful, and a lump of ginger emerged on the end
+of the button-hook. While she went to wipe the button-hook, Rachel
+bit the ginger and at once cried, "I must spit it out!"
+
+"Are you sure you have really tasted it?"  Miss Allan demanded.
+
+For answer Rachel threw it out of the window.
+
+"An experience anyhow," said Miss Allan calmly.  "Let me see--I have
+nothing else to offer you, unless you would like to taste this." 
+A small cupboard hung above her bed, and she took out of it a slim
+elegant jar filled with a bright green fluid.
+
+"Creme de Menthe," she said.  "Liqueur, you know.  It looks
+as if I drank, doesn't it?  As a matter of fact it goes to prove
+what an exceptionally abstemious person I am.  I've had that jar
+for six-and-twenty years," she added, looking at it with pride,
+as she tipped it over, and from the height of the liquid it could
+be seen that the bottle was still untouched.
+
+"Twenty-six years?"  Rachel exclaimed.
+
+Miss Allan was gratified, for she had meant Rachel to be surprised.
+
+"When I went to Dresden six-and-twenty years ago," she said,
+"a certain friend of mine announced her intention of making me
+a present.  She thought that in the event of shipwreck or accident
+a stimulant might be useful.  However, as I had no occasion for it,
+I gave it back on my return.  On the eve of any foreign journey
+the same bottle always makes its appearance, with the same note;
+on my return in safety it is always handed back.  I consider it a kind
+of charm against accidents.  Though I was once detained twenty-four
+hours by an accident to the train in front of me, I have never met
+with any accident myself.  Yes," she continued, now addressing
+the bottle, "we have seen many climes and cupboards together,
+have we not?  I intend one of these days to have a silver label
+made with an inscription.  It is a gentleman, as you may observe,
+and his name is Oliver.  . . . I do not think I could forgive you,
+Miss Vinrace, if you broke my Oliver," she said, firmly taking the
+bottle out of Rachel's hands and replacing it in the cupboard.
+
+Rachel was swinging the bottle by the neck.  She was interested
+by Miss Allan to the point of forgetting the bottle.
+
+"Well," she exclaimed, "I do think that odd; to have had a friend
+for twenty-six years, and a bottle, and--to have made all those journeys."
+
+"Not at all; I call it the reverse of odd," Miss Allan replied. 
+"I always consider myself the most ordinary person I know. 
+It's rather distinguished to be as ordinary as I am.  I forget--
+are you a prodigy, or did you say you were not a prodigy?"
+
+She smiled at Rachel very kindly.  She seemed to have known
+and experienced so much, as she moved cumbrously about the room,
+that surely there must be balm for all anguish in her words,
+could one induce her to have recourse to them.  But Miss Allan,
+who was now locking the cupboard door, showed no signs of
+breaking the reticence which had snowed her under for years. 
+An uncomfortable sensation kept Rachel silent; on the one hand,
+she wished to whirl high and strike a spark out of the cool pink flesh;
+on the other she perceived there was nothing to be done but to drift
+past each other in silence.
+
+"I'm not a prodigy.  I find it very difficult to say what I mean--"
+she observed at length.
+
+"It's a matter of temperament, I believe," Miss Allan helped her. 
+"There are some people who have no difficulty; for myself I find
+there are a great many things I simply cannot say.  But then I
+consider myself very slow.  One of my colleagues now, knows whether
+she likes you or not--let me see, how does she do it?--by the way you
+say good-morning at breakfast.  It is sometimes a matter of years
+before I can make up my mind.  But most young people seem to find
+it easy?"
+
+"Oh no," said Rachel.  "It's hard!"
+
+Miss Allan looked at Rachel quietly, saying nothing; she suspected
+that there were difficulties of some kind.  Then she put her hand
+to the back of her head, and discovered that one of the grey coils
+of hair had come loose.
+
+"I must ask you to be so kind as to excuse me," she said, rising,
+"if I do my hair.  I have never yet found a satisfactory type
+of hairpin.  I must change my dress, too, for the matter of that;
+and I should be particularly glad of your assistance, because there
+is a tiresome set of hooks which I _can_ fasten for myself,
+but it takes from ten to fifteen minutes; whereas with your help--"
+
+She slipped off her coat and skirt and blouse, and stood doing
+her hair before the glass, a massive homely figure, her petticoat
+being so short that she stood on a pair of thick slate-grey legs.
+
+"People say youth is pleasant; I myself find middle age far pleasanter,"
+she remarked, removing hair pins and combs, and taking up her brush. 
+When it fell loose her hair only came down to her neck.
+
+"When one was young," she continued, "things could seem so very
+serious if one was made that way.  . . . And now my dress."
+
+In a wonderfully short space of time her hair had been reformed in its
+usual loops.  The upper half of her body now became dark green with black
+stripes on it; the skirt, however, needed hooking at various angles,
+and Rachel had to kneel on the floor, fitting the eyes to the hooks.
+
+"Our Miss Johnson used to find life very unsatisfactory, I remember,"
+Miss Allan continued.  She turned her back to the light.  "And then
+she took to breeding guinea-pigs for their spots, and became
+absorbed in that.  I have just heard that the yellow guinea-pig
+has had a black baby.  We had a bet of sixpence on about it. 
+She will be very triumphant."
+
+The skirt was fastened.  She looked at herself in the glass with
+the curious stiffening of her face generally caused by looking
+in the glass.
+
+"Am I in a fit state to encounter my fellow-beings?" she asked. 
+"I forget which way it is--but they find black animals very rarely
+have coloured babies--it may be the other way round.  I have had
+it so often explained to me that it is very stupid of me to have
+forgotten again."
+
+She moved about the room acquiring small objects with quiet force,
+and fixing them about her--a locket, a watch and chain, a heavy
+gold bracelet, and the parti-coloured button of a suffrage society. 
+Finally, completely equipped for Sunday tea, she stood before Rachel,
+and smiled at her kindly.  She was not an impulsive woman, and her
+life had schooled her to restrain her tongue.  At the same time,
+she was possessed of an amount of good-will towards others,
+and in particular towards the young, which often made her regret
+that speech was so difficult.
+
+"Shall we descend?" she said.
+
+She put one hand upon Rachel's shoulder, and stooping, picked up
+a pair of walking-shoes with the other, and placed them neatly side
+by side outside her door.  As they walked down the passage they
+passed many pairs of boots and shoes, some black and some brown,
+all side by side, and all different, even to the way in which they
+lay together.
+
+"I always think that people are so like their boots," said Miss Allan. 
+"That is Mrs. Paley's--" but as she spoke the door opened,
+and Mrs. Paley rolled out in her chair, equipped also for tea.
+
+She greeted Miss Allan and Rachel.
+
+"I was just saying that people are so like their boots,"
+said Miss Allan.  Mrs. Paley did not hear.  She repeated it
+more loudly still.  Mrs. Paley did not hear.  She repeated it
+a third time.  Mrs. Paley heard, but she did not understand. 
+She was apparently about to repeat it for the fourth time,
+when Rachel suddenly said something inarticulate, and disappeared
+down the corridor.  This misunderstanding, which involved a complete
+block in the passage, seemed to her unbearable.  She walked quickly
+and blindly in the opposite direction, and found herself at the end
+of a _cul_ _de_ _sac_.  There was a window, and a table and a
+chair in the window, and upon the table stood a rusty inkstand,
+an ashtray, an old copy of a French newspaper, and a pen with a
+broken nib.  Rachel sat down, as if to study the French newspaper,
+but a tear fell on the blurred French print, raising a soft blot. 
+She lifted her head sharply, exclaiming aloud, "It's intolerable!" 
+Looking out of the window with eyes that would have seen nothing
+even had they not been dazed by tears, she indulged herself at last
+in violent abuse of the entire day.  It had been miserable from
+start to finish; first, the service in the chapel; then luncheon;
+then Evelyn; then Miss Allan; then old Mrs. Paley blocking up
+the passage.  All day long she had been tantalized and put off. 
+She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of some crisis,
+from which the world is finally displayed in its true proportions. 
+She disliked the look of it immensely--churches, politicians, misfits,
+and huge impostures--men like Mr. Dalloway, men like Mr. Bax,
+Evelyn and her chatter, Mrs. Paley blocking up the passage. 
+Meanwhile the steady beat of her own pulse represented the hot current
+of feeling that ran down beneath; beating, struggling, fretting. 
+For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in the world,
+which tried to burst forth here--there--and was repressed now by
+Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous stupidity,
+the weight of the entire world.  Thus tormented, she would twist
+her hands together, for all things were wrong, all people stupid. 
+Vaguely seeing that there were people down in the garden beneath
+she represented them as aimless masses of matter, floating hither
+and thither, without aim except to impede her.  What were they doing,
+those other people in the world?
+
+"Nobody knows," she said.  The force of her rage was beginning
+to spend itself, and the vision of the world which had been so vivid
+became dim.
+
+"It's a dream," she murmured.  She considered the rusty inkstand,
+the pen, the ash-tray, and the old French newspaper.  These small
+and worthless objects seemed to her to represent human lives.
+
+"We're asleep and dreaming," she repeated.  But the possibility
+which now suggested itself that one of the shapes might be
+the shape of Terence roused her from her melancholy lethargy. 
+She became as restless as she had been before she sat down.  She was
+no longer able to see the world as a town laid out beneath her. 
+It was covered instead by a haze of feverish red mist.  She had
+returned to the state in which she had been all day.  Thinking was
+no escape.  Physical movement was the only refuge, in and out
+of rooms, in and out of people's minds, seeking she knew not what. 
+Therefore she rose, pushed back the table, and went downstairs. 
+She went out of the hall door, and, turning the corner of the hotel,
+found herself among the people whom she had seen from the window. 
+But owing to the broad sunshine after shaded passages, and to
+the substance of living people after dreams, the group appeared
+with startling intensity, as though the dusty surface had been
+peeled off everything, leaving only the reality and the instant. 
+It had the look of a vision printed on the dark at night. 
+White and grey and purple figures were scattered on the green,
+round wicker tables, in the middle the flame of the tea-urn made
+the air waver like a faulty sheet of glass, a massive green tree
+stood over them as if it were a moving force held at rest. 
+As she approached, she could hear Evelyn's voice repeating monotonously,
+"Here then--here--good doggie, come here"; for a moment nothing
+seemed to happen; it all stood still, and then she realised that
+one of the figures was Helen Ambrose; and the dust again began
+to settle.
+
+The group indeed had come together in a miscellaneous way;
+one tea-table joining to another tea-table, and deck-chairs serving
+to connect two groups.  But even at a distance it could be seen
+that Mrs. Flushing, upright and imperious, dominated the party. 
+She was talking vehemently to Helen across the table.
+
+"Ten days under canvas," she was saying.  "No comforts.  If you
+want comforts, don't come.  But I may tell you, if you don't come
+you'll regret it all your life.  You say yes?"
+
+At this moment Mrs. Flushing caught sight of Rachel.
+
+"Ah, there's your niece.  She's promised.  You're coming, aren't you?" 
+Having adopted the plan, she pursued it with the energy of a child.
+
+Rachel took her part with eagerness.
+
+"Of course I'm coming.  So are you, Helen.  And Mr. Pepper too." 
+As she sat she realised that she was surrounded by people she knew,
+but that Terence was not among them.  From various angles people
+began saying what they thought of the proposed expedition. 
+According to some it would be hot, but the nights would be cold;
+according to others, the difficulties would lie rather in getting a boat,
+and in speaking the language.  Mrs. Flushing disposed of all objections,
+whether due to man or due to nature, by announcing that her husband
+would settle all that.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Flushing quietly explained to Helen that the expedition
+was really a simple matter; it took five days at the outside;
+and the place--a native village--was certainly well worth seeing
+before she returned to England.  Helen murmured ambiguously,
+and did not commit herself to one answer rather than to another.
+
+The tea-party, however, included too many different kinds of people
+for general conversation to flourish; and from Rachel's point
+of view possessed the great advantage that it was quite unnecessary
+for her to talk.  Over there Susan and Arthur were explaining
+to Mrs. Paley that an expedition had been proposed; and Mrs. Paley
+having grasped the fact, gave the advice of an old traveller that they
+should take nice canned vegetables, fur cloaks, and insect powder. 
+She leant over to Mrs. Flushing and whispered something which
+from the twinkle in her eyes probably had reference to bugs. 
+Then Helen was reciting "Toll for the Brave" to St. John Hirst,
+in order apparently to win a sixpence which lay upon the table;
+while Mr. Hughling Elliot imposed silence upon his section
+of the audience by his fascinating anecdote of Lord Curzon
+and the undergraduate's bicycle.  Mrs. Thornbury was trying to
+remember the name of a man who might have been another Garibaldi,
+and had written a book which they ought to read; and Mr. Thornbury
+recollected that he had a pair of binoculars at anybody's service. 
+Miss Allan meanwhile murmured with the curious intimacy which a spinster
+often achieves with dogs, to the fox-terrier which Evelyn had at last
+induced to come over to them.  Little particles of dust or blossom
+fell on the plates now and then when the branches sighed above. 
+Rachel seemed to see and hear a little of everything, much as a
+river feels the twigs that fall into it and sees the sky above,
+but her eyes were too vague for Evelyn's liking.  She came across,
+and sat on the ground at Rachel's feet.
+
+"Well?" she asked suddenly.  "What are you thinking about?"
+
+"Miss Warrington," Rachel replied rashly, because she had to
+say something.  She did indeed see Susan murmuring to Mrs. Elliot,
+while Arthur stared at her with complete confidence in his own love. 
+Both Rachel and Evelyn then began to listen to what Susan was saying.
+
+"There's the ordering and the dogs and the garden, and the children
+coming to be taught," her voice proceeded rhythmically as if checking
+the list, "and my tennis, and the village, and letters to write
+for father, and a thousand little things that don't sound much;
+but I never have a moment to myself, and when I got to bed,
+I'm so sleepy I'm off before my head touches the pillow.  Besides I
+like to be a great deal with my Aunts--I'm a great bore, aren't I,
+Aunt Emma?" (she smiled at old Mrs. Paley, who with head slightly
+drooped was regarding the cake with speculative affection), "and
+father has to be very careful about chills in winter which means
+a great deal of running about, because he won't look after himself,
+any more than you will, Arthur!  So it all mounts up!"
+
+Her voice mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life
+and her own nature.  Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan,
+ignoring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. 
+She appeared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific,
+the kind blue eyes now shallow and watery, the bloom of the cheeks
+congealed to a network of dry red canals.
+
+Helen turned to her.  "Did you go to church?" she asked. 
+She had won her sixpence and seemed making ready to go.
+
+"Yes," said Rachel.  "For the last time," she added.
+
+In preparing to put on her gloves, Helen dropped one.
+
+"You're not going?"  Evelyn asked, taking hold of one glove
+as if to keep them.
+
+"It's high time we went," said Helen.  "Don't you see how silent
+every one's getting--?"
+
+A silence had fallen upon them all, caused partly by one of the
+accidents of talk, and partly because they saw some one approaching. 
+Helen could not see who it was, but keeping her eyes fixed upon Rachel
+observed something which made her say to herself, "So it's Hewet." 
+She drew on her gloves with a curious sense of the significance
+of the moment.  Then she rose, for Mrs. Flushing had seen Hewet too,
+and was demanding information about rivers and boats which showed
+that the whole conversation would now come over again.
+
+Rachel followed her, and they walked in silence down the avenue. 
+In spite of what Helen had seen and understood, the feeling that was
+uppermost in her mind was now curiously perverse; if she went on
+this expedition, she would not be able to have a bath, the effort
+appeared to her to be great and disagreeable.
+
+"It's so unpleasant, being cooped up with people one hardly knows,"
+she remarked.  "People who mind being seen naked."
+
+"You don't mean to go?"  Rachel asked.
+
+The intensity with which this was spoken irritated Mrs. Ambrose.
+
+"I don't mean to go, and I don't mean not to go," she replied. 
+She became more and more casual and indifferent.
+
+"After all, I daresay we've seen all there is to be seen;
+and there's the bother of getting there, and whatever they
+may say it's bound to be vilely uncomfortable."
+
+For some time Rachel made no reply; but every sentence Helen spoke
+increased her bitterness.  At last she broke out--
+
+"Thank God, Helen, I'm not like you!  I sometimes think you don't think
+or feel or care to do anything but exist!  You're like Mr. Hirst. 
+You see that things are bad, and you pride yourself on saying so. 
+It's what you call being honest; as a matter of fact it's being lazy,
+being dull, being nothing.  You don't help; you put an end
+to things."
+
+Helen smiled as if she rather enjoyed the attack.
+
+"Well?" she enquired.
+
+"It seems to me bad--that's all," Rachel replied.
+
+"Quite likely," said Helen.
+
+At any other time Rachel would probably have been silenced by her
+Aunt's candour; but this afternoon she was not in the mood to be
+silenced by any one.  A quarrel would be welcome.
+
+"You're only half alive," she continued.
+
+"Is that because I didn't accept Mr. Flushing's invitation?" 
+Helen asked, "or do you always think that?"
+
+At the moment it appeared to Rachel that she had always seen the same
+faults in Helen, from the very first night on board the _Euphrosyne_,
+in spite of her beauty, in spite of her magnanimity and their love.
+
+"Oh, it's only what's the matter with every one!" she exclaimed. 
+"No one feels--no one does anything but hurt.  I tell you, Helen,
+the world's bad.  It's an agony, living, wanting--"
+
+Here she tore a handful of leaves from a bush and crushed them
+to control herself.
+
+"The lives of these people," she tried to explain, the aimlessness,
+the way they live.  One goes from one to another, and it's all the same. 
+One never gets what one wants out of any of them."
+
+Her emotional state and her confusion would have made her an easy
+prey if Helen had wished to argue or had wished to draw confidences. 
+But instead of talking she fell into a profound silence as they
+walked on.  Aimless, trivial, meaningless, oh no--what she
+had seen at tea made it impossible for her to believe that. 
+The little jokes, the chatter, the inanities of the afternoon had
+shrivelled up before her eyes.  Underneath the likings and spites,
+the comings together and partings, great things were happening--
+terrible things, because they were so great.  Her sense of safety
+was shaken, as if beneath twigs and dead leaves she had seen
+the movement of a snake.  It seemed to her that a moment's respite
+was allowed, a moment's make-believe, and then again the profound
+and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to its liking,
+making and destroying.
+
+She looked at Rachel walking beside her, still crushing the leaves
+in her fingers and absorbed in her own thoughts.  She was in love,
+and she pitied her profoundly.  But she roused herself from
+these thoughts and apologised.  "I'm very sorry," she said,
+"but if I'm dull, it's my nature, and it can't be helped."  If it
+was a natural defect, however, she found an easy remedy, for she went
+on to say that she thought Mr. Flushing's scheme a very good one,
+only needing a little consideration, which it appeared she had given
+it by the time they reached home.  By that time they had settled
+that if anything more was said, they would accept the invitation.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX
+
+
+
+When considered in detail by Mr. Flushing and Mrs. Ambrose
+the expedition proved neither dangerous nor difficult. 
+They found also that it was not even unusual.  Every year at this
+season English people made parties which steamed a short way up
+the river, landed, and looked at the native village, bought a certain
+number of things from the natives, and returned again without
+damage done to mind or body.  When it was discovered that six
+people really wished the same thing the arrangements were soon carried out.
+
+Since the time of Elizabeth very few people had seen the river,
+and nothing has been done to change its appearance from what it
+was to the eyes of the Elizabethan voyagers.  The time of Elizabeth
+was only distant from the present time by a moment of space
+compared with the ages which had passed since the water had run
+between those banks, and the green thickets swarmed there,
+and the small trees had grown to huge wrinkled trees in solitude. 
+Changing only with the change of the sun and the clouds, the waving
+green mass had stood there for century after century, and the water
+had run between its banks ceaselessly, sometimes washing away
+earth and sometimes the branches of trees, while in other parts
+of the world one town had risen upon the ruins of another town,
+and the men in the towns had become more and more articulate
+and unlike each other.  A few miles of this river were visible
+from the top of the mountain where some weeks before the party
+from the hotel had picnicked.  Susan and Arthur had seen it as they
+kissed each other, and Terence and Rachel as they sat talking
+about Richmond, and Evelyn and Perrott as they strolled about,
+imagining that they were great captains sent to colonise the world. 
+They had seen the broad blue mark across the sand where it flowed
+into the sea, and the green cloud of trees mass themselves about it
+farther up, and finally hide its waters altogether from sight. 
+At intervals for the first twenty miles or so houses were scattered
+on the bank; by degrees the houses became huts, and, later still,
+there was neither hut nor house, but trees and grass, which were
+seen only by hunters, explorers, or merchants, marching or sailing,
+but making no settlement.
+
+By leaving Santa Marina early in the morning, driving twenty
+miles and riding eight, the party, which was composed finally
+of six English people, reached the river-side as the night fell. 
+They came cantering through the trees--Mr. and Mrs. Flushing,
+Helen Ambrose, Rachel, Terence, and St. John.  The tired little
+horses then stopped automatically, and the English dismounted. 
+Mrs. Flushing strode to the river-bank in high spirits.  The day had
+been long and hot, but she had enjoyed the speed and the open air;
+she had left the hotel which she hated, and she found the company
+to her liking.  The river was swirling past in the darkness;
+they could just distinguish the smooth moving surface of the water,
+and the air was full of the sound of it.  They stood in an empty
+space in the midst of great tree-trunks, and out there a little green
+light moving slightly up and down showed them where the steamer lay
+in which they were to embark.
+
+When they all stood upon its deck they found that it was a very
+small boat which throbbed gently beneath them for a few minutes,
+and then shoved smoothly through the water.  They seemed to be
+driving into the heart of the night, for the trees closed in
+front of them, and they could hear all round them the rustling
+of leaves.  The great darkness had the usual effect of taking away
+all desire for communication by making their words sound thin
+and small; and, after walking round the deck three or four times,
+they clustered together, yawning deeply, and looking at the same spot
+of deep gloom on the banks.  Murmuring very low in the rhythmical
+tone of one oppressed by the air, Mrs. Flushing began to wonder
+where they were to sleep, for they could not sleep downstairs,
+they could not sleep in a doghole smelling of oil, they could not
+sleep on deck, they could not sleep--She yawned profoundly.  It was
+as Helen had foreseen; the question of nakedness had risen already,
+although they were half asleep, and almost invisible to each other. 
+With St. John's help she stretched an awning, and persuaded
+Mrs. Flushing that she could take off her clothes behind this,
+and that no one would notice if by chance some part of her which had
+been concealed for forty-five years was laid bare to the human eye. 
+Mattresses were thrown down, rugs provided, and the three women
+lay near each other in the soft open air.
+
+The gentlemen, having smoked a certain number of cigarettes,
+dropped the glowing ends into the river, and looked for a time at
+the ripples wrinkling the black water beneath them, undressed too,
+and lay down at the other end of the boat.  They were very tired,
+and curtained from each other by the darkness.  The light from one
+lantern fell upon a few ropes, a few planks of the deck, and the rail
+of the boat, but beyond that there was unbroken darkness, no light
+reached their faces, or the trees which were massed on the sides
+of the river.
+
+Soon Wilfrid Flushing slept, and Hirst slept.  Hewet alone lay awake
+looking straight up into the sky.  The gentle motion and the black
+shapes that were drawn ceaselessly across his eyes had the effect
+of making it impossible for him to think.  Rachel's presence so near
+him lulled thought asleep.  Being so near him, only a few paces off
+at the other end of the boat, she made it as impossible for him
+to think about her as it would have been impossible to see her if she
+had stood quite close to him, her forehead against his forehead. 
+In some strange way the boat became identified with himself, and just
+as it would have been useless for him to get up and steer the boat,
+so was it useless for him to struggle any longer with the irresistible
+force of his own feelings.  He was drawn on and on away from all
+he knew, slipping over barriers and past landmarks into unknown
+waters as the boat glided over the smooth surface of the river. 
+In profound peace, enveloped in deeper unconsciousness than had been
+his for many nights, he lay on deck watching the tree-tops change
+their position slightly against the sky, and arch themselves,
+and sink and tower huge, until he passed from seeing them into
+dreams where he lay beneath the shadow of the vast trees, looking up
+into the sky.
+
+When they woke next morning they had gone a considerable way up
+the river; on the right was a high yellow bank of sand tufted
+with trees, on the left a swamp quivering with long reeds and tall
+bamboos on the top of which, swaying slightly, perched vivid green
+and yellow birds.  The morning was hot and still.  After breakfast they
+drew chairs together and sat in an irregular semicircle in the bow. 
+An awning above their heads protected them from the heat of the sun,
+and the breeze which the boat made aired them softly.  Mrs. Flushing
+was already dotting and striping her canvas, her head jerking this
+way and that with the action of a bird nervously picking up grain;
+the others had books or pieces of paper or embroidery on their knees,
+at which they looked fitfully and again looked at the river ahead. 
+At one point Hewet read part of a poem aloud, but the number of
+moving things entirely vanquished his words.  He ceased to read,
+and no one spoke.  They moved on under the shelter of the trees. 
+There was now a covey of red birds feeding on one of the little islets
+to the left, or again a blue-green parrot flew shrieking from tree
+to tree.  As they moved on the country grew wilder and wilder. 
+The trees and the undergrowth seemed to be strangling each other
+near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle; while here and there
+a splendid tree towered high above the swarm, shaking its thin green
+umbrellas lightly in the upper air.  Hewet looked at his books again. 
+The morning was peaceful as the night had been, only it was very
+strange because he could see it was light, and he could see Rachel
+and hear her voice and be near to her.  He felt as if he were waiting,
+as if somehow he were stationary among things that passed over him
+and around him, voices, people's bodies, birds, only Rachel too
+was waiting with him.  He looked at her sometimes as if she must
+know that they were waiting together, and being drawn on together,
+without being able to offer any resistance.  Again he read from
+his book:
+
+   Whoever you are holding me now in your hand,
+   Without one thing all will be useless.
+
+A bird gave a wild laugh, a monkey chuckled a malicious question,
+and, as fire fades in the hot sunshine, his words flickered and went out.
+
+By degrees as the river narrowed, and the high sandbanks fell
+to level ground thickly grown with trees, the sounds of the forest
+could be heard.  It echoed like a hall.  There were sudden cries;
+and then long spaces of silence, such as there are in a cathedral
+when a boy's voice has ceased and the echo of it still seems
+to haunt about the remote places of the roof.  Once Mr. Flushing
+rose and spoke to a sailor, and even announced that some time
+after luncheon the steamer would stop, and they could walk a little
+way through the forest.
+
+"There are tracks all through the trees there," he explained. 
+"We're no distance from civilisation yet."
