The Voyage Out

Woolf, Virginia

Published: 1915
Categorie(s): Fiction, Literary
Source: http://gutenberg.org

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About Woolf:
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was an English
novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary
figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was
a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the
Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dal-
loway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the
book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum,
"a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction".

Also available on Feedbooks for Woolf:

• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• A Haunted House (1921)
• The Waves (1931)
• Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street (1923)
• Between the Acts (1941)
• The Duchess and the Jeweller (1938)
• Orlando (1928)
• The New Dress (1927)
• The Mark on the Wall (1917)

Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is

Life+70 and in the USA.

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Chapter 1
As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very nar-
row, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, law-
yers' clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typ-
ists 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 be-
coming 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, agit-
ated 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 fric-
tion 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 at-
tempted 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.

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 The embankment juts out in angles here and there, like pulpits; instead
of preachers, however, small boys occupy them, dangling string, drop-
ping 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 medi-
um 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."

4
 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 shoot-
ing 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 work-
ers driving in a straight line to their offices; there were the poor who
were unhappy and rightly malignant. Already, though there was sun-
light 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 al-
ways 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

5
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 ap-
peared 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 can-
nonballs 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 cer-
tain ships would sail for Scotland, Mrs. Ambrose did her best to find in-
formation. 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 ob-
long 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.

6
 "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 passen-
gers 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 civil-
ised people, as though they were of the nature of an approaching physic-
al discomfort—a tight shoe or a draughty window. She was already un-
naturally 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 con-
sidered 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?"

7
 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 seduct-
ive, 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 ex-
tent 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 aud-
ibly, "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 blush-
ing 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 wo-
man out of a tobacconist's, and lived in the Fens—never heard what be-
came 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.

8
 "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, al-
lowing 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 collec-
tion?—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.

9
 "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 edu-
cation of children, about the use of fog sirens in an opera—without be-
traying 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 them-
selves round her knees, and both arms to her hair. But slowly the intoxic-
ation 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

10
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 cer-
tain 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 in-
vited 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.

11
 "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 re-
flected 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, emo-
tional, and when you said something to her it would make no more last-
ing impression than the stroke of a stick upon water. There was nothing
to take hold of in girls—nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory. Did Wil-
loughby 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.

12
 "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 com-
fort—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. Un-
less 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 ex-
perience, that he would work all day; his boxes, she said, were packed
with books.

13
 "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 mo-
ment 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 de-
tects a mouse, as the draught struck at his ankles. Drawn up there, suck-
ing at his cigar, with his arms encircling his knees, he looked like the im-
age 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 de-
pends 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

14
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 prolif-
ic 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. Be-
ing 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 togeth-
er. 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 emphatic-
ally, "Damn!"

15
Chapter 2
Uncomfortable as the night, with its rocking movement, and salt smells,
may have been, and in one case undoubtedly was, for Mr. Pepper had in-
sufficient 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 reflec-
ted, "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 sus-
pected 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 Aris-
totle—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 compar-
able to her own children. "She really might be six years old," was all she

16
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 penet-
rating glances assured him that he was right last night in judging that
Helen was beautiful. Blandly he passed her the jam. She was talking non-
sense, 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 rail-
way station in Bombay, he had seen only coloured women, military wo-
men, 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

17
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 Ro-
mans, passed to England and the right method, which speedily became
the wrong method, and wound up with such a fury of denunciation dir-
ected 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 de-
termined 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 Wil-
loughby, 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 Wil-
loughby 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

18
their freedom ran through them all. The ship was making her way stead-
ily through small waves which slapped her and then fizzled like effer-
vescing 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 dis-
turbed 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 em-
ployment, 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 counter-
panes? 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.

19
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 lin-
en heaped upon a table. Mrs. Chailey handled the sheets as if she knew
each by name, character, and constitution. Some had yellow stains, oth-
ers 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 ex-
pected 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 multi-
tude of tiny photographs, representing downright workmen in their
Sunday best, and women holding white babies. But there was one por-
trait in a gilt frame, for which a nail was needed, and before she sought it

20
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. Am-
brose 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 mar-
ries, 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

21
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 capri-
cious. 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. Innu-
merable 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 pro-
gnosticated pleasant things about the course of the world. As for the con-
fidences 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 hori-
zon, 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 Eng-
land. Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small is-
land, 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

22
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 be-
hind. 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 hus-
band, 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 be-
ing 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 quar-
ters more to his liking; Willoughby at his documents, for he used a voy-
age to work of arrears of business; and Rachel—Helen, between her sen-
tences of philosophy, wondered sometimes what Rachel did do with her-
self? 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 noth-
ing. When the ship was full this apartment bore some magnificent title

23
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 be-
lieve 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 pro-
fessors or mistresses. But this system of education had one great advant-
age. 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 mu-
sic. All the energies that might have gone into languages, science, or lit-
erature, 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

24
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 ig-
norant 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 in-
teresting to one whose mind reached other stages at other times.
But lying in her chair, with one hand behind her head, the other grasp-
ing 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 re-
minds me of funerals."
"Nonsense, Rachel," Aunt Lucy replied; "don't say such foolish things,
dear. I always think it a particularly cheerful plant."

25
 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 blot-
ted 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 morn-
ing 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 inex-
plicable, 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

26
music she accepted her lot very complacently, blazing into indignation
perhaps once a fortnight, and subsiding as she subsided now. Inextric-
ably mixed in dreamy confusion, her mind seemed to enter into commu-
nion, 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 think-
ing for at least two minutes. She then smiled, turned noiselessly away
and went, lest the sleeper should waken, and there should be the awk-
wardness of speech between them.

27
Chapter 3
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 sta-
tionary hill. They had dropped anchor in the mouth of the Tagus, and in-
stead 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 pas-
sages—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."

28
 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, al-
though 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 in-
troduction, 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 med-
itated 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

29
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 up-
setting; 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 probabil-
ity never would be.

30
 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 recol-
lect Ambrose—was it a surname?—but failed. She was made slightly un-
easy by what she had heard. She knew that scholars married any
one—girls they met in farms on reading parties; or little suburban wo-
men 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:

31
 "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 pro-
fundity. "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 sauce-
pans!" said Mrs. Dalloway, looking with more interest at Helen, a prob-
able 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 re-
sponsibility. 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 con-
fess. 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 con-
demn 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.

32
 "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 envi-
able, 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 vis-
ions—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."

33
 "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, ad-
dressing 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. Dallo-
way 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:

πολλἀ τἀ δεινά, κοὐδἑν ἀν-

θρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.
τοῦτο καί πολιοῦ πέραν
πόντου χειμερίῳ νότῳ
χωρεῖ, περιβρυχίοισι
περῶν ὑπ´ οῐδμασι

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 de-
cline, 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

34
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 distin-
guished, 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 actu-
ally sick once," he corrected himself. "That was crossing the Channel. But
a choppy sea, I confess, or still worse, a swell, makes me distinctly un-
comfortable. 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 Reyn-
olds or a Romney. She made Helen and the others look coarse and slov-
enly 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

35
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 in-
to 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."

