‘I don’t think your husband liked me.’
Angela sighed: ‘Very probably not. Ralph never likes the people I do; he objects to my friends on principle I think.’
Then Angela talked more openly of Ralph. Just now he was staying away with his mother, but next week he would be returning to The Grange, and then he was certain to be disagreeable: ‘Whenever he’s been with his mother he’s that way—she puts him against me, I never know why—unless, of course, it’s because I’m not English. I’m the stranger within the gates, it may be that.’ And when Stephen protested, ‘Oh, yes indeed, I’m quite often made to feel like a stranger. Take the people round here, do you think they like me?’
Then Stephen, who had not yet learnt to dissemble, stared hard at her shoes, in embarrassed silence.
Just outside the door a clock boomed seven. Stephen started; she had been there nearly three hours. ‘I must go,’ she said, getting abruptly to her feet, ‘you look tired, I’ve been making a visitation.’
Her hostess made no effort to retain her: ‘Well,’ she smiled, ‘come again, please come very often—that is if you won’t find it dull, Miss Gordon; we’re terribly quiet here at The Grange.’
3
Stephen drove home slowly, for now that it was over she felt like a machine that had suddenly run down. Her nerves were relaxed, she was thoroughly tired, yet she rather enjoyed this unusual sensation. The hot June evening was heavy with thunder. From somewhere in the distance came the bleating of sheep, and the melancholy sound seemed to blend and mingle with her mood, which was now very gently depressed. A gentle but persistent sense of depression enveloped her whole being like a soft, grey cloak; and she did not wish to shake off this cloak, but rather to fold it more closely around her.
At Morton she stopped the car by the lakes and sat staring through the trees at the glint of water. For a long while she sat there without knowing why, unless it was that she wished to remember. But she found that she could not even be certain of the kind of dress that Angela had worn—it had been of some soft stuff, that much she remembered, so soft that it had easily torn, for the rest her memories of it were vague—though she very much wanted to remember that dress.
A faint rumble of thunder came out of the west, where the clouds were banking up ominously purple. Some uncertain and rather hysterical swallows flew high and then low at the sound of the thunder. Her sense of depression was now much less gentle, it increased every moment, turning to sadness. She was sad in spirit and mind and body—her body felt dejected, she was sad all over. And now some one was whistling down by the stables, old Williams, she suspected, for the whistle was tuneless. The loss of his teeth had disgruntled his whistle; yes, she was sure that that must be Williams. A horse whinnied as one bucket clanked against another—sounds came clearly this evening; they were watering the horses. Anna’s young carriage horses would be pawing their straw, impatient because they were feeling thirsty.