CHAPTER XXIX
RETURN OF THE LITTLE MODEL
That same afternoon in High Street, Kensington, “Westminister,” with his coat-collar raised against the inclement wind, his old hat spotted with rain, was drawing at a clay pipe and fixing his iron-rimmed gaze on those who passed him by. It had been a day when singularly few as yet had bought from him his faintly green-tinged journal, and the low class of fellow who sold the other evening prints had especially exasperated him. His single mind, always torn to some extent between an ingrained loyalty to his employers and those politics of his which differed from his paper’s, had vented itself twice since coming on his stand; once in these words to the seller of “Pell Mells”: “I stupulated with you not to come beyond the lamp-post. Don’t you never speak to me again – a-crowdin’ of me off my stand”; and once to the younger vendors of the less expensive journals, thus: “Oh, you boys! I’ll make you regret of it – a-snappin’ up my customers under my very nose! Wait until ye’re old!” To which the boys had answered: “All right, daddy; don’t you have a fit. You’ll be a deader soon enough without that, y’know!”
It was now his time for tea, but “Pell Mell” having gone to partake of this refreshment, he waited on, hoping against hope to get a customer or two of that low fellow’s. And while in black insulation he stood there a timid voice said at his elbow —
“Mr. Creed!”
The aged butler turned, and saw the little model.
“Oh,” he said dryly, “it’s you, is it?” His mind, with its incessant love of rank, knowing that she earned her living as a handmaid to that disorderly establishment, the House of Art, had from the first classed her as lower than a lady’s-maid. Recent events had made him think of her unkindly. Her new clothes, which he had not been privileged to see before, while giving him a sense of Sunday, deepened his moral doubts.
“And where are you living now?” he said in tones incorporating these feelings.
“I’m not to tell you.”
“Oh, very well. Keep yourself to yourself.”
The little model’s lower lip drooped more than ever. There were dark marks beneath her eyes; her face was altogether rather pinched and pitiful.
“Won’t you tell me any news?” she said in her matter-of-fact voice.
The old butler gave a strange grunt.
“Ho!” he said. “The baby’s dead, and buried to-morrer.”
“Dead!” repeated the little model.
“I’m a-goin’ to the funeral – Brompton Cemetery. Half-past nine I leave the door. And that’s a-beginnin’ at the end. The man’s in prison, and the woman’s gone a shadder of herself.”
The little model rubbed her hands against her skirt.
“What did he go to prison for?”
“For assaultin’ of her; I was witness to his battery.”
“Why did he assault her?”
Creed looked at her, and, wagging his head, answered:
“That’s best known to them as caused of it.”
The little model’s face went the colour of carnations.
“I can’t help what he does,” she said. “What should I want him for – a man like that? It wouldn’t be him I’d want!” The genuine contempt in that sharp burst of anger impressed the aged butler.
“I’m not a-sayin’ anything,” he said; “it’s all a-one to me. I never mixes up with no other people’s business. But it’s very ill-convenient. I don’t get my proper breakfast. That poor woman – she’s half off her head. When the baby’s buried I’ll have to go and look out for another room before he gets a-comin’ out.”
“I hope they’ll keep him there,” muttered the little model suddenly.
“They give him a month,” said Creed.
“Only a month!”
The old butler looked at her. ‘There’s more stuff’ in you,’ he seemed to say, ‘than ever I had thought.’
“Because of his servin’ of his country,” he remarked aloud.
“I’m sorry about the poor little baby,” said the little model in her stolid voice.
“Westminister” shook his head. “I never suspected him of goin’ to live,” he said.
The girl, biting the finger-tip of her white cotton glove, was staring out at the traffic. Like a pale ray of light entering the now dim cavern of the old man’s mind, the thought came to Creed that he did not quite understand her. He had in his time had occasion to class many young persons, and the feeling that he did not quite know her class of person was like the sensation a bat might have, surprised by daylight.
Suddenly, without saying good-bye to him, she walked away.
‘Well,’ he thought, looking after her, ‘your manners ain’t improved by where you’re living, nor your appearance neither, for all your new clothes.’ And for some time he stood thinking of the stare in her eyes and that abrupt departure.
Through the crystal clearness of the fundamental flux the mind could see at that same moment Bianca leaving her front gate.
Her sensuous exaltation, her tremulous longing after harmony, had passed away; in her heart, strangely mingled, were these two thoughts: ‘If only she were a lady!’ and, ‘I am glad she is not a lady!’
