The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Furnace

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe FurnaceThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The FurnaceAuthor: Rose MacaulayRelease date: August 22, 2010 [eBook #33482]Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FURNACE ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The FurnaceAuthor: Rose MacaulayRelease date: August 22, 2010 [eBook #33482]Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana)

Title: The Furnace

Author: Rose Macaulay

Release date: August 22, 2010 [eBook #33482]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FURNACE ***

'Le métal precieux qu'on trouvera un jour au fond des cendres....'Maurice Maeterlinck

CHAPTER I. YOUTH IN THE CITYCHAPTER II. THE IMPRESSION-SEEKERCHAPTER III. OF MENTAL STANDPOINTSCHAPTER IV. BLIND WALLSCHAPTER V. BALÆ'S BAYCHAPTER VI. GRADONICHAPTER VII. RETROSPECT WITH THE SEARCH-LIGHTCHAPTER VIII. BROKEN BARRIERSCHAPTER IX. FURNACE FLAMESCHAPTER X. BETTY AND TOMMYCHAPTER XI. THE ETERNAL ROADSCHAPTER XII. THE ROADS DIVIDECHAPTER XIII. PINE-BARK BOATSBY THE SAME AUTHOR

'Val più aver amici in piazzaChe denari nella cassa.'Proverb.

'Val più aver amici in piazzaChe denari nella cassa.'

Proverb.

Royalty was arriving in the harbour in a steam-yacht. It had, that is, already arrived in the harbour; it was now disembarking on the pier. It was an interesting event. An edified crowd watched it; representatives of the Press jotted down their impressions; some took photographs. A few drew pictures instead. The representative of theMarchese Peppino, an illustrated paper widely perused in certain circles, drew pictures; one might gather that it was his intention to be funny, later, when he had leisure to amplify.Marchese Peppinoalways had that intention, and its readers, whose judgment of humour was possibly, however, not of the most delicate or polished type, considered that it usually fulfilled it. The drawings now in process of production were, before they were amplified at leisure, really quite like life; later they would become less so, but no doubt more entertaining. They seemed to be a little funny even now. A man looking over the artist's shoulder giggled and dug him in the ribs. The artist was a nonchalant young man, who did not seem to be amusing himself particularly, but to be working in a wholly professional and business-like spirit. He had quick eyes and clever fingers, and presumably, since he did his job really well, a suitably developed sense of the ludicrous.

Royalty left the pier. It was, presumably, going to have lunch before it admired Naples. That was certainly as well; it gave the representatives of the Press a respite, during which they, too, if they had the inclination and the wherewithal, might have lunch.

The representative of theMarchese Peppinosat down on an inverted basket and continued to record impressions, while the crowd thinned slowly.

A facetious young man, passing the artist, made a show of being doubled up with helpless laughter—a mirth presumably anticipatory in nature and complimentary of intent. When he wearied of the compliment he clapped the journalist on the shoulder and observed:

'We shall split our sides on Thursday, ne?'

He cherished an immense admiration for the pictorial staff of theMarchese Peppino. The staff gave him his usual melancholy look from under quick brows, and said:

'Have you seen my sister?'

'Just now, talking over there with La Corrini.'

From the group indicated by the jerked thumb the staff's sister emerged. She strolled up to her brother. There did not seem to be any particular difference between them, externally. The boy might have been twenty-three and the girl twenty-two; or it was quite equally likely to be the other way about. At first glance there seemed to be a certain resemblance between them in dress as well as in face; analysis, however, reduced this to the suggestion in each of an untidiness—one might all but say a disreputability—that made their worldly status a matter for speculation. The girl's hat was of broken straw, pulled over her eyes; one of her shoes lacked a lace; her blue cotton dress was sun-bleached and discoloured. The boy wore a ragged blazer, frayed flannel trousers, and a very limp Panama hat, which he kept turning up, with sweet-tempered patience, when it flopped over his eyes.

The girl sat down beside her brother. She had—they both had—a serene air of being admirably content to do nothing during prolonged periods. To sit by the harbour and talk, if the day were fine and the company agreeable, was an excellent afternoon's occupation. The streets were always entertaining, and the harbour particularly so, with the thronging of those who go down to the sea in ships, and the gay greetings of friends, and the cheerful shouting of mariners. Neapolitan loafers (and really to loaf, in the highest sense of that agreeable word, one should go to Naples) always like the harbour. The smell of the sea, too, is pleasant on a hot September afternoon, especially to the unfastidious, who do not cavil at its dilution with various other odours.

The talk between the brother and sister and the cheerful youth who was giving himself a holiday from his shop was leisurely, of an easy familiarity, seasoned with allusions and anecdotes that showed them to share in common a 'set.' The girl's talk was partly professional, of the music-hall stage, on which she made casual and irregular appearances. La Corrini had been saying something to her.... In the report this was very funny. The stout youth, whose name, one gathered, was Luli, roared with laughter and spat many times. It was noticeable that the drawer of pictures, though he, too, talked a great deal, did not spit at all: he only stammered.

Presently they decided to have lunch, and went off, the three of them together, Luli affectionately clinging to the journalist's arm. They turned into atrattoriain the Toledo. At one of the marble-topped and not very elaborately cleaned tables a finely developed young woman atespaghettiwith admirable speed and dexterity, and drank red Posilipo. The three, seeing her, hailed her with some effusion, and joined her at her table. There ensued a very sociable and conversational repast, and there was a great deal of noise, with the full-bodied and rather strident tones of the young woman of thespaghetti, the resonant laughter of Luli, and the stuttering, melancholy-toned and unceasing flow of singularly futile and inane babbling that emanated from the journalist and his sister. These two appeared to have a somewhat extensive circle in Naples; they exchanged greetings with most of their fellow-eaters. Some of these were really comparatively reputable; quite a number were very gaily attired, and most seemed light of heart.

The journalist, after finishing his wine and his inexpensive cigar, announced himself obliged to depart in pursuit of business.

'I must catch them driving out. They are sure to drive out, you know.'

His sister said she too would come, and catch them driving out.

So they went out into the street and sauntered leisurely along it. Its screaming, gay business was a little hushed at this hour of the hot September day; behind closed green shutters people shunned the vertically striking sun; the heavy noon brooded over what was almost, for Naples, stillness. It was not, had the representative ofMarchese Peppinoconsidered the question, in the least likely that he would at this hour 'catch them driving out.' He very likely did not particularly care whether he so caught them or not; he liked to walk about the streets; neither he nor his sister minded the glare and the hot, baked smell that beat up into their faces. They had an air of very leisurely sweet temper and content with life as it was lived as they sauntered along the Toledo together. There were two things it was manifest that they would not in any circumstances do: they would quarrel with no one, and they would take no thought for the morrow.

'I wonder,' the journalist was saying, 'if Luli would lend us twenty francs. Think he would, Betty?'

