h, and they had eaten their lunch among the wild rose
thickets that tumbled down from the road to the sea. Rachael had raised
it all to something on a much higher level than an outing by munching
vegetarian sandwiches and talking subversively, for she too was a
Suffragette and a Socialist, at the great nine-foot wall round Lord
Wemyss's estate, by which they were to cycle for some miles. She pointed
out how its perfect taste and avoidance of red brick and its hoggish
swallowing of tracts of pleasant land symbolised the specious charm and
the thieving greed which were well known to be the attributes of the
aristocracy. Rachael was wonderful. She was an Atheist, too. When she
was twelve she had decided to do without God for a year, and it had
worked. Ellen had not got as far as that. She thought religion rather
pretty and a great consolation if one was poor. Rachael was even poorer
than Ellen, but she had an unbreakable spirit and seemed to mind nothing
in the world, not even that she never had new clothes because she had
two elder sisters. It had always seemed so strange that such a clever
girl couldn't make things with paper patterns as Ellen could, as Ellen
had frequently done in the past, as Ellen never wished to do again. She
was filled with terror by the thought that she should ever again pin
brown paper out of _Weldon's Fashions_ on to stuff that must not on any
account run higher than a shilling the yard; that she should slash with
the big cutting-out scissors just as Mrs. Melville murmured over her
shoulder, "I doubt you've read the instructions right...." What was the
good? She was decaying. That was proven by the present current of her
thoughts, which had passed from the countryside, towards which she had
always previously directed her mind when she had desired it to be happy,
as one moves for warmth into a southern-facing room, and were now
dwelling on the mean life of hopeless thrift she and her mother lived in
Hume Park Square. She recollected admiringly the radiance that had been
hers when she was sixteen; of the way she had not minded more than a
wrinkle between the brows those Monday evenings when she had to dodge
among the steamy wet clothes hanging on the kitchen pulleys as she
cooked the supper, those Saturday nights when she and her mother had to
wait for the cheap pieces at the butcher's among a crowd that hawked and
spat and made jokes that were not geniality but merely a mental form of
hawking and sp