Next she had picked up _Cowper's_ _Letters_, the classic prescribed by her father which had bored her, so that one sentence chancing to say something about the smell of broom in his garden, she had thereupon seen the little hall at Richmond laden with flowers on the day of her mother's funeral, smelling so strong that now any flower-scent brought back the sickly horrible sensation; and so from one scene she passed, half-hearing, half-seeing, to another.

She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging flowers in the drawing-room.
"Aunt Lucy," she volunteered, "I don't like the smell of broom; it reminds me of funerals." "Nonsense, Rachel," Aunt Lucy replied; "don't say such foolish things, dear.

I always think it a particularly cheerful plant." Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her aunts, their views, and the way they lived.

Indeed this was a subject that lasted her hundreds of morning walks round Richmond Park, and blotted out the trees and the people and the deer.

Why did they do the things they did, and what did they feel, and what was it all about?
Again she heard Aunt Lucy talking to Aunt Eleanor.