“I should like to call you Helen,” Rachel answered.

“D’you think me very unsympathetic?”

Rachel reviewed the points which Helen had certainly failed to understand; they arose chiefly from the difference of nearly twenty years in age between them, which made Mrs. Ambrose appear too humorous and cool in a matter of such moment.

“No,” she said.  “Some things you don’t understand, of course.”

“Of course,” Helen agreed.  “So now you can go ahead and be a person on your own account,” she added.

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel’s mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.

“I can by m-m-myself,” she stammered, “in spite of you, in spite of the Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my Aunts, in spite of these?” She swept her hand across a whole page of statesmen and soldiers.

“In spite of them all,” said Helen gravely.  She then put down her needle, and explained a plan which had come into her head as they talked.  Instead of wandering on down the Amazons until she reached some sulphurous tropical port, where one had to lie within doors all day beating off insects with a fan, the sensible thing to do surely was to spend the season with them in their villa by the seaside, where among other advantages Mrs. Ambrose herself would be at hand to—­“After all, Rachel,” she broke off, “it’s silly to pretend that because there’s twenty years’ difference between us we therefore can’t talk to each other like human beings.”

“No; because we like each other,” said Rachel.

“Yes,” Mrs. Ambrose agreed.

That fact, together with other facts, had been made clear by their twenty minutes’ talk, although how they had come to these conclusions they could not have said.

However they were come by, they were sufficiently serious to send Mrs. Ambrose a day or two later in search of her brother-in-law.  She found him sitting in his room working, applying a stout blue pencil authoritatively to bundles of filmy paper.  Papers lay to left and to right of him, there were great envelopes so gorged with papers that they spilt papers on to the table.  Above him hung a photograph of a woman’s head.  The need of sitting absolutely still before a Cockney photographer had given her lips a queer little pucker, and her eyes for the same reason looked as though she thought the whole situation ridiculous.  Nevertheless it was the head of an individual and interesting woman, who would no doubt have turned and laughed at Willoughby if she could have caught his eye; but when he looked up at her he sighed profoundly.  In his mind this work of his, the great factories at Hull which showed like mountains at night, the ships that crossed the ocean punctually, the schemes for combining this and that and building up a solid mass of industry, was all an offering to her; he laid his success at her feet; and was always thinking how to educate his daughter so that Theresa might be glad.  He was a very ambitious man; and although he had not been particularly kind to her while she lived, as Helen thought, he now believed that she watched him from Heaven, and inspired what was good in him.