36
 "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 dis-
cussion, 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 de-
pended on one string, and stretching her limbs to the utmost end of her
berth, she merely changed her dress for a dressing-gown, with innumer-
able 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 prop-
er instrument. The scent which had intoxicated Rachel pervaded the air.
Thus established, Mrs. Dalloway began to write. A pen in her hands be-
came 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

37
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 gener-
ally supposed to matter. I'd rather have my head cut off than wear flan-
nel 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 missionar-
ies, 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 news-
papers, 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.

38
 "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 con-
ditions 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 Eng-
lish. One thinks of all we've done, and our navies, and the people in In-
dia 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 re-
mains 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.

39
 "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 exceed-
ingly pretty at dinner, and made a conquest by which she has bound her-
self 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 moth-
er 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 de-
tail of each other's faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.

40
Chapter 4
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 per-
son 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 Eng-
land 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 taper-
ing 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:

41
 "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 Eng-
lish gentleman. But his favourite reading was Huxley, Herbert Spencer,
and Henry George; while Emerson and Thomas Hardy he read for relax-
ation. 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

42
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

43
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 discus-
sion 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'syour 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 be-
came 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 fin-
ger. In three minutes she was deep in a very difficult, very classical
fugue in A, and over her face came a queer remote impersonal expres-
sion of complete absorption and anxious satisfaction. Now she stumbled;
now she faltered and had to play the same bar twice over; but an invis-
ible 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 ap-
peared 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.

44
 "What a dear little room!" she said, looking round. "Oh, Cowper's Let-
ters! 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 ex-
traordinary 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 delight-
ful things. I think young people make such a mistake about that—not let-
ting 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

45
attractive—I'm going to say it!—everything'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 with-
in 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 ab-
solutely 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 think-
ing—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.

46
 "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 Am-
broses. 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 perfunc-
tory, 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.

47
 Here Helen passed them, and seeing Rachel arm-in-arm with a com-
parative 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 advant-
age 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

48
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 occupa-
tion 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 sink-
ing 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 dis-
gust, 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 ap-
peared, 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.

49
 "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 conver-
sations of my life took place while perambulating the great court at Trin-
ity. 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 suffi-
ciently amused to answer.
"Well, how shall I reply? In one word—Unity. Unity of aim, of domin-
ion, 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 il-
lusions 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 al-
ways 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 go-
ing 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

50
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

51
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 wid-
ows in solitary lodgings!"
Rachel considered.

52
 "Are you a Liberal or are you a Conservative?" she asked.
"I call myself a Conservative for convenience sake," said Richard, smil-
ing. "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 con-
fused 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 remem-
ber, 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 Vin-
race, 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?

53
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'tknow?"
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 seek-
ing 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 sad-
ness 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.

54
Chapter 5
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, viol-
ently 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 sen-
sations 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 con-
sciousness to suppose herself a donkey on the summit of a moor in a

55
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 pil-
low, 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 appear-
ance. "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 ex-
pected 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 re-
laxing, was interfered with, and every one at table looked up and felt
something loosen within them. The strain was slackened and human

56
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 tri-
umphant 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, ter-
ribly 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.

57
 "I hear you've been very good to my wife," he said. "She's had an aw-
ful 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, ex-
cusing 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 go-
ing 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 re-
member arguing until five in the morning with Duffy—now Secretary
for India—pacing round and round those cloisters until we decided it

58
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 Let-
ters? … 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 com-
municate! 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

59
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 isol-
ation—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 pos-
sibilities, 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 con-
tinued 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 for-
ward. 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 possibil-
ities 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 uncomfort-
able, 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

60
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 gib-
bering, 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.

61
Chapter 6
"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 any-
how—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 mur-
mured 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 smal-
ler 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 empti-
ness 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

62
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 at-
tempt to listen to what Helen was saying, as Helen indulged in common-
places 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."

63
 "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 fig-
ure 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 up-
bringing she supposed that she had been kept entirely ignorant as to the
relations of men with women. With a shyness which she felt with wo-
men 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 terri-
fied 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.

64
 "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 ad-
ded 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 go-
ing 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.

65
 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 re-
strained herself and said aloud:
"One has to make experiments."
"And they were nice," said Rachel. "They were extraordinarily interest-
ing." 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, disap-
peared 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, Nav-
al 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,

66
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 Dallo-
ways, 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 under-
stand; 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

67
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 hu-
man 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 au-
thoritatively 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 pa-
pers 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. Neverthe-
less 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 in-
dustry, 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 par-
ticularly 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.

68
 "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 sugges-
ted 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 cer-
tain 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 foot-
ing, 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 af-
fection 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

69
it—Rachel a Tory hostess!—and marvelling as she left him at the aston-
ishing 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 hu-
man being.

70
Chapter 7
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 fig-
ures 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 mis-
taken 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 em-
blem 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 appear-
ance 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

71
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 per-
spective, was too much bewildered by the approach of the shore to real-
ise 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 cruci-
fixes knobbed with emeralds. When the Spaniards came down from their
drinking, a fight ensued, the two parties churning up the sand, and driv-
ing 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; wo-
men 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

72
mind of that age lacked imagination, and, merely for want of a few thou-
sand 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 cli-
mate 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 inter-
marry 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 dissatis-
faction among the English with the older countries and the enormous ac-
cumulations 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 beauti-
ful, 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.

73
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 mem-
bers; 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 ab-
surdly 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

74
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 ven-
tured 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 ex-
quisite 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 vision-
ary 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.

75
 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 din-
ner, he appeared more restless than usual. The dinner-table was set
between two long windows which were left uncurtained by Helen's or-
ders. 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. Build-
ings 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 draw-
ing 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 genu-
ine kindliness and good sense, but a certain dryness of soul, took his de-
parture. Also she could not help feeling it sad that friendships should

76
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 sup-
posed to feel.

77
Chapter 8
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 illu-
minations 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 Bern-
ard," 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 fest-
ivals, 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, in-
deed, a condescending tone towards that poor island, which was now

78
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 hu-
man 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 mat-
ters 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 wo-
men 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 preju-
diced 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.

79
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 vigor-
ous 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, ob-
served 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 tri-
angle 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 civil-
ised 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

80
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 win-
dows 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 fif-
teenth 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 post-
cards; then there are wretched little shop-girls with round bandboxes;
then there are bank clerks in tail coats; and then—any number of dress-
makers. People from South Kensington drive up in a hired fly; officials

81
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 chess-
board, so strange were their differences, so marked and so implicitly be-
lieved 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.

