The strip of beach gravel that led toward the rose-trellis was warm and crackly underfoot. Among the grey pebbles were small bleached shells. Once upon a time, she had told the children, those shells belonged to snails who lived in the sea. When the tide went out, their little rocky pool got warm and torpid in the glare. Then the sea came back again, crumbling over the ledges with a fresh hoarse noise: great gushes of cold salty water pouring in, waving the seaweeds, waking up the crabs. She could imagine the reviving snails wriggling happily in their spiral cottages, feeling that coolness prickle along their skins. She would like to lie down on the gravel and think about this. Would reality, joy, truth, ever come pouring in on her like that? There was a bench in the rose-garden, if she could get so far. When things are a bit too much for one (fine true old phrase: they _are_ just a little too much for us, adorable torturing _things_) it’s so strangely comforting to lie flat on sun-warmed earth ... the legend of Antæus ... but not here, Lizzie could see her from that synoptic pantry window. How large a proportion of life consists in heroically denying the impulse? But just round this corner, behind the shrubbery---- Someone was doing it already. Oh, this must be the man Lizzie spoke of. How very odd: sprawled on the gravel, playing with pebbles. Lizzie must have been right, one of the artists. Unconventional, to come into a private garden like that ... asking for a piece of cake. Never be surprised, though, at artists. Perhaps he’s doing a still-life painting: something very modern, a slice of cocoanut cake on a lettuce leaf. Artists (she had a vague idea) enjoyed making pictures of food. But he’d been playing with the children, Lizzie said. What sort of person would play with children before being introduced to their parents? Perhaps he wanted to do a portrait of them. Portraits of children were better done with the mother, who could keep them quiet.... I always think there’s no influence like a mother’s, don’t you?... On the bench in the rose-garden, that would be the place. She could see the picture, reproduced in _Vanity Fair_ ... Green Muslin: Study of Mrs. George Granville and Her Daughters. But even if it were painted at once it couldn’t possibly be printed in a magazine before next--when? January? George would know about that. But strange the man didn’t get up, he must hear her coming. He looked like a gentleman. “How do you do?” she said, a little coldly. He was studying the pebbles; at the sound of her voice he twisted and looked up over his shoulder. He seemed faintly shy, yet also entirely composed.