Of all the dark and tortuous places of this life, the human heart is the most dark and tortuous; and of all human hearts none are less clear, more intricate than the hearts of all that class of people among whom Bianca had her being. Pride was a simple quality when joined with a simple view of life, based on the plain philosophy of property; pride was no simple quality when the hundred paralysing doubts and aspirations of a social conscience also hedged it round. In thus going forth with the full intention of restoring the little model to her position in the household, her pride fought against her pride, and her woman’s sense of ownership in the man whom she had married wrestled with the acquired sentiments of freedom, liberality, equality, good taste. With her spirit thus confused, and her mind so at variance with itself, she was really acting on the simple instinct of compassion.
She had run upstairs from Mr. Stone’s room, and now walked fast, lest that instinct, the most physical, perhaps, of all – awakened by sights and sounds, and requiring constant nourishment – should lose its force.
Rapidly, then, she made her way to the grey street in Bayswater where Cecilia had told her that the girl now lived.
The tall, gaunt landlady admitted her.
“Have you a Miss Barton lodging here?” Bianca asked.
“Yes,” said the landlady, “but I think she’s out.”
She looked into the little model’s room.
“Yes,” she said; “she’s out; but if you’d like to leave a note you could write in here. If you’re looking for a model, she wants work, I believe.”
That modern faculty of pressing on an aching nerve was assuredly not lacking to Bianca. To enter the girl’s room was jabbing at the nerve indeed.
She looked round her. The mental vacuity of that little room! There was not one single thing – with the exception of a torn copy of Tit-Bits – which suggested that a mind of any sort lived there. For all that, perhaps because of that, it was neat enough.
“Yes,” said the landlady, “she keeps her room tidy. Of course, she’s a country girl – comes from down my way.” She said this with a dry twist of her grim, but not unkindly, features. “If it weren’t for that,” she went on, “I don’t think I should care to let to one of her profession.”
Her hungry eyes, gazing at Bianca, had in them the aspirations of all Nonconformity.
Bianca pencilled on her card:
“If you can come to my father to-day or tomorrow, please do.”
“Will you give her this, please? It will be quite enough.”
“I’ll give it her,” the landlady said; “she’ll be glad of it, I daresay. I see her sitting here. Girls like that, if they’ve got nothing to do – see, she’s been moping on her bed…”
The impress of a form was, indeed, clearly visible on the red and yellow tasselled tapestry of the bed.
Bianca cast a look at it.
“Thank you,” she said; “good day.”
With the jabbed nerve aching badly she came slowly homewards.
Before the garden gate the little model herself was gazing at the house, as if she had been there some time. Approaching from across the road, Bianca had an admirable view of that young figure, now very trim and neat, yet with something in its lines – more supple, perhaps, but less refined – which proclaimed her not a lady; a something fundamentally undisciplined or disciplined by the material facts of life alone, rather than by a secret creed of voluntary rules. It showed here and there in ways women alone could understand; above all, in the way her eyes looked out on that house which she was clearly longing to enter. Not ‘Shall I go in?’ was in that look, but ‘Dare I go in?’
Suddenly she saw Bianca. The meeting of these two was very like the ordinary meeting of a mistress and her maid. Bianca’s face had no expression, except the faint, distant curiosity which seems to say: ‘You are a sealed book to me; I have always found you so. What you really think and do I shall never know.’
The little model’s face wore a half-caught-out, half-stolid look.
“Please go in,” Bianca said; “my father will be glad to see you.”
She held the garden gate open for the girl to pass through. Her feeling at that moment was one of slight amusement at the futility of her journey. Not even this small piece of generosity was permitted her, it seemed.
“How are you getting on?”
The little model made an impulsive movement at such an unexpected question. Checking it at once, she answered:
“Very well, thank you; that is, not very – ”
“You will find my father tired to-day; he has caught a chill. Don’t let him read too much, please.”
The little model seemed to try and nerve herself to make some statement, but, failing, passed into the house.
Bianca did not follow, but stole back into the garden, where the sun was still falling on a bed of wallflowers at the far end. She bent down over these flowers till her veil touched them. Two wild bees were busy there, buzzing with smoky wings, clutching with their black, tiny legs at the orange petals, plunging their black, tiny tongues far down into the honeyed centres. The flowers quivered beneath the weight of their small dark bodies. Bianca’s face quivered too, bending close to them, nor making the slightest difference to their hunt.
