“Jolly, isn’t it,” said Gilbert, seeing the book.

“Very entertaining,” said Grandmama, and Mrs. Hilary echoed “Most,” at which Grandmama eyed her with a twinkle, knowing that it bored her, like all the Russians.  Mrs. Hilary cared nothing for style ("Literature!” said Lady Adela.  “Give me something to read!"); she liked nice lifelike books about people as she believed them to be, and though she was quite prepared to believe that real Russians were like Russians in books, she felt that she did not care to meet either of them.  But Mrs. Hilary had learnt that intelligent persons seldom liked the books which seemed to her to be about real, natural people, any more than they admired the pictures which struck her as being like things as they were.  Though she thought those who differed from her profoundly wrong, she never admitted ignorance of the books they admired.  For she was in a better position to differ from them about a book if she had nominally read it—­and really it didn’t matter if she had actually done so or not, for she knew beforehand what she would think of it if she had.  So well she knew this, indeed, that the line between the books she had and hadn’t read was, even in her own mind, smudgy and vague, not hard and clear as with most people.  Often when she had seen reviews which quoted extracts she thought she had read the book, just as some people, when they have seen publishers’ advertisements, think they have seen reviews, and declare roundly in libraries that a book is out when it lacks a month of publication.

Mrs. Hilary, having thus asserted her acquaintance with Tchekov’s Letters, left Gilbert, Grandmama and Neville to talk about it together, and herself began telling the others how disappointed Jim had been that he could not come for her birthday.

“He was passionately anxious to come,” she said, in her clear, vibrating voice, that struck a different note when she mentioned each one of her children, so that you always knew which she meant.  “He never misses to-day if he can possibly help it.  But he simply couldn’t get away....  One of these tremendously difficult new operations, that hardly anyone can do.  His work must come first, of course.  He wouldn’t be Jim if it didn’t.”

“Fancy knifing people in town a day like this,” said Rosalind, stretching her large, lazy limbs in the sun.  Rosalind was big and fair, and sensuously alive.

Music blared out from the parade.  Gilbert, adjusting his glasses, observed its circumstances, with his air of detached, fastidious interest.

“The Army,” he remarked.  “The Army calling for strayed sheep.”

“Oh,” exclaimed Rosalind, raising herself, “wouldn’t I love to go out and be saved!  I was saved once, when I was eleven.  It was one of my first thrills.  I felt I was blacker in guilt than all creatures before me, and I came forward and found the Lord.  Afraid I had a relapse rather soon, though.”