+
+He scrutinised his wife's painting.  Too polite to praise it openly,
+he contented himself with cutting off one half of the picture
+with one hand, and giving a flourish in the air with the other.
+
+"God!"  Hirst exclaimed, staring straight ahead.  "Don't you think
+it's amazingly beautiful?"
+
+"Beautiful?"  Helen enquired.  It seemed a strange little word,
+and Hirst and herself both so small that she forgot to answer him.
+
+Hewet felt that he must speak.
+
+"That's where the Elizabethans got their style," he mused,
+staring into the profusion of leaves and blossoms and prodigious fruits.
+
+"Shakespeare?  I hate Shakespeare!"  Mrs. Flushing exclaimed;
+and Wilfrid returned admiringly, "I believe you're the only person
+who dares to say that, Alice."  But Mrs. Flushing went on painting. 
+She did not appear to attach much value to her husband's compliment,
+and painted steadily, sometimes muttering a half-audible word
+or groan.
+
+The morning was now very hot.
+
+"Look at Hirst!"  Mr. Flushing whispered.  His sheet of paper
+had slipped on to the deck, his head lay back, and he drew a long
+snoring breath.
+
+Terence picked up the sheet of paper and spread it out before Rachel. 
+It was a continuation of the poem on God which he had begun
+in the chapel, and it was so indecent that Rachel did not
+understand half of it although she saw that it was indecent. 
+Hewet began to fill in words where Hirst had left spaces,
+but he soon ceased; his pencil rolled on deck.  Gradually they
+approached nearer and nearer to the bank on the right-hand side,
+so that the light which covered them became definitely green,
+falling through a shade of green leaves, and Mrs. Flushing set aside
+her sketch and stared ahead of her in silence.  Hirst woke up;
+they were then called to luncheon, and while they ate it,
+the steamer came to a standstill a little way out from the bank. 
+The boat which was towed behind them was brought to the side,
+and the ladies were helped into it.
+
+For protection against boredom, Helen put a book of memoirs beneath
+her arm, and Mrs. Flushing her paint-box, and, thus equipped,
+they allowed themselves to be set on shore on the verge of the forest.
+
+They had not strolled more than a few hundred yards along the track
+which ran parallel with the river before Helen professed to find
+it was unbearably hot.  The river breeze had ceased, and a hot
+steamy atmosphere, thick with scents, came from the forest.
+
+"I shall sit down here," she announced, pointing to the trunk of a tree
+which had fallen long ago and was now laced across and across by creepers
+and thong-like brambles.  She seated herself, opened her parasol,
+and looked at the river which was barred by the stems of trees. 
+She turned her back to the trees which disappeared in black shadow
+behind her.
+
+"I quite agree," said Mrs. Flushing, and proceeded to undo her
+paint-box. Her husband strolled about to select an interesting
+point of view for her.  Hirst cleared a space on the ground by
+Helen's side, and seated himself with great deliberation, as if he
+did not mean to move until he had talked to her for a long time. 
+Terence and Rachel were left standing by themselves without occupation. 
+Terence saw that the time had come as it was fated to come,
+but although he realised this he was completely calm and master
+of himself.  He chose to stand for a few moments talking to Helen,
+and persuading her to leave her seat.  Rachel joined him too
+in advising her to come with them.
+
+"Of all the people I've ever met," he said, "you're the least adventurous. 
+You might be sitting on green chairs in Hyde Park.  Are you
+going to sit there the whole afternoon?  Aren't you going to walk?"
+
+"Oh, no," said Helen, "one's only got to use one's eye. 
+There's everything here--everything," she repeated in a drowsy
+tone of voice.  "What will you gain by walking?"
+
+"You'll be hot and disagreeable by tea-time, we shall be cool and sweet,"
+put in Hirst.  Into his eyes as he looked up at them had come yellow
+and green reflections from the sky and the branches, robbing them
+of their intentness, and he seemed to think what he did not say. 
+It was thus taken for granted by them both that Terence and Rachel
+proposed to walk into the woods together; with one look at each
+other they turned away.
+
+"Good-bye!" cried Rachel.
+
+"Good-by. Beware of snakes," Hirst replied.  He settled himself
+still more comfortably under the shade of the fallen tree and
+Helen's figure.  As they went, Mr. Flushing called after them,
+"We must start in an hour.  Hewet, please remember that.  An hour."
+
+Whether made by man, or for some reason preserved by nature,
+there was a wide pathway striking through the forest at right
+angles to the river.  It resembled a drive in an English forest,
+save that tropical bushes with their sword-like leaves grew at
+the side, and the ground was covered with an unmarked springy
+moss instead of grass, starred with little yellow flowers. 
+As they passed into the depths of the forest the light grew dimmer,
+and the noises of the ordinary world were replaced by those creaking
+and sighing sounds which suggest to the traveller in a forest that he
+is walking at the bottom of the sea.  The path narrowed and turned;
+it was hedged in by dense creepers which knotted tree to tree,
+and burst here and there into star-shaped crimson blossoms. 
+The sighing and creaking up above were broken every now and then
+by the jarring cry of some startled animal.  The atmosphere was close
+and the air came at them in languid puffs of scent.  The vast green
+light was broken here and there by a round of pure yellow sunlight
+which fell through some gap in the immense umbrella of green above,
+and in these yellow spaces crimson and black butterflies were circling
+and settling.  Terence and Rachel hardly spoke.
+
+Not only did the silence weigh upon them, but they were both unable
+to frame any thoughts.  There was something between them which had to be
+spoken of.  One of them had to begin, but which of them was it to be? 
+Then Hewet picked up a red fruit and threw it as high as he could. 
+When it dropped, he would speak.  They heard the flapping of
+great wings; they heard the fruit go pattering through the leaves
+and eventually fall with a thud.  The silence was again profound.
+
+"Does this frighten you?"  Terence asked when the sound of the fruit
+falling had completely died away.
+
+"No," she answered.  "I like it."
+
+She repeated "I like it."  She was walking fast, and holding herself
+more erect than usual.  There was another pause.
+
+"You like being with me?"  Terence asked.
+
+"Yes, with you," she replied.
+
+He was silent for a moment.  Silence seemed to have fallen upon
+the world.
+
+"That is what I have felt ever since I knew you," he replied. 
+"We are happy together."  He did not seem to be speaking, or she
+to be hearing.
+
+"Very happy," she answered.
+
+They continued to walk for some time in silence.  Their steps
+unconsciously quickened.
+
+"We love each other," Terence said.
+
+"We love each other," she repeated.
+
+The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones
+of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words.  Faster and
+faster they walked; simultaneously they stopped, clasped each other
+in their arms, then releasing themselves, dropped to the earth. 
+They sat side by side.  Sounds stood out from the background making
+a bridge across their silence; they heard the swish of the trees
+and some beast croaking in a remote world.
+
+"We love each other," Terence repeated, searching into her face. 
+Their faces were both very pale and quiet, and they said nothing. 
+He was afraid to kiss her again.  By degrees she drew close to him,
+and rested against him.  In this position they sat for some time. 
+She said "Terence" once; he answered "Rachel."
+
+"Terrible--terrible," she murmured after another pause,
+but in saying this she was thinking as much of the persistent
+churning of the water as of her own feeling.  On and on it went
+in the distance, the senseless and cruel churning of the water. 
+She observed that the tears were running down Terence's cheeks.
+
+The next movement was on his part.  A very long time seemed
+to have passed.  He took out his watch.
+
+"Flushing said an hour.  We've been gone more than half an hour."
+
+"And it takes that to get back," said Rachel.  She raised herself
+very slowly.  When she was standing up she stretched her arms
+and drew a deep breath, half a sigh, half a yawn.  She appeared
+to be very tired.  Her cheeks were white.  "Which way?" she asked.
+
+"There," said Terence.
+
+They began to walk back down the mossy path again.  The sighing and
+creaking continued far overhead, and the jarring cries of animals. 
+The butterflies were circling still in the patches of yellow sunlight. 
+At first Terence was certain of his way, but as they walked he
+became doubtful.  They had to stop to consider, and then to return
+and start once more, for although he was certain of the direction
+of the river he was not certain of striking the point where they
+had left the others.  Rachel followed him, stopping where he stopped,
+turning where he turned, ignorant of the way, ignorant why he stopped
+or why he turned.
+
+"I don't want to be late," he said, "because--" He put a flower into
+her hand and her fingers closed upon it quietly.  "We're so late--
+so late--so horribly late," he repeated as if he were talking
+in his sleep.  "Ah--this is right.  We turn here."
+
+They found themselves again in the broad path, like the drive in
+the English forest, where they had started when they left the others. 
+They walked on in silence as people walking in their sleep,
+and were oddly conscious now and again of the mass of their bodies. 
+Then Rachel exclaimed suddenly, "Helen!"
+
+In the sunny space at the edge of the forest they saw Helen
+still sitting on the tree-trunk, her dress showing very white
+in the sun, with Hirst still propped on his elbow by her side. 
+They stopped instinctively.  At the sight of other people they could
+not go on.  They stood hand in hand for a minute or two in silence. 
+They could not bear to face other people.
+
+"But we must go on," Rachel insisted at last, in the curious dull
+tone of voice in which they had both been speaking, and with a
+great effort they forced themselves to cover the short distance
+which lay between them and the pair sitting on the tree-trunk.
+
+As they approached, Helen turned round and looked at them. 
+She looked at them for some time without speaking, and when they
+were close to her she said quietly:
+
+"Did you meet Mr. Flushing?  He has gone to find you.  He thought
+you must be lost, though I told him you weren't lost."
+
+Hirst half turned round and threw his head back so that he looked
+at the branches crossing themselves in the air above him.
+
+"Well, was it worth the effort?" he enquired dreamily.
+
+Hewet sat down on the grass by his side and began to fan himself.
+
+Rachel had balanced herself near Helen on the end of the tree trunk.
+
+"Very hot," she said.
+
+"You look exhausted anyhow," said Hirst.
+
+"It's fearfully close in those trees," Helen remarked, picking up
+her book and shaking it free from the dried blades of grass
+which had fallen between the leaves.  Then they were all silent,
+looking at the river swirling past in front of them between the
+trunks of the trees until Mr. Flushing interrupted them.  He broke
+out of the trees a hundred yards to the left, exclaiming sharply:
+
+"Ah, so you found the way after all.  But it's late--much later
+than we arranged, Hewet."
+
+He was slightly annoyed, and in his capacity as leader of the expedition,
+inclined to be dictatorial.  He spoke quickly, using curiously sharp,
+meaningless words.
+
+"Being late wouldn't matter normally, of course," he said,
+"but when it's a question of keeping the men up to time--"
+
+He gathered them together and made them come down to the river-bank,
+where the boat was waiting to row them out to the steamer.
+
+The heat of the day was going down, and over their cups of tea
+the Flushings tended to become communicative.  It seemed to
+Terence as he listened to them talking, that existence now went
+on in two different layers.  Here were the Flushings talking,
+talking somewhere high up in the air above him, and he and Rachel
+had dropped to the bottom of the world together.  But with something
+of a child's directness, Mrs. Flushing had also the instinct which
+leads a child to suspect what its elders wish to keep hidden. 
+She fixed Terence with her vivid blue eyes and addressed herself
+to him in particular.  What would he do, she wanted to know,
+if the boat ran upon a rock and sank.
+
+"Would you care for anythin' but savin' yourself?  Should I? 
+No, no," she laughed, "not one scrap--don't tell me.  There's only
+two creatures the ordinary woman cares about," she continued,
+"her child and her dog; and I don't believe it's even two with men. 
+One reads a lot about love--that's why poetry's so dull. 
+But what happens in real life, he?  It ain't love!" she cried.
+
+Terence murmured something unintelligible.  Mr. Flushing,
+however, had recovered his urbanity.  He was smoking a cigarette,
+and he now answered his wife.
+
+"You must always remember, Alice," he said, "that your upbringing
+was very unnatural--unusual, I should say.  They had no mother,"
+he explained, dropping something of the formality of his tone;
+"and a father--he was a very delightful man, I've no doubt,
+but he cared only for racehorses and Greek statues.  Tell them about
+the bath, Alice."
+
+"In the stable-yard," said Mrs. Flushing.  "Covered with ice in winter. 
+We had to get in; if we didn't, we were whipped.  The strong
+ones lived--the others died.  What you call survival of the fittest--
+a most excellent plan, I daresay, if you've thirteen children!"
+
+"And all this going on in the heart of England,
+in the nineteenth century!"  Mr. Flushing exclaimed, turning to Helen.
+
+"I'd treat my children just the same if I had any," said Mrs. Flushing.
+
+Every word sounded quite distinctly in Terence's ears; but what
+were they saying, and who were they talking to, and who were they,
+these fantastic people, detached somewhere high up in the air? 
+Now that they had drunk their tea, they rose and leant over the bow of
+the boat.  The sun was going down, and the water was dark and crimson. 
+The river had widened again, and they were passing a little island
+set like a dark wedge in the middle of the stream.  Two great white
+birds with red lights on them stood there on stilt-like legs,
+and the beach of the island was unmarked, save by the skeleton
+print of birds' feet.  The branches of the trees on the bank looked
+more twisted and angular than ever, and the green of the leaves
+was lurid and splashed with gold.  Then Hirst began to talk,
+leaning over the bow.
+
+"It makes one awfully queer, don't you find?" he complained. 
+"These trees get on one's nerves--it's all so crazy. 
+God's undoubtedly mad.  What sane person could have conceived
+a wilderness like this, and peopled it with apes and alligators? 
+I should go mad if I lived here--raving mad."
+
+Terence attempted to answer him, but Mrs. Ambrose replied instead. 
+She bade him look at the way things massed themselves--look at
+the amazing colours, look at the shapes of the trees.  She seemed
+to be protecting Terence from the approach of the others.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Flushing.  "And in my opinion," he continued,
+"the absence of population to which Hirst objects is precisely
+the significant touch.  You must admit, Hirst, that a little Italian
+town even would vulgarise the whole scene, would detract from
+the vastness--the sense of elemental grandeur."  He swept his hands
+towards the forest, and paused for a moment, looking at the great
+green mass, which was now falling silent.  "I own it makes us seem
+pretty small--us, not them."  He nodded his head at a sailor who
+leant over the side spitting into the river.  "And that, I think,
+is what my wife feels, the essential superiority of the peasant--"
+Under cover of Mr. Flushing's words, which continued now gently
+reasoning with St. John and persuading him, Terence drew Rachel
+to the side, pointing ostensibly to a great gnarled tree-trunk
+which had fallen and lay half in the water.  He wished, at any rate,
+to be near her, but he found that he could say nothing.  They could
+hear Mr. Flushing flowing on, now about his wife, now about art,
+now about the future of the country, little meaningless words
+floating high in air.  As it was becoming cold he began to pace
+the deck with Hirst.  Fragments of their talk came out distinctly
+as they passed--art, emotion, truth, reality.
+
+"Is it true, or is it a dream?"  Rachel murmured, when they had passed.
+
+"It's true, it's true," he replied.
+
+But the breeze freshened, and there was a general desire for movement. 
+When the party rearranged themselves under cover of rugs and cloaks,
+Terence and Rachel were at opposite ends of the circle, and could
+not speak to each other.  But as the dark descended, the words of
+the others seemed to curl up and vanish as the ashes of burnt paper,
+and left them sitting perfectly silent at the bottom of the world. 
+Occasional starts of exquisite joy ran through them, and then they
+were peaceful again.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI
+
+
+
+Thanks to Mr. Flushing's discipline, the right stages of the river
+were reached at the right hours, and when next morning after
+breakfast the chairs were again drawn out in a semicircle in the bow,
+the launch was within a few miles of the native camp which was
+the limit of the journey.  Mr. Flushing, as he sat down, advised them
+to keep their eyes fixed on the left bank, where they would soon
+pass a clearing, and in that clearing, was a hut where Mackenzie,
+the famous explorer, had died of fever some ten years ago,
+almost within reach of civilisation--Mackenzie, he repeated,
+the man who went farther inland than any one's been yet.  Their eyes
+turned that way obediently.  The eyes of Rachel saw nothing. 
+Yellow and green shapes did, it is true, pass before them, but she
+only knew that one was large and another small; she did not know
+that they were trees.  These directions to look here and there
+irritated her, as interruptions irritate a person absorbed in thought,
+although she was not thinking of anything.  She was annoyed with all
+that was said, and with the aimless movements of people's bodies,
+because they seemed to interfere with her and to prevent her from
+speaking to Terence.  Very soon Helen saw her staring moodily
+at a coil of rope, and making no effort to listen.  Mr. Flushing
+and St. John were engaged in more or less continuous conversation
+about the future of the country from a political point of view,
+and the degree to which it had been explored; the others, with their
+legs stretched out, or chins poised on the hands, gazed in silence.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose looked and listened obediently enough, but inwardly
+she was prey to an uneasy mood not readily to be ascribed to any
+one cause.  Looking on shore as Mr. Flushing bade her, she thought
+the country very beautiful, but also sultry and alarming. 
+She did not like to feel herself the victim of unclassified emotions,
+and certainly as the launch slipped on and on, in the hot morning sun,
+she felt herself unreasonably moved.  Whether the unfamiliarity
+of the forest was the cause of it, or something less definite,
+she could not determine.  Her mind left the scene and occupied itself
+with anxieties for Ridley, for her children, for far-off things,
+such as old age and poverty and death.  Hirst, too, was depressed. 
+He had been looking forward to this expedition as to a holiday, for,
+once away from the hotel, surely wonderful things would happen,
+instead of which nothing happened, and here they were as uncomfortable,
+as restrained, as self-conscious as ever.  That, of course, was what
+came of looking forward to anything; one was always disappointed. 
+He blamed Wilfrid Flushing, who was so well dressed and so formal;
+he blamed Hewet and Rachel.  Why didn't they talk?  He looked at
+them sitting silent and self-absorbed, and the sight annoyed him. 
+He supposed that they were engaged, or about to become engaged,
+but instead of being in the least romantic or exciting, that was as dull
+as everything else; it annoyed him, too, to think that they were in love. 
+He drew close to Helen and began to tell her how uncomfortable his night
+had been, lying on the deck, sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold,
+and the stars so bright that he couldn't get to sleep.  He had lain
+awake all night thinking, and when it was light enough to see,
+he had written twenty lines of his poem on God, and the awful thing
+was that he'd practically proved the fact that God did not exist. 
+He did not see that he was teasing her, and he went on to wonder
+what would happen if God did exist--"an old gentleman in a beard and
+a long blue dressing gown, extremely testy and disagreeable as he's
+bound to be?  Can you suggest a rhyme?  God, rod, sod--all used;
+any others?"
+
+Although he spoke much as usual, Helen could have seen, had she looked,
+that he was also impatient and disturbed.  But she was not called upon
+to answer, for Mr. Flushing now exclaimed "There!"  They looked at the hut
+on the bank, a desolate place with a large rent in the roof, and the
+ground round it yellow, scarred with fires and scattered with rusty open tins.
+
+"Did they find his dead body there?"  Mrs. Flushing exclaimed,
+leaning forward in her eagerness to see the spot where the explorer
+had died.
+
+"They found his body and his skins and a notebook," her husband replied. 
+But the boat had soon carried them on and left the place behind.
+
+It was so hot that they scarcely moved, except now to change
+a foot, or, again, to strike a match.  Their eyes, concentrated upon
+the bank, were full of the same green reflections, and their lips
+were slightly pressed together as though the sights they were passing
+gave rise to thoughts, save that Hirst's lips moved intermittently
+as half consciously he sought rhymes for God.  Whatever the thoughts
+of the others, no one said anything for a considerable space. 
+They had grown so accustomed to the wall of trees on either side
+that they looked up with a start when the light suddenly widened
+out and the trees came to an end.
+
+"It almost reminds one of an English park," said Mr. Flushing.
+
+Indeed no change could have been greater.  On both banks of the river lay
+an open lawn-like space, grass covered and planted, for the gentleness
+and order of the place suggested human care, with graceful trees
+on the top of little mounds.  As far as they could gaze, this lawn
+rose and sank with the undulating motion of an old English park. 
+The change of scene naturally suggested a change of position,
+grateful to most of them.  They rose and leant over the rail.
+
+"It might be Arundel or Windsor," Mr. Flushing continued, "if you
+cut down that bush with the yellow flowers; and, by Jove, look!"
+
+Rows of brown backs paused for a moment and then leapt with a motion
+as if they were springing over waves out of sight.
+
+for a moment no one of them could believe that they had really
+seen live animals in the open--a herd of wild deer, and the sight
+aroused a childlike excitement in them, dissipating their gloom.
+
+"I've never in my life seen anything bigger than a hare!" 
+Hirst exclaimed with genuine excitement.  "What an ass I was not
+to bring my Kodak!"
+
+Soon afterwards the launch came gradually to a standstill,
+and the captain explained to Mr. Flushing that it would be pleasant
+for the passengers if they now went for a stroll on shore; if they
+chose to return within an hour, he would take them on to the village;
+if they chose to walk--it was only a mile or two farther on--
+he would meet them at the landing-place.
+
+The matter being settled, they were once more put on shore: 
+the sailors, producing raisins and tobacco, leant upon the rail
+and watched the six English, whose coats and dresses looked so
+strange upon the green, wander off.  A joke that was by no means
+proper set them all laughing, and then they turned round and lay
+at their ease upon the deck.
+
+Directly they landed, Terence and Rachel drew together slightly
+in advance of the others.
+
+"Thank God!"  Terence exclaimed, drawing a long breath.  "At last
+we're alone."
+
+"And if we keep ahead we can talk," said Rachel.
+
+Nevertheless, although their position some yards in advance of
+the others made it possible for them to say anything they chose,
+they were both silent.
+
+"You love me?"  Terence asked at length, breaking the silence painfully. 
+To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they
+were silent they were keenly conscious of each other's presence,
+and yet words were either too trivial or too large.
+
+She murmured inarticulately, ending, "And you?"
+
+"Yes, yes," he replied; but there were so many things to be said,
+and now that they were alone it seemed necessary to bring themselves
+still more near, and to surmount a barrier which had grown up
+since they had last spoken.  It was difficult, frightening even,
+oddly embarrassing.  At one moment he was clear-sighted, and,
+at the next, confused.
+
+"Now I'm going to begin at the beginning," he said resolutely. 
+"I'm going to tell you what I ought to have told you before. 
+In the first place, I've never been in love with other women,
+but I've had other women.  Then I've great faults.  I'm very lazy,
+I'm moody--" He persisted, in spite of her exclamation, "You've got
+to know the worst of me.  I'm lustful.  I'm overcome by a sense
+of futility--incompetence.  I ought never to have asked you to marry me,
+I expect.  I'm a bit of a snob; I'm ambitious--"
+
+"Oh, our faults!" she cried.  "What do they matter?"  Then she demanded,
+"Am I in love--is this being in love--are we to marry each other?"
+
+Overcome by the charm of her voice and her presence, he exclaimed,
+"Oh, you're free, Rachel.  To you, time will make no difference,
+or marriage or--"
+
+The voices of the others behind them kept floating, now farther,
+now nearer, and Mrs. Flushing's laugh rose clearly by itself.
+
+"Marriage?"  Rachel repeated.
+
+The shouts were renewed behind, warning them that they were bearing
+too far to the left.  Improving their course, he continued,
+"Yes, marriage."  The feeling that they could not be united until
+she knew all about him made him again endeavour to explain.
+
+"All that's been bad in me, the things I've put up with--
+the second best--"
+
+She murmured, considered her own life, but could not describe
+how it looked to her now.
+
+"And the loneliness!" he continued.  A vision of walking with her
+through the streets of London came before his eyes.  "We will go for
+walks together," he said.  The simplicity of the idea relieved them,
+and for the first time they laughed.  They would have liked had
+they dared to take each other by the hand, but the consciousness
+of eyes fixed on them from behind had not yet deserted them.
+
+"Books, people, sights--Mrs. Nutt, Greeley, Hutchinson," Hewet murmured.
+
+With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them
+seem unreal to each other, since the previous afternoon melted
+a little further, and their contact became more and more natural. 
+Up through the sultry southern landscape they saw the world they knew
+appear clearer and more vividly than it had ever appeared before As
+upon that occasion at the hotel when she had sat in the window,
+the world once more arranged itself beneath her gaze very vividly
+and in its true proportions.  She glanced curiously at Terence
+from time to time, observing his grey coat and his purple tie;
+observing the man with whom she was to spend the rest of her life.
+
+After one of these glances she murmured, "Yes, I'm in love. 
+There's no doubt; I'm in love with you."
+
+Nevertheless, they remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so
+close together, as she spoke, that there seemed no division
+between them, and the next moment separate and far away again. 
+Feeling this painfully, she exclaimed, "It will be a fight."
+
+But as she looked at him she perceived from the shape of his eyes,
+the lines about his mouth, and other peculiarities that he pleased her,
+and she added:
+
+"Where I want to fight, you have compassion.  You're finer than I am;
+you're much finer."
+
+He returned her glance and smiled, perceiving, much as she had done,
+the very small individual things about her which made her delightful
+to him.  She was his for ever.  This barrier being surmounted,
+innumerable delights lay before them both.
+
+"I'm not finer," he answered.  "I'm only older, lazier; a man,
+not a woman."
+
+"A man," she repeated, and a curious sense of possession coming
+over her, it struck her that she might now touch him; she put out
+her hand and lightly touched his cheek.  His fingers followed where
+hers had been, and the touch of his hand upon his face brought back
+the overpowering sense of unreality.  This body of his was unreal;
+the whole world was unreal.
+
+"What's happened?" he began.  "Why did I ask you to marry me? 
+How did it happen?"
+
+"Did you ask me to marry you?" she wondered.  They faded far away
+from each other, and neither of them could remember what had been said.
+
+"We sat upon the ground," he recollected.
+
+"We sat upon the ground," she confirmed him.  The recollection of sitting
+upon the ground, such as it was, seemed to unite them again, and they
+walked on in silence, their minds sometimes working with difficulty
+and sometimes ceasing to work, their eyes alone perceiving the things
+round them.  Now he would attempt again to tell her his faults,
+and why he loved her; and she would describe what she had felt at this
+time or at that time, and together they would interpret her feeling. 
+So beautiful was the sound of their voices that by degrees they
+scarcely listened to the words they framed.  Long silences came between
+their words, which were no longer silences of struggle and confusion
+but refreshing silences, in which trivial thoughts moved easily. 
+They began to speak naturally of ordinary things, of the flowers
+and the trees, how they grew there so red, like garden flowers
+at home, and there bent and crooked like the arm of a twisted old man.
+
+Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing
+in her veins, or the water of the stream running over stones,
+Rachel became conscious of a new feeling within her.  She wondered
+for a moment what it was, and then said to herself, with a little
+surprise at recognising in her own person so famous a thing:
+
+"This is happiness, I suppose."  And aloud to Terence she spoke,
+"This is happiness."
