Peter's room was the smallest and highest in the boarding-house. It was extremely small and high, and just above the bed was a ceiling that got hot through and through like a warming-pan, so that the room in summer was like a little oven below. What air there was came in came through a small skylight above the wash-stand; through this also came the rain when it rained; the dirtiest rain Peter had ever seen.  
It was not raining this morning, when Peter, after passing a very warm night, heard the bells beginning. A great many bells begin on Sunday mornings in this part of London, no doubt in any part of London, but here they seem particularly loud. The boarding-house was in a small street close to a large English church and a small Roman church; and the English church had its first Mass at seven, and the Roman church at six, and each had another an hour later, and bells rang for all. So Peter lay and listened.
 
Sometimes he went with Hilary and Peggy to the Roman Mass. That pleased Peggy, who had hopes of some day converting him. And occasionally he went alone to the English Mass, and he liked that better, on the whole, because the little Roman church was rather ugly. Peter didn't think he would ever join the Roman church, even to please Peggy. It certainly seemed to him in some ways the most finely expressive¹ of the churches; but equally certainly it often expressed the wrong things, and (like all other churches) left whole worlds unexpressed. And so much of its expression had a crudity².... It kept saying too little and too much, and jarring.
 
Anyhow, this morning Peter, who had a headache after his warm night, lay and heard the bells and thought what a nice day Sunday was, with no office to go to. Instead, he would take Rhoda on the river in the morning, and go and see Lucy in the afternoon, and probably have tea there. When Peter went to see Lucy he always had a faint hope that Urquhart would perhaps walk in, and that they would all be friendly and happy together in the old way, for one afternoon. It hadn't happened yet. Peter hadn't seen Urquhart since they had left Venice, two months ago. Sunday was his day for going to see Lucy, and it wasn't Urquhart's day, perhaps because Urquhart was so often away for week-ends; though last Sunday, indeed, he had just left the Hopes' house when Peter arrived.
 
Lucy, when Peter had told her his tale of dishonour³ two months ago, had said, half laughing at him, "How stupid of all of you!" She hadn't realised quite how much it mattered. Lucy judged everything by a queer, withdrawn⁴ standard of her own.
 
Peter had agreed that it had been exceedingly stupid of all of them. Once, since then, when he heard that Urquhart had returned and had seen Lucy, he had asked her, "Does he dislike us all very much? Is he quite too disgusted to want to see me again?"
 
Lucy had wrinkled her forehead over it.
 
"He's not angry," she had said. "You can fancy, can't you? Merely—merely ..."
 
"Detached," said Peter, who had more words, and always expressed what Lucy meant; and she nodded. "Just that, you know." She had looked at him wistfully, hoping he wasn't minding too horribly much.
 
"It's stupid of him," she had said, using her favourite adjective, and had added, dubiously⁵, "Come and meet him sometime. You can't go on like this; it's too silly."
 
Peter had shaken his head. "I won't till he wants to. I don't want to bother him, you see."
 
"He does want to," Lucy had told him. "Of course he does. Only he thinks you don't. That's what's so silly."
 
They had left it there for the present. Some day Peter meant to walk into Denis's rooms and say, "Don't be stupid. This can't go on." But the day hadn't come yet. If it had been Denis who had done the shady thing and was in penury⁶ and dishonour thereby⁷, it would have been so simple. But that was inconceivable; such things didn't happen to Denis; and as it was it was not simple.
 
Peter got out of his hot bed on to his hot floor, and made for the bathroom. There was only one bathroom in the boarding-house, but there was no great competition for it, so Peter had his bath in peace, and sang a tune⁸ in it as was his custom, and came back to his hot room and put on his hot clothes (his less tidy clothes, because it was the day of joy), and came down to breakfast at 9:25.
 
Most of the other boarders had got there before him. It was a mixed boarding-house, and contained at the moment two gentlemen besides Hilary and Peter, and five ladies besides Peggy and Rhoda. They were on the whole a happy and even gay society, and particularly on Sundays.
 
Peggy, looking up from the tea-cups, gave Peter a broad smile, and Rhoda gave him a little subdued⁹ one, and Peter looked pleased to see everyone; he always did, even on Mondays.
 
"I'm sure your brother hasn't a care in the world," an envious¹⁰ lady boarder had once said to Peggy; "he's always so happy-looking."
 
This was the lady who was saying, as Peter entered, "And my mother's last words were, 'Find Elizabeth Dean's grave.' Elizabeth Dean was an author, you know—oh, very well known, I believe. She treated my mother and me none too well; didn't stand by us when she should have—but we won't say anything about that now. Anyhow, it was a costly¹¹ funeral—forty pounds and eight horses—and my mother hadn't an idea where she was laid. So she said, 'Find Elizabeth Dean's grave,' just like that. And the strange thing was that in the first churchyard I walked into, in a little village down in Sussex, there was a tombstone, 'Elizabeth Dean, 65. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.' Wasn't that queer, now? So I went straight and...."
 
