“Ernest’s reply will be obvious. You’d better not ask him.”
“And then I’ll write to you.”
“Don’t bother, don’t bother,” Miss Mole said airily. “I’ll come to tea one afternoon. These,” she smiled maliciously, “are not my best clothes—but very nearly. My shoes, however,” she thrust out a surprisingly elegant foot, “will always stand inspection.”
Mrs. Spenser-Smith gave an unwilling, downward glance. “Absurd!” she said. “You’ve no sense of proportion.”
“Yet I risked this one,” Hannah pointed to her right foot, “without a thought for its beauty. Fortunately, it’s hardly scratched.” She looked up, her face rejuvenated by mischief. “I broke a window with it, Lilla.”
Incredulity struggled with curiosity in Mrs. Spenser-Smith, and curiosity with her determination to deny Hannah the pleasure of thinking herself interesting. “Pooh!” she said lightly, and then her unpractised imagination took a clumsy flight. “You don’t mean to tell me that woman had locked you out of the house?”
“I don’t mean to tell you anything,” Miss Mole said sweetly, and with the smile on her lips she watched her cousin’s admirable exit which was designed to show the increasing number of people in the shop that she was of very different quality from that of the person she left behind her.
III
All over Upper Radstowe, in late springtime, the pavements are strewn with flecks of colour, as though there had been a wedding in every house, for petals of pink and white, purple and yellow, lie there, dropped as a benison on the approach of summer. Before this, urged by the warm rain, the trees open their new leaves slowly, carefully unwrapping the yearly surprise which never grows stale, and the flowers which come afterwards are like happy laughter at its success. The dropping of the petals has a gracious resignation in it for, without them, the smaller flowering trees have lost their beauty for the year; their greenness is merged into the general greenness of the summer and they have no splendour to offer autumn. Miss Mole had missed the spring in Radstowe, she had missed the almond blossom—a faint pink against a bright blue sky or rosy against a grey one—she had missed the lilacs and laburnums and the double cherry, the tall tulips in the gardens and the consciousness that, across the river, primroses were growing on grassy banks; she had seen the summer and made the best of the only season she did not care for and here was autumn, prodigal of its gold and bronze, and there were moments when she renounced her allegiance to the spring or, rather, yoked with it a new allegiance to the autumn which was responsible for spring’s increase. In spring she knew that something both exciting and beautiful would happen with each day while her pleasure in the autumn was as much anticipatory as immediate. Like a man gloating over the wine bottles with which he means to stock his cellar, enjoying the variations in the shapes and sizes of the bottles and the colours of their contents, but looking forward to the day of the wine’s maturity, Hannah watched the big trees in this time of their brilliance, and with a contentment which was not of the eye alone, saw it lying in heaps at their feet. She was a farmer’s daughter; she had a feeling for the earth and liked to see it nourished and though she had been dowered with a constant desire for beauty, and found it sufficient in itself, there was an added satisfaction in knowing it was feeding what it came from, and so, when she wandered about Upper Radstowe that October, finding unexpected little streets, paved lanes and winding paths or flights of steps, leading from the Upper to the Lower Radstowe; when she strolled down the long Avenue where, on one side, well set back from the road, there were large houses screened by one row of the elms, and on the other, screened by the opposing row, a stretch of tree-laden grass ending in a cliff which bound the river; when she walked on the Downs dotted with well-grown hawthorn bushes which were almost insignificant in that expanse, where the sense of the river, out of sight, was always present and the voices of the ships came with challenge or complaint, she could feel that while her own affairs were in a sad condition, those of the earth were doing well and beautifully.
Until she was fourteen years old, she had only seen Radstowe in snatches of a day, when her parents had business in the city and allowed her to accompany them, and there had been torture as well as pleasure in the expeditions, for her father would linger at the cattle market and her mother spend an unreasonable time in the shops. It was maddening to know that there were intricate miles of river and docks to be explored, ferry boats awaiting her at the cost of a halfpenny a journey, broad bridges spanning the water, narrow ones, without railings, across the locks, big ships with sacks of flour sliding into their holds, slow-moving cranes dangling their burdens with apparent unwillingness to let them go; it was maddening to see these things only in glimpses or in a desperate sally from which she was recalled by the anxiety of her mother or the anger of her father and by her own premature knowledge that these two were, in effect, younger than she was and must not be distressed. In a vague way, she was always sorry for them: there must have been a few years during which they represented authority and wisdom but, within her memory, they were a little pathetic in their slowness and in their silences which were only broken for the utterance of what they thought were facts, and physically they seemed very old—they were both in
