Mrs. Thornbury went with them to the gate, trailing very slowly and gracefully across the grass and the gravel, and talking all the time about flowers and birds.  She told them that she had taken up the study of botany since her daughter married, and it was wonderful what a number of flowers there were which she had never seen, although she had lived in the country all her life and she was now seventy-two.  It was a good thing to have some occupation which was quite independent of other people, she said, when one got old.  But the odd thing was that one never felt old.  She always felt that she was twenty-five, not a day more or a day less, but, of course, one couldn’t expect other people to agree to that.

“It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to imagine that you’re twenty-five,” she said, looking from one to the other with her smooth, bright glance.  “It must be very wonderful, very wonderful indeed.”  She stood talking to them at the gate for a long time; she seemed reluctant that they should go.

Chapter XXV

The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on the shore sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature, and even on the terrace under an awning the bricks were hot, and the air danced perpetually over the short dry grass.  The red flowers in the stone basins were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now dry, and their edges were curled and yellow.  Only the stiff and hostile plants of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be grown upon spines, still remained standing upright and defied the sun to beat them down.  It was too hot to talk, and it was not easy to find any book that would withstand the power of the sun.  Many books had been tried and then let fall, and now Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the words of Milton had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary to understand what he was saying; one could merely listen to his words; one could almost handle them.

There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,

he read,

     That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream. 
       Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;
     Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,
       That had the sceptre from his father Brute.

The words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be laden with meaning, and perhaps it was for this reason that it was painful to listen to them; they sounded strange; they meant different things from what they usually meant.  Rachel at any rate could not keep her attention fixed upon them, but went off upon curious trains of thought suggested by words such as “curb” and “Locrine” and “Brute,” which brought unpleasant sights before her eyes, independently of their meaning.  Owing to the heat and the dancing air the garden too looked strange—­the trees were either too near or too far, and her head almost certainly ached.  She was not quite certain, and therefore she did not know, whether to tell Terence now, or to let him go on reading.  She decided that she would wait until he came to the end of a stanza, and if by that time she had turned her head this way and that, and it ached in every position undoubtedly, she would say very calmly that her head ached.