The sun of that same day going down, dusk was saluted as usualat the hotel by an instantaneous sparkle of electric lights.

　　The hours between dinner and bedtime were always difficult enoughto kill, and the night after the dance they were further tarnishedby the peevishness of dissipation. Certainly, in the opinionof Hirst and Hewet, who lay back in long arm-chairs in the middleof the hall, with their coffee-cups beside them, and their cigarettesin their hands, the evening was unusually dull, the women unusuallybadly dressed, the men unusually fatuous. Moreover, when the mailhad been distributed half an hour ago there were no letters foreither of the two young men. As every other person, practically,had received two or three plump letters from England, which theywere now engaged in reading, this seemed hard, and promptedHirst to make the caustic remark that the animals had been fed.

　　Their silence, he said, reminded him of the silence in the lion-housewhen each beast holds a lump of raw meat in its paws. He went on,stimulated by this comparison, to liken some to hippopotamuses,some to canary birds, some to swine, some to parrots, and some toloathsome reptiles curled round the half-decayed bodies of sheep.

　　The intermittent sounds--now a cough, now a horrible wheezingor throat-clearing, now a little patter of conversation--were just,he declared, what you hear if you stand in the lion-house when thebones are being mauled. But these comparisons did not rouse Hewet,who, after a careless glance round the room, fixed his eyes upona thicket of native spears which were so ingeniously arrangedas to run their points at you whichever way you approached them.

　　He was clearly oblivious of his surroundings; whereupon Hirst,perceiving that Hewet's mind was a complete blank, fixed hisattention more closely upon his fellow-creatures. He was too farfrom them, however, to hear what they were saying, but it pleased himto construct little theories about them from their gestures and appearance.

　　Mrs. Thornbury had received a great many letters. She was completelyengrossed in them. When she had finished a page she handed itto her husband, or gave him the sense of what she was reading in aseries of short quotations linked together by a sound at the backof her throat. "Evie writes that George has gone to Glasgow.

　　'He finds Mr. Chadbourne so nice to work with, and we hope to spendChristmas together, but I should not like to move Betty and Alfredany great distance (no, quite right), though it is difficultto imagine cold weather in this heat. . . . Eleanor and Rogerdrove over in the new trap. . . . Eleanor certainly looked morelike herself than I've seen her since the winter. She has put Babyon three bottles now, which I'm sure is wise (I'm sure it is too),and so gets better nights. . . . My hair still falls out. I find iton the pillow! But I am cheered by hearing from Tottie Hall Green.

　　. . . Muriel is in Torquay enjoying herself greatly at dances.

　　She _is_ going to show her black put after all.' . . . A linefrom Herbert--so busy, poor fellow! Ah! Margaret says, 'Poor oldMrs. Fairbank died on the eighth, quite suddenly in the conservatory,only a maid in the house, who hadn't the presence of mind to lifther up, which they think might have saved her, but the doctor saysit might have come at any moment, and one can only feel thankfulthat it was in the house and not in the street (I should think so!).

　　The pigeons have increased terribly, just as the rabbits did fiveyears ago . . .'" While she read her husband kept nodding his headvery slightly, but very steadily in sign of approval.

　　Near by, Miss Allan was reading her letters too. They were notaltogether pleasant, as could be seen from the slight rigiditywhich came over her large fine face as she finished reading themand replaced them neatly in their envelopes. The lines of careand responsibility on her face made her resemble an elderly manrather than a woman. The letters brought her news of the failureof last year's fruit crop in New Zealand, which was a serious matter,for Hubert, her only brother, made his living on a fruit farm,and if it failed again, of course, he would throw up his place,come back to England, and what were they to do with him this time?

　　The journey out here, which meant the loss of a term's work,became an extravagance and not the just and wonderful holiday dueto her after fifteen years of punctual lecturing and correctingessays upon English literature. Emily, her sister, who was ateacher also, wrote: "We ought to be prepared, though I have nodoubt Hubert will be more reasonable this time." And then wenton in her sensible way to say that she was enjoying a very jollytime in the Lakes. "They are looking exceedingly pretty just now.

