This Freedom Part 14

This was not good for Rosalie.

Moreover, the community of the boarding house served Rosalie ill on another point. She came there with all those grotesque ideas of her childhood on the respective positions of men and women precipitated through her older years to the perception given to Keggo: women were this, women were that; in their commonest characteristics they contrasted very badly with men; men did things better than women; they had by far the better lot in life than women; unquestionably men were the creatures; of course--off-handedly--they were beasts. She came to the boarding house with these ideas and the boarding house presented these ideas to her in living fact and a.s.sured her in her ideas. She came there very susceptible to the qualities she believed to be rooted with their s.e.x in men and women and she saw those qualities there at once. The boarding house might have been all her ideas of women and of men taken away by an artist and put into an exact picture. It was her words to Keggo in terms of actual life. Its population, little varying, was always round about twenty; the proportion in s.e.x always in the region of fifteen women to five men. The figures were always constant and the characters, when they changed, seemed always to Rosalie to be constant; the names changed, the personalities did not change. Even the faces did not change: there are certain types of faces that either are produced by permanent residence in boarding houses or that go instinctively to boarding houses for their permanent residence. There is a boarding-house mould. There would always be two husbands with wives and three men without wives. The men were never spoken to by any of the women but with a certain archness which Rosalie detested; and they never spoke to the women but with a certain boisterousness, a kind of rubbing together of the hands and a "Ha! What miserable weather, Mrs. Keeley. How does it suit you? Ha!" which Rosalie equally detested. It was as though the women, leading boarding-house lives, knew that the men (who were never in to lunch and sometimes absent from dinner) did not lead boarding-house lives but secret, dashing and mysterious lives; and as though the men knew that they lived secret, dashing and mysterious lives but condescended to the women who lived only boarding-house lives; and the archness on the one side and the boisterousness on the other implied tribute and worthiness of tribute. This implication Rosalie also detested.

Men--as she now saw men and women--she dismissed; generally as "of course they're beasts," severally and in the groups to which they belonged, as cats--of the cat tribe--tame cats, wild cats, Cheshire cats, tomcats and stray cats. But she dismissed them. That was her att.i.tude, as it developed, towards men. They had been, in her regard, owners of the earth, possessing and having dominion over the round world and all that therein is, as a stage magician owns and dominates his stage; they had next been wonderful things but apt to be troublesome and braggart things whose braggadocio caused you to blink and have a funny feeling; they had then been sinister and frightening things that caused poor Anna to say it was hard for women; they became, at last, creatures that had the best of life, that is to say the better time in life, not because they merited it, but because it was theirs by tradition and they stepped into it, or were put into it, as naturally as a man child is put into trousers; and they had, when all was reckoned up, the better qualities--largeness, tolerance, directness, explosiveness (as opposed to smouldering-ness)--not, Rosalie thought, because they were males, but because they had the position that males have, just as by the habit of command is given to small boys in the Navy and very young men in the Army the air and the poise of command.

Yes, certainly men were, as they had always been, the creatures; but the eyes that formerly saw them as magicians, as by a savage is seen only the mystery of the moving hands, the tick, and the strike of a clock, now looked inside the case and saw the works.

No mystery. No exclusiveness of natural power. Nothing abnormal.

Men, on their estimable qualities and position, were what they were merely because, as the works of a watch, thus and thus the wheels were made to go round. Easy. Nothing in it. On the contrary. On the contrary, men were the more despicable in that, dowered as by tradition they were dowered, they yet were--what they were! The eyes that had been caused to blink by Robert blowing smoke through his nose and by Harold pulling up his collar and speaking with a "haw!" sound, blinked from a contempt yet more profound (because now known for contempt) at the exhibition, seen all about her, of men's unlovely side. And she dismissed them. They did not attract her in the smallest degree. All that they had in them to esteem, whether of qualities or of position, they had--here was the parallel--in common with drones in a hive. They had the best of everything; they were blundering, bl.u.s.tering, noisy, careless, buccaneering owners of the world, and to her--as all the roystering swarm to any individual worker bee--to her, negligible. She was a worker bee, busy, purposeful.

There is a special function belonging to drones in a hive. That special function of men in regard to women was repellant to Rosalie.