+
+On the heels of her words he answered, "This is happiness,"
+upon which they guessed that the feeling had sprung in both of them
+the same time.  They began therefore to describe how this felt
+and that felt, how like it was and yet how different; for they
+were very different.
+
+Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which
+they were now sunk.  The repetition of Hewet's name in short,
+dissevered syllables was to them the crack of a dry branch
+or the laughter of a bird.  The grasses and breezes sounding and
+murmuring all round them, they never noticed that the swishing of
+the grasses grew louder and louder, and did not cease with the lapse
+of the breeze.  A hand dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel's shoulder;
+it might have been a bolt from heaven.  She fell beneath it,
+and the grass whipped across her eyes and filled her mouth and ears. 
+Through the waving stems she saw a figure, large and shapeless
+against the sky.  Helen was upon her.  Rolled this way and that,
+now seeing only forests of green, and now the high blue heaven;
+she was speechless and almost without sense.  At last she lay still,
+all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting. 
+Over her loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman,
+of Terence and Helen.
+
+Both were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving;
+they came together and kissed in the air above her.  Broken fragments
+of speech came down to her on the ground.  She thought she heard them
+speak of love and then of marriage.  Raising herself and sitting up,
+she too realised Helen's soft body, the strong and hospitable arms,
+and happiness swelling and breaking in one vast wave.  When this
+fell away, and the grasses once more lay low, and the sky
+became horizontal, and the earth rolled out flat on each side,
+and the trees stood upright, she was the first to perceive a
+little row of human figures standing patiently in the distance. 
+For the moment she could not remember who they were.
+
+"Who are they?" she asked, and then recollected.
+
+Falling into line behind Mr. Flushing, they were careful to leave
+at least three yards' distance between the toe of his boot
+and the rim of her skirt.
+
+He led them across a stretch of green by the river-bank and then
+through a grove of trees, and bade them remark the signs of human
+habitation, the blackened grass, the charred tree-stumps, and there,
+through the trees, strange wooden nests, drawn together in an arch
+where the trees drew apart, the village which was the goal of their journey.
+
+Stepping cautiously, they observed the women, who were squatting on
+the ground in triangular shapes, moving their hands, either plaiting
+straw or in kneading something in bowls.  But when they had looked
+for a moment undiscovered, they were seen, and Mr. Flushing,
+advancing into the centre of the clearing, was engaged in talk
+with a lean majestic man, whose bones and hollows at once made
+the shapes of the Englishman's body appear ugly and unnatural. 
+The women took no notice of the strangers, except that their hands
+paused for a moment and their long narrow eyes slid round and fixed
+upon them with the motionless inexpensive gaze of those removed
+from each other far far beyond the plunge of speech.  Their hands
+moved again, but the stare continued.  It followed them as they walked,
+as they peered into the huts where they could distinguish guns leaning
+in the corner, and bowls upon the floor, and stacks of rushes;
+in the dusk the solemn eyes of babies regarded them, and old women
+stared out too.  As they sauntered about, the stare followed them,
+passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously not
+without hostility, like the crawl of a winter fly.  As she drew
+apart her shawl and uncovered her breast to the lips of her baby,
+the eyes of a woman never left their faces, although they moved
+uneasily under her stare, and finally turned away, rather than stand
+there looking at her any longer.  When sweetmeats were offered them,
+they put out great red hands to take them, and felt themselves
+treading cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers among these soft
+instinctive people.  But soon the life of the village took no notice
+of them; they had become absorbed in it.  The women's hands became
+busy again with the straw; their eyes dropped.  If they moved,
+it was to fetch something from the hut, or to catch a straying child,
+or to cross the space with a jar balanced on their heads;
+if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh unintelligible cry. 
+Voices rose when a child was beaten, and fell again; voices rose
+in song, which slid up a little way and down a little way,
+and settled again upon the same low and melancholy note. 
+Seeking each other, Terence and Rachel drew together under a tree. 
+Peaceful, and even beautiful at first, the sight of the women,
+who had given up looking at them, made them now feel very cold
+and melancholy.
+
+"Well," Terence sighed at length, "it makes us seem insignificant,
+doesn't it?"
+
+Rachel agreed.  So it would go on for ever and ever, she said,
+those women sitting under the trees, the trees and the river. 
+They turned away and began to walk through the trees, leaning, without fear
+of discovery, upon each other's arms.  They had not gone far before
+they began to assure each other once more that they were in love,
+were happy, were content; but why was it so painful being in love,
+why was there so much pain in happiness?
+
+The sight of the village indeed affected them all curiously though
+all differently.  St. John had left the others and was walking slowly
+down to the river, absorbed in his own thoughts, which were bitter
+and unhappy, for he felt himself alone; and Helen, standing by herself
+in the sunny space among the native women, was exposed to presentiments
+of disaster.  The cries of the senseless beasts rang in her ears
+high and low in the air, as they ran from tree-trunk to tree-top.
+How small the little figures looked wandering through the trees! 
+She became acutely conscious of the little limbs, the thin veins,
+the delicate flesh of men and women, which breaks so easily and lets
+the life escape compared with these great trees and deep waters. 
+A falling branch, a foot that slips, and the earth has crushed them
+or the water drowned them.  Thus thinking, she kept her eyes anxiously
+fixed upon the lovers, as if by doing so she could protect them
+from their fate.  Turning, she found the Flushings by her side.
+
+They were talking about the things they had bought and arguing
+whether they were really old, and whether there were not signs
+here and there of European influence.  Helen was appealed to. 
+She was made to look at a brooch, and then at a pair of ear-rings.
+But all the time she blamed them for having come on this expedition,
+for having ventured too far and exposed themselves.  Then she roused
+herself and tried to talk, but in a few moments she caught herself
+seeing a picture of a boat upset on the river in England, at midday. 
+It was morbid, she knew, to imagine such things; nevertheless she
+sought out the figures of the others between the trees, and whenever
+she saw them she kept her eyes fixed on them, so that she might be
+able to protect them from disaster.
+
+But when the sun went down and the steamer turned and began
+to steam back towards civilisation, again her fears were calmed. 
+In the semi-darkness the chairs on deck and the people sitting
+in them were angular shapes, the mouth being indicated by a tiny
+burning spot, and the arm by the same spot moving up or down as the
+cigar or cigarette was lifted to and from the lips.  Words crossed
+the darkness, but, not knowing where they fell, seemed to lack energy
+and substance.  Deep sights proceeded regularly, although with some
+attempt at suppression, from the large white mound which represented
+the person of Mrs. Flushing.  The day had been long and very hot,
+and now that all the colours were blotted out the cool night air
+seemed to press soft fingers upon the eyelids, sealing them down. 
+Some philosophical remark directed, apparently, at St. John Hirst
+missed its aim, and hung so long suspended in the air until it
+was engulfed by a yawn, that it was considered dead, and this
+gave the signal for stirring of legs and murmurs about sleep. 
+The white mound moved, finally lengthened itself and disappeared,
+and after a few turns and paces St. John and Mr. Flushing withdrew,
+leaving the three chairs still occupied by three silent bodies. 
+The light which came from a lamp high on the mast and a sky pale
+with stars left them with shapes but without features; but even
+in this darkness the withdrawal of the others made them feel each
+other very near, for they were all thinking of the same thing. 
+For some time no one spoke, then Helen said with a sigh, "So you're both
+very happy?"
+
+As if washed by the air her voice sounded more spiritual and softer
+than usual.  Voices at a little distance answered her, "Yes."
+
+Through the darkness she was looking at them both, and trying to
+distinguish him.  What was there for her to say?  Rachel had passed
+beyond her guardianship.  A voice might reach her ears, but never
+again would it carry as far as it had carried twenty-four hours ago. 
+Nevertheless, speech seemed to be due from her before she went to bed. 
+She wished to speak, but she felt strangely old and depressed.
+
+"D'you realise what you're doing?" she demanded.  "She's young,
+you're both young; and marriage--" Here she ceased.  They begged
+her, however, to continue, with such earnestness in their voices,
+as if they only craved advice, that she was led to add:
+
+"Marriage! well, it's not easy."
+
+"That's what we want to know," they answered, and she guessed
+that now they were looking at each other.
+
+"It depends on both of you," she stated.  Her face was turned
+towards Terence, and although he could hardly see her, he believed
+that her words really covered a genuine desire to know more about him. 
+He raised himself from his semi-recumbent position and proceeded
+to tell her what she wanted to know.  He spoke as lightly as he
+could in order to take away her depression.
+
+"I'm twenty-seven, and I've about seven hundred a year," he began. 
+"My temper is good on the whole, and health excellent, though Hirst
+detects a gouty tendency.  Well, then, I think I'm very intelligent." 
+He paused as if for confirmation.
+
+Helen agreed.
+
+"Though, unfortunately, rather lazy.  I intend to allow Rachel
+to be a fool if she wants to, and--Do you find me on the whole
+satisfactory in other respects?" he asked shyly.
+
+"Yes, I like what I know of you," Helen replied.
+
+"But then--one knows so little."
+
+"We shall live in London," he continued, "and--" With one voice
+they suddenly enquired whether she did not think them the happiest
+people that she had ever known.
+
+"Hush," she checked them, "Mrs. Flushing, remember.  She's behind us."
+
+Then they fell silent, and Terence and Rachel felt instinctively
+that their happiness had made her sad, and, while they were anxious
+to go on talking about themselves, they did not like to.
+
+"We've talked too much about ourselves," Terence said.  "Tell us--"
+
+"Yes, tell us--" Rachel echoed.  They were both in the mood to believe
+that every one was capable of saying something very profound.
+
+"What can I tell you?"  Helen reflected, speaking more to herself
+in a rambling style than as a prophetess delivering a message. 
+She forced herself to speak.
+
+"After all, though I scold Rachel, I'm not much wiser myself. 
+I'm older, of course, I'm half-way through, and you're just beginning. 
+It's puzzling--sometimes, I think, disappointing; the great things
+aren't as great, perhaps, as one expects--but it's interesting--
+Oh, yes, you're certain to find it interesting--And so it goes on,"
+they became conscious here of the procession of dark trees into which,
+as far as they could see, Helen was now looking, "and there are
+pleasures where one doesn't expect them (you must write to your father),
+and you'll be very happy, I've no doubt.  But I must go to bed,
+and if you are sensible you will follow in ten minutes, and so,"
+she rose and stood before them, almost featureless and very large,
+"Good-night." She passed behind the curtain.
+
+After sitting in silence for the greater part of the ten minutes
+she allowed them, they rose and hung over the rail.  Beneath them
+the smooth black water slipped away very fast and silently. 
+The spark of a cigarette vanished behind them.  "A beautiful voice,"
+Terence murmured.
+
+Rachel assented.  Helen had a beautiful voice.
+
+After a silence she asked, looking up into the sky, "Are we on
+the deck of a steamer on a river in South America?  Am I Rachel,
+are you Terence?"
+
+The great black world lay round them.  As they were drawn smoothly
+along it seemed possessed of immense thickness and endurance. 
+They could discern pointed tree-tops and blunt rounded tree-tops.
+Raising their eyes above the trees, they fixed them on the stars
+and the pale border of sky above the trees.  The little points of
+frosty light infinitely far away drew their eyes and held them fixed,
+so that it seemed as if they stayed a long time and fell a great
+distance when once more they realised their hands grasping the rail
+and their separate bodies standing side by side.
+
+"You'd forgotten completely about me," Terence reproached her,
+taking her arm and beginning to pace the deck, "and I never forget you."
+
+"Oh, no," she whispered, she had not forgotten, only the stars--
+the night--the dark--
+
+"You're like a bird half asleep in its nest, Rachel.  You're asleep. 
+You're talking in your sleep."
+
+Half asleep, and murmuring broken words, they stood in the angle
+made by the bow of the boat.  It slipped on down the river. 
+Now a bell struck on the bridge, and they heard the lapping of water
+as it rippled away on either side, and once a bird startled in its
+sleep creaked, flew on to the next tree, and was silent again. 
+The darkness poured down profusely, and left them with scarcely
+any feeling of life, except that they were standing there together
+in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII
+
+
+
+The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely
+over the earth and parted them from the strange day in the forest
+when they had been forced to tell each other what they wanted,
+this wish of theirs was revealed to other people, and in the process
+became slightly strange to themselves.  Apparently it was not anything
+unusual that had happened; it was that they had become engaged
+to marry each other.  The world, which consisted for the most part
+of the hotel and the villa, expressed itself glad on the whole
+that two people should marry, and allowed them to see that they were
+not expected to take part in the work which has to be done in order
+that the world shall go on, but might absent themselves for a time. 
+They were accordingly left alone until they felt the silence as if,
+playing in a vast church, the door had been shut on them. 
+They were driven to walk alone, and sit alone, to visit secret places
+where the flowers had never been picked and the trees were solitary. 
+In solitude they could express those beautiful but too vast desires
+which were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other men and women--
+desires for a world, such as their own world which contained two
+people seemed to them to be, where people knew each other intimately
+and thus judged each other by what was good, and never quarrelled,
+because that was waste of time.
+
+They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun,
+or sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed.  They were no
+longer embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not
+express itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers
+down a twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner
+is turned; the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable,
+and in many ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious,
+for it was refreshingly solid, and called out effort, and effort
+under such circumstances was not effort but delight.
+
+While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged,
+as far as the occasional writing of a word in pencil testified,
+in shaping the world as it appeared to him now that he and Rachel
+were going to be married.  It was different certainly.  The book
+called _Silence_ would not now be the same book that it would
+have been.  He would then put down his pencil and stare in front
+of him, and wonder in what respects the world was different--
+it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence, more importance,
+greater depth.  Why, even the earth sometimes seemed to him very deep;
+not carved into hills and cities and fields, but heaped in great masses. 
+He would look out of the window for ten minutes at a time; but no, he did
+not care for the earth swept of human beings.  He liked human beings--
+he liked them, he suspected, better than Rachel did.  There she was,
+swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful of him,--
+but he liked that quality in her.  He liked the impersonality
+which it produced in her.  At last, having written down a series
+of little sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them,
+he observed aloud, "'Women--'under the heading Women I've written:
+
+"'Not really vainer than men.  Lack of self-confidence at the base
+of most serious faults.  Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded
+on fact?  Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist,
+because they don't think.'  What do you say, Rachel?"  He paused
+with his pencil in his hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.
+
+Rachel said nothing.  Up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven
+sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined staircase,
+energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her feet
+with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run
+to begin at the very bottom again.
+
+"'Again, it's the fashion now to say that women are more practical
+and less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable
+organising ability but no sense of honour'--query, what is meant
+by masculine term, honour?--what corresponds to it in your sex?  Eh?"
+
+Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected
+this opportunity of revealing the secrets of her sex. 
+She had, indeed, advanced so far in the pursuit of wisdom
+that she allowed these secrets to rest undisturbed; it seemed
+to be reserved for a later generation to discuss them philosophically.
+
+Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she exclaimed at last,
+swinging round upon him:
+
+"No, Terence, it's no good; here am I, the best musician in
+South America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can't play
+a note because of you in the room interrupting me every other second."
+
+"You don't seem to realise that that's what I've been aiming
+at for the last half-hour," he remarked.  "I've no objection
+to nice simple tunes--indeed, I find them very helpful
+to my literary composition, but that kind of thing is merely
+like an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain."
+
+He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which were
+scattered on the table, conveying the congratulations of their friends.
+
+"'--all possible wishes for all possible happiness,'" he read;
+"correct, but not very vivid, are they?"
+
+"They're sheer nonsense!"  Rachel exclaimed.  "Think of words
+compared with sounds!" she continued.  "Think of novels and plays
+and histories--" Perched on the edge of the table, she stirred
+the red and yellow volumes contemptuously.  She seemed to herself
+to be in a position where she could despise all human learning. 
+Terence looked at them too.
+
+"God, Rachel, you do read trash!" he exclaimed.  "And you're
+behind the times too, my dear.  No one dreams of reading this kind
+of thing now--antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions
+of life in the east end--oh, no, we've exploded all that. 
+Read poetry, Rachel, poetry, poetry, poetry!"
+
+Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his intention
+being to satirise the short sharp bark of the writer's English;
+but she paid no attention, and after an interval of meditation exclaimed:
+
+"Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed
+entirely of vast blocks of matter, and that we're nothing but
+patches of light--" she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering
+over the carpet and up the wall--"like that?"
+
+"No," said Terence, "I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my
+chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth.  But at Cambridge,
+I can remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states
+of semi-coma about five o'clock in the morning.  Hirst does now,
+I expect--oh, no, Hirst wouldn't."
+
+Rachel continued, "The day your note came, asking us to go on
+the picnic, I was sitting where you're sitting now, thinking that;
+I wonder if I could think that again?  I wonder if the world's changed?
+and if so, when it'll stop changing, and which is the real world?"
+
+"When I first saw you," he began, "I thought you were like a
+creature who'd lived all its life among pearls and old bones. 
+Your hands were wet, d'you remember, and you never said a word until
+I gave you a bit of bread, and then you said, 'Human Beings!'"
+
+"And I thought you--a prig," she recollected.  "No; that's not quite it. 
+There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and
+St. John were like those ants--very big, very ugly, very energetic,
+with all your virtues on your backs.  However, when I talked to you
+I liked you--"
+
+"You fell in love with me," he corrected her.  "You were in love
+with me all the time, only you didn't know it."
+
+"No, I never fell in love with you," she asserted.
+
+"Rachel--what a lie--didn't you sit here looking at my window--
+didn't you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun--?"
+
+"No," she repeated, "I never fell in love, if falling in love
+is what people say it is, and it's the world that tells the lies
+and I tell the truth.  Oh, what lies--what lies!"
+
+She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from
+Mr. Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. 
+It was strange, considering how very different these people were,
+that they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to
+congratulate her upon her engagement.
+
+That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could
+ever feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second
+that they were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church
+service had done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done;
+and if they didn't feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? 
+The simplicity and arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated
+into a single spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence;
+being engaged had not that effect on him; the world was different,
+but not in that way; he still wanted the things he had always wanted,
+and in particular he wanted the companionship of other people
+more than ever perhaps.  He took the letters out of her hand,
+and protested:
+
+"Of course they're absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just
+because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss
+Allan is; you can't deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she's got
+too many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone
+to the bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees--
+hasn't she a kind of beauty--of elemental simplicity as Flushing
+would say?  Isn't she rather like a large old tree murmuring
+in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on?  By the way,
+Ralph's been made governor of the Carroway Islands--the youngest
+governor in the service; very good, isn't it?"
+
+But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority
+of the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread
+with her own destiny.
+
+"I won't have eleven children," she asserted; "I won't have the eyes
+of an old woman.  She looks at one up and down, up and down,
+as if one were a horse."
+
+"We must have a son and we must have a daughter," said Terence,
+putting down the letters, "because, let alone the inestimable
+advantage of being our children, they'd be so well brought up." 
+They went on to sketch an outline of the ideal education--
+how their daughter should be required from infancy to gaze at a large
+square of cardboard painted blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity,
+for women were grown too practical; and their son--he should be taught
+to laugh at great men, that is, at distinguished successful men,
+at men who wore ribands and rose to the tops of their trees. 
+He should in no way resemble (Rachel added) St. John Hirst.
+
+At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst. 
+Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them;
+he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. 
+Where should we all be without him and his like?  Choked in weeds;
+Christians, bigots,--why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan
+to sing songs to men when they felt drowsy.
+
+"But you'll never see it!" he exclaimed; "because with all your virtues
+you don't, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being
+for the pursuit of truth!  You've no respect for facts, Rachel;
+you're essentially feminine."  She did not trouble to deny it,
+nor did she think good to produce the one unanswerable argument
+against the merits which Terence admired.  St. John Hirst said
+that she was in love with him; she would never forgive that;
+but the argument was not one to appeal to a man.
+
+"But I like him," she said, and she thought to herself that she also
+pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the warm
+mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we ourselves
+move about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St. John Hirst.
+
+She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would
+not kiss him supposing he wished it, which was not likely.
+
+As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then
+bestowed upon him, Terence protested:
+
+"And compared with Hirst I'm a perfect Zany."
+
+The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.
+
+"We're wasting the morning--I ought to be writing my book, and you
+ought to be answering these."
+
+"We've only got twenty-one whole mornings left," said Rachel. 
+"And my father'll be here in a day or two."
+
+However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write laboriously,
+
+"My dear Evelyn--"
+
+Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had written,
+a process which he found essential to the composition of his own. 
+For a considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking
+of the clock and the fitful scratch of Rachel's pen, as she produced
+phrases which bore a considerable likeness to those which she
+had condemned.  She was struck by it herself, for she stopped writing
+and looked up; looked at Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked
+at the different pieces of furniture, at her bed in the corner,
+at the window-pane which showed the branches of a tree filled
+in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and was amazed at the gulf
+which lay between all that and her sheet of paper.  Would there
+ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible?  Even with
+Terence himself--how far apart they could be, how little she knew
+what was passing in his brain now!  She then finished her sentence,
+which was awkward and ugly, and stated that they were "both very happy,
+and going to be married in the autumn probably and hope to live
+in London, where we hope you will come and see us when we get back." 
+Choosing "affectionately," after some further speculation,
+rather than sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly
+beginning on another when Terence remarked, quoting from his book:
+
+"Listen to this, Rachel.  'It is probable that Hugh' (he's the hero,
+a literary man), 'had not realised at the time of his marriage,
+any more than the young man of parts and imagination usually
+does realise, the nature of the gulf which separates the needs
+and desires of the male from the needs and desires of the female. 
+. . . At first they had been very happy.  The walking tour in Switzerland
+had been a time of jolly companionship and stimulating revelations
+for both of them.  Betty had proved herself the ideal comrade. 
+. . . They had shouted _Love_ _in_ _the_ _Valley_ to each other across
+the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn' (and so on, and so on--I'll skip
+the descriptions). . . . 'But in London, after the boy's birth,
+all was changed.  Betty was an admirable mother; but it did not
+take her long to find out that motherhood, as that function is
+understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did not absorb
+the whole of her energies.  She was young and strong, with healthy
+limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise. 
+. . .' (In short she began to give tea-parties.) . . . 'Coming
+in late from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky,
+book-lined room, where the two men had each unloosened his soul
+to the other, with the sound of the traffic humming in his ears,
+and the foggy London sky slung tragically across his mind . . . he
+found women's hats dotted about among his papers.  Women's wraps
+and absurd little feminine shoes and umbrellas were in the hall. 
+. . . Then the bills began to come in.  . . . He tried to speak
+frankly to her.  He found her lying on the great polar-bear skin
+in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining with the Greens
+in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the diamonds wink
+and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve of her breast--
+a vision of adorable femininity.  He forgave her all.'  (Well, this
+goes from bad to worse, and finally about fifty pages later,
+Hugh takes a week-end ticket to Swanage and 'has it out with himself
+on the downs above Corfe.'  . . . Here there's fifteen pages or so
+which we'll skip.  The conclusion is . . .) 'They were different. 
+Perhaps, in the far future, when generations of men had struggled
+and failed as he must now struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed,
+what she now made a pretence of being--the friend and companion--
+not the enemy and parasite of man.'
+
+"The end of it is, you see, Hugh went back to his wife, poor fellow. 
+It was his duty, as a married man.  Lord, Rachel," he concluded,
+"will it be like that when we're married?"
+
+Instead of answering him she asked,
+
+"Why don't people write about the things they do feel?"
+
+"Ah, that's the difficulty!" he sighed, tossing the book away.
+
+"Well, then, what will it be like when we're married?  What are
+the things people do feel?"
+
+She seemed doubtful.
+
+"Sit on the floor and let me look at you," he commanded. 
+Resting her chin on his knee, she looked straight at him.
+
+He examined her curiously.
+
+"You're not beautiful," he began, "but I like your face. 
+I like the way your hair grows down in a point, and your eyes too--
+they never see anything.  Your mouth's too big, and your cheeks
+would be better if they had more colour in them.  But what I like
+about your face is that it makes one wonder what the devil you're
+thinking about--it makes me want to do that--" He clenched his fist
+and shook it so near her that she started back, "because now you look
+as if you'd blow my brains out.  There are moments," he continued,
+"when, if we stood on a rock together, you'd throw me into the sea."
+
+Hypnotised by the force of his eyes in hers, she repeated, "If we
+stood on a rock together--"
+
+To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven
+about the roots of the world--the idea was incoherently delightful. 
+She sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting
+aside the chairs and tables as if she were indeed striking through
+the waters.  He watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving
+a passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles
+which would hinder their passage through life.
+
+"It does seem possible!" he exclaimed, "though I've always thought
+it the most unlikely thing in the world--I shall be in love
+with you all my life, and our marriage will be the most exciting
+thing that's ever been done!  We'll never have a moment's peace--"
+He caught her in his arms as she passed him, and they fought
+for mastery, imagining a rock, and the sea heaving beneath them. 
+At last she was thrown to the floor, where she lay gasping,
+and crying for mercy.
+
+"I'm a mermaid!  I can swim," she cried, "so the game's up." 
+Her dress was torn across, and peace being established, she fetched
+a needle and thread and began to mend the tear.
+
+"And now," she said, "be quiet and tell me about the world;
+tell me about everything that's ever happened, and I'll tell you--
+let me see, what can I tell you?--I'll tell you about Miss Montgomerie
+and the river party.  She was left, you see, with one foot in the boat,
+and the other on shore."
+
+They had spent much time already in thus filling out for the other
+the course of their past lives, and the characters of their friends
+and relations, so that very soon Terence knew not only what Rachel's
+aunts might be expected to say upon every occasion, but also how
+their bedrooms were furnished, and what kind of bonnets they wore. 
+He could sustain a conversation between Mrs. Hunt and Rachel, and carry
+on a tea-party including the Rev. William Johnson and Miss Macquoid,
+the Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth. 
+But he had known many more people, and was far more highly skilled
+in the art of narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were,
+for the most part, of a curiously childlike and humorous kind,
+so that it generally fell to her lot to listen and ask questions.
+
+He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and felt,
+and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other men
+and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she
+became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people,
+where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them. 
+According to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made
+life reasonable, or if that word was foolish, made it of deep
+interest anyhow, for sometimes it seemed possible to understand
+why things happened as they did.  Nor were people so solitary
+and uncommunicative as she believed.  She should look for vanity--
+for vanity was a common quality--first in herself, and then
+in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they all had their share of it--
+and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve she met;
+and once linked together by one such tie she would find them
+not separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable,
+and she would come to love them when she found that they were
+like herself.
