There had been wonderful stars the evening before, and she had gone out into the top garden after dinner, leaving Mrs. Fisher alone over her nuts and wine, and, sitting on the wall at the place where the lilies crowded their ghost heads, she had looked out into the gulf of the night, and it had suddenly seemed as if her life had been a noise all about nothing.

She had been intensely surprised.  She knew stars and darkness did produce unusual emotions because, in others, she had seen them being produced, but they had not before done it in herself.  A noise all about nothing.  Could she be quite well?  She had wondered.  For a long while past she had been aware that her life was a noise, but it had seemed to be very much about something; a noise, indeed, about so much that she felt she must get out of earshot for a little or she would be completely, and perhaps permanently, deafened.  But suppose it was only a noise about nothing?

She had not had a question like that in her mind before.  It had made her feel lonely.  She wanted to be alone, but not lonely.  That was very different; that was something that ached and hurt dreadfully right inside one.  It was what one dreaded most.  It was what made one go to so many parties; and lately even the parties had seemed once or twice not to be a perfectly certain protection.  Was it possible that loneliness had nothing to do with circumstances, but only with the way one met them?  Perhaps, she had thought, she had better go to bed.  She couldn’t be very well.

She went to bed; and in the morning, after she had escaped the fly and had her breakfast and got out again into the garden, there was this same feeling again, and in broad daylight.  Once more she had that really rather disgusting suspicion that her life till now had not only been loud but empty.  Well, if that were so, and if her first twenty-eight years—­the best ones—­had gone just in meaningless noise, she had better stop a moment and look round her; pause, as they said in tiresome novels, and consider.  She hadn’t got many sets of twenty-eight years.  One more would see her growing very like Mrs. Fisher.  Two more—­ She averted her eyes.

Her mother would have been concerned if she had known.  Her mother doted.  Her father would have been concerned too, for he also doted.  Everybody doted.  And when, melodiously obstinate, she had insisted on going off to entomb herself in Italy for a whole month with queer people she had got out of an advertisement, refusing even to take her maid, the only explanation her friends could imagine was that poor Scrap—­such was her name among them—­had overdone it and was feeling a little nervy.