was marriage into a family. Such was family life… Yes, she felt unreal there, and also unsafe. She had prevaricated about George and the penknife; and she had allowed Clara to remain under the impression that her visit to the house was a birthday visit. Auntie Hamps and destiny, between them, would lay bare all this lying. The antipathy against her would increase. But let it increase never so much, it still would not equal Hilda's against the family, as she thrilled to it then. Their narrow ignorance, their narrow self-conceit, their detestation of beauty, their pietism, their bigotry-revolted her. In what century had they been living all those years? Was this married life? Had Albert and Clara ever felt a moment of mutual passion? They were nothing but parents, eternally preoccupied with "oughts" and "ought nots" and forbiddances and horrid reluctant permissions. They did not know what joy was, and they did not want anybody else to know what joy was. Even on the outskirts of such a family, a musical evening on a Sunday night appeared a forlorn enterprise. And all the families in all the streets were the same. Hilda was hard enough on George sometimes, but in that moment she would have preferred George to be a thoroughly bad rude boy and to go to the devil, and herself to be a woman abandoned to every licence, rather than that he and she should resemble Clara and her offspring. All her wrath centred upon Clara as the very symbol of what she loathed.
"Hello!" cried the watchful Albert from the window. "What's happening, I wonder?"
In a moment Rupert ran into the room, and without a word scrambled on his mother's lap, absolutely confident in her goodness and power.
"What's amiss, tuppenny?" asked his father.
"Tired," answered Rupert, with a faint, endearing smile.
He laid himself close against his mother's breast, and drew up his knees, and Clara held his body in her arms, and whispered to him.
"Amy 'udn't play with me," he murmured.
"Wouldn't she? Naughty Amy!"
"Mammy tired too," he glanced upwards at his mother's eyes in sympathy.
And immediately he was asleep. Clara kissed him, bending her head down and with difficulty reaching his cheek with her lips.
Auntie Hamps enquired fondly:
"What does he mean-'mother tired too'?"
"Well," said Clara, "the fact is some of 'em were so excited they stopped my afternoon sleep this afternoon. I always do have my nap, you know," – she looked at Hilda. "In here! When this door's closed they know mother mustn't be disturbed. Only this afternoon Lucy or Amy-I don't know which, and I didn't enquire too closely-forgot… He's remembered it, the little Turk."
"Is he asleep?" Hilda demanded in a low voice.
"Fast. He's been like that lately. He'll play a bit, and then he'll stop, and say he's tired, and sometimes cry, and he'll come to me and be asleep in two jiffs. I think he's been a bit run down. He said he had toothache yesterday. It was nothing but a little cold; they've all had colds; but I wrapped his face up to please him. He looked so sweet in his bandage, I assure you I didn't want to take it off again. No, I didn't… I wonder why Amy wouldn't play with him? She's such a splendid playmate-when she likes. Full of imagination! Simply full of it!"
Albert had approached from the window.
With an air of important conviction, he said to Hilda:
"Yes, Amy's imagination is really remarkable." As no one responded to this statement, he drummed on the table to ease the silence, and then suddenly added: "Well, I suppose I must be getting on with my dictionary reading! I'm only at S; and there's bound to be a lot of words under U-beginning with un, you know. I saw at once there would be." He spoke rather defiantly, as though challenging public opinion to condemn his new dubious activity.
"Oh!" said Clara. "Albert's quite taken up with missing words nowadays."
But instead of conning his dictionary, Albert returned to the window, drawn by his inexhaustible paternal curiosity, and he even opened the window and leaned out, so that he might more effectively watch the garden. And with the fresh air there entered the high, gay, inspiriting voices of the children.
Clara smiled down at the boy sleeping in her lap. She was happy. The child was happy. His flushed face, with its expression of loving innocence, was exquisitely touching. Clara's face was full of proud tenderness. Everybody gazed at the picture with secret and profound pleasure. Hilda wished once more that George was only two and a half years old again. George's infancy, and her early motherhood, had been very different from all this. She had never been able to shut a dining-room door, or any other door, as a sign that she must not be disturbed. And certainly George had never sympathetically remarked that she was tired… She was envious… And yet a minute ago she had been execrating the family life of the Benbows. The complexity of the tissue of existence was puzzling.
When Albert brought his head once more into the room he suddenly discovered the stuffiness of the atmosphere, and with the large, free gestures of a mountaineer and a sanitarian threw open both windows as wide as possible. The bleak wind from the moorlands surged in, fluttering curtains, and lowering the temperature at a run.
"Won't Rupert catch cold?" Hilda suggested, chilled.
"He's got to be hardened, Rupert has!" Albert replied easily. "Fresh air! Nothing like it! Does 'em good to feel it!"
Hilda thought:
"Pity you didn't think so a bit earlier!"
Her countenance was too expressive. Albert divined some ironic thought in her brain, and turned on her with a sort of parrying jeer:
"And how's the great man getting along?"
In this phrase, which both he and Clara employed with increasing frequency, Albert let out not only his jealousy of, but his respect for, the head of the family. Hilda did not like it, but it flattered her on Edwin's behalf, and she never showed her resentment of the attitude which prompted it.
"Edwin? Oh, he's all right. He's working." She put a slight emphasis on the last pronoun, in order revengefully to contrast Edwin's industry with Albert's presence during business hours at a children's birthday party. "He said to me as he went out that he must go and earn something towards Maggie's rent." She laughed softly.
Clara smiled cautiously; Maggie smiled and blushed a little; Albert did not commit himself; only Auntie Hamps laughed without reserve.
"Edwin will have his joke," said she.
Although Hilda had audaciously gone forth that afternoon with the express intention of opening negotiations, on her own initiative, with Maggie for the purchase of the house, she had certainly not meant to discuss the matter in the presence of the entire family. But she was seized by one of her characteristic impulses, and she gave herself up to it with the usual mixture of glee and apprehension. She said:
"I suppose you wouldn't care to sell us the house, would you, Maggie?"
Everybody became alert, and as it grew apparent that the company was assisting at the actual birth of a family episode or incident, a peculiar feeling of eager pleasure spread through the room, and the appetite for history-making leapt up.
"Indeed I should!" Maggie answered, with a deepening flush, and all were astonished at her decisiveness, and at the warmth of her tone. "I never wanted the house. Only it was arranged that I should have it, so of course I took it." The long-silent victim was speaking. Money was useless to her, for she was incapable of turning it into happiness; but she had her views
