betrothed had in consequence, during her holiday, the odd and yet
pleasant and almost languid sense of an anticlimax. She had become
conscious of an extraordinary collapse, a surrender to stillness and to
retrospect. She cared neither to walk nor to sail; it was enough for her
to sit on benches and wonder at the sea and taste the air and not be at
Cocker's and not see the counter-clerk. She still seemed to wait for
something--something in the key of the immense discussions that had
mapped out their little week of idleness on the scale of a world-atlas.
Something came at last, but without perhaps appearing quite adequately to
crown the monument.

Preparation and precaution were, however, the natural flowers of Mr.
Mudge's mind, and in proportion as these things declined in one quarter
they inevitably bloomed elsewhere. He could always, at the worst, have
on Tuesday the project of their taking the Swanage boat on Thursday, and
on Thursday that of their ordering minced kidneys on Saturday. He had
moreover a constant gift of inexorable enquiry as to where and what they
should have gone and have done if they hadn't been exactly as they were.
He had in short his resources, and his mistress had never been so
conscious of them; on the other hand they never interfered so little with
her own. She liked to be as she was--if it could only have lasted. She
could accept even without bitterness a rigour of economy so great that
the little fee they paid for admission to the pier had to be balanced
against other delights. The people at Ladle's and at Thrupp's had
_their_ ways of amusing themselves, whereas she had to sit and hear Mr.
Mudge talk of what he might do if he didn't take a bath, or of the bath
he might take if he only hadn't taken something else. He was always with
her now, of course, always beside her; she saw him more than "hourly,"
more than ever yet, more even than he had planned she should do at Chalk
Farm. She preferred to sit at the far end, away from the band and the