+
+If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings
+were as various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes
+and manes, and horns and humps; and so, wrestling over the entire
+list of their acquaintances, and diverging into anecdote
+and theory and speculation, they came to know each other. 
+The hours passed quickly, and seemed to them full to leaking-point.
+After a night's solitude they were always ready to begin again.
+
+The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist
+in free talk between men and women did in truth exist for both
+of them, although not quite in the measure she prescribed. 
+Far more than upon the nature of sex they dwelt upon the nature
+of poetry, but it was true that talk which had no boundaries
+deepened and enlarged the strangely small bright view of a girl. 
+In return for what he could tell her she brought him such curiosity
+and sensitiveness of perception, that he was led to doubt
+whether any gift bestowed by much reading and living was quite
+the equal of that for pleasure and pain.  What would experience
+give her after all, except a kind of ridiculous formal balance,
+like that of a drilled dog in the street?  He looked at her face
+and wondered how it would look in twenty years' time, when the eyes
+had dulled, and the forehead wore those little persistent wrinkles
+which seem to show that the middle-aged are facing something hard
+which the young do not see?  What would the hard thing be for them,
+he wondered?  Then his thoughts turned to their life in England.
+
+The thought of England was delightful, for together they would see
+the old things freshly; it would be England in June, and there would be
+June nights in the country; and the nightingales singing in the lanes,
+into which they could steal when the room grew hot; and there would
+be English meadows gleaming with water and set with stolid cows,
+and clouds dipping low and trailing across the green hills. 
+As he sat in the room with her, he wished very often to be back
+again in the thick of life, doing things with Rachel.
+
+He crossed to the window and exclaimed, "Lord, how good it is to
+think of lanes, muddy lanes, with brambles and nettles, you know,
+and real grass fields, and farmyards with pigs and cows, and men
+walking beside carts with pitchforks--there's nothing to compare
+with that here--look at the stony red earth, and the bright blue sea,
+and the glaring white houses--how tired one gets of it!  And the air,
+without a stain or a wrinkle.  I'd give anything for a sea mist."
+
+Rachel, too, had been thinking of the English country:  the flat land
+rolling away to the sea, and the woods and the long straight roads,
+where one can walk for miles without seeing any one, and the great
+church towers and the curious houses clustered in the valleys,
+and the birds, and the dusk, and the rain falling against the windows.
+
+"But London, London's the place," Terence continued.  They looked
+together at the carpet, as though London itself were to be seen
+there lying on the floor, with all its spires and pinnacles pricking
+through the smoke.
+
+"On the whole, what I should like best at this moment,"
+Terence pondered, "would be to find myself walking down Kingsway,
+by those big placards, you know, and turning into the Strand. 
+Perhaps I might go and look over Waterloo Bridge for a moment. 
+Then I'd go along the Strand past the shops with all the new
+books in them, and through the little archway into the Temple. 
+I always like the quiet after the uproar.  You hear your own footsteps
+suddenly quite loud.  The Temple's very pleasant.  I think I should
+go and see if I could find dear old Hodgkin--the man who writes
+books about Van Eyck, you know.  When I left England he was very sad
+about his tame magpie.  He suspected that a man had poisoned it. 
+And then Russell lives on the next staircase.  I think you'd
+like him.  He's a passion for Handel.  Well, Rachel," he concluded,
+dismissing the vision of London, "we shall be doing that together
+in six weeks' time, and it'll be the middle of June then--and June
+in London--my God! how pleasant it all is!"
+
+"And we're certain to have it too," she said.  "It isn't as if we
+were expecting a great deal--only to walk about and look at things."
+
+"Only a thousand a year and perfect freedom," he replied. 
+"How many people in London d'you think have that?"
+
+"And now you've spoilt it," she complained.  "Now we've got to think
+of the horrors."  She looked grudgingly at the novel which had once
+caused her perhaps an hour's discomfort, so that she had never opened
+it again, but kept it on her table, and looked at it occasionally,
+as some medieval monk kept a skull, or a crucifix to remind him
+of the frailty of the body.
+
+"Is it true, Terence," she demanded, "that women die with bugs
+crawling across their faces?"
+
+"I think it's very probable," he said.  "But you must admit,
+Rachel, that we so seldom think of anything but ourselves
+that an occasional twinge is really rather pleasant."
+
+Accusing him of an affection of cynicism which was just as bad as
+sentimentality itself, she left her position by his side and knelt upon
+the window sill, twisting the curtain tassels between her fingers. 
+A vague sense of dissatisfaction filled her.
+
+"What's so detestable in this country," she exclaimed, "is the blue--
+always blue sky and blue sea.  It's like a curtain--all the things
+one wants are on the other side of that.  I want to know what's going
+on behind it.  I hate these divisions, don't you, Terence?  One person
+all in the dark about another person.  Now I liked the Dalloways,"
+she continued, "and they're gone.  I shall never see them again. 
+Just by going on a ship we cut ourselves off entirely from the rest
+of the world.  I want to see England there--London there--all sorts
+of people--why shouldn't one? why should one be shut up all by oneself
+in a room?"
+
+While she spoke thus half to herself and with increasing vagueness,
+because her eye was caught by a ship that had just come into the bay,
+she did not see that Terence had ceased to stare contentedly in front
+of him, and was looking at her keenly and with dissatisfaction. 
+She seemed to be able to cut herself adrift from him, and to pass away
+to unknown places where she had no need of him.  The thought roused
+his jealousy.
+
+"I sometimes think you're not in love with me and never will be,"
+he said energetically.  She started and turned round at his words.
+
+"I don't satisfy you in the way you satisfy me," he continued. 
+"There's something I can't get hold of in you.  You don't want me
+as I want you--you're always wanting something else."
+
+He began pacing up and down the room.
+
+"Perhaps I ask too much," he went on.  "Perhaps it isn't really
+possible to have what I want.  Men and women are too different. 
+You can't understand--you don't understand--"
+
+He came up to where she stood looking at him in silence.
+
+It seemed to her now that what he was saying was perfectly true,
+and that she wanted many more things than the love of one human being--
+the sea, the sky.  She turned again the looked at the distant blue,
+which was so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could
+not possibly want only one human being.
+
+"Or is it only this damnable engagement?" he continued.  "Let's be
+married here, before we go back--or is it too great a risk? 
+Are we sure we want to marry each other?"
+
+They began pacing up and down the room, but although they came
+very near each other in their pacing, they took care not to touch
+each other.  The hopelessness of their position overcame them both. 
+They were impotent; they could never love each other sufficiently
+to overcome all these barriers, and they could never be satisfied
+with less.  Realising this with intolerable keenness she stopped
+in front of him and exclaimed:
+
+"Let's break it off, then."
+
+The words did more to unite them than any amount of argument. 
+As if they stood on the edge of a precipice they clung together. 
+They knew that they could not separate; painful and terrible it
+might be, but they were joined for ever.  They lapsed into silence,
+and after a time crept together in silence.  Merely to be so close
+soothed them, and sitting side by side the divisions disappeared,
+and it seemed as if the world were once more solid and entire, and as if,
+in some strange way, they had grown larger and stronger.
+
+It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with
+great reluctance.  They stood together in front of the looking-glass,
+and with a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been
+feeling nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. 
+But it chilled them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of
+being vast and indivisible they were really very small and separate,
+the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection
+of other things.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII
+
+
+
+But no brush was able to efface completely the expression of happiness,
+so that Mrs. Ambrose could not treat them when they came downstairs as if
+they had spent the morning in a way that could be discussed naturally. 
+This being so, she joined in the world's conspiracy to consider
+them for the time incapacitated from the business of life,
+struck by their intensity of feeling into enmity against life,
+and almost succeeded in dismissing them from her thoughts.
+
+She reflected that she had done all that it was necessary to do in
+practical matters.  She had written a great many letters, and had obtained
+Willoughby's consent.  She had dwelt so often upon Mr. Hewet's prospects,
+his profession, his birth, appearance, and temperament, that she had
+almost forgotten what he was really like.  When she refreshed herself
+by a look at him, she used to wonder again what he was like, and then,
+concluding that they were happy at any rate, thought no more about it.
+
+She might more profitably consider what would happen in three years'
+time, or what might have happened if Rachel had been left
+to explore the world under her father's guidance.  The result,
+she was honest enough to own, might have been better--who knows? 
+She did not disguise from herself that Terence had faults.  She was
+inclined to think him too easy and tolerant, just as he was inclined
+to think her perhaps a trifle hard--no, it was rather that she
+was uncompromising.  In some ways she found St. John preferable;
+but then, of course, he would never have suited Rachel. 
+Her friendship with St. John was established, for although she
+fluctuated between irritation and interest in a way that did credit
+to the candour of her disposition, she liked his company on the whole. 
+He took her outside this little world of love and emotion. 
+He had a grasp of facts.  Supposing, for instance, that England made
+a sudden move towards some unknown port on the coast of Morocco,
+St. John knew what was at the back of it, and to hear him engaged
+with her husband in argument about finance and the balance of power,
+gave her an odd sense of stability.  She respected their arguments
+without always listening to them, much as she respected a solid
+brick wall, or one of those immense municipal buildings which,
+although they compose the greater part of our cities, have been built
+day after day and year after year by unknown hands.  She liked to sit
+and listen, and even felt a little elated when the engaged couple,
+after showing their profound lack of interest, slipped from the room,
+and were seen pulling flowers to pieces in the garden.  It was not
+that she was jealous of them, but she did undoubtedly envy them
+their great unknown future that lay before them.  Slipping from
+one such thought to another, she was at the dining-room with fruit
+in her hands.  Sometimes she stopped to straighten a candle stooping
+with the heat, or disturbed some too rigid arrangement of the chairs. 
+She had reason to suspect that Chailey had been balancing herself
+on the top of a ladder with a wet duster during their absence,
+and the room had never been quite like itself since.  Returning from
+the dining-room for the third time, she perceived that one of
+the arm-chairs was now occupied by St. John.  He lay back in it,
+with his eyes half shut, looking, as he always did, curiously buttoned
+up in a neat grey suit and fenced against the exuberance of a foreign
+climate which might at any moment proceed to take liberties with him. 
+Her eyes rested on him gently and then passed on over his head. 
+Finally she took the chair opposite.
+
+"I didn't want to come here," he said at last, "but I was positively
+driven to it.  . . . Evelyn M.," he groaned.
+
+He sat up, and began to explain with mock solemnity how the detestable
+woman was set upon marrying him.
+
+"She pursues me about the place.  This morning she appeared
+in the smoking-room. All I could do was to seize my hat and fly. 
+I didn't want to come, but I couldn't stay and face another meal
+with her."
+
+"Well, we must make the best of it," Helen replied philosophically. 
+It was very hot, and they were indifferent to any amount of silence,
+so that they lay back in their chairs waiting for something to happen. 
+The bell rang for luncheon, but there was no sound of movement in
+the house.  Was there any news?  Helen asked; anything in the papers? 
+St. John shook his head.  O yes, he had a letter from home, a letter
+from his mother, describing the suicide of the parlour-maid. She
+was called Susan Jane, and she came into the kitchen one afternoon,
+and said that she wanted cook to keep her money for her; she had
+twenty pounds in gold.  Then she went out to buy herself a hat. 
+She came in at half-past five and said that she had taken poison. 
+They had only just time to get her into bed and call a doctor before
+she died.
+
+"Well?"  Helen enquired.
+
+"There'll have to be an inquest," said St. John.
+
+Why had she done it?  He shrugged his shoulders.  Why do people
+kill themselves?  Why do the lower orders do any of the things
+they do do?  Nobody knows.  They sat in silence.
+
+"The bell's run fifteen minutes and they're not down," said Helen
+at length.
+
+When they appeared, St. John explained why it had been necessary
+for him to come to luncheon.  He imitated Evelyn's enthusiastic
+tone as she confronted him in the smoking-room. "She thinks there
+can be nothing _quite_ so thrilling as mathematics, so I've lent
+her a large work in two volumes.  It'll be interesting to see
+what she makes of it."
+
+Rachel could now afford to laugh at him.  She reminded him of Gibbon;
+she had the first volume somewhere still; if he were undertaking
+the education of Evelyn, that surely was the test; or she had heard
+that Burke, upon the American Rebellion--Evelyn ought to read them
+both simultaneously.  When St. John had disposed of her argument
+and had satisfied his hunger, he proceeded to tell them that the
+hotel was seething with scandals, some of the most appalling kind,
+which had happened in their absence; he was indeed much given
+to the study of his kind.
+
+"Evelyn M., for example--but that was told me in confidence."
+
+"Nonsense!"  Terence interposed.
+
+"You've heard about poor Sinclair, too?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I've heard about Sinclair.  He's retired to his mine
+with a revolver.  He writes to Evelyn daily that he's thinking of
+committing suicide.  I've assured her that he's never been so happy
+in his life, and, on the whole, she's inclined to agree with me."
+
+"But then she's entangled herself with Perrott," St. John continued;
+"and I have reason to think, from something I saw in the passage,
+that everything isn't as it should be between Arthur and Susan. 
+There's a young female lately arrived from Manchester.  A very good
+thing if it were broken off, in my opinion.  Their married life is
+something too horrible to contemplate.
+
+Oh, and I distinctly heard old Mrs. Paley rapping out the most
+fearful oaths as I passed her bedroom door.  It's supposed that she
+tortures her maid in private--it's practically certain she does. 
+One can tell it from the look in her eyes."
+
+"When you're eighty and the gout tweezes you, you'll be swearing
+like a trooper," Terence remarked.  "You'll be very fat, very testy,
+very disagreeable.  Can't you imagine him--bald as a coot, with a pair
+of sponge-bag trousers, a little spotted tie, and a corporation?"
+
+After a pause Hirst remarked that the worst infamy had still
+to be told.  He addressed himself to Helen.
+
+"They've hoofed out the prostitute.  One night while we were away that
+old numskull Thornbury was doddering about the passages very late. 
+(Nobody seems to have asked him what _he_ was up to.) He saw
+the Signora Lola Mendoza, as she calls herself, cross the passage
+in her nightgown.  He communicated his suspicions next morning
+to Elliot, with the result that Rodriguez went to the woman and
+gave her twenty-four hours in which to clear out of the place. 
+No one seems to have enquired into the truth of the story, or to
+have asked Thornbury and Elliot what business it was of theirs;
+they had it entirely their own way.  I propose that we should all
+sign a Round Robin, go to Rodriguez in a body, and insist upon
+a full enquiry.  Something's got to be done, don't you agree?"
+
+Hewet remarked that there could be no doubt as to the lady's profession.
+
+"Still," he added, "it's a great shame, poor woman; only I don't
+see what's to be done--"
+
+"I quite agree with you, St. John," Helen burst out.  "It's monstrous. 
+The hypocritical smugness of the English makes my blood boil. 
+A man who's made a fortune in trade as Mr. Thornbury has is bound
+to be twice as bad as any prostitute."
+
+She respected St. John's morality, which she took far more seriously
+than any one else did, and now entered into a discussion with him
+as to the steps that were to be taken to enforce their peculiar
+view of what was right.  The argument led to some profoundly
+gloomy statements of a general nature.  Who were they, after all--
+what authority had they--what power against the mass of superstition
+and ignorance?  It was the English, of course; there must be something
+wrong in the English blood.  Directly you met an English person,
+of the middle classes, you were conscious of an indefinable sensation
+of loathing; directly you saw the brown crescent of houses above Dover,
+the same thing came over you.  But unfortunately St. John added,
+you couldn't trust these foreigners--
+
+They were interrupted by sounds of strife at the further end
+of the table.  Rachel appealed to her aunt.
+
+"Terence says we must go to tea with Mrs. Thornbury because she's
+been so kind, but I don't see it; in fact, I'd rather have my right
+hand sawn in pieces--just imagine! the eyes of all those women!"
+
+"Fiddlesticks, Rachel," Terence replied.  "Who wants to look at you? 
+You're consumed with vanity!  You're a monster of conceit! 
+Surely, Helen, you ought to have taught her by this time that she's
+a person of no conceivable importance whatever--not beautiful,
+or well dressed, or conspicuous for elegance or intellect,
+or deportment.  A more ordinary sight than you are," he concluded,
+"except for the tear across your dress has never been seen. 
+However, stay at home if you want to.  I'm going."
+
+She appealed again to her aunt.  It wasn't the being looked at, she explained,
+but the things people were sure to say.  The women in particular. 
+She liked women, but where emotion was concerned they were as flies
+on a lump of sugar.  They would be certain to ask her questions. 
+Evelyn M. would say:  "Are you in love?  Is it nice being in love?" 
+And Mrs. Thornbury--her eyes would go up and down, up and down--
+she shuddered at the thought of it.  Indeed, the retirement
+of their life since their engagement had made her so sensitive,
+that she was not exaggerating her case.
+
+She found an ally in Helen, who proceeded to expound her views
+of the human race, as she regarded with complacency the pyramid
+of variegated fruits in the centre of the table.  It wasn't
+that they were cruel, or meant to hurt, or even stupid exactly;
+but she had always found that the ordinary person had so little
+emotion in his own life that the scent of it in the lives of others
+was like the scent of blood in the nostrils of a bloodhound. 
+Warming to the theme, she continued:
+
+"Directly anything happens--it may be a marriage, or a birth,
+or a death--on the whole they prefer it to be a death--every one
+wants to see you.  They insist upon seeing you.  They've got
+nothing to say; they don't care a rap for you; but you've got to go
+to lunch or to tea or to dinner, and if you don't you're damned. 
+It's the smell of blood," she continued; "I don't blame 'em; only
+they shan't have mind if I know it!"
+
+She looked about her as if she had called up a legion of human beings,
+all hostile and all disagreeable, who encircled the table,
+with mouths gaping for blood, and made it appear a little island
+of neutral country in the midst of the enemy's country.
+
+Her words roused her husband, who had been muttering rhythmically
+to himself, surveying his guests and his food and his wife with eyes
+that were now melancholy and now fierce, according to the fortunes
+of the lady in his ballad.  He cut Helen short with a protest. 
+He hated even the semblance of cynicism in women.  "Nonsense, nonsense,"
+he remarked abruptly.
+
+Terence and Rachel glanced at each other across the table, which meant
+that when they were married they would not behave like that. 
+The entrance of Ridley into the conversation had a strange effect. 
+It became at once more formal and more polite.  It would have been
+impossible to talk quite easily of anything that came into their heads,
+and to say the word prostitute as simply as any other word. 
+The talk now turned upon literature and politics, and Ridley told
+stories of the distinguished people he had known in his youth. 
+Such talk was of the nature of an art, and the personalities
+and informalities of the young were silenced.  As they rose to go,
+Helen stopped for a moment, leaning her elbows on the table.
+
+"You've all been sitting here," she said, "for almost an hour,
+and you haven't noticed my figs, or my flowers, or the way
+the light comes through, or anything.  I haven't been listening,
+because I've been looking at you.  You looked very beautiful;
+I wish you'd go on sitting for ever."
+
+She led the way to the drawing-room, where she took up her embroidery,
+and began again to dissuade Terence from walking down to the
+hotel in this heat.  But the more she dissuaded, the more he
+was determined to go.  He became irritated and obstinate. 
+There were moments when they almost disliked each other. 
+He wanted other people; he wanted Rachel, to see them with him. 
+He suspected that Mrs. Ambrose would now try to dissuade her
+from going.  He was annoyed by all this space and shade and beauty,
+and Hirst, recumbent, drooping a magazine from his wrist.
+
+"I'm going," he repeated.  "Rachel needn't come unless she wants to."
+
+"If you go, Hewet, I wish you'd make enquiries about the prostitute,"
+said Hirst.  "Look here," he added, "I'll walk half the way with you."
+
+Greatly to their surprise he raised himself, looked at his watch,
+and remarked that, as it was now half an hour since luncheon,
+the gastric juices had had sufficient time to secrete; he was trying
+a system, he explained, which involved short spells of exercise
+interspaced by longer intervals of rest.
+
+"I shall be back at four," he remarked to Helen, "when I shall lie
+down on the sofa and relax all my muscles completely."
+
+"So you're going, Rachel?"  Helen asked.  "You won't stay with me?"
+
+She smiled, but she might have been sad.
+
+Was she sad, or was she really laughing?  Rachel could not tell, and she
+felt for the moment very uncomfortable between Helen and Terence. 
+Then she turned away, saying merely that she would go with Terence,
+on condition that he did all the talking.
+
+A narrow border of shadow ran along the road, which was broad
+enough for two, but not broad enough for three.  St. John therefore
+dropped a little behind the pair, and the distance between
+them increased by degrees.  Walking with a view to digestion,
+and with one eye upon his watch, he looked from time to time at
+the pair in front of him.  They seemed to be so happy, so intimate,
+although they were walking side by side much as other people walk. 
+They turned slightly toward each other now and then, and said
+something which he thought must be something very private. 
+They were really disputing about Helen's character, and Terence was
+trying to explain why it was that she annoyed him so much sometimes. 
+But St. John thought that they were saying things which they did
+not want him to hear, and was led to think of his own isolation. 
+These people were happy, and in some ways he despised them for
+being made happy so simply, and in other ways he envied them. 
+He was much more remarkable than they were, but he was not happy. 
+People never liked him; he doubted sometimes whether even Helen
+liked him.  To be simple, to be able to say simply what one felt,
+without the terrific self-consciousness which possessed him,
+and showed him his own face and words perpetually in a mirror,
+that would be worth almost any other gift, for it made one happy. 
+Happiness, happiness, what was happiness?  He was never happy. 
+He saw too clearly the little vices and deceits and flaws
+of life, and, seeing them, it seemed to him honest to take notice
+of them.  That was the reason, no doubt, why people generally
+disliked him, and complained that he was heartless and bitter. 
+Certainly they never told him the things he wanted to be told,
+that he was nice and kind, and that they liked him.  But it was
+true that half the sharp things that he said about them were said
+because he was unhappy or hurt himself.  But he admitted that he
+had very seldom told any one that he cared for them, and when he
+had been demonstrative, he had generally regretted it afterwards. 
+His feelings about Terence and Rachel were so complicated that he
+had never yet been able to bring himself to say that he was glad
+that they were going to be married.  He saw their faults so clearly,
+and the inferior nature of a great deal of their feeling for
+each other, and he expected that their love would not last. 
+He looked at them again, and, very strangely, for he was so used
+to thinking that he seldom saw anything, the look of them filled him
+with a simple emotion of affection in which there were some traces
+of pity also.  What, after all, did people's faults matter in comparison
+with what was good in them?  He resolved that he would now tell them
+what he felt.  He quickened his pace and came up with them just
+as they reached the corner where the lane joined the main road. 
+They stood still and began to laugh at him, and to ask him whether
+the gastric juices--but he stopped them and began to speak very quickly
+and stiffly.
+
+"D'you remember the morning after the dance?" he demanded. 
+"It was here we sat, and you talked nonsense, and Rachel made little
+heaps of stones.  I, on the other hand, had the whole meaning
+of life revealed to me in a flash."  He paused for a second,
+and drew his lips together in a tight little purse.  "Love," he said. 
+"It seems to me to explain everything.  So, on the whole, I'm very glad
+that you two are going to be married."  He then turned round abruptly,
+without looking at them, and walked back to the villa.  He felt both
+exalted and ashamed of himself for having thus said what he felt. 
+Probably they were laughing at him, probably they thought him
+a fool, and, after all, had he really said what he felt?
+
+It was true that they laughed when he was gone; but the dispute
+about Helen which had become rather sharp, ceased, and they became
+peaceful and friendly.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIV
+
+
+
+They reached the hotel rather early in the afternoon, so that most
+people were still lying down, or sitting speechless in their bedrooms,
+and Mrs. Thornbury, although she had asked them to tea, was nowhere
+to be seen.  They sat down, therefore, in the shady hall,
+which was almost empty, and full of the light swishing sounds of
+air going to and fro in a large empty space.  Yes, this arm-chair
+was the same arm-chair in which Rachel had sat that afternoon when
+Evelyn came up, and this was the magazine she had been looking at,
+and this the very picture, a picture of New York by lamplight. 
+How odd it seemed--nothing had changed.
+
+By degrees a certain number of people began to come down the stairs
+and to pass through the hall, and in this dim light their figures
+possessed a sort of grace and beauty, although they were all
+unknown people.  Sometimes they went straight through and out into
+the garden by the swing door, sometimes they stopped for a few minutes
+and bent over the tables and began turning over the newspapers. 
+Terence and Rachel sat watching them through their half-closed eyelids--
+the Johnsons, the Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons', the Lees,
+the Morleys, the Campbells, the Gardiners.  Some were dressed
+in white flannels and were carrying racquets under their arms,
+some were short, some tall, some were only children, and some perhaps
+were servants, but they all had their standing, their reason for
+following each other through the hall, their money, their position,
+whatever it might be.  Terence soon gave up looking at them,
+for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he fell half asleep
+in his chair.  Rachel watched the people for some time longer;
+she was fascinated by the certainty and the grace of their movements,
+and by the inevitable way in which they seemed to follow each other,
+and loiter and pass on and disappear.  But after a time her thoughts
+wandered, and she began to think of the dance, which had been held
+in this room, only then the room itself looked quite different. 
+Glancing round, she could hardly believe that it was the same room. 
+It had looked so bare and so bright and formal on that night
+when they came into it out of the darkness; it had been filled,
+too, with little red, excited faces, always moving, and people so
+brightly dressed and so animated that they did not seem in the least
+like real people, nor did you feel that you could talk to them. 
+And now the room was dim and quiet, and beautiful silent people
+passed through it, to whom you could go and say anything you liked. 
+She felt herself amazingly secure as she sat in her arm-chair, and
+able to review not only the night of the dance, but the entire past,
+tenderly and humorously, as if she had been turning in a fog
+for a long time, and could now see exactly where she had turned. 
+For the methods by which she had reached her present position,
+seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about them
+was that she had not known where they were leading her.  That was
+the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going,
+or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret,
+always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led
+to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing,
+and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty,
+and it was this process that people called living.  Perhaps, then,
+every one really knew as she knew now where they were going;
+and things formed themselves into a pattern not only for her,
+but for them, and in that pattern lay satisfaction and meaning. 
+When she looked back she could see that a meaning of some kind
+was apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the brief visit
+of the Dalloways whom she would never see again, and in the life of
+her father.
