go away alone
was bad; to think was worse. No good could come out of the thinking
of a beautiful young woman. Complications could come out of it in
profusion, but no good. The thinking of the beautiful was bound to
result in hesitations, in reluctances, in unhappiness all round. And
here, if she could have seen her, sat her Scrap thinking quite hard.
And such things. Such old things. Things nobody ever began to think
till they were at least forty.

Chapter 9

That one of the two sitting-rooms which Mrs. Fisher had taken for
her own was a room of charm and character. She surveyed it with
satisfaction on going into it after breakfast, and was glad it was
hers. It had a tiled floor, and walls the colour of pale honey, and
inlaid furniture the colour of amber, and mellow books, many in ivory
or lemon-coloured covers. There was a big window overlooking the sea
towards Genoa, and a glass door through which she could proceed out
on to the battlements and walk along past the quaint and attractive
watch-tower, in itself a room with chairs and a writing table, to where
on the other side of the tower the battlements ended in a marble seat,
and one could see the western bay and the point round which began the
Gulf of Spezia. Her south view, between these two stretches of sea,
was another hill, higher than San Salvatore, the last of the little
peninsula, with the bland turrets of a smaller and uninhabited castle
on the top, on which the setting sun still shone when everything else
was sunk in shadow. Yes, she was very comfortably established here;
and receptacles--Mrs. Fisher did not examine their nature closely, but
they seemed to be small stone troughs, or perhaps little sarcophagi--
ringed round the battlements with flowers.

These battlements, she thought, considering them, would have been
a perfect place for her to pace up and down gently in moments when she
least felt the need of her stick, or to sit in on the marble seat,
having first put a cushion on it, if there had not unfortunately been a
second glass door opening on to them, destroying their complete
privacy, spoiling her feeling that the place was only for her. The
second door belonged to the round drawing-room, which both she and Lady
Caroline had rejected as too dark. That room would probably be sat in
by the women from Hampstead, and she was afraid they would not confine
themselves to sitting in it, but would come out through the glass door
a