own and see
her. Such mad neglect of her own good must not be permitted without some
effort to prevent it. They found her very thin, and charming; humble,
but quite obstinate in her refusal. "Oh! I couldn't, really! I should be
so unhappy. Those poor little stunted people who made it all for him!
That little, awful town! I simply couldn't be reminded. Don't talk about
it, please. I'm quite all right as I am." They had threatened her with
lurid pictures of the workhouse and a destitute old age. To no purpose,
she would not take the money. She had been forty when she refused that
aid from heaven--forty, and already past any hope of marriage. For
though Scudamore had never known for certain that she had ever wished or
hoped for marriage, he had his theory--that all her eccentricity came
from wasted sexual instinct. This last folly had seemed to him monstrous
enough to be pathetic, and he no longer avoided her. Indeed, he would
often walk over to tea in her little hermitage. With Uncle Martin's
money he had bought and restored the beautiful old house over the River
Arun, and was now only five miles from Alicia's across country. She too
would come tramping over at all hours, floating in with wild flowers or
ferns, which she would put into water the moment she arrived. She had
ceased to wear hats, and had by now a very doubtful reputation for
sanity about the countryside. This was the period when Watts was on
every painter's tongue, and he seldom saw Alicia without a disputation
concerning that famous symbolist. Personally, he had no use for Watts,
resenting his faulty drawing and crude allegories, but Alicia always
maintained with her extravagant fervour that he was great because he
tried to paint the soul of things. She especially loved a painting
called "Iris"--a female symbol of the rainbow, which indeed in its
floating eccentricity had a certain resemblance to herself. "Of course
he failed," she would say; "he tried for the impossible and went on
trying all his life. Oh! I can't bear your rules, and catchwords, Dick;
what's the good of them! Beauty's too big, too deep!" Poor Alicia! She
was sometimes very wearing.

He never knew quite how it came about that she went abroad with them to
Dauphine in the autumn of 1904--a rather disastrous business--never
again would he take anyone travelling who did not know how to come in
out of the cold. It was a painter's country, and he had hired a little
_chateau_ in front of the Glan