Mrs. Arley had thrown off her wrap and loosened her hood in a manner that made it almost imperative to ask them to stay with him for lunch--an invitation accepted with an assurance showing that it had been expected, and it wasn’t difficult, in conventional battledore and shuttlecock with her, to show a good humor and frivolity that discountenanced pathetic interpretations. What Mrs. Arley’s interpretations were he didn’t quite know; her eyes, fatigued yet fresh, were very acute behind their trivial meanings, and he could wonder if Eppie had shared with her her own sense of his “horribleness,” and if, in consequence, her conception of Eppie’s significance as the opponent of that quality was tinged with sentimental associations.
Eppie’s gaze, while they rattled on, lost something of its gravity, but he was startled, as if by an assurance deeper than any of Mrs. Arley’s, when she rose to slip off her coat and went across the room to a small old mirror that hung near the door to take off her cap as well.
In her manner of standing there with her back to them, untying her veils, pushing back her hair, was the assurance, indeed, of a person whose feet were firmly planted on certain rights, all the more firmly for “knowing her place” as it were, and for having repudiated mistaken assumptions. She might almost have been a new sick-nurse come to take up her duties by his side. She passed from the mirror to the writing-table, examining the books laid there, and then, until lunch was announced, stood looking out of the window. Quite the silent, capable, significant new nurse, with many theories of her own that might much affect the future.
The dining-room at Cheylesford Lodge opened on a wonderful old lawn, centuries in its green. Bordered by beds, just alight with pale spring flowers, it swept in and out among shrubberies of rhododendron and laurel, the emerald nook set in a circle of trees, a high arabesque on the sky.
Eppie from her seat at the table faced the sky, the trees, the lawn. What a beautiful place, she was thinking. A place for life, sheltered, embowered. How she would have loved, as a child, those delicious rivulets of green that ran into the thick mysteries of shadow. How she would have loved to play dolls on a hot summer afternoon in the shade of the great yew-tree that stretched its dark branches half across the sky. The house, the garden, made her think of children; she saw white pinafores and golden heads glancing in and out among the trees and shrubs, and the vision of young life, blossoming, growing in security and sunlight, filled her thought with its pictured songs of innocence, while, at the same time, under the vision, she was feeling it all--all the beauty and sheltered sweetness--as dreadful in its emptiness, its worse than emptiness: a casket holding a death’s-head. She came back with something of a start to hear her work in the slums enthusiastically described by Mrs. Arley. “I thought it was only in novels that children clung to the heroine’s skirts. I never believed they clung in real life until seeing Eppie with her ragamuffins; they adore her.”