Chapter: Charles need not have been anxious. Miss Schlegel had never heard of his
mother's strange request. She was to hear of it in after years, when she
had built up her life differently, and it was to fit into position as
the headstone of the corner. Her mind was bent on other questions
now, and by her also it would have been rejected as the fantasy of an
invalid.

She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his
mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of
it for ever. The ripple had left no traces behind; the wave had strewn
at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood
for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells
a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. Her
friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in degradation.
Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease and pain. Some
leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox
had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She
had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her
friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but
not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to
die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet
with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he
must leave.

The last word--whatever it would be--had certainly not been said in
Hilton churchyard. She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any
more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy
devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would
register the quick motions of man. In Margaret's eyes Mrs. Wilcox had
escaped registration. She had gone out of life vividly, her own way, and
no dust was so truly dust as the contents of that heavy coffin, lowered
with ceremonial until it rested on the dust of the earth, no flowers so
utterly wasted as the chrysanthemums that the frost must have withered
before morning. Margaret had once said she "loved superstition." It was
not true. Few women had tried more earnestly to pierce the accretions in
which body and soul are enwrapped. The death of Mrs. Wilcox had helped
her in her work. She saw a little more clearly than hitherto what a
human being is, and to what he may aspire. Truer relationships gleamed.
Perhaps the last word would be hope--hope even on this side of the
grave.

Meanwhile, she could take an interest in the survivors. In spite of her
Christmas duties, in spite of her brother, the Wilcoxes continued to
play a considerable part in her thoughts. She had seen so much of them
in the final week. They were not "her sort," they were often suspicious
and stupid, and deficient where she excelled; but collision with them
stimulated her, and she felt an interest that verged into liking, even
for Charles. She desired to protect them, and often felt that they could
protect her, excelling where she was deficient. Once past the rocks of
emotion, they knew so well what to do, whom to send for; their hands
were on all the ropes, they had grit as well as grittiness and she
valued grit enormously. They led a life that she could not attain
to--the outer life of "telegrams and anger," which had detonated when
Helen and Paul had touched in June, and had detonated again the other
week. To Margaret this life was to remain a real force. She could not
despise it, as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtues
as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no
doubt, but they have formed our civilisation. They form character, too;
Margaret could not doubt it; they keep the soul from becoming sloppy.
How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a
world?

"Don't brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of
the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our
business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them."

Helen replied that she had no intention of brooding on such a dull
subject. What did her sister take her for? The weather was magnificent.
She and the Mosebachs had gone tobogganing on the only hill that
Pomerania boasted. It was fun, but over-crowded, for the rest of
Pomerania had gone there too. Helen loved the country, and her letter
glowed with physical exercise and poetry. She spoke of the scenery,
quiet, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, with their scampering herds
of deer; of the river and its quaint entrance into the Baltic Sea; of
the Oderberge, only three hundred feet high, from which one slid all too
quickly back into the Pomeranian plains, and yet these Oderberge were
real mountains, with pine-forests, streams, and views complete. "It
isn't size that counts so much as the way things are arranged." In
another paragraph she referred to Mrs. Wilcox sympathetically, but the
news had not bitten into her. She had not realised the accessories
of death, which are in a sense more memorable than death itself. The
atmosphere of precautions and recriminations, and in the midst a human
body growing more vivid because it was in pain; the end of that body in
Hilton churchyard; the survival of something that suggested hope, vivid
in its turn against life's workaday cheerfulness;--all these were lost
to Helen, who only felt that a pleasant lady could now be pleasant no
longer. She returned to Wickham Place full of her own affairs--she had
had another proposal--and Margaret, after a moment's hesitation, was
content that this should be so.

The proposal had not been a serious matter. It was the work of Fraulein
Mosebach, who had conceived the large and patriotic notion of winning
back her cousins to the Fatherland by matrimony. England had played Paul
Wilcox, and lost; Germany played Herr Forstmeister some one--Helen could
not remember his name. Herr Forstmeister lived in a wood, and, standing
on the summit of the Oderberge, he had pointed out his house to Helen,
or rather, had pointed out the wedge of pines in which it lay. She had
exclaimed, "Oh, how lovely! That's the place for me!" and in the evening
Frieda appeared in her bedroom. "I have a message, dear Helen," etc.,
and so she had, but had been very nice when Helen laughed; quite
understood--a forest too solitary and damp--quite agreed, but Herr
Forstmeister believed he had assurance to the contrary. Germany had
lost, but with good-humour; holding the manhood of the world, she felt
bound to win. "And there will even be some one for Tibby," concluded
Helen. "There now, Tibby, think of that; Frieda is saving up a little
girl for you, in pig-tails and white worsted stockings but the feet
of the stockings are pink as if the little girl had trodden in
strawberries. I've talked too much. My head aches. Now you talk."

