He was not so reckless that he made more sober people feel disagreeably responsible when they were with him, and yet he was reckless enough, because of the confidence given him by his money, to convey a delightful ‘doesn’t matter’ element into his pastimes.

Until she knew Juan, Sophia had not realized that an imagination can become, like the grasshopper, a burden.

Belinha was stupid. Sophia suspected that she was also affectionate and gentle, but never had a chance to find out because Belinha hardly ever spoke about anything, let alone herself. Probably she never thought about herself, either. Her senses lay close to the surface of her nature, like the rosy purple roots exposed in soil after rain, and she was guided by them to make the very most of her beautiful appearance, to smile, to be divinely silent, but her mind was like a bud that will never open.

There would be fewer unmarried ones, Sophia decided, if women would learn to talk less.

Juan’s good nature and Belinha’s beauty gave ample excuse to the Garden boys, should they ever have to justify this new friendship, and added to these attractions there was the important one of tastes in common.

Juan’s tastes were certainly common. He enjoyed, as nine people out of ten enjoy or would enjoy if they could, getting rather drunk, kissing, going very fast in an expensive car, dancing, swimming, laughing. He would still be enjoying these pastimes when he was fifty, and as he was wealthy, he would be able to have them when he was fifty. Francis and Harry enjoyed them now at the ages of seventeen and twenty-one; but as they were poor, it seemed unlikely that they would be able to have them at the age of fifty. All the more reason therefore to taste these gorgeous joys now; to drink the gin, and kiss the girl, and dance solemnly to the incantations of the snow music, and go at seventy miles an hour.

All their own nervous vitality, and the appetite for strong and deeply coloured pleasures which they had inherited from their father conspired to drive them at these natural joys like wild young horses; and if their prospects and background had been rosier and more solid, Sophia would have realized that such foragings were inevitable, and she would not have been quite so worried.

But dismal things happened to poor young men who acquired expensive tastes which ravened to be fed. Sophia, walking across the Heath intoxicated by the smell of young leaves and the steady fall of the sunlight on her face, thanked her stars that her own desires were fed by objects which did not cost much money. She painfully, priggishly tried to understand why the boys enjoyed kissing young women whom they did not know, and all the other pastimes of which seemingly they could not have enough; and could not understand at all, and made herself extremely irritating to her brothers by trying.

The month of July was a dull, unhappy one for her. The interest and pleasure which her brothers had first taken in the cottage had dwindled. They took their home for granted. It was a useful place to have parties in when old Juan’s aunt had said that they must have no more in The Judge’s House for some time, and they still felt its charm when they mentioned it to new acquaintances, but its novelty had departed. They used it, Sophia bitterly thought, like an hotel; and she was the chief muck-and-bottle washer.