Hilary, who, it has been seen, lived in thoughts about events rather than in events themselves, and to whom crude acts and words had little meaning save in relation to what philosophy could make of them, greeted with a startled movement the girl’s appearance in the corridor outside Mr. Stone’s apartment. But the little model, who mentally lived very much from hand to mouth, and had only the philosophy of wants, acted differently. She knew that for the last five days, like a spaniel dog shut away from where it feels it ought to be, she had wanted to be where she was now standing; she knew that, in her new room with its rust-red doors, she had bitten her lips and fingers till blood came, and, as newly caged birds will flutter, had beaten her wings against those walls with blue roses on a yellow ground. She remembered how she had lain, brooding, on that piece of red and yellow tapestry, twisting its tassels, staring through half-closed eyes at nothing.
There was something different in her look at Hilary. It had lost some of its childish devotion; it was bolder, as if she had lived and felt, and brushed a good deal more down off her wings during those few days.
“Mrs. Dallison told me to come,” she said. “I thought I might. Mr. Creed told me about him being in prison.”
Hilary made way for her, and, following her into Mr. Stone’s presence, shut the door.
“The truant has returned,” he said.
Hearing herself called so unjustly by that name, the little model gushed deeply, and tried to speak. She stopped at the smile on Hilary’s face, and gazed from him to Mr. Stone and back again, the victim of mingled feelings.
Mr. Stone was seen to have risen to his feet, and to be very slowly moving towards his desk. He leaned both arms on his papers for support, and, seeming to gather strength, began sorting out his manuscript.
Through the open window the distant music of a barrel-organ came drifting in. Faint, and much too slow, was the sound of the waltz it played, but there was invitation, allurement, in that tune. The little model turned towards it, and Hilary looked hard at her. The girl and that sound together-there, quite plain, was the music he had heard for many days, like a man lying with the touch of fever on him.
“Are you ready?” said Mr. Stone.
The little model dipped her pen in ink. Her eyes crept towards the door, where Hilary was still standing with the same expression on his face. He avoided her eyes, and went up to Mr. Stone.
“Must you read to-day, sir?”
Mr. Stone looked at him with anger.
“Why not?” he said.
“You are hardly strong enough.”
Mr. Stone raised his manuscript.
“We are three days behind;” and very slowly he began dictating: “‘Bar-ba-rous ha-bits in those days, such as the custom known as War – '” His voice died away; it was apparent that his elbows, leaning on the desk, alone prevented his collapse.
Hilary moved the chair, and, taking him beneath the arms, lowered him gently into it.
Noticing that he was seated, Mr. Stone raised his manuscript and read on: “‘ – were pursued regardless of fraternity. It was as though a herd of horn-ed cattle driven through green pastures to that Gate, where they must meet with certain dissolution, had set about to prematurely gore and disembowel each other, out of a passionate devotion to those individual shapes which they were so soon to lose. So men – tribe against tribe, and country against country – glared across the valleys with their ensanguined eyes; they could not see the moonlit wings, or feel the embalming airs of brotherhood.'”
Slower and slower came his sentences, and as the last word died away he was heard to be asleep, breathing through a tiny hole left beneath the eave of his moustache. Hilary, who had waited for that moment, gently put the manuscript on the desk, and beckoned to the girl. He did not ask her to his study, but spoke to her in the hall.
“While Mr. Stone is like this he misses you. You will come, then, at present, please, so long as Hughs is in prison. How do you like your room?”
The little model answered simply: “Not very much.”
“Why not?”
“It’s lonely there. I shan’t mind, now I’m coming here again.”
“Only for the present,” was all Hilary could find to say.
The little model’s eyes were lowered.
“Mrs. Hughs’ baby’s to be buried to-morrow,” she said suddenly.
“Where?”
“In Brompton Cemetery. Mr. Creed’s going.”
“What time is the funeral?”
The girl looked up stealthily.
“Mr. Creed’s going to start at half-past nine.”
“I should like to go myself,” said Hilary.
A gleam of pleasure passing across her face was instantly obscured behind the cloud of her stolidity. Then, as she saw Hilary move nearer to the door, her lip began to droop.
“Well, good-bye,” he said.
The little model flushed and quivered. ‘You don’t even look at me,’ she seemed to say; ‘you haven’t spoken kindly to me once.’ And suddenly she said in a hard voice:
“Now I shan’t go to Mr. Lennard’s any more.”
