Sunday dawned, and with it the old panorama of iterations unfolded itself: Mr. Bolton's velvet coat and fez, Mr. Cordal's carpet slippers with the fur tops, Mrs. Barnes' indecision, Mr. Sefton's genial and romantic optimism, Miss Sikkum's sumptuary excesses; all presented themselves in due sequence just as they had done for—"was it centuries?" Patricia asked herself. To crown all it was a roast-pork Sunday, and the reek of onions preparing for the seasoning filled the house.
Patricia felt that the fates were fighting against her. In nerving herself for the usual human Sunday ordeal, she had forgotten the vegetable menace, in other words that it was "pork Sunday." Mr. Bolton was always more than usually trying on Sundays; but reinforced by onions he was almost unbearable. Patricia fled.
It was the Sunday before August Bank Holiday. Patricia shuddered at the remembrance. It meant that people were away. She did not pause to think that her world was at home, pursuing its various paths whereby to cultivate an appetite worthy of the pork that was even then sizzling in the Galvin House kitchen under the eagle eye of the cook, who prided herself on her "crackling," which Galvin House crunched with noisy gusto.
Patricia sank down upon a chair far back under the trees opposite the Stanhope Gate. Here she remained in a vague way watching the people, yet unconscious of their presence. From time to time some snatch of meaningless conversation would reach her. "You know Betty's such a sport?" one man said to another. Patricia found herself wondering what Betty was like and what, to the speaker's mind, constituted being a sport. Was Betty pretty? She must be, Patricia decided; no one cared whether or no a plain girl were a sport. She found herself wanting to know Betty. What were the lives of all these people, these shadows, that were moving to and fro in front of her, each intent upon something that seemed of vital importance? Were they——?
"I doubt if Cassandra could have looked more gloomily prophetic."
She turned with a start and saw Geoffrey Elton smiling down upon her.
"Did I look as bad as that?" she enquired, as he took a seat beside her.
"You looked as if you were gratuitously settling the destinies of the world," he replied.
"In a way I suppose I was," she said musingly. "You see they all mean something," indicating the paraders with a nod of her head, "tragedy, comedy, farce, sometimes all three. If you only stop to think about life, it all seems so hopeless. I feel sometimes that I could run away from it all."
"That in the Middle Ages would have been diagnosed as the monastic spirit," said Elton. "It arose, and no doubt continues in most cases to arise from a sluggish liver."