He spoke in English now; they always spoke English to each other when they were alone together, though they seemed quite equally at their ease in both languages; they also stammered equally in both. They stammered when they were at all excited, or earnest, or tired, and very often when they were not. When they were talking, these hiatuses were often the only opportunities their companions had of getting in a word edgeways.

Betty thought it improbable that Luli would lend any such sum.

'You know, Tommy, we had ten from him last month. He won't miss it if we don't remind him, but it would be silly to bother him again just yet.'

'Oh, all right. But I'm afraid we've rather got to get some somehow. We've spent an awful lot lately. Why did we have lunch to-day? We didn't want it.'

'Who's been bothering?'

From long experience Betty caught the issue.

'The chap I get paints from. I—I told him he'd got to wait; he c-cut up rough; said he'd waited long enough.'

The stutter, becoming pronounced, showed Tommy a little stirred.

'Well——' Betty's tone was depressed. There was an intonation of melancholy, however, in general in the Crevequers' stammering speech—a melancholy that was on the borderland of laughter, and stuttered into it as a man stumbles unawares into puddles, walking along a wet path. Miss Crevequer, quite suddenly, stumbled into one now, for no apparent reason, and dragged Tommy after her. 'Well'—Betty regained, as it were, dry ground—'let's give him this week's rent; and by next week something will have turned up. You can win some at cards, can't you? It's a pity I've got no job just now. At least, it's rather fun really, and we'll go to the theatre to-night.'

Tommy nodded. The proposition seemed a matter of course; no incongruity struck either. There was, in fact, no incongruity; it was very simple: the payment of debts would have been an indulgence quite beyond their means; going to the theatre was one within them. The Crevequers could only afford cheap pleasures.

They settled themselves for the afternoon under an awning outside a café by which royalty, it was supposed, would eventually pass. There they conversed with friends, and Tommy drew pictures, and time, as usual, passed agreeably and sociably. At about six o'clock there came by an informant, who remarked that royalty had gone for a drive in the opposite direction. Tommy started in pursuit, and did not join Betty again till it was too late for the theatre. So they asked some friends and had a supper-party at a restaurant instead, because the theatre money must be somehow spent. Its spending, and a good deal more besides, proved beautifully easy. Then they came home through the lit streets; the flare of them and the noise of them and the gay people who lounged and talked in them always made the Crevequers feel cheerily at home, and flowing over with the milk of human kindness.

Beyond the flaring, screaming world there was a soft summer moon, nearly at the full, and spaces of silver light on the land and the dark, still sea. But these children of the gay streets had no concern with the moon; the lamps were for them, and the flare of lights that lit the coster's barrow and the pedlar's awning. They loafed along with the true vagrant's air of irresponsible well-being to their home, which was in a narrow street sloping upwards out of the Toledo—sloping up steeply, and laid out in shallow steps.

The Crevequers lived in a flat at the top of a tall pink house. None of the occupants of the house seemed to have yet retired; most of them were in the street outside. The Crevequers stayed for a little to talk to them, then went in and climbed many flights of dark stone stairs, and came at last into the room where they lived. The room had an inexpensive air. It had, however, no lack of contents, and these were, without exception, in unexpected places; the books, for instance, lay on the floor in a corner—a battered selection from the light literature of two languages. There were papers, half-finished drawings, writing and painting materials, littered over the table among half-emptied bottles, cigarettes, and unwashed glasses. The ceiling was interesting; it was partially covered with a design in bold colours, unfinished; it gave the impression of being worked at, spasmodically, at irregular intervals, by more than one artist; it had an interesting air of awaiting the next inspiration. It was an untrammelled composite, so far, of the beauties of nature, imaginative and highly exciting dramatic incident, and scenes from pagan lore, with, whenever imagination or space required padding, a cherub plunging through a festoon of flowers. Some of the designs bore a vaguely familiar air; the visitor to Pompei might have recognized, for instance, the lady on her knees with a bird's-nest full of infants. The most note-worthy point about this ceiling was that it was really not badly painted.

The most comfortable features of the room were two large arm-chairs, one on each side of the stove. Tommy cleared a space in one of them and subsided into it. Betty dragged a spirit-lamp and a saucepan of milk from under the table and knelt over it, whistling a soft, tired little tune the while. Tommy, lying in his chair, whistled too, feeling in his pockets for matches.

'Cocoa, Tommy?' Betty broke her tune to say.

'No.' He had found a match, and was scraping it perseveringly on his knee. 'It's going to boil over,' he remarked.

She caught it off with a deft hand and poured it into a cup, and, carrying it to the other arm-chair, in which she did not trouble to clear a space, she lay back with a sigh of contented languor.

'Cigarette, please. Thank you.'

There was a battering at the door, and an influx of three youths and two young women. It seemed that they had been having supper together—enough supper to raise their spirits and to make them very sociable and amiable. The Crevequers, having also had supper, were sociable and amiable too, and Tommy got out more wine, and the room became blue with smoke and full of laughter; and Tommy played his banjo, and Betty sang a song which amused them all very much, and the three young men and the two young women shouted the chorus. None of the other occupants of the house seemed to be disturbed—they were probably used to it. The company stayed late. These pleasant gatherings are hard to break up, and the Crevequers' friends seemed attached to them. With the young man who had drunk most wine Tommy made a bet and won it; it was a five-franc note, and it was satisfactory as it changed hands to feel that the loser, in his then state of warm generosity, did not at all miss it. Tommy did a further stroke of business by arranging an evening of cards with this gentleman for the following week. At last, with hilarious leave-taking, the visitors departed, some to their rooms in the same house, some elsewhere, all very merry and affectionate.

'It hasn't been a really busy day—not so very,' Betty remarked presently. 'Why are we tired?'

'There seems to have been plenty to do, one way and another,' Tommy said, still gently fingering the banjo-strings.

They spoke languidly. The tiredness of their faces seemed to slur over the delicate discriminations that really existed between them. They were, as a matter of fact, not quite exactly alike at ordinary times. For example, Betty had a dimple, when she laughed, in her left cheek; Tommy's indentation, rather fainter, was in his right. Both had blue eyes glinting to grey, but the longer sweep of Betty's lashes made hers oftener approach to black. When their eyes flickered from melancholy to sudden laughter, as they did rather often, and usually on quite unexpected and incongruous occasions, they had a trick of narrowing to blue slits. The slant of the black brows of both was up, slightly, from left to right; they were quick brows, that flickered a little with their speech.

'Let's get on our dressing-gowns and brush our hairs,' Betty suggested.

She went into one of the two adjoining rooms, and returned with a red dressing-gown and a hair-brush, and curled herself up in her chair.

'Tommy, you really have done that faun's right leg so very badly—it's getting a bad dream to me.'

