"The world is too much with us," he murmured.
After that it seemed as though they were companions in distress, linked by
a secret, wordless understanding, and Ann walked on with a lighter heart.
Cara was a few paces ahead, flanked by Robin and the local doctor, who were
each endeavouring to secure her undivided attention. She was looking very
lovely, in an elusive frock of some ephemeral material veiling a delicate
prismatic undertone of colour. She always dressed rather wonderfully,
every detail perfect. There was a kind of frail, worldly charm about her
clothes--the sort of charm you never find in the clothes of a thoroughly
good and virtuous woman, as Lady Susan trenchantly observed one day.
Ann herself was acutely conscious of that faintly languorous, mysterious
atmosphere of charm with which Mrs. Hilyard seemed to be invested, and she
had sometimes wondered how Eliot was able to resist it and treat her with
the same cool detachment which he accorded to other people. To her there
was something magnetic in Cara's personality. Perhaps her very silence
about herself, and the vague background of an unhappy marriage of which Ann
was dimly aware, contributed towards it.
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