MARCIA FAVERSHAM put down her embroidery and lay back in her deck chair, surrendering herself for a moment to the delicious sensation of languor that was stealing over her.
    She was sitting at the farther end of the lawn, so that she could see the lilac and laburnum in flower against the creeper-covered house. They had only moved into the house last autumn, and every day of this early summer was bringing fresh delights. Flowers sprang up where they had not known that flowers had been planted, a little shrub that had looked most prosaically green took to itself suddenly tiny orange blossoms. There was an almond tree among the trees by the greenhouse. They had never noticed that till they found it in bloom one morning … It was like living in a fairy tale. Anything might happen any day.  No other year, of course, would be quite like this.
    It was because of the garden that John had taken the house. John was garden-mad. Before they came here they had lived in Monkton Hawes, the nearest country town, where John’s work was. They had had a pretty house there but only a small garden. For many years John’s dream had been to ‘move farther out.’ He had worked hard and saved money. He had thought himself very fortunate in securing the house in Leadon Hill just five miles out of Monkton Hawes. He cycled or walked into the town every day to his work, and Hugo and Moyna (the two elder children) cycled in to their schools. Moyna came home every evening, but Hugo was a weekly boarder at Marfield, his Preparatory School.
    Already John had worked marvels in this garden. He had made a rose garden beyond the lawn, and beyond that a broad path of crazy pavement with a little pool in the middle and a rockery at the end. The garden was too large for John to work unaided, so a jobbing gardener came three days a week—a thin, morose creature called Blake, who accepted John’s orders and watched John’s exertion with a sardonic smile. Horticulturally speaking, Blake was not allowed a soul of his own, and he resented it.
    Above the hedge Marcia could just see the next house shuttered and untenanted. That belonged to them too. John had bought them both—The Hawthorns and The Chestnuts. The names had annoyed her at first and she had decided to change them. But she could think of no others that satisfied her. All names for houses seemed affected. So she had begun to call them by their numbers, Six and Eight, till she found that this was considered as an affront by the inhabi­tants of the other houses in the road. There was a touch of the plebeian about a house known only by its number, in the eyes of Leadon Hill. Most of the better houses in Leadon Hill were known by the name of some tree that grew (or failed to grow) in their gardens. Of course there was a higher scale of names. Towers and Granges and Manors and Halls. The inhabitants of Acacia Road did not aspire to those. They knew their place. They were The Laurels and Laburnums and Elms and Limes. But they weren’t numbers. That was the class next below them—houses all joined together without any gardens to speak of. Those were numbers. That the Favershams should call the two largest houses in Acacia Road numbers was an insult to every Limes and Laburnums and Elms in it. It implied that the Favershams thought the houses weren’t good enough for names. “The idea!” as little Miss Mitcham of Ivy Cottage said indignantly. Miss Mitcham had never in her life before lived in a road where the houses had numbers and she didn’t see why she should be submitted to the in­dignity at her age. What would her friends think? It gave such an impression … So John, who was only anxious to be on good terms with his neighbours and was horrified at the feeling of indignation caused by this inno­cent attempt towards the general simplification of life, hastily ordered the names The Hawthorns and The Chestnuts to be repainted on to the two green gates, and Acacia Road breathed again.
    The Chestnuts was not a lucky house. For no reason in particular people didn’t stay in it long. The last occupant had been a Mr. Brewer, to whom John had let the house soon after buying it. Mr. Brewer had made money in groceries in the war and was considered ‘not quite’ by Leadon Hill. Shortly after taking The Chestnuts he had come into yet more money, and finding Leadon Hill rather duller than he had anticipated had moved to London in search of a brighter life. Acacia Road was glad. He had been the only person in it who was ‘not quite,’ and his occasional lapses in accent and aspiration of the letter aitch had caused his neighbours (who were all essentially ‘quite’) real pain. Miss Mitcham had begged John to ‘make sure’ next time. He owed something, she said magnificently, to the neighbourhood. She gave him to understand that his inability to spot ‘not quites’ damned him as being in some way a ‘not quite’ himself.
    Marcia rather liked The Chestnuts being empty. The lack of its rent, of course, meant so much less income to John, but John had enough income for their needs. She disliked the feeling of responsibility for the inmate of The Chestnuts that Acacia Road had impressed upon her, and she liked the feeling of privacy that the shuttered windows of The Chest­nuts gave her. You could see the garden of The Hawthorns so well from the upstairs windows of The Chestnuts.
    She took up Moyna’s frock again, put a few stitches of embroidery into it, then laid it down, openly, flagrantly lazy, enjoying the fresh sun-laden air, the clamorously sweet song of the birds …
    This early summer was so delicious. No other season quite equalled it. Midsummer was glorious, but you were used to the sun, the flowers, by then. Autumn was glorious, but autumn was so near winter …
    She remembered suddenly that she had promised John to buy him a book of stamps in the village and went to put on her hat.

II

    She walked slowly down Acacia Road. As she passed The Elms, a little grey-haired old lady smiled and waved to her from the window. That was Miss Dulcie Martyn, who lived at The Elms with her elder sister and her niece. The elder Miss Martyn disapproved of Miss Dulcie’s waving to friends from the window, but it was a habit she could never break her of. Miss Dulcie was always naively pleased to see people she knew and could not learn to dissemble her pleasure.
    A girl was coming down the road calling at each house. That was Olive Legarde, the Miss Martyns’ niece; she was delivering the Parish Magazine. She had only come to live with her aunts last month, and had already constituted herself an unofficial curate in the village. She passed Marcia with a fugitive glance and a quick “Good afternoon, Mrs. Faver­sham.”
    At the end of the road Marcia felt keen eyes upon her, though she did not look up. That was Miss Mitcham watching, watching Leadon Hill incessantly, from behind the lace curtains of the drawing-room of Ivy Cottage.
    Marcia walked slowly across the Green to the post office. A clergyman, with, obviously, his wife beside him, was walking across the Green in the other direction. They were Mr. and Mrs. Langley, the vicar and his wife. The man was tall and stout, with a look of slackness about face and figure. The woman was pretty in rather a common style.
    Marcia went into the post office and bought her stamps. At the counter stood the two Miss Paintons from Craig Lodge—very faded, very thin, very shabbily dressed. They greeted Marcia primly and distantly.
    As she came out again she saw a plump, smiling, middle-aged woman coming towards the Green with a very pretty girl. That was Mrs. Croombs from Moss Rose Cottage, with her daughter Freda. Marcia returned their greeting, then crossed over into Acacia Road again. Again she felt Miss Mitcham’s veiled but piercing glance from the house at the corner. Again Miss Dulcie Martyn waved ecstatically from the window of The Elms.
    Marcia went back to the garden. She did not take up her sewing at once. Somehow her walk had slightly depressed her—she did not know why. Often a meeting with the other inhabitants of Leadon Hill, however pleasant they might be, left her with this curious feeling of oppression. Of course she and John were strangers in the eyes of the village. They had been there less than a year. They were the latest arrivals in the village, except Olive Legarde, and she, as a niece of the Miss Martyns, did not rank quite as a stranger.
    Oh dear, she must finish this smock of Moyna’s. She roused herself with a little shake and began to stitch briskly.
    Then she heard the children’s voices and laid her work down again, watching with a smile the corner of the house from which she knew they would come … Hugo, Moyna, Timmy.....