Naturally Mrs. Wilkins was blotted out.  “She,” said his sister, with something herself of the judicial, the digested, and the final in her manner, “should stay at home.”  But Wilkins could not leave his wife at home.  He was a family solicitor, and all such have wives and show them.  With his in the week he went to parties, and with his on Sundays he went to church.  Being still fairly young—­he was thirty-nine—­and ambitious of old ladies, of whom he had not yet acquired in his practice a sufficient number, he could not afford to miss church, and it was there that Mrs. Wilkins became familiar, though never through words, with Mrs. Arbuthnot.

She saw her marshalling the children of the poor into pews.  She would come in at the head of the procession from the Sunday School exactly five minutes before the choir, and get her boys and girls neatly fitted into their allotted seats, and down on their little knees in their preliminary prayer, and up again on their feet just as, to the swelling organ, the vestry door opened, and the choir and clergy, big with the litanies and commandments they were presently to roll out, emerged.  She had a sad face, yet she was evidently efficient.  The combination used to make Mrs. Wilkins wonder, for she had been told my Mellersh, on days when she had only been able to get plaice, that if one were efficient one wouldn’t be depressed, and that if one does one’s job well one becomes automatically bright and brisk.

About Mrs. Arbuthnot there was nothing bright and brisk, though much in her way with the Sunday School children that was automatic; but when Mrs. Wilkins, turning from the window, caught sight of her in the club she was not being automatic at all, but was looking fixedly at one portion of the first page of The Times, holding the paper quite still, her eyes not moving.  She was just staring; and her face, as usual, was the face of a patient and disappointed Madonna.

Mrs. Wilkins watched her a minute, trying to screw up courage to speak to her.  She wanted to ask her if she had seen the advertisement.  She did not know why she wanted to ask her this, but she wanted to.  How stupid not to be able to speak to her.  She looked so kind.  She looked so unhappy.  Why couldn’t two unhappy people refresh each other on their way through this dusty business of life by a little talk—­real, natural talk, about what they felt, what they would have liked, what they still tried to hope?  And she could not help thinking that Mrs. Arbuthnot, too, was reading that very same advertisement.  Her eyes were on the very part of the paper.  Was she, too, picturing what it would be like—­the colour, the fragrance, the light, the soft lapping of the sea among little hot rocks?  Colour, fragrance, light, sea; instead of Shaftesbury Avenue, and the wet omnibuses, and the fish department at Shoolbred’s, and the Tube to Hampstead, and dinner, and to-morrow the same and the day after the same and always the same . . .