“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 old boy kept in the cellars. Then there were stacks upon stacks of 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 collects buckles—men’s shoe-buckles they must be, in use between the years 1580 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 levelheaded 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 his move—“Lady Maud has a horror of cats and clergymen, and people with 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 her drawing-room, but mention a clergyman, a bishop even, nay, the Archbishop himself, and she gobbles like a turkey-cock. I’ve been told it’s a family feud—something to do with an ancestor in the reign of Charles the First. Yes,” he continued, suffering check after check, “I always like to know something of the grandmothers of our fashionable young men. In my opinion they preserve all that we admire in the eighteenth century, with the advantage, in the majority of cases, that they are personally clean. Not that one would insult old Lady Barborough by calling her clean. How often d’you think, Hilda,” he called out to his wife, “her ladyship takes a 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 worse than 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 front of 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 piece of the rug at their feet. “Not old, of course, but the design is 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 brooch and gave it to her husband without looking at him or acknowledging the tentative bow which Mr. Elliot was desirous of giving her. If she had listened, she might have been amused by the reference to old Lady Barborough, her great-aunt, but, oblivious of her surroundings, she went on reading.
The clock, which had been wheezing for some minutes like an old man preparing to cough, now struck nine. The sound slightly disturbed 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 eyes half shut; they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and then closed them again. They had the appearance of crocodiles so fully gorged by their last meal that the future of the world gives them no anxiety whatever. The only disturbance in the placid bright room was caused by a large moth which shot from light to light, whizzing over elaborate heads of hair, and causing several young women to raise their hands nervously and exclaim, “Someone ought to kill it!”
Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not spoken for a long time.
When the clock struck, Hirst said:
“Ah, the creatures begin to stir. …” He watched them raise 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 think about 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 really ought 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