82
 "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 re-
proved 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 gentle-
men lounging in chairs, the couples leaning over coffee-cups, the game
of cards in the centre under profuse clusters of electric light. He was con-
gratulating 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 hum-
ming 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 prac-
tice—one's no good without the other."

83
 "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 spec-
tacles. "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 mel-
ancholy 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.

84
Chapter 9
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, stop-
ping indeed to pencil a note, when a pair of boots dropped, one after an-
other, 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 suc-
ceeded 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 War-
rington 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 ex-
treme solicitude at her own face in the glass. She turned her head from

85
side to side, tossing heavy locks now this way now that; and then with-
drew 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 her-
self 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 confid-
ences was often a sad one, and she had been known to jump into bed,
treating her hair unkindly, feeling herself overlooked by life in comparis-
on 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 feel-
ing that he is not 'quite,' though clever certainly. Beat them. Day splen-
did, 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 re-
sembled 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, promin-
ent above the sheets. Growing accustomed to the darkness, for the win-
dows were open and showed grey squares with splinters of starlight, one

86
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 pre-
sumably, 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 na-
ked 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.

87
 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, hop-
ping 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.

88
 "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 pro-
foundly 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 al-
lowed 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.

89
 Hewet proceeded to think.
"The truth of it is that one never is alone, and one never is in com-
pany," 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 poin-
ted 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."

90
 "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 usu-
ally occupied by a first confinement."
"It will need considerable organisation," said Hewet. He was now pad-
ding 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 flicker-
ing lights in empty streets marked the places where their cities were

91
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 pro-
found 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, pick-
ing 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."

92
 "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 moun-
tains." 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 Eng-
lish 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 con-
tinued, "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 spin-
ster," 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.

93
 "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 en-
quired, 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 com-
ing 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.

94
 "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 im-
mense 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, surround-
ing 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 wo-
men—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. Thorn-
bury. "I believe that there are more of us than ever now. Sir Harley Leth-
bridge was telling me only the other day how difficult it is to find boys

95
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 occupa-
tion. 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. Thorn-
bury 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 pa-
per had to say, and noticed that a cousin of hers had married a clergy-
man at Minehead—ignoring the drunken women, the golden animals of
Crete, the movements of battalions, the dinners, the reforms, the fires,

96
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. Por-
tuguese 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 ceas-
ing. 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, en-
joyed 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 wo-
man 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

97
heat, but Susan sat in her room afterwards, turning over and over the de-
lightful 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 wo-
men sought different corners where they could lie unobserved, and from
two to four it might be said without exaggeration that the hotel was in-
habited 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 re-
marking 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."

98
 Mr. Venning was a dark young man, about thirty-two years of age,
very slapdash and confident in his manner, although at this moment ob-
viously 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. Ven-
ning 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 trem-
bling 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 mak-
ing 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."

99
 "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 untidi-
ness. 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 re-
member, "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 nat-
ive 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 com-
pare 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

100
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 dread-
ful 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 allow-
ance for hip-bones?" enquired Hughling Elliot. He knew by this time ex-
actly 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.

101
Chapter 10
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 vis-
ion 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, be-
cause she had seen nothing but print for the space of two hours, now ap-
peared 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

102
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 consider-
ably, 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 in-
deed 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 wo-
men. She desired that Rachel should think, and for this reason offered
books and discouraged too entire a dependence upon Bach and Beeth-
oven and Wagner. But when Mrs. Ambrose would have suggested De-
foe, 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 re-
modelled 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 dis-
comfort 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 con-
tracting 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 mo-
ment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let it fall on the arm

103
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 pa-
per in her hand amazed Rachel.
"I don't know what to answer, or who Terence Hewet is," Helen con-
tinued, 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, in-
stead of seeming vague as ghosts, each word was astonishingly promin-
ent; 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.

104
 "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 surround-
ing 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 accep-
ted, 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 oth-
er, 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 wo-
men, 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.

105
 "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, remark-
ing 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 wo-
man rubbing the nose of one of them, while another woman was kneel-
ing 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 car-
riage 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 as-
cent 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 roy-
alist 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.

106
 "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 be-
hind her, "considering the difficulty I had getting on."
"These little donkeys stand anything, n'est-ce pas?" Mrs. Elliot ad-
dressed 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 al-
ways 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 de-
pended 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.

107
 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 sur-
veyed 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 rest-
lessly, 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 moun-
ted again it was Mr. Perrott who lifted her to her seat.

108
 "When one has laid the eggs one eats the omelette," said Hughling Elli-
ot, 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 moun-
tain was only a small tent of earth against an enormous blue back-
ground. The English fell silent; the natives who walked beside the don-
keys 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 legitim-
ate 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 mur-
mured 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 pos-
sessed 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,

109
"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.

110
 "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 discov-
ery was very welcome. The ants were pouring down a glacier of loose
earth heaped between the stones of the ruin—large brown ants with pol-
ished 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 war-
fare 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 stiff-
ness, 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."

111
 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 en-
trance, 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, per-
petually 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; Ven-
ning 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 im-
mensely, 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."

112
Chapter 11
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, nat-
ives 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 squal-
id—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 cer-
tain amount of pain beneath his ironical manner.
"I'm not a young lady," Evelyn flashed; she bit her underlip. "Just be-
cause 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 splen-
did 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

113
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 timid-
ity 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 dis-
tinctly. 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 send-
ing 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.

114
 "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 sail-
ing, 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 stick-
ing to the roots—"As if it had a kind of meaning. You've made the differ-
ence 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 draw-
ing 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.

115
 "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 de-
voted 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 con-
tinued, "what was it that you first liked me for?"
"It was a buckle you wore one night at sea," said Arthur, after due con-
sideration. "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 cot-
tage 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 ob-
served. 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 ab-
sorbed 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?"

116
 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 pro-
ceeded 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 differ-
ent, 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 won-
dering what they looked like."
His eyes became dreamy, as though he were matching things, and re-
minded 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 ut-
most tassel of it, and wondered if the insect realised his strange adven-
ture, and thought how strange it was that she should have bent that tas-
sel rather than any other of the million tassels.
"You've never told me you name," said Hewet suddenly. "Miss Some-
body 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?"

117
 "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 de-
scribe 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 cap-
able of being moved by either."
Rachel was a good deal stung by his banter, which she felt to be direc-
ted 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 confes-
sion to make. Your book—the poems of Wordsworth, which if you

118
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, look-
ing 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 biograph-
ical sketch of himself or herself," said Hirst, sitting upright. "Miss Vin-
race, 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 pi-
ano, 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 sup-
pose, 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.

119
 "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 con-
scious 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.

120
 "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 peevish-
ness 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 re-
sponsible, 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 ty-
ing 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 sec-
tions 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 op-
posite direction. He was a little flushed, and in the mood to answer hil-
ariously whatever was said to him.
"What have you been doing to that old chap's grave?" he asked, point-
ing 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

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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 al-
most 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 interpreta-
tion 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 anti-
quaries 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 ex-
posed 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 gen-
tleman in argument, was absent at the moment. He now came up hold-
ing 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

122
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 be-
coming 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 sep-
arated, bundling into carriages and driving off, without saying good-
night, or saying it only in a half-muffled way.

