“Oh no,” said Helen, with great decision.  From her observations at tea she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to educate Rachel.  She had gradually come to be interested in her niece, and fond of her; she disliked some things about her very much, she was amused by others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being, experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling.  Somewhere in the depths of her, too, she was bound to Rachel by the indestructible if inexplicable ties of sex.  “She seems vague, but she’s a will of her own,” she said, as if in the interval she had run through her qualities.

The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses into the dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in her skeins of silk, or, with head a little drawn back and eyes narrowed, considered the effect of the whole.  Thus she merely said, “Um-m-m” to St. John’s next remark, “I shall ask her to go for a walk with me.”

Perhaps he resented this division of attention.  He sat silent watching Helen closely.

“You’re absolutely happy,” he proclaimed at last.

“Yes?” Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.

“Marriage, I suppose,” said St. John.

“Yes,” said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.

“Children?” St. John enquired.

“Yes,” said Helen, sticking her needle in again.  “I don’t know why I’m happy,” she suddenly laughed, looking him full in the face.  There was a considerable pause.

“There’s an abyss between us,” said St. John.  His voice sounded as if it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks.  “You’re infinitely simpler than I am.  Women always are, of course.  That’s the difficulty.  One never knows how a woman gets there.  Supposing all the time you’re thinking, ‘Oh, what a morbid young man!’”

Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand.  From her position she saw his head in front of the dark pyramid of a magnolia-tree.  With one foot raised on the rung of a chair, and her elbow out in the attitude for sewing, her own figure possessed the sublimity of a woman’s of the early world, spinning the thread of fate—­the sublimity possessed by many women of the present day who fall into the attitude required by scrubbing or sewing.  St. John looked at her.

“I suppose you’ve never paid any a compliment in the course of your life,” he said irrelevantly.

“I spoil Ridley rather,” Helen considered.

“I’m going to ask you point blank—­do you like me?”

After a certain pause, she replied, “Yes, certainly.”

“Thank God!” he exclaimed.  “That’s one mercy.  You see,” he continued with emotion, “I’d rather you liked me than any one I’ve ever met.”

“What about the five philosophers?” said Helen, with a laugh, stitching firmly and swiftly at her canvas.  “I wish you’d describe them.”