This idyllic attitude towards life in general had lasted ten days or so, but during the last four she no longer tried to conceal from herself her mind had changed. The weather, perhaps, became rather hotter, or she more languid; in any case, though she cared no less for the dogs and the riot of vegetable life, she missed something. And that something, she was beginning to be afraid, was people. Again and again she arrived at this same disheartening conclusion, and though, as many times, she went over in her mind the list of the people whom it was possible she might miss, and found none desirable, it was none the less true that she missed them _en masse_. Imagining them with her now, one by one, she would have wished each of them away, but with them all away there was something lacking. "Perhaps they are like a tonic," she said to herself. "One doesn't want to take it, but one is the better for it." She sat up in her hammock and surveyed her surroundings. The book she had brought out to read had fallen, crumple-edged, on the grass, and looking at the back, even the very title came as new to her. Dogs in various stages of exhaustion were stretched round her, and at the sound of her movement tails thumped the grass, but otherwise none stirred. Overhead, the chestnut with green five-fingered leaves drooped in the heat, and stars of wavering light fell through the interspaces of foliage on to her dress. To the right the hay, already tall and ripe to die, stood motionless in the dead calm; and the scent of clover and flowering grass, which in the morning had been wafted in flow and ebb of varying scent, hung heavy and stagnant in the air. Southwards the river was a sheet of glass; a centreboard, hopelessly becalmed, lay with flapping sail in the middle, and a splashed line of broken water showed the paddling efforts of its master. To this side lay the lawn; the croquet hoops were up, and leaning against the stick was a mallet; four balls in as uninteresting position lay immobilized here and there, the _débris_ of a game, red versus blue, which Maud had begun that morning, but had found her honesty or her interest unable to cope with. Beyond was the house, bandaged as to the windows with green sun-blinds, and empty but for Maud's maid, who was in love with the caretaker, who adored the kitchenmaid-cook, who adored nobody. There was also the caretaker's wife, and nobody adored her.