To live there always, I thought, would be bliss, provided that Philip was with me, always in a house covered with ivy and conducted by an aunt who baked and fried for you and tied up your cuts, and would clean half a hundred perchlings for you without a murmur, though by the end of it her face and the adjacent windows were covered with the flying scales. “Why don’t you catch two or three really big ones?” she would question, sighing for weariness, but still smiling at us, and putting on her crafty-looking spectacles. “Whew, if we could,” we said one to another. It seemed possible for the moment; for she was a wonderful woman, and the house wonderful too, no anger, no sorrow, no fret, such a large fire-place, everything different from London, and better than anything in London except Abercorran House. The ticking of her three clocks was delicious, especially very early in the morning as you lay awake, or when you got home tired at twilight, before lamps were lit. Everything had been as it was in Aunt Rachel’s house for untold time; it was natural like the trees; also it was never stale; you never came down in the morning feeling that you had done the same yesterday and would do the same to-morrow, as if each day was a new, badly written line in a copy-book, with the same senseless words at the head of every page. Why couldn’t we always live there? There was no church or chapel for us--Philip had never in his life been to either. Sunday at Lydiard Constantine was not the day of grim dulness when everyone was set free from work, only to show that he or she did not know what to do or not to do; if they had been chained slaves these people from Candelent Street and elsewhere could not have been stiffer or more savagely solemn. Those adult people were a different race. I had no thought that Philip or I could become like that, and I laughed at them without a pang, not knowing what was to save Philip from such an end. How different from those people was my aunt, her face serene and kind, notwithstanding that she was bustling about all day and had trodden her heels down and had let her hair break out into horns and wisps.