"It would be no laughing matter really," said Mrs. Elliot confidentially to Mrs.
Thornbury, "if an ant did get between the vest and the skin."
The noise grew suddenly more clamorous, for it was discovered that a long line of ants
had found their way on to the table-cloth by a back entrance, and if success could be
gauged by noise, Hewet had every reason to think his party a success. Nevertheless he
became, for no reason at all, profoundly depressed.
"They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble," he thought, surveying his guests from a
little distance, where he was gathering together the plates. He glanced at them all,
stooping and swaying and gesticulating round the table-cloth. Amiable and modest,
respectable in many ways, lovable even in their contentment and desire to be kind, how
mediocre they all were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one another! There was
Mrs. 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. His eye fell upon Rachel. She was lying back rather behind
the others resting on one elbow; she might have been thinking precisely the same
thoughts as Hewet himself. Her eyes were fixed rather sadly but not intently upon the row
of people opposite her. Hewet crawled up to her on his knees, with a piece of bread in his
hand.
"What are you looking at?" he asked.
She was a little startled, but answered directly, "Human beings."
