Mrs. Eldridge also looked thoroughly in place behind the old silver and china of her equipage. She always came down to breakfast in a state of apparent content with herself and her surroundings, cool and unruffled both in dress and demeanour. In the time that was past there had been so much to look forward to in the day of which this gathering was the inauguration. Though not, presumably, attached to the life of the country by the same ties as bound her husband, and enjoying her life equally when the periodic moves were made to London, she would have chosen the country rather than the town for permanent residence. The choice had not been hers, but it had had to be made. Much had gone that had made life agreeable to her at Hayslope, but much remained. On these summer mornings it was not so unlike what it had always been to her. There was the pleasant meal with her husband and her children, whom she loved; the appointments of the table, in which she never failed to take pleasure, though she had used them regularly for over twenty years; the sense of being newly and becomingly dressed; the birds singing in the garden, which was so fresh and inviting, and with the windows open so much a part, as it were, of the room itself. Her letters never brought her worries, as her husband's sometimes brought him—only occasionally a mild regret for opportunities of which she could no longer take advantage. But at this time of the day she was not much inclined to want more than she had. Her domestic duties were immediately in front of her, and she enjoyed them. She enjoyed them even more than before, for with fewer servants more depended on her. Only half of her desired the distractions due to wealth; the rest of her was pure domesticity. She had never been happier than during the first few years of married life, before her husband had succeeded his father as Squire of Hayslope. She was happy now in much the same responsibilities as had then devolved upon her, had she but known it. In these early hours of the day the consciousness of what she had lost did not trouble her. Besides, something might always happen in the long hours before her. She was not so old as to have lost that sense of the unexpected.
Pamela was happy too. She might grumble sometimes—to Norman—about the restrictions that had come to spoil the life of Hayslope Hall; but she loved it. And all the future was before her, golden and glamorous. It wrapped her in a sort of happy aura, which contained no definite point of desire. Anything might happen to her, in any one of these summer days, which began with the family meeting at breakfast. Something was bound to happen some day, and in the meantime life was sweet, and the shadow that had come to lie over her home hardly darkened at all the radiance in which she walked.
Judith was as pretty as Pamela in her way, which was an entirely different way. She was the only dark member of the family, now that Hugo was dead. Some forgotten ancestress had bequeathed her her lustrous hair, of which the shadows were almost visibly blue, and her large, deep, solemn eyes, her very skin was dark, but with the bloom of youth on it, and the healthy blood that flowed beneath its soft surface, it was rich and delicate. At the age of eighteen she had not yet come into the full heritage of her beauty, which did not depend so much as Pamela's upon youth. She hardly even seemed aware of it, and clothes were not yet a matter of much interest to her. She had alternations of childish high spirits and brooding reflection. Out of doors she was still something of a tomboy, in her young and restless energy; but she would sit for hours over a book, and in those moods she was oblivious to everybody and everything around her. She seldom talked about what she read, and indeed her reading would have been a puzzle to anyone who had tried to draw inferences of literary taste from it. Pamela had once reported to Norman the books over which Judith had spent hours of a wet day. They were Grimm's Fairy Tales, "The Wide, Wide World," and Bacon's Essays, and she seemed to have spent about the same time over each. Pamela held that she had no literary taste whatever; Norman was inclined to treat her preferences as a touchstone of merit. If Judith liked something, it was probably good. This theory was strengthened when she said she liked a picture of Gaugin's, of which he submitted to her a reproduction, and weakened by her absorption in Martin Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy," which she had found in the library and carried up to her room with her. She was quite ready to laugh with them over her tastes, but she would never give any explanation of them. "I like it," or "I don't like it," was her sole contribution to literary criticism, and she would never be moved a hair's breadth by any consensus of opinion. Judith went her own way in everything, but her way at present was confined almost entirely to Hayslope, where she found everything that she wanted. Less than Pamela did she feel the loss of what had made the life of her home rich in interest before the war. She had grown up from childhood under the new conditions and was happy in them.
The exceptional family beauty seemed to have stopped short at Judith. Alice and Isabelle, who were thirteen and twelve, respectively, had their abundant fair hair to recommend them, and their active youth, but nothing much else as yet in the way of looks. They were agreeable children, much alike in their eager interest in whatever went on around them, and their unerring pursuit of pleasure. They were always "the children" to the rest of the family, and what they thought was of small importance, though what they did sometimes obtruded itself upon their elders. Sitting at breakfast, one on either side of their mother, in their neat clothes, which would not be so neat later on in the day, their thick manes confined in heavy plaits, they seemed eminently good children, showing a healthy appetite, but no greediness, in the consumption of viands, taking a bright part in the conversation when it touched their orbit, but not obtruding themselves in such a way as to make their company noxious. Their presence at the breakfast table seemed, indeed, to heighten the effect of a family at one and at peace; for young children in a happy home have no desires outside it. Their parents, their brothers and sisters, even the servants and dependants who are also part of the family for the time being, are the chief characters in their little world. Not even their parents themselves are so bounded in their interests by the home they have made for them. And the wonderful imagination of children makes it the chief place of delight to them, even where its opportunities are small. Opportunities were not small at Hayslope Hall for these two, and they were as happy as children of their age could very well be.
If Miss Baldwin, their governess, was not completely happy—as what woman living always in other people's houses can be?—she was as contented as the accidents of her lot in life could make her. She was a precise spinster of middle age, and sat very prim and mindful of her manners between Pamela and Alice, never speaking unless when spoken to, but then speaking with an attention to the composition of sentences and the correct enunciation of her vowels which was a lesson to everybody present, and intended to be so to at least two of them. Colonel Eldridge addressed her directly, at least once in the course of every meal at which she was present, out of politeness. Mrs. Eldridge always found it difficult to remember that she was there, but also addressed her occasionally; but her attention was apt to wander over the reply.
Miss Baldwin had been at Hayslope for two years, but was no nearer to making one of the family circle than when she arrived. She was strict in the schoolroom and a good teacher in a limited way, but without any real interest in the subjects which she taught. Nobody would have thought, from her appearance and manner, that she was an incurable sentimentalist. She lived in a world of her own—a world of romance, of which the materials were sent her once a week in official-looking long envelopes with a typewritten address. Her time came when the children were in bed, and the life of the house, in which she had no wish to take part, was concentrated below. Then, in the large quiet schoolroom, sitting by the open window in the summer, or in winter time by the fire, she would be wafted away from the actual life about her, with all its restrictions for one of her age and class, to live richly and freely with the heroes and heroines of her chosen world. Baldness of narrative troubled her not at all. In the novels by authors of repute which she sometimes heard people discussing, there seemed no room for the play of imagination; the novelist would have it just so and not otherwise, and the characters to which he introduced his readers were so much like the characters one might meet at any time in the dull and sterile flesh. Those strong heroes of her favourite romances were as gods beside the emasculate earth-dwellers who stood for hero even in the