123
 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."

124
Chapter 12
When Susan's engagement had been approved at home, and made pub-
lic 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 celeb-
ration—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 leo-
pard 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 wed-
dings—fiddled so as to make a tortoise waltz; and his daughter, al-
though 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.

125
 "You are to take the floor with Miss Allan," Hewet continued, consult-
ing 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 descend-
ing. 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 gen-
eral excitement. Ten minutes before the clock struck nine the committee
made a tour through the ballroom. The hall, when emptied of its fur-
niture, 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 mur-
mured, 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. Mean-
while as they stood talking, the musicians were unwrapping their instru-
ments, 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 tri-
umphant 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 de-
grees the room grew perceptibly hotter. The smell of kid gloves mingled

126
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 Am-
brose 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 Octo-
ber 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 Lon-
don?" They were both breathing fast, and both a little excited, though
each was determined not to show any excitement at all.

127
 "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 an-
swer 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 in-
terrupted 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 nev-
er 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 de-
termined 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 acquire-
ments 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."

128
 Rachel looked at him but said nothing.
"About Gibbon," he continued. "D'you think you'll be able to appreci-
ate him? He's the test, of course. It's awfully difficult to tell about wo-
men," 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 un-
derstand—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 con-
scious 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 sur-
prise. "Hirst—insolent?"

129
 "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 oth-
er; 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

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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 magni-
ficently 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 kiss-
ing 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 depos-
ited 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.

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 "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, con-
scious 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 interest-
ing 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.

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 "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 re-
ceived 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 char-
acter for her, for a few minutes. Bursting out of the crowd, Helen ap-
proached 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 ex-
pansive 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

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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 brace-
lets 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 dif-
ficult 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

134
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

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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 in-
teresting 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 ex-
citement 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 inex-
perienced. 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, al-
though they generally try to hide it? There's nothing to be frightened of.

136
It's so much more beautiful than the pretences—always more interest-
ing—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 be-
cause 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 lit-
erature. 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 poin-
ted 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

137
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 win-
dow, 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 inno-
cent 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 Indi-
an maiden dancing before her Rajah. The tune marched; and Miss Allen

138
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 ob-
served, 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 champi-
onship; 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 ap-
proach. 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 in-
stinctively 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 sub-
dued 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 fest-
ive 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

139
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 ad-
vancing very nobly under the direction of the music. They felt them-
selves 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 ex-
claimed. "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."

140
 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.

141
Chapter 13
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 harmoni-
ous 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 ob-
serving 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 learn-
ing another, and sex a third, Mr. Ambrose in his study was some thou-
sand 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 occa-
sional 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.

142
 "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 them-
selves 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 Col-
eridge, 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

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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 him-
self—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 alpha-
bet, 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 re-
membered 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 coun-
tries and skies into their embrace, she walked without seeing. The night

144
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 occa-
sional 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 her-
self 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 dis-
tant 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

145
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 know-
ledge now opening before her that she ceased to read, and a breeze turn-
ing the page, the covers of Gibbon gently ruffled and closed together.
She then rose again and walked on. Slowly her mind became less con-
fused 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 per-
sistent, 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

146
butterfly flew away, she rose, and with her two books beneath her arm
returned home again, much as a soldier prepared for battle.

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Chapter 14
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 dissip-
ation. 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 let-
ters 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 comparis-
on, 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 conver-
sation—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

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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 alto-
gether 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, be-
came an extravagance and not the just and wonderful holiday due to her
after fifteen years of punctual lecturing and correcting essays upon Eng-
lish literature. Emily, her sister, who was a teacher also, wrote: "We
ought to be prepared, though I have no doubt Hubert will be more reas-
onable 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 exceed-
ingly 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 notgood, I

149
think privately, but do not like to damp Ellen's enthusiasm. Lloyd Ge-
orge 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 Eng-
lish 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, rest-
lessness, 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

150
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 consid-
erable 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 in-
terest 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 Pa-
tience 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

151
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 be-
fore, a tall handsome man, with a head resembling the head of an intel-
lectual 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 of-
ten 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 cel-
lars. 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 inter-
rupted 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 lady-
ship takes a bath?"

152
 "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 acknow-
ledging 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 cer-
tain somnolent merchants, government officials, and men of independ-
ent means who were lying back in their chairs, chatting, smoking, rumin-
ating 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 ap-
pearance 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

153
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 nod-
ding 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 forbid-
ding 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 usu-
ally 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,

154
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 temp-
ted 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

155
chairs being moved inside. He had almost decided to go back, when sud-
denly 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 amaz-
ingly—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. Ap-
parently Rachel tried to pull Helen out on to the terrace, and helen res-
isted. There was a certain amount of scuffling, entreating, resisting, and

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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 re-
lief 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 ro-
mance 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 innu-
merable words, lovely words about innumerable things, running down-
hill 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

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much under the influence of the dark and the fresh air to consider care-
fully 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 un-
pleasant 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 un-
happy 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 morn-
ing 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 contin-
ued. "He seemed so lonely, especially as Arthur had gone off with Susan,

158
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 clev-
er. 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 in-
tent, 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

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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 disap-
pointing. 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, be-
cause for the moment he could not remember what it was that they had

160
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 con-
scious 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 ex-
plain. "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 under-
standing," 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.

161
 "Of course I don't," she protested. "Haven't I told you? I want friend-
ship; 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 disap-
pointment, 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 danger-
ous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an in-
stinct 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 cross-
ing from one room to another.

162
Chapter 15
Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually meet-
ing 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 be-
cause 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 un-
conscious 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 gen-
eral seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness.
The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this stage of com-
munity, 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 exclama-
tions, "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 ob-
scured 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

163
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 signific-
antly, 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 educa-
tion 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, re-
member—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 re-
fused 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 beg-
gars 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 Hugh-
ling 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 pat-
tering 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

164
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 experi-
ence. 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 encyclo-
paedic 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 know-
ing something of a good many people, by name at least, and Helen re-
membered 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 an-
imals 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. Flush-
ing was helping herself to cherry jam. She had a peculiar jerking move-
ment 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 fea-
tures, together with the deep red of lips and cheeks, pointed to many
generations of well-trained and well-nourished ancestors behind her.

165
 "Nothin' that's more than twenty years old interests me," she contin-
ued. "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 dig-
ging 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 ex-
cite 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 de-
manded, 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.

166
 "I always contradict my husband when he says that," said Mrs. Thorn-
bury 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 intens-
ity 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!"

