if a man’s taken very, very seriously by every one—if he gets appointments, and has offices and a title, and lots of letters after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees. I don’t grudge it ’em, though sometimes it comes over me—what an amazing concoction! What a miracle the masculine conception of life is—judges, civil servants, army, navy, Houses of Parliament, lord mayors—what a world we’ve made of it! Look at Hirst now. I assure you,” he said, “not a day’s passed since we came here without a discussion as to whether he’s to stay on at Cambridge or to go to the Bar. It’s his career—his sacred career. And if I’ve heard it twenty times, I’m sure his mother and sister have heard it five hundred times. Can’t you imagine the family conclaves, and the sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St. John must have the school-room to himself—‘St. John’s working,’ ‘St. John wants his tea brought to him.’ Don’t you know the kind of thing? No wonder that St. John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. It is too. He has to earn his living. But St. John’s sister—” Hewet puffed in silence. “No one takes her seriously, poor dear. She feeds the rabbits.”
“Yes,” said Rachel. “I’ve fed rabbits for twenty-four years; it seems odd now.” She looked meditative, and Hewet, who had been talking much at random and instinctively adopting the feminine point of view, saw that she would now talk about herself, which was what he wanted, for so they might come to know each other.
She looked back meditatively upon her past life.
“How do you spend your day?” he asked.
She meditated still. When she thought of their day it seemed to her it was cut into four pieces by their meals. These divisions were absolutely rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate themselves within the four rigid bars. Looking back at her life, that was what she saw.
“Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight,” she said.
“Well,” said Hewet, “what d’you do in the morning?”
“I need to play the piano for hours and hours.”
“And after luncheon?”
“Then I went shopping with one of my aunts. Or we went to see some one, or we took a message; or we did something that had to be done—the taps might be leaking. They visit the poor a good deal—old charwomen with bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. Or I used to walk in the park by myself. And after tea people sometimes called; or in summer we sat in the garden or played croquet; in winter I read aloud, while they worked; after dinner I played the piano and they wrote letters. If father was at home we had friends of his to dinner, and about once a month we went up to the play. Every now and then we dined out; sometimes I went to a dance in London, but that was difficult because of getting back. The people we saw were old family friends, and relations, but we didn’t see many people. There was the clergyman, Mr. Pepper, and the Hunts. Father generally wanted to be quiet when he came home, because he works very hard at Hull. Also my aunts aren’t very strong. A house takes up a lot of time if you do it properly. Our servants were always bad, and so Aunt Lucy used to do a good deal in the kitchen, and Aunt Clara, I think, spent most of the morning dusting the drawing-room and going through the linen and silver. Then there were the dogs. They had to be exercised, besides being washed and brushed. Now Sandy’s dead, but Aunt Clara has a very old cockatoo that came from India. Everything in our house,” she exclaimed, “comes from somewhere! It’s full of old furniture, not really old, Victorian, things mother’s family had or father’s family had, which they didn’t like to get rid of, I suppose, though we’ve really no room for them. It’s rather a nice house,” she continued, “except that it’s a little dingy—dull I should say.” She called up before her eyes a vision of the drawing-room at home; it was a large oblong room, with a square window opening on the garden. Green plush chairs stood against the wall; there was a heavy carved book-case, with glass doors, and a general impression of faded sofa covers, large spaces of pale green, and baskets with pieces of wool-work dropping out of them. Photographs from old Italian masterpieces hung on the walls, and views of Venetian bridges and Swedish waterfalls which members of the family had seen years ago. There were also one or two portraits of fathers and grandmothers, and an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after the picture by Watts. It was a room without definite character, being neither typically and openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor really comfortable. Rachel roused herself from the contemplation of this familiar picture.
“But this isn’t very interesting for you,” she said, looking up.
“Good Lord!” Hewet exclaimed. “I’ve never been so much interested in my life.” She then realised that while she had been thinking of Richmond, his eyes had never left her face. The knowledge of this excited her.
“Go on, please go on,” he urged. “Let’s imagine it’s a Wednesday. You’re all at luncheon. You sit there, and Aunt Lucy there, and Aunt Clara here”; he arranged three pebbles on the grass between them.
“Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb,” Rachel continued. She fixed her gaze upon the pebbles. “There’s a very ugly yellow china stand in front of me, called a dumb waiter, on which are three dishes, one for biscuits, one for butter, and one for cheese. There’s a pot of ferns. Then there’s Blanche the maid, who snuffles because of her nose. We talk—oh yes, it’s Aunt Lucy’s afternoon at Walworth, so we’re rather quick over luncheon. She goes off. She has a purple bag, and a black notebook. Aunt Clara has what they call a G.F.S. meeting in the drawing-room on Wednesday, so I take the dogs out. I go up Richmond Hill, along the terrace, into the park. It’s the 18th of April—the same day as it is here. It’s spring in England. The ground is rather damp. However, I cross the road and get on to the grass and we walk along, and I sing as I always do when I’m alone, until we come to the open place where you can see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day. Hampstead Church spire there, Westminster Cathedral over there, and factory chimneys about here. There’s generally a haze over the low parts of London; but it’s often blue over the park when London’s in a mist. It’s the open place that the balloons cross going over to Hurlingham. They’re pale yellow. Well, then, it smells very good, particularly if they happen to be burning wood in the keeper’s lodge which is there. I could tell you now how to get from place to place, and exactly what trees you’d pass, and where you’d cross the roads. You see, I played there when I was small. Spring is good, but it’s best in the autumn when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky, and I go back through the streets, and you can’t see people properly; they come past very quick, you just see their faces and then they’re gone—that’s what I like—and no one knows in the least what you’re doing—”
“But you have to be back for tea, I suppose?” Hewet checked her.
“Tea? Oh yes. Five o’clock. Then I say what I’ve done, and my aunts say what they’ve done, and perhaps some one comes in: Mrs. Hunt, let’s suppose. She’s an old lady with a lame leg. She has or she once had eight children; so we ask after them. They’re all over the world; so we ask where they are, and sometimes they’re ill, or they’re stationed in a cholera district, or in some place where it only rains once in five months. Mrs. Hunt,” she said with a smile, “had a son who was hugged to death by a bear.”
Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused by the same things that amused her. She was reassured. But she thought it necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.
“You can’t conceive how it interests me,” he said. Indeed, his cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another.
“Why does it interest you?” she asked.
“Partly because you’re a woman,” he replied. When he said this, Rachel, who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a childlike state of interest