Her voice died away drowsily. The brush slipped from her hand down among the piled contents of the chair; she yawned softly and fell asleep, her hair hanging in two dark, unbrushed strands over either shoulder, her cheek pillowed on one thin, scarred, childish hand. It was a curious scar, crossing the back of her left hand, a white diagonal, drawn from the knuckle of the fore-finger nearly to the wrist-bone.

Tommy, his face turned complacently ceilingwards, fell asleep too. He was very tired. They were both very tired. Betty's assertion that it had not been a particularly busy day was doubtless correct, using the word busy in its accepted sense. But, as Tommy had said, there seemed anyhow to have been a good deal to do. There was usually for the Crevequers a good deal to do, because, though they only at times and reluctantly conformed to the law that those who would eat must work, they did homage, thorough and without reservation, to the much more insistent command of their being, that those who would live life as it should be lived must make of it an exciting game, the object being to cram into the space of each twenty-four hours as many amusements as could by straining be confined therein. The number of points thus possible to score each day they had discovered to be large; the chances they did not devise for themselves by the ingenuity of their wits were devised for them by affectionate acquaintances (the Crevequers were very popular). They might be said, in fact, thoroughly to understand the art of living; to understand, rather, one aspect of it—that which is concerned with the receipt of pleasure. Their lack of means, though deplored by them, did not very seriously incommode them. It only meant, after all, that one had to practise a certain selection, and one could select the right things, meaning thereby life's pleasing superfluities, and leave the necessities to take care of themselves. The necessities did not invariably take care of themselves; the Crevequers were sometimes in winter cold (they liked immensely and above most things to be warm), and sometimes remained hungry during a longer period than seemed good to them, and were very often weary of foot, and usually without the clothes they would have liked (mildly) to have been wearing. But these times balanced themselves by occasional periods of luxury and riotous living, particularly at the beginning of the year, when their income figured before their ever-sanguine eyes, untouched, infinite and inexhaustible in its possibilities. For they had a little besides professional earnings; only it happened somehow that they spent always rather more than they had, superfluities being so essential to their existence. Lent, of course, came in opportunely, just when the first riotous flush of the year was subsiding; in Lent one could not live in luxury and go to theatres, even if one could afford it. The iron hand of necessity clasped the more pliable fingers of duty, forcing them to an unrelaxing hold. The Crevequers' confessor would, no doubt, have approved of youth thus constrained.

But, with all its inconveniences, life was a charmingly entertaining game. In the faces of the children asleep, there was, besides sheer weariness, a youthfulness almost ridiculous. They might have been fourteen and fifteen. They were always young—very young—but when they slept they were as two twin babes. Their youth, their childhood, seemed somehow to obscure an aspect of them; there might have been also in it, to the sentimentalist, a touch of pity, and to the moralist a vague rising of dubious hope.

Tommy, waking at a quarter-past two, stretched himself, yawned, and threw an empty cigarette-box into Betty's lap.

'Come to bed,' he said.

Have you reckoned the landscape took substance and form that it mightbe painted in a picture?Or men and women that they might be written of, and songs sung?Or the attraction of gravity and the great laws and harmoniouscombinations and the fluids of the air as subjects for the savants?Or the brown land and the blue sea for maps and charts?—Walt Whitman.

It was probable that Mrs. Venables came to Naples in order to absorb impressions. This was the business of her life; she made of herself a sponge, and let the waters of her experiences fill her. Later, she squeezed them out. It is admitted, of course, that any sponge will a little colour with its own individualities of hue the water which passes through it. She had really a fine power of discerning and appraising significance in matters the most ordinary. When all is said, to be easily 'struck' (her own word) must be accounted a gift, like any other of the manifold gifts of receptiveness. Mrs. Venables was struck—immensely struck—by the picturesque (her own word again) gaiety of the Toledo in the late November evening. Her walk through it was a veritable orgie to her. Her intelligent profile wore at moments a strained look; it was as if the impressions pressed in with almost too great a rapidity and force for capture. Capture was all she attempted; digestion might come later. The same anxious strain may be observed in the face of the gourmand confronted, he half fears, with more than his match. This anxiety perhaps takes the edge from entire enjoyment; but Mrs. Venables had not entered into life to receive pleasure, but impressions. It was all copy to her: the pedlars' stalls with their lights and groups of loafers, the unkempt men and women gutter-picking ('themozzonari, Warren,' said Mrs. Venables, impressed), the people eating macaroni under the awnings of travelling cooks, the rag-sellers and the bone-buyers, and the general noisy sociability. It was all absorbed; it would all be squeezed forth in due time; nothing would be kept back, for the atmosphere of Southern Italy, so unique, depended on these details. 'Be truthful, and you will certainly be interesting,' was Mrs. Venables' theory of art; not at all 'Be interesting, and you may possibly be truthful incidentally.' For which she deserved credit, as the holder of a commendable ideal.

Her son Warren knew that this walk was of the nature of an orgie. The curve of his mother's fine lips would alone have conveyed that to him. The set of his own evinced a little amusement; the scene to him was ordinary enough, and there seemed to him to be a good many rather obnoxious people about. People, obnoxious or agreeable, were not to him copy, unless he wanted to paint them. His dark, clever face missed the ideality of his mother's; his speculative eyes saw a good deal more.

Outside a café a noisy group lounged. One of them was reading something aloud from a paper; it seemed to be amusing. An explosion of laughter interrupted the stuttering voice of the reader, as the Venables passed. The reader, glancing up, looked Warren Venables full in the face. Then the stuttering voice went on. More laughter exploded.

'What are they reading?' Mrs. Venables wondered, as they left the group behind them.

'Oh, some rotten thing....' Warren Venables looked abstracted for a moment or two. Then he jerked back his head, in sudden enlightenment. 'That was it—he was in my house in my last year at school. An infant with a horrid stutter; I used to lick him for it; never knew whether it was meant for cheek or not.... What was his name, now?' He pondered it.

'What are you talking about, Warren? Look at that girl. What a striking face! The features of the Moor and the spirit of the Greek.... Did you see some one you know, dear boy?'

'Yes—the man reading; I was at school with him in my last year, but I can't think of his name.... Crevequer, that's it.... Now, that's funny, rather,' he mused.

'The young man reading, Warren?'

'That's the one. I knew him by his stutter, chiefly—and the blazer. He knew me, too, or half thought he did. Seems to be amusing himself pretty well. Do you remember, mother, you said something about my seeing after him, more or less, when he went to school? You'd met his father, or knew about him in some way. I suppose that was why I felt I had to lick him for his stutter; I don't remember that I ever had much other intercourse with him.'