All that pertained to it was repulsive to her. She loathed to think of men in that capacity and she loathed to see women ensnared in that regard by men. Beautiful cousin Laet.i.tia and the "good match"

that obviously had been found for her: she detested seeing those two together: it made her feel sick.

Men! By this and by that in pa.s.sage of time she was in contact with a good number and a good variety of men. There was the frequently changing male contribution to the boarding-house community; there were clients met in the development of her work at Simc.o.x's; there were the men of the circle of Uncle Pyke Pounce; there were the men of the circle of cousin Laet.i.tia, brought to the little Sat.u.r.day-dinner parties. A very fair average, a rather wider than the normal average of contact with men; and she dismissed them.

They had not any attraction for her at all. If, rarely, she met one whose superficial points were superficially attractive, his contribution to her att.i.tude to men was to make her blink (inwardly) the more, albeit on a different note. That one so exceptionally dowered should find pleasure in, for instance, dalliance of s.e.x!

Contemptible! Oh, sickening and contemptible! One Harry Occleve, of Laet.i.tia's circle, so obviously "the good match," was outstandingly such a case. It was thought upon him, scornful and disgusted thought, that made her, walking back from one of the Sat.u.r.day-evening parties--he was always there--arrange her experiences with men in that a.n.a.logy between men and cats which, as related, had been delivered to Miss Salmon.

Like a tame cat! She never had met a man she despised so much.

You'd think a man like that couldn't help but be above such things as Cousin Laet.i.tia and Aunt Belle made of him. "Occleve." The very name that he owned had a nice sound; and he was brilliantly clever and looked brilliantly clever. He was a barrister and Aunt Belle, who was forever talking about him, had said that evening, just before his arrival, that some famous counsel had declared of him that he was unquestionably the most brilliant of the young men of the day at the Bar. So he was talented, had a great future before him, had a strong, most taking presence, a commanding air, a voice of uncommon charm--and was in bonds to Laet.i.tia! Looked sickly at her! Mouthed fatuous nothings with her! Was obviously marked down to be that "good match" that Laet.i.tia was to make, and was content, was eager, to be the tame cat of her languishing glances and of Aunt Belle's excessive gushings! Was to be seen in a future not distant mated with Laet.i.tia and sharing with her an atmosphere of milk and silk and babies and kisses! Tame cat! What an end to which to bring such qualities! What a desecration of such qualities to set them to win such an end! Tame cat!

But they all were cats of one kind or another. Yes, men are of the cat tribe! Tabby cats--the soft, fattish kind, without any manlike qualities, that seemed to be by far the greater proportion of all the men one saw about in buses and in the streets and met in business; tabby cats--sloppy, old-womanish creatures. Cheshire cats--the kind that grinned out of vacuous minds and that never could speak to a woman without grinning; the unattached men at the boarding house invariably were of the Cheshire-cat cats. Tomcats--the beastly ones with lecherous eyes that looked at you. "Of course they're beasts."

It had been a large experience of the tomcat cats that had made her add that final summary of men to Keggo. The Bashibazook, once or twice encountered in her last terms at the Sultana's, though never spoken with, had looked at her in a horrible way, not understood, but felt to be frightening and horrible; Mr. Ponders, on a dreadful occasion after handing over the medicine for Miss Keggs, had horribly said, "Well, now, wouldn't a kiss be nice? I think a nice kiss would be very nice." She had managed to get away without being touched; the nausea in her eyes perhaps had frightened him. It was nausea she felt, not fear, a horrible physical sickness; and finally to round off the "of course they're beasts" of men as then experienced and now to fill up the schedule of tomcat cats the friends of Uncle Pyke Pounce's circle and Uncle Pyke Pounce himself and the men like the men of his circle--tomcats something past their prime as lechers (but at a hint only more lecherous for that) but in the full prime of their beastliness as guzzlers, who with guzzle eyes eyed their food. She had come across a word in Carlyle's "French Revolution" that instantly brought Uncle Pyke Pounce and his friends to her mind and that always thereafter she applied to the elderly tomcat encountered or pa.s.sed in the street--"atrabilious." Atrabilious!

The very word! She looked it up in the dictionary, was disappointed to find it did not mean exactly what she thought it meant, but gave it her own meaning, and applied it to them. It sounded like them.