“Oh, then you have been to him!”
Triumph at attracting his attention, fear of what she had admitted, supplication, and a half-defiant shame – all this was in her face.
“Yes,” she said.
Hilary did not speak.
“I didn’t care any more when you told me I wasn’t to come here.”
Still Hilary did not speak.
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” she said, with tears in her voice.
“No, no,” said Hilary; “of course not!”
The little model choked.
“It’s my profession.”
“Yes, yes,” said Hilary; “it’s all right.”
“I don’t care what he thinks; I won’t go again so long as I can come here.”
Hilary touched her shoulder.
“Well, well,” he said, and opened the front door.
The little model, tremulous, like’ a flower kissed by the sun after rain, went out with a light in her eyes.
The master of the house returned to Mr. Stone. Long he sat looking at the old man’s slumber. “A thinker meditating upon action!” So might Hilary’s figure, with its thin face resting on its hand, a furrow between the brows, and that painful smile, have been entitled in any catalogue of statues.
CHAPTER XXX
FUNERAL OF A BABY
Following out the instinct planted so deeply in human nature for treating with the utmost care and at great expense when dead those, who, when alive, have been served with careless parsimony, there started from the door of No. 1 in Hound Street a funeral procession of three four-wheeled cabs. The first bore the little coffin, on which lay a great white wreath (gift of Cecilia and Thyme). The second bore Mrs. Hughs, her son Stanley, and Joshua Creed. The third bore Martin Stone. In the first cab Silence was presiding with the scent of lilies over him who in his short life had made so little noise, the small grey shadow which had crept so quietly into being, and, taking his chance when he was not noticed, had crept so quietly out again. Never had he felt so restful, so much at home, as in that little common coffin, washed as he was to an unnatural whiteness, and wrapped in his mother’s only spare sheet. Away from all the strife of men he was Journeying to a greater peace. His little aloe-plant had flowered; and, between the open windows of the only carriage he had ever been inside, the wind – which, who knows? he had perhaps become – stirred the fronds of fern and the flowers of his funeral wreath. Thus he was going from that world where all men were his brothers.
From the second cab the same wind was rigidly excluded, and there was silence, broken by the aged butler’s breathing. Dressed in his Newmarket coat, he was recalling with a certain sense of luxury past, journeys in four-wheeled cabs – occasions when, seated beside a box corded and secured with sealing-wax, he had taken his master’s plate for safety to the bank; occasions when, under a roof piled up with guns and boxes, he had sat holding the “Honorable Bateson’s” dog; occasions when, with some young person by his side, he had driven at the tail of a baptismal, nuptial, or funeral cortege. These memories of past grandeur came back to him with curious poignancy, and for some reason the words kept rising in his mind: ‘For richer or poorer, for better or worser, in health and in sick places, till death do us part.’ But in the midst of the exaltation of these recollections the old heart beneath his old red flannel chest-protector – that companion of his exile – twittering faintly at short intervals, made him look at the woman by his side. He longed to convey to her some little of the satisfaction he felt in the fact that this was by no means the low class of funeral it might have been. He doubted whether, with her woman’s mind, she was getting all the comfort she could out of three four-wheeled cabs and a wreath of lilies. The seamstress’s thin face, with its pinched, passive look, was indeed thinner, quieter, than ever. What she was thinking of he could not tell. There were so many things she might be thinking of. She, too, no doubt, had seen her grandeur, if but in the solitary drive away from the church where, eight years ago, she and Hughs had listened to the words now haunting Creed. Was she thinking of that; of her lost youth and comeliness, and her man’s dead love; of the long descent to shadowland; of the other children she had buried; of Hughs in prison; of the girl that had “put a spell on him”; or only of the last precious tugs the tiny lips at rest in the first four-wheeled cab had given at her breast? Or was she, with a nicer feeling for proportion, reflecting that, had not people been so kind, she might have had to walk behind a funeral provided by the parish?
The old butler could not tell, but he – whose one desire now, coupled with the wish to die outside a workhouse, was to save enough to bury his own body without the interference of other people – was inclined to think she must be dwelling on the brighter side of things; and, designing to encourage her, he said: “Wonderful improvement in these ‘ere four-wheel cabs! Oh dear, yes! I remember of them when they were the shadders of what they are at the present time of speakin’.”