167
 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 af-
ternoon to read it, and for some reason the glory which she had per-
ceived 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 deman-
ded, "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 occu-
pied 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 be-
cause 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

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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 oth-
ers 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 per-
secute 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, affec-
tion—all the things that really matter. Oh, you Christians! You're the
most conceited, patronising, hypocritical set of old humbugs in the king-
dom! Of course," he continued, "I'm the first to allow your country gen-
tlemen great merits. For one thing, they're probably quite frank about
their passions, which we are not. My father, who is a clergyman in Nor-
folk, 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 complex-
ion, 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, ex-
claiming 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 reputa-
tion 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

169
Helen herself always pitied poor Mr. Parry, who was understood to be
shut up downstairs with cases full of gems, while his wife enjoyed her-
self 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 magnifi-
cent 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 peri-
od 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 in-
clined for a walk?" he said. "There's a magnificent walk, up behind the

170
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 every-
body!" he added. "At Cambridge there are people to talk to."
"At Cambridge there are people to talk to," Helen echoed him, rhyth-
mically 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 op-
posite 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 elev-
ate their minds to a very high tower from which the human race ap-
peared to them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.
"And the future?" she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men be-
coming 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:

171
 "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 bit-
ter. 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 ap-
pearance, 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 excep-
tionally 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 im-
pulse 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 col-
oured 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.

172
 "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 inex-
plicable 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 dif-
ficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses into the dia-
logue 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 po-
sition 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 atti-
tude 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

173
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 me-
dieval 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 gar-
rulous. 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.

174
 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 com-
posed 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 even-
ing, 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.

175
Chapter 16
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 Eng-
land; the villages and the hills there having names, and the farthest hori-
zon 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 cit-
ies were founded, and the races of men changed from dark savages to
white civilised men, and back to dark savages again. Perhaps their Eng-
lish 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 hu-
man being had ever broken that water with boat or with body. Obeying
some impulse, she determined to mar that eternity of peace, and threw

176
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 over-
come 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 expres-
sion, and rubbed her fingers in the earth—"scratching on the matchbox.
Most of the time when I was reading Gibbon this afternoon I was hor-
ribly, oh infernally, damnably bored!" She gave a shake of laughter, look-
ing at Hewet, who laughed too.

177
 "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 ugli-
ness—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 re-
lationships 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 soli-
citor 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 pa-
per 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

178
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 Cam-
bridge 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.

179
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 ser-
vants 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 some-
where! 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 com-
fortable. 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 Rich-
mond, 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.

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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 be-
neath 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 au-
tumn 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 chol-
era 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

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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 unrep-
resented 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 ap-
pear 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 de-
scribe 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 to-
wards 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

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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 sub-
stance 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 charwo-
men 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 innu-
merable 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

183
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 energetic-
ally, 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 any-
body. 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 an-
other; 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

184
world worth doing. These other people," he indicated the hotel, "are al-
ways wanting something they can't get. But there's an extraordinary sat-
isfaction 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 be-
lieve 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 ob-
sessed 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 be-
comes older and older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers. Can't
you imagine the wretched man, after some splendid evening of debauch-
ery, 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 sui-
cide 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 her-
ring 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

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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 re-
spectability. 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 condi-
tions, 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 judg-
ments. 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 im-
portant 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.

186
 "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 Ter-
ence 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 any-
how. 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 fig-
ures… . 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 fig-
ures 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

187
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?

188
Chapter 17
It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came from Eng-
land 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 Elli-
ots, 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 estab-
lished 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 back-
ground 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 wo-
man 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 si-
lent. 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 com-
ment upon the people they saw, and the secret between them made itself

189
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 propor-
tion 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 ar-
gue, 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 fluctuat-
ing, 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 per-
fectly 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 cry-
ing Stop! she would have refrained, thinking it best that things should

190
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 con-
siders 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 col-
our 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 in-
clination. 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 Ter-
ence sat with people moving round him. Every one who stayed in the
hotel had a peculiar romance and interest about them. They were not or-
dinary 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 depres-
sion. 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 continu-
ity of sensation. Although these moods were directly or indirectly caused
by the presence of Terence or the thought of him, she never said to

191
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 Ib-
sen, 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 unsatis-
fied, though ignorant that the other shared the feeling.
If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even more com-
pletely 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 physic-
al 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

192
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 literat-
ure 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 sun-
shine, 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 expres-
sion, 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 con-
sciously 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.

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 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 pen-
ance 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 flour-
ishing, some religious body had taken the place in hand, and it was now
fitted out with a number of glazed yellow benches, claret-coloured foot-
stools; 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 issu-
ing 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, ap-
proving 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 de-
vour 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

194
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 ambi-
tious, some stupid, some wild and experimental, some in love, and oth-
ers long past any feeling except a feeling of comfort, they did very differ-
ent 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 rep-
resenting goodness, in the same way, no doubt, as one of those industri-
ous 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 famili-
ar 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 con-
ductor, 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

195
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 per-
petually going on, great buildings, filled with innumerable men and wo-
men, not seeing clearly, who finally gave up the effort to see, and re-
lapsed tamely into praise and acquiescence, half-shutting their eyes and
pursing up their lips. The thought had the same sort of physical discom-
fort 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 care-
fully she came to the conclusion that the hospital nurse was only slav-
ishly 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 Chris-
tianity. 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 agree-
able 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

196
credit for such qualities, and examined him as though he were an epi-
tome 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 ac-
cidental 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 altern-
ately 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 in-
tently 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

197
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 Lon-
don 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 ex-
horted 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 neces-
sity 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 in-
struction, 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 wa-
ter, detached, alone, separate from others, falling from the cloud and en-
tering 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 con-
figuration of the globe and the lives of millions of sea creatures, and fi-
nally the lives of the men and women who seek their living upon the

198
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 to-
wards 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 lunch-
eon. 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 Elli-
ots. 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.

199
 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 de-
lightful 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 famili-
ar 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

200
herself of one of them, and, with the vanity of an artist, Mrs. Flushing de-
manded 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 sugges-
ted 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 rest-
less, looked about her.
"Open the wardrobe," said Mrs. Flushing after a pause, speaking indis-
tinctly 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 curi-
ous 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 can-
vas. My husband's done it. One would lie out under the trees at night

201
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 pur-
suits 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 doubt-
less 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 reckon-
ing 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 mid-
day 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."

202
 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 indul-
gence, making up by the suavity and fluency of his speech for the ab-
ruptness 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 inat-
tentive, and Hirst was finding him also very cross and disagreeable.
They had touched upon all the usual topics—upon politics and literat-
ure, gossip and Christianity. They had quarrelled over the service, which

203
was every bit as fine as Sappho, according to Hewet; so that Hirst's pa-
ganism 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 liter-
ature, 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 collec-
tion of Europeans were now engaged in eating, in some cases in gnaw-
ing, the stringy foreign fowls. Hewet looked, and grew more out of tem-
per 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 re-
turned to his plate. "That's the worst of friendships with young wo-
men—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 separ-
ated, 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

204
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 col-
our, 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 mak-
ing it unnecessary for them to speak again. Hewet began to wonder
whether he might not cross over to the Flushings' corner, when Hirst ap-
peared 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.

