house he
did not exist. Why then should Alvina be attracted by him? Perhaps
because of his "closeness," and his secret determinedness.

When she met him in the street she would stop him--though he was
always busy--and make him exchange a few words with her. And when
she had tea at his house, she would try to rouse his attention. But
though he looked at her, steadily, with his blue eyes, from under
his long lashes, still, she knew, he looked at her objectively. He
never conceived any connection with her whatsoever.

It was Lottie who had a scheming mind. In the family of three
brothers there was one--not black sheep, but white. There was one
who was climbing out, to be a gentleman. This was Albert, the second
brother. He had been a school-teacher in Woodhouse: had gone out to
South Africa and occupied a post in a sort of Grammar School in one
of the cities of Cape Colony. He had accumulated some money, to add
to his patrimony. Now he was in England, at Oxford, where he would
take his belated degree. When he had got his degree, he would return
to South Africa to become head of his school, at seven hundred a
year.

Albert was thirty-two years old, and unmarried. Lottie was
determined he should take back to the Cape a suitable wife:
presumably Alvina. He spent his vacations in Woodhouse--and he was
only in his first year at Oxford. Well now, what could be more
suitable--a young man at Oxford, a young lady in Woodhouse. Lottie
told Alvina all about him, and Alvina was quite excited to meet him.
She imagined him a taller, more fascinating, educated Arthur.

For the fear of being an old maid, the fear of her own virginity was
really gaining on Alvina. There was a terrible sombre futility,
nothingness, in Manchester House. She was twenty-six years old. Her
life was utterly barren now Miss Frost had gone. She was shabby and
penniless, a mere household drudge: for James begrudged even a girl
to help in the kitchen. She was looking faded and worn. Panic, the
terrible and deadly panic which overcomes so many unmarried women at
about the age of thirty, was beginning to overcome her. She would
not care about marriage, if even she had a lover. But some sort of
_terror_ hunted her to the search of a lover. She would become
loose, she would become a prostitute, she said to herself, rather
than die off like Cassie Allsop and the rest, wither slowly and
ignominiously and hideously on the tree. She would rather kill
herself.

But i