week."

Even during the slow progress of the pomp, Jenny, in the first coach
with her father and May, was continually on the verge of laughter
because, just as by a great effort she had managed to bring her emotions
under control, Aunt Mabel had tripped over her skirt and dived head
foremost into the carriage that was to hold Claude, Uncle James and his
wife, and herself. Moreover, to make matters worse, her father's black
kid gloves kept splitting in different places until, by the time the
cemetery was reached, his hands merely looked as if they were
plentifully patched with court-plaster. It was blue and white April
weather, fit for cowslips and young lambs, when the somber people
darkened the vivid, wet grass round the grave. During the solemnity and
mournfulness of the burial service Jenny stood very rigid and pale, more
conscious of the wind sighing through the yew trees than of finality and
irremediable death. She was neither irritated nor moved by the sniffling
of those around her. The fluttering of the priest's surplice and the
tear-dabbled handkerchiefs occupied her attention less than the figure
of a widow looking with sorrowful admiration at a tombstone two hundred
yards away. She did not advance with the rest to stare uselessly down on
the lowered coffin. The last words had been said: the ceremony was done.
In the sudden silver wash of an April shower they all hurried to the
shelter of the mourning coaches. Jenny looked back once, and under the
arc of a rainbow saw men with gleaming spades: then she, too, lost in
the dust and hangings of the heavy equipage, was jogged slowly back to
Islington.

Funerals, like weddings, are commonly employed by families to weld
broken links in the chain of association with comparisons of progress
and the condolences or congratulations of a decade's chance and change.
Jenny could not bear to see these relations cawing like rooks in a
domestic parliament. She felt their presence outraged the humor of the
dead woman and pictured to herself how, if her father had died, her
mother would have sent them all flapping away. She did not want to hear
her mother extolled by unappreciative people. She loathed the sight of
her sleek cousin Claude, of Alfie glowering at Edie, of her future
sister-in-law picking pieces of white cotton off her skirt, of Edie
brushing currants from the side of Norman's mouth. Finally, when she was
compelled to listen to her father's statement of his suscepti