walked on after
one of these demonstrations, "by the village organist at home, who
had invented a system of notation which he tried to teach me, with the
result that I never got to the tune-playing at all. My mother
thought music wasn't manly for boys; she wanted me to kill rats and
birds--that's the worst of living in the country. We live in Devonshire.
It's the loveliest place in the world. Only--it's always difficult at
home when one's grown up. I'd like you to know one of my sisters. . . .
Oh, here's your gate--" He pushed it open. They paused for a moment.
She could not ask him to come in. She could not say that she hoped they
would meet again; there was nothing to be said, and so without a word
she went through the gate, and was soon invisible. Directly Hewet lost
sight of her, he felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly than
before. Their talk had been interrupted in the middle, just as he was
beginning to say the things he wanted to say. After all, what had they
been able to say? He ran his mind over the things they had said, the
random, unnecessary things which had eddied round and round and used
up all the time, and drawn them so close together and flung them so far
apart, and left him in the end unsatisfied, ignorant still of what she
felt and of what she was like. What was the use of talking, talking,
merely talking?

Chapter XVII

It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came from
England left a few people on the shores of Santa Marina who drove up to
the hotel. The fact that the Ambroses had a house where one could escape
momentarily from the slightly inhuman atmosphere of an hotel was a
source of genuine pleasure not only to Hirst and Hewet, but to the
Elliots, the Thornburys, the Flushings, Miss Allan, Evelyn M., together
with other people whose identity was so little developed that the
Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names. By degrees there
was established a kind of correspondence between the two houses, the big
and the small, so that at most hours of the day one house could guess
what was going on in the other, and the words "the villa" and "the
hotel" called up the idea of two separate systems of life. Acquaintances
showed signs of developing into friends, for that one tie to Mrs.
Parry's drawing-room had inevitably split into many other ties attached
to different parts of England, and sometimes these alliances seemed
cynically fragile, and sometime