n
ought to join in these matters. We ought to go into Piccadilly and stop
one of these poor wretches and say: 'Now, look here, I'm no better than
you are, and I don't pretend to be any better, but you're doing what you
know to be beastly, and I won't have you doing beastly things, because
we're all the same under our skins, and if you do a beastly thing it
does matter to me.' That's what Mr. Bax was saying this morning,
and it's true, though you clever people--you're clever too, aren't
you?--don't believe it."

When Evelyn began talking--it was a fact she often regretted--her
thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen to other
people's thoughts. She continued without more pause than was needed for
taking breath.

"I don't see why the Saturday club people shouldn't do a really great
work in that way," she went on. "Of course it would want organisation,
some one to give their life to it, but I'm ready to do that. My notion's
to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care
of themselves. What's wrong with Lillah--if there is anything wrong--is
that she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards. Now
there's one thing I'll say to my credit," she continued; "I'm not
intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort, but I'm jolly human."
She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor, looking up at Rachel. She
searched up into her face as if she were trying to read what kind of
character was concealed behind the face. She put her hand on Rachel's
knee.

"It _is_ being human that counts, isn't it?" she continued. "Being real,
whatever Mr. Hirst may say. Are you real?"

Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close to her,
and that there was something exciting in this closeness, although it was
also disagreeable. She was spared the need of finding an answer to the
question, for Evelyn proceeded, "Do you _believe_ in anything?"

In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes, and to
relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back her chair and
exclaimed, "In everything!" and began to finger different objects, the
books on the table, the photographs, the freshly leaved plant with the
stiff bristles, which stood in a large earthenware pot in the window.

"I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony,
in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing," she remarked, still speaking recklessly,
with something at the back of her