“What was that you were saying?” Helen remarked, after an interval of conversation which no third person could have understood.

“Rachel—­you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel,” he observed significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked at him.  His observations were apt to be true.

“Young gentlemen don’t interest themselves in young women’s education without a motive,” he remarked.

“Oh, Hirst,” said Helen.

“Hirst and Hewet, they’re all the same to me—­all covered with spots,” he replied.  “He advises her to read Gibbon.  Did you know that?”

Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior to her husband in powers of observation.  She merely said: 

“Nothing would surprise me.  Even that dreadful flying man we met at the dance—­even Mr. Dalloway—­even—­”

“I advise you to be circumspect,” said Ridley.  “There’s Willoughby, remember—­Willoughby”; he pointed at a letter.

Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her dressing-table.  Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive, perpetually jocular, robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring after his daughter’s manners and morals—­hoping she wasn’t a bore, and bidding them pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she were—­and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion, and then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little natives who went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he roared English oaths at them, “popping my head out of the window just as I was, in my shirt sleeves.  The beggars had the sense to scatter.”

“If Theresa married Willoughby,” she remarked, turning the page with a hairpin, “one doesn’t see what’s to prevent Rachel—­”

But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with the washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and yet Ridley couldn’t simply point at the door and tell him to go.  The truth of it was, they saw too many people.  And so on and so on, more conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both ready to go down to tea.

The first thing that caught Helen’s eye as she came downstairs was a carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding on the tops of hats.  She had only time to gain the drawing-room before two names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thornbury came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.

“Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing,” said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand.  “A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry.”

Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically.  She was a woman of forty perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust, though not as tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.

She looked Helen straight in the face and said, “You have a charmin’ house.”