Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner Page A

children and offer, she supposed, spiritual consolation. Apparently the presence of a clergyman of the Church of England in her morning-room was consolation enough, as though, like some moral vinaigrette he had but to be filled by a Bishop, introduced, unstoppered, and gently waved about the room, to diffuse a refreshing atmosphere. To visit widows in their affliction, she thought, moving the decanter towards him, was part of his duties. Possibly she was not sufficiently a widow to call out his most reviving gales. But indeed, beyond a pleasant civility and a rather tedious flow of chit-chat, no more was to be expected of him. He gave away very respectable soup, and preached sensible sermons, and his cucumber frames were undoubtedly the most successful in the village. What more to ask, except that he should soon go away? She had often congratulated herself that the parish was served by such a rational exponent of Christianity.
    To-day, of course, they discussed the storm.
    “This cooler air,” said he, “must certainly be of assistance to your little invalids. We may, indeed, consider the storm (since you tell me it did not alarm them) as providential. I understand, too, that nearly all the corn was already cut, so that the harvest will not be endangered.”
    Tithes, thought Sophia.
    God was a cloud, lightnings were round about his seat. But Mr. Harwood was unaware of this, and good manners forbade that she should hint it to him. Instead, she found herself thanking him warmly for his promise of balsam seed, well-ripened by the hot summer. If brought on under glass and transferred to a southern aspect, she should have a fine show of plants next summer.
    For everything would go on, and she with it, broken on the wheeling year. Next summer would come, and she would walk in the silent garden, her black dress trailing, her empty heart stuffed up like an old rat-hole with insignificant cares, her ambition for seemliness and prosperity driving her on to oversee the pruning of trees, the trimming of hedges, the tillage of her lands, the increase of her stock. Urged and directed by her will, everything would go on, though to no end. The balsams would bloom, and she be proud of them.
    If I were a man, she thought, I would plunge into dissipation.
    What dissipation is to a man, religion is to a woman. Would it be possible to become a Roman Catholic and go into a convent? No, never for her! — of the two alternatives dissipation seemed the more feasible. For though she could not imagine how it might be contrived, since both to wine and the love of man she opposed an immovably good head, yet, could a suitable dissipation be devised, she might find in herself a will for it; but under no circumstances could she yield herself to devotion. There was gaming, she remembered; that was possible to women. And for a moment she paused to consider herself contracted into an anguished ecstasy that the croupier’s rake could thrust or gather. Gaming might do; yet in its very fever it was cold, and if she were to survive, she must be warmed — she so frigid to wine and the love of man. There was ambition. That should fit her, with her long-breathed resolution, her clear head and love of dominance. But how should a woman satisfy ambition unless acting upon and through a man? — and how control a man by resolution or reason, when any pretty face or leaning bosom could deflect him?
    Far off stood the shade of Papa, speaking of philosophy and the calm joys of an elevated mind. True, Papa spoke also of the inconvenience of blue-stockings, pointing to his own mother as a model of all a daughter should be — Grandmamma, thick, dumpy, and perfumed, her creaking stomacher rising and falling under her gloved and folded hands, saying, “Come, little Sophia. You must not run about in the sun. Fetch your needlework, and sit by me.” Yet, avoiding blue-stockings, one might yet find some succour from Papa and intellectual pursuits — take up chemistry or