'Crevequer?... Oh, Maddan Crevequer's boy, do you mean? Yes, I met Maddan Crevequer once or twice, and I used to hear a good deal about him. He was an eccentric—a genius, too, I think, only he didn't turn it in the right directions. Shut himself up in a little place in the North of Italy, and no one ever knew what he did there. Very striking. Then he came to England to send his boy to school, and it killed him. He required Italy for his existence, physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Quite a pagan, but his wife was a Roman Catholic, and I heard that the children were brought up to her faith, though she died quite young.... One feels always about his books that they should be intensely interesting, but it is an interest somehow run off the lines.... And so that is Maddan Crevequer's boy!'

The thought suddenly brought her up. The flare of a street lamp had shown Tommy Crevequer rather plainly—his bare head, his frayed blazer, his friends, girls and men, who laughed. It was, perhaps, his friends who chiefly put the ring of surprise into Mrs. Venables' tone. Interest followed close on its heels. The thing struck her.

'Curious. We must find him out, Warren; get to know him.'

'Must we, mother? Good copy, do you think? But one knows the sort'—he made a downward movement with his hand—'when it's sober it borrows, and that's such a bore. Besides, we shan't be able to find him—and he won't, probably, want to be found.'

'You might go back now....'

'Interrupt the reading? No, I think not. He mightn't be pleased.'

'He looked,' said Mrs. Venables, 'as if he was entering into the life of the quite poor. That would be an enterprise of immense interest if one could really accomplish it, really break down the barriers. We must find the boy, Warren.'

'All right, we'll try. But I expect he's just scum, you know. There are lots like him in every big town; it drifts about the bottom, that sort, and personally I don't think it's anything in its favour that it's by way of being—or having been—a gentleman. But I've no doubt you'd like it, mother, so we'll look for Crevequer. Only its not an easy sort to find, I warn you. Nomadic, you know.... Oh, of course Crevequer may be just on the spree for to-night; he may dress better as a rule.'

The impression of Mr. Crevequer seemed to remain with Mrs. Venables, standing out above the other dishes of her orgie. She returned to her hotel replete.

Tommy Crevequer met his sister at the door of the Fondo Theatre, and walked home with her. He mentioned Venables.

'Head of my house in my first year at school. He was decent to me, rather. I don't suppose he knew me to-night; he had some one with him, so I didn't stop him; but I wouldn't mind meeting him again.'

It was quite clear that he would not mind in the least. The Crevequers never minded meeting people; they were very sociable.

Betty said that Morello had asked her to sit to him.

'I suppose I'd better—had I? It will bore me quite awfully, but it would be extravagant not to, of course. And he's asked Gina and me to supper to-morrow. You'd better come too; it may be fun.'

Tommy hummed an air.

'He's a silly ass, Morello is. But we'll have supper with him by all means, particularly with him and Gina; Gina's great sport.... It's struck me, Betty, that perhaps Venables did know me, and was feeling proud or something. If he's proud I should love to meet him again, and introduce him to—to Luli and every one. It would be our duty, don't you think? But Venables used to be an awfully good sort—I don't believe he's really proud—and if we do run into him again, we'll take him about with us.... I'm awfully hard up just now.'

The Crevequers did not suffer from pride.

Three weeks later, Venables walked into the Crevequers' room. It was about six o'clock; the Crevequers had guests, who smoked and drank wine and conversed. Tommy Crevequer sat astride on the table; Betty was on the arm of a chair, leaning back against Gina Lunelli's broad shoulder. It was confusing to come into such an intimate party.

Tommy looked round, and broke off in the middle of what he was saying, and got off the table. He was glad Venables had come. Venables apologized.

'How are you, Crevequer?... But I'm interrupting you; I'll come in another time.'

But Tommy drew him in, and introduced him to Betty, and to Luli and Gina and all the rest, and offered him wine. It was a convivial gathering; Venables, being a stranger, and wearing a rather clean collar, perhaps threw a shade of restraint over it, but mirth broke out again before long. At last, with common accord, the company took its leave—all but Venables.

'Well, how are you Crevequer? I've been looking for you, you know, all over the place.'

Tommy had almost forgotten how much he had admired Venables once; it returned to him now as they talked. He would have liked to see a good deal of Venables. Venables painted, he learnt—painted successfully, Tommy presumed, looking at the clean collar and the well-cut coat. It was perhaps a pity, Tommy reflected, his melancholy eyes, under their quick, amused brows, turning from Venables to his sister, that he and Betty were not better dressed to-day. Venables was probably a person of prejudices, and his collar was very clean.

Venables learned that Crevequer was a journalist.

'What's your paper?'

'That.' Tommy indicatedMarchese Peppinoon the table; it came out that day.

'Oh.'

Venables just glanced at it; he showed no desire to inspect it more closely; possibly he knew enough about it already. His clever face was scrupulously devoid of expression.

'I chiefly do sketches,' Tommy elaborated. 'You know the sort of thing? They aren't funny, not a bit; but they sell. Oh, I write for it, too, of course; and that's funnier, rather.Novelle in corto, you know; we have the news in, as much as if we were anybody; combine instruction with amusement, don't you know.'

Venables knew quite well.

'I wonder,' he thought afterwards, 'whyhe shoved it down my throat like that. Mere cheek, perhaps, or to show he didn't mind, or to warn me off at once in case I didn't like his style. Or doesn't he really, perhaps, realize....'

Not really to realize, Crevequer must have pushed very far from the shores of decency.

Venables let the topic ofMarchese Peppinolie where Tommy had dropped it. He delivered his mother's message, not stiffly, but with voice and face a little vacant of expression, lacking interest. He asked the Crevequers to come to lunch to-morrow at Parker's Hotel. Mrs. Venables had not been aware of Betty, but Warren supposed that her existence would add a further element of picturesque interest to the 'impression.' The invitation was accepted. Venables stayed a little longer, and examined the ceiling, and discovered incidentally that the Crevequers—probably by the sheer insane futility of their stammering flow—had the power of pricking him at all points to sudden laughter.

He considered it walking home. In his search for Tommy Crevequer he had happened upon a man—he kept a billiard saloon—who knew him rather well. His remarks, entirely friendly (he was really fond of Tommy), conveyed to Venables several items of information about him; among others, that Venables would at no time have any difficulty in finding him, as a good many people thought it prudent to keep him under view. At the same time, Tommy's acquaintances seemed to assume as a matter of course that he might find an occasional plunge into obscurity a convenience. These casually conveyed impressions Venables had assimilated without surprise. As he would have said, one knew the sort. And Venables liked people who amused him.

ButMarchese Peppinostuck in his throat.

Betty observed to Tommy:

'What fun. We shall probably forget to go. But if we don't, we shall have to eat so much that we shan't need any more for a week. How economical! Lunch in England—do you remember, Tommy?'

Tommy was thinking.

'Betty, we don't dress well enough. I want a new hat; so do you. Venables is better dressed than we are. We must be tidy, and cut a dash at lunch. It's a mistake not to be well dressed; people are so prejudiced. I shall wear a collar to-morrow—a quite clean one, like Venables. And we won't have any supper to-night, because we shall have to eat too much at lunch. And I suppose Mrs. Venables will talk about father's books, as she's so interested; so let's read them.'