+
+The sound of Terence, breathing deep in his slumber, confirmed her
+in her calm.  She was not sleepy although she did not see anything
+very distinctly, but although the figures passing through the hall
+became vaguer and vaguer, she believed that they all knew exactly
+where they were going, and the sense of their certainty filled her
+with comfort.  For the moment she was as detached and disinterested
+as if she had no longer any lot in life, and she thought that she
+could now accept anything that came to her without being perplexed
+by the form in which it appeared.  What was there to frighten or
+to perplex in the prospect of life?  Why should this insight ever
+again desert her?  The world was in truth so large, so hospitable,
+and after all it was so simple.  "Love," St. John had said, "that seems
+to explain it all."  Yes, but it was not the love of man for woman,
+of Terence for Rachel.  Although they sat so close together, they had
+ceased to be little separate bodies; they had ceased to struggle
+and desire one another.  There seemed to be peace between them. 
+It might be love, but it was not the love of man for woman.
+
+Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying back
+in his chair, and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth was,
+and his chin so small, and his nose curved like a switchback
+with a knob at the end.  Naturally, looking like that he was lazy,
+and ambitious, and full of moods and faults.  She remembered
+their quarrels, and in particular how they had been quarreling about
+Helen that very afternoon, and she thought how often they would
+quarrel in the thirty, or forty, or fifty years in which they would
+be living in the same house together, catching trains together,
+and getting annoyed because they were so different.  But all this
+was superficial, and had nothing to do with the life that went
+on beneath the eyes and the mouth and the chin, for that life
+was independent of her, and independent of everything else. 
+So too, although she was going to marry him and to live with him
+for thirty, or forty, or fifty years, and to quarrel, and to be
+so close to him, she was independent of him; she was independent
+of everything else.  Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love that
+made her understand this, for she had never felt this independence,
+this calm, and this certainty until she fell in love with him,
+and perhaps this too was love.  She wanted nothing else.
+
+For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little distance
+looking at the couple lying back so peacefully in their arm-chairs.
+She could not make up her mind whether to disturb them or not,
+and then, seeming to recollect something, she came across the hall. 
+The sound of her approach woke Terence, who sat up and rubbed his eyes. 
+He heard Miss Allan talking to Rachel.
+
+"Well," she was saying, "this is very nice.  It is very nice indeed. 
+Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion.  It cannot often
+happen that two couples who have never seen each other before meet
+in the same hotel and decide to get married."  Then she paused
+and smiled, and seemed to have nothing more to say, so that Terence
+rose and asked her whether it was true that she had finished her book. 
+Some one had said that she had really finished it.  Her face lit up;
+she turned to him with a livelier expression than usual.
+
+"Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it," she said. 
+"That is, omitting Swinburne--Beowulf to Browning--I rather
+like the two B's myself.  Beowulf to Browning," she repeated,
+"I think that is the kind of title which might catch one's eye on
+a railway book-stall."
+
+She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book, for no one
+knew what an amount of determination had gone to the making of it. 
+Also she thought that it was a good piece of work, and, considering
+what anxiety she had been in about her brother while she wrote it,
+she could not resist telling them a little more about it.
+
+"I must confess," she continued, "that if I had known how many
+classics there are in English literature, and how verbose the best
+of them contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work. 
+They only allow one seventy thousand words, you see."
+
+"Only seventy thousand words!"  Terence exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, and one has to say something about everybody," Miss Allan added. 
+"That is what I find so difficult, saying something different
+about everybody."  Then she thought that she had said enough
+about herself, and she asked whether they had come down to join
+the tennis tournament.  "The young people are very keen about it. 
+It begins again in half an hour."
+
+Her gaze rested benevolently upon them both, and, after a momentary
+pause, she remarked, looking at Rachel as if she had remembered
+something that would serve to keep her distinct from other people.
+
+"You're the remarkable person who doesn't like ginger."  But the
+kindness of the smile in her rather worn and courageous face made them
+feel that although she would scarcely remember them as individuals,
+she had laid upon them the burden of the new generation.
+
+"And in that I quite agree with her," said a voice behind;
+Mrs. Thornbury had overheard the last few words about not liking ginger. 
+"It's associated in my mind with a horrid old aunt of ours (poor thing,
+she suffered dreadfully, so it isn't fair to call her horrid)
+who used to give it to us when we were small, and we never had
+the courage to tell her we didn't like it.  We just had to put
+it out in the shrubbery--she had a big house near Bath."
+
+They began moving slowly across the hall, when they were stopped
+by the impact of Evelyn, who dashed into them, as though in running
+downstairs to catch them her legs had got beyond her control.
+
+"Well," she exclaimed, with her usual enthusiasm, seizing Rachel
+by the arm, "I call this splendid!  I guessed it was going to happen
+from the very beginning!  I saw you two were made for each other. 
+Now you've just got to tell me all about it--when's it to be,
+where are you going to live--are you both tremendously happy?"
+
+But the attention of the group was diverted to Mrs. Elliot,
+who was passing them with her eager but uncertain movement,
+carrying in her hands a plate and an empty hot-water bottle. 
+She would have passed them, but Mrs. Thornbury went up and stopped her.
+
+"Thank you, Hughling's better," she replied, in answer to Mrs. Thornbury's
+enquiry, "but he's not an easy patient.  He wants to know what his
+temperature is, and if I tell him he gets anxious, and if I don't
+tell him he suspects.  You know what men are when they're ill! 
+And of course there are none of the proper appliances, and, though he
+seems very willing and anxious to help" (here she lowered her voice
+mysteriously), "one can't feel that Dr. Rodriguez is the same
+as a proper doctor.  If you would come and see him, Mr. Hewet,"
+she added, "I know it would cheer him up--lying there in bed all day--
+and the flies--But I must go and find Angelo--the food here--
+of course, with an invalid, one wants things particularly nice." 
+And she hurried past them in search of the head waiter.  The worry
+of nursing her husband had fixed a plaintive frown upon her forehead;
+she was pale and looked unhappy and more than usually inefficient,
+and her eyes wandered more vaguely than ever from point to point.
+
+"Poor thing!"  Mrs. Thornbury exclaimed.  She told them that for some
+days Hughling Elliot had been ill, and the only doctor available
+was the brother of the proprietor, or so the proprietor said,
+whose right to the title of doctor was not above suspicion.
+
+"I know how wretched it is to be ill in a hotel," Mrs. Thornbury
+remarked, once more leading the way with Rachel to the garden. 
+"I spent six weeks on my honeymoon in having typhoid at Venice,"
+she continued.  "But even so, I look back upon them as some of the
+happiest weeks in my life.  Ah, yes," she said, taking Rachel's arm,
+"you think yourself happy now, but it's nothing to the happiness
+that comes afterwards.  And I assure you I could find it in my heart
+to envy you young people!  You've a much better time than we had,
+I may tell you.  When I look back upon it, I can hardly believe
+how things have changed.  When we were engaged I wasn't allowed to go
+for walks with William alone--some one had always to be in the room
+with us--I really believe I had to show my parents all his letters!--
+though they were very fond of him too.  Indeed, I may say they
+looked upon him as their own son.  It amuses me," she continued,
+"to think how strict they were to us, when I see how they spoil
+their grand-children!"
+
+The table was laid under the tree again, and taking her place
+before the teacups, Mrs. Thornbury beckoned and nodded until she had
+collected quite a number of people, Susan and Arthur and Mr. Pepper,
+who were strolling about, waiting for the tournament to begin. 
+A murmuring tree, a river brimming in the moonlight, Terence's words
+came back to Rachel as she sat drinking the tea and listening
+to the words which flowed on so lightly, so kindly, and with such
+silvery smoothness.  This long life and all these children had
+left her very smooth; they seemed to have rubbed away the marks
+of individuality, and to have left only what was old and maternal.
+
+"And the things you young people are going to see!" 
+Mrs. Thornbury continued.  She included them all in her forecast,
+she included them all in her maternity, although the party
+comprised William Pepper and Miss Allan, both of whom might
+have been supposed to have seen a fair share of the panorama. 
+"When I see how the world has changed in my lifetime," she went on,
+"I can set no limit to what may happen in the next fifty years. 
+Ah, no, Mr. Pepper, I don't agree with you in the least," she laughed,
+interrupting his gloomy remark about things going steadily
+from bad to worse.  "I know I ought to feel that, but I don't,
+I'm afraid.  They're going to be much better people than we were. 
+Surely everything goes to prove that.  All round me I see women,
+young women, women with household cares of every sort, going out
+and doing things that we should not have thought it possible to do."
+
+Mr. Pepper thought her sentimental and irrational like all old women,
+but her manner of treating him as if he were a cross old baby baffled
+him and charmed him, and he could only reply to her with a curious
+grimace which was more a smile than a frown.
+
+"And they remain women," Mrs. Thornbury added.  "They give a great
+deal to their children."
+
+As she said this she smiled slightly in the direction of Susan
+and Rachel.  They did not like to be included in the same lot,
+but they both smiled a little self-consciously, and Arthur and Terence
+glanced at each other too.  She made them feel that they were all in
+the same boat together, and they looked at the women they were going
+to marry and compared them.  It was inexplicable how any one could
+wish to marry Rachel, incredible that any one should be ready to spend
+his life with Susan; but singular though the other's taste must be,
+they bore each other no ill-will on account of it; indeed, they liked
+each other rather the better for the eccentricity of their choice.
+
+"I really must congratulate you," Susan remarked, as she leant
+across the table for the jam.
+
+There seemed to be no foundation for St. John's gossip about Arthur
+and Susan.  Sunburnt and vigorous they sat side by side, with their
+racquets across their knees, not saying much but smiling slightly
+all the time.  Through the thin white clothes which they wore, it was
+possible to see the lines of their bodies and legs, the beautiful
+curves of their muscles, his leanness and her flesh, and it was
+natural to think of the firm-fleshed sturdy children that would
+be theirs.  Their faces had too little shape in them to be beautiful,
+but they had clear eyes and an appearance of great health and power
+of endurance, for it seemed as if the blood would never cease
+to run in his veins, or to lie deeply and calmly in her cheeks. 
+Their eyes at the present moment were brighter than usual, and wore
+the peculiar expression of pleasure and self-confidence which is
+seen in the eyes of athletes, for they had been playing tennis,
+and they were both first-rate at the game.
+
+Evelyn had not spoken, but she had been looking from Susan
+to Rachel.  Well--they had both made up their minds very easily,
+they had done in a very few weeks what it sometimes seemed to her
+that she would never be able to do.  Although they were so different,
+she thought that she could see in each the same look of satisfaction
+and completion, the same calmness of manner, and the same slowness
+of movement.  It was that slowness, that confidence, that content
+which she hated, she thought to herself.  They moved so slowly
+because they were not single but double, and Susan was attached
+to Arthur, and Rachel to Terence, and for the sake of this one man
+they had renounced all other men, and movement, and the real things
+of life.  Love was all very well, and those snug domestic houses,
+with the kitchen below and the nursery above, which were so secluded
+and self-contained, like little islands in the torrents of the world;
+but the real things were surely the things that happened, the causes,
+the wars, the ideals, which happened in the great world outside,
+and went so independently of these women, turning so quietly and
+beautifully towards the men.  She looked at them sharply.  Of course
+they were happy and content, but there must be better things than that. 
+Surely one could get nearer to life, one could get more out of life,
+one could enjoy more and feel more than they would ever do. 
+Rachel in particular looked so young--what could she know of life? 
+She became restless, and getting up, crossed over to sit beside Rachel. 
+She reminded her that she had promised to join her club.
+
+"The bother is," she went on, "that I mayn't be able to start work
+seriously till October.  I've just had a letter from a friend of mine
+whose brother is in business in Moscow.  They want me to stay with them,
+and as they're in the thick of all the conspiracies and anarchists,
+I've a good mind to stop on my way home.  It sounds too thrilling." 
+She wanted to make Rachel see how thrilling it was.  "My friend
+knows a girl of fifteen who's been sent to Siberia for life merely
+because they caught her addressing a letter to an anarchist. 
+And the letter wasn't from her, either.  I'd give all I have in
+the world to help on a revolution against the Russian government,
+and it's bound to come."
+
+She looked from Rachel to Terence.  They were both a little touched
+by the sight of her remembering how lately they had been listening
+to evil words about her, and Terence asked her what her scheme was,
+and she explained that she was going to found a club--a club for
+doing things, really doing them.  She became very animated, as she
+talked on and on, for she professed herself certain that if once
+twenty people--no, ten would be enough if they were keen--set about
+doing things instead of talking about doing them, they could abolish
+almost every evil that exists.  It was brains that were needed. 
+If only people with brains--of course they would want a room,
+a nice room, in Bloomsbury preferably, where they could meet once
+a week.  . . .
+
+As she talked Terence could see the traces of fading youth in her face,
+the lines that were being drawn by talk and excitement round her mouth
+and eyes, but he did not pity her; looking into those bright, rather hard,
+and very courageous eyes, he saw that she did not pity herself,
+or feel any desire to exchange her own life for the more refined
+and orderly lives of people like himself and St. John, although,
+as the years went by, the fight would become harder and harder. 
+Perhaps, though, she would settle down; perhaps, after all,
+she would marry Perrott.  While his mind was half occupied with
+what she was saying, he thought of her probable destiny, the light
+clouds of tobacco smoke serving to obscure his face from her eyes.
+
+Terence smoked and Arthur smoked and Evelyn smoked, so that the air
+was full of the mist and fragrance of good tobacco.  In the intervals
+when no one spoke, they heard far off the low murmur of the sea,
+as the waves quietly broke and spread the beach with a film of water,
+and withdrew to break again.  The cool green light fell through
+the leaves of the tree, and there were soft crescents and diamonds
+of sunshine upon the plates and the tablecloth.  Mrs. Thornbury,
+after watching them all for a time in silence, began to ask Rachel
+kindly questions--When did they all go back?  Oh, they expected
+her father.  She must want to see her father--there would be a
+great deal to tell him, and (she looked sympathetically at Terence)
+he would be so happy, she felt sure.  Years ago, she continued,
+it might have been ten or twenty years ago, she remembered meeting
+Mr. Vinrace at a party, and, being so much struck by his face,
+which was so unlike the ordinary face one sees at a party, that she
+had asked who he was, and she was told that it was Mr. Vinrace,
+and she had always remembered the name,--an uncommon name,--and he
+had a lady with him, a very sweet-looking woman, but it was one of
+those dreadful London crushes, where you don't talk,--you only look
+at each other,--and although she had shaken hands with Mr. Vinrace,
+she didn't think they had said anything.  She sighed very slightly,
+remembering the past.
+
+Then she turned to Mr. Pepper, who had become very dependent on her,
+so that he always chose a seat near her, and attended to what she
+was saying, although he did not often make any remark of his own.
+
+"You who know everything, Mr. Pepper," she said, "tell us how did
+those wonderful French ladies manage their salons?  Did we ever
+do anything of the same kind in England, or do you think that there
+is some reason why we cannot do it in England?"
+
+Mr. Pepper was pleased to explain very accurately why there has
+never been an English salon.  There were three reasons, and they were
+very good ones, he said.  As for himself, when he went to a party,
+as one was sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence--
+his niece, for example, had been married the other day--he walked
+into the middle of the room, said "Ha! ha!" as loud as ever he could,
+considered that he had done his duty, and walked away again. 
+Mrs. Thornbury protested.  She was going to give a party directly
+she got back, and they were all to be invited, and she should set
+people to watch Mr. Pepper, and if she heard that he had been caught
+saying "Ha! ha!" she would--she would do something very dreadful
+indeed to him.  Arthur Venning suggested that what she must do
+was to rig up something in the nature of a surprise--a portrait,
+for example, of a nice old lady in a lace cap, concealing a bath
+of cold water, which at a signal could be sprung on Pepper's head;
+or they'd have a chair which shot him twenty feet high directly he sat
+on it.
+
+Susan laughed.  She had done her tea; she was feeling very well
+contented, partly because she had been playing tennis brilliantly,
+and then every one was so nice; she was beginning to find it so much
+easier to talk, and to hold her own even with quite clever people,
+for somehow clever people did not frighten her any more. 
+Even Mr. Hirst, whom she had disliked when she first met him,
+really wasn't disagreeable; and, poor man, he always looked so ill;
+perhaps he was in love; perhaps he had been in love with Rachel--
+she really shouldn't wonder; or perhaps it was Evelyn--she was of
+course very attractive to men.  Leaning forward, she went on with
+the conversation.  She said that she thought that the reason why
+parties were so dull was mainly because gentlemen will not dress: 
+even in London, she stated, it struck her very much how people
+don't think it necessary to dress in the evening, and of course
+if they don't dress in London they won't dress in the country. 
+It was really quite a treat at Christmas-time when there were
+the Hunt balls, and the gentlemen wore nice red coats, but Arthur
+didn't care for dancing, so she supposed that they wouldn't go
+even to the ball in their little country town.  She didn't think
+that people who were fond of one sport often care for another,
+although her father was an exception.  But then he was an exception
+in every way--such a gardener, and he knew all about birds and animals,
+and of course he was simply adored by all the old women in the village,
+and at the same time what he really liked best was a book. 
+You always knew where to find him if he were wanted; he would be
+in his study with a book.  Very likely it would be an old, old book,
+some fusty old thing that no one else would dream of reading. 
+She used to tell him that he would have made a first-rate old bookworm
+if only he hadn't had a family of six to support, and six children,
+she added, charmingly confident of universal sympathy, didn't leave
+one much time for being a bookworm.
+
+Still talking about her father, of whom she was very proud, she rose,
+for Arthur upon looking at his watch found that it was time they
+went back again to the tennis court.  The others did not move.
+
+"They're very happy!" said Mrs. Thornbury, looking benignantly
+after them.  Rachel agreed; they seemed to be so certain of themselves;
+they seemed to know exactly what they wanted.
+
+"D'you think they _are_ happy?"  Evelyn murmured to Terence in
+an undertone, and she hoped that he would say that he did not think
+them happy; but, instead, he said that they must go too--go home,
+for they were always being late for meals, and Mrs. Ambrose,
+who was very stern and particular, didn't like that.  Evelyn laid
+hold of Rachel's skirt and protested.  Why should they go? 
+It was still early, and she had so many things to say to them. 
+"No," said Terence, "we must go, because we walk so slowly.  We stop
+and look at things, and we talk."
+
+"What d'you talk about?"  Evelyn enquired, upon which he laughed
+and said that they talked about everything.
+
+Mrs. Thornbury went with them to the gate, trailing very slowly
+and gracefully across the grass and the gravel, and talking all
+the time about flowers and birds.  She told them that she had taken up
+the study of botany since her daughter married, and it was wonderful
+what a number of flowers there were which she had never seen,
+although she had lived in the country all her life and she was now
+seventy-two. It was a good thing to have some occupation which was
+quite independent of other people, she said, when one got old. 
+But the odd thing was that one never felt old.  She always felt that
+she was twenty-five, not a day more or a day less, but, of course,
+one couldn't expect other people to agree to that.
+
+"It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to
+imagine that you're twenty-five," she said, looking from one to the
+other with her smooth, bright glance.  "It must be very wonderful,
+very wonderful indeed."  She stood talking to them at the gate
+for a long time; she seemed reluctant that they should go.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXV
+
+
+The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on
+the shore sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature,
+and even on the terrace under an awning the bricks were hot,
+and the air danced perpetually over the short dry grass. 
+The red flowers in the stone basins were drooping with the heat,
+and the white blossoms which had been so smooth and thick only a few
+weeks ago were now dry, and their edges were curled and yellow. 
+Only the stiff and hostile plants of the south, whose fleshy leaves
+seemed to be grown upon spines, still remained standing upright
+and defied the sun to beat them down.  It was too hot to talk,
+and it was not easy to find any book that would withstand the power
+of the sun.  Many books had been tried and then let fall, and now
+Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the words of Milton
+had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary to understand
+what he was saying; one could merely listen to his words; one could
+almost handle them.
+
+There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,
+
+he read,
+
+   That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.
+   Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;
+   Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,
+
+That had the sceptre from his father Brute.
+
+The words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be laden
+with meaning, and perhaps it was for this reason that it was painful
+to listen to them; they sounded strange; they meant different things
+from what they usually meant.  Rachel at any rate could not keep
+her attention fixed upon them, but went off upon curious trains of
+thought suggested by words such as "curb" and "Locrine" and "Brute,"
+which brought unpleasant sights before her eyes, independently of
+their meaning.  Owing to the heat and the dancing air the garden
+too looked strange--the trees were either too near or too far,
+and her head almost certainly ached.  She was not quite certain,
+and therefore she did not know, whether to tell Terence now,
+or to let him go on reading.  She decided that she would wait until
+he came to the end of a stanza, and if by that time she had turned
+her head this way and that, and it ached in every position undoubtedly,
+she would say very calmly that her head ached.
+
+   Sabrina fair,
+     Listen where thou art sitting
+   Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
+     In twisted braids of lilies knitting
+   The loose train of thy amber dropping hair,
+   Listen for dear honour's sake,
+     Goddess of the silver lake,
+     Listen and save!
+
+But her head ached; it ached whichever way she turned it.
+
+She sat up and said as she had determined, "My head aches so that
+I shall go indoors."  He was half-way through the next verse,
+but he dropped the book instantly.
+
+"Your head aches?" he repeated.
+
+For a few moments they sat looking at one another in silence,
+holding each other's hands.  During this time his sense of dismay
+and catastrophe were almost physically painful; all round him he
+seemed to hear the shiver of broken glass which, as it fell to earth,
+left him sitting in the open air.  But at the end of two minutes,
+noticing that she was not sharing his dismay, but was only rather
+more languid and heavy-eyed than usual, he recovered, fetched Helen,
+and asked her to tell him what they had better do, for Rachel had
+a headache.
+
+Mrs. Ambrose was not discomposed, but advised that she should go
+to bed, and added that she must expect her head to ache if she sat up
+to all hours and went out in the heat, but a few hours in bed would
+cure it completely.  Terence was unreasonably reassured by her words,
+as he had been unreasonably depressed the moment before.  Helen's sense
+seemed to have much in common with the ruthless good sense of nature,
+which avenged rashness by a headache, and, like nature's good sense,
+might be depended upon.
+
+Rachel went to bed; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her,
+for a very long time, but at length, waking from a transparent
+kind of sleep, she saw the windows white in front of her,
+and recollected that some time before she had gone to bed with
+a headache, and that Helen had said it would be gone when she woke. 
+She supposed, therefore, that she was now quite well again. 
+At the same time the wall of her room was painfully white,
+and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat.  Turning her
+eyes to the window, she was not reassured by what she saw there. 
+The movement of the blind as it filled with air and blew slowly out,
+drawing the cord with a little trailing sound along the floor, seemed to
+her terrifying, as if it were the movement of an animal in the room. 
+She shut her eyes, and the pulse in her head beat so strongly
+that each thump seemed to tread upon a nerve, piercing her forehead
+with a little stab of pain.  It might not be the same headache,
+but she certainly had a headache.  She turned from side to side,
+in the hope that the coolness of the sheets would cure her, and that
+when she next opened her eyes to look the room would be as usual. 
+After a considerable number of vain experiments, she resolved to put
+the matter beyond a doubt.  She got out of bed and stood upright,
+holding on to the brass ball at the end of the bedstead. 
+Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of her hand,
+and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of the floor
+proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and walk
+than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change
+was refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great
+as the discomfort of standing up.  She accepted the idea that she
+would have to stay in bed all day long, and as she laid her head
+on the pillow, relinquished the happiness of the day.
+
+When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped her
+cheerful words, looked startled for a second and then unnaturally calm,
+the fact that she was ill was put beyond a doubt.  It was confirmed
+when the whole household knew of it, when the song that some
+one was singing in the garden stopped suddenly, and when Maria,
+as she brought water, slipped past the bed with averted eyes. 
+There was all the morning to get through, and then all the afternoon,
+and at intervals she made an effort to cross over into the ordinary world,
+but she found that her heat and discomfort had put a gulf between
+her world and the ordinary world which she could not bridge. 
+At one point the door opened, and Helen came in with a little
+dark man who had--it was the chief thing she noticed about him--
+very hairy hands.  She was drowsy and intolerably hot, and as he
+seemed shy and obsequious she scarcely troubled to answer him,
+although she understood that he was a doctor.  At another point
+the door opened and Terence came in very gently, smiling too steadily,
+as she realised, for it to be natural.  He sat down and talked to her,
+stroking her hands until it became irksome to her to lie any more
+in the same position and she turned round, and when she looked up
+again Helen was beside her and Terence had gone.  It did not matter;
+she would see him to-morrow when things would be ordinary again. 
+Her chief occupation during the day was to try to remember how the
+lines went:
+
+   Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
+     In twisted braids of lilies knitting
+   The loose train of thy amber dropping hair;
+
+and the effort worried her because the adjectives persisted
+in getting into the wrong places.
+
+The second day did not differ very much from the first day,
+except that her bed had become very important, and the world outside,
+when she tried to think of it, appeared distinctly further off. 
+The glassy, cool, translucent wave was almost visible before her,
+curling up at the end of the bed, and as it was refreshingly cool
+she tried to keep her mind fixed upon it.  Helen was here, and Helen
+was there all day long; sometimes she said that it was lunchtime,
+and sometimes that it was teatime; but by the next day all landmarks
+were obliterated, and the outer world was so far away that the
+different sounds, such as the sounds of people moving overhead,
+could only be ascribed to their cause by a great effort of memory. 
+The recollection of what she had felt, or of what she had been
+doing and thinking three days before, had faded entirely. 
+On the other hand, every object in the room, and the bed itself,
+and her own body with its various limbs and their different sensations
+were more and more important each day.  She was completely cut off,
+and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated alone
+with her body.
+
+Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through
+the morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to
+the depths of the night.  One evening when the room appeared very dim,
+either because it was evening or because the blinds were drawn,
+Helen said to her, "Some one is going to sit here to-night. You
+won't mind?"
+
+Opening her eyes, Rachel saw not only Helen but a nurse in spectacles,
+whose face vaguely recalled something that she had once seen. 
+She had seen her in the chapel.  "Nurse McInnis," said Helen,
+and the nurse smiled steadily as they all did, and said that she
+did not find many people who were frightened of her.  After waiting
+for a moment they both disappeared, and having turned on her pillow
+Rachel woke to find herself in the midst of one of those interminable
+nights which do not end at twelve, but go on into the double figures--
+thirteen, fourteen, and so on until they reach the twenties,
+and then the thirties, and then the forties.  She realised that
+there is nothing to prevent nights from doing this if they choose. 
+At a great distance an elderly woman sat with her head bent down;
+Rachel raised herself slightly and saw with dismay that she was playing
+cards by the light of a candle which stood in the hollow of a newspaper. 
+The sight had something inexplicably sinister about it, and she
+was terrified and cried out, upon which the woman laid down her
+cards and came across the room, shading the candle with her hands. 
+Coming nearer and nearer across the great space of the room,
+she stood at last above Rachel's head and said, "Not asleep? 
+Let me make you comfortable."
+
+She put down the candle and began to arrange the bedclothes. 
