"It'll do you good, the sea," she remarked presently, after sweeping yet one more comprehensive glance around her, "and we can only hope Mrs Monnerie will be as good as her word. A spot like this—trespassing or not—is good for neither man nor beast. And when you are young the more human company you get, with proper supervising, the better."
"Were you happy as a girl, Mrs Bowater?" I inquired after a pause.
Our voices went up and up into the still, mild air. "Happy enough—for my own good," she said, neatly screwing up her remaining biscuits in their paper bag. "In my days children were brought up. Taught to make themselves useful. I would as soon have lifted a hand against my mother as answer her back."
"You mean she—she whipped you?"
"If need be," my landlady replied complacently, folding her thread-gloved hands on her lap and contemplating the shiny toecaps of her boots. "She had large hands, my mother; and plenty of temper kept well under control. What's more, if life isn't a continual punishment for the stoopidities and wickedness of others, not to mention ourselves, then it must be even a darker story than was ever told me."
"And was, Mrs Bowater, Mr Bowater your—your first——" I looked steadily at a flower at my foot in case she might be affected at so intimate a question, and not wish me to see her face.
"If Mr Bowater was not the first," was her easy response, "he may well live to boast of being the last. Which is neither here nor there, for we may be sure he's enjoying attentive nursing. Broken bones are soon mended. It's when things are disjointed from the root that the wrench comes."
The storm-felled bole lay there beside us, as if for picture to her parable. I began to think rather more earnestly than I had intended to that morning. In my present state of conscience, it was never an easy matter to decide whether Mrs Bowater's comments on life referred openly to things in general or covertly to me in particular. How fortunate that the scent of Fanny's notepaper was not potent enough to escape from its tomb. And whether or not, speech seemed less dangerous than silence.
"It seems to me, Mrs Bowater," I began rather hastily, "at least to judge from my own father and mother, that a man depends very much on a woman. Men don't seem to grow up in the same way, though I suppose they are practical enough as men."
"If it were one female," was the reply, "there'd be less to be found fault with. That poor young creature over there took her life for no better reason, even though the reason was turned inside out as you may say."