They had small beady eyes, set in yellow; no apparent eyelids either above or below, just an unblinking eye set in a puffy face like a currant in a slab of cold pudding that gloated or glared at everything and everybody as if it was a thing to be devoured; guzzlers who gloated upon their food and wallowed in their soup, always with little streaks of red veins and blue veins in their faces. Atrabilious!

Tomcats!

Wild cats--the roamers, the untamed ones, the ones with cruel and with wicked faces that made you not sick, but frightened; mostly they were dressed in rough clothes, men hanging about the streets who patently were thieves or worse, who looked at you and at once looked all around as if to see if any were about that might protect you; but often dressed in gentle dress and then with the cruel and wicked look more cruel and more wicked, to make your shudder to think of a woman having to belong to that.

Stray cats--on the whole the only really bearable ones; the lonely ones that seemed to have lost something or to be lost, that seemed to need looking after, that made you have a funny tender feeling towards them, a wanting as it were to pick them up and carry them home and be sharp with them because they couldn't take care of themselves, and to be kind to them also because they couldn't take care of themselves; yes, the only bearable ones: Mr. Simc.o.x was precisely one.

All cats, of the cat tribe. There wasn't one you couldn't place.

There wasn't one, save dear little Mr. Simc.o.x and the stray cat ones you sometimes saw, that was not in some trait contemptible.

The only thing to be said for them was that it was their nature.

They were created like that. You just shrugged your shoulders at them and let them go at that, negligible ent.i.ties. Active disgust was only felt of them when one of their traits was manifested directly towards you; or, much more, when the sight was given of such a one as this Harry Occleve making such an exhibition of himself and enjoying it, delighting in it, asking nothing better than to be philandering with Laet.i.tia, or escorting Laet.i.tia, or gazing at Laet.i.tia. That did make you angry enough with a man to hate a man. It was like seeing a good book--as it might be "Lombard Street"--used to prop a table leg; or a jolly dog--as the dearest Scotch terrier once brought to the boarding house--led for a walk on a leash by an old maiden mistress and wearing a lapdog's flannel coat with ribbon bows at the corner. Her aversion to Harry Occleve was such that, in their rare pa.s.sages together, she was almost openly rude to him. It seemed there was even no physical quality he had but he used it to abase himself or to make an exhibition of himself. He had noticeably long, strong-looking arms, but the sickening thing to see him once using those arms to hold silk for Laet.i.tia while she wound it! He had a striking face that she named, from a line in Browning, a "marching" face--"one who never turned his back but marched breast forward"--but to see that face bent fatuously towards Laet.i.tia! There radiated from the corners of his eyes towards his temples those little lines that sailors often have, "horizon tracks," she called them; but to see them deeply marked while he mouthed earnest nothings with Laet.i.tia! There was an odd, nice smell about him, of peat, of tobacco, of soap, of heather with the wind across it, of things like that most agreeably mixed, and actually she had heard Laet.i.tia say to him in the babyish way she spoke to him, "You smoke too much. You do." And he, like a moon calf: "Oh, you're not going to ask me to give up smoking, are you?" And she with a trailing eye and hint of a blush, "Perhaps I shall--some day." And he--a sigh! Positively a love-sick sigh straight out of a novel! Ah, positively she could detest the man!

She came to discover it as an odd thing that, while commonly she was entirely indifferent to men, always after a Sat.u.r.day meeting with Laet.i.tia's Harry she had for quite a day or two an active detestation of them.

But it was the women at the boarding house--to instance the boarding house--the fifteen women, the immense, straggling army of women as they looked to be, when they came trooping in to dinner or went trailing out again, that had Rosalie's sharpest observation and that best pointed her youthful estimates. Unlike men who had fallen woefully from her childhood estimate of them, the women maintained and intensified her early estimate of women. The women in the boarding house showed Rosalie what women come to. A few were emphatically old; the rest, with the single exception of Miss Salmon, were emphatically not old; on the other hand they were emphatically not young. They were at pains to let you see they were not old and the pains they were at rather dreadfully (to Rosalie) emphasised the fact that they were not young. The thing about them, the warning, the proof that they exhibited of all Rosalie's ideas about the inferiority of women, was that they were, in her phrase, derelicts--not wanted; abandoned; homeless; or they would not be here. Yes, derelict; and what was worse, derelict not in the sense of desuetude of powers or of powers outworn, but with the suggestion of never having had any powers, of having been always the mere vessels of another's powers--some man's; and now, with that power withdrawn--the man, whether father, brother, lover or husband, gone--derelict as a ship, abandoned of crew, rudderless and dismasted, is derelict; as an obscure habitation, cold of hearth, crazy of walls, abandoned to decay, is derelict. She summed them all up as having arrived at what they were precisely because in their earlier years they had been what in her childhood she had supposed women to be: inferior creatures at the disposal and for the benefit and service of men.

