Really she was thinking as much of her own good name as of Jay’s.  For there was a most irritating similarity between Jay’s present apparent practices and Mrs. Gustus’s own much-expressed theories.  The beauty of a free life of simplicity had filled pages of Anonyma’s notebooks, and also, to the annoyance of Cousin Gustus, had overflowed into her conversation.  Cousin Gustus’s memory had been constantly busy extracting from the past moral tales concerning the disasters attendant on excessive simplicity in human relationships.  For a time it had seemed as if Cousin Gustus’s lot had been cast entirely with the matrimonially unorthodox.  And now Mrs. Gustus, for one impatient minute, wished that the children would pay more attention to their elderly and experienced guardian.  It was too much to ask her—­a professional theory-maker—­to adapt her theories to the young and literal.  That was the worst of Jay, she was so literal, so unimaginative, so lacking in the simple unpractical quality of poetry.  However, not a word to the others.  Jay’s reputation and Anonyma’s dignity might yet be saved.

“I don’t know where we are going,” said Anonyma presently.  “I have no bump of locality.”

She always spoke proudly of her failings, as though there were a rapt press interviewer at her elbow, anxious to make a word-vignette about her.

Mr. Russell was thinking, and Kew was singing, so between them they forgot to shape the course of Christina due west.  When they got outside London, they found themselves going south.

To go out of London was like going out of doors.  The beauty of London is a dim beauty, and while you are in the middle of it you forget what it is like to see things clearly.  In London every hour is a hill of adventure, and in the country every hour is a dimple in a quiet expanse of time.

The Family went out over the hills of Surrey, and between roadside trees they saw the crowned heads of the seaward downs.  The horizon sank lower around them, the fields and woods circled and squared the ribs of the land.

Before sunset they had reached the little town that guards the gate in the wall of the Sussex downs.  They were welcomed by a thunderstorm, and by passionate rain that drove them to the inn.  Christina, torn between her pride of soul and her pride of paint, was obliged to edge herself into a shed which was already occupied by two cows and a red and blue waggon.

When the pursuers of Jay set their feet on the uneven floor of the inn, they recognised the place immediately as ideal.  Its windows squinted, its floor made you feel as though you were drunk, its banisters reeled, its flights of stairs looked frequently round in an angular way at their own beginnings.

“How Arcadian!” said Mrs. Gustus, as she splashed her signature into the visitor’s book.  “One could be content to vegetate for ever here.  Isn’t it pathetic how one spends one’s life collecting heart’s desires, until one suddenly discovers that in having nothing and in desiring nothing lies happiness.”