Miss Fulkes read the sentence through; but before she had come to the end of it, she had forgotten what the beginning was about. She began again: “… for want of the opportunity to exchange all that surplus … [‘I could take the sleeves out of my brown dress,’ she was thinking, ‘because it’s only under the arms that it’s begun to go and wear it for the skirt only with a jumper over it’] … over and above his own consumption for such parts … [‘an orange jumper, perhaps.’]” She tried a third time, reading the words out aloud. “ ‘When the market is very small …’ ” A vision of the cattle market at Oxford floated before her inward eye; it was quite a large market. “ ‘No person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself …’ ” What was it all about? Miss Fulkes suddenly rebelled against her own conscientiousness. She hated the highest when she saw it. Getting up, she put The Wealth of Nations back on the shelf. It was a row of very high books—“My treasures,” she called them. Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Tennyson bound in squashy leather and looking with their rounded corners and Gothic titles like so many Bibles. Sartor Resartus, also Emerson’s Essays. Marcus Aurelius in one of those limp, leathery, artistic little editions that one gives at Christmas, and in sheer despair, to those to whom one can think of nothing more suitable to give, Macaulay’s History, Thomas à Kempis, Mrs. Browning.
Miss Fulkes did not select any of them. She put her hand behind the best that has been thought or said and withdrew from its secret place a copy of The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds. A ribbon marked her place. She opened and began to read:
Lady Kitty turned on the lights and walked in. A cry of horror broke from her lips, a sudden faintness almost overcame her. In the middle of the room lay the body of a man in faultless evening dress. The face was almost unrecognizably mangled; there was a red gash in the white shirt front. The rich Turkey carpet was darkly soaked with blood …
Miss Fulkes read on, avidly. The thunder of the gong brought her back with a start from the world of emeralds and murder. She sprang up. “I ought to have kept an eye on the time,” she thought, feeling guilty. “We shall be late.” Pushing The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds back into its place behind the best that has been thought or said, she hurried along to the night nursery. Little Phil had to be washed and brushed.
There was no breeze except the wind of the ship’s own speed, and that was like a blast from the engine room. Stretched in their chairs, Philip and Elinor watched the gradual diminution against the sky of a jagged island of bare red rock. From the deck above came the sound of people playing shuffleboard. Walking on principle or for an appetite, their fellow passengers passed and re-passed with the predictable regularity of comets.
“The way people take exercise!” said Elinor in a tone positively of resentment; it made her hot to look at them. “Even in the Red Sea.”
“It explains the British Empire,” he said.
There was a silence. Burnt brown, burnt scarlet, the young men on leave laughing, four to a girl. Sun-dried and curry-pickled veterans of the East strolled by with acrimonious words, about the Reforms and the cost of Indian living, upon their lips. Two female missionaries padded past in a rarely broken silence. The French globetrotters reacted to the oppressively imperial atmosphere by talking very loud. The Indian students slapped one another on the back like stage subalterns in the days of Charlie’s Aunt; and the slang they talked would have seemed old-fashioned in a preparatory school.
Time flowed; the island vanished; the air was if possible hotter.
“I’m worried about Walter,” said Elinor, who had been ruminating the contents of that last batch of letters she had received just before leaving Bombay.
“He’s a fool,” Philip answered. “After committing one stupidity with that Carling female, he ought to have had the sense not to start again with Lucy.”
“Of course he ought,” said Elinor irritably. “But the point is that he hasn’t had the sense. It’s a question of thinking of a remedy.”
“Well, it’s no good thinking about it five thousand miles away.”
“I’m afraid he may suddenly rush off and leave poor Marjorie in the lurch. With a baby on the way, too. She’s a dreary woman. But he mustn’t be allowed to treat her like that.”
“No,” Philip agreed. There was a pause. The sparse procession of exercise-lovers marched past. “I’ve been thinking,” he went on reflectively, “that it would make an excellent subject.”
“What?”
“This business of Walter’s.”
“You don’t propose to exploit poor Walter as copy?” Elinor was indignant. “No, really, I won’t have it. Botanizing on his grave—or at any rate, his heart.”
“But of course not!” Philip protested.
“Mais je vous assure,” one of the Frenchwomen was shouting so loudly that he had to abandon the attempt to continue, “aux Galeries Lafayette les camisoles en flanelle pour enfant ne coûtent que …”
“Camisoles en flanelle,” repeated Philip. “Phew!”
“But seriously, Phil …”
“But, my dear, I never intended to use more than the situation. The young man who tries to make his life rhyme with his idealizing books and imagines he’s having a great spiritual love, only to discover that’s he’s got hold of a bore
