Encounters

Front matter

Encounters: Stories by Elizabeth Bowen

Boni and Liveright Publishers New York

To M. J.

Breakfast

Behold, I die daily," thought Mr. Rossiter, entering the breakfast-room. He saw the family in silhouette against the windows; the windows looked out into a garden closed darkly in upon by walls. There were so many of the family it seemed as though they must have multiplied during the night; their flesh gleamed pinkly in the cold northern light and they were always moving. Often, like the weary shepherd, he could have prayed them to keep still that he might count them.

They turned at his entrance profiles and three-quarter faces towards him. There was a silence of suspended munching and little bulges of food were thrust into their cheeks that they might wish him perfunctory good-mornings.

Miss Emily further inquired whether he had slept well, with a little vivacious uptilt of her chin. Her voice was muffled: he gathered that the contents of her mouth was bacon, because she was engaged in sopping up the liquid fat from her plate with little dice of bread, which she pushed round briskly with a circular movement of her fork. It was not worth sitting down till she had finished, because he would be expected to take her plate away. Why was the only empty chair always beside Miss Emily?

Last night in the lamplight he had almost begun to think he liked Miss Emily. She was the only lady present who had not beaten time with hand or foot or jerking head while they played "Toreador Song" on the gramophone. But here, pressed in upon her by the thick fumes of coffee and bacon, the doggy-smelling carpet, the tight, glazed noses of the family ready to split loudly from their skins … There was contamination in the very warm edge of her plate, as he took it from her with averted head and clattered it down among the others on the sideboard.

"Bacon?" insinuated Mrs. Russel. "A little chilly, I'm afraid. I do hope there's plenty, but we early birds are sometimes inclined to be rather ravenous."

She added: "There's an egg," but there was no invitation in her tone.

She could never leave a phrase unmodified. He could have answered with facetious emphasis that he was almost inclined to believe he would rather have enjoyed that egg.

Dumbly, he took two rashers of the moist and mottled bacon.

"And then," Hilary Bevel was recounting, "it all changed, and we were moving very quickly through a kind of pinkish mist—running, it felt like, only all my legs and arms were somewhere else. That was the time when you came into it, Aunt Willoughby. You were winding up your sewing machine like a motor car, kneeling down, in a sort of bunching bathing dress. …" She dared indelicacy, reaching out for the marmalade with a little agitated rustle to break up the silence with which her night's amazing experiences had been received.

Miss Emily, always kindly, tittered into her cup. She kicked the leg of Rossiter's chair and apologised; and he watched her thin, sharp shoulders shining through her blouse.

Mrs. Russel's eye travelled slowly round the table; there slowed and ceased the rotatory mastication of her jaws. Above her head was a square of white light reflected across from the window to the overmantel. He wished that the sheen of the tablecloth were snow, and that he could heap it over his head as that eye came round towards him.

"Now for it," he braced himself, clenching his hands upon his knife and fork, and squaring his elbows till one touched Miss Emily, who quivered.

"I'm afraid you couldn't hardly have heard the gong this morning, Mr. Rossiter. That new girl doesn't hardly know how to make it sound yet. She seems to me just to give it a sort of rattle."

Damn her impudence. She censored him for being late.

"Oh, I—I heard it, thank you!"

They had all stopped talking, and ate quite quietly to hear him speak. Only Jervis Bevel drained his coffee-cup with a gulp and gurgle.

"The fact is, I was—er—looking for my collar-stud."

"Ah, yes. I'm afraid you've sometimes been a little reckless about buying new ones before you were quite sure you'd lost the others, haven't you, Mr. Rossiter? Only fancy,"—she looked round to collect the attention of the breakfasters; there was a sensation to follow—" Annie found three good ones, really good ones, under the wardrobe, when she was turning out your room."

"I can't think how they get there," he protested, conscious of inanity.

"Perhaps they took little legs unto themselves and walked," suggested Hilary Bevel.

"Perhaps the wardrobe got up in the night and sat on top of them," bettered Miss Emily.

There was a rustle of laughter, and she cast down her eyes with a deprecatory titter.

The remark was a success. It was really funny. It was received by Mrs. Russel with a warm benignity: "Really, Emily, you do say silly things." She laughed her gentle breathy laugh, gazing at Mr. Rossiter, who wriggled.