What a warning never to be that! There they were--manless. And therefore derelict. And because derelict for such a reason, therefore testimony to a social condition that was abominable, and because seen to be abominable never, never herself should enfold. Never!

Manless. Husbandless. There they were, the straggling mob of them,--deserted by husbands, semi-detached from husbands, relict of husbands fallen out with a st.i.tch in the side in the race for husbands. Urh!

She was very young, Rosalie.

"Despised and rejected of men," she said to Miss Salmon, holding forth in their bedroom on her subject. "That's what I call them.

Despised and rejected of men. Oh, don't hum louder than ever. It's not irreverent to say that. It describes a condition, that's all, and I'm using it because it describes this condition, their condition, exactly. It does. You can hum; but it does. They've never done anything, they've never meant to do anything, they've never tried to do anything except hang round after some man. That's all. They've either caught him and now lost him; or they've missed him and now go on missing him. That's their lives. That's nearly any woman's life. It's not going to be mine. If anything were wanted to make the whole idea of marriage and all that repulsive to me--and nothing is wanted--that would. Despised and rejected of men! I used to think and to say I intended to be like a man and to do a man's work and have a man's share. I tell you that even getting so close to a man as that--I mean as close as intentional emulation of him--even getting as close as that makes me feel sick now. It's my own life I'm going to have, my own place, my own share; not modelled on any one else's. If it were conceivable that I ever met a man I cared tuppence about--but it isn't conceivable; that's a quality that's been left clean out of me, thank goodness--but if it were conceivable, what I'd offer would be just to share; to go on living my own way and he his--Oh, your humming! I mean after marriage, of course; I think this free-love business they talk about is even more detestable than the lawful kind--just animalism. That's all I'd do. Me my life; he his life; meeting, as equals, when it was convenient to meet. I'd like to bring all these poets and people who write about love into our dining-room to see those people. That'd teach them!

Man's love is of his life a thing apart; 'Tis woman's whole existence.

What an existence!"

"Well, now--" (gulp).

CHAPTER VII

"You have pretended to dislike and to despise men, but it was a pretence to deceive me and you are a liar."

This was the astounding opening of an astounding letter, pages and pages, to Rosalie from Miss Salmon. Pages and pages, having the appearance, each one, of a battlefield or of a riot: a welter of thick, black underscores strewn about like coffins or like corpses, and a bristling pin-cushionful (black pins) of notes of exclamation leaping about like war-dancing Zulus or staggering about like drunken or like wounded men. A welter you had to pick your way through with epithets rushing against you at every step like units of a surging mob hounding and charging against an unfortunate pedestrian caught in the trouble.

Miss Salmon had two months before introduced "a gentleman friend"

to the boarding house. He was a clerk in some big business firm.

His name was Upsmith and he bore upon a fattish face a troubled, beseeching look, rather as though something internal and not to be mentioned was severely incommoding him and might at any moment become acute. Miss Salmon called him Boo, which Rosalie considered grotesque but not unsuitable, and it was communicated to the boarding house that the twain were at a mysterious point of affinity called, not an engagement, but an understanding.

Rosalie had by this time taken the second step in her upward progression of comfort in the boarding house. She had moved into a separate room, leaving Miss Salmon to become half of another two friends as one, and she and Miss Salmon therefore saw much less of each other. But Rosalie still sat at the same table as Miss Salmon at dinner and there Mr. Upsmith joined them.

The thing may be hurried along to its astounding conclusion in the astounding letter. It was not in itself an event of any sort of moment to Rosalie. She was in no way outraged by being called a liar. There is no hurt at all in being called a liar when you know you are not a liar. The accusation has sting only if you are a liar; and indeed it is comforting evidence of some inner self within us that only when we have ourselves debased that inner self become we open to wounds from without. That citadel is never taken by storm; only by treachery. No, the significance of the astounding letter reposed in the fact that her reception of it opened to Rosalie a glimpse of a quality rising beneath her to carry her forward as a wave beneath a swimmer. It has been perceived in her but Rosalie had not perceived it.

