Chapter XV

      Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually meeting in a hotel at midnight, they possess one advantage at least over the bonds which unite the elderly, who have lived together once and so must live for ever. Slight they may be, but vivid and genuine, merely because the power to break them is within the grasp of each, and there is no reason for continuance except a true desire that continue they shall. When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other’s bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness. The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this stage of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to recall with an effort whether a thing had been said or only thought, shared or dreamt in private. At four o’clock in the afternoon two or three days later Mrs. Ambrose was standing brushing her hair, while her husband was in the dressing-room which opened out of her room, and occasionally, through the cascade of water—he was washing his face—she caught exclamations, “So it goes on year after year; I wish, I wish, I wish I could make an end of it,” to which she paid no attention.

      “It’s white? Or only brown?” Thus she herself murmured, examining a hair which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. She pulled it out and laid it on the dressing-table. She was criticising her own appearance, or rather approving of it, standing a little way back from the glass and looking at her own face with superb pride and melancholy, when her husband appeared in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half obscured by a towel.

      “You often tell me I don’t notice things,” he remarked.

      “Tell me if this is a white hair, then?” she replied. She laid the hair on his hand.

      “There’s not a white hair on your head,” he exclaimed.

      “Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt,” she sighed; and bowed her head under his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced only a kiss where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife then proceeded to move about the room, casually murmuring.

      “What was that you were saying?” Helen remarked, after an interval of conversation which no third person could have understood.

      “Rachel—you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel,” he observed significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked at him. His observations were apt to be true.

      “Young gentlemen don’t interest themselves in young women’s education without a motive,” he remarked.

      “Oh, Hirst,” said Helen.

      “Hirst and Hewet, they’re all the same to me—all covered with spots,” he replied. “He advises her to read Gibbon. Did you know that?”

      Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior to her husband in powers of observation. She merely said:

      “Nothing would surprise me. Even that dreadful flying man we met at the dance—even Mr. Dalloway—even—”

      “I advise you to be circumspect,” said Ridley. “There’s Willoughby, remember—Willoughby”; he pointed at a letter.

      Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her dressing-table. Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive, perpetually jocular, robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring after his daughter’s manners and morals—hoping she wasn’t a bore, and bidding them pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she were—and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion, and then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little natives who went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he roared English oaths at them, “popping my head out of the window just as I was, in my shirt sleeves. The beggars had the sense to scatter.”

      “If Theresa married Willoughby,” she remarked, turning the page with a hairpin, “one doesn’t see what’s to prevent Rachel—”

      But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with the washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and yet Ridley couldn’t simply point at the door and tell him to go. The truth of it was, they saw too many people. And so on and so on, more conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both ready to go down to tea.

      The first thing that caught Helen’s eye as she came downstairs was a carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding on the tops of hats. She had only time to gain the drawing-room before two names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thornbury came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.

      “Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing,” said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand. “A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry.”

      Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically. She was a woman of forty perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust, though not as tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.

      She looked Helen straight in the face and said, “You have a charmin’ house.”

      She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you, and though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous at the same time. Mrs. Thornbury acted as interpreter, making things smooth all round by a series of charming commonplace remarks.

      “I’ve taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose,” she said, “to promise that you will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the benefit