'Perhaps,' said Betty, 'we'd better read her own works too; only I don't feel sure they'd be quite nice, so I think we'll wait till we're older—thirty-two and thirty-three. We can tell her if she asks that we read so little that we have to be very careful about what we read. It would be so disappointing to read a book we didn't like; she'll understand that.'

'E parea posta lor diversa legge.'—Dante.

The Crevequers, as they had anticipated, did eat too much at lunch—a good deal too much. They cast, occasionally, wondering and interested glances round the dining-room, and took in the fact that every one at all the little tables was also eating too much. It was borne upon them that this exorbitance, a strange incident in their own lives, was to these others a daily occurrence. Every day at one o'clock the dining-room at Parker's, the dining-rooms at all the hotels of its genus, were filled with Anglo-Saxons and a few others, all sitting round little tables, and all eating too much. Then again at dinner-time.... The impressiveness of the thought widened their eyes, filling them with an awestruck solemnity. To eat too much, a good deal too much, twice—nay, thrice—a day (for visions of the Anglo-Saxon breakfast haunted them: one had honey, one ordered omelette) during a period of weeks and months—it required thinking over quietly afterwards. At present, face to face with the amazing succession of the courses, the contemplation of all it meant made one a little dizzy. The Crevequers took all the courses; they would not have missed one; they intended to see this thing through. As they ate they talked stammeringly. Mrs. Venables was struck by the melancholy of their pondering eyes. Her interest—she had an immense fund of it—was gathering itself together to pour itself unstintedly forth on Maddan Crevequer's children. Her son and her daughter and her niece watched the gathering; it was a familiar process to them. The son watched it with languid amusement; the daughter with stolid unconcern (she was a bored child of eighteen); the niece with eyes inscrutably remote. The Crevequers were copy; they came to be studied, to be drawn out; they responded to the process with their usual affability. They answered questions as to their way of life, their friends, the customs of the Neapolitan poor, their religion. Mrs. Venables, as she said, found the Roman Catholic standpoint quite immensely interesting. The Crevequers groped uncomprehendingly after the reason of such interest, and gave it up. They were, however, quite ready to answer the questions put to them; it seemed a harmless craze enough. Mrs. Venables had been to Mass the day before, and had, she affirmed, been much struck by the impressive contrast of the ordered stateliness of the service and the spontaneous gaiety of the people as they trooped out into the piazza afterwards. It had occurred to her, watching the devout worshippers, that Catholicism was in some of its aspects a strange medium for the spiritual interpretation of the blithe Italian genius. What did Mr. Crevequer think?

Mr. Crevequer thought, but did not say, that she might have been more profitably employed in attending to the service than in watching the devout worshippers.

Mrs. Venables' niece, Prudence Varley, talked about Naples, with a certain careful accentuation of the purely ordinary point of view of the cultivated seer of sights. Her cousin Warren, watching her, smiled inwardly at the accentuation. He understood it perfectly well. There was in it a certain quality of externality that gained edge from the contrast with Mrs. Venables' all-reaching intimacy. It revealed, anyhow, how the Crevequers wallowed in ignorance—how they knew nothing. Museums, mosaics, pictures, sculpture, were to them less than names. Churches they knew only in so far as they went to church in them; and it was not from the point of view of one interested in worship, but in architecture, that Miss Varley seemed to approach the subject, differing herein from her aunt. When she discovered that the Crevequers knew nothing, she did not follow the subject; she gently fell again into her non-conversational attitude, which seemed almost a little abstracted. (She had often that air.) The Crevequers had indeed their own knowledge of Naples—none more so; but it was the intimacy of streets and corners, that close acquaintance with the face of a city which belongs to those who, as Warren Venables had said, 'drift about the bottom.' How should they know of mosaics? They knew every little narrowgradone, shut in with leaning houses, that led steeply up out of all the length of the Toledo, from Piazza San Carlo to the doors of the museum. (Beyond the doors their ignorance began.) They knew at what hour on Friday mornings it was most amusing to be playing round Porta Nolana; they knew the price at which you can get a plate of macaroni and a mezzo-litro of wine at all thetrattorie(of any economy) in Naples, and at which you were most likely to meet amusing acquaintances, and at what hours. But it was possible that Miss Varley felt no more curiosity as to these things than the Crevequers as to the Angevin tombs in Santa Chiara. In Naples there seemed to be no meeting-ground, or none which Miss Varley cared to seek. It was Mrs. Venables who talked of Pompei—of the unique, almost oppressive, so she said, interest of it. The Crevequers knew Pompei as a place with nice hot, bright streets, scampered over by lizards, where it was agreeable to spend an afternoon among the gaily-hued, roofless houses, and go to sleep. But, they said, Christian Pompei was a better place—it had more variety. Here the gulf yawned aggressively; Mrs. Venables strove to throw a bridge by remarking that to some mental standpoints the present teemed with an eternal interest that quite obscured the past. The Crevequers supposed that this might be so.

Young Miranda Venables said that she thought the past was an awful bore. She did not approve of Naples; she was vexed at missing the hockey and beagling season at home, and she thought towns were beastly, especially Italian towns. She hated them. She looked towards the Crevequers with a rising of hope; here, it seemed, were two people who lacked intelligent interest even as she did. Miranda was, from her mother's point of view, a failure. She was in no way æsthetic, except sartorially. The Liberty frocks and flopping hats that her soul loathed seemed to give an edged incongruity to her pleasant round face, with its rosy cheeks and blue eyes, and mouth that drooped pathetically at the corners. She did not rebel against the bitter yoke of the picturesque: it was not worth while; she was merely used to remark, with her customary forcible elegance of phrase, that if her mother chose to spend money on making her look a guy, it was her look out, though Miranda considered it a pity that she could not get better value than that for her outlay. But her soul was not at all in her clothes; it was in quite different things—chiefly in hockey.

She raised that theme.

'I say, couldn't we get up a sort of a club? There must be a ground somewhere.'

But the Crevequers, it seemed, did not play hockey. It was sad how everywhere gulfs yawned. Miranda sighed, and fell back upon her lunch. That remains, even in Naples.

