Scrap burrowed her head comfortably in the cushions, and with her feet crossed on the low parapet gave herself up to more thought.  She said to herself, as she had said at intervals throughout the morning:  Now I’m going to think.  But, never having thought out anything in her life, it was difficult.  Extraordinary how one’s attention wouldn’t stay fixed; extraordinary how one’s mind slipped sideways.  Settling herself down to a review of her past as a preliminary to the consideration of her future, and hunting in it to begin with for any justification of that distressing word tawdry, the next thing she knew was that she wasn’t thinking about this at all, but had somehow switched on to Mr. Wilkins.

Well, Mr. Wilkins was quite easy to think about, though not pleasant.  She viewed his approach with misgivings.  For not only was it a profound and unexpected bore to have a man added to the party, and a man, too, of the kind she was sure Mr. Wilkins must be, but she was afraid—­and her fear was the result of a drearily unvarying experience —­that he might wish to hang about her.

This possibility had evidently not yet occurred to Mrs. Wilkins, and it was not one to which she could very well draw her attention; not, that is, without being too fatuous to live.  She tried to hope that Mr. Wilkins would be a wonderful exception to the dreadful rule.  If only he were, she would be so much obliged to him that she believed she might really quite like him.

But—­she had misgivings.  Suppose he hung about her so that she was driven from her lovely top garden; suppose the light in Mrs. Wilkins’s funny, flickering face was blown out.  Scrap felt she would particularly dislike this to happen to Mrs. Wilkins’s face, yet she had never in her life met any wives, not any at all, who had been able to understand that she didn’t in the least want their husbands.  Often she had met wives who didn’t want their husbands either, but that made them none the less indignant if they thought somebody else did, and none the less sure, when they saw them hanging round Scrap, that she was trying to get them.  Trying to get them!  The bare thought, the bare recollection of these situations, filled her with a boredom so extreme that it instantly sent her to sleep again.

When she woke up she went on with Mr. Wilkins.

Now if, thought Scrap, Mr. Wilkins were not an exception and behaved in the usual way, would Mrs. Wilkins understand, or would it just simply spoil her holiday?  She seemed quick, but would she be quick about just this?  She seemed to understand and see inside one, but would she understand and see inside one when it came to Mr. Wilkins?

The experienced Scrap was full of doubts.  She shifted her feet on the parapet; she jerked a cushion straight.  Perhaps she had better try and explain to Mrs. Wilkins, during the days still remaining before the arrival—­explain in a general way, rather vague and talking at large—­her attitude towards such things.  She might also expound to her her peculiar dislike of people’s husbands, and her profound craving to be, at least for this one month, let alone.