That, thought Mrs. Fisher, her eyes going steadily line by line down the page and not a word of it getting through into her consciousness, if foolish of friends.  It is condemning one to a premature death.  One should continue (of course with dignity) to develop, however old one may be.  She had nothing against developing, against further ripeness, because as long as one was alive one was not dead—­obviously, decided Mrs. Fisher, and development, change, ripening, were life.  What she would dislike would be unripening, going back to something green.  She would dislike it intensely; and this is what she felt she was on the brink of doing.

Naturally it made her very uneasy, and only in constant movement could she find distraction.  Increasingly restless and no longer able to confine herself to her battlements, she wandered more and more frequently, and also aimlessly, in and out of the top garden, to the growing surprise of Scrap, especially when she found that all Mrs. Fisher did was to stare for a few minutes at the view, pick a few dead leaves off the rose-bushes, and go away again.

In Mr. Wilkins’s conversation she found temporary relief, but though he joined her whenever he could he was not always there, for he spread his attentions judiciously among the three ladies, and when he was somewhere else she had to face and manage her thoughts as best she could by herself.  Perhaps it was the excess of light and colour at San Salvatore which made every other place seem dark and black; and Prince of Wales Terrace did seem a very dark black spot to have to go back to —­a dark, narrow street, and her house dark and narrow as the street, with nothing really living or young in it.  The goldfish could hardly be called living, or at most not more than half living, and were certainly not young, and except for them there were only the maids, and they were dusty old things.

Dusty old things.  Mrs. Fisher paused in her thoughts, arrested by the strange expression.  Where had it come from?  How was it possible for it to come at all?  It might have been one of Mrs. Wilkins’s, in its levity, its almost slang.  Perhaps it was one of hers, and she had heard her say it and unconsciously caught it from her.

If so, this was both serious and disgusting.  That the foolish creature should penetrate into Mrs. Fisher’s very mind and establish her personality there, the personality which was still, in spite of the harmony apparently existing between her and her intelligent husband, so alien to Mrs. Fisher’s own, so far removed from what she understood and liked, and infect her with her undesirable phrases, was most disturbing.  Never in her life before had such a sentence come into Mrs. Fisher’s head.  Never in her life before had she though of her maids, or of anybody else, as dusty old things.  Her maids were not dusty old things; they were most respectable, neat women, who were allowed the use of the bathroom every Saturday night.  Elderly, certainly, but then so was she, so was her house, so was her furniture, so were her goldfish.  They were all elderly, as they should be, together.  But there was a great difference between being elderly and being a dusty old thing.