"The woman's a fool," muttered the gentleman next Peter, a cynical-faced commercial traveller. Peter had heard the remark from him frequently before, and did not feel called upon to reply to it.
 
But the tale of Elizabeth Dean was interrupted by a lady of a speculative¹² habit of mind.
 
"Now I want to ask you all, should one put up a tombstone to the departed? I've been having quite a kick-up with my sisters about it lately. Hadn't one better spend the money on the living? What do you think, Miss Matthews?"
 
Miss Matthews said she liked to see a handsome headstone.
 
"After all, one honours them that way. It's all one can do for them, isn't it."
 
"Oh, Miss Matthews, all?" Several ladies were shocked. "What about one's prayers for the dead?"
 
"I don't pray for the dead," said Miss Matthews, who was a protestant, and did not attend the large church in the next street. "I do not belong to the Romish religion. I'm not saying anything against those who do, but I consider that those who do not should confine their prayers to those who may require them in this troubled world, and not waste them upon those whose fate we have every reason to believe is settled once and for all."
 
The lady who always quarrelled with her on this subject rose to the occasion. Peggy, soothing¹³ them down, said mechanically, "There now.... Three lumps, Peter?... Micky, one doesn't suck napkin rings; naughty."
 
Peter was appealed to by his neighbour, who knew that he occasionally attended St. Austin's church. People were always drawing him into theological discussions, which he knew nothing at all about.
 
"Mr. Peter, isn't that against all reason, to stop praying for our friends merely because they've passed through the veil?"
 
"Yes," Peter agreed. "I should have thought so." But all he really thought was that beyond the veil was such darkness that he never looked into it, and that it was a pity people should argue on a holiday.
 
"Now," said someone else, wishing to be a peace-maker, "I'm afraid you'll all say I'm very naughty, but I attend the early Mass at St. Austin's, high Mass at the Roman church"—she nodded at Peggy—"and the City Temple in the evening"—she smiled at the commercial traveller, who was believed to be a New Theologian. "Aren't I naughty, now?"
 
Mademoiselle, the French governess, came down at this point, saying she had had a dream about a hat with pink roses. The peace-making lady said, "Bad little thing, she's quite frisky¹⁴ this morning." Hilary, to whom Mademoiselle was the last straw, left the room.
 
Rhoda followed his example. She had sat very silent, as usual, over breakfast, eating little. Peter came out with her, and followed her into the sitting-room¹⁵, where she stood listlessly playing with the tassel¹⁶ of the blind. Rhoda was thinner than ever, and floppier¹⁷, and took even less pains to be neat. She had left off her beads¹⁸, but had not replaced them by a collar.
 
Peter said, "Are you coming out with me this morning?"
 
She replied, listless and uncaring, "If you like."
 
"We might go," said Peter, "and see if the New English Art Club is open on Sunday mornings. And then we'll go on the river. Shall we?"
 
She assented²⁰ again. "Very well."
 
A moment later she sighed, and said wearily, "How it does go on, day after day, doesn't it!"
 
Peter said it did.
 
"On and on," said Rhoda. "Same stupid people saying the same stupid old things. I do wonder they don't get tired. They don't know anything, do they?"
 
Rhoda's hankering was still after Great Minds.
 
"They're funny sometimes," suggested Peter tentatively; but she was blind to that.
 
"They don't know a thing. And they talk and talk, so stupidly. About religion—as if one religion was different from another. And about dead people, as if they knew all about them and what they were doing. They seem to make sure souls go on—Miss Matthews and Miss Baker²¹ were both sure of that. But how can they tell? Some people that know lots more than them don't think so, but say ... say it's nothingness."
 
Peter recognised Guy Vyvian's word. Rhoda would have said "nothing to follow."
 
"People say," he agreed, "quite different things, and none of them know anything about it, of course. One needn't worry, though."
 
"You never worry," she accused him, half fretfully. "But," she added, "you don't preach, either. You don't say things are so when you can't know.... Do you think anything about that, Peter—about going on? I don't believe you do."
 
Peter reflected. "No," he said. "I don't believe I do. I can't look beyond what I can see and touch; I don't try. I expect I'm a materialist²². The colours and shapes of things matter so awfully²³ much; I can't imagine anything of them going on when those are dead. I rather wish I could. Some people that know lots more than me do, and I think it's splendid of them and for them. They're very likely right, too, you know."
 
Rhoda shook her head. "I believe it's nothingness."
 
Peter felt it a dreary²⁴ subject, and changed it.
 
"Well, let's come and look at pictures. And I can't imagine nothingness, can you? We might have lunch out somewhere, if you don't mind."
 
So they went out and looked at pictures, and went up the river in a steamer, and had lunch out somewhere, and Rhoda grew very gentle and more cheerful, and said, "I didn't mean to be cross to you, Peter. You're ever so good to me," and winked²⁵ away tears, and the gentle Peter, who hated no one, wished that some catastrophe²⁶ would wipe Guy Vyvian off the face of the earth and choke his memory with dust. Whenever one thought Rhoda was getting rather better, the image of Vyvian, who knew such a lot more than most people, came up between her and the world she ought to have be............