Helen smiled."Oh,Meg,you are a person,"
she said."Think of the racket and torture this time last year.
But now I couldn't stop unhappy if I tried.What a change--and all through you!""Oh,we merely settled down.You and Henry learnt to understand one another and to forgive,all through the autumn and the winter.""Yes,but who settled us down?"
Margaret did not reply.The scything had begun,and she took off her pince-nez to watch it.
"You!"cried Helen."You did it all,sweetest,though you're too stupid to see.Living here was your plan--I wanted you;he wanted you;and every one said it was impossible,but you knew.
Just think of our lives without you,Meg--I and baby with Monica,revolting by theory,he handed about from Dolly to Evie.But you picked up the pieces,and made us a home.Can't it strike you--even for a moment--that your life has been heroic?Can't you remember the two months after Charles's arrest,when you began to act,and did all?""You were both ill at the time,"said Margaret.
"I did the obvious things.I had two invalids to nurse.Here was a house,ready furnished and empty.It was obvious.I didn't know myself it would turn into a permanent home.No doubt I have done a little towards straightening the tangle,but things that I can't phrase have helped me.""I hope it will be permanent,"said Helen,drifting away to other thoughts.
"I think so.There are moments when I feel Howards End peculiarly our own.""All the same,London's creeping."
She pointed over the meadow--over eight or nine meadows,but at the end of them was a red rust.
"You see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now,"she continued."I can see it from the Purbeck Downs.And London is only part of something else,I'm afraid.Life's going to be melted down,all over the world."Margaret knew that her sister spoke truly.
Howards End,Oniton,the Purbeck Downs,the Oderberge,were all survivals,and the melting-pot was being prepared for them.Logically,they had no right to be alive.One's hope was in the weakness of logic.
Were they possibly the earth beating time?
"Because a thing is going strong now,it need not go strong for ever,"she said."This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years.It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement,because it will rest on the earth.All the signs are against it now,but I can't help hoping,and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that our house is the future as well as the past."They turned and looked at it.Their own memories coloured it now,for Helen's child had been born in the central room of the nine.Then Margaret said,"Oh,take care--!"for something moved behind the window of the hall,and the door opened.
"The conclave's breaking at last.I'll go."
It was Paul.
Helen retreated with the children far into the field.
Friendly voices greeted her.Margaret rose,to encounter a man with a heavy black moustache.
"My father has asked for you,"he said with hostility.
She took her work and followed him.
"We have been talking business,"he continued,"but I dare say you knew all about it beforehand.""Yes,I did."
Clumsy of movement--for he had spent all his life in the saddle--Paul drove his foot against the paint of the front door.
Mrs.Wilcox gave a little cry of annoyance.She did not like anything scratched;she stopped in the hall to take Dolly's boa and gloves out of a vase.
Her husband was lying in a great leather chair in the dining-room,and by his side,holding his hand rather ostentatiously,was Evie.Dolly,dressed in purple,sat near the window.The room was a little dark and airless;they were obliged to keep it like this until the carting of the hay.Margaret joined the family without speaking;the five of them had met already at tea,and she knew quite well what was going to be said.Averse to wasting her time,she went on sewing.The clock struck six.