The Crevequers, on their side of the gulf, talked; they were really quite entertaining; their acquaintance included such various types of persons, their experience such interesting incidents. Some of the incidents revealed them, personally, in a light rather unusual—a light not apt, as a rule, to illumine a lunch-party. Of this they were sublimely unconscious; at their ignoring of it Warren Venables smiled a little. They were wholly innocent of the half-humorous, half-boastful posturing of the conscious rake; these things, assumed as the basis of their stories rather than narrated, were to them entirely natural—a matter of course. From the same outer darkness—Venables came to believe it was that—Tommy had discoursed ofMarchese Peppino. It was not that they considered themselves reputable people, but simply that reputability (and the word includes in this case common honesty) was a thing wholly ignored by them, outside their sphere of knowledge. Certainly, such ignoring obviated embarrassment. Meanwhile, to entertain a tableful of strangers at lunch is an admirable gift. Mrs. Venables, possibly, did not sufficiently appreciate it; being amused came very much lower down on her scale of pleasures than being interested; it was perhaps fortunate, therefore, that it was a pleasure much rarer of attainment. She did not desire it of the Crevequers; she desired, as she phrased it, to draw them out, to achieve a near and serious intimacy.

When every one had finished eating too much (the Crevequers wondered to each other afterwards why it had come to an end just at that point, no sooner and no later; they themselves, once wound up to eat continuously, could have carried it on indefinitely), Mrs. Venables found a divan for herself and Betty in a secluded corner of the large hall, and continued the process of eduction. She had formed a plan; she wished of all things to come into contact with the real life of the people; she wanted Tommy and Betty to help her.

'You must be so delightfully intimate with them. With me they may be suspicious and reserved at first. And I am not at all completely mistress of the language. But I can at all events give them a very genuine sympathy and interest; and it would please me to try the experiment. I know something of our girls in London who work at the great factories. If we could form a sort of club here—social evenings, and so on—your help would be of immense value to me. You have achieved a real intimacy—you and your brother. To share the same faith must be a tremendous bond; there is no more tenacious or more beautiful tie, as Tolstoy says.... You remember the passage, perhaps?'

Betty shook her head.

'We don't read much, Tommy and I don't. There seems always something else to be done, out in the streets or somewhere.'

'The true pagan joy in mere living,' reflected Mrs. Venables, and continued: 'If one could call oneself, definitely, a member of any faith.... But one cannot, after all, sacrifice truth to beauty—even to the beauty of sympathy and close community with others.... You are happy in having found a firm foothold.'

Mrs. Venables was not crude enough to ask questions on these subjects; she drew confidence gently towards her. Doubt found in her always a ready hearer. But Betty, it seemed, was not in doubt.

A further step in intimacy Mrs. Venables achieved.

'If there is anything I can do to help you.... I should be glad, you know, to be of any service to your father's children.... We must see a great deal of each other.'

'Thank you very much,' said Betty, considering.

Mrs. Venables perceived the pondering glance of the melancholy eyes, and leaned forward, laying a gentle hand on the thin childish one, waiting confidence.

'Well ... if you would be so awfully kind as to l-lend us twenty francs,' the sad tones stammered.

'Lend you....'

Mrs. Venables drew back; her surprise startled Betty. It was, surely, a very usual and natural request.

'Of course,' Mrs. Venables said gently, after a moment. 'I will give it to you now.... I am so sorry....'

'Thank you tremendously.'

Betty put the notes in her purse. Mrs. Venables became aware that the Crevequer smile, with the single dimple, was rather engaging. Then Tommy came up with Venables, and said it was time to go away.

Miss Varley, as she said good-bye, referred to Betty's statement that she sometimes posed.

'Will you for me? I am painting a picture, and I should be very grateful if you would.'

The unsmiling directness of the tone made the request very much a matter of business. Betty said she would.

'Warren and Prudence are always painting,' Miranda explained mournfully. 'Their pictures are rotten, I think; I hate them.'

The Crevequers went.

'Very picturesque; very striking; very sad,' Mrs. Venables observed.

'Very obvious,' Warren commented. 'I would have betted a guinea that Crevequer would borrow from me; he did. I call that so obvious as to be tiresome.'

To his cousin, a little later, he remarked:

'You're standing on a quite false pedestal of superiority, you know. Because you're going to paint her yourself. Where's the difference?'

'Ah, well, there is some. To me she's frankly copy, you see; I shall pretend nothing else; I shan't call it making friends—don't you see? There's where it comes in.'

'All the same, you'll be doing what you repudiate; you'll be making use for your own ends of what you wouldn't otherwise have anything to do with. You're in a false position; you can't escape that by sophistries.'

'If I am, I shall have to be more than ever careful not to make it falser by throwing veils over it,' said Prudence Varley consideringly.

She had the air of a person of a very delicate sense of justice—delicate almost to exaggeration. One detected it in her farsighted grey eyes, with the twinkle that lurked just within call.

Warren chuckled.

'Poor model! You needn't make it so hard as all that for her; let her have a veil or two—it's so much more comfortable.'

Prudence shook her head with decision.

'It wouldn't be fair; it would be ugly.'

Warren smiled again—at her characteristic habit of arriving, with great deliberation, at her own position in a matter, and remaining in it unshaken. If to her perception an immense difference stretched between the frankness of taking copy as such, and ending there, and the course of tact and sympathy and 'achievement of intimacy' which his mother pursued, no accusations of sophistry or overniceness would bridge that gulf to her.

'Well,' Venables said, half defensively, 'Mother really is interested, you know—very much so.'

Prudence frowned over it, half abstractedly.

'As I see it, you either like people or you don't. If you don't, and yet make use of them, they've got to know how the thing stands and all about it.'

'The Crevequers, you know,' Venables said, 'are quite clever enough to know "all about it," even if you do use a veil or two.'

'Are they?' Prudence's eyes mused. 'Oh, I dare say they're clever enough to know. But, Warren, I have a feeling about them—it came to me in the middle of lunch, quite suddenly—that theydon'tknow; that, somehow, either because they are made so, or because they've missed their chances, they know—well, really very little indeed about themselves and how they stand. And that—if that's so—makes it worse; because, do you see, if we accepted them, they would take it naturally, and be content to be accepted; and all the time there would be all kinds of things between us, that we knew of and that they didn't. That would be ugly. Don't you see? But if we don't accept them, the things between don't matter; it's all right and fair.'

'Well, it may be. Anyhow, if that's what mother would call your "mental standpoint," I'm a little sorry for Miss Crevequer. It will be an embarrassing sitting—except that I can't quite imagine either of you embarrassed.... Personally, you know, they amuse me quite a lot.'

'Oh, well, as to that——' The twinkle came to the front of the grey eyes.

The Crevequers, lounging about Santa Lucia that evening, had their own comments to make. They were a little puzzled.

'Whynotbe a Catholic?' Tommy pondered, with knitted forehead. 'What else should a man be? Why is it funnier than to be a heretic, or a Jew, or a Buddhist? Perhaps those thingsareinteresting, though, if once one begins thinking about them. We aren't interested in enough things, Betty. Let's study agnostics, and begin with Mrs. Venables. We'll ask her how she feels in church, and say "this is most impressive," as she does. Do agnostics go to church, at least?'

