5

The Fools’ Progress

1.

Lois said:

‘I hate to disturb you, dear, but isn’t it time you went to dress?’

‘I expect so,’ said Hubert without moving.

‘Very well, then….’

He sniffed appreciatively the warmth of the peat fire and turned a gloomy eye upon the uninviting dusk beyond the window.

‘I don’t want to go,’ he said, not for the first time.

‘I’m sorry if it bores you, but I really think you should.’

Lois spoke with decision, looking a little like her mother. There was already a hint of the same massive contours about her jaw. He, for his peace of mind, did not observe it for he had risen to tap the barometer.

‘I shouldn’t wonder if there was a frost tonight,’ he protested.

‘Take the foot-warmer and the fur rug,’ she advised.

Making a final effort against the benevolent pressure which was forcing him out of his house on so unpleasant an evening, he turned on her and said:

‘Look here! I don’t really see why I should go. They don’t particularly expect me. It won’t be in the least rude if I don’t turn up. They don’t want me. They are your friends, you know; and if you don’t go, I don’t see why I should. And it’s the kind of thing that bores me stiff.’

‘I’m sorry I can’t come,’ she pleaded, ‘but I really oughtn’t to, you know. It wouldn’t be a suitable party for a young woman in my interesting condition.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t use such vulgar expressions,’ he complained. ‘I can’t think where you pick them up. “Interesting condition” is very low.’

‘I got it out of Dickens: it’s mid-Victorian. But I could say much worse. I could say “in the family way.” “A party in the family way.” …’

Hubert drew himself up into a mid-Victorian husband, and thundered:

‘Be silent, ma’am, and don’t pollute my house with such coarse expressions….’

He was interrupted by the parlourmaid who came to carry out the tea. Hastily he left off being Mr Caudle and picked up the London Mercury. Lois crossed to the window and drew the blue linen curtains, shutting out the chilly twilight. She could afford to make jokes about her condition since it scarcely troubled her at all. Though she was nearly seven months gone, her cheeks still bloomed and she moved buoyantly.

The clock struck, and Hubert remarked with relief:

‘It’s only six. I needn’t dress yet.’

‘The car is ordered for a quarter to seven, and you’ll take all of three-quarters of an hour.’

‘But that will get me up to town at seven-thirty, and I don’t need to be there before nine, surely?’

‘You’ll want dinner first. Aren’t you dining at Eaton Square? I told Mother you would be, when I rang her up this morning.’

‘Uncommonly officious of you, Lois! I never authorized you to say such a thing. I’d meant to dine here and go up afterwards, if I felt inclined, and if it wasn’t too cold. But this absolutely pledges me. I suppose your mother is expecting me now?’

‘I’m afraid so, dear.’

‘All the same, I don’t see why I should have to go to the Martins’ if I don’t want to. What, exactly, do you expect me to do when I get there?’

‘Oh, my dear Hubert! We’ve been into all this before.’

‘Yes, you’ve told me what I ought to do, but not how I’m to do it. I’m to lead the fellow round, I suppose, and introduce him to all the people you and your mother think he ought to know.’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘And what earthly good do you think that’s going to do him or them? Haven’t you learnt by this time that it’s quite impossible for the family to run him?’

‘But, Hubert, this is the whole object of getting him and Dolly to come and live at Hampstead.’

‘I never could see any object in their living at Hampstead.’

‘Of course, Chelsea would have been better, but Dolly had all these ideas about the children getting good air. And there are artists at Hampstead. But the point of the whole thing is to get him into congenial society; to get him to meet more people and get known a little. I’ve been so pleased about his getting this invitation to the Martins’. It’s just the sort of thing we want. He will meet exactly the right people.’

‘All right, let him meet them! What good do you think that will do? What sort of impression is James likely to make on the right people, or they on him? Can’t you see that he would much sooner stay at home with his Dolly?’

‘Dolly is invited too, tonight.’

‘Is she? Then I don’t really think I need go. She’ll look after him quite capably. I shan’t go. I’ll run up and dine with your mother and come back.’