"I say—er—Bevel, when you've finished with that newspaper——"

Jervis Bevel looked insolently at him over the top of the paper. "Sorry, I've only just begun. I left it lying on your plate some time, then I didn't think you'd have much time to read it, being rather rushed."

Rossiter hated Bevel, with his sleek head. He was not aware that he was rushed. What business had Bevel got to tell him so?

"Well, when you have finished——"

Hilary Bevel was staring at him across the table as though she had never seen him before. She had eyebrows like her brother's, owl's eyebrows, and long-lidded, slanting eyes; and affected a childish directness and ingenuousness of speech which she considered attractive. Her scarlet, loose-lipped mouth curled itself round her utterances, making them doubly distinct.

"Mr. Rossiter's got another tie on, a crimson tie!" said Hilary Bevel.

Rossiter was instantly aware, not only of his tie but of his whole body visible above the table-edge. He felt his ears protruding fanwise from his head, felt them redden, and the blush burn slowly across his cheekbones, down his pricking skin to the tip of his nose.

Mrs. Russel's attention was temporarily directed from himself by a skirmish with Aunt Willoughby. The click of swords was audible to all.

"Oh, but you wouldn't, Aunt Willoughby. Not when they've got five or six rooms to settle up every day, you wouldn't. You see, with you, when poor uncle was alive, it was a different thing altogether. What I mean to say is, in proportion to the size of the family you had more of them, in a kind of way. It was a larger staff."

"Ah then, Rosie, but what I always used to say, 'You do what I expect of you and we won't expect any more than that. I'm reasonable,' I used to say, 'I won't expect any more than that.' Annie could tell you that was what I used to say to her. As my dear husband used to say," Aunt Willoughby raised her voice, anticipating an interruption, "there are those that can get good work out of their servants and those that can't. We mustn't be set up about it, it's just a gift, like other gifts, that many haven't got. I've had such a happy, happy home," she sighed towards the attentive Miss Emily. "Always so comfortable, it was."

"Annie is a funny girl," reflected Mrs. Russel; "she said to me—of course I never take the things those girls say seriously—'I wouldn't go back to Mrs. Willoughby not for anything you might give me, I wouldn't.' I said, 'But she spoke so well of you, Annie,' and she just wagged her head at me, sort of. She is a funny girl! Of course, I didn't ought to tell you, but it made me laugh at the time, it did really."

"I came down on her rather hard," admitted Aunt Willoughby swiftly. "I was so particular, you see, and she had some dirty ways. Now I shouldn't wonder—when was it you lost those collar-studs, Mr. Rossiter?"

"I don't exactly remember," said Rossiter, basely. He felt Mrs. Russel's approval warm upon him, but was sorry to have failed Aunt Willoughby, who, disconcerted, relapsed into irrelevancy.

Miss Emily harked back.

"Oh, Hilary, you are awful—why shouldn't he?"

"Well, I didn't say he shouldn't, I simply said it was one. They'll be jealous of you at the office, won't they, Mr. Rossiter?"

Mr. Rossiter, eyeing her contemplatively, supposed that Miss Bevel was a "merry" girl.

"It may mean an occasion for Mr. Rossiter," said Mrs. Russel from her Olympia behind the urn. "You shouldn't draw attention to it, girls."

The light glanced on Hilary's waved and burnished hair as she turned her head towards Aunt Willoughby.

"Nobody takes any notice of little me, when I go gadding, do they. Auntie! Why, it's all round the table in a minute if I come down with half an inch of new coloured cammie-ribbon sticking out above my jumper!"

"You wouldn't put it in at all if you didn't think it was going to notice," remarked her brother, without raising his eyes from the Daily Express.

"I wouldn't put on anything at all if I was quite invisible, if that's what you mean!"

Miss Emily glanced apprehensively at the unshaken barricade of newspaper.

"Oh, Hilary, you are awf——"

Jervis had apparently not heard.

"Hilary!" said Mrs. Russel, "I'm afraid you're shocking Mr. Rossiter!" She lingered on the name as though he were something delicious to eat.

"I believe," thought Rossiter, "they all want to marry me! Is this insight or delirium? P'raps not Aunt Willoughby, but——"

He appraised Jervis round the edge of the newspaper. Surely he was showier, more attractive? Why couldn't he divert some of their attentions; take on, say, Miss Emily and Mrs. Russel? Mrs. Russel was old enough to be the mother of either of them.

A hand shot out suddenly from behind the urn. Rossiter jumped.