'She does. She watches the devout worshippers. We must think of some nice striking things to tell her, Tommy. She likes that, and we ought to do it, as they've been so kind to us—about how the contadini round Baja still pray to Pan, and things of that sort, that foreigners always like to hear. Would she take that, do you think? No, not quite, perhaps—rather risky. It was very nice of them to lend us both money; and they won't be in a hurry, I should think. I shall rather like to sit to Miss Varley; she's nice to look at, don't you think? She doesn't say very much, but then I can do that.'

'Well, I call them all rather decent,' Tommy said.

They stood for a little and listened to the soft sound of the little night waves scraping the shingle, and looked over the still, dark bay, cut across by the golden road of the three-quarter moon, to where the pine-shaped column above Vesuvius hung and blazed intermittently.

'Something ominous in that sign that the sleeping monster still lives,' murmured Betty. Then, in answer to a questioning stare, 'Not my own—Mrs. Venables. Tommy, I'm sleepy; let's go to bed.'

'No,' said Tommy—'supper at Brunati's. We'll find some one to have it with us.'

Betty looked dubious.

'To-morrow, don't you think? We really did have such a splendid lunch....'

'To-night,' said Tommy recklessly. 'They must have had tea just after we left them, and dinner after that, and I expect they eat more at it than they did at lunch. We're as good as they are, I should think.'

'The internal nature of each being is surrounded by a circle, not to be surmounted by his fellows; and it is this repulsion which constitutes the misfortune of the condition of life.'—Shelley.

'Our eyes are hidden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened.'—Emerson.

'Forty-six—ninety-eight—fifteen—sixty-three—twenty-seven,' little Silvio Sardi announced at the door of the Trattoria Buonaventura, at the top of his strident young voice.

When he had repeated it three times, every one understood. The expectant stir gave place, in general, to flat disappointment. It is unfortunate to be so sanguine that the weekly disappointment loses none of its force with repetition.

But Tommy Crevequer stood up suddenly.

'Ninety-eight and sixty-three. I say, Betty——'

Betty nodded.

'They're ours all right. The ambo; that's how much—seventy-five francs.'

The Crevequers were rapid and accurate at mental arithmetic.

Congratulation buzzed round them.

Some one raised a voice of anguish.

'Madre Dio, I should have won the terno if I'd staked the numbers my husband had from the parocco, and I forgot all about it!'

The general opinion, conveyed by shrugs and expressive pursings of the lips, seemed to be that this was a great pity for Maddalena. They all knew her husband, who was a Guardian of the Public Security and a hard man. A friend of his remarked, in a confidential undertone, with no uncertainty on the subject, 'He'll cut her throat for her.'

'It won't be the first time if he does,' returned his neighbour. 'Dio! what a fool!'

A man from a table in a corner got up and came over to the Crevequers, and sat down beside them, with an aspect of resolution, good-humoured but adamant.

'I shall come with you when you fetch it,' he observed, nodding cheerfully.

Tommy looked at him, his eyebrows a little aggrieved.

'Oh, Grollo, you——I tell you, I've any amount to do with it; it will go no way.'

'On the contrary, it will go nearly all the way. For the remaining five francs I'll wait.'

'I've got to get my evening clothes out of pawn; I'm going out to dinner on Monday.'

'Well, you must go as you are, then.'

Tommy looked at him resentfully.

'Well, half, then—forty?'

'I shall come with you when you fetch it,' the creditor repeated, good-temperedly stubborn.

'Oh, well——' Tommy shrugged his shoulders resignedly. 'Come, then; I shall fetch it now. Coming, Betty?'

'No.'

Betty was talking to Gina Lunelli. Gina was a fine young woman, rather beautiful, with black curly hair, and an immense amount of experience, on and off the music-hall stage, for her twenty-seven years. She was a great friend of the Crevequers; it rather entertained her that anyone should be so silly and so young. All the men she knew made love to her as a matter of course—or possibly she made love to them; it, anyhow, between the two, was invariably made. Tommy Crevequer's love-making was to both an excellent joke; to Betty also, for they were nearly always a three-cornered party. Gina and Betty went out now and stood in the street and talked; or rather Gina talked, and Betty listened and rather often laughed; it took very little to amuse the Crevequers. Soon Tommy came back; he carried a parcel; his face was rather gloomy.

'Grollo's got it all,' he remarked resentfully. 'But I've got my dress-clothes; I met Venables.'

'He who walks home from the theatre with you?' Gina said to Betty.

'Yes. He's always so kind about lending us money,' Betty explained.

Gina nodded. She had once been introduced to Venables in the Crevequers' room; she had been a little embarrassed with him; it was a type outside her fairly wide sphere of experience.

'Well, good-bye till to-night; I must go.'

The Crevequers walked home through the darkening December afternoon.

'Venables is really decent,' Tommy observed, with some enthusiasm.

Betty nodded. They had seen a good deal of Venables lately. Yesterday he and Betty had been to Baja in a motor-car; it had amused them both very much. He was a good companion, being quite ready and able to enter into the game of being hopelessly silly, which, the Crevequers had long since found, very many people, otherwise pleasant, quite failed to understand. Nobody, it seemed to them, understood it quite as well as they did themselves; it was fortunate, therefore, as they sometimes remarked, that they had each other to go about with.

In the evolution of relations with the Venables, that with Warren seemed now to be, on the whole, the most satisfactory. The relation with Mrs. Venables, though her own 'achievement of intimacy' suffered no flagging, had been to the Crevequers a little spoiled by a renunciation on their side. For sometime they co-operated readily and cheerfully in the process of eduction; knowing it their business to 'strike,' they did their best to do so, laying on effects sometimes a little over lurid. They instituted competitions as to which of them could call forth most often during an interview the comment 'very striking.' Tommy usually won, because, as Betty complained, Mrs. Venables was more easily struck by boys than by girls. It was Tommy who appropriated Betty's idea of the worship of Pan that lingered in country districts about Naples.

'That's why goats are so common, all about the streets—don't you know?'

He turned to Miranda, who nodded.

'I know. Beasts. I hate them.'

Mrs. Venables was stirred.

'So vestiges of paganism really do linger. That is extremely striking.'

Tommy, pluming himself, happened to look across and meet Miss Varley's eyes fastened consideringly upon him. He returned the regard with his melancholy gaze.

'Not only Pan, either—Venus, Jupiter, Mars——'

'Don't!' Miranda interrupted. 'You're going on just like my astronomy mistress. She was a beast. I hated her. And I hate stars. And you do talk rot, you two. You both tell the most awful——'

But Tommy was looking at Miss Varley with his sad regard from under quick black brows.

She turned to her aunt and started a new subject.

Tommy remarked to her as he said good-bye:

'I'm sorry you thought I was so rude.'

She looked at him for a moment.

'I shouldn't have thought you were particularly sorry, you know. Good-bye.'

The leisurely considering tone, that quite lacked interest, seemed to add an edge to the words.