‘Oh, Hubert, please! Remember James is my stepbrother….’

‘Whom you’ve always understood. I know.’

‘Don’t interrupt! Yes, I do understand him. I discovered him long before anyone else, now didn’t I? Ages before you did….’

‘It’s a pity you didn’t discover him a little sooner over that Braxhall affair….’

She put her hand over his mouth and stopped him. The smouldering bitterness in his heart was instantly quenched: he caught her fingers and kissed them.

‘All right!’ He sighed. ‘I’ll do my best; I promise I will. I’ll go. Only you see, I don’t think it will do any good. I’m coming to the conclusion that our cue is to leave him absolutely alone. He’s of age, and a married man, and what not, and I shouldn’t wonder if he knows what he wants better than we do. Honestly, my dear, I think your mother is making a mistake in trying to turn him into a tame family genius at this time of day. But I’ll do what I can.’

‘It’s just that he needs to know a few more people and go about rather more,’ repeated Lois with conviction. ‘He’s never been among really congenial people … creative artists….’

Hubert was silent, since he disagreed with her. He sat by her side and absorbed regretfully the beauty and comfort of his home, still but half resigned to his enforced departure. They were in the living-room. There was nothing so Victorian as a drawing-room in Hubert’s house; only a library, a hall dining-room, a music room, and a living-room, besides a billiard-room in the garden, and quite enough too, as Dolly had observed when she heard of it. The house, which was called Killigrew’s Croft, suited Hubert and Lois very well. It was in Buckinghamshire, near Amersham, within easy reach of town, yet sufficiently out of it to pass as country. Outside it was rather ordinary, and suggested the placid comfort of a retired stockbroker. But the interior was very Georgian. The carpetless floors, the severe whitewashed walls, the Russian linen, the black divans with their brilliant cushions, the John drawings and the peat fires were all there. Hubert liked it immensely, and felt that it was exactly right. So, had he been born a generation earlier, would he have regarded a Morris paper and Willow Pattern china. But he did not suppose that his house was at all individual, having spent his life in homes exactly like it. Lois, born in Manchester, and reared at Lyndon, was still inclined to regard it as unique. She thought it a great deal more tasteful than the home of her girlhood, and often argued with Hubert about it. She could not grasp his admiration for a house so unlike his own.

‘Looking at this, one would never think you admired Lyndon,’ she would say, comparing the yellow washed walls of her living-room with the Chinese paper in Agatha’s drawing-room, all strange birds and exotic vegetation. ‘It’s so crowded! Every sort of style, all mixed up. Think of those lacquered cabinets and the Queen Anne Talbois cheek by jowl in Agatha’s bedroom.’

‘I never was in Agatha’s bedroom,’ said Hubert wistfully. ‘What was it like?’

‘Like nothing on earth. A wonderful Elizabethan bed, all hung with old Italian tapestries. And, I think, an Aubusson carpet. And a Louis Quinze dressing-table, and a crystal jug and basin from somewhere in Hungary. And, by way of pictures, a Gainsborough portrait, and a landscape, Cotman, I think, and “The Rake’s Progress” in funny little black frames all along the chimneypiece. And a good deal of carved jade and ivory lying around. It was just like all the other rooms in the house, only she had seized on the very best things.’

‘I can’t imagine it.’

‘Just a muddle! Not any clear expression of one kind of culture. If all the things had been English, or all French, or all Chinese!’

‘But that’s England, you know, Lois. Just that! There’s nothing in England so English as a house like Lyndon. A medley of races and civilizations and ideas, all chucked together anyhow, and yet … not chaos … but a whole … a living, individual whole.’

‘I didn’t know you were so patriotic.’

‘No more did I. I’ve always considered myself rather cosmopolitan. But, when I think of Lyndon I feel sorry. Sorry all that should go. It’s so absolutely ours, you know, and it’s melting like snow in the sun. Now a room like this,’ he waved a hand round his living-room, ‘you might find in any capital in Europe at the present moment.’

‘Well, if you are so discontented with it, change it! It’s yours. You say you admire Lyndon, but you don’t copy it, I notice.’