"——had your second cup of coffee, yet," Mrs. Russel was saying. "You look quite poetic, Mr. Rossiter"—she was referring to his abstracted glare?—"Aren't you going to pass along your cup?"

"Thank you—half a cup, if you please."

"There's no hurry." She glanced over her shoulder at the round relentless clock-face on the mantel. "You see you eat rather faster than the others, Mr. Rossiter, though they have had a bit of a start this morning!"

Did he really bolt his food and make, perhaps, disgusting noises with his mouth?

"That's why I always say we'd rather breakfast early—all of us, even the ones who haven't necessarily got to rush. It's so much homier, one feels, than rough-and-tumble modern breakfast nowadays. Everybody sort of rushing in and scrambling and snatching and making grabs at things off a table at the side. There's nothing so homely," said Mrs. Russel with conscious brilliance, "as a comfortable sit-down family to breakfast."

"My God!" said Jervis irritably, "there's going to be another strike on that damned railway—they're cutting down the trains again. Why pretend railways are a convenience—that's what I should like to know?"

No one could tell him.

He pushed his chair back from the table, impatiently, and crossed his legs.

"Pore old thing, then," trilled Hilary. "Diddums wazzums cwoss."

"They're not taking off the eight-forty-seven, are they?"

"Not the eight-forty-seven?"

"They are. That means either the eight-twenty-seven or the eight-fifty-three. The eight-fifty-three!"

"The eight-twenty-seven," they decided unanimously.

"Then that'll just have to mean breakfast earlier," said Mrs. Russel brightly; "you won't mind, will you, girls?" Her appeal included Aunt Willoughby, who made no response. "You see, we couldn't hardly rush them over their breakfasts, could we?"

This was "home comforts." This was one of the privileges for which Rossiter paid her twenty-four shillings a week. Being sat round and watched while you were eating. Not being rushed. He had a vision of a "rushed breakfast," of whirling endlessly through space while one snapped at a sausage with little furtive bites; of munching bread and marmalade with the wind of one's velocity whistling through one's teeth.

Would it be better? Could it be worse?

Not worse than his chair-edge creaking against Miss Emily's; the unceasing consciousness of her unceasing consciousness of him. Not worse than Hilary Bevel, vis-à-vis; with her complacent prettiness, her tinkling, laboured witticisms. Not worse than Aunt Willoughby's baffled, bearded morosity; than Jervis Bevel's sleek disdain.

He would escape from Mrs. Russel, her advances, her criticisms, her fumbling arguments that crushed you down beneath their heavy gentleness until you felt you were being trampled to death by a cow. By a blind cow, that fumbled its way backwards and forwards across you. …

The "girls" delivered their ultimatum in chorus.

"England expects," declaimed Hilary, turning her eyes towards the ceiling, "effery woman to—er—do—er herr dew-ty."

"It's nice to be down early," said Miss Emily earnestly, "with a nice long day stretching out in front of me."

"Breakfast will be at quarter to eight sharp," said Mrs. Russel. "Mr. Rossiter, we really must try not to lose our collar-studs."

All his days and nights were loops, curving out from breakfast time, curving back to it again. Inexorably the loops grew smaller, the breakfasts longer; looming more and more over his nights, eating more and more out of his days.

Jervis Bevel's eyes swerved over to the mantelpiece. He pushed his chair back further over the bristling carpet pile.

"Well," he said, "I think it's almost time——"

The room broke up, the table grew smaller again as they all rose from their chairs. Mrs. Russel and Aunt Willoughby gathered themselves together; Hilary seized Miss Emily by the back of the waist and punted her laughingly towards the door.

The coffee and the bacon and the hostility and the christian forbearance blew out before them into the chilly hall.

Daffodils

Miss Murcheson stopped at the corner of the High Street to buy a bunch of daffodils from the flower-man. She counted out her money very carefully, pouring a little stream of coppers from her purse into the palm of her hand.

"——ninepence—ten—eleven—pence half-penny—a shilling! Thank you very much. Good afternoon."

A gust of wind rushed up the street, whirling her skirts up round her like a ballet-dancer's, and rustling the Reckitts-blue paper round the daffodils. The slender gold trumpets tapped and quivered against her face as she held them up with one hand and pressed her skirts down hastily with the other. She felt as though she had been enticed into a harlequinade by a company of Columbines who were quivering with laughter at her discomfiture; and looked round to see if anyone had witnessed her display of chequered moirette petticoat and the inches of black stocking above her boots. But the world remained unembarrassed.

