And this was not what he wanted.  He wanted some strange wonder and excitement; he wanted to find it in Anne and in nobody but Anne, and he couldn’t find it.  He wanted to be in love with Anne and he wasn’t.  She was too near him, too much a part of him, too well-known, too well-remembered.  She made him restless and impatient, looking, looking for the strangeness, the mystery he wanted and couldn’t find.

If only he could have seen her suddenly for the first time.

iii

It was extraordinary how happy it made her to be with Aunt Adeline, walking slowly, slowly, with her round the garden, stretched out beside her on the terrace, following her abrupt moves from the sun into the shade and back again; or sitting for hours with her in the big darkened bedroom when Adeline had one of the bad headaches that attacked her now, brushing her hair, and putting handkerchiefs soaked in eau-de-cologne on her hot forehead.

Extraordinary, because this inactivity did violence to Anne’s nature; besides, Auntie Adeline behaved as if you were uninteresting and unimportant, not attending to a word you said.  Yet her strength lay in her inconsistency.  One minute her arrogance ignored you and the next she came humbly and begged for your caresses; she was dependent, like a child, on your affection.  Anne thought that pathetic.  And there was always her fascination.  That was absolute; above logic and morality, irrefutable as the sweetness of a flower.  Everybody felt it, even the servants whom she tormented with her incalculable wants.  Jerrold and Colin, even Eliot, now that he was grown-up, felt it.  As for Uncle Robert he was like a young man in the beginning of first love.

Adeline judged people by their attitude to her.  Anne, whether she listened to her or not, was her own darling.  Her husband and John Severn were adorable, Major Markham of Wyck Wold and Mr. Hawtrey of Medlicote, who admired her, were perfect dears, Sir John Corbett of Underwoods, who didn’t, was that silly old thing.  Resist her and she felt no mean resentment; you simply dropped out of her scene.  Thus her world was peopled with her adorers.

Anne couldn’t have told you whether she felt the charm on its own account, or whether the pleasure of being with her was simply part of the blessed state of being at Wyck-on-the-Hill.  Enough that Auntie Adeline was there where Uncle Robert and Eliot and Colin and Jerrold were; she belonged to them; she belonged to the house and garden; she stood with the flowers.

Anne was walking with her now, gathering roses for the house.  The garden was like a room shut in by the clipped yew walls, and open to the sky.  The sunshine poured into it; the flagged walks were pale with heat.

Anne’s cat, Nicky, was there, the black Persian that Jerrold had given her last birthday.  He sat in the middle of the path, on his haunches, his forelegs straight and stiff, planted together.  His face had a look of sweet and solemn meditation.