"Tea? Oh yes. Five o'clock. Then I say what I've done, and my aunts
say what they've done, and perhaps some one comes in: Mrs. Hunt, let's
suppose. She's an old lady with a lame leg. She has or she once had
eight children; so we ask after them. They're all over the world; so we
ask where they are, and sometimes they're ill, or they're stationed in
a cholera district, or in some place where it only rains once in five
months. Mrs. Hunt," she said with a smile, "had a son who was hugged to
death by a bear."
Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused by
the same things that amused her. She was reassured. But she thought it
necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.
"You can't conceive how it interests me," he said. Indeed, his cigarette
had gone out, and he had to light another.
"Why does it interest you?" she asked.
"Partly because you're a woman," he replied. When he said this, Rachel,
who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a
childlike state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became
self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under observation,
as she felt with St. John Hirst. She was about to launch into an
argument which would have made them both feel bitterly against each
other, and to define sensations which had no such importance as words
were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a different
direction.
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