+It struck Rachel that a woman who sat playing cards in a cavern all
+night long would have very cold hands, and she shrunk from the touch
+of them.
+
+"Why, there's a toe all the way down there!" the woman said,
+proceeding to tuck in the bedclothes.  Rachel did not realise
+that the toe was hers.
+
+"You must try and lie still," she proceeded, "because if you lie still
+you will be less hot, and if you toss about you will make yourself
+more hot, and we don't want you to be any hotter than you are." 
+She stood looking down upon Rachel for an enormous length of time.
+
+"And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well," she repeated.
+
+Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling,
+and all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow
+should move.  But the shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed
+above her.  She shut her eyes.  When she opened them again several
+more hours had passed, but the night still lasted interminably. 
+The woman was still playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel
+under a river, and the light stood in a little archway in the wall
+above her.  She cried "Terence!" and the peaked shadow again moved
+across the ceiling, as the woman with an enormous slow movement rose,
+and they both stood still above her.
+
+"It's just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep
+Mr. Forrest in bed," the woman said, "and he was such a tall gentleman."
+
+In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again
+shut her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under
+the Thames, where there were little deformed women sitting in archways
+playing cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed
+with damp, which collected into drops and slid down the wall. 
+But the little old women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time,
+standing in the window together whispering, whispering incessantly.
+
+Meanwhile outside her room the sounds, the movements, and the lives of
+the other people in the house went on in the ordinary light of the sun,
+throughout the usual succession of hours.  When, on the first day
+of her illness, it became clear that she would not be absolutely well,
+for her temperature was very high, until Friday, that day
+being Tuesday, Terence was filled with resentment, not against her,
+but against the force outside them which was separating them. 
+He counted up the number of days that would almost certainly be
+spoilt for them.  He realised, with an odd mixture of pleasure
+and annoyance, that, for the first time in his life, he was so
+dependent upon another person that his happiness was in her keeping. 
+The days were completely wasted upon trifling, immaterial things,
+for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity all the usual
+occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point.  The least
+intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel's illness,
+and to discuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this subject
+was exhausted, to discuss illness of all kinds, and what caused them,
+and what cured them.
+
+Twice every day he went in to sit with Rachel, and twice
+every day the same thing happened.  On going into her room,
+which was not very dark, where the music was lying about as usual,
+and her books and letters, his spirits rose instantly.  When he
+saw her he felt completely reassured.  She did not look very ill. 
+Sitting by her side he would tell her what he had been doing,
+using his natural voice to speak to her, only a few tones lower
+down than usual; but by the time he had sat there for five minutes
+he was plunged into the deepest gloom.  She was not the same;
+he could not bring them back to their old relationship; but although
+he knew that it was foolish he could not prevent himself from
+endeavouring to bring her back, to make her remember, and when this
+failed he was in despair.  He always concluded as he left her room
+that it was worse to see her than not to see her, but by degrees,
+as the day wore on, the desire to see her returned and became almost
+too great to be borne.
+
+On Thursday morning when Terence went into her room he felt the usual
+increase of confidence.  She turned round and made an effort to remember
+certain facts from the world that was so many millions of miles away.
+
+"You have come up from the hotel?" she asked.
+
+"No; I'm staying here for the present," he said.  "We've just
+had luncheon," he continued, "and the mail has come in. 
+There's a bundle of letters for you--letters from England."
+
+Instead of saying, as he meant her to say, that she wished to see them,
+she said nothing for some time.
+
+"You see, there they go, rolling off the edge of the hill,"
+she said suddenly.
+
+"Rolling, Rachel?  What do you see rolling?  There's nothing rolling."
+
+"The old woman with the knife," she replied, not speaking to Terence
+in particular, and looking past him.  As she appeared to be looking
+at a vase on the shelf opposite, he rose and took it down.
+
+"Now they can't roll any more," he said cheerfully.  Nevertheless she
+lay gazing at the same spot, and paid him no further attention
+although he spoke to her.  He became so profoundly wretched that he
+could not endure to sit with her, but wandered about until he
+found St. John, who was reading _The_ _Times_ in the verandah. 
+He laid it aside patiently, and heard all that Terence had to say
+about delirium.  He was very patient with Terence.  He treated him
+like a child.
+
+By Friday it could not be denied that the illness was no longer
+an attack that would pass off in a day or two; it was a real illness
+that required a good deal of organisation, and engrossed the attention
+of at least five people, but there was no reason to be anxious. 
+Instead of lasting five days it was going to last ten days. 
+Rodriguez was understood to say that there were well-known varieties
+of this illness.  Rodriguez appeared to think that they were treating
+the illness with undue anxiety.  His visits were always marked
+by the same show of confidence, and in his interviews with Terence
+he always waved aside his anxious and minute questions with a kind
+of flourish which seemed to indicate that they were all taking it
+much too seriously.  He seemed curiously unwilling to sit down.
+
+"A high temperature," he said, looking furtively about the room,
+and appearing to be more interested in the furniture and in Helen's
+embroidery than in anything else.  "In this climate you must
+expect a high temperature.  You need not be alarmed by that. 
+It is the pulse we go by" (he tapped his own hairy wrist), "and
+the pulse continues excellent."
+
+Thereupon he bowed and slipped out.  The interview was conducted
+laboriously upon both sides in French, and this, together with the fact
+that he was optimistic, and that Terence respected the medical
+profession from hearsay, made him less critical than he would
+have been had he encountered the doctor in any other capacity. 
+Unconsciously he took Rodriguez' side against Helen, who seemed
+to have taken an unreasonable prejudice against him.
+
+When Saturday came it was evident that the hours of the day must
+be more strictly organised than they had been.  St. John offered
+his services; he said that he had nothing to do, and that he might
+as well spend the day at the villa if he could be of use.  As if they
+were starting on a difficult expedition together, they parcelled out
+their duties between them, writing out an elaborate scheme of hours
+upon a large sheet of paper which was pinned to the drawing-room door. 
+Their distance from the town, and the difficulty of procuring
+rare things with unknown names from the most unexpected places,
+made it necessary to think very carefully, and they found it
+unexpectedly difficult to do the simple but practical things that
+were required of them, as if they, being very tall, were asked
+to stoop down and arrange minute grains of sand in a pattern on the ground.
+
+It was St. John's duty to fetch what was needed from the town,
+so that Terence would sit all through the long hot hours alone in the
+drawing-room, near the open door, listening for any movement upstairs,
+or call from Helen.  He always forgot to pull down the blinds,
+so that he sat in bright sunshine, which worried him without his
+knowing what was the cause of it.  The room was terribly stiff
+and uncomfortable.  There were hats in the chairs, and medicine bottles
+among the books.  He tried to read, but good books were too good,
+and bad books were too bad, and the only thing he could tolerate
+was the newspaper, which with its news of London, and the movements
+of real people who were giving dinner-parties and making speeches,
+seemed to give a little background of reality to what was otherwise
+mere nightmare.  Then, just as his attention was fixed on the print,
+a soft call would come from Helen, or Mrs. Chailey would bring
+in something which was wanted upstairs, and he would run up
+very quietly in his socks, and put the jug on the little table
+which stood crowded with jugs and cups outside the bedroom door;
+or if he could catch Helen for a moment he would ask, "How is she?"
+
+"Rather restless.  . . . On the whole, quieter, I think."
+
+The answer would be one or the other.
+
+As usual she seemed to reserve something which she did not say,
+and Terence was conscious that they disagreed, and, without saying
+it aloud, were arguing against each other.  But she was too hurried
+and pre-occupied to talk.
+
+The strain of listening and the effort of making practical arrangements
+and seeing that things worked smoothly, absorbed all Terence's power. 
+Involved in this long dreary nightmare, he did not attempt to think
+what it amounted to.  Rachel was ill; that was all; he must see that
+there was medicine and milk, and that things were ready when they
+were wanted.  Thought had ceased; life itself had come to a standstill. 
+Sunday was rather worse than Saturday had been, simply because
+the strain was a little greater every day, although nothing else
+had changed.  The separate feelings of pleasure, interest, and pain,
+which combine to make up the ordinary day, were merged in one long-drawn
+sensation of sordid misery and profound boredom.  He had never been
+so bored since he was shut up in the nursery alone as a child. 
+The vision of Rachel as she was now, confused and heedless,
+had almost obliterated the vision of her as she had been once
+long ago; he could hardly believe that they had ever been happy,
+or engaged to be married, for what were feelings, what was there
+to be felt?  Confusion covered every sight and person, and he
+seemed to see St. John, Ridley, and the stray people who came up
+now and then from the hotel to enquire, through a mist; the only
+people who were not hidden in this mist were Helen and Rodriguez,
+because they could tell him something definite about Rachel.
+
+Nevertheless the day followed the usual forms.  At certain hours
+they went into the dining-room, and when they sat round the table
+they talked about indifferent things.  St. John usually made it
+his business to start the talk and to keep it from dying out.
+
+"I've discovered the way to get Sancho past the white house,"
+said St. John on Sunday at luncheon.  "You crackle a piece of paper
+in his ear, then he bolts for about a hundred yards, but he goes
+on quite well after that."
+
+"Yes, but he wants corn.  You should see that he has corn."
+
+"I don't think much of the stuff they give him; and Angelo seems
+a dirty little rascal."
+
+There was then a long silence.  Ridley murmured a few lines of
+poetry under his breath, and remarked, as if to conceal the fact
+that he had done so, "Very hot to-day."
+
+"Two degrees higher than it was yesterday," said St. John. 
+"I wonder where these nuts come from," he observed, taking a nut
+out of the plate, turning it over in his fingers, and looking at
+it curiously.
+
+"London, I should think," said Terence, looking at the nut too.
+
+"A competent man of business could make a fortune here in no time,"
+St. John continued.  "I suppose the heat does something funny to
+people's brains.  Even the English go a little queer.  Anyhow they're
+hopeless people to deal with.  They kept me three-quarters of an hour
+waiting at the chemist's this morning, for no reason whatever."
+
+There was another long pause.  Then Ridley enquired, "Rodriguez
+seems satisfied?"
+
+"Quite," said Terence with decision.  "It's just got to run its course." 
+Whereupon Ridley heaved a deep sigh.  He was genuinely sorry
+for every one, but at the same time he missed Helen considerably,
+and was a little aggrieved by the constant presence of the two
+young men.
+
+They moved back into the drawing-room.
+
+"Look here, Hirst," said Terence, "there's nothing to be done
+for two hours."  He consulted the sheet pinned to the door. 
+"You go and lie down.  I'll wait here.  Chailey sits with Rachel
+while Helen has her luncheon."
+
+It was asking a good deal of Hirst to tell him to go without waiting
+for a sight of Helen.  These little glimpses of Helen were the only
+respites from strain and boredom, and very often they seemed to make
+up for the discomfort of the day, although she might not have anything
+to tell them.  However, as they were on an expedition together,
+he had made up his mind to obey.
+
+Helen was very late in coming down.  She looked like a person who has
+been sitting for a long time in the dark.  She was pale and thinner,
+and the expression of her eyes was harassed but determined. 
+She ate her luncheon quickly, and seemed indifferent to what she
+was doing.  She brushed aside Terence's enquiries, and at last,
+as if he had not spoken, she looked at him with a slight frown
+and said:
+
+"We can't go on like this, Terence.  Either you've got to find
+another doctor, or you must tell Rodriguez to stop coming, and I'll
+manage for myself.  It's no use for him to say that Rachel's better;
+she's not better; she's worse."
+
+Terence suffered a terrific shock, like that which he had suffered
+when Rachel said, "My head aches."  He stilled it by reflecting
+that Helen was overwrought, and he was upheld in this opinion
+by his obstinate sense that she was opposed to him in the argument.
+
+"Do you think she's in danger?" he asked.
+
+"No one can go on being as ill as that day after day--" Helen replied. 
+She looked at him, and spoke as if she felt some indignation
+with somebody.
+
+"Very well, I'll talk to Rodriguez this afternoon," he replied.
+
+Helen went upstairs at once.
+
+Nothing now could assuage Terence's anxiety.  He could not read,
+nor could he sit still, and his sense of security was shaken, in spite
+of the fact that he was determined that Helen was exaggerating,
+and that Rachel was not very ill.  But he wanted a third person
+to confirm him in his belief.
+
+Directly Rodriguez came down he demanded, "Well, how is she? 
+Do you think her worse?"
+
+"There is no reason for anxiety, I tell you--none," Rodriguez replied
+in his execrable French, smiling uneasily, and making little
+movements all the time as if to get away.
+
+Hewet stood firmly between him and the door.  He was determined
+to see for himself what kind of man he was.  His confidence in
+the man vanished as he looked at him and saw his insignificance,
+his dirty appearance, his shiftiness, and his unintelligent,
+hairy face.  It was strange that he had never seen this before.
+
+"You won't object, of course, if we ask you to consult another doctor?"
+he continued.
+
+At this the little man became openly incensed.
+
+"Ah!" he cried.  "You have not confidence in me?  You object
+to my treatment?  You wish me to give up the case?"
+
+"Not at all," Terence replied, "but in serious illness of this kind--"
+
+Rodriguez shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"It is not serious, I assure you.  You are overanxious.  The young
+lady is not seriously ill, and I am a doctor.  The lady of course
+is frightened," he sneered.  "I understand that perfectly."
+
+"The name and address of the doctor is--?" Terence continued.
+
+"There is no other doctor," Rodriguez replied sullenly.  "Every one
+has confidence in me.  Look!  I will show you."
+
+He took out a packet of old letters and began turning them over
+as if in search of one that would confute Terence's suspicions. 
+As he searched, he began to tell a story about an English lord
+who had trusted him--a great English lord, whose name he had,
+unfortunately, forgotten.
+
+"There is no other doctor in the place," he concluded, still turning
+over the letters.
+
+"Never mind," said Terence shortly.  "I will make enquiries for myself." 
+Rodriguez put the letters back in his pocket.
+
+"Very well," he remarked.  "I have no objection."
+
+He lifted his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, as if to repeat
+that they took the illness much too seriously and that there was
+no other doctor, and slipped out, leaving behind him an impression
+that he was conscious that he was distrusted, and that his malice
+was aroused.
+
+After this Terence could no longer stay downstairs.  He went up,
+knocked at Rachel's door, and asked Helen whether he might see
+her for a few minutes.  He had not seen her yesterday.  She made
+no objection, and went and sat at a table in the window.
+
+Terence sat down by the bedside.  Rachel's face was changed. 
+She looked as though she were entirely concentrated upon the effort
+of keeping alive.  Her lips were drawn, and her cheeks were sunken
+and flushed, though without colour.  Her eyes were not entirely shut,
+the lower half of the white part showing, not as if she saw,
+but as if they remained open because she was too much exhausted
+to close them.  She opened them completely when he kissed her. 
+But she only saw an old woman slicing a man's head off with a knife.
+
+"There it falls!" she murmured.  She then turned to Terence and
+asked him anxiously some question about a man with mules, which he
+could not understand.  "Why doesn't he come?  Why doesn't he come?"
+she repeated.  He was appalled to think of the dirty little man downstairs
+in connection with illness like this, and turning instinctively
+to Helen, but she was doing something at a table in the window,
+and did not seem to realise how great the shock to him must be. 
+He rose to go, for he could not endure to listen any longer;
+his heart beat quickly and painfully with anger and misery. 
+As he passed Helen she asked him in the same weary, unnatural,
+but determined voice to fetch her more ice, and to have the jug
+outside filled with fresh milk.
+
+When he had done these errands he went to find Hirst.  Exhausted and
+very hot, St. John had fallen asleep on a bed, but Terence woke
+him without scruple.
+
+"Helen thinks she's worse," he said.  "There's no doubt she's
+frightfully ill.  Rodriguez is useless.  We must get another doctor."
+
+"But there is no other doctor," said Hirst drowsily, sitting up
+and rubbing his eyes.
+
+"Don't be a damned fool!"  Terence exclaimed.  "Of course there's
+another doctor, and, if there isn't, you've got to find one.  It ought
+to have been done days ago.  I'm going down to saddle the horse." 
+He could not stay still in one place.
+
+In less than ten minutes St. John was riding to the town in the
+scorching heat in search of a doctor, his orders being to find
+one and bring him back if he had to be fetched in a special train.
+
+"We ought to have done it days ago," Hewet repeated angrily.
+
+When he went back into the drawing-room he found that Mrs. Flushing
+was there, standing very erect in the middle of the room,
+having arrived, as people did in these days, by the kitchen
+or through the garden unannounced.
+
+"She's better?"  Mrs. Flushing enquired abruptly; they did not
+attempt to shake hands.
+
+"No," said Terence.  "If anything, they think she's worse."
+
+Mrs. Flushing seemed to consider for a moment or two, looking straight
+at Terence all the time.
+
+"Let me tell you," she said, speaking in nervous jerks, "it's always
+about the seventh day one begins to get anxious.  I daresay you've
+been sittin' here worryin' by yourself.  You think she's bad,
+but any one comin' with a fresh eye would see she was better. 
+Mr. Elliot's had fever; he's all right now," she threw out. 
+"It wasn't anythin' she caught on the expedition.  What's it matter--
+a few days' fever?  My brother had fever for twenty-six days once. 
+And in a week or two he was up and about.  We gave him nothin' but milk
+and arrowroot--"
+
+Here Mrs. Chailey came in with a message.
+
+"I'm wanted upstairs," said Terence.
+
+"You see--she'll be better," Mrs. Flushing jerked out as he
+left the room.  Her anxiety to persuade Terence was very great,
+and when he left her without saying anything she felt dissatisfied
+and restless; she did not like to stay, but she could not bear to go. 
+She wandered from room to room looking for some one to talk to,
+but all the rooms were empty.
+
+Terence went upstairs, stood inside the door to take Helen's directions,
+looked over at Rachel, but did not attempt to speak to her. 
+She appeared vaguely conscious of his presence, but it seemed to
+disturb her, and she turned, so that she lay with her back to him.
+
+For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside,
+because it needed all her attention to follow the hot, red,
+quick sights which passed incessantly before her eyes. 
+She knew that it was of enormous importance that she should attend
+to these sights and grasp their meaning, but she was always being
+just too late to hear or see something which would explain it all. 
+For this reason, the faces,--Helen's face, the nurse's, Terence's,
+the doctor's,--which occasionally forced themselves very close to her,
+were worrying because they distracted her attention and she might
+miss the clue.  However, on the fourth afternoon she was suddenly
+unable to keep Helen's face distinct from the sights themselves;
+her lips widened as she bent down over the bed, and she began to
+gabble unintelligibly like the rest.  The sights were all concerned
+in some plot, some adventure, some escape.  The nature of what
+they were doing changed incessantly, although there was always
+a reason behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp.  Now they
+were among trees and savages, now they were on the sea, now they
+were on the tops of high towers; now they jumped; now they flew. 
+But just as the crisis was about to happen, something invariably slipped
+in her brain, so that the whole effort had to begin over again. 
+The heat was suffocating.  At last the faces went further away;
+she fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed
+over her head.  She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint
+booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. 
+While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was
+not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea.  There she lay,
+sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then
+some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea.
+
+
+
+After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun wrangling
+with evasive and very garrulous natives, he extracted the information
+that there was a doctor, a French doctor, who was at present away
+on a holiday in the hills.  It was quite impossible, so they said,
+to find him.  With his experience of the country, St. John thought it
+unlikely that a telegram would either be sent or received; but having
+reduced the distance of the hill town, in which he was staying,
+from a hundred miles to thirty miles, and having hired a carriage
+and horses, he started at once to fetch the doctor himself. 
+He succeeded in finding him, and eventually forced the unwilling
+man to leave his young wife and return forthwith.  They reached
+the villa at midday on Tuesday.
+
+Terence came out to receive them, and St. John was struck by the fact
+that he had grown perceptibly thinner in the interval; he was white too;
+his eyes looked strange.  But the curt speech and the sulky masterful
+manner of Dr. Lesage impressed them both favourably, although at
+the same time it was obvious that he was very much annoyed at the
+whole affair.  Coming downstairs he gave his directions emphatically,
+but it never occurred to him to give an opinion either because of
+the presence of Rodriguez who was now obsequious as well as malicious,
+or because he took it for granted that they knew already what was to be known.
+
+"Of course," he said with a shrug of his shoulders, when Terence
+asked him, "Is she very ill?"
+
+They were both conscious of a certain sense of relief when Dr. Lesage
+was gone, leaving explicit directions, and promising another visit
+in a few hours' time; but, unfortunately, the rise of their spirits
+led them to talk more than usual, and in talking they quarrelled. 
+They quarrelled about a road, the Portsmouth Road.  St. John said that
+it is macadamised where it passes Hindhead, and Terence knew as well
+as he knew his own name that it is not macadamised at that point. 
+In the course of the argument they said some very sharp things
+to each other, and the rest of the dinner was eaten in silence,
+save for an occasional half-stifled reflection from Ridley.
+
+When it grew dark and the lamps were brought in, Terence felt
+unable to control his irritation any longer.  St. John went to bed
+in a state of complete exhaustion, bidding Terence good-night
+with rather more affection than usual because of their quarrel,
+and Ridley retired to his books.  Left alone, Terence walked up
+and down the room; he stood at the open window.
+
+The lights were coming out one after another in the town beneath,
+and it was very peaceful and cool in the garden, so that he stepped
+out on to the terrace.  As he stood there in the darkness, able only
+to see the shapes of trees through the fine grey light, he was overcome
+by a desire to escape, to have done with this suffering, to forget
+that Rachel was ill.  He allowed himself to lapse into forgetfulness
+of everything.  As if a wind that had been raging incessantly suddenly
+fell asleep, the fret and strain and anxiety which had been pressing
+on him passed away.  He seemed to stand in an unvexed space of air,
+on a little island by himself; he was free and immune from pain. 
+It did not matter whether Rachel was well or ill; it did not matter
+whether they were apart or together; nothing mattered--nothing mattered. 
+The waves beat on the shore far away, and the soft wind passed
+through the branches of the trees, seeming to encircle him with
+peace and security, with dark and nothingness.  Surely the world
+of strife and fret and anxiety was not the real world, but this was
+the real world, the world that lay beneath the superficial world,
+so that, whatever happened, one was secure.  The quiet and peace
+seemed to lap his body in a fine cool sheet, soothing every nerve;
+his mind seemed once more to expand, and become natural.
+
+But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house roused him;
+he turned instinctively and went into the drawing-room. The
+sight of the lamp-lit room brought back so abruptly all that he
+had forgotten that he stood for a moment unable to move. 
+He remembered everything, the hour, the minute even, what point they
+had reached, and what was to come.  He cursed himself for making
+believe for a minute that things were different from what they are. 
+The night was now harder to face than ever.
+
+Unable to stay in the empty drawing-room, he wandered out and sat
+on the stairs half-way up to Rachel's room.  He longed for some
+one to talk to, but Hirst was asleep, and Ridley was asleep;
+there was no sound in Rachel's room.  The only sound in the house
+was the sound of Chailey moving in the kitchen.  At last there was a
+rustling on the stairs overhead, and Nurse McInnis came down fastening
+the links in her cuffs, in preparation for the night's watch. 
+Terence rose and stopped her.  He had scarcely spoken to her,
+but it was possible that she might confirm him in the belief which
+still persisted in his own mind that Rachel was not seriously ill. 
+He told her in a whisper that Dr. Lesage had been and what he
+had said.
+
+"Now, Nurse," he whispered, "please tell me your opinion.  Do you
+consider that she is very seriously ill?  Is she in any danger?"
+
+"The doctor has said--" she began.
+
+"Yes, but I want your opinion.  You have had experience of many
+cases like this?"
+
+"I could not tell you more than Dr. Lesage, Mr. Hewet," she replied
+cautiously, as though her words might be used against her.  "The case
+is serious, but you may feel quite certain that we are doing all we can
+for Miss Vinrace."  She spoke with some professional self-approbation.
+But she realised perhaps that she did not satisfy the young man,
+who still blocked her way, for she shifted her feet slightly upon the
+stair and looked out of the window where they could see the moon over the sea.
+
+"If you ask me," she began in a curiously stealthy tone, "I never
+like May for my patients."
+
+"May?"  Terence repeated.
+
+"It may be a fancy, but I don't like to see anybody fall ill in May,"
+she continued.  "Things seem to go wrong in May.  Perhaps it's the moon. 
+They say the moon affects the brain, don't they, Sir?"
+
+He looked at her but he could not answer her; like all the others,
+when one looked at her she seemed to shrivel beneath one's eyes
+and become worthless, malicious, and untrustworthy.
+
+She slipped past him and disappeared.
+
+Though he went to his room he was unable even to take his clothes off. 
+For a long time he paced up and down, and then leaning out of
+the window gazed at the earth which lay so dark against the paler
+blue of the sky.  With a mixture of fear and loathing he looked at
+the slim black cypress trees which were still visible in the garden,
+and heard the unfamiliar creaking and grating sounds which show
+that the earth is still hot.  All these sights and sounds appeared
+sinister and full of hostility and foreboding; together with
+the natives and the nurse and the doctor and the terrible force
+of the illness itself they seemed to be in conspiracy against him. 
+They seemed to join together in their effort to extract the greatest
+possible amount of suffering from him.  He could not get used to
+his pain, it was a revelation to him.  He had never realised before
+that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day,
+pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able
+to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges
+of all action, eating away the lives of men and women.  He thought
+for the first time with understanding of words which had before
+seemed to him empty:  the struggle of life; the hardness of life. 
+Now he knew for himself that life is hard and full of suffering. 
+He looked at the scattered lights in the town beneath, and thought
+of Arthur and Susan, or Evelyn and Perrott venturing out unwittingly,
+and by their happiness laying themselves open to suffering such
+as this.  How did they dare to love each other, he wondered; how had
+he himself dared to live as he had lived, rapidly and carelessly,
+passing from one thing to another, loving Rachel as he had loved her? 
+Never again would he feel secure; he would never believe in the stability
+of life, or forget what depths of pain lie beneath small happiness
+and feelings of content and safety.  It seemed to him as he looked back
+that their happiness had never been so great as his pain was now. 
+There had always been something imperfect in their happiness,
+something they had wanted and had not been able to get.  It had been
+fragmentary and incomplete, because they were so young and had not
+known what they were doing.
+
+The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree
+outside the window, and as the branch swayed in the darkness there
+came before his mind a picture of all the world that lay outside
+his window; he thought of the immense river and the immense forest,
+the vast stretches of dry earth and the plains of the sea that
+encircled the earth; from the sea the sky rose steep and enormous,
+and the air washed profoundly between the sky and the sea. 