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Chapter 18
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 land-
scape 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 to-
wards 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 fest-
ive peasants, or turkeys swelling unevenly like a bundle of air balls be-
neath 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 supposi-
tion—her sudden interest in Hirst's writing, her way of quoting his opin-
ions 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 in-
terested and attracted, more and more interested and attracted, until he

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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 de-
cided that he did not want to marry any one. Partly because he was irrit-
ated by Rachel the idea of marriage irritated him. It immediately sugges-
ted 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 ad-
vantage. All the most individual and humane of his friends were bachel-
ors 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, be-
cause he had one day let slip that a brother of his had died of pneumo-
nia. The sight amused him, but was not pleasant if you substituted Ter-
ence 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 aero-
planes. They would settle down. He then looked at the couples who had

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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 con-
flict 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 ar-
gument, 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 char-
acter 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

208
of politics. Nevertheless she was intelligent certainly, and honest too.
Her temper was uncertain—that he had noticed—and she was not do-
mestic, 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 to-
gether. 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.

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Chapter 19
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 com-
manded 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 rest-
lessness 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

210
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 in-
side 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 oc-
curred 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 detest-
able, 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 Sin-
clair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me to give an an-
swer, 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 disgust-
ing 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 be-
haved 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."

211
 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 Ter-
ence 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 think-
ing 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 say-
ing 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

212
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 any-
thing 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 con-
cealed behind the face. She put her hand on Rachel's knee.

213
 "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 oth-
er 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 be-
half of unfortunate women which Evelyn was once more beginning to
describe. She looked again from one to the other.

214
 "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 seiz-
ing 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.

215
 "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 pas-
sage, 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 fly-
ing, 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 vin-
dictive 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 hat-
pins 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

216
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 an-
other 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 ex-
pression 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 pre-
served 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 im-
plement. "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.

217
 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 exception-
ally 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 cer-
tain 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 ap-
pearance, 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 ad-
dressing 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 distin-
guished 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 ex-
perienced 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

218
snowed her under for years. An uncomfortable sensation kept Rachel si-
lent; 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 ob-
served 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 ser-
ious 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

219
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 curi-
ous 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. Pa-
ley 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 culde 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 in-
tolerable!" Looking out of the window with eyes that would have seen

220
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 dis-
played in its true proportions. She disliked the look of it im-
mensely—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 be-
neath 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 worth-
less 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 Ter-
ence 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 ow-
ing 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

221
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, up-
right 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 diffi-
culties 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 expedi-
tion 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 re-
turned 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 pos-
sessed the great advantage that it was quite unnecessary for her to talk.
Over there Susan and Arthur were explaining to Mrs. Paley that an ex-
pedition had been proposed; and Mrs. Paley having grasped the fact,
gave the advice of an old traveller that they should take nice canned

222
vegetables, fur cloaks, and insect powder. She leant over to Mrs. Flush-
ing and whispered something which from the twinkle in her eyes prob-
ably 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, ig-
noring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. She ap-
peared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the
kind blue eyes now shallow and watery, the bloom of the cheeks con-
gealed to a network of dry red canals.

223
 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 acci-
dents of talk, and partly because they saw some one approaching. Helen
could not see who it was, but keeping her eyes fixed upon Rachel ob-
served 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 mo-
ment. Then she rose, for Mrs. Flushing had seen Hewet too, and was de-
manding 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 up-
permost in her mind was now curiously perverse; if she went on this ex-
pedition, 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 be-
came 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.

224
 "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 si-
lenced 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 inanit-
ies 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 al-
lowed, a moment's make-believe, and then again the profound and reas-
onless 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.

225
Chapter 20
When considered in detail by Mr. Flushing and Mrs. Ambrose the exped-
ition 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 cen-
tury, 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 un-
like 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 pic-
nicked. Susan and Arthur had seen it as they kissed each other, and Ter-
ence 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

226
only by hunters, explorers, or merchants, marching or sailing, but mak-
ing 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, Ter-
ence, 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

227
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 pa-
per 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

228
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 be-
ing 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 si-
lence, 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 Wil-
frid 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

229
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 be-
hind 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 al-
lowed 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 atmo-
sphere, 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 para-
sol, 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 him-
self 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

230
Helen, and persuading her to leave her seat. Rachel joined him too in ad-
vising 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 yel-
low 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

231
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 uncon-
sciously 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 si-
lence; they heard the swish of the trees and some beast croaking in a re-
mote 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.

232
 "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 ex-
claimed 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.

233
 "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 swirl-
ing past in front of them between the trunks of the trees until Mr. Flush-
ing 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 expedi-
tion, 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 lay-
ers. 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 ad-
dressed 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.

234
 "You must always remember, Alice," he said, "that your upbringing
was very unnatural—unusual, I should say. They had no mother," he ex-
plained, dropping something of the formality of his tone; "and a fath-
er—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 ex-
cellent plan, I daresay, if you've thirteen children!"
"And all this going on in the heart of England, in the nineteenth cen-
tury!" 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 un-
marked, 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 pro-
tecting Terence from the approach of the others.
"Yes," said Mr. Flushing. "And in my opinion," he continued, "the ab-
sence of population to which Hirst objects is precisely the significant
touch. You must admit, Hirst, that a little Italian town even would vul-
garise 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 si-
lent. "I own it makes us seem pretty small—us, not them." He nodded his

235
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 reas-
oning 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 coun-
try, 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 move-
ment. 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 oth-
ers 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.

236
Chapter 21
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 clear-
ing, 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 inter-
ruptions 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 inter-
fere 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 continu-
ous 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 coun-
try 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.

237
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 re-
strained, 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 to-
gether 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 any-
thing 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.

238
 "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 gentle-
ness 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 mo-
tion 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 ex-
claimed with genuine excitement. "What an ass I was not to bring my
Kodak!"
Soon afterwards the launch came gradually to a standstill, and the cap-
tain explained to Mr. Flushing that it would be pleasant for the passen-
gers 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 sail-
ors, 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 ad-
vance 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

239
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 go-
ing 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 over-
come 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 deman-
ded, "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 mar-
riage 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 bear-
ing too far to the left. Improving their course, he continued, "Yes, mar-
riage." 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.

240
 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 pro-
portions. 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 to-
gether, 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.

241
 "We sat upon the ground," she confirmed him. The recollection of sit-
ting upon the ground, such as it was, seemed to unite them again, and
they walked on in silence, their minds sometimes working with diffi-
culty 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 re-
freshing 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.

