h other,
and were friends.

Mrs. Wilkins had always been friends, but Scrap had struggled not
to be. She had tried hard to be cautious, but how difficult was
caution with Mrs. Wilkins! Free herself from every vestige of it, she
was so entirely unreserved, so completely expansive, that soon Scrap,
almost before she knew what she was doing, was being unreserved too.
And nobody could be more unreserved than Scrap, once she let herself
go.

The only difficulty about Lotty was that she was nearly always
somewhere else. You couldn't catch her; you couldn't pin her down to
come and talk. Scrap's fears that she would grab seemed grotesque in
retrospect. Why, there was no grab in her. At dinner and after dinner
were the only times one really saw her. All day long she was
invisible, and would come back in the late afternoon looking a perfect
sight, her hair full of bits of moss, and her freckles worse than ever.
Perhaps she was making the most of her time before Mellersh arrived to
do all the things she wanted to do, and meant to devote herself
afterwards to going about with him, tidy and in her best clothes.

Scrap watched her, interested in spite of herself, because it
seemed so extraordinary to be as happy as all that on so little. San
Salvatore was beautiful, and the weather was divine; but scenery and
weather had never been enough for Scrap, and how could they be enough
for somebody who would have to leave them quite soon and go back to
life in Hampstead? Also, there was the imminence of Mellersh, of that
Mellersh from whom Lotty had so lately run. It was all very well to
feel one ought to share, and to make a beau geste and do it, but the
beaux gestes Scrap had known hadn't made anybody happy. Nobody really
liked being the object of one, and it always meant an effort on the
part of the maker. Still, she had to admit there was no effort about
Lotty; it was quite plain that everything she did and said was
effortless, and that she was just simply, completely happy.

And so Mrs. Wilkins was; for her doubts as to whether she had had
time to become steady enough in serenity to go on being serene in
Mellersh's company when she had it uninterruptedly right round the
clock, had gone by the middle of the week, and she felt that nothing
now could shake her. She was ready for anything. She was firmly
grafted, rooted, built into heaven. Whatever Mellersh said or did, she
would not budge an inch out of heaven, would n