　　I have seldom seen the trees so forward at this time of year.

　　We have taken our lunch out several days. Old Alice is as young as ever,and asks after every one affectionately. The days pass very quickly,and term will soon be here. Political prospects _not_ good,I think privately, but do not like to damp Ellen's enthusiasm.

　　Lloyd George has taken the Bill up, but so have many before now,and we are where we are; but trust to find myself mistaken.

　　Anyhow, we have our work cut out for us. . . . Surely Meredithlacks the _human_ note one likes in W. W.?" she concluded, and wenton to discuss some questions of English literature which Miss Allanhad raised in her last letter.

　　At a little distance from Miss Allan, on a seat shaded and madesemi-private by a thick clump of palm trees, Arthur and Susanwere reading each other's letters. The big slashing manuscriptsof hockey-playing young women in Wiltshire lay on Arthur's knee,while Susan deciphered tight little legal hands which rarely filledmore than a page, and always conveyed the same impression of jocularand breezy goodwill.

　　"I do hope Mr. Hutchinson will like me, Arthur," she said, looking up.

　　"Who's your loving Flo?" asked Arthur.

　　"Flo Graves--the girl I told you about, who was engaged to thatdreadful Mr. Vincent," said Susan. "Is Mr. Hutchinson married?"she asked.

　　Already her mind was busy with benevolent plans for her friends,or rather with one magnificent plan--which was simple too--they were all to get married--at once--directly she got back.

　　Marriage, marriage that was the right thing, the only thing,the solution required by every one she knew, and a great part ofher meditations was spent in tracing every instance of discomfort,loneliness, ill-health, unsatisfied ambition, restlessness, eccentricity,taking things up and dropping them again, public speaking,and philanthropic activity on the part of men and particularlyon the part of women to the fact that they wanted to marry,were trying to marry, and had not succeeded in getting married.

　　If, as she was bound to own, these symptoms sometimes persistedafter marriage, she could only ascribe them to the unhappy lawof nature which decreed that there was only one Arthur Venning,and only one Susan who could marry him. Her theory, of course,had the merit of being fully supported by her own case. She hadbeen vaguely uncomfortable at home for two or three years now,and a voyage like this with her selfish old aunt, who paid her farebut treated her as servant and companion in one, was typical of thekind of thing people expected of her. Directly she became engaged,Mrs. Paley behaved with instinctive respect, positively protestedwhen Susan as usual knelt down to lace her shoes, and appeared reallygrateful for an hour of Susan's company where she had been used toexact two or three as her right. She therefore foresaw a life of fargreater comfort than she had been used to, and the change had alreadyproduced a great increase of warmth in her feelings towards other people.

　　It was close on twenty years now since Mrs. Paley had been ableto lace her own shoes or even to see them, the disappearance ofher feet having coincided more or less accurately with the deathof her husband, a man of business, soon after which event Mrs. Paleybegan to grow stout. She was a selfish, independent old woman,possessed of a considerable income, which she spent upon the upkeepof a house that needed seven servants and a charwoman in LancasterGate, and another with a garden and carriage-horses in Surrey.

　　Susan's engagement relieved her of the one great anxiety of her life--that her son Christopher should "entangle himself" with his cousin.

　　Now that this familiar source of interest was removed, she felta little low and inclined to see more in Susan than she used to.

　　She had decided to give her a very handsome wedding present, a chequefor two hundred, two hundred and fifty, or possibly, conceivably--it depended upon the under-gardener and Huths' bill for doing upthe drawing-room--three hundred pounds sterling.

　　She was thinking of this very question, revolving the figures,as she sat in her wheeled chair with a table spread with cardsby her side. The Patience had somehow got into a muddle, and shedid not like to call for Susan to help her, as Susan seemed to bebusy with Arthur.

　　"She's every right to expect a handsome present from me, of course,"she thought, looking vaguely at the leopard on its hind legs,"and I've no doubt she does! Money goes a long way with every one.