Tibby consented to talk. He too was full of his own affairs, for he had
just been up to try for a scholarship at Oxford. The men were down, and
the candidates had been housed in various colleges, and had dined in
hall. Tibby was sensitive to beauty, the experience was new, and he
gave a description of his visit that was almost glowing. The august and
mellow University, soaked with the richness of the western counties that
it has served for a thousand years, appealed at once to the boy's taste;
it was the kind of thing he could understand, and he understood it
all the better because it was empty. Oxford is--Oxford; not a mere
receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to
love it rather than to love one another; such at all events was to
be its effect on Tibby. His sisters sent him there that he might make
friends, for they knew that his education had been cranky, and had
severed him from other boys and men. He made no friends. His Oxford
remained Oxford empty, and he took into life with him, not the memory of
a radiance, but the memory of a colour scheme.

It pleased Margaret to hear her brother and sister talking. They did
not get on overwell as a rule. For a few moments she listened to them,
feeling elderly and benign.

Then something occurred to her, and she interrupted.

"Helen, I told you about poor Mrs. Wilcox; that sad business?"

"Yes."

"I have had a correspondence with her son. He was winding up the estate,
and wrote to ask me whether his mother had wanted me to have anything.
I thought it good of him, considering I knew her so little. I said that
she had once spoken of giving me a Christmas present, but we both forgot
about it afterwards."

"I hope Charles took the hint."

"Yes--that is to say, her husband wrote later on, and thanked me for
being a little kind to her, and actually gave me her silver vinaigrette.
Don't you think that is extraordinarily generous? It has made me
like him very much. He hopes that this will not be the end of our
acquaintance, but that you and I will go and stop with Evie some time in
the future. I like Mr. Wilcox. He is taking up his work--rubber--it is
a big business. I gather he is launching out rather. Charles is in it,
too. Charles is married--a pretty little creature, but she doesn't seem
wise. They took on the flat, but now they have gone off to a house of
their own."

Helen, after a decent pause, continued her account of Stettin. How
quickly a situation changes! In June she had been in a crisis; even in
November she could blush and be unnatural; now it was January and
the whole affair lay forgotten. Looking back on the past six months,
Margaret realised the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its
difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by
historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead
nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never
comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that
might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that
of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is
never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly
silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good,
and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life
fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save
by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality
would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of
it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its
essence is romantic beauty. Margaret hoped that for the future she would
be less cautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the past.

 It turns out that Margaret didn't know about Mrs. Wilcox's bequest after all. She feels undone by her friend's death, and contemplates the way in which she disappeared from the world. Margaret also thinks over the funeral - it was nothing but a ceremony, with nothing to do with Mrs. Wilcox's actual death. Finally, she also thinks a lot about the Wilcoxes, who she can't understand; they live in a completely different world than her family, and she can't blame them for it . Margaret and Helen exchange letters . Helen is unaffected by Mrs. Wilcox's death - she's a little sad, but that's it. Helen returns from Germany, and has had another marriage proposal, which she rejected. The Schlegels' cousin Frieda keeps trying to set them up with potential German spouses to bring them back to their original homeland. Tibby also has news - he's getting ready to go to Oxford, and he loves it for its aesthetic qualities. We get the feeling again that Tibby is rather an odd duck. Margaret interrupts the pleasant family banter to bring up the Wilcoxes. We can tell from what she says that they made an effort to see if Mrs. Wilcox had told Margaret about leaving Howards End to her - obviously she didn't, and obviously they're not going to tell her. Mr. Wilcox ended up giving Margaret a silver vinaigrette to remember Mrs. Wilcox by. Helen isn't interested. She pauses to be polite, then goes on talking about her Germany trip. Margaret sees that life isn't as linearly organized as history makes it seem; one can never really be prepared for things. She resolves to be less cautious in the future.

