Perhaps the poor little woman was thirsty, for she had ridden long on a
hard, dry road, and, as all London knows, to ride a bicycle and talk to
young Flippard will try the toughest constitution; or perhaps the sight
of the cool bracken grove, whence 'those two' were coming down, excited
her envy. The cool bracken grove on the top of the hill, with the oak
boughs for roof, where the pigeons were raising an endless wedding hymn,
and the autumn, humming, whispered to the ears of lovers in the fern,
while the deer stole by. The bracken grove of irretrievable delights,
of golden minutes in the long marriage of heaven and earth! The bracken
grove, sacred to stags, to strange tree-stump fauns leaping around the
silver whiteness of a birch-tree nymph at summer dusk.
This lady knew all the Forsytes, and having been at June's 'at home,'
was not at a loss to see with whom she had to deal. Her own marriage,
poor thing, had not been successful, but having had the good sense and
ability to force her husband into pronounced error, she herself had
passed through the necessary divorce proceedings without incurring
censure.
She was therefore a judge of all that sort of thing, and lived in one of
those large buildings, where in small sets of apartments, are gathered
incredible quantities of Forsytes, whose chief recreation out of
business hours is the discussion of each other's affairs.
Poor little woman, perhaps she was thirsty, certainly she was bored, for
Flippard was a wit. To see 'those two' in so unlikely a spot was quite a
merciful 'pick-me-up.'
At the MacAnder, like all London, Time pauses.
This small but remarkable woman merits attention; her all-seeing eye
and shrewd tongue were inscrutably the means of furthering the ends of
Providence.
With an air of being in at the death, she had an almost distressing
power of taking care of herself. She had done more, perhaps, in her way
than any woman about town to destroy the sense of chivalry which
still clogs the wheel of civilization. So smart she was, and spoken of
endearingly as 'the little MacAnder!'
Dressing tightly and well, she belonged to a Woman's Club, but was by no
means the neurotic and dismal type of member who was always thinking of
her rights. She took her rights unconsciously, they came natural to
her, and she knew exactly how to make the most of them without exciting
anything but admiration amongst that great class to whom she was
affiliated, not precisely perhaps by manner, but by birth, breeding, and
the true, the secret gauge, a sense of property.