"It's as clever as it can be. To anyone who doesn't know her, it's the most wonderful likeness. It's what grandmother would like herself."
He caught the note in her voice that threatened the pink security of Portland Place. He held her hand a little tighter.
"In what way?"
"Oh, it's got the dragons and the tapestry and the purple carpet. All the coloured things that grandmother like so much and that help her so. Why, imagine her for a second in an ordinary room, in an old arm-chair with a worn-out carpet and everlastings on the mantelpiece; what would she do? The young man, whoever he is, has helped her all he can."
Rachel felt his grasp of her hand slacken a little.
"Yes, I know it's wrong of me to talk like that. But it's all so sham. It's like someone in one of those absurd fantastic novels that people write nowadays when half the characters are out of Dickens only put into a real background. I'm frightened of grandmother—you know I always have been—but sometimes I wonder whether——"
She paused.
"Whether there's anything really to be frightened of. And yet the relief when I can get off this half-hour every evening—the relief even now when I'm even grown up—oh! it's absurd!"
"Well, my dear, you're coming out, you're going to break away from all of us—you'll have your own life now to make what you like of."
"Yes, that's all very well. But I've been brought up all wrong. Most girls begin to come out when they're about ten and go on, more and more, until, when the time actually comes, well, there's simply nothing in it. I've never known anyone intimately except May, and now at the thought of crowds and crowds of people, at one moment I'd like to fly into a convent somewhere, and at the next I want to go and be rude to the lot of them—to get in quickly you know, lest they should be rude to me first."