+How vast and dark it must be tonight, lying exposed to the wind;
+and in all this great space it was curious to think how few
+the towns were, and how small little rings of light, or single
+glow-worms he figured them, scattered here and there, among the
+swelling uncultivated folds of the world.  And in those towns
+were little men and women, tiny men and women.  Oh, it was absurd,
+when one thought of it, to sit here in a little room suffering
+and caring.  What did anything matter?  Rachel, a tiny creature,
+lay ill beneath him, and here in his little room he suffered on
+her account.  The nearness of their bodies in this vast universe,
+and the minuteness of their bodies, seemed to him absurd and laughable. 
+Nothing mattered, he repeated; they had no power, no hope. 
+He leant on the window-sill, thinking, until he almost forgot the time
+and the place.  Nevertheless, although he was convinced that it
+was absurd and laughable, and that they were small and hopeless,
+he never lost the sense that these thoughts somehow formed part
+of a life which he and Rachel would live together.
+
+Owing perhaps to the change of doctor, Rachel appeared to be rather
+better next day.  Terribly pale and worn though Helen looked,
+there was a slight lifting of the cloud which had hung all these
+days in her eyes.
+
+"She talked to me," she said voluntarily.  "She asked me what day
+of the week it was, like herself."
+
+Then suddenly, without any warning or any apparent reason,
+the tears formed in her eyes and rolled steadily down her cheeks. 
+She cried with scarcely any attempt at movement of her features,
+and without any attempt to stop herself, as if she did not know
+that she was crying.  In spite of the relief which her words
+gave him, Terence was dismayed by the sight; had everything
+given way?  Were there no limits to the power of this illness? 
+Would everything go down before it?  Helen had always seemed
+to him strong and determined, and now she was like a child. 
+He took her in his arms, and she clung to him like a child,
+crying softly and quietly upon his shoulder.  Then she roused herself
+and wiped her tears away; it was silly to behave like that, she said;
+very silly, she repeated, when there could be no doubt that Rachel
+was better.  She asked Terence to forgive her for her folly. 
+She stopped at the door and came back and kissed him without
+saying anything.
+
+On this day indeed Rachel was conscious of what went on round her. 
+She had come to the surface of the dark, sticky pool, and a wave
+seemed to bear her up and down with it; she had ceased to have
+any will of her own; she lay on the top of the wave conscious
+of some pain, but chiefly of weakness.  The wave was replaced by
+the side of a mountain.  Her body became a drift of melting snow,
+above which her knees rose in huge peaked mountains of bare bone. 
+It was true that she saw Helen and saw her room, but everything
+had become very pale and semi-transparent. Sometimes she could see
+through the wall in front of her.  Sometimes when Helen went away
+she seemed to go so far that Rachel's eyes could hardly follow her. 
+The room also had an odd power of expanding, and though she pushed
+her voice out as far as possible until sometimes it became a bird
+and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever reached the
+person she was talking to.  There were immense intervals or chasms,
+for things still had the power to appear visibly before her,
+between one moment and the next; it sometimes took an hour for Helen
+to raise her arm, pausing long between each jerky movement, and pour
+out medicine.  Helen's form stooping to raise her in bed appeared
+of gigantic size, and came down upon her like the ceiling falling. 
+But for long spaces of time she would merely lie conscious of her body
+floating on the top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote
+corner of her body, or escaped and gone flitting round the room. 
+All sights were something of an effort, but the sight of Terence
+was the greatest effort, because he forced her to join mind to body
+in the desire to remember something.  She did not wish to remember;
+it troubled her when people tried to disturb her loneliness;
+she wished to be alone.  She wished for nothing else in the world.
+
+Although she had cried, Terence observed Helen's greater hopefulness
+with something like triumph; in the argument between them she had
+made the first sign of admitting herself in the wrong.  He waited
+for Dr. Lesage to come down that afternoon with considerable anxiety,
+but with the same certainty at the back of his mind that he would
+in time force them all to admit that they were in the wrong.
+
+As usual, Dr. Lesage was sulky in his manner and very short
+in his answers.  To Terence's demand, "She seems to be better?"
+he replied, looking at him in an odd way, "She has a chance of life."
+
+The door shut and Terence walked across to the window.  He leant
+his forehead against the pane.
+
+"Rachel," he repeated to himself.  "She has a chance of life.  Rachel."
+
+How could they say these things of Rachel?  Had any one yesterday
+seriously believed that Rachel was dying?  They had been engaged
+for four weeks.  A fortnight ago she had been perfectly well. 
+What could fourteen days have done to bring her from that state to this? 
+To realise what they meant by saying that she had a chance of life
+was beyond him, knowing as he did that they were engaged.  He turned,
+still enveloped in the same dreary mist, and walked towards the door. 
+Suddenly he saw it all.  He saw the room and the garden, and the trees
+moving in the air, they could go on without her; she could die. 
+For the first time since she fell ill he remembered exactly what
+she looked like and the way in which they cared for each other. 
+The immense happiness of feeling her close to him mingled with a more
+intense anxiety than he had felt yet.  He could not let her die;
+he could not live without her.  But after a momentary struggle,
+the curtain fell again, and he saw nothing and felt nothing clearly. 
+It was all going on--going on still, in the same way as before. 
+Save for a physical pain when his heart beat, and the fact that
+his fingers were icy cold, he did not realise that he was anxious
+about anything.  Within his mind he seemed to feel nothing about Rachel
+or about any one or anything in the world.  He went on giving orders,
+arranging with Mrs. Chailey, writing out lists, and every now and then
+he went upstairs and put something quietly on the table outside
+Rachel's door.  That night Dr. Lesage seemed to be less sulky than usual. 
+He stayed voluntarily for a few moments, and, addressing St. John and
+Terence equally, as if he did not remember which of them was engaged
+to the young lady, said, "I consider that her condition to-night is
+very grave."
+
+Neither of them went to bed or suggested that the other should go to bed. 
+They sat in the drawing-room playing picquet with the door open. 
+St. John made up a bed upon the sofa, and when it was ready insisted
+that Terence should lie upon it.  They began to quarrel as to who should
+lie on the sofa and who should lie upon a couple of chairs covered
+with rugs.  St. John forced Terence at last to lie down upon the sofa.
+
+"Don't be a fool, Terence," he said.  "You'll only get ill if you
+don't sleep."
+
+"Old fellow," he began, as Terence still refused, and stopped abruptly,
+fearing sentimentality; he found that he was on the verge of tears.
+
+He began to say what he had long been wanting to say, that he was
+sorry for Terence, that he cared for him, that he cared for Rachel. 
+Did she know how much he cared for her--had she said anything,
+asked perhaps?  He was very anxious to say this, but he refrained,
+thinking that it was a selfish question after all, and what
+was the use of bothering Terence to talk about such things? 
+He was already half asleep.  But St. John could not sleep at once. 
+If only, he thought to himself, as he lay in the darkness,
+something would happen--if only this strain would come to an end. 
+He did not mind what happened, so long as the succession of these
+hard and dreary days was broken; he did not mind if she died. 
+He felt himself disloyal in not minding it, but it seemed to him that
+he had no feelings left.
+
+All night long there was no call or movement, except the opening
+and shutting of the bedroom door once.  By degrees the light
+returned into the untidy room.  At six the servants began to move;
+at seven they crept downstairs into the kitchen; and half an hour
+later the day began again.
+
+Nevertheless it was not the same as the days that had gone before,
+although it would have been hard to say in what the difference consisted. 
+Perhaps it was that they seemed to be waiting for something. 
+There were certainly fewer things to be done than usual.  People drifted
+through the drawing-room--Mr. Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury. 
+They spoke very apologetically in low tones, refusing to sit down,
+but remaining for a considerable time standing up, although the only
+thing they had to say was, "Is there anything we can do?" and there
+was nothing they could do.
+
+Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how Helen had said
+that whenever anything happened to you this was how people behaved. 
+Was she right, or was she wrong?  He was too little interested
+to frame an opinion of his own.  He put things away in his mind,
+as if one of these days he would think about them, but not now. 
+The mist of unreality had deepened and deepened until it had
+produced a feeling of numbness all over his body.  Was it his body? 
+Were those really his own hands?
+
+This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossible
+to sit alone in his room.  He was very uncomfortable downstairs,
+and, as he did not know what was going on, constantly in the way;
+but he would not leave the drawing-room. Too restless to read,
+and having nothing to do, he began to pace up and down reciting poetry
+in an undertone.  Occupied in various ways--now in undoing parcels,
+now in uncorking bottles, now in writing directions, the sound
+of Ridley's song and the beat of his pacing worked into the minds
+of Terence and St. John all the morning as a half comprehended refrain.
+
+   They wrestled up, they wrestled down,
+     They wrestled sore and still:
+   The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,
+     That night he had his will.
+
+   Like stags full spent, among the bent
+     They dropped awhile to rest--
+
+"Oh, it's intolerable!"  Hirst exclaimed, and then checked himself,
+as if it were a breach of their agreement.  Again and again Terence
+would creep half-way up the stairs in case he might be able to glean
+news of Rachel.  But the only news now was of a very fragmentary kind;
+she had drunk something; she had slept a little; she seemed quieter. 
+In the same way, Dr. Lesage confined himself to talking about details,
+save once when he volunteered the information that he had just been
+called in to ascertain, by severing a vein in the wrist, that an old
+lady of eighty-five was really dead.  She had a horror of being
+buried alive.
+
+"It is a horror," he remarked, "that we generally find in the very old,
+and seldom in the young."  They both expressed their interest in what
+he told them; it seemed to them very strange.  Another strange thing
+about the day was that the luncheon was forgotten by all of them until
+it was late in the afternoon, and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them,
+and looked strange too, because she wore a stiff print dress,
+and her sleeves were rolled up above her elbows.  She seemed
+as oblivious of her appearance, however, as if she had been called
+out of her bed by a midnight alarm of fire, and she had forgotten,
+too, her reserve and her composure; she talked to them quite
+familiarly as if she had nursed them and held them naked on her knee. 
+She assured them over and over again that it was their duty to eat.
+
+The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly than
+they expected.  Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but on seeing
+them shut it again quickly; once Helen came down to fetch something,
+but she stopped as she left the room to look at a letter addressed
+to her.  She stood for a moment turning it over, and the extraordinary
+and mournful beauty of her attitude struck Terence in the way
+things struck him now--as something to be put away in his mind
+and to be thought about afterwards.  They scarcely spoke,
+the argument between them seeming to be suspended or forgotten.
+
+Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house,
+Ridley paced up and down the terrace repeating stanzas of a long poem,
+in a subdued but suddenly sonorous voice.  Fragments of the poem
+were wafted in at the open window as he passed and repassed.
+
+   Peor and Baalim
+   Forsake their Temples dim,
+     With that twice batter'd God of Palestine
+   And mooned Astaroth--
+
+The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to both the
+young men, but they had to be borne.  As the evening drew on and the red
+light of the sunset glittered far away on the sea, the same sense
+of desperation attacked both Terence and St. John at the thought
+that the day was nearly over, and that another night was at hand. 
+The appearance of one light after another in the town beneath them
+produced in Hirst a repetition of his terrible and disgusting desire
+to break down and sob.  Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey. 
+She explained that Maria, in opening a bottle, had been so foolish
+as to cut her arm badly, but she had bound it up; it was unfortunate
+when there was so much work to be done.  Chailey herself limped
+because of the rheumatism in her feet, but it appeared to her mere
+waste of time to take any notice of the unruly flesh of servants. 
+The evening went on.  Dr. Lesage arrived unexpectedly, and stayed
+upstairs a very long time.  He came down once and drank a cup
+of coffee.
+
+"She is very ill," he said in answer to Ridley's question. 
+All the annoyance had by this time left his manner, he was grave
+and formal, but at the same time it was full of consideration,
+which had not marked it before.  He went upstairs again. 
+The three men sat together in the drawing-room. Ridley was quite
+quiet now, and his attention seemed to be thoroughly awakened. 
+Save for little half-voluntary movements and exclamations
+that were stifled at once, they waited in complete silence. 
+It seemed as if they were at last brought together face to face
+with something definite.
+
+It was nearly eleven o'clock when Dr. Lesage again appeared in the room. 
+He approached them very slowly, and did not speak at once. 
+He looked first at St. John and then at Terence, and said to Terence,
+"Mr. Hewet, I think you should go upstairs now."
+
+Terence rose immediately, leaving the others seated with Dr. Lesage
+standing motionless between them.
+
+Chailey was in the passage outside, repeating over and over again,
+"It's wicked--it's wicked."
+
+Terence paid her no attention; he heard what she was saying,
+but it conveyed no meaning to his mind.  All the way upstairs he
+kept saying to himself, "This has not happened to me.  It is not
+possible that this has happened to me."
+
+He looked curiously at his own hand on the banisters.  The stairs were
+very steep, and it seemed to take him a long time to surmount them. 
+Instead of feeling keenly, as he knew that he ought to feel,
+he felt nothing at all.  When he opened the door he saw Helen sitting
+by the bedside.  There were shaded lights on the table, and the room,
+though it seemed to be full of a great many things, was very tidy. 
+There was a faint and not unpleasant smell of disinfectants. 
+Helen rose and gave up her chair to him in silence.  As they passed
+each other their eyes met in a peculiar level glance, he wondered
+at the extraordinary clearness of his eyes, and at the deep calm
+and sadness that dwelt in them.  He sat down by the bedside,
+and a moment afterwards heard the door shut gently behind her. 
+He was alone with Rachel, and a faint reflection of the sense of relief
+that they used to feel when they were left alone possessed him. 
+He looked at her.  He expected to find some terrible change in her,
+but there was none.  She looked indeed very thin, and, as far as he
+could see, very tired, but she was the same as she had always been. 
+Moreover, she saw him and knew him.  She smiled at him and said,
+"Hullo, Terence."
+
+The curtain which had been drawn between them for so long
+vanished immediately.
+
+"Well, Rachel," he replied in his usual voice, upon which she
+opened her eyes quite widely and smiled with her familiar smile. 
+He kissed her and took her hand.
+
+"It's been wretched without you," he said.
+
+She still looked at him and smiled, but soon a slight look of fatigue
+or perplexity came into her eyes and she shut them again.
+
+"But when we're together we're perfectly happy," he said. 
+He continued to hold her hand.
+
+The light being dim, it was impossible to see any change in her face. 
+An immense feeling of peace came over Terence, so that he had no
+wish to move or to speak.  The terrible torture and unreality
+of the last days were over, and he had come out now into perfect
+certainty and peace.  His mind began to work naturally again
+and with great ease.  The longer he sat there the more profoundly
+was he conscious of the peace invading every corner of his soul. 
+Once he held his breath and listened acutely; she was still breathing;
+he went on thinking for some time; they seemed to be thinking together;
+he seemed to be Rachel as well as himself; and then he listened again;
+no, she had ceased to breathe.  So much the better--this was death. 
+It was nothing; it was to cease to breathe.  It was happiness,
+it was perfect happiness.  They had now what they had always wanted
+to have, the union which had been impossible while they lived. 
+Unconscious whether he thought the words or spoke them aloud,
+he said, "No two people have ever been so happy as we have been. 
+No one has ever loved as we have loved."
+
+It seemed to him that their complete union and happiness filled
+the room with rings eddying more and more widely.  He had no wish
+in the world left unfulfilled.  They possessed what could never
+be taken from them.
+
+He was not conscious that any one had come into the room, but later,
+moments later, or hours later perhaps, he felt an arm behind him. 
+The arms were round him.  He did not want to have arms round him,
+and the mysterious whispering voices annoyed him.  He laid Rachel's hand,
+which was now cold, upon the counterpane, and rose from his chair,
+and walked across to the window.  The windows were uncurtained,
+and showed the moon, and a long silver pathway upon the surface of
+the waves.
+
+"Why," he said, in his ordinary tone of voice, "look at the moon. 
+There's a halo round the moon.  We shall have rain to-morrow."
+
+The arms, whether they were the arms of man or of woman, were round
+him again; they were pushing him gently towards the door.  He turned
+of his own accord and walked steadily in advance of the arms,
+conscious of a little amusement at the strange way in which people
+behaved merely because some one was dead.  He would go if they
+wished it, but nothing they could do would disturb his happiness.
+
+As he saw the passage outside the room, and the table with the cups
+and the plates, it suddenly came over him that here was a world
+in which he would never see Rachel again.
+
+"Rachel!  Rachel!" he shrieked, trying to rush back to her. 
+But they prevented him, and pushed him down the passage and into
+a bedroom far from her room.  Downstairs they could hear the thud
+of his feet on the floor, as he struggled to break free; and twice
+they heard him shout, "Rachel, Rachel!"
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVI
+
+
+
+For two or three hours longer the moon poured its light through
+the empty air.  Unbroken by clouds it fell straightly, and lay
+almost like a chill white frost over the sea and the earth. 
+During these hours the silence was not broken, and the only movement
+was caused by the movement of trees and branches which stirred slightly,
+and then the shadows that lay across the white spaces of the land
+moved too.  In this profound silence one sound only was audible,
+the sound of a slight but continuous breathing which never ceased,
+although it never rose and never fell.  It continued after the birds
+had begun to flutter from branch to branch, and could be heard
+behind the first thin notes of their voices.  It continued
+all through the hours when the east whitened, and grew red,
+and a faint blue tinged the sky, but when the sun rose it ceased,
+and gave place to other sounds.
+
+The first sounds that were heard were little inarticulate cries,
+the cries, it seemed, of children or of the very poor, of people who
+were very weak or in pain.  But when the sun was above the horizon,
+the air which had been thin and pale grew every moment richer
+and warmer, and the sounds of life became bolder and more full
+of courage and authority.  By degrees the smoke began to ascend
+in wavering breaths over the houses, and these slowly thickened,
+until they were as round and straight as columns, and instead of
+striking upon pale white blinds, the sun shone upon dark windows,
+beyond which there was depth and space.
+
+The sun had been up for many hours, and the great dome of air was
+warmed through and glittering with thin gold threads of sunlight,
+before any one moved in the hotel.  White and massive it stood
+in the early light, half asleep with its blinds down.
+
+At about half-past nine Miss Allan came very slowly into the hall,
+and walked very slowly to the table where the morning papers
+were laid, but she did not put out her hand to take one; she stood
+still, thinking, with her head a little sunk upon her shoulders. 
+She looked curiously old, and from the way in which she stood,
+a little hunched together and very massive, you could see what
+she would be like when she was really old, how she would sit
+day after day in her chair looking placidly in front of her. 
+Other people began to come into the room, and to pass her, but she
+did not speak to any of them or even look at them, and at last,
+as if it were necessary to do something, she sat down in a chair,
+and looked quietly and fixedly in front of her.  She felt
+very old this morning, and useless too, as if her life had been
+a failure, as if it had been hard and laborious to no purpose. 
+She did not want to go on living, and yet she knew that she would. 
+She was so strong that she would live to be a very old woman. 
+She would probably live to be eighty, and as she was now fifty,
+that left thirty years more for her to live.  She turned her hands
+over and over in her lap and looked at them curiously; her old hands,
+that had done so much work for her.  There did not seem to be much
+point in it all; one went on, of course one went on.  . . . She
+looked up to see Mrs. Thornbury standing beside her, with lines drawn
+upon her forehead, and her lips parted as if she were about to ask
+a question.
+
+Miss Allan anticipated her.
+
+"Yes," she said.  "She died this morning, very early, about three o'clock."
+
+Mrs. Thornbury made a little exclamation, drew her lips together,
+and the tears rose in her eyes.  Through them she looked at
+the hall which was now laid with great breadths of sunlight,
+and at the careless, casual groups of people who were standing
+beside the solid arm-chairs and tables.  They looked to her unreal,
+or as people look who remain unconscious that some great explosion
+is about to take place beside them.  But there was no explosion,
+and they went on standing by the chairs and the tables.  Mrs. Thornbury
+no longer saw them, but, penetrating through them as though they
+were without substance, she saw the house, the people in the house,
+the room, the bed in the room, and the figure of the dead lying still
+in the dark beneath the sheets.  She could almost see the dead. 
+She could almost hear the voices of the mourners.
+
+"They expected it?" she asked at length.
+
+Miss Allan could only shake her head.
+
+"I know nothing," she replied, "except what Mrs. Flushing's maid
+told me.  She died early this morning."
+
+The two women looked at each other with a quiet significant gaze,
+and then, feeling oddly dazed, and seeking she did not know
+exactly what, Mrs. Thornbury went slowly upstairs and walked
+quietly along the passages, touching the wall with her fingers
+as if to guide herself.  Housemaids were passing briskly from room
+to room, but Mrs. Thornbury avoided them; she hardly saw them;
+they seemed to her to be in another world.  She did not even look
+up directly when Evelyn stopped her.  It was evident that Evelyn
+had been lately in tears, and when she looked at Mrs. Thornbury she
+began to cry again.  Together they drew into the hollow of a window,
+and stood there in silence.  Broken words formed themselves at last
+among Evelyn's sobs.  "It was wicked," she sobbed, "it was cruel--
+they were so happy."
+
+Mrs. Thornbury patted her on the shoulder.
+
+"It seems hard--very hard," she said.  She paused and looked out
+over the slope of the hill at the Ambroses' villa; the windows were
+blazing in the sun, and she thought how the soul of the dead had
+passed from those windows.  Something had passed from the world. 
+It seemed to her strangely empty.
+
+"And yet the older one grows," she continued, her eyes regaining
+more than their usual brightness, "the more certain one becomes that
+there is a reason.  How could one go on if there were no reason?"
+she asked.
+
+She asked the question of some one, but she did not ask it of Evelyn. 
+Evelyn's sobs were becoming quieter.  "There must be a reason,"
+she said.  "It can't only be an accident.  For it was an accident--
+it need never have happened."
+
+Mrs. Thornbury sighed deeply.
+
+"But we must not let ourselves think of that," she added, "and let
+us hope that they don't either.  Whatever they had done it might
+have been the same.  These terrible illnesses--"
+
+"There's no reason--I don't believe there's any reason at all!" 
+Evelyn broke out, pulling the blind down and letting it fly back
+with a little snap.
+
+"Why should these things happen?  Why should people suffer? 
+I honestly believe," she went on, lowering her voice slightly,
+"that Rachel's in Heaven, but Terence.  . . ."
+
+"What's the good of it all?" she demanded.
+
+Mrs. Thornbury shook her head slightly but made no reply,
+and pressing Evelyn's hand she went on down the passage. 
+Impelled by a strong desire to hear something, although she did
+not know exactly what there was to hear, she was making her way
+to the Flushings' room.  As she opened their door she felt that
+she had interrupted some argument between husband and wife. 
+Mrs. Flushing was sitting with her back to the light, and Mr. Flushing
+was standing near her, arguing and trying to persuade her of something.
+
+"Ah, here is Mrs. Thornbury," he began with some relief in his voice. 
+"You have heard, of course.  My wife feels that she was in some
+way responsible.  She urged poor Miss Vinrace to come on the expedition. 
+I'm sure you will agree with me that it is most unreasonable to feel that. 
+We don't even know--in fact I think it most unlikely--that she caught
+her illness there.  These diseases--Besides, she was set on going. 
+She would have gone whether you asked her or not, Alice."
+
+"Don't, Wilfrid," said Mrs. Flushing, neither moving nor taking
+her eyes off the spot on the floor upon which they rested. 
+"What's the use of talking?  What's the use--?" She ceased.
+
+"I was coming to ask you," said Mrs. Thornbury, addressing Wilfrid,
+for it was useless to speak to his wife.  "Is there anything you
+think that one could do?  Has the father arrived?  Could one go
+and see?"
+
+The strongest wish in her being at this moment was to be able to
+do something for the unhappy people--to see them--to assure them--
+to help them.  It was dreadful to be so far away from them. 
+But Mr. Flushing shook his head; he did not think that now--
+later perhaps one might be able to help.  Here Mrs. Flushing rose stiffly,
+turned her back to them, and walked to the dressing-room opposite. 
+As she walked, they could see her breast slowly rise and slowly fall. 
+But her grief was silent.  She shut the door behind her.
+
+When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists together, and began
+beating the back of a chair with them.  She was like a wounded animal. 
+She hated death; she was furious, outraged, indignant with death,
+as if it were a living creature.  She refused to relinquish her
+friends to death.  She would not submit to dark and nothingness. 
+She began to pace up and down, clenching her hands, and making
+no attempt to stop the quick tears which raced down her cheeks. 
+She sat still at last, but she did not submit.  She looked stubborn
+and strong when she had ceased to cry.
+
+
+
+In the next room, meanwhile, Wilfrid was talking to Mrs. Thornbury
+with greater freedom now that his wife was not sitting there.
+
+"That's the worst of these places," he said.  "People will behave
+as though they were in England, and they're not.  I've no doubt myself
+that Miss Vinrace caught the infection up at the villa itself. 
+She probably ran risks a dozen times a day that might have given
+her the illness.  It's absurd to say she caught it with us."
+
+If he had not been sincerely sorry for them he would have been annoyed. 
+"Pepper tells me," he continued, "that he left the house because
+he thought them so careless.  He says they never washed their
+vegetables properly.  Poor people!  It's a fearful price to pay. 
+But it's only what I've seen over and over again--people seem
+to forget that these things happen, and then they do happen,
+and they're surprised.
+
+Mrs. Thornbury agreed with him that they had been very careless,
+and that there was no reason whatever to think that she had caught
+the fever on the expedition; and after talking about other things
+for a short time, she left him and went sadly along the passage
+to her own room.  There must be some reason why such things happen,
+she thought to herself, as she shut the door.  Only at first it
+was not easy to understand what it was.  It seemed so strange--
+so unbelievable.  Why, only three weeks ago--only a fortnight ago,
+she had seen Rachel; when she shut her eyes she could almost
+see her now, the quiet, shy girl who was going to be married. 
+She thought of all that she would have missed had she died at
+Rachel's age, the children, the married life, the unimaginable
+depths and miracles that seemed to her, as she looked back,
+to have lain about her, day after day, and year after year. 
+The stunned feeling, which had been making it difficult for her
+to think, gradually gave way to a feeling of the opposite nature;
+she thought very quickly and very clearly, and, looking back over
+all her experiences, tried to fit them into a kind of order. 
+There was undoubtedly much suffering, much struggling, but, on the whole,
+surely there was a balance of happiness--surely order did prevail. 
+Nor were the deaths of young people really the saddest things in life--
+they were saved so much; they kept so much.  The dead--she called
+to mind those who had died early, accidentally--were beautiful;
+she often dreamt of the dead.  And in time Terence himself would
+come to feel--She got up and began to wander restlessly about
+the room.
+
+For an old woman of her age she was very restless, and for one of
+her clear, quick mind she was unusually perplexed.  She could not
+settle to anything, so that she was relieved when the door opened. 