A great triumph and a great happiness swelled within Miss Salmon with the arrival of Mr. Upsmith and with the circulation about the boarding house that there was an understanding between herself and Mr. Upsmith. Her humming took on a loud, defiant quality, as of triumph; she pursued her pince-nez with a certain eagerness, as of confidence of balance and cert.i.tude of capture. Her note and her air seemed to say that she was Boo's and Boo hers and she gloried in it with that exalted and yet something fearful glory that is to be seen, pathetically, on the faces of very plain young women, or of distinctly ageing young women, who have got a Boo but for whom the Boos of this world are elusive to capture and slippery to hold.

The look is to be seen a dozen times on any Sunday afternoon when the young couples are out.

At dinner time Miss Salmon would talk much to Boo in whispers and then would look up and hum across at Rosalie in triumph, as of one that knew things that Rosalie could not know and that had a thing that Rosalie did not possess. Mr. Upsmith looked also much at Rosalie, in no triumph, but in an apparent great excess of his unfortunate complaint. He stared, troubled and beseeching, at her at meals, and he stared, troubled and beseeching, at her when he encountered her away from meals. The longer he sojourned in the boarding house the more troubled and beseeching, when Rosalie happened to notice him, did his fattish countenance appear to become. That was all.

There scarcely ever was exchanged between them even the courtesies customary between dwellers beneath the same roof; they never, that Rosalie could remember, were a minute alone together and yet on a day in an August, Miss Salmon a week away on a month at the seaside with the family to which she was nursery governess, Rosalie was being told in the violent opening sentence of one letter that she had pretended to despise and dislike men but had only done it to deceive Miss Salmon and was a liar; and in the impa.s.sioned sentences of another which had been enclosed and had fallen and to which bewildered she stooped and then read, that the heart of Boo was at her feet ("your proud, sweet little feet that I would kiss in my adorance") that he had adored her ever since he had first set eyes on her, that he treasured "like pearls before swine" every encouragement she had given him from her divine eyes and from her proud little lips, that he had had no sleep for a fortnight and felt he would go mad unless he wrote these few lines (nine pages), that he earned "good money," and that he was, in conclusion, to which Rosalie amazedly skipped, "ever and ever and imperishably always her imperishably adoring Boo."

Two days previously Rosalie had received, but not read, another slightly mysterious letter. It had been in her receptacle in the letter rack in the hall, addressed to her in an unfamiliar writing and deposited by hand, not through the post. It had begun "Dear Miss Salmon, re our friendship I have to inform you--" Rosalie had turned to the end, "B. Upsmith." She had replaced it in its envelope, written upon the envelope, "This is evidently for you, but addressed to me, as you see--R." and had placed it in another stamped wrapper to be forwarded by Miss Kentish. She had only thought of it as in funny style for a love letter, proper no doubt to the niceties of an "understanding." And what had happened was that the vile, egregious, and infamous Boo, writing to break off one understanding and establish another, had placed them in the wrong envelopes. The outpourings of his bursting heart to Rosalie had been received by Miss Salmon; the information "re our friendship"

had gone to Rosalie.

Of itself, as has been said, the whole incident was nothing at all in the life of Rosalie. It came with the crash, but only startling and quite harmless crash, of an unexpected clap of thunder, and it pa.s.sed as completely and as pa.s.sively, doing no damage, leaving no mark. Miss Salmon never returned to the boarding house; the vile, egregious and infamous Boo haply incisively informed by Miss Salmon of what he had done, incontinently, and without speech to Rosalie, fled from the boarding house. They were gone, they were nothing to Rosalie; the correspondence was destroyed, it was nothing to Rosalie.

But the significance of the matter was here. There was in Miss Salmon's letter to Rosalie one paragraph that Rosalie read a second time. She had received the letter when coming in just before dinner.

