“Ah, why did I touch it? I am sick to death of everything.” She went over to the sofa and flung herself back among the cushions. It was a great slab of frosted wedding-cake, kept over for the first christening. “Oh, it’s all a most frantic joke!” she said. “Here he comes, I must sit up and play to my audience, knowing all the time the audience sees into the marrow of my bones.” She was not perhaps quite sane, as saneness goes, all through their lunch, but she was strangely brilliant, her eyes flashed with a queer fluttering light, her lips were soft and mobile, and she ate her chicken with a will, and only that her natural fineness of nature restrained her, she would have seized the big old cut-glass decanter of wine and have drained it at a gulp. But she kept the curb well on and never once flagged in her course, which surprised herself even more than it did her husband. But when he went out to see the horses put in she had a little private collapse all to herself. It was hotter than ever and the flies grew more troublesome, but it was all very fresh and green. “I never knew this part was so pretty,” she said as they were driving through a chestnut-bordered lane. Talking was an effort but it seemed a less exhaustive one than sitting there mute under her husband’s reflections. “It’s pretty,” he said absently, “and almost as little known as Central Africa; look at the indifferent calm estate of those cows, they might live in the desert for anything they know of the noise of life.” “Yes, and here we are in the thick of genteel barbarism,” said Gwen, as they turned into the high road. “It is well for the cows that they live by sight, not by imagination; it’s a horrid anomaly, the cows and the country, and not a hundred yards away ’Arry rampant.” “I believe I like the combinations, still life, and life in the struggle, and ’Arry everywhere, from cradle to grave, his cemetery not a stone-throw away.” “Your toleration is rather overpowering,” remarked Gwen sardonically, “you speak in the same kindly good-humoured way of ’Arry and of God, adopting the same heavy-fatherly style to both.” “I really beg their pardons, but as a matter of fact, I look on them both as much-maligned beings and as requiring the conscientious championship of all honest citizens. We judge the two, the Potter and His clay, by measuring them by our own standards. I think, for my own part, it’s amazing impudence to sit at one’s ease and damn ’Arry, as is the vogue now; nearly as much the vogue as sitting at ease and criticizing the Almighty. I must, however, leave God and man, and proceed to think chiefly of horses for the present. Look at those brutes of donkey carts!” They were just going up the hill which was abnormally crowded. The donkey carts were ubiquitous. “I never saw them so thick before,” said Strange, “why, I forgot, of course, it’s a holiday! I wonder if it will be so crowded down the hill? Those tram lines are the deuce for hoofs.”