+She went up to her husband, took him in her arms, and kissed him
+with unusual intensity, and then as they sat down together she began
+to pat him and question him as if he were a baby, an old, tired,
+querulous baby.  She did not tell him about Miss Vinrace's death,
+for that would only disturb him, and he was put out already. 
+She tried to discover why he was uneasy.  Politics again? 
+What were those horrid people doing?  She spent the whole morning
+in discussing politics with her husband, and by degrees she became
+deeply interested in what they were saying.  But every now and then
+what she was saying seemed to her oddly empty of meaning.
+
+At luncheon it was remarked by several people that the visitors
+at the hotel were beginning to leave; there were fewer every day. 
+There were only forty people at luncheon, instead of the sixty that
+there had been.  So old Mrs. Paley computed, gazing about her with her
+faded eyes, as she took her seat at her own table in the window. 
+Her party generally consisted of Mr. Perrott as well as Arthur
+and Susan, and to-day Evelyn was lunching with them also.
+
+She was unusually subdued.  Having noticed that her eyes were red,
+and guessing the reason, the others took pains to keep up
+an elaborate conversation between themselves.  She suffered it
+to go on for a few minutes, leaning both elbows on the table,
+and leaving her soup untouched, when she exclaimed suddenly,
+"I don't know how you feel, but I can simply think of nothing else!"
+
+The gentlemen murmured sympathetically, and looked grave.
+
+Susan replied, "Yes--isn't it perfectly awful?  When you think
+what a nice girl she was--only just engaged, and this need
+never have happened--it seems too tragic."  She looked at Arthur
+as though he might be able to help her with something more suitable.
+
+"Hard lines," said Arthur briefly.  "But it was a foolish thing
+to do--to go up that river."  He shook his head.  "They should have
+known better.  You can't expect Englishwomen to stand roughing
+it as the natives do who've been acclimatised.  I'd half a mind
+to warn them at tea that day when it was being discussed.  But it's
+no good saying these sort of things--it only puts people's backs up--
+it never makes any difference."
+
+Old Mrs. Paley, hitherto contented with her soup, here intimated,
+by raising one hand to her ear, that she wished to know what was
+being said.
+
+"You heard, Aunt Emma, that poor Miss Vinrace has died of the fever,"
+Susan informed her gently.  She could not speak of death loudly
+or even in her usual voice, so that Mrs. Paley did not catch a word. 
+Arthur came to the rescue.
+
+"Miss Vinrace is dead," he said very distinctly.
+
+Mrs. Paley merely bent a little towards him and asked, "Eh?"
+
+"Miss Vinrace is dead," he repeated.  It was only by stiffening all
+the muscles round his mouth that he could prevent himself from bursting
+into laughter, and forced himself to repeat for the third time,
+"Miss Vinrace.  . . . She's dead."
+
+Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that
+were outside her daily experience took some time to reach
+Mrs. Paley's consciousness.  A weight seemed to rest upon
+her brain, impeding, though not damaging its action.  She sat
+vague-eyed for at least a minute before she realised what Arthur meant.
+
+"Dead?" she said vaguely.  "Miss Vinrace dead?  Dear me . . . that's
+very sad.  But I don't at the moment remember which she was. 
+We seem to have made so many new acquaintances here."  She looked at
+Susan for help.  "A tall dark girl, who just missed being handsome,
+with a high colour?"
+
+"No," Susan interposed.  "She was--" then she gave it up in despair. 
+There was no use in explaining that Mrs. Paley was thinking of
+the wrong person.
+
+"She ought not to have died," Mrs. Paley continued.  "She looked
+so strong.  But people will drink the water.  I can never make out why. 
+It seems such a simple thing to tell them to put a bottle of Seltzer
+water in your bedroom.  That's all the precaution I've ever taken,
+and I've been in every part of the world, I may say--Italy a dozen
+times over.  . . . But young people always think they know better,
+and then they pay the penalty.  Poor thing--I am very sorry for her." 
+But the difficulty of peering into a dish of potatoes and helping
+herself engrossed her attention.
+
+Arthur and Susan both secretly hoped that the subject was now disposed of,
+for there seemed to them something unpleasant in this discussion. 
+But Evelyn was not ready to let it drop.  Why would people never
+talk about the things that mattered?
+
+"I don't believe you care a bit!" she said, turning savagely upon
+Mr. Perrott, who had sat all this time in silence.
+
+"I?  Oh, yes, I do," he answered awkwardly, but with obvious sincerity. 
+Evelyn's questions made him too feel uncomfortable.
+
+"It seems so inexplicable," Evelyn continued.  "Death, I mean. 
+Why should she be dead, and not you or I?  It was only a fortnight
+ago that she was here with the rest of us.  What d'you believe?"
+she demanded of mr.  Perrott.  "D'you believe that things go on,
+that she's still somewhere--or d'you think it's simply a game--
+we crumble up to nothing when we die?  I'm positive Rachel's
+not dead."
+
+Mr. Perrott would have said almost anything that Evelyn wanted him
+to say, but to assert that he believed in the immortality of the soul
+was not in his power.  He sat silent, more deeply wrinkled than usual,
+crumbling his bread.
+
+Lest Evelyn should next ask him what he believed, Arthur, after making
+a pause equivalent to a full stop, started a completely different topic.
+
+"Supposing," he said, "a man were to write and tell you that he wanted
+five pounds because he had known your grandfather, what would you do? 
+It was this way.  My grandfather--"
+
+"Invented a stove," said Evelyn.  "I know all about that. 
+We had one in the conservatory to keep the plants warm."
+
+"Didn't know I was so famous," said Arthur.  "Well," he continued,
+determined at all costs to spin his story out at length, "the old chap,
+being about the second best inventor of his day, and a capable
+lawyer too, died, as they always do, without making a will. 
+Now Fielding, his clerk, with how much justice I don't know,
+always claimed that he meant to do something for him.  The poor old boy's
+come down in the world through trying inventions on his own account,
+lives in Penge over a tobacconist's shop.  I've been to see him there. 
+The question is--must I stump up or not?  What does the abstract
+spirit of justice require, Perrott?  Remember, I didn't benefit
+under my grandfather's will, and I've no way of testing the truth
+of the story."
+
+"I don't know much about the abstract spirit of justice," said Susan,
+smiling complacently at the others, "but I'm certain of one thing--
+he'll get his five pounds!"
+
+As Mr. Perrott proceeded to deliver an opinion, and Evelyn insisted
+that he was much too stingy, like all lawyers, thinking of the letter
+and not of the spirit, while Mrs. Paley required to be kept informed
+between the courses as to what they were all saying, the luncheon
+passed with no interval of silence, and Arthur congratulated himself
+upon the tact with which the discussion had been smoothed over.
+
+As they left the room it happened that Mrs. Paley's wheeled
+chair ran into the Elliots, who were coming through the door,
+as she was going out.  Brought thus to a standstill for a moment,
+Arthur and Susan congratulated Hughling Elliot upon his convalescence,--
+he was down, cadaverous enough, for the first time,--and Mr. Perrott
+took occasion to say a few words in private to Evelyn.
+
+"Would there be any chance of seeing you this afternoon,
+about three-thirty say?  I shall be in the garden, by the fountain."
+
+The block dissolved before Evelyn answered.  But as she left them
+in the hall, she looked at him brightly and said, "Half-past three,
+did you say?  That'll suit me."
+
+She ran upstairs with the feeling of spiritual exaltation and quickened
+life which the prospect of an emotional scene always aroused in her. 
+That Mr. Perrott was again about to propose to her, she had no doubt,
+and she was aware that on this occasion she ought to be prepared
+with a definite answer, for she was going away in three days' time. 
+But she could not bring her mind to bear upon the question.  To come
+to a decision was very difficult to her, because she had a natural
+dislike of anything final and done with; she liked to go on and on--
+always on and on.  She was leaving, and, therefore, she occupied
+herself in laying her clothes out side by side upon the bed. 
+She observed that some were very shabby.  She took the photograph
+of her father and mother, and, before she laid it away in her box,
+she held it for a minute in her hand.  Rachel had looked at it. 
+Suddenly the keen feeling of some one's personality, which things that
+they have owned or handled sometimes preserves, overcame her; she felt
+Rachel in the room with her; it was as if she were on a ship at sea,
+and the life of the day was as unreal as the land in the distance. 
+But by degrees the feeling of Rachel's presence passed away,
+and she could no longer realise her, for she had scarcely known her. 
+But this momentary sensation left her depressed and fatigued. 
+What had she done with her life?  What future was there before her? 
+What was make-believe, and what was real?  Were these proposals and
+intimacies and adventures real, or was the contentment which she had
+seen on the faces of Susan and Rachel more real than anything she had
+ever felt?
+
+She made herself ready to go downstairs, absentmindedly, but her fingers
+were so well trained that they did the work of preparing her almost
+of their own accord.  When she was actually on the way downstairs,
+the blood began to circle through her body of its own accord too,
+for her mind felt very dull.
+
+Mr. Perrott was waiting for her.  Indeed, he had gone straight
+into the garden after luncheon, and had been walking up and down
+the path for more than half an hour, in a state of acute suspense.
+
+"I'm late as usual!" she exclaimed, as she caught sight of him. 
+"Well, you must forgive me; I had to pack up.  . . . My word! 
+It looks stormy!  And that's a new steamer in the bay, isn't it?"
+
+She looked at the bay, in which a steamer was just dropping anchor,
+the smoke still hanging about it, while a swift black shudder ran
+through the waves.  "One's quite forgotten what rain looks like,"
+she added.
+
+But Mr. Perrott paid no attention to the steamer or to the weather.
+
+"Miss Murgatroyd," he began with his usual formality, "I asked you
+to come here from a very selfish motive, I fear.  I do not think
+you need to be assured once more of my feelings; but, as you are
+leaving so soon, I felt that I could not let you go without asking
+you to tell me--have I any reason to hope that you will ever come
+to care for me?"
+
+He was very pale, and seemed unable to say any more.
+
+The little gush of vitality which had come into Evelyn as she
+ran downstairs had left her, and she felt herself impotent. 
+There was nothing for her to say; she felt nothing.  Now that he
+was actually asking her, in his elderly gentle words, to marry him,
+she felt less for him than she had ever felt before.
+
+"Let's sit down and talk it over," she said rather unsteadily.
+
+Mr. Perrott followed her to a curved green seat under a tree. 
+They looked at the fountain in front of them, which had long ceased
+to play.  Evelyn kept looking at the fountain instead of thinking
+of what she was saying; the fountain without any water seemed to be
+the type of her own being.
+
+"Of course I care for you," she began, rushing her words out in
+a hurry; "I should be a brute if I didn't. I think you're quite one
+of the nicest people I've ever known, and one of the finest too. 
+But I wish . . . I wish you didn't care for me in that way. 
+Are you sure you do?"  For the moment she honestly desired that he
+should say no.
+
+"Quite sure," said Mr. Perrott.
+
+"You see, I'm not as simple as most women," Evelyn continued. 
+"I think I want more.  I don't know exactly what I feel."
+
+He sat by her, watching her and refraining from speech.
+
+"I sometimes think I haven't got it in me to care very much for
+one person only.  Some one else would make you a better wife. 
+I can imagine you very happy with some one else."
+
+"If you think that there is any chance that you will come to care
+for me, I am quite content to wait," said Mr. Perrott.
+
+"Well--there's no hurry, is there?" said Evelyn.  "Suppose I thought
+it over and wrote and told you when I get back?  I'm going to Moscow;
+I'll write from Moscow."
+
+But Mr. Perrott persisted.
+
+"You cannot give me any kind of idea.  I do not ask for a date .
+. . that would be most unreasonable."  He paused, looking down
+at the gravel path.
+
+As she did not immediately answer, he went on.
+
+"I know very well that I am not--that I have not much to offer you
+either in myself or in my circumstances.  And I forget; it cannot
+seem the miracle to you that it does to me.  Until I met you I
+had gone on in my own quiet way--we are both very quiet people,
+my sister and I--quite content with my lot.  My friendship with Arthur
+was the most important thing in my life.  Now that I know you,
+all that has changed.  You seem to put such a spirit into everything. 
+Life seems to hold so many possibilities that I had never dreamt of."
+
+"That's splendid!"  Evelyn exclaimed, grasping his hand. 
+"Now you'll go back and start all kinds of things and make a great
+name in the world; and we'll go on being friends, whatever happens
+. . . we'll be great friends, won't we?"
+
+"Evelyn!" he moaned suddenly, and took her in his arms, and kissed her. 
+She did not resent it, although it made little impression on her.
+
+As she sat upright again, she said, "I never see why one shouldn't
+go on being friends--though some people do.  And friendships do make
+a difference, don't they?  They are the kind of things that matter
+in one's life?"
+
+He looked at her with a bewildered expression as if he did not really
+understand what she was saying.  With a considerable effort he
+collected himself, stood up, and said, "Now I think I have told you
+what I feel, and I will only add that I can wait as long as ever you wish."
+
+Left alone, Evelyn walked up and down the path.  What did matter than? 
+What was the meaning of it all?
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVII
+
+
+
+All that evening the clouds gathered, until they closed entirely over
+the blue of the sky.  They seemed to narrow the space between earth
+and heaven, so that there was no room for the air to move in freely;
+and the waves, too, lay flat, and yet rigid, as if they were restrained. 
+The leaves on the bushes and trees in the garden hung closely together,
+and the feeling of pressure and restraint was increased by the short
+chirping sounds which came from birds and insects.
+
+So strange were the lights and the silence that the busy hum
+of voices which usually filled the dining-room at meal times
+had distinct gaps in it, and during these silences the clatter
+of the knives upon plates became audible.  The first roll of thunder
+and the first heavy drop striking the pane caused a little stir.
+
+"It's coming!" was said simultaneously in many different languages.
+
+There was then a profound silence, as if the thunder had withdrawn
+into itself.  People had just begun to eat again, when a gust of cold
+air came through the open windows, lifting tablecloths and skirts,
+a light flashed, and was instantly followed by a clap of thunder
+right over the hotel.  The rain swished with it, and immediately
+there were all those sounds of windows being shut and doors slamming
+violently which accompany a storm.
+
+The room grew suddenly several degrees darker, for the wind
+seemed to be driving waves of darkness across the earth.  No one
+attempted to eat for a time, but sat looking out at the garden,
+with their forks in the air.  The flashes now came frequently,
+lighting up faces as if they were going to be photographed,
+surprising them in tense and unnatural expressions.  The clap
+followed close and violently upon them.  Several women half rose
+from their chairs and then sat down again, but dinner was continued
+uneasily with eyes upon the garden.  The bushes outside were
+ruffled and whitened, and the wind pressed upon them so that they
+seemed to stoop to the ground.  The waiters had to press dishes
+upon the diners' notice; and the diners had to draw the attention
+of waiters, for they were all absorbed in looking at the storm. 
+As the thunder showed no signs of withdrawing, but seemed massed
+right overhead, while the lightning aimed straight at the garden
+every time, an uneasy gloom replaced the first excitement.
+
+Finishing the meal very quickly, people congregated in the hall,
+where they felt more secure than in any other place because they could
+retreat far from the windows, and although they heard the thunder,
+they could not see anything.  A little boy was carried away sobbing
+in the arms of his mother.
+
+While the storm continued, no one seemed inclined to sit down,
+but they collected in little groups under the central skylight,
+where they stood in a yellow atmosphere, looking upwards. 
+Now and again their faces became white, as the lightning flashed,
+and finally a terrific crash came, making the panes of the skylight
+lift at the joints.
+
+"Ah!" several voices exclaimed at the same moment.
+
+"Something struck," said a man's voice.
+
+The rain rushed down.  The rain seemed now to extinguish the lightning
+and the thunder, and the hall became almost dark.
+
+After a minute or two, when nothing was heard but the rattle of water
+upon the glass, there was a perceptible slackening of the sound,
+and then the atmosphere became lighter.
+
+"It's over," said another voice.
+
+At a touch, all the electric lights were turned on, and revealed
+a crowd of people all standing, all looking with rather strained faces
+up at the skylight, but when they saw each other in the artificial
+light they turned at once and began to move away.  For some minutes
+the rain continued to rattle upon the skylight, and the thunder
+gave another shake or two; but it was evident from the clearing
+of the darkness and the light drumming of the rain upon the roof,
+that the great confused ocean of air was travelling away from them,
+and passing high over head with its clouds and its rods of fire,
+out to sea.  The building, which had seemed so small in the tumult
+of the storm, now became as square and spacious as usual.
+
+As the storm drew away, the people in the hall of the hotel sat down;
+and with a comfortable sense of relief, began to tell each other stories
+about great storms, and produced in many cases their occupations
+for the evening.  The chess-board was brought out, and Mr. Elliot,
+who wore a stock instead of a collar as a sign of convalescence, but was
+otherwise much as usual, challenged Mr. Pepper to a final contest. 
+Round them gathered a group of ladies with pieces of needlework,
+or in default of needlework, with novels, to superintend the game,
+much as if they were in charge of two small boys playing marbles. 
+Every now and then they looked at the board and made some encouraging
+remark to the gentlemen.
+
+Mrs. Paley just round the corner had her cards arranged in long ladders
+before her, with Susan sitting near to sympathise but not to correct,
+and the merchants and the miscellaneous people who had never been
+discovered to possess names were stretched in their arm-chairs
+with their newspapers on their knees.  The conversation in these
+circumstances was very gentle, fragmentary, and intermittent,
+but the room was full of the indescribable stir of life.  Every now
+and then the moth, which was now grey of wing and shiny of thorax,
+whizzed over their heads, and hit the lamps with a thud.
+
+A young woman put down her needlework and exclaimed, "Poor creature!
+it would be kinder to kill it."  But nobody seemed disposed to rouse
+himself in order to kill the moth.  They watched it dash from lamp
+to lamp, because they were comfortable, and had nothing to do.
+
+On the sofa, beside the chess-players, Mrs. Elliot was imparting
+a new stitch in knitting to Mrs. Thornbury, so that their heads
+came very near together, and were only to be distinguished
+by the old lace cap which Mrs. Thornbury wore in the evening. 
+Mrs. Elliot was an expert at knitting, and disclaimed a compliment
+to that effect with evident pride.
+
+"I suppose we're all proud of something," she said, "and I'm proud of
+my knitting.  I think things like that run in families.  We all knit well. 
+I had an uncle who knitted his own socks to the day of his death--
+and he did it better than any of his daughters, dear old gentleman. 
+Now I wonder that you, Miss Allan, who use your eyes so much,
+don't take up knitting in the evenings.  You'd find it such a relief,
+I should say--such a rest to the eyes--and the bazaars are so glad
+of things."  Her voice dropped into the smooth half-conscious tone
+of the expert knitter; the words came gently one after another. 
+"As much as I do I can always dispose of, which is a comfort, for then
+I feel that I am not wasting my time--"
+
+Miss Allan, being thus addressed, shut her novel and observed
+the others placidly for a time.  At last she said, "It is surely
+not natural to leave your wife because she happens to be in love
+with you.  But that--as far as I can make out--is what the gentleman
+in my story does."
+
+"Tut, tut, that doesn't sound good--no, that doesn't sound
+at all natural," murmured the knitters in their absorbed voices.
+
+"Still, it's the kind of book people call very clever," Miss Allan added.
+
+"_Maternity_--by Michael Jessop--I presume," Mr. Elliot put in,
+for he could never resist the temptation of talking while he
+played chess.
+
+"D'you know," said Mrs. Elliot, after a moment, "I don't think people
+_do_ write good novels now--not as good as they used to, anyhow."
+
+No one took the trouble to agree with her or to disagree with her. 
+Arthur Venning who was strolling about, sometimes looking at the game,
+sometimes reading a page of a magazine, looked at Miss Allan,
+who was half asleep, and said humorously, "A penny for your thoughts,
+Miss Allan."
+
+The others looked up.  They were glad that he had not spoken to them. 
+But Miss Allan replied without any hesitation, "I was thinking
+of my imaginary uncle.  Hasn't every one got an imaginary uncle?"
+she continued.  "I have one--a most delightful old gentleman. 
+He's always giving me things.  Sometimes it's a gold watch;
+sometimes it's a carriage and pair; sometimes it's a beautiful little
+cottage in the New Forest; sometimes it's a ticket to the place I most
+want to see."
+
+She set them all thinking vaguely of the things they wanted. 
+Mrs. Elliot knew exactly what she wanted; she wanted a child;
+and the usual little pucker deepened on her brow.
+
+"We're such lucky people," she said, looking at her husband. 
+"We really have no wants."  She was apt to say this, partly in order
+to convince herself, and partly in order to convince other people. 
+But she was prevented from wondering how far she carried conviction
+by the entrance of Mr. and Mrs. Flushing, who came through the hall
+and stopped by the chess-board. Mrs. Flushing looked wilder than ever. 
+A great strand of black hair looped down across her brow, her cheeks
+were whipped a dark blood red, and drops of rain made wet marks
+upon them.
+
+Mr. Flushing explained that they had been on the roof watching
+the storm.
+
+"It was a wonderful sight," he said.  "The lightning went right
+out over the sea, and lit up the waves and the ships far away. 
+You can't think how wonderful the mountains looked too, with the lights
+on them, and the great masses of shadow.  It's all over now."
+
+He slid down into a chair, becoming interested in the final struggle
+of the game.
+
+"And you go back to-morrow?" said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at
+Mrs. Flushing.
+
+"Yes," she replied.
+
+"And indeed one is not sorry to go back," said Mrs. Elliot,
+assuming an air of mournful anxiety, "after all this illness."
+
+"Are you afraid of dyin'?" Mrs. Flushing demanded scornfully.
+
+"I think we are all afraid of that," said Mrs. Elliot with dignity.
+
+"I suppose we're all cowards when it comes to the point,"
+said Mrs. Flushing, rubbing her cheek against the back of the chair. 
+"I'm sure I am."
+
+"Not a bit of it!" said Mr. Flushing, turning round, for Mr. Pepper
+took a very long time to consider his move.  "It's not cowardly
+to wish to live, Alice.  It's the very reverse of cowardly. 
+Personally, I'd like to go on for a hundred years--granted, of course,
+that I had the full use of my faculties.  Think of all the things that
+are bound to happen!"  "That is what I feel," Mrs. Thornbury rejoined. 
+"The changes, the improvements, the inventions--and beauty. 
+D'you know I feel sometimes that I couldn't bear to die and cease
+to see beautiful things about me?"
+
+"It would certainly be very dull to die before they have discovered
+whether there is life in Mars," Miss Allan added.
+
+"Do you really believe there's life in Mars?" asked Mrs. Flushing,
+turning to her for the first time with keen interest.  "Who tells
+you that?  Some one who knows?  D'you know a man called--?"
+
+Here Mrs. Thornbury laid down her knitting, and a look of extreme
+solicitude came into her eyes.
+
+"There is Mr. Hirst," she said quietly.
+
+St. John had just come through the swing door.  He was rather
+blown about by the wind, and his cheeks looked terribly pale,
+unshorn, and cavernous.  After taking off his coat he was going
+to pass straight through the hall and up to his room, but he could
+not ignore the presence of so many people he knew, especially as
+Mrs. Thornbury rose and went up to him, holding out her hand. 
+But the shock of the warm lamp-lit room, together with the sight
+of so many cheerful human beings sitting together at their ease,
+after the dark walk in the rain, and the long days of strain
+and horror, overcame him completely.  He looked at Mrs. Thornbury
+and could not speak.
+
+Every one was silent.  Mr. Pepper's hand stayed upon his Knight. 
+Mrs. Thornbury somehow moved him to a chair, sat herself beside him,
+and with tears in her own eyes said gently, "You have done everything
+for your friend."
+
+Her action set them all talking again as if they had never stopped,
+and Mr. Pepper finished the move with his Knight.
+
+"There was nothing to be done," said St. John.  He spoke very slowly. 
+"It seems impossible--"
+
+He drew his hand across his eyes as if some dream came between him
+and the others and prevented him from seeing where he was.
+
+"And that poor fellow," said Mrs. Thornbury, the tears falling
+again down her cheeks.
+
+"Impossible," St. John repeated.
+
+"Did he have the consolation of knowing--?" Mrs. Thornbury began
+very tentatively.
+
+But St. John made no reply.  He lay back in his chair, half-seeing
+the others, half-hearing what they said.  He was terribly tired,
+and the light and warmth, the movements of the hands, and the soft
+communicative voices soothed him; they gave him a strange sense
+of quiet and relief.  As he sat there, motionless, this feeling
+of relief became a feeling of profound happiness.  Without any
+sense of disloyalty to Terence and Rachel he ceased to think
+about either of them.  The movements and the voices seemed to draw
+together from different parts of the room, and to combine themselves
+into a pattern before his eyes; he was content to sit silently
+watching the pattern build itself up, looking at what he hardly saw.
+
+The game was really a good one, and Mr. Pepper and Mr. Elliot were
+becoming more and more set upon the struggle.  Mrs. Thornbury,
+seeing that St. John did not wish to talk, resumed her knitting.
+
+"Lightning again!"  Mrs. Flushing suddenly exclaimed.  A yellow
+light flashed across the blue window, and for a second they saw
+the green trees outside.  She strode to the door, pushed it open,
+and stood half out in the open air.
+
+But the light was only the reflection of the storm which was over. 
+The rain had ceased, the heavy clouds were blown away, and the air
+was thin and clear, although vapourish mists were being driven swiftly
+across the moon.  The sky was once more a deep and solemn blue,
+and the shape of the earth was visible at the bottom of the air,
+enormous, dark, and solid, rising into the tapering mass of the mountain,
+and pricked here and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of villas. 
+The driving air, the drone of the trees, and the flashing light
+which now and again spread a broad illumination over the earth
+filled Mrs. Flushing with exultation.  Her breasts rose and fell.
+
+"Splendid!  Splendid!" she muttered to herself.  Then she turned back
+into the hall and exclaimed in a peremptory voice, "Come outside
+and see, Wilfrid; it's wonderful."
+
+Some half-stirred; some rose; some dropped their balls of wool
+and began to stoop to look for them.
+
+"To bed--to bed," said Miss Allan.
+
+"It was the move with your Queen that gave it away, Pepper,"
+exclaimed Mr. Elliot triumphantly, sweeping the pieces together
+and standing up.  He had won the game.
+
+"What?  Pepper beaten at last?  I congratulate you!" said Arthur
+Venning, who was wheeling old Mrs. Paley to bed.
+
+All these voices sounded gratefully in St. John's ears as he lay
+half-asleep, and yet vividly conscious of everything around him. 
+Across his eyes passed a procession of objects, black and indistinct,
+the figures of people picking up their books, their cards, their balls
+of wool, their work-baskets, and passing him one after another on
+their way to bed.
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Voyage Out
+
+
+
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