woman.' She looked straight at him. 'There are terrors and agonies,' she said, keeping her eye on him as if to detect the slightest hint of laughter.
'I can believe it,' he said. He returned her look with perfect sincerity.
'Women one sees in the streets,' she said.
'Prostitutes?'
'Men kissing one.'
He nodded his head.
'You were never told?'
She shook her head.
'And then,' she began and stopped. Here came in the great space of life into which no one had ever penetrated. All that she had been saying about her father and her aunts and walks in Richmond Park, and what they did from hour to hour, was merely on the surface. Hewet was watching her. Did he demand that she should describe that also? Why did he sit so near and keep his eye on her? Why did they not have done with this searching and agony? Why did they not kiss each other simply? She wished to kiss him. But all the time she went on spinning out words.
'A girl is more lonely than a boy. No one cares in the least what she does. Nothing's expected of her. Unless one's very pretty people don't listen to what you say. . . . And that is what I like,' she added energetically, as if the memory were very happy. 'I like walking in Richmond Park and singing to myself and knowing it doesn't matter a damn to anybody. I like seeing things go on--as we saw you that night when you didn't see us--I love the freedom of it--it's like being the wind or the sea.' She turned with a curious fling of her hands and looked at the sea. It was still very blue, dancing away as far as the eye could reach, but the light on it was yellower, and the clouds were turning flamingo red. A feeling of intense depression crossed Hewet's mind as she spoke. It seemed plain that she would never care for one person rather than another; she was evidently quite indifferent to him; they seemed to come very near, and then they were as far apart as ever again; and her gesture as she turned away had been oddly beautiful.
'Nonsense,' he said abruptly. 'You like people. You like admiration. Your real grudge against Hirst is that he doesn't admire you.'
She made no answer for some time. Then she said:
'That's probably true. Of course I like people--I like almost every one I've ever met.' She turned her back on the sea and regarded Hewet with friendly if critical eyes. He was good-looking in the sense that he had always had a sufficiency of beef to eat and fresh air to breathe. His head was big; the eyes were also large; though generally vague they could be forcible; and the lips were sensitive. One might account him a man of considerable passion and fitful energy, likely to be at the mercy of moods which had little relation to facts; at once tolerant and fastidious. The breadth of his forehead showed capacity for thought. The interest with which Rachel looked at him was heard in her voice.
'What novels do you write?' she asked.
'I want to write a novel about Silence,' he said; 'the things people don't say. But the difficulty is immense.' He sighed. 'However, you don't care,' he continued. He looked at her almost severely. 'Nobody cares. All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he's put in. As for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one's seen the thing, felt about it, make it stand in relation to other things, not one in a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether there's anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other people,' he indicated the hotel, 'are always wanting something they can't get. But there's an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even in the attempt to write. What you said just now is true: one doesn't want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.' Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he gazed out to sea. It was Rachel's turn now to feel depressed. As he talked of writing he had become suddenly impersonal. He might never care for any one; all that desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt pressing on her almost painfully, had completely vanished.
'Are you a good writer?' she asked.
'Yes,' he said. 'I'm not first-rate, of course; I'm good second-rate; about as good as Thackeray, I should say.'
Rachel was amazed. For one thing it amazed her to hear Thackeray called second-rate; and then she could not widen her point of view to believe that there could be great writers in existence at the present day, or if there were, that any one she knew could be a great writer, and his self-confidence astounded her, and he became more and more remote.
'My other novel,' Hewet continued, 'is about a young man who is obsessed by an idea-the idea of being a gentleman. He manages to exist at Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year. He has a coat; it was once a very good coat. But the trousers--they're not so good. Well, he goes up to London, gets into good society, owing to an early- morning adventure on the banks of the Serpentine. He is led into telling lies--my idea, you see, is to show the gradual corruption of the soul--calls himself the son of some great landed proprietor in Devonshire. Meanwhile the coat becomes older and older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers. Can't you imagine the wretched man, after some splendid evening of debauchery, contemplating these garments--hanging them over the end of the bed, arranging them now in full light, now in shade, and wondering whether they will survive him, or he will survive them? Thoughts of suicide cross his mind. He has a friend, too, a man who somehow subsists upon selling small birds, for which he sets traps in the fields near Uxbridge. They're scholars, both of them. I know one or two wretched starving creatures like that who quote Aristotle at you over a fried herring and a pint of porter.
