went straight through and out into the garden by the
swing door, sometimes they stopped for a few minutes and bent over the
tables and began turning over the newspapers. Terence and Rachel sat
watching them through their half-closed eyelids--the Johnsons,
the Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons', the Lees, the Morleys, the
Campbells, the Gardiners. Some were dressed in white flannels and were
carrying racquets under their arms, some were short, some tall, some
were only children, and some perhaps were servants, but they all had
their standing, their reason for following each other through the hall,
their money, their position, whatever it might be. Terence soon gave up
looking at them, for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he fell half
asleep in his chair. Rachel watched the people for some time longer; she
was fascinated by the certainty and the grace of their movements, and by
the inevitable way in which they seemed to follow each other, and loiter
and pass on and disappear. But after a time her thoughts wandered, and
she began to think of the dance, which had been held in this room, only
then the room itself looked quite different. Glancing round, she could
hardly believe that it was the same room. It had looked so bare and
so bright and formal on that night when they came into it out of the
darkness; it had been filled, too, with little red, excited faces,
always moving, and people so brightly dressed and so animated that they
did not seem in the least like real people, nor did you feel that you
could talk to them. And now the room was dim and quiet, and beautiful
silent people passed through it, to whom you could go and say anything
you liked. She felt herself amazingly secure as she sat in her
arm-chair, and able to review not only the night of the dance, but the
entire past, tenderly and humorously, as if she had been turning in a
fog for a long time, and could now see exactly where she had turned. For
the methods by which she had reached her present position, seemed to her
very strange, and the strangest thing about them was that she had not
known where they were leading her. That was the strange thing, that
one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed
blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and
knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something
had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm,
this quiet, this certaint