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 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 hap-
piness 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 hab-
itation, 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 no-
tice of the strangers, except that their hands paused for a moment and
their long narrow eyes slid round and fixed upon them with the motion-
less 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, curi-
ously 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

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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 stray-
ing 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 wo-
men 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 as-
sure each other once more that they were in love, were happy, were con-
tent; 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 dis-
aster. 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 fig-
ures 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 pro-
tect 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

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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 an-
gular 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 pro-
ceeded 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 blot-
ted 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 dis-
tinguish 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,

245
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 de-
tects 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 her-
self 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 puzz-
ling—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

246
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 al-
lowed 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 bor-
der 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, tak-
ing 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 pro-
fusely, and left them with scarcely any feeling of life, except that they
were standing there together in the darkness.

247
Chapter 22
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 it-
self 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 embar-
rassed, 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 prefer-
able 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.

248
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 import-
ance, 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 sen-
tences, 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 Beeth-
oven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined staircase, en-
ergetically 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 abil-
ity 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 oppor-
tunity 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 undis-
turbed; 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 Amer-
ica, 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

249
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 com-
pared with sounds!" she continued. "Think of novels and plays and his-
tories—" 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 be-
ing 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 re-
member, 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 pic-
nic, 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

250
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 win-
dow—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 compan-
ionship 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 be-
cause 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 chil-
dren 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 Is-
lands—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.

251
 "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 practic-
al; 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 pro-
duce 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 pit-
ied 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 be-
stowed 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."

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 "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 Ter-
ence 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 go-
ing 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 liter-
ary 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

253
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 ab-
surd 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 de-
licious 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 him-
self 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 para-
site 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 any-
thing. 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."

254
 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 wa-
ters. 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 rela-
tions, so that very soon Terence knew not only what Rachel's aunts
might be expected to say upon every occasion, but also how their bed-
rooms 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 oth-
er 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.

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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 be-
lieved. She should look for vanity—for vanity was a common qual-
ity—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 acquaint-
ances, 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

256
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 glar-
ing 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 to-
gether 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 con-
cluded, 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 Lon-
don—my God! how pleasant it all is!"
"And we're certain to have it too," she said. "It isn't as if we were ex-
pecting 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

257
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 crawl-
ing 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 sen-
timentality itself, she left her position by his side and knelt upon the win-
dow 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 be-
hind 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 under-
stand—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 be-
ing—the sea, the sky. She turned again the looked at the distant blue,

258
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 mar-
ried 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 oth-
er. 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 to-
gether 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.

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Chapter 23
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 natur-
ally. 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 intens-
ity 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 prac-
tical matters. She had written a great many letters, and had obtained
Willoughby's consent. She had dwelt so often upon Mr. Hewet's pro-
spects, 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 to-
wards 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 argu-
ment 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

260
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 exuber-
ance 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 driv-
en to it… . Evelyn M.," he groaned.
He sat up, and began to explain with mock solemnity how the detest-
able 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 moth-
er, 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.

261
 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 noth-
ing 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 Gib-
bon; 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 seeth-
ing 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 re-
volver. He writes to Evelyn daily that he's thinking of committing sui-
cide. 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 hor-
rible 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 dis-
agreeable. 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.

262
 "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 en-
quired 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 pro-
pose 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 gen-
eral nature. Who were they, after all—what authority had they—what
power against the mass of superstition and ignorance? It was the Eng-
lish, of course; there must be something wrong in the English blood. Dir-
ectly you met an English person, of the middle classes, you were con-
scious 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

263
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 ex-
plained, 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 exaggerat-
ing 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 varie-
gated 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 blood-
hound. 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

264
prostitute as simply as any other word. The talk now turned upon literat-
ure 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 embroid-
ery, and began again to dissuade Terence from walking down to the
hotel in this heat. But the more she dissuaded, the more he was determ-
ined 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 re-
marked 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 in-
creased 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

265
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 char-
acter, 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, happi-
ness, 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 un-
happy 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

266
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.

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Chapter 24
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. So-
metimes 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 stand-
ing, 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 fascin-
ated by the certainty and the grace of their movements, and by the inev-
itable 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

268
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 humor-
ously, 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 cer-
tainty, 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 dis-
tinctly, but although the figures passing through the hall became vaguer
and vaguer, she believed that they all knew exactly where they were go-
ing, and the sense of their certainty filled her with comfort. For the mo-
ment 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

269
small, and his nose curved like a switchback with a knob at the end. Nat-
urally, 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 independ-
ence, this calm, and this certainty until she fell in love with him, and per-
haps this too was love. She wanted nothing else.
For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little dis-
tance 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 expres-
sion than usual.
"Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it," she said. "That is, omit-
ting 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.

270
 "I must confess," she continued, "that if I had known how many clas-
sics there are in English literature, and how verbose the best of them con-
trive 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 ad-
ded. "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 tourna-
ment. "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 kind-
ness 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. Thorn-
bury had overheard the last few words about not liking ginger. "It's asso-
ciated 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

271
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 mysteri-
ously), "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 re-
marked, once more leading the way with Rachel to the garden. "I spent
six weeks on my honeymoon in having typhoid at Venice," she contin-
ued. "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 con-
tinued, "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

272
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 life-
time," 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 togeth-
er, and they looked at the women they were going to marry and com-
pared 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 rac-
quets 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

273
little shape in them to be beautiful, but they had clear eyes and an ap-
pearance 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 usu-
al, 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 tor-
rents 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 seri-
ously 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 ad-
dressing 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 Russi-
an government, and it's bound to come."

274
 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 ex-
ists. 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 with-
drew 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 fath-
er—there would be a great deal to tell him, and (she looked sympathetic-
ally at Terence) he would be so happy, she felt sure. Years ago, she con-
tinued, 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

275
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 any-
thing 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 nev-
er 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 ex-
ample, 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 con-
tented, 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

276
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 ex-
ception 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 con-
fident 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 un-
dertone, 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 pro-
tested. 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 bot-
any 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.

277
 "It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to ima-
gine that you're twenty-five," she said, looking from one to the other
with her smooth, bright glance. "It must be very wonderful, very won-
derful indeed." She stood talking to them at the gate for a long time; she
seemed reluctant that they should go.

278
Chapter 25
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 re-
mained 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 with-
stand 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 under-
stand 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

279
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 de-
cided 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 usu-
al, 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.

280
 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 pain-
fully white, and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat. Turn-
ing 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 stand-
ing 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 ordin-
ary 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 in-
tolerably hot, and as he seemed shy and obsequious she scarcely

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troubled to answer him, although she understood that he was a doctor.
At another point the door opened and Terence came in very gently, smil-
ing 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 commu-
nicate 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 ap-
peared 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

282
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, proceed-
ing 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."