To-day the houses seemed taller and farther apart; the street wider and full of a bright, clear light that cast no shadows and was never sunshine. Under archways and between the houses the distances had a curious transparency, as though they had been painted upon glass. Against the luminous and indeterminate sky the Abbey tower rose distinct and delicate.

Miss Murcheson, forgetting all confusion, was conscious of her wings. She paused again to hitch up the bundle of exercise books slithering down beneath her elbow, then took the dipping road as a bird swings down into the air. Her mouth was faintly acrid with spring dust and the scent of daffodils was in her nostrils. As she left the High Street further behind her, the traffic sounded as a faint and murmurous hum, striking here and there a tinkling note like wind-bells.

Under her detachment she was conscious of the houses, the houses and the houses. They were square, flat-faced and plaster-fronted, painted creams and greys and buffs; one, a purplish rose colour. Venetian shutters flat against the wall broadened the line of the windows, there were coloured fanlights over all the doors. Spiked railings before them shut off their little squares of grass or gravel from the road, and between the railings branches swung out to brush against her dress and recall her to the wonder of their budding loveliness.

Miss Murcheson remembered that her mother would be out for tea, and quickened her steps in anticipation of that delightful solitude. The silver birch tree that distinguished their front garden slanted beckoning her across the pavement. She hesitated, as her gate swung open, and stood looking up and down the road. She was sorry to go in, but could not resist the invitation of the empty house. She wondered if to-morrow would fill her with so strange a stirring as to-day. Soon, in a few months, it would be summer and there would be nothing more to come. Summer would be beautiful, but this spring made promise of a greater beauty than summer could fulfil; hinted at a mystery which other summers had evaded rather than explained. She went slowly up the steps, fumbling for her latch-key.

The day's dinner still hung dank and heavy in the air of the little hall. She stood in the doorway, with that square of light and sound behind her, craving the protection and the comfort with which that dark entrance had so often received her. There was a sudden desolation in the emptiness of the house.

Quickly she entered the sitting-room and flung open the window, which set the muslin curtains swaying in the breeze and clanked the little pictures on the walls. The window embrasure was so deep that there was little light in the corners of the room; armchairs and cabinets were lurking in the dusk. The square of daylight by the window was blocked by a bamboo table groaning under an array of photographs. In her sweeping mood she deposed the photographs, thrust the table to one side, and pulled her chair up into the window. "I can't correct my essays in the dark," she asserted, though she had done so every evening of the year.

"How tight-laced you are, poor Columbines," she said, throwing away the paper and seeing how the bass cut deep into the fleshy stems. "You were brave above it all, but—there now!" She cut the bass and shook the flowers out into a vase. "I can't correct," she sighed, "with you all watching me. You are so terribly flippant!"

But what a curious coincidence: she had set her class to write an essay upon Daffodils! "You shall judge; I'll read them all out loud. They will amuse you." She dipped her pen in the red-ink pot with an anticipatory titter.

With a creak of wheels a young woman went by slowly, wheeling a perambulator. She leant heavily on the handle-bar, tilting the perambulator on its two back wheels, and staring up, wide-mouthed, at the windows.

"How nice to be so much interested," thought Miss Murcheson, pressing open the first exercise-book. "But I'm sure it can't be a good thing for the baby."

The essays lacked originality. Each paragraph sidled up self-consciously to openings for a suitable quotation, to rush each one through with a gasp of triumph.

And then my heart with pleasure fills And dances with the daffodils."

Fair daffodils, we weep to see You fade away so soon."

She wondered if any of her class could weep for the departure of a daffodil. Mostly they had disclaimed responsibility for such weakness by the stern prefix, "As the poet says——." Flora Hopwood had, she remembered, introduced a "Quotation Dictionary," which must have been the round of her circle.

"I must forbid it. Why can't they see things for themselves, think them out? I don't believe they ever really see anything, just accept things on the authority of other people. I could make them believe anything. What a responsibility teaching is—— But is it? They'd believe me, but they wouldn't care. It wouldn't matter, really.

"They're so horribly used to things. Nothing ever comes new to them that they haven't grown up with. They get their very feelings out of books. Nothing ever surprises or impresses them. When spring comes they get preoccupied, stare dreamily out of the windows. They're thinking out their new hats. Oh, if only I didn't know them quite so well, or knew them a little better!

