drips, drips from the trees in the big dull park where my people live. I daresay I oughtn’t to say such things to you, but, as I tell you, I’m quite a proper lunatic and I might as well keep up the character. When one’s one of eight daughters and there’s very little money (for any of _us_ at least) and nothing to do but to go out with three or four others in mackintoshes, one can easily go off one’s head. Of course there’s the village, and it’s not at all a nice one, and there are the people to look after, and goodness knows they’re in want of it; but one must work with the vicarage, and at the vicarage are four more daughters, all old maids, and it’s dreary and dreadful and one has too much of it, for they don’t understand what one thinks or feels or a single word one says to them. Besides, they _are_ stupid, I admit, the country poor; they’re very very dense. I like Camberwell better,” said Lady Aurora, smiling and taking breath at the end of her nervous, hurried, almost incoherent speech, of which she had delivered herself pantingly, with strange intonations and contortions, as if afraid that from one moment to the other she would repent, not of her confidence but of her egotism. It placed her for Hyacinth in an unexpected light, making him feel that her awkward aristocratic spinsterhood was the cover of tumultuous passions. No one could have less the appearance of being animated by a vengeful irony; but he saw this timorous, scrupulous, though clearly all generous, creature to be evidently most a person not to spare, wherever she could prick them, the institutions among which she had been brought up and against which she had violently reacted. He had always supposed a reactionary to mean a backslider from the liberal faith, but Rosy’s devotee gave a new value to the term; she appeared to have been driven to her present excesses by the squire and the parson and the conservative influences of that upper-class British home which our young man had always held the highest fruit of civilisation. It was clear that her ladyship was an original, and an original with force; but it gave Hyacinth a real pang to hear her make light of Inglefield (especially the park) and of the opportunities that must have abounded in Belgrave Square. It had been his belief that in a world of suffering and injustice these things were if not the most righteous at least the most fascinating. If they didn’t give one the finest sensations where were such sensations to be had? He looked at Lady Aurora with a face that was a tribute to her sudden vividness while he said: “I can easily understand your wanting to do some good in the world, because you’re a kind of saint.” “A very curious kind!” laughed her ladyship. “But I don’t understand your not liking what your position gives you.” “I don’t know anything about my position. I want to live!” “And do you call _this_ life?” “I’ll tell you what my position is if you want to know: it’s the deadness of the grave!”