Even when
she wondered what sort of tea they gave you at Kew, he felt that
something loomed up behind her words, and stood vast and solid behind
them; and the mist very slowly rose and uncovered--O, Heavens, what were
those shapes?--little white tables, and waitresses who looked first at
her and then at him; and there was a bill that he would pay with a real
two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he assured himself,
fingering the coin in his pocket, real to everyone except to him and to
her; even to him it began to seem real; and then--but it was too
exciting to stand and think any longer, and he pulled the parasol out of
the earth with a jerk and was impatient to find the place where one had
tea with other people, like other people.

"Come along, Trissie; it's time we had our tea."

"Wherever _does_ one have one's tea?" she asked with the oddest thrill
of excitement in her voice, looking vaguely round and letting herself be
drawn on down the grass path, trailing her parasol, turning her head
this way and that way, forgetting her tea, wishing to go down there and
then down there, remembering orchids and cranes among wild flowers, a
Chinese pagoda and a crimson crested bird; but he bore her on.

Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless
movement passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer
of green blue vapour, in which at first their bodies had substance and a
dash of colour, but later both substance and colour dissolved in the
green-blue atmosphere. How hot it was! So hot that even the thrush chose
to hop, like a mechanical bird, in the shadow of the flowers, with long
pauses between one movement and the next; instead of rambling vaguely
the white butterflies danced one above another, making with their white
shifting flakes the outline of a shattered marble column above the
tallest flowers; the glass roofs of the palm house shone as if a whole
market full of shiny green umbrellas had opened in the sun; and in the
drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce
soul. Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these
colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the
horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass,
they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops
of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with
red and blue. It seemed as if all gross