"If he gets that appointment he won't go back." She thought: "She'll never be unhappy again. She'll never be afraid he'll get cholera." For a minute their souls met and burned together in the joy they shared. Then broke apart. "Aren't you going to show me Mr. Sutcliffe's letter?" "Why should I?" "You don't mean to say there's anything in it I can't see?" "You can see it if you like. There's nothing in it." That was why she hadn't wanted her to see it. For anything there was in it you might never have known him. But Mrs. Sutcliffe had sent her love. Mamma looked up sharply. "Did you write to him, Mary?" "Of course I did." "You'll not write again. He's let you know pretty plainly he isn't going to be bothered." (It wasn't that. It couldn't be that.) "Did they say anything more about your going there?" "No." "That ought to show you then.... But as long as you live you'll give yourself away to people who don't want you." "I'd rather you didn't talk about them." "I should like to know what I _can_ talk about," said Mamma. She folded up her work and laid it in the basket. Her voice dropped from the sharp note of resentment. "I wish you'd go and see if those asters have come." II. The asters had come. She had carried out the long, shallow boxes into the garden. She had left her mother kneeling beside them, looking with adoration into the large, round, innocent faces, white and purple, mauve and magenta and amethyst and pink. If the asters had not come the memory of the awful things they had said to each other would have remained with them till bed-time; but Mamma would be happy with the asters like a child with its toys, planning where they were to go and planting them. She went up to her room. After thirteen years she had still the same childish pleasure in the thought that it was hers and couldn't be taken from her, because nobody else wanted it. The bookshelves stretched into three long rows on the white wall above her bed to hold the books Mr. Sutcliffe had given her; a light blue row for the Thomas Hardys; a dark blue for the George Merediths; royal blue and gold for the Rudyard Kiplings. And in the narrow upright bookcase in the arm of the T facing her writing-table, Mark's books: the Homers and the Greek dramatists. Their backs had faded from puce colour to drab. Mark's books.--When she looked at them she could still feel her old, childish lust for possession, her childish sense of insecurity, of defeat. And something else. The beginning of thinking things about Mamma. She could see herself standing in Mark's bedroom at Five Elms and Mamma with her hands on Mark's books. She could hear herself saying, "You're afraid." "What did I think Mamma was afraid of?" Mamma was happy out there with the asters. There would be three hours before dinner.