reams of watery words, to which we, with our
aerial-resonant ears, are deaf for ever.

The odd thing was that this odd fish seemed from the very first to
imagine she had accepted him as a follower. And he was quite
prepared to follow. Nay, from the very first moment he was smiling
on her with a sort of complacent delight--compassionate, one might
almost say--as if there was a full understanding between them. If
only she could have got into the right state of mind, she would
really rather have liked him. He smiled at her, and said really
interesting things between his big teeth. There was something rather
nice about him. But, we must repeat, it was as if the glass wall of
an aquarium divided them.

Alvina looked at Arthur. Arthur was short and dark-haired and nicely
coloured. But, now his brother was there, he too seemed to have a
dumb, aqueous silence, fish-like and aloof, about him. He seemed to
swim like a fish in his own little element. Strange it all was,
like Alice in Wonderland. Alvina understood now Lottie's strained
sort of thinness, a haggard, sinewy, sea-weedy look. The poor thing
was all the time swimming for her life.

For Alvina it was a most curious tea-party. She listened and smiled
and made vague answers to Albert, who leaned his broad, thin,
brittle shoulders towards her. Lottie seemed rather shadowily to
preside. But it was Arthur who came out into communication. And now,
uttering his rather broad-mouthed speeches, she seemed to hear in
him a quieter, subtler edition of his father. His father had been a
little, terrifically loud-voiced, hard-skinned man, amazingly
uneducated and amazingly bullying, who had tyrannized for many years
over the Sunday School children during morning service. He had been
an odd-looking creature with round grey whiskers: to Alvina, always
a creature, never a man: an atrocious leprechaun from under the
Chapel floor. And how he used to dig the children in the back with
his horrible iron thumb, if the poor things happened to whisper or
nod in chapel!

These were his children--most curious chips of the old block. Who
ever would have believed she would have been taking tea with them.

"Why don't you have a bicycle, and go out on it?" Arthur was saying.

"But I can't ride," said Alvina.

"You'd learn in a couple of lessons. There's nothing in riding a
bicycle."

"I don't believe I ever should," laughed Alvina.

"You don't mean to say you're nervous?" said Arthur rudely