Thornbury, sweet but trivial in her maternal egoism; Mrs.
Elliot, perpetually complaining of her lot; her husband a mere pea in
a pod; and Susan--she had no self, and counted neither one way nor the
other; Venning was as honest and as brutal as a schoolboy; poor old
Thornbury merely trod his round like a horse in a mill; and the less
one examined into Evelyn's character the better, he suspected. Yet these
were the people with money, and to them rather than to others was given
the management of the world. Put among them some one more vital, who
cared for life or for beauty, and what an agony, what a waste would they
inflict on him if he tried to share with them and not to scourge!
"There's Hirst," he concluded, coming to the figure of his friend; with
his usual little frown of concentration upon his forehead he was peeling
the skin off a banana. "And he's as ugly as sin." For the ugliness of
St. John Hirst, and the limitations that went with it, he made the rest
in some way responsible. It was their fault that he had to live alone.
Then he came to Helen, attracted to her by the sound of her laugh. She
was laughing at Miss Allan. "You wear combinations in this heat?" she
said in a voice which was meant to be private. He liked the look of her
immensely, not so much her beauty, but her largeness and simplicity,
which made her stand out from the rest like a great stone woman, and
he passed on in a gentler mood.
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