"I don't know. She's rather unusual. Not your sort at all I should imagine. But—well, I don't know. It will be rather amusing to see."
(2)
Ursula went on down the drive, her thoughts idle, her appreciation vivid. Arrived in the macadamised road of civilisation, she followed it without giving a thought to the fact that girls, soaked to the skin, hatless but happy, are rareties along even country roads. The surface had been rapidly softening under the downpour, but little she cared for that either. Blackberries gleamed scarlet, purple, black in every hedge; thrushes, in the now gentle rain, were already out on the war-path for worms; and the sweep of the South Downs on her right was visible through the dripping trees. Ursula began to sing to herself as she went, breaking off to nod friendlily to a carter who knew her, and picking up her song again without troubling whether or not he was out of earshot. That was her way. She had always seen clearly and scorned muddle-headed conventionalities; at first, while her father lived and she was still in her teens, with a certain submission to authority, but since, after her twenty-first birthday, quite openly and frankly. Her mother, who never had had much of a will of her own, gave in to her daughter as she had to her husband. Thus, at Ursula's suggestion, they had taken the old cottage under Chanctonbury on the edge, but actually part of, Mr. Tressor's estate, and Mrs. Manning had been forced to admit the advantage of the change from the big establishment which Mr. Manning had maintained as befitted a banking magnate. Then, a rather lonely aunt coming to live with them, the girl had announced her intention of having a flat and studio in town, and since she had her own money and moreover made more, nothing in the world was able to prevent her. She came and went now between the two, with intervals of wandering abroad. She had a big circle of her own acquaintances of whom her mother knew little, chiefly however, it must be confessed, because she did not understand more than about a third of what they said and did when they came down to Sussex with her daughter; but she had only a few friends. These her mother knew less than the rest, retaining enough spirit to avow definitely that she did not want to know them. They professed views and took part in movements which were, frankly, beyond toleration. There was Muriel Lister, for example, who preached in churches and actually led a campaign for the admission of women to the priesthood.
Yet Ursula herself took active part in no movements or campaigns. On account of this it was perhaps odd that the leaders of them should be her friends. But then a subtle reason underlay that. For Ursula was rather a good person to talk to, and a very good person to have coffee with by night in her studio after the fatigue of committees, inclined, as is the way of committees, to be a little heavy in hand. She was sympathetic, understanding, entirely capable of giving an opinion, but she did not say much. Also she was clean-handed, so to speak. It was a little irritating, possibly, at times, that she was so resolutely unimpassioned when a reactionary bishop insulted women or ministers took back by some Civil Service Regulation what the Removal of Sex Disabilities Act had given. But one knew it was Ursula. And one knew, moreover, that at a crisis neither bishop nor ministers mattered to her a toss of her present rain-soaked plait.
For Ursula, with her quiet, good-humoured resolution and her unquestioned art, not only saw life from an enviable angle, but quietly acted as if that were the only one from which it should be seen by reasonable people. Her cousin had once said of her that she "pressed towards the goal" with apostolic conviction. Not that it was a wholly good definition because, unlike the apostle, she tried to make no proselytes, seeing the world about her as a very lovely satisfying thing with which she was content to be satisfied. Constitutionally, and from environment, no lost cause had as yet come vividly her way.
Two days later she was introduced to Paul. Manning and he were doing the round of the park, Manning with a gun under his arm, Paul, metaphorically, with a pencil in his hand. In other words, he was realising what a lovely place it was. The wide sweeps of grass, the clumps of trees, the views of the Downs, and the utter quiet of this little Sussex backwater were already exercising their magic upon him. The two of them had come along the northern boundary of the estate and were now skirting the lake. It was a wild overgrown place, with nothing formal about it, a big irregular sheet of water with a tangle of weeds and lilies at one end and a regiment of great elms closing it in. An avenue of limes led from it to the house, an odd avenue that only appeared as an avenue when you came upon its entrance, suddenly, in the middle of grassy park-land. Thus it started nowhere in particular, and, from a distance, had no particular object, since the water itself lay low at the far end of it behind a raised bank. Paul already loved that. You wandered down from the garden and saw, suddenly, the green guarded road of it running away into the park. Intrigued, you entered, and sauntered carelessly up it. Then, at quite a long last, you climbed the slope of the bank and suddenly saw before you this still enchanted refuge where the fish leaped in the gathering dusk and white swans sailed friendlily up in the heat of the sun. Here and there a fallen trunk lay half in and half out of the water. In places there was no coming at the brink for forests of reeds. But, at its deepest corner, a promontory of hazels that was almost an island, thrust out into its serenity.
The friends leaped from stone to tussock and tussock to log and landed. A suggestion of a path led them through the few yards of undergrowth. And there, hidden by a screen of green, with the water at her feet, sat Ursula on the flat prow of a punt. She was making a little water-colour, palette in one hand, brush in the other, a little impressionist study of a pine that stood by himself on the bank opposite, his brown roots reaching down into the lake.
"Hullo, Ursula," said Manning, "we didn't see you. Let me introduce Paul Kestern. He's going to be a near neighbour, so you've got to know him."
The girl looked up but did not move. Paul found himself staring across a tiny strip of water into clear brown eyes, a pale oval face, and a frame of black hair, all set on a tall pillar of white throat and neck. She was wearing a brilliant yellow jumper, without adornment, and a short blue skirt. She was long-limbed, and he realised vaguely that her white bare arms and black stockinged legs were shapely and lissom and good to see. "How do you do," he said properly.
"I've seen you before somewhere," she replied.