The seamstress answered in her quiet voice: “Very comfortable this is. Sit still, Stanley!” Her little son, whose feet did not reach the floor, was drumming his heels against the seat. He stopped and looked at her, and the old butler addressed him.
“You’ll a-remember of this occasion,” he said, “when you gets older.”
The little boy turned his black eyes from his mother to him who had spoken last.
“It’s a beautiful wreath,” continued Creed. “I could smell of it all the way up the stairs. There’s been no expense spared; there’s white laylock in it – that’s a class of flower that’s very extravagant.”
A train of thought having been roused too strong for his discretion, he added: “I saw that young girl yesterday. She came interrogatin’ of me in the street.”
On Mrs. Hughs’ face, where till now expression had been buried, came such a look as one may see on the face of an owl-hard, watchful, cruel; harder, more cruel, for the softness of the big dark eyes.
“She’d show a better feeling,” she said, “to keep a quiet tongue. Sit still, Stanley!”
Once more the little boy stopped drumming his heels, and shifted his stare from the old butler back to her who spoke. The cab, which had seemed to hesitate and start, as though jibbing at something in the road, resumed its ambling pace. Creed looked through the well-closed window. There before him, so long that it seemed to have no end, like a building in a nightmare, stretched that place where he did not mean to end his days. He faced towards the horse again. The colour had deepened in his nose. He spoke:
“If they’d a-give me my last edition earlier, ‘stead of sending of it down after that low-class feller’s taken all my customers, that’d make a difference to me o’ two shillin’s at the utmost in the week, and all clear savin’s.” To these words, dark with hidden meaning, he received no answer save the drumming of the small boy’s heels; and, reverting to the subject he had been distracted from, he murmured: “She was a-wearin’ of new clothes.”
He was startled by the fierce tone of a voice he hardly knew. “I don’t want to hear about her; she’s not for decent folk to talk of.”
The old butler looked round askance. The seamstress was trembling violently. Her fierceness at such a moment shocked him. “‘Dust to dust,'” he thought.
“Don’t you be considerate of it,” he said at last, summoning all his knowledge of the world; “she’ll come to her own place.” And at the sight of a slow tear trickling over her burning cheek, he added hurriedly: “Think of your baby – I’ll see yer through. Sit still, little boy – sit still! Ye’re disturbin’ of your mother.”
Once more the little boy stayed the drumming of his heels to look at him who spoke; and the closed cab rolled on with its slow, jingling sound.
In the third four-wheeled cab, where the windows again were wide open, Martin Stone, with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his coat, and his long legs crossed, sat staring at the roof, with a sort of twisted scorn on his pale face.
Just inside the gate, through which had passed in their time so many dead and living shadows, Hilary stood waiting. He could probably not have explained why he had come to see this tiny shade committed to the earth – in memory, perhaps, of those two minutes when the baby’s eyes had held parley with his own, or in the wish to pay a mute respect to her on whom life had weighed so hard of late. For whatever reason he had come, he was keeping quietly to one side. And unobserved, he, too, had his watcher – the little model, sheltering behind a tall grave.
Two men in rusty black bore the little coffin; then came the white-robed chaplain; then Mrs. Hughs and her little son; close behind, his head thrust forward with trembling movements from side to side, old Creed; and, last of all, young Martin Stone. Hilary joined the young doctor. So the five mourners walked.
Before a small dark hole in a corner of the cemetery they stopped. On this forest of unflowered graves the sun was falling; the east wind, with its faint reek, touched the old butler’s plastered hair, and brought moisture to the corners of his eyes, fixed with absorption on the chaplain. Words and thoughts hunted in his mind.
‘He’s gettin’ Christian burial. Who gives this woman away? I do. Ashes to ashes. I never suspected him of livin’.’ The conning of the burial service, shortened to fit the passing of that tiny shade, gave him pleasurable sensation; films came down on his eyes; he listened like some old parrot on its perch, his head a little to one side.
‘Them as dies young,’ he thought, ‘goes straight to heaven. We trusts in God – all mortal men; his godfathers and his godmothers in his baptism. Well, so it is! I’m not afeared o’ death!’
Seeing the little coffin tremble above the hole, he craned his head still further forward. It sank; a smothered sobbing rose. The old butler touched the arm in front of him with shaking fingers.
“Don’t ‘e,” he whispered; “he’s a-gone to glory.”
But, hearing the dry rattle of the earth, he took out his own handkerchief and put it to his nose.
