“How little they look,” Michael said.

Their littleness and their distance made them harmless, made them pathetic.  Frances was sorry that she was not glad.  That was the difference between her and Dorothy, that she was sorry and always would be sorry for not being what she ought to be; and Dorothy never would be sorry for being what she was.  She seemed to be saying, already, in her clearness and hardness, “What I am I am, and you can’t change me.”  The utmost you could wring from her was that she couldn’t help it.

Frances’s sorrow was almost unbearable when the four women in black came nearer, when she saw them climbing the slope below the garden and the lane.

II

Grannie took a long time crossing the lawn from the door in the lane to the tree of Heaven.

She came first.  Her daughters followed, forced to her slow pace, advancing with an air of imperfect cohesion, of not really belonging to each other, as if they had been strangers associated by some accident.  It had grown on them in their efforts to carry off the embarrassment of appearing as an eternal trio.  Auntie Louie carried it off best.  Sharp and rigid, Auntie Louie’s figure never lent itself to any group.  But for her black gown she really might not have belonged.

Mrs. Fleming went slowly, not because she was old, for she was only sixty, but because, though she said, and thought, that she was wrapped up in Frances and her children, she was still absorbed, fascinated by her sacred sense of bereavement.  She moved as if hypnotized by her own sorrow.

To her three unmarried daughters she behaved with a sort of mystic hostility, a holy detachment and displeasure, as if she suspected them of getting over it, or of wanting to get over it if they could.  But to her one married daughter and to her grand-children she was soft and gentle.  So that, when they happened to be all together, her moods changed so rapidly that she seemed a creature of unaccountable caprice.  One minute her small, white, dry face quivered with softness and gentleness, and the next it stiffened, or twitched with the inimical, disapproving look it had for Louie and Emmeline and Edith.

The children lifted up their pure, impassive faces to be kissed at.  Old Nanna brought Baby John and put him on his grandmother’s knee.  Dorothy and Nicholas went off with Mary-Nanna to the party.  Michael forgot all about playing with himself.  He stayed where he was, drawn by the spectacle of Grannie and the Aunties.  Grannie was clucking and chuckling to Baby John as she had clucked and chuckled to her own babies long ago.  Her under lip made itself wide and full; it worked with an in and out movement very funny and interesting to Michael.  The movement meant that Grannie chuckled under protest of memories that were sacred to Grandpapa.

“Tchoo—­tchoo—­tchoo—­tchoo!  Chuckaboo!  Beautiful boy!” said Grannie.