Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her aunts, their views, and the way they lived.  Indeed this was a subject that lasted her hundreds of morning walks round Richmond Park, and blotted out the trees and the people and the deer.  Why did they do the things they did, and what did they feel, and what was it all about?  Again she heard Aunt Lucy talking to Aunt Eleanor.  She had been that morning to take up the character of a servant, “And, of course, at half-past ten in the morning one expects to find the housemaid brushing the stairs.”  How odd!  How unspeakably odd!  But she could not explain to herself why suddenly as her aunt spoke the whole system in which they lived had appeared before her eyes as something quite unfamiliar and inexplicable, and themselves as chairs or umbrellas dropped about here and there without any reason.  She could only say with her slight stammer, “Are you f-f-fond of Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Lucy?” to which her aunt replied, with her nervous hen-like twitter of a laugh, “My dear child, what questions you do ask!”

“How fond?  Very fond!” Rachel pursued.

“I can’t say I’ve ever thought ‘how,’” said Miss Vinrace.  “If one cares one doesn’t think ‘how,’ Rachel,” which was aimed at the niece who had never yet “come” to her aunts as cordially as they wished.

“But you know I care for you, don’t you, dear, because you’re your mother’s daughter, if for no other reason, and there are plenty of other reasons”—­and she leant over and kissed her with some emotion, and the argument was spilt irretrievably about the place like a bucket of milk.

By these means Rachel reached that stage in thinking, if thinking it can be called, when the eyes are intent upon a ball or a knob and the lips cease to move.  Her efforts to come to an understanding had only hurt her aunt’s feelings, and the conclusion must be that it is better not to try.  To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently.  It was far better to play the piano and forget all the rest.  The conclusion was very welcome.  Let these odd men and women—­her aunts, the Hunts, Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest—­be symbols,—­featureless but dignified, symbols of age, of youth, of motherhood, of learning, and beautiful often as people upon the stage are beautiful.  It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.  Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling to think about it, except as something superficially strange.  Absorbed by her music she accepted her lot very complacently, blazing into indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and subsiding as she subsided now.  Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion, her mind seemed