"If I had a school of my own," she meditated, running her eyes down the pages and mechanically underlining spelling-mistakes, "I would make them think. I'd horrify them, if nothing better. But here—how ever can one, teaching at a High School? Miss Peterson would——

"They do like me. At least, one set does, I know. I'm rather a cult, they appreciate my Titian hair. They'd like me more, though, if I knew how to do it better, and knew better how to use my eyes. Their sentimentality embarrasses me. In a way they're so horribly mature, I feel at a disadvantage with them. If only they'd be a little more spontaneous. But spontaneity is beyond them at present. They're simply calves, after all, rather sophisticated calves."

She dreamed, and was awakened by familiar laughter. Nobody's laughter in particular, but surely it was the laughter of the High School? Three girls were passing with arms close linked, along the pavement underneath her window. She looked down on the expressive, tilted ovals of their sailor hats; then, on an impulse, smacked the window-sill to attract their attention. Instantly they turned up three pink faces of surprise, which broadened into smiles of recognition.

"Hullo, Miss Murcheson!"

"Hullo, children! Come in for a minute and talk to me. I'm all alone."

Millicent, Rosemary and Doris hesitated, eyeing one another, poised for flight. "Righto!" they agreed unanimously.

Miss Murcheson, all of a flutter, went round to open the front door. She looked back at the sitting-room as though she had never seen it before.

Why had she asked them in, those terrible girls whom she had scarcely spoken to? They would laugh at her, they would tell the others.

The room was full of them, of their curiosity and embarrassment and furtive laughter. She had never realised what large girls they were; how plump and well-developed. She felt them eyeing her stack of outraged relatives, the photographs she swept off on to a chair; their eyes flitted from the photographs to the daffodils, from the daffodils to the open, red-scored exercise books.

"Yes," she said, "your writings, I daresay. Do you recognise them? I was correcting 'Daffodils' and they made me dreary—sit down, won't you?—dreary. I wonder if any of you have ever used your senses; smelt, or seen things—— Oh, do sit down!"

She seemed to be shouting into a forest of thick bodies. They seated themselves along the edge of an ottoman in a bewildered row; this travestied their position in the class-room and made her feel, facing them, terribly official and instructive. She tried to shake this off.

"It's cruel, isn't it, to lie in wait for you like this and pull you in and lecture you about what you don't feel about daffodils!"

Her nervous laughter tinkled out into silence.

"It was a beastly subject," said someone, heavily.

"Beastly? Oh, Mill—Rosemary, have you never seen a daffodil?"

They giggled.

"No, but looked at one?" Her earnestness swept aside her embarrassment. "Not just heard about them—'Oh yes, daffodils: yellow flowers; spring, mother's vases, bulbs, borders, flashing past flower-shop windows'—but taken one up in your hands and felt it?"

How she was haranguing them!

"It's very difficult to be clever about things one's used to," said Millicent. "That's why history essays are so much easier. You tell us about things, and we just write them down."

"That's why you're so lazy; you're using my brains; just giving me back what I gave you again, a little bit the worse for the wear."

They looked hurt and uncomfortable.

Doris got up and walked over to the fire-place.

("Good," thought Miss Murcheson, "it will relieve the tension a bit if they will only begin to prowl.")

"What a pretty photograph. Miss Murcheson. Who is it? Not—not you?"

"Me?" said Miss Murcheson with amusement. "Yes. Why not? Does it surprise you, then?"

"You've got such a dinky hat on!" cried the girl, with naive astonishment.

The others crowded round her.

"You look so different," said Doris, still scrutinising the photograph. "Awfully happy, and prosperous, and—cocksure."

"Perhaps it was the hat!" suggested Millicent.

"Oh, Millicent! No, I'm sure Miss Murcheson was thinking about something nice."

"Or somebody."

"Oh, Doris, you are awful!"

They all giggled, and glanced apprehensively across at her.

She wondered why she was not more offended by them.

"As a matter of fact," she enlightened them, "that was because of daffodils. It just illustrates my point, curiously enough."

They were still absorbed.

"Oh, Miss Murcheson!"

"Miss Murcheson!"

"When was it taken?"

"Last Easter holidays. Nearly a year ago. At Seabrooke. By a friend of mine."

"Do-oo give me one!"

"——And me?"

"I'm afraid that's the only print I've got; and that's mother's."

"Were there more?"

