“Yes, I do,” said Mrs. Wilkins.  “Our sort of goodness does.  We have attained it, and we are unhappy.  There are miserable sorts of goodness and happy sorts—­the sort we’ll have at the mediaeval castle, for instance, is the happy sort.”

“That is, supposing we go there,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot restrainingly.  She felt that Mrs. Wilkins needed holding on to.  “After all, we’ve only written just to ask.  Anybody may do that.  I think it quite likely we shall find the conditions impossible, and even if they were not, probably by to-morrow we shall not want to go.”

“I see us there,” was Mrs. Wilkins’s answer to that.

All this was very unbalancing.  Mrs. Arbuthnot, as she presently splashed though the dripping streets on her way to a meeting she was to speak at, was in an unusually disturbed condition of mind.  She had, she hoped, shown herself very calm to Mrs. Wilkins, very practical and sober, concealing her own excitement.  But she was really extraordinarily moved, and she felt happy, and she felt guilty, and she felt afraid, and she had all the feelings, though this she did not know, of a woman who was come away from a secret meeting with her lover.  That, indeed, was what she looked like when she arrived late on her platform; she, the open-browed, looked almost furtive as her eyes fell on the staring wooden faces waiting to hear her try and persuade them to contribute to the alleviation of the urgent needs of the Hampstead poor, each one convinced that they needed contributions themselves.  She looked as though she were hiding something discreditable but delightful.  Certainly her customary clear expression of candor was not there, and its place was taken by a kind of suppressed and frightened pleasedness, which would have led a more worldly-minded audience to the instant conviction of recent and probably impassioned lovemaking.

Beauty, beauty, beauty . . . the words kept ringing in her ears as she stood on the platform talking of sad things to the sparsely attended meeting.  She had never been to Italy.  Was that really what her nest-egg was to be spent on after all?  Though she couldn’t approve of the way Mrs. Wilkins was introducing the idea of predestination into her immediate future, just as if she had no choice, just as if to struggle, or even to reflect, were useless, it yet influenced her.  Mrs. Wilkins’s eyes had been the eyes of a seer.  Some people were like that, Mrs. Arbuthnot knew; and if Mrs. Wilkins had actually seen her at the mediaeval castle it did seem probable that struggling would be a waste of time.  Still, to spend her nest-egg on self-indulgence—­ The origin of this egg had been corrupt, but she had at least supposed its end was to be creditable.  Was she to deflect it from its intended destination, which alone had appeared to justify her keeping it, and spend it on giving herself pleasure?

Mrs. Arbuthnot spoke on and on, so much practiced in the kind of speech that she could have said it all in her sleep, and at the end of the meeting, her eyes dazzled by her secret visions, she hardly noticed that nobody was moved in any way whatever, least of all in the way of contributions.