“They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble,” he thought, surveying his guests from a little distance, where he was gathering together the plates.  He glanced at them all, stooping and swaying and gesticulating round the table-cloth.  Amiable and modest, respectable in many ways, lovable even in their contentment and desire to be kind, how mediocre they all were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one another!  There was Mrs. Thornbury, sweet but trivial in her maternal egoism; Mrs. Elliot, perpetually complaining of her lot; her husband a mere pea in a pod; and Susan—­she had no self, and counted neither one way nor the other; Venning was as honest and as brutal as a schoolboy; poor old Thornbury merely trod his round like a horse in a mill; and the less one examined into Evelyn’s character the better, he suspected.  Yet these were the people with money, and to them rather than to others was given the management of the world.  Put among them some one more vital, who cared for life or for beauty, and what an agony, what a waste would they inflict on him if he tried to share with them and not to scourge!

“There’s Hirst,” he concluded, coming to the figure of his friend; with his usual little frown of concentration upon his forehead he was peeling the skin off a banana.  “And he’s as ugly as sin.”  For the ugliness of St. John Hirst, and the limitations that went with it, he made the rest in some way responsible.  It was their fault that he had to live alone.  Then he came to Helen, attracted to her by the sound of her laugh.  She was laughing at Miss Allan.  “You wear combinations in this heat?” she said in a voice which was meant to be private.  He liked the look of her immensely, not so much her beauty, but her largeness and simplicity, which made her stand out from the rest like a great stone woman, and he passed on in a gentler mood.  His eye fell upon Rachel.  She was lying back rather behind the others resting on one elbow; she might have been thinking precisely the same thoughts as Hewet himself.  Her eyes were fixed rather sadly but not intently upon the row of people opposite her.  Hewet crawled up to her on his knees, with a piece of bread in his hand.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

She was a little startled, but answered directly, “Human beings.”

Chapter XI

One after another they rose and stretched themselves, and in a few minutes divided more or less into two separate parties.  One of these parties was dominated by Hughling Elliot and Mrs. Thornbury, who, having both read the same books and considered the same questions, were now anxious to name the places beneath them and to hang upon them stores of information about navies and armies, political parties, natives and mineral products—­all of which combined, they said, to prove that South America was the country of the future.

Evelyn M. listened with her bright blue eyes fixed upon the oracles.