III
There used to come to the gardens a little fat red-faced girl called Mary Kitson, the child of simple and ingenuous parents (her father was a writer of stories of adventure for boys' papers); she was herself simple-minded, lethargic, unadventurous, and happily stupid. Walking one day slowly with Hortense down one of the garden paths, Sarah saw Mary Kitson engaged in talking to two dolls, seated on a bench with them, patting their clothes, very happy, her nurse busy over a novelette.
Sarah stopped.
"I'll sit here," she said, walked across to the bench and sat down. Mary looked up from her dolls, and then, nervously and self-consciously, went back to her play. Sarah stared straight before her.
Hortense amiably endeavoured to draw the nurse into conversation.
"You 'ave 'ere ze fine gardens," she said. "It calls to mind my own Paris. Ah, the gardens in Paris!"
But the nurse had been taught to distrust all foreigners, and her views of Paris were coloured by her reading. She admired Hortense's clothes, but distrusted her advances.
She buried herself even more deeply in the paper. Poor Mary Kitson, alas! found that, in some undefinable manner, the glory had departed from her dolls. Adrian and Emily were, of a sudden, glassy and lumpy abstractions of sawdust and china. Very timidly she raised her large, stupid eyes and regarded Sarah. Sarah returned the glance and smiled. Then she came close to Mary.
"It's better under there," she said, pointing to the shade of a friendly tree.
"May I?" Mary said to her nurse with a frightened gasp.