s that had
mapped out their little week of idleness on the scale of a world-atlas.
Something came at last, but without perhaps appearing quite adequately to
crown the monument.

Preparation and precaution were, however, the natural flowers of Mr.
Mudge's mind, and in proportion as these things declined in one quarter
they inevitably bloomed elsewhere. He could always, at the worst, have
on Tuesday the project of their taking the Swanage boat on Thursday, and
on Thursday that of their ordering minced kidneys on Saturday. He had
moreover a constant gift of inexorable enquiry as to where and what they
should have gone and have done if they hadn't been exactly as they were.
He had in short his resources, and his mistress had never been so
conscious of them; on the other hand they never interfered so little with
her own. She liked to be as she was--if it could only have lasted. She
could accept even without bitterness a rigour of economy so great that
the little fee they paid for admission to the pier had to be balanced
against other delights. The people at Ladle's and at Thrupp's had
_their_ ways of amusing themselves, whereas she had to sit and hear Mr.
Mudge talk of what he might do if he didn't take a bath, or of the bath
he might take if he only hadn't taken something else. He was always with
her now, of course, always beside her; she saw him more than "hourly,"
more than ever yet, more even than he had planned she should do at Chalk
Farm. She preferred to sit at the far end, away from the band and the
crowd; as to which she had frequent differences with her friend, who
reminded her often that they could have only in the thick of it the sense
of the money they were getting back. That had little effect on her, for
she got back her money by seeing many things, the things of the past
year, fall together and connect themselves, undergo the happy relegation
that transforms melancholy and misery, passion and effort, into
experience and knowledge.

She liked having done with them, as she assured herself she had
practically done, and the strange thing was that she neither missed the
procession now nor wished to keep her place for it. It had become there,
in the sun and the breeze and the sea-smell, a far-away story, a picture
of another life. If Mr. Mudge himself liked processions, liked them at
Bournemouth and on the pier quite as much as at Chalk Farm or anywhere,
she learned after a little not to be worried by his