s though Amanda was not manifestly capable of taking care of herself;
and when he had been Listerined and bandaged, they would have it that he
should join them at their supper-dinner, which was already prepared and
waiting. They treated him as if he were still an undergraduate, they
took his arrangements in hand as though he was a favourite nephew. He
must stay in Harting that night. Both the Ship and the Coach and Horses
were excellent inns, and over the Downs there would be nothing for miles
and miles....

The house was a little long house with a verandah and a garden in front
of it with flint-edged paths; the room in which they sat and ate was
long and low and equipped with pieces of misfitting good furniture, an
accidental-looking gilt tarnished mirror, and a sprinkling of old and
middle-aged books. Some one had lit a fire, which cracked and spurted
about cheerfully in a motherly fireplace, and a lamp and some candles
got lit. Mrs. Wilder, Amanda's aunt, a comfortable dark broad-browed
woman, directed things, and sat at the end of the table and placed
Benham on her right hand between herself and Amanda. Amanda's mother
remained undeveloped, a watchful little woman with at least an eyebrow
like her daughter's. Her name, it seemed, was Morris. No servant
appeared, but two cousins of a vague dark picturesqueness and with a
stamp of thirty upon them, the first young women Benham had ever seen
dressed in djibbahs, sat at the table or moved about and attended to the
simple needs of the service. The reconciled dogs were in the room and
shifted inquiring noses from one human being to another.

Amanda's people were so easy and intelligent and friendly, and
Benham after his thirty hours of silence so freshly ready for human
association, that in a very little while he could have imagined he had
known and trusted this household for years. He had never met such people
before, and yet there was something about them that seemed familiar--and
then it occurred to him that something of their easy-going freedom was
to be found in Russian novels. A photographic enlargement of somebody
with a vegetarian expression of face and a special kind of slouch hat
gave the atmosphere a flavour of Socialism, and a press and tools and
stamps and pigments on an oak table in the corner suggested some such
socialistic art as bookbinding. They were clearly 'advanced' people. And
Amanda was tremendously important to them, she was their light, their
pri