Cousin Jane held distinct views on the cut of under-clothes for the deserving poor, and as clouds disperse before the sun so did household dust before her presence.  Untidiness followed in Zora’s steps, as it does in those of the physically large, and Cousin Jane disapproved of her thoroughly.  But Mrs. Oldrieve often sighed for Cousin Jane as she had never sighed for Zora, Emily, or her husband.  She was more than content with the prospect of her companionship.

“At any rate, my dear,” she said that evening, as she paused, candle in hand, by her bedroom door, “at any rate I hope you’ll do nothing that is unbecoming to a gentlewoman.”

Such was her benison.

Zora bumped her head against the oak beam that ran across her bedroom ceiling.

“It’s quite true,” she said to herself, “the place is too small for me, I don’t fit.”

* * * * *

What she was going to do in this wide world into whose glories she was about to enter she had but the vaguest notion.  All to her was the Beautiful Unknown.  Narrow means had kept her at Cheltenham and afterwards at Nunsmere, all her life.  She had met her husband in Ipswich while she was paying a polite visit to some distant cousins.  She had married him offhand, in a whirl of the senses.  He was a handsome blackguard, of independent means, and she had spent her nightmare of a honeymoon at Brighton.  On three occasions, during her five-and-twenty years of existence, she had spent a golden week in London.  That was all she knew of the wide world.  It was not very much.  Reading had given her a second-hand acquaintance with the doings of various classes of mankind, and such pictures as she had seen had filled her head with dreams of strange and wonderful places.  But otherwise she was ignorant, beautifully, childishly ignorant—­and undismayed.

What was she going to do?  Sensitive and responsive to beauty, filled with artistic impulses, she could neither paint, act, sing, nor write pretty little stories for the magazines.  She had no special gift to develop.  To earn her living in a humdrum way she had no need.  She had no high Ibsenite notions of working out her own individuality.  She had no consuming passion for reforming any section of the universe.  She had no mission—­that she knew of—­to accomplish.  Unlike so many of her sex who yearn to be as men and go out into the world she had no inner mandate to do anything, no ambition to be anything.  She was simply a great, rich flower, struggling through the shade to the sunlight, plenty of sunlight, as much sunlight as the heavens could give her.

The Literary Man from London happened to be returning to town by the train that carried Zora on the first stage of her pilgrimage.  He obtained her consent to travel up in the same carriage.  He asked her to what branch of human activity she intended to devote herself.  She answered that she was going to lie, anyhow, among the leaves.  He rebuked her.