ll, slight, trailing woman, with the remains of beauty, and her dark,
untidy hair was only streaked with grey. Since her husband had died, ten
years ago, she had lived at St. Mary's Bay with her mother. It had been
her old home; not The Gulls, but the vicarage, in the days when St.
Mary's Bay had been a little fishing village without an esplanade. To
old Mrs. Lennox it was the same fishing village still, and the people,
even the summer visitors, were to her the flock of her late husband, who
had died twenty years ago.

"A good many changes lately," she would say to them. "Some people think
the place is improving. But I can't say I like the esplanade."

But the visitors, unless they were very old, didn't know anything about
the changes. To them St. Mary's Bay was not a fishing village but a
seaside resort. To Mrs. Hilary it was her old home, and had healthy air
and plenty of people for her mother to gossip with and was as good a
place as any other for her to parch in like a withered flower now that
the work of her life was done. The work of her life had been making a
home for her husband and children; she had never had either the desire or
the faculties for any other work. Now that work was over, and she was
rather badly left, as she cared neither for cards, knitting, gardening,
nor intellectual pursuits. Once, seven years ago, at Neville's
instigation, she had tried London life for a time, but it had been no
use. The people she met there were too unlike her, too intelligent and up
to date; they went to meetings and concerts and picture exhibitions and
read books and talked about public affairs not emotionally but coolly and
drily; they were mildly surprised at Mrs. Hilary's vehemence of feeling
on all points, and she was strained beyond endurance by their knowledge
of facts and catholicity of interests. So she returned to St. Mary's Bay,
where she passed muster as an intelligent woman, gossiped with her
mother, the servants and their neighbours, read novels, brooded over the
happier past, walked for miles alone along the coast, and slipped every
now and then, as she had slipped even in youth, over the edge of
emotionalism into hysterical passion or grief. Her mother was no use at
such times; she only made her worse, sitting there in the calm of old
age, looking tranquilly at the end, for her so near that nothing
mattered. Only Jim or Neville were of any use then.

Neville on the eve of this her sixty-third birthday soo