so strong that now any flower-scent brought back the sickly horrible
sensation; and so from one scene she passed, half-hearing, half-seeing,
to another. She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging flowers in the drawing-room.

"Aunt Lucy," she volunteered, "I don't like the smell of broom; it
reminds me of funerals."

"Nonsense, Rachel," Aunt Lucy replied; "don't say such foolish things,
dear. I always think it a particularly cheerful plant."

Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her
aunts, their views, and the way they lived. Indeed this was a subject
that lasted her hundreds of morning walks round Richmond Park, and
blotted out the trees and the people and the deer. Why did they do the
things they did, and what did they feel, and what was it all about?
Again she heard Aunt Lucy talking to Aunt Eleanor. She had been that
morning to take up the character of a servant, "And, of course, at
half-past ten in the morning one expects to find the housemaid brushing
the stairs." How odd! How unspeakably odd! But she could not explain to
herself why suddenly as her aunt spoke the whole system in which they
lived had appeared before her eyes as something quite unfamiliar and
inexplicable, and themselves as chairs or umbrellas dropped about
here and there without any reason. She could only say with her slight
stammer, "Are you f-f-fond of Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Lucy?" to which her
aunt replied, with her nervous hen-like twitter of a laugh, "My dear
child, what questions you do ask!"

"How fond? Very fond!" Rachel pursued.

"I can't say I've ever thought 'how,'" said Miss Vinrace. "If one cares