Tommy, going home with Betty, observed:

'I'm not going to be striking any more. Miss Varley looks at me, and it makes me so shy, and when one's shy one isn't convincing.... I suppose it's really rather a rotten game, you know.'

Betty admitted that it might be so. So that renunciation was made, and their relation with Mrs. Venables became less amusing to themselves and, presumably, less edifying to her. It was quite wearying having to be so comparatively literal.

The Crevequers wondered if Miss Varley appreciated the sacrifice. Betty did not imagine her likely to notice it; she was a person of abstraction. She took an interest, it seemed, in nothing but her work. To be in her presence—in her studio, for instance—was a little like being in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of a mountain-top. It was curious, always, to plunge suddenly into it. To get back afterwards into the warm valleys was also rather curious. Her conversation, when she had any, was a little obvious in its conventionality. It seemed to Betty, when she looked at her, surprising that this should be so. She was pleasant to look at, slim and tall, with head poised a little high, a little backwards; her short upper lip was caught up a little from her lower, seeming to carry out the character of the round, lifted chin and backward-poised head. Over her far-seeing grey eyes her fair brows often puckered thoughtfully, as if they strove to discern. The winter sunshine, striking in through the window, made of her light hair a fluffy aureole. There was, perhaps, a Puritan touch somewhere about her, emphasized by the simple lines of her green painting-smock. There was also something remote, inaccessible. Her grey eyes, dwelling on Betty, were artist's eyes; they seemed to take in every line, carefully noting, and to give out nothing. There was in their regard a certain quality of reserve, an implication of something held back.

Betty, returning the look with her own melancholy child's gaze, took it in without interpretation or analysis. It happens sometimes that for the interpretation of a look we have to wait for spaces of years. Apprehension is a thing of gradual growth; sudden lightening is rare.

Betty felt it a pity that Miss Varley was not a more conversational person, or at least that her conversation should be so very unexciting, so obvious. In the unquiet condition of Vesuvius, in the fact that a great number of visitors were staying in Naples, Betty felt not the least interest. But Miss Varley seemed disinclined to talk of other things; when the conversation tended to become at all autobiographical she became inattentive and absorbed. Betty, lest she should become bored (an unthinkable calamity), started a game, something of the nature of that which she and Tommy played with Mrs. Venables; the object in this case was to produce the sudden curve of the lifted upper lip, the quick twinkle in the grey eyes, which seemed to come irrepressibly, and half against the owner's will. When Betty scored a point—it really happened fairly often—it cheered her very much.

It was curious how much she liked Prudence Varley. She would have liked to see a great deal of her, not in the rarefied altitude of the studio, but in a more human and convivial atmosphere. She would very much have liked to ask her to tea (the Crevequers hated tea as a drink, but the function amused them, especially when they were the entertainers). She did suggest it one day, but Miss Varley, it seemed, had other engagements. Mrs. Venables came, with Miranda. Miranda was being educated; she was being introduced to the life of the people. The people did not interest her at all, but she liked the Crevequers, whose function was that of go-between. She would have liked to make a friend of Betty. She and Tommy were, of course, 'rotters'; they both talked much too much, and usually the most awful rubbish, and their absurd stammer made it sound sillier still, and you never knew when they meant a thing and when they didn't; and they neither knew nor cared anything about games or sport.

But, all this said, Miranda was left in an attitude of half-puzzled admiration, of which she could not have quite explained the reason. Her frequent 'I say, you are rotters, you two!' conveyed a little bewilderment, a touch of contempt, and an immense attraction. This attraction put Mrs. Venables into a position of rather annoying inconsistency. She was not strait-laced; she would have been beyond measure distressed had prudery, or any conventional limitations, been attributed to her—had she, in anyone's mind, been termedbornée.

Nevertheless, below her æsthetic self—the self which was struck, which designed Liberty dresses and wrote novels (those novels which the Crevequers had decided to put off reading till they were thirty-two and thirty-three)—there lurked a self more ordinary, to whom the artistic issues were obscured, who could become, on occasion, purely the disapproving, very reputable censor of conduct. It was the existence of this self, side by side with the other, which made Prudence Varley sit in judgment on her attitude towards the Crevequers and their kind; it was the existence of this self which made the position of Miranda something of a problem.

Theoretically, it was right and desirable that Miranda should see life as it was lived; practically, Mrs. Venables hesitated a little when confronted by the atmosphere so corrupt and so disreputable—she could not phrase it otherwise—in which Maddan Crevequer's children moved—an atmosphere that seemed to hang about them, jarring so incongruously, and at times (but not to Mrs. Venables) so laughably, with their great sad eyes and their flow of childlike nonsense.

So, half ashamed, Mrs. Venables held Miranda back from personal friendship, knowing herself false to her principles, and morbidly nervous of seeing the wordbornéelurking behind her son's observing eyes. Seeing that it was expected of him, he occasionally made use of it; in protest against it she threw herself, and threw Miranda, with increased fervour, into the Intimate Contact with the People. In the Intimate Contact the Crevequers were links. To the club-room in the Vicolo de' Fiori (the steep alley next to that of the Crevequers) they induced their friends to come; on Tuesday evenings, from half-past six to half-past seven, girls and women (really a very creditable number) sat and made paper hats, and Mrs. Venables achieved intimacy with them. Then they danced; finally they paid a penny and had coffee and a bun, over which further intimacy was achieved. On Saturday nights men and boys came, and played bagatelle and spoof and quit, at Mrs. Venables' suggestion, and mora andzecchinettoon their own. The intimacy here was chiefly achieved by the Crevequers, who joined in the games. But every one was very agreeable to Mrs. Venables, though, as she said, difference of language (and of faith) made confidential relations a matter of slow growth. She envied the Crevequers their closer intimacy.

Miranda on these occasions usually sat in a chair by herself, looking about her with slightly aggrieved blue eyes. The faint disgust in the droop of her lips implied, 'Beastly place, I hate it.' She did not wish to achieve intimacy. She wished that Betty would come and talk to her, instead of playing with the People. Sometimes Mrs. Venables would command her to go and talk to someone; then she would rise reluctantly, feeling exceedingly conscious of her movements and quite over-large. The People, she thought, seemed mostly rather undersized.

'What's the good, Mother? YouknowI can't say a single thing.' Her voice dragged plaintively.

'It will be so good for you to try. Go to that nice-looking girl over there, making a petticoat. She is smiling at you.'

She certainly appeared to be doing so. The fact did not lessen Miranda's embarrassment. She waited till her mother turned away, then turned her back without ceremony on the nice-looking girl who smiled, and made for her retreat in the corner. There she sat, yawning dejectedly, till Betty Crevequer came to her. Betty stood in front of her, regarding her with a whimsical scrutiny, her head at an angle of contemplation, her lips twitching a little.

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