Her eyes
were fixed so steadily upon a ball on the rail of the ship that she
would have been startled and annoyed if anything had chanced to obscure
it for a second. She had begun her meditations with a shout of laughter,
caused by the following translation from _Tristan_:
In shrinking trepidation
His shame he seems to hide
While to the king his relation
He brings the corpse-like Bride.
Seems it so senseless what I say?
She cried that it did, and threw down the book. Next she had picked up
_Cowper's_ _Letters_, the classic prescribed by her father which had
bored her, so that one sentence chancing to say something about the
smell of broom in his garden, she had thereupon seen the little hall at
Richmond laden with flowers on the day of her mother's funeral, smelling
so strong that now any flower-scent brought back the sickly horrible
sensation; and so from one scene she passed, half-hearing, half-seeing,
to another. She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging flowers in the drawing-room.
"Aunt Lucy," she volunteered, "I don't like the smell of broom; it
reminds me of funerals."
"Nonsense, Rachel," Aunt Lucy replied; "don't say such foolish things,
dear. I always think it a particularly cheerful plant."
Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her
aunts, their views, and the way they lived.
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