Not at all injured nor in any way discommoded by the hurtling epithets, the terrific underscores intended to be as bludgeons, or the leaping exclamatory notes set there for stabs, she had put the thing away in a drawer and gone down to her meal. The pa.s.sage alluded to came more than once into her mind. When she was about to get into bed that night she destroyed the letter, first reading that paragraph, and only that, again. Sole in the violent welter of those sheets it had no underscores nor any exclamations. It was added as a postscript. It said:

"Well, now; Boo and I met the first time in a crowd watching a horse that had fallen down. It kicked and I stepped back quickly and trod on his foot. It made him put his hands on my arms and I looked around to apologise and there was his dear face smiling at me, although in great pain, for I had trodden on a corn he has; and I knew at once it was the face I had looked for and longed for all my life and had found at last; and I loved him from the first and we went out of the crowd and talked. Well, now; I clung to him in all our happy, happy months together, in a way you can never understand, because I loved him, and because I am not the sort that men like because I am only plain, and I knew that if ever he left me I could never get another. Well, now; you have taken him away from me. You could get dozens and dozens of men to love you, but you have taken mine, and I never, never can get another."

The thoughts of Rosalie, not sequent, but going about and amounting thusly, were thus: "That is very pathetic. That is horribly sad and pathetic. Coming at the end like that and without any strokes and flourishes, it is as if she was exhausted of her hate and rage and just put out an utterly tired hand and set this here like a sigh. That's pathetic, the mere look of it and that thought of it. And then what she says. The dreadfully simple naivete of the beginning of it. Staring at a fallen horse in the street. It's just where they would be, both of them. They'd stand there for hours and just stare and stare. And then she steps back on his foot and there's 'his dear face' smiling at her; ah, it's pathetic, it's poignant! I can see it absolutely. Yes, I can. As if I were in the crowd around the horse, watching them. There they are, the horse between us, and all the doltish, staring faces round about; and their two dull and stupid faces; and as their eyes meet that sudden look upon their foolish faces, as of irradiation out of heaven, that would make a clown's face beautiful and cause the hardest heart to twist. But it doesn't cause mine to twist. That's the odd thing.

I remember perfectly when a thing like that would have given me a little blinky kind of feeling. I've always been awfully quick to notice things like that. I've often seen them. Quite recently, so little, I believe, as a year ago, things like that, things like this, would have moved me a lot. They somehow do not now. That frightful ending of hers: 'You could get dozens and dozens of men to love you, but you have taken mine and I can never, never get another.' That is most terribly pathetic. I think that is the most poignant thing I have ever heard. Well, I can realise its utter pathos; I can realise it but I cannot feel it. It does not move me. 'And I never, never can get another.' It's frightful. I could cry. But I do not a bit want to cry. I must have somehow changed. I am not a bit sorry if I have changed. I would be sorry to go back and be as, if I have changed, I must have been--sentimental. I have changed. I believe I can look back and see it. About the time I left the Sultana's, mother's letters, and keeping them and answering them, began to be--yes they did begin to be a little, tiny bit of a nuisance to me. Yes, it was beginning then, this. And I expect earlier, if I worked it out. There's nothing in it to regret. It's just a growing out of a thing. It's not, when I see a thing that's pathetic, that I've grown blunt or blind and can't see it for pathetic. It's just--I know what it is--it's just that it doesn't appeal to me in the same way. It's like seeing a dish of most tempting food in front of you, not that I ever remember my mouth, as they say, watering at anything; but say strawberries and cream--I'm fond of strawberries and cream--it's like seeing a dish of strawberries and cream in front of you, and knowing it's good and knowing it's delicious, and knowing you're awfully fond of it--and just not being hungry; turning away and leaving it there, not because it's not everything that it ought to be, but just because--you don't want it. I should say that's how it is with me about these--these pathetic things. I know they're pathetic. I don't want them."

That is how it was, how it had become, with Rosalie. That was just her first recognition of it, as the swimmer, intent on his own making of his progression, recognises not, till he has been borne some distance by it, the current that also is carrying him along.

Visits home to the Rectory were further manifestations to her of this arising symptom.

There were appeals that should have arisen to her out of her home; and they did arise; and she recognised them; but they did not appeal to her--not in the old way. She went home very rarely for occasional week-ends, always for her annual holidays, always for Christmas; and the discovery she made was that she liked her home very much better when she was away from it than when she was in it. When a visit was in prospect she desired her home, that is to say her mother, most frightfully. But when the visit was in being the joy she had promised herself she would spread somehow was not at her command; the love she had yearned to show somehow was chilled within her and not forthcoming. It was the tempting dish in a new ill.u.s.tration--rushing eagerly to it, avid of its delights; coming to it and finding, after all, one was not hungry.