"What of Adam cast out of Eden?
(And O the Bower and the hour!)
Lo! with care like a shadow shaken
He kills the hard earth whence he was taken."
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
I
To the ordinary observer Lizzie Rand was, during that hot July, as she had ever been.
The servants in 104 Portland Place could detect no change, but then they did not search for one, having long regarded Miss Rand as a piece of machinery, symbolized by that broad shining belt of hers, happily calculated to fit, precisely, the duties for which it was required.
But Miss Rand herself knew that there was a sharp, accurate, shrewd piece of machinery named Miss Rand, and a breathing, emotional, uncertain human being called Lizzie. There had always been those two, but since the inadequacy of her mother and sister had been confronted with the stern necessity of making two ends meet, Miss Rand had been in constant demand and Lizzie had only, by her occasional obtrusion, made life complicated and disturbing.
Miss Rand had told herself that Lizzie was now almost an anachronism, that the emotions in life that aroused her were bad cheap emotions, and that this was an age that demanded increasingly of women a hard practical efficiency without sentiments or enthusiasms.
These forcible arguments had for a time kept Lizzie in a darkened background; it was some years since Miss Rand had been disturbed. But now in the warm weather of 1898 Lizzie had not only reappeared, but had leapt, an insistent, shining presence, into urgent life. Miss Rand faced her—what had created her? A little, the weather, the beauty of those brazen days—A little, Rachel's coming out into the world, an adventure that had stirred the whole house into a new and sympathetic excitement—a little, these things. But chiefly, and no pretence nor shame could conceal the fact, did this new Lizzie owe her creation to the appearance of Francis Breton.
Lizzie Rand had had, from her birth, a romantic heart; she had had also a prosaic practical exterior, and a mind as hard and clear, if necessary, as her own most lucent typewriter.