　　The young are very selfish. If I were to die, nobody would miss mebut Dakyns, and she'll be consoled by the will! However, I've gotno reason to complain. . . . I can still enjoy myself. I'm nota burden to any-one. . . . I like a great many things a good deal,in spite of my legs."Being slightly depressed, however, she went on to think of the onlypeople she had known who had not seemed to her at all selfishor fond of money, who had seemed to her somehow rather finer thanthe general run; people she willingly acknowledged, who were finerthan she was. There were only two of them. One was her brother,who had been drowned before her eyes, the other was a girl,her greatest friend, who had died in giving birth to her first child.

　　These things had happened some fifty years ago.

　　"They ought not to have died," she thought. "However, they did--and we selfish old creatures go on." The tears came to her eyes;she felt a genuine regret for them, a kind of respect for their youthand beauty, and a kind of shame for herself; but the tears did not fall;and she opened one of those innumerable novels which she usedto pronounce good or bad, or pretty middling, or really wonderful.

　　"I can't think how people come to imagine such things," she would say,taking off her spectacles and looking up with the old faded eyes,that were becoming ringed with white.

　　Just behind the stuffed leopard Mr. Elliot was playing chess withMr. Pepper. He was being defeated, naturally, for Mr. Pepper scarcelytook his eyes off the board, and Mr. Elliot kept leaning back in hischair and throwing out remarks to a gentleman who had only arrivedthe night before, a tall handsome man, with a head resembling the headof an intellectual ram. After a few remarks of a general naturehad passed, they were discovering that they knew some of the same people,as indeed had been obvious from their appearance directly they saw each other.

　　"Ah yes, old Truefit," said Mr. Elliot. "He has a son at Oxford.

　　I've often stayed with them. It's a lovely old Jacobean house.

　　Some exquisite Greuzes--one or two Dutch pictures which the oldboy kept in the cellars. Then there were stacks upon stacksof prints. Oh, the dirt in that house! He was a miser, you know.

　　The boy married a daughter of Lord Pinwells. I know them too.

　　The collecting mania tends to run in families. This chap collectsbuckles--men's shoe-buckles they must be, in use between the years1580 and 1660; the dates mayn't be right, but fact's as I say.

　　Your true collector always has some unaccountable fad of that kind.

　　On other points he's as level-headed as a breeder of shorthorns,which is what he happens to be. Then the Pinwells, as you probably know,have their share of eccentricity too. Lady Maud, for instance--"he was interrupted here by the necessity of considering hismove,--"Lady Maud has a horror of cats and clergymen, and peoplewith big front teeth. I've heard her shout across a table,'Keep your mouth shut, Miss Smith; they're as yellow as carrots!'

　　across a table, mind you. To me she's always been civility itself.

　　She dabbles in literature, likes to collect a few of us in herdrawing-room, but mention a clergyman, a bishop even, nay,the Archbishop himself, and she gobbles like a turkey-cock. I'vebeen told it's a family feud--something to do with an ancestor inthe reign of Charles the First. Yes," he continued, suffering checkafter check, "I always like to know something of the grandmothersof our fashionable young men. In my opinion they preserve allthat we admire in the eighteenth century, with the advantage,in the majority of cases, that they are personally clean. Not thatone would insult old Lady Barborough by calling her clean. How oftend'you think, Hilda," he called out to his wife, "her ladyship takesa bath?""I should hardly like to say, Hugh," Mrs. Elliot tittered,"but wearing puce velvet, as she does even on the hottest August day,it somehow doesn't show.""Pepper, you have me," said Mr. Elliot. "My chess is even worsethan I remembered." He accepted his defeat with great equanimity,because he really wished to talk.

　　He drew his chair beside Mr. Wilfrid Flushing, the newcomer.

　　"Are these at all in your line?" he asked, pointing at a case in frontof them, where highly polished crosses, jewels, and bits of embroidery,the work of the natives, were displayed to tempt visitors.

　　"Shams, all of them," said Mr. Flushing briefly. "This rug,now, isn't at all bad." He stopped and picked up a pieceof the rug at their feet. "Not old, of course, but the designis quite in the right tradition. Alice, lend me your brooch.

