“Oh, she noticed after a time. She began to be uncomfortable. I—withdrew myself, as it were. You know my way. She didn’t like that. She tried—I will say that for her—she did try to direct the conversation towards my subjects. Useless, of course. He was, not illiterate—no, you can’t say illiterate—but curiously unintellectual. Socialism now—somehow we got on to socialism. That roused him. I must say, though he expressed himself clumsily, that he had ideas. But so limited. He had never heard of Marx. Bernard Shaw was barely a name to him. Socialism—his socialism—when we disentangled it, was only another word for the proper feeding of the local infants—drains—measles—the village schools. Beyond that he was mute. But Madala chimed in with details of American slum life, and roused him at once. They grew quite eloquent. But not one word, if you please, of her own work. Anything and everything but her work. He did ask her what she was doing. ‘Oh,’ said she in an offhand way, ‘I scribble. Stories.’ And then—‘It earns money, and it kills time.’ Yes, that’s exactly how she put it. ‘Madala!’ I said, ‘that’s not the spirit—’ I’d never heard her use such a tone before. She had such high ideals of art. It jarred me. I thought that she ought to have known better. But she looked at me in such a curious way—defiant almost. She said—‘It’s my own spirit, Nita. Oh, let me have a holiday!’ And at that up she jumped and left us sitting there, and wandered off to the stile and was over it in a second. We sat still. The hedge hid her. Then we heard her call—‘Cowslips! Oh, cowslips!’ I thought he would go when she called, but he sat where he was, listening. It was one of those hot, still days, you know. There was a sort of spell on things. There were bees about. We heard a cart roll up the road. I wanted to get up and talk, make some kind of diversion, and yet I couldn’t. We heard her call again—‘Hundreds of cowslips! I’m going to make a cowslip ball.’ Her voice sounded far away, but very clear. And there was a scent of may in the air, and dust—an intoxicating smell. It made me quite sleepy. It was just as if time stood still. Three o’clock’s a drowsy time, I suppose. And he never stirred—just sat there stupidly. But I was too sleepy to be bored with him. Presently back she came. She had picked up her skirt and her petticoat showed—it was that lavender silk you gave her, Lila. So unsuitable, you know, on those dirty roads. And her skirt was full of cowslips. She was just a dark figure against the sky until she was close to us; but then, I thought that she looked pretty, extremely pretty. Bright cheeks, you know, and her eyes so blue——” “Grey—” said Mr. Flood, “the grey eyes of a goddess.”