In any case, they had always been inclined to think her “a bit wild,” although why it should be considered “wild” to want to live in one country rather than another it was difficult to see. Anyhow, it was lucky for the Empire that somebody had been wild enough to do it sometimes! Occasionally she had tried to point this out both to the sisters and the friends, but she had never convinced them that it applied to her personally. Perhaps the folks among whom you were brought up never did understand that things might apply to you just as much as to the people outside. No doubt the neighbours here had thought her “a bit wild,” too, and discussed her disapprovingly over their tea-cups. The village was a small one, little more than a hamlet set on the edge of the park, and no member of the limited community would be likely to escape its gossip. The thought of their shaken heads did not distress her, however, for she had found them a kindly enough lot, on the whole. More than one of them would have a good word for her, she knew, when the message got round to them that she was leaving them for ever. She had known some of them now for nearly forty years, and yet there was not one among them she could really call a friend. They were on good enough terms, of course,--such terms as other people would undoubtedly call friendship; but in this, as in other things, she had asked more of life than it had so far seen fit to give her. A friend was a person you settled down with, side by side, and whose life dovetailed into yours as board dovetailed into board. She had never been able to have a friend like that because she had never been able to settle down. Always she had lived like someone starting on a journey, for whom at any moment the signal may be dropped. It was not only that, in her first years of homesickness and revolt, she had not cared to know the people in the place; or that, having come from a village which was the hereditary enemy of this, she was naturally disposed to dislike its inhabitants. There was jealousy between villages as bitter and lasting as there ever was between individuals. Nobody knew what started it, as a rule, or why it persisted from generation to generation. But the moment the people from these two places happened to get together, there was bound to be trouble. Before you could turn round, they were at work belauding themselves and belittling each other, whether it was about football or the quality of the land or the amount of money in the Sunday collection-bag. Kirkby had been not only too gentle but too much in love to make trouble of that kind, although she herself had made it unashamedly in their quarrels. But that particular feeling of animosity had died in her to some extent as time went on. The real bar to friendship had been the fear of being tied down,--the necessity for keeping herself free against the hour when she should go.