crowd; as to which she had frequent differences with her friend, who
reminded her often that they could have only in the thick of it the sense
of the money they were getting back. That had little effect on her, for
she got back her money by seeing many things, the things of the past
year, fall together and connect themselves, undergo the happy relegation
that transforms melancholy and misery, passion and effort, into
experience and knowledge.

She liked having done with them, as she assured herself she had
practically done, and the strange thing was that she neither missed the
procession now nor wished to keep her place for it. It had become there,
in the sun and the breeze and the sea-smell, a far-away story, a picture
of another life. If Mr. Mudge himself liked processions, liked them at
Bournemouth and on the pier quite as much as at Chalk Farm or anywhere,
she learned after a little not to be worried by his perpetual counting of
the figures that made them up. There were dreadful women in particular,
usually fat and in men's caps and write shoes, whom he could never let
alone--not that she cared; it was not the great world, the world of
Cocker's and Ladle's and Thrupp's, but it offered an endless field to his
faculties of memory, philosophy, and frolic. She had never accepted him
so much, never arranged so successfully for making him chatter while she
carried on secret conversations. This separate commerce was with
herself; and if they both practised a great thrift she had quite mastered
that of merely spending words enough to keep him imperturbably and
continuously going.

He was charmed with the panorama, not knowing--or at any rate not at all
showing that he knew--what far other images peopled her mind than the
women in the navy caps and the shop-boys in the blazers. His
observations on these types, his general interpretation of the show,