however healthy they may feel inside. Don't you know how Turner
spoils his pictures by introducing a man like a bolster in the
foreground? Well, in actual life every landscape is spoilt by men
of worse shapes still."

"You sound like a bolster with the stuffing out." They laughed.
She always blew his cobwebs away like this, with a puff of
humorous mountain air. Just now the associations he attached to
her were various--she reminded him of a heroine of Meredith's--
but a heroine at the end of the book. All had been written about
her. She had played her mighty part, and knew that it was over.
He and he alone was not content, and wrote for her daily a
trivial and impossible sequel.

Last time they had talked about Gerald. But that was some six
months ago, when things felt easier. Today Gerald was the
faintest blur. Fortunately the conversation turned to Mr.
Pembroke and to education. Did women lose a lot by not knowing
Greek? "A heap," said Rickie, roughly. But modern languages? Thus
they got to Germany, which he had visited last Easter with
Ansell; and thence to the German Emperor, and what a to-do he
made; and from him to our own king (still Prince of Wales), who
had lived while an undergraduate at Madingley Hall. Here it was.
And all the time he thought, "It is hard on her. She has no right
to be walking with me. She would be ill with disgust if she knew.
It is hard on her to be loved."

They looked at the Hall, and went inside the pretty little
church. Some Arundel prints hung upon the pillars, and Agnes
expressed the opinion that pictures inside a place of worship