ht with him and your Uncle Dick looking bored and your Aunt Adela
looking nothing at all--and so out of it I came."

He came over and sat on the broad, fat arm of her chair and looked out,
in his contented, amiable way, over the light, salmon-coloured and pale,
that now had persuaded Portland Place into silence. His eyes seemed to
say: "Now this is how I like things--all pink and quiet and
comfortable."

Rachel leant a little against his shoulder, and put her hand on his
knee--

"You've had tea down there?"

"Yes, thank you--all I wanted. What have you been doing all the
afternoon?"

He put his own hand down upon hers.

"Oh! Aunt Adela and I went to look at grandmother's portrait."

"Well?"

"It's as clever as it can be. To anyone who doesn't know her, it's the
most wonderful likeness. It's what grandmother would like herself."

He caught the note in her voice that threatened the pink security of
Portland Place. He held her hand a little tighter.

"In what way?"

"Oh, it's got the dragons and the tapestry and the purple carpet. All
the coloured things that grandmother like so much and that help her so.
Why, imagine her for a second in an ordinary room, in an old arm-chair
with a worn-out carpet and everlastings on the mantelpiece; what _would_
she do? The young man, whoever he is, has helped her all he can."

Rachel felt his grasp of her hand slacken a little.

"Yes, I know it's wrong of me to talk like that. But it's all so sham.
It's like someone in one of those absurd fantastic novels that people
write nowadays when half the characters are out of Dickens only put into
a real background. I'm frightened of grandmother--you know I always have
been--but sometimes I wonder whether----"

She paused.

"Whether there's anything really to be frightened of. And yet the relief
when I can get off this half-hour every evening--the relief even now
when I'm even grown up--oh! it's absurd!"

"Well, my dear, you're coming out, you're going to break away from all
of us--you'll have your own life now to make what you like of."

"Yes, that's all very well. But I've been brought up all wrong. Most
girls begin to come out when they're about ten and go on, more and more,
until, when the time actually comes, well, there's simply nothing in it.
I've never known anyone intimately except May, and now at the thought of
crowds and crowds of people, at one moment I'd like to fly into a
convent somewhere, and at the next I wa