Cecilia cried with heat, “I do wish you would attend a minute, Father; it’s really an important matter,” and she turned towards the window, tears being very near her eyes.

The voice of Mr. Stone said humbly:  “I will try, my dear.”

But Cecilia thought:  ’I must give him a good lesson.  He really is too self-absorbed’; and she did not move, conveying by the posture of her shoulders how gravely she was vexed.

She could see nursemaids wheeling babies towards the Gardens, and noted their faces gazing, not at the babies, but, uppishly, at other nursemaids, or, with a sort of cautious longing, at men who passed.  How selfish they looked!  She felt a little glow of satisfaction that she was making this thin and bent old man behind her conscious of his egoism.

‘He will know better another time,’ she thought.  Suddenly she heard a whistling, squeaking sound—­it was Mr. Stone whispering the third page of his manuscript: 

“’—–­animated by some admirable sentiments, but whose doctrines—­riddled by the fact that life is but the change of form to form—­were too constricted for the evils they designed to remedy; this little sect, who had as yet to learn the meaning of universal love, were making the most strenuous efforts, in advance of the community at large, to understand themselves.  The necessary, movement which they voiced—­reaction against the high-tide of the fratricidal system then prevailing—­was young, and had the freshness and honesty of youth....’”

Without a word Cecilia turned round and hurried to the door.  She saw her father drop the sheet of paper; she saw his face, all pink and silver, stooping after it; and remorse visited her anger.

In the corridor outside she was arrested by a noise.  The uncertain light of London halls fell there; on close inspection the sufferer was seen to be Miranda, who, unable to decide whether she wanted to be in the garden or the house, was seated beneath the hatrack snuffling to herself.  On seeing Cecilia she came out.

“What do you want, you little beast?”

Peering at her over the tops of her eyes, Miranda vaguely lifted a white foot.  ‘Why ask me that?’ she seemed to say.  ’How am I to know?  Are we not all like this?’

Her conduct, coming at that moment, over-tried Cecilia’s nerves.  She threw open Hilary’s study-door, saying sharply:  “Go in and find your master!”

Miranda did not move, but Hilary came out instead.  He had been correcting proofs to catch the post, and wore the look of a man abstracted, faintly contemptuous of other forms of life.

Cecilia, once more saved from the necessity of approaching her sister, the mistress of the house, so fugitive, haunting, and unseen, yet so much the centre of this situation, said: 

“Can I speak to you a minute, Hilary?”

They went into his study, and Miranda came creeping in behind.

To Cecilia her brother-in-law always seemed an amiable and more or less pathetic figure.  In his literary preoccupations he allowed people to impose on him.  He looked unsubstantial beside the bust of Socrates, which moved Cecilia strangely—­it was so very massive and so very ugly!  She decided not to beat about the bush.