ker! It must make Life so intensely interesting!"

Behind her badinage was she half in earnest? Lawrence's eye
ranged over the old pale walls of the vicarage, on which the
climbing roses were already beginning to redden their leaves:
over the lavender borders: over the dry pale turf underfoot and
the silver and brown of the Plain, burnt by a hot summer. The
fruit that had been green in June was ripe now, and down the
Painted-Lady apple-trees fell such a cascade of ruby and
coral-coloured apples, from high sprig to heavy bole, that they
looked like trees in a Kate Greenaway drawing. But there was no
other change. Life at Chilmark flowed on uneventful from day to
day. He did not admonish Isabel to be content with it. "Should
you like to live in Chelsea?"

Isabel shut her eyes. "I should like fifteen thousand a year and
a yacht. Don't tell Jimmy, it would break his heart. He says
money is a curse. But he's not much of a judge, dear angel,
because he's never had any. What's your opinion--you're rich,
aren't you? Has it done you any harm?"

"Oh, I am a fairly decent sort of fellow as men go."

"But would you be a nobler character if you were poor?" Isabel
asked, pillowing her round chin on her palm and examining
Lawrence apparently in a spirit of scientific enquiry. "Because
that is Jimmy's theory, and merely to say that you're noble now
doesn't meet the case. Do you do good with your money?"

"No fear! I encourage trade. I've never touched second rate
stuff in my life."

"Oh, you are different!" Isabel exclaimed. They had been using
words for counters, to mean at once less and more than they said,
but under his irony she penetrated to a hard material egoism, as
swiftly as he had detected in her the eternal unrest of youth.
"Val was right."

"What saith the Gospel according to St. Val?"

"That you were only a bird of passage."

Lawrence waited a moment before replying. "Birds of passage
have their mating seasons." Once more Isabel, not knowing what
to make of this remark, let it alone. "But I should like to
possess Val's good opinion. What have I done to offend him?
Can't you give me any tips?"

"It isn't so much what you do as what you are. Val's very, very
English."

"But what am I?"

"Foreign," said Isabel simply.

"A Jew? Yes, I knew I should have that prejudice to live down.
But I'm not a hall-marked Israelite, am I? After all I'm half
English by birth and wholly so by breeding.