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 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 wo-
men became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time, standing in the win-
dow 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, Ter-
ence 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 intoler-
able occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel's illness, and to dis-
cuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this subject was ex-
hausted, 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

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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 lunch-
eon," 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 at-
tack that would pass off in a day or two; it was a real illness that re-
quired a good deal of organisation, and engrossed the attention of at
least five people, but there was no reason to be anxious. Instead of last-
ing five days it was going to last ten days. Rodriguez was understood to
say that there were well-known varieties of this illness. Rodriguez ap-
peared 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 unwill-
ing 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 embroid-
ery than in anything else. "In this climate you must expect a high temper-
ature. 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

285
that he was optimistic, and that Terence respected the medical profession
from hearsay, made him less critical than he would have been had he en-
countered the doctor in any other capacity. Unconsciously he took
Rodriguez' side against Helen, who seemed to have taken an unreason-
able 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 diffi-
cult 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 care-
fully, and they found it unexpectedly difficult to do the simple but prac-
tical 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 real-
ity 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,

286
were arguing against each other. But she was too hurried and pre-occu-
pied 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.

287
 "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.

288
 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 van-
ished as he looked at him and saw his insignificance, his dirty appear-
ance, 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

289
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 keep-
ing 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 re-
peated. 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 rub-
bing his eyes.
"Don't be a damned fool!" Terence exclaimed. "Of course there's anoth-
er 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 scorch-
ing 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.

290
 When he went back into the drawing-room he found that Mrs. Flush-
ing was there, standing very erect in the middle of the room, having ar-
rived, 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 expedi-
tion. 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, be-
cause 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 im-
portance 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 unin-
telligibly like the rest. The sights were all concerned in some plot, some

291
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 dis-
tance 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

292
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 argu-
ment 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 com-
plete 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 es-
cape, 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 en-
circle 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.

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 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 pre-
paration 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 seri-
ously 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 win-
dow 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 unfa-
miliar creaking and grating sounds which show that the earth is still hot.
All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and full of hostility and

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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 un-
derneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies, quies-
cent, 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 suf-
fering. He looked at the scattered lights in the town beneath, and
thought of Arthur and Susan, or Evelyn and Perrott venturing out un-
wittingly, 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 in-
complete, 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 uncultiv-
ated 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

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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 ab-
surd 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 at-
tempt 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-transpar-
ent. 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 be-
came a bird and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever
reached the person she was talking to. There were immense intervals or

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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 gi-
gantic 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 dis-
turb 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 an-
swers. To Terence's demand, "She seems to be better?" he replied, look-
ing 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.

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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 per-
haps? 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 Ter-
ence 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, al-
though 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

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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 unreal-
ity had deepened and deepened until it had produced a feeling of numb-
ness 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. Occu-
pied 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

299
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 waf-
ted 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 appear-
ance 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 un-
expectedly, and stayed upstairs a very long time. He came down once
and drank a cup of coffee.

300
 "She is very ill," he said in answer to Ridley's question. All the annoy-
ance 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 be-
fore. He went upstairs again. The three men sat together in the drawing-
room. Ridley was quite quiet now, and his attention seemed to be thor-
oughly awakened. Save for little half-voluntary movements and exclam-
ations 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. In-
stead 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.

301
 "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 contin-
ued 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 bet-
ter—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 al-
ways 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

302
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 be-
haved 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 pre-
vented 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!"

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Chapter 26
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 si-
lence was not broken, and the only movement was caused by the move-
ment 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,

304
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 la-
borious 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 uncon-
scious 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 pas-
sages, touching the wall with her fingers as if to guide herself. House-
maids were passing briskly from room to room, but Mrs. Thornbury
avoided them; she hardly saw them; they seemed to her to be in another

305
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 hol-
low of a window, and stood there in silence. Broken words formed them-
selves 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 hon-
estly 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 press-
ing 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

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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 ill-
ness 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. Flush-
ing 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 an-
imal. 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 ab-
surd to say she caught it with us."
If he had not been sincerely sorry for them he would have been an-
noyed. "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 hap-
pen, and then they do happen, and they're surprised."

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 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 diffi-
cult 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 in-
tensity, 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

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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 un-
touched, 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 in-
to laughter, and forced himself to repeat for the third time, "Miss Vin-
race… . She's dead."
Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that were out-
side her daily experience took some time to reach Mrs. Paley's conscious-
ness. 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

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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 pen-
alty. 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 dis-
posed of, for there seemed to them something unpleasant in this discus-
sion. 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, crum-
bling his bread.
Lest Evelyn should next ask him what he believed, Arthur, after mak-
ing 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, de-
termined at all costs to spin his story out at length, "the old chap, being

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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 con-
gratulated Hughling Elliot upon his convalescence,—he was down, ca-
daverous 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 de-
cision was very difficult to her, because she had a natural dislike of any-
thing 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

311
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 ad-
ventures 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 fin-
gers 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.

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 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 mo-
ment 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 per-
son 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?"

313
 "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?

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Chapter 27
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 feel-
ing 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 ac-
company 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 ex-
pressions. The clap followed close and violently upon them. Several wo-
men 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

315
no signs of withdrawing, but seemed massed right overhead, while the
lightning aimed straight at the garden every time, an uneasy gloom re-
placed 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 light-
ning 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 travel-
ling 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

316
looked at the board and made some encouraging remark to the
gentlemen.
Mrs. Paley just round the corner had her cards arranged in long lad-
ders 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 knit-
ting, 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 won-
der that you, Miss Allan, who use your eyes so much, don't take up knit-
ting 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 natur-
al," 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.

317
 "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. Ar-
thur 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 contin-
ued. "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; some-
times it's a ticket to the place I most want to see."
She set them all thinking vaguely of the things they wanted. Mrs. Elli-
ot 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 pre-
vented 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.

318
 "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 inven-
tions—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, turn-
ing 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 so-
licitude 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, to-
gether 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.

319
 "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 pro-
found 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 com-
bine themselves into a pattern before his eyes; he was content to sit si-
lently 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," ex-
claimed Mr. Elliot triumphantly, sweeping the pieces together and stand-
ing up. He had won the game.

320
 "What? Pepper beaten at last? I congratulate you!" said Arthur Ven-
ning, 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.

321
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322
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his pitiful life, to a mountain retreat in Colorado.

323
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let the story carry you where it will, across space and time, to love.
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thor were not renewed. Therefore this work is in the public do-
main in the United States. It may also be in the public domain in
other countries based on the life of the author, who in this instance
died in 1968. Check your country's copyright length at ht-
tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_countries%27_copyright_length .
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The Story of the Pony Express
An account of the most remarkable mail service ever in existence,
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to the Pacific Coast. It was a system by means of which messages

325
were carried swiftly on horseback across the plains and deserts,
and over the mountains of the far West. It brought the Atlantic
coast and the rapidly developing state of California ten days near-
er to each other.
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October 1861, when it was supplanted by the trans-continental
telegraph. Yet it was of the greatest importance in binding the East
and West together at a time when overland travel was slow and
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326
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Food for the mind

327