The Virginia Woolf Megapack. Virginia Woolf

white? Or only brown?” Thus she herself murmured, examining a hair which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. She pulled it out and laid it on the dressing-table. She was criticising her own appearance, or rather approving of it, standing a little way back from the glass and looking at her own face with superb pride and melancholy, when her husband appeared in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half obscured by a towel.

      “You often tell me I don’t notice things,” he remarked.

      “Tell me if this is a white hair, then?” she replied. She laid the hair on his hand.

      “There’s not a white hair on your head,” he exclaimed.

      “Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt,” she sighed; and bowed her head under his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced only a kiss where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife then proceeded to move about the room, casually murmuring.

      “What was that you were saying?” Helen remarked, after an interval of conversation which no third person could have understood.

      “Rachel—you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel,” he observed significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked at him. His observations were apt to be true.

      “Young gentlemen don’t interest themselves in young women’s education without a motive,” he remarked.

      “Oh, Hirst,” said Helen.

      “Hirst and Hewet, they’re all the same to me—all covered with spots,” he replied. “He advises her to read Gibbon. Did you know that?”

      Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior to her husband in powers of observation. She merely said:

      “Nothing would surprise me. Even that dreadful flying man we met at the dance—even Mr. Dalloway—even—”

      “I advise you to be circumspect,” said Ridley. “There’s Willoughby, remember—Willoughby”; he pointed at a letter.

      Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her dressing-table. Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive, perpetually jocular, robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring after his daughter’s manners and morals—hoping she wasn’t a bore, and bidding them pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she were—and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion, and then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little natives who went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he roared English oaths at them, “popping my head out of the window just as I was, in my shirt sleeves. The beggars had the sense to scatter.”

      “If Theresa married Willoughby,” she remarked, turning the page with a hairpin, “one doesn’t see what’s to prevent Rachel—”

      But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with the washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and yet Ridley couldn’t simply point at the door and tell him to go. The truth of it was, they saw too many people. And so on and so on, more conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both ready to go down to tea.

      The first thing that caught Helen’s eye as she came downstairs was a carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding on the tops of hats. She had only time to gain the drawing-room before two names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thornbury came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.

      “Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing,” said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand. “A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry.”

      Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically. She was a woman of forty perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust, though not as tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.

      She looked Helen straight in the face and said, “You have a charmin’ house.”

      She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you, and though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous at the same time. Mrs. Thornbury acted as interpreter, making things smooth all round by a series of charming commonplace remarks.

      “I’ve taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose,” she said, “to promise that you will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the benefit of your experience. I’m sure no one here knows the country as well as you do. No one takes such wonderful long walks. No one, I’m sure, has your encyclopaedic knowledge upon every subject. Mr. Wilfrid Flushing is a collector. He has discovered really beautiful things already. I had no notion that the peasants were so artistic—though of course in the past—”

      “Not old things—new things,” interrupted Mrs. Flushing curtly. “That is, if he takes my advice.”

      The Ambroses had not lived for many years in London without knowing something of a good many people, by name at least, and Helen remembered hearing of the Flushings. Mr. Flushing was a man who kept an old furniture shop; he had always said he would not marry because most women have red cheeks, and would not take a house because most houses have narrow staircases, and would not eat meat because most animals bleed when they are killed; and then he had married an eccentric aristocratic lady, who certainly was not pale, who looked as if she ate meat, who had forced him to do all the things he most disliked—and this then was the lady. Helen looked at her with interest. They had moved out into the garden, where the tea was laid under a tree, and Mrs. Flushing was helping herself to cherry jam. She had a peculiar jerking movement of the body when she spoke, which caused the canary-coloured plume on her hat to jerk too. Her small but finely-cut and vigorous features, together with the deep red of lips and cheeks, pointed to many generations of well-trained and well-nourished ancestors behind her.

      “Nothin’ that’s more than twenty years old interests me,” she continued. “Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they stick ’em in museums when they’re only fit for burnin’.”

      “I quite agree,” Helen laughed. “But my husband spends his life in digging up manuscripts which nobody wants.” She was amused by Ridley’s expression of startled disapproval.

      “There’s a clever man in London called John who paints ever so much better than the old masters,” Mrs. Flushing continued. “His pictures excite me—nothin’ that’s old excites me.”

      “But even his pictures will become old,” Mrs. Thornbury intervened.

      “Then I’ll have ’em burnt, or I’ll put it in my will,” said Mrs. Flushing.

      “And Mrs. Flushing lived in one of the most beautiful old houses in England—Chillingley,” Mrs. Thornbury explained to the rest of them.

      “If I’d my way I’d burn that tomorrow,” Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless.

      “What does any sane person want with those great big houses?” she demanded. “If you go downstairs after dark you’re covered with black beetles, and the electric lights always goin’ out. What would you do if spiders came out of the tap when you turned on the hot water?” she demanded, fixing her eye on Helen.

      Mrs. Ambrose shrugged her shoulders with a smile.

      “This is what I like,” said Mrs. Flushing. She jerked her head at the Villa. “A little house in a garden. I had one once in Ireland. One could lie in bed in the mornin’ and pick roses outside the window with one’s toes.”

      “And the gardeners, weren’t they surprised?” Mrs. Thornbury enquired.

      “There were no gardeners,” Mrs. Flushing chuckled. “Nobody but me and an old woman without any teeth. You know the poor in Ireland lose their teeth after they’re twenty. But you wouldn’t expect a politician to understand that—Arthur Balfour wouldn’t understand that.”

      Ridley sighed that he never expected any one to understand anything, least of all politicians.

      “However,” he concluded, “there’s