l
with my Aunts--I'm a great bore, aren't I, Aunt Emma?" (she smiled at
old Mrs. Paley, who with head slightly drooped was regarding the cake
with speculative affection), "and father has to be very careful about
chills in winter which means a great deal of running about, because
he won't look after himself, any more than you will, Arthur! So it all
mounts up!"

Her voice mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life
and her own nature. Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan,
ignoring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. She
appeared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the
kind blue eyes now shallow and watery, the bloom of the cheeks congealed
to a network of dry red canals.

Helen turned to her. "Did you go to church?" she asked. She had won her
sixpence and seemed making ready to go.

"Yes," said Rachel. "For the last time," she added.

In preparing to put on her gloves, Helen dropped one.

"You're not going?" Evelyn asked, taking hold of one glove as if to keep
them.

"It's high time we went," said Helen. "Don't you see how silent every
one's getting--?"

A silence had fallen upon them all, caused partly by one of the
accidents of talk, and partly because they saw some one approaching.
Helen could not see who it was, but keeping her eyes fixed upon Rachel
observed something which made her say to herself, "So it's Hewet."
She drew on her gloves with a curious sense of the significance of the
moment. Then she rose, for Mrs. Flushing had seen Hewet too, and was
demanding information about rivers and boats which showed that the whole
conversation would now come over again.

Rachel followed her, and they walked in silence down the avenue. In
spite of what Helen had seen and understood, the feeling that was
uppermost in her mind was now curiously perverse; if she went on this
expedition, she would not be able to have a bath, the effort appeared to
her to be great and disagreeable.

"It's so unpleasant, being cooped up with people one hardly knows," she
remarked. "People who mind being seen naked."

"You don't mean to go?" Rachel asked.

The intensity with which this was spoken irritated Mrs. Ambrose.

"I don't mean to go, and I don't mean not to go," she replied. She
became more and more casual and indifferent.

"After all, I daresay we've seen all there is to be seen; and there's
the bother of getting there, and whatever they may say it's