The child was eight years old. She was capable of anything; in her
remote avoidance of any passion, any regret, any anticipated pleasure,
any spontaneity, she was inhuman. Hortense thought that she detected in
the chit's mother something of her own fear.


III

There used to come to the gardens a little fat red-faced girl called
Mary Kitson, the child of simple and ingenuous parents (her father was a
writer of stories of adventure for boys' papers); she was herself
simple-minded, lethargic, unadventurous, and happily stupid. Walking one
day slowly with Hortense down one of the garden paths, Sarah saw Mary
Kitson engaged in talking to two dolls, seated on a bench with them,
patting their clothes, very happy, her nurse busy over a novelette.

Sarah stopped.

"I'll sit here," she said, walked across to the bench and sat down. Mary
looked up from her dolls, and then, nervously and self-consciously, went
back to her play. Sarah stared straight before her.

Hortense amiably endeavoured to draw the nurse into conversation.

"You 'ave 'ere ze fine gardens," she said. "It calls to mind my own
Paris. Ah, the gardens in Paris!"

But the nurse had been taught to distrust all foreigners, and her views
of Paris were coloured by her reading. She admired Hortense's clothes,
but distrusted her advances.