, because we walk
so slowly. We stop and look at things, and we talk."

"What d'you talk about?" Evelyn enquired, upon which he laughed and said
that they talked about everything.

Mrs. Thornbury went with them to the gate, trailing very slowly and
gracefully across the grass and the gravel, and talking all the time
about flowers and birds. She told them that she had taken up the study
of botany since her daughter married, and it was wonderful what a number
of flowers there were which she had never seen, although she had lived
in the country all her life and she was now seventy-two. It was a good
thing to have some occupation which was quite independent of other
people, she said, when one got old. But the odd thing was that one never
felt old. She always felt that she was twenty-five, not a day more or a
day less, but, of course, one couldn't expect other people to agree to
that.

"It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to imagine
that you're twenty-five," she said, looking from one to the other with
her smooth, bright glance. "It must be very wonderful, very wonderful
indeed." She stood talking to them at the gate for a long time; she
seemed reluctant that they should go.

Chapter XXV

The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on
the shore sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature,
and even on the terrace under an awning the bricks were hot, and the
air danced perpetually over the short dry grass. The red flowers in the
stone basins were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which
had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now dry, and
their edges were curled and yellow. Only the stiff and hostile plants
of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be grown upon spines, still
remained standing upright and defied the sun to beat them down. It
was too hot to talk, and it was not easy to find any book that would
withstand the power of the sun. Many books had been tried and then let
fall, and now Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the
words of Milton had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary to
understand what he was saying; one could merely listen to his words; one
could almost handle them.

There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,

he read,

That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.
Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;
Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,