‘Yes, he’s a-gone,’ he thought; ‘another little baby. Old men an’ maidens, young men an’ little children; it’s a-goin’ on all the time. Where ‘e is now there’ll be no marryin’, no, nor givin’ out in marriage; till death do us part.’
The wind, sweeping across the filled-in hole, carried the rustle of his husky breathing, the dry, smothered sobbing of the seamstress, out across the shadows’ graves, to those places, to those streets…
From the baby’s funeral Hilary and Martin walked away together, and far behind them, across the road, the little model followed. For some time neither spoke; then Hilary, stretching out his hand towards a squalid alley, said:
“They haunt us and drag us down. A long, dark passage. Is there a light at the far end, Martin?”
“Yes,” said Martin gruffly.
“I don’t see it.”
Martin looked at him.
“Hamlet!”
Hilary did not reply.
The young man watched him sideways. “It’s a disease to smile like that!”
Hilary ceased to smile. “Cure me, then,” he said, with sudden anger, “you man of health!”
The young “Sanitist’s” sallow cheeks flushed. “Atrophy of the nerve of action,” he muttered; “there’s no cure for that!”
“Ah!” said Hilary: “All kinds of us want social progress in our different ways. You, your grandfather, my brother, myself; there are four types for you. Will you tell me any one of us is the right man for the job? For instance, action’s not natural to me.”
“Any act,” answered Martin, “is better than no act.”
“And myopia is natural to you, Martin. Your prescription in this case has not been too successful, has it?”
“I can’t help it if people will be d – d fools.”
“There you hit it. But answer me this question: Isn’t a social conscience, broadly speaking, the result of comfort and security?”
Martin shrugged his shoulders.
“And doesn’t comfort also destroy the power of action?”
Again Martin shrugged.
“Then, if those who have the social conscience and can see what is wrong have lost their power of action, how can you say there is any light at the end of this dark passage?”
Martin took his pipe out, filled it, and pressed the filling with his thumb.
“There is light,” he said at last, “in spite of all invertebrates. Good-bye! I’ve wasted enough time,” and he abruptly strode away.
“And in spite of myopia?” muttered Hilary.
A few minutes later, coming out from Messrs. Rose and Thorn’s, where he had gone to buy tobacco, he came suddenly on the little model, evidently waiting.
“I was at the funeral,” she, said; and her face added plainly: ‘I’ve followed you.’ Uninvited, she walked on at his side.
‘This is not the same girl,’ he thought, ‘that I sent away five days ago. She has lost something, gained something. I don’t know her.’
There seemed such a stubborn purpose in her face and manner. It was like the look in a dog’s eyes that says: ‘Master, you thought to shut me up away from you; I know now what that is like. Do what you will, I mean in future to be near you.’
This look, by its simplicity, frightened one to whom the primitive was strange. Desiring to free himself of his companion, yet not knowing how, Hilary sat down in Kensington Gardens on the first bench they came to. The little model sat down beside him. The quiet siege laid to him by this girl was quite uncanny. It was as though someone were binding him with toy threads, swelling slowly into rope before his eyes. In this fear of Hilary’s there was at first much irritation. His fastidiousness and sense of the ridiculous were roused. What did this little creature with whom he had no thoughts and no ideas in common, whose spirit and his could never hope to meet, think that she could get from him? Was she trying to weave a spell over him too, with her mute, stubborn adoration? Was she trying to change his protective weakness for her to another sort of weakness? He turned and looked; she dropped her eyes at once, and sat still as a stone figure.
As in her spirit, so in her body, she was different; her limbs looked freer, rounder; her breath seemed stirring her more deeply; like a flower of early June she was opening before his very eyes. This, though it gave him pleasure, also added to his fear. The strange silence, in its utter naturalness – for what could he talk about with her? – brought home to him more vividly than anything before, the barriers of class. All he thought of was how not to be ridiculous! She was inviting him in some strange, unconscious, subtle way to treat her as a woman, as though in spirit she had linked her round young arms about his neck, and through her half-closed lips were whispering the eternal call of sex to sex. And he, a middle-aged and cultivated man, conscious of everything, could not even speak for fear of breaking through his shell of delicacy. He hardly breathed, disturbed to his very depths by the young figure sitting by his side, and by the dread of showing that disturbance.
Beside the cultivated plant the self-sown poppy rears itself; round the stem of a smooth tree the honeysuckle twines; to a trim wall the ivy clings.