　　See the difference between the old work and the new."A lady, who was reading with great concentration, unfastened her broochand gave it to her husband without looking at him or acknowledgingthe tentative bow which Mr. Elliot was desirous of giving her.

　　If she had listened, she might have been amused by the reference to oldLady Barborough, her great-aunt, but, oblivious of her surroundings,she went on reading.

　　The clock, which had been wheezing for some minutes like an oldman preparing to cough, now struck nine. The sound slightlydisturbed certain somnolent merchants, government officials,and men of independent means who were lying back in their chairs,chatting, smoking, ruminating about their affairs, with their eyeshalf shut; they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and thenclosed them again. They had the appearance of crocodiles so fullygorged by their last meal that the future of the world gives themno anxiety whatever. The only disturbance in the placid brightroom was caused by a large moth which shot from light to light,whizzing over elaborate heads of hair, and causing several young womento raise their hands nervously and exclaim, "Some one ought to kill it!"Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not spokenfor a long time.

　　When the clock struck, Hirst said:

　　"Ah, the creatures begin to stir. . . ." He watched themraise themselves, look about them, and settle down again.

　　"What I abhor most of all," he concluded, "is the female breast.

　　Imagine being Venning and having to get into bed with Susan!

　　But the really repulsive thing is that they feel nothing at all--about what I do when I have a hot bath. They're gross, they're absurd,they're utterly intolerable!"So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded to thinkabout himself, about science, about Cambridge, about the Bar,about Helen and what she thought of him, until, being very tired,he was nodding off to sleep.

　　Suddenly Hewet woke him up.

　　"How d'you know what you feel, Hirst?""Are you in love?" asked Hirst. He put in his eyeglass.

　　"Don't be a fool," said Hewet.

　　"Well, I'll sit down and think about it," said Hirst. "One reallyought to. If these people would only think about things,the world would be a far better place for us all to live in.

　　Are you trying to think?"That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour,but he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.

　　"I shall go for a walk," he said.

　　"Remember we weren't in bed last night," said Hirst with a prodigious yawn.

　　Hewet rose and stretched himself.

　　"I want to go and get a breath of air," he said.

　　An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and forbiddinghim to settle into any one train of thought. It was precisely as if hehad been in the middle of a talk which interested him profoundly whensome one came up and interrupted him. He could not finish the talk,and the longer he sat there the more he wanted to finish it.

　　As the talk that had been interrupted was a talk with Rachel,he had to ask himself why he felt this, and why he wanted to go ontalking to her. Hirst would merely say that he was in love with her.

　　But he was not in love with her. Did love begin in that way,with the wish to go on talking? No. It always began in his case withdefinite physical sensations, and these were now absent, he did noteven find her physically attractive. There was something, of course,unusual about her--she was young, inexperienced, and inquisitive,they had been more open with each other than was usually possible.

　　He always found girls interesting to talk to, and surely thesewere good reasons why he should wish to go on talking to her;and last night, what with the crowd and the confusion, he hadonly been able to begin to talk to her. What was she doing now?

　　Lying on a sofa and looking at the ceiling, perhaps. He couldimagine her doing that, and Helen in an arm-chair, with her handson the arm of it, so--looking ahead of her, with her great big eyes--oh no, they'd be talking, of course, about the dance. But supposeRachel was going away in a day or two, suppose this was the endof her visit, and her father had arrived in one of the steamersanchored in the bay,--it was intolerable to know so little.

　　Therefore he exclaimed, "How d'you know what you feel, Hirst?" to stophimself from thinking.

　　But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their aimlessmovements and their unknown lives were disturbing, so that he longedfor the empty darkness. The first thing he looked for when he steppedout of the hall door was the light of the Ambroses' villa. When hehad definitely decided that a certain light apart from the othershigher up the hill was their light, he was considerably reassured.

　　There seemed to be at once a little stability in all this incoherence.

　　Without any definite plan in his head, he took the turning to the rightand walked through the town and came to the wall by the meetingof the roads, where he stopped. The booming of the sea was audible.

　　The dark-blue mass of the mountains rose against the paler blueof the sky. There was no moon, but myriads of stars, and lightsw............