Nobody diverted her now, reflected Mrs. Fisher, making straight for the clump of daphne; the world had grown very dull, and had entirely lost its sense of humour.  Probably they still had their jokes, these people—­in fact she knew they did, for Punch still went on; but how differently it went on, and what jokes.  Thackeray, in his inimitable way, would have made mincemeat of this generation.  Of how much it needed the tonic properties of that astringent pen it was of course unaware.  It no longer even held him—­at least, so she had been informed—­in any particular esteem.  Well, she could not give it eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to understand, but she could and would give it, represented and united in the form of Lady Caroline, a good dose of honest medicine.

“I hear you are not well,” she said, standing in the narrow entrance of the loop and looking down with the inflexible face of one who is determined to do good at the motionless and apparently sleeping Scrap.

Mrs. Fisher had a deep voice, very like a man’s, for she had been overtaken by that strange masculinity that sometimes pursues a woman during the last laps of her life.

Scrap tried to pretend that she was asleep, but if she had been her cigarette would not have been held in her fingers but would have been lying on the ground.

She forgot this.  Mrs. Fisher did not, and coming inside the loop, sat down on a narrow stone seat built out of the wall.  For a little she could sit on it; for a little, till the chill began to penetrate.

She contemplated the figure before her.  Undoubtedly a pretty creature, and one that would have had a success at Farringford.  Strange how easily even the greatest men were moved by exteriors.  She had seen with her own eyes Tennyson turn away from everybody—­turn, positively, his back on a crowd of eminent people assembled to do him honour, and withdraw to the window with a young person nobody had ever heard of, who had been brought there by accident and whose one and only merit—­if it be a merit, that which is conferred by chance—­was beauty.  Beauty!  All over before you can turn round.  An affair, one might almost say, of minutes.  Well, while it lasted it did seem able to do what it liked with men.  Even husbands were not immune.  There had been passages in the life of Mr. Fisher . . .

“I expect the journey has upset you,” she said in her deep voice.  “What you want is a good dose of some simple medicine.  I shall ask Domenico if there is such a thing in the village as castor oil.”

Scrap opened her eyes and looked straight at Mrs. Fisher.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Fisher, “I knew you were not asleep.  If you had been you would have let your cigarette fall to the ground.”

“Waste,” said Mrs. Fisher.  “I don’t like smoking for women, but I still less like waste.”

“What does one do with people like this?” Scrap asked herself, her eyes fixed on Mrs. Fisher in what felt to her an indignant stare but appeared to Mrs. Fisher as really charming docility.