"Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?" The technique of the Rector's sermons involved the repetition of his text at stated intervals. Cicely thought, as the words fell on her ears for the third or fourth time, that she could have supplied a meaning to them which had escaped the preacher. Food and raiment! That represented all the things amongst which she had been brought up, the large, comfortable rooms in the big house, the abundant, punctual meals, the tribe of servants, the clothes and the trinkets, the gardens and stables, well-stocked and well-filled, the home farm, kept up to supply the needs of the large household, everything that came to the children of a well-to-do country gentleman as a matter of course, and made life easy--but oh, how dull! No one seeing her sitting there quietly, her slender, ungloved hands lying in her lap, prettily dressed in a cool summer frock and a shady, flower-trimmed hat, with the jewelled chains and bracelets and brooches of a rich man's daughter rousing the admiring envy of the school-children, whose weekly excitement it was to count them up--nobody would have thought that under the plaited tresses of this young girl's shapely head was a brain seething in revolt, or that the silken laces of her bodice muffled the beatings of a heart suffocated by the luxurious dulness of a life which she now told herself had become insupportable. Cicely had thought a great deal since her visit to London and Muriel's wedding, and had arrived at this conclusion--that she was suffocating, and that her life was insupportable. She raised her eyes and glanced at her father, wrapped in the pleasant slumber that overtakes healthy, out-of-door men when they are forced for a time into unwonted quiescence, and at her brother, calm and self-satisfied, dressed with a correct elaboration that was only unobtrusive because it was so expensively perfect. The men of the family--everything was done to bring them honour and gratification. They had everything they wanted and did what they would. It was to them that tribute and obedience were paid by every one around them, including their own womenfolk. She looked at her two young sisters. They were happy enough in their free and healthy childhood; so had she been at their age, when the spacious house and the big gardens, the stables and the farm and the open country had provided everything she needed for her amusement. But even then there had been the irksome restraint exercised by "the old starling" and the fixed rules of the house to spoil her freedom, while her brothers had been away at Eton, or at Oxford or Cambridge, trying their wings and preparing for the unfettered delights of well-endowed manhood.