She, Zora Middlemist, who had announced in the market place, with such a
flourish of trumpets, that she was starting on her glorious pilgrimage to
the Heart of Life, abjuring all conversation with the execrated male sex,
to have this ironical adventure! It was deliciously funny. Not only had she
found two men in the Heart of Life, but she was bringing them back with her
to Nunsmere. She could not hide them from the world in the secrecy of her
own memory: there they were in actual, bodily presence, the sole trophies
of her quest.

Yet she put a postscript to a letter to her mother.

"I know, in your dear romantic way, you will declare that these two men
have fallen in love with me. You'll be wrong. If they had, _I shouldn't
have anything to do with them. It would have made them quite impossible_."

The energy with which she licked and closed the envelope was remarkable but
unnecessary.




CHAPTER VI


Things happen slowly at Nunsmere--from the grasping of an idea to the pace
of the church choir over the hymns. Life there is no vulgar, tearing
two-step, as it is in Godalming, London, and other vortices of human
passions, but the stately measure of a minuet. Delights are deliberate and
have lingering ends. A hen would scorn to hatch a chicken with the indecent