“I was thinking how one longs to share this with those one loves,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.

“You mustn’t long in heaven,” said Mrs. Wilkins.  “You’re supposed to be quite complete there.  And it is heaven, isn’t it, Rose?  See how everything has been let in together—­the dandelions and the irises, the vulgar and the superior, me and Mrs. Fisher—­all welcome, all mixed up anyhow, and all so visibly happy and enjoying ourselves.”

“Mrs. Fisher doesn’t seem happy—­not visibly, anyhow,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, smiling.

“She’ll begin soon, you’ll see.”

Mrs. Arbuthnot said she didn’t believe that after a certain age people began anything.

Mrs. Wilkins said she was sure no one, however old and tough, could resist the effects of perfect beauty.  Before many days, perhaps only hours, they would see Mrs. Fisher bursting out into every kind of exuberance.  “I’m quite sure,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “that we’ve got to heaven, and once Mrs. Fisher realizes that that’s where she is, she’s bound to be different.  You’ll see.  She’ll leave off being ossified, and go all soft and able to stretch, and we shall get quite—­why, I shouldn’t be surprised if we get quite fond of her.”

The idea of Mrs. Fisher bursting out into anything, she who seemed so particularly firmly fixed inside her buttons, made Mrs. Arbuthnot laugh.  She condoned Lotty’s loose way of talking of heaven, because in such a place, on such a morning, condonation was in the very air.  Besides, what an excuse there was.

And Lady Caroline, sitting where they had left her before breakfast on the wall, peeped over when she heard laughter, and saw them standing on the path below, and thought what a mercy it was they were laughing down there and had not come up and done it round her.  She disliked jokes at all times, but in the morning she hated them; especially close up; especially crowding in her ears.  She hoped the originals were on their way out for a walk, and not on their way back from one.  They were laughing more and more.  What could they possibly find to laugh at?

She looked down on the tops of their heads with a very serious face, for the thought of spending a month with laughers was a grave one, and they, as though they felt her eyes, turned suddenly and looked up.

The dreadful geniality of those women. . .

She shrank away from their smiles and wavings, but she could not shrink out of sight without falling into the lilies.  She neither smiled nor waved back, and turning her eyes to the more distant mountains surveyed them carefully till the two, tired of waving, moved away along the path and turned the corner and disappeared.

This time they both did notice that they had been met with, at least, unresponsiveness.

“If we weren’t in heaven,” said Mrs. Wilkins serenely, “I should say we had been snubbed, but as nobody snubs anybody there of course we can’t have been.”