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days or when suffering from a sick headache) was troubling
and exotic. She really looked very young then.
Philip was much exercised over her age. He added twenty
and seventeen together, and could not bring them to a sat-
isfactory total. He asked Aunt Louisa more than once why
she thought Miss Wilkinson was thirty-seven: she didn’t
look more than thirty, and everyone knew that foreigners
aged more rapidly than English women; Miss Wilkinson
had lived so long abroad that she might almost be called a
foreigner. He personally wouldn’t have thought her more
than twenty-six.
‘She’s more than that,’ said Aunt Louisa.
Philip did not believe in the accuracy of the Careys’
statements. All they distinctly remembered was that Miss
Wilkinson had not got her hair up the last time they saw
her in Lincolnshire. Well, she might have been twelve then:
it was so long ago and the Vicar was always so unreliable.
They said it was twenty years ago, but people used round
figures, and it was just as likely to be eighteen years, or sev-
enteen. Seventeen and twelve were only twenty-nine, and
hang it all, that wasn’t old, was it? Cleopatra was forty-eight
when Antony threw away the world for her sake.
It was a fine summer. Day after day was hot and cloud-
less; but the heat was tempered by the neighbourhood of the
sea, and there was a pleasant exhilaration in the air, so that
one was excited and not oppressed by the August sunshine.
There was a pond in the garden in which a fountain played;
water lilies grew in it and gold fish sunned themselves on
the surface. Philip and Miss Wilkinson used to take rugs

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