"Yes, various people took them. You see, I haven't faced a real camera for years, so when I got these snaps they were scrambled for by people who'd been asking me for photos"

"People?" She was rising visibly in their estimation.

"Oh yes. Friends."

"Why daffodils?" reverted Rosemary.

"Somebody had just given me a great big bunch." She was impressed by their interest. "I wonder if daffodils will ever make any of you look like that."

"It all depends, you see," said Millicent, astutely. "Nobody has ever given us any. If they did perhaps——"

"Really?" said Miss Murcheson, with innocent concern. "Take all those, if they would really inspire you! No, dears, I'd like you to."

She gathered the daffodils together and lifted them, dripping, from the vase.

The girls retreated.

"Oh no, really, not your daffodils——"

"We don't mean——"

"Not your daffodils. Miss Murcheson. It wasn't that a bit."

Evidently a false move on her part. She was bewildered by them; could not fathom the depths of their cinema-bred romanticism.

Doris had put away the photograph and stood with her back to the others, fingering the ornaments on the chimney-piece.

"There are lots of things," she said rapidly, "that you only feel because of people. That's the only reason things are there for, I think. You wouldn't notice them otherwise, or care about them. It's only sort of——" She stopped. Her ears glowed crimson underneath her hat.

"Association," they sighed, ponderously.

"That's exactly what's the matter," cried Miss Murcheson. "We've got all the nice, fresh, independent, outside things so smeared over with our sentimentalities and prejudices and—associations—that we can't see them anyhow but as part of ourselves. That's how you're—we're missing things and spoiling things for ourselves. You—we don't seem able to discover."

"Life," said Doris sententiously, "is a very big adventure. Of course we all see that."

The other two looked at her quickly. All three became suddenly hostile. She was encouraging them to outrage the decencies of conversation. It was bad form, this flagrant discussion of subjects only for their most secret and fervid whisperings.

To her, they were still unaccountable. She had not wished to probe.

"I don't think that's what I meant," she said a little flatly. "Of course your lives will be full of interesting things, and those will be your own affairs. Only, if I could be able, I'm always trying, to make you care about the little fine things you might pass over, that have such big roots underground.

"I should like you to be as happy as I've been, and as I'm going to be," she said impulsively. "I should love to watch you after you've left my form, going up and up the school, and getting bigger, and then, when you've left, going straight and clearly to the essential things."

The tassel of the blind cord tapped against the window-sill, through the rustling curtains they looked out on to the road.

They had awaited a disclosure intimate and personal. The donor of those last year's daffodils had taken form, portentous in their minds. But she had told them nothing, given them the stone of her abstract, colourless idealism while they sat there, open-mouthed for sentimental bread.

"Won't you stay to tea?" she asked. "Oh, do. We'll picnic; boil the kettle on the gas-ring, and eat sticky buns—I've got a bag of sticky buns. We'll have a party in honour of the daffodils."

The prospect allured her, it would be a fantastic interlude.

They all got up.

"Doris and Millicent are coming to tea with me, Miss Murcheson. Mother's expecting us, thanks most awfully. Else we should have loved to."

"We should have loved to," echoed the others. "Thanks most awfully."

She felt a poignant disappointment and relief, as standing with her eyes on the daffodils, she heard the children clattering down the steps.

To-morrow they will be again impersonal; three pink moons in a firmament of faces.

The three, released, eyed one another with a common understanding.

"Miss Murcheson has never really lived," said Doris.

They linked arms again and sauntered down the road.

The Return

Mr. and Mrs. Tottenham had come home.

The moist brown gravel of the drive and sweep bore impress of their fly wheels. Lydia Broadbent listened from the doorstep to the receding gritty rumble of the empty fly, and the click and rattle as the gate swung to. Behind her, in the dusky hall, Mr. Tottenham shouted directions for the disposal of the luggage, flustered servants bumped against each other and recoiled, and Porloch the gardener shouldered the heavy trunks with gasps and lurches, clutching at the banisters until they creaked.

Lydia heard Mrs. Tottenham burst open the drawing-room door and cross the threshold with her little customary pounce, as though she hoped to catch somebody unawares. She pictured her looking resentfully round her, and knew that presently she would hear her tweaking at the curtains. During her six weeks of solitude the house had grown very human to Lydia. She felt now as if it were drawing itself together into a nervous rigour, as a man draws himself together in suffering irritation at the entrance of a fussy wife.