I hope he won't give way, but he's rather weak."

However, Stanhope was, in the politest language, declining to have anything of the sort. "Call it the Chorus," he said, "or if you like I'll try and find a name for the leader, and the rest can just dance and sing. But I'm afraid 'Leaf-Spirits' would be misleading."

"What about'Chorus of Nature-Powers'?" asked Miss Fox, but Stanhope only said, smiling, "You will try and make the trees friendly," which no one quite understood, and shook his head again.

Prescott asked: "Incidentally, I suppose they will be women?"

Mrs. Parry had said, "O, of course, Mr. Prescott," before the question reached her brain. When it did, she added, "At least...I naturally took it for granted.... They are feminine, aren't they?"

Still hankering after mass, Adela said, "It sounds to me more like undifferentiated sex force," and ignored Hugh's murmur, "There isn't much fun in that."

"I don't know that they were meant to be either male or female," Stanhope said. "I told you they were more of an experiment in a different kind of existence. But whether men or women are most like that is another matter." He shed an apologetic smile on Mrs. Parry.

"If they're going to be leaves," Miss Fox asked, "couldn't they all wear huge green leaves, so that no one would know if they were wearing knee-breeches or skirts?"

There was a pause while everyone took this in, then Mrs. Parry said, very firmly, "I don't think that would answer," while Hugh Prescott said to Adela, "Chorus of Figleaves!"

"Why not follow the old pantomime or the present musical comedy," Stanhope asked, "and dress your feminine chorus in exquisite masculine costume? That's what Shakespeare did with his heroines, as often as he could, and made a diagram of something more sharp and wonderful than either. I don't think you'll do better. Masculine voices—except boys—would hardly do, nor feminine appearances."

Mrs. Parry sighed, and everyone contemplated the problem again. Adela Hunt and Hugh Prescott discussed modernity between themselves. Pauline, lying back, like Stanhope, in her chair, was thinking of Stanhope's phrases, "a different life", "a terrible good", and wondering if they were related, if this Chorus over which they were spending so much trouble were indeed an effort to shape in verse a good so alien as to be terrifying. She had never considered good as a thing of terror, and certainly she had not supposed a certain thing of terror in her own secret life as any possible good. Nor now; yet there had been an inhumanity in the great and moving lines of the Chorus. She thought, with an anger generous in its origin but proud and narrow in its conclusion, that not many of the audience really cared for poetry or for Stanhope's poetry—perhaps none but she. He was a great poet, one of a very few, but what would he do if one evening he met himself coming up the drive? Doppelgaenger, the learned called it, which was no comfort. Another poet had thought of it; she had had to learn the lines at school, as an extra task because of undone work:

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden.

She had never done the imposition, for she had had nightmares that night, after reading the lines, and had to go sick for days. But she had always hated Shelley since for making it so lovely, when it wasn't loveliness but black panic. Shelley never seemed to suggest that the good might be terrible. What would Peter Stanhope do? what could he? if he met himself?

They were going: people were getting up and moving off. Everyone was being agreeably grateful to Stanhope for his lawn, his tea, and his poetry. In her fear of solitude she attached herself to Adela and Hugh and Myrtle Fox, who were all saying good-bye at once. As he shook hands he said casually: "You don't think they are?" and she did not immediately understand the reference to the measurement of Omnipotence by mortal tremors. Her mind was on Myrtle, who lived near her. She hated the pang of gratitude she felt, and hated it more because she despised Miss Fox. But at least she wouldn't be alone, and the thing she hated most only came, or had so far only come, when she was alone.