‘Copy Lyndon? Oh, Lord! Copy Lyndon! My dear girl, I couldn’t! It can’t be copied, that’s just it. One man didn’t make it; it’s been the work of generations. The smell of it! That smell of stone passages and beer! No one can build a new house and put a smell like that into it. Think of all the storms it has weathered! It’s survived the landscape gardening of the eighteenth century, and the flagrant bad taste of the Regency, and Victoria’s upholstered mahogany, and the aesthetic monsoon of my childhood, Walter Crane and all that, yes, and the recent deluge of peasant handicrafts and chromatic barbarism. These impermanent things go over it in waves. Our house, for instance, is just part of a wave, and quite a nice wave too. But Lyndon is a rock. The whole effect remains essentially the same, though it emerges from each wave with a few more things scattered over it as relics of the epoch. Lovely things … the best that each particular tide has produced…. Pity it should go!’

‘Why do you talk of it going? Nobody wants to burn it down.’

‘A house dies with its family. Lyndon has come to an end. It’s nothing better than a museum now. And a museum isn’t a living thing; it’s a mausoleum for bygone cultures.’

‘John may go back there in the spring, Mother says. So it won’t have been empty for so very long. Six months can’t turn it into a museum, surely?’ she asked, with some derision.

‘N—no,’ he replied uncertainly.

He had always thought of Lyndon as Agatha’s house, rather than John’s, and, to him, its history was ended upon the day when she fled to Corsica with her accursed cousin. But he knew better than to air this idea, especially when Lois was already a little irritated. It was, in truth, hard upon her to have to listen to these glorifications of Lyndon when she had spent so much of her rebellious youth in trying to escape from it.

Pondering upon these conversations, he sat beside her, holding her hand in somnolent content until the clock struck a quarter past six. Pressure was again exerted by his wife. ‘You positively must dress,’ she urged, and he capitulated.

Upon his way to town, however, his indignation boiled up again. It was bad enough that he should be forced to spend the evening with the Martins. He had begun to grow out of the atmosphere of guarded Bohemianism in which they moved, and expected to be bored. But it was monstrous that he should have to dine with his mother-in-law as well. He raged dimly against the conspiracy of women which netted him in. He had always hated Eaton Square, and just now he knew that there would be long, unsparing inquiries about Lois and her health. Besides, he might see John, and he hated meeting John. He knew that he ought to be sorry for the fellow; that his was the gesture of the Levite who passed by on the other side; but he could not help it. John was too unfortunate; it was impossible to forget that his wife had deserted him in a particularly heartless manner, and that he was dying by inches. It was really tactless of him, all things considered, to hang about London in this way. He should have buried himself and his sorrows in some decently distant place. He was not, it seemed, too ill to shoot in the country at weekends. Hubert thought that he should stay there altogether.

He supposed that John was right, on the whole, not to plunge into the scandals of a divorce. It was decent of him, anyhow. But it made the affair so unofficial: so preposterously delicate. One never knew where one was. It was impossible to talk to anyone of the Clewer connection for five minutes without getting on dangerous ground. The thing had become a question of clan loyalty, and everybody in the family was expected to lie fluently in the cause. It was a silly fiction, this upholding of Agatha’s respectability in the public eye, for the whole story was bound to come out sooner or later. She was showing no disposition to leave her cavalier, and her reputation could only be held together as long as she was content to lie concealed in Corsica. Hubert racked his brains to remember the details of the official explanation. Supposing Stella Martin were to ask him tonight how long Agatha would be abroad! Should he say he didn’t know? Or was he supposed to know? He ought to have asked Lois.

But he did not, willingly, discuss Agatha with his wife. Within the tribal group there was, of course, no charity for the lost mistress of Lyndon. It seemed to him sometimes that they were almost too hard on her. He knew that she had behaved badly; she could scarcely have behaved worse; but he could never listen to the abuse which the other women poured out upon her without a pang, the stirrings of an emotion which was not condemnatory. He remembered how lovely, how unlucky, and how kind she had been. Yes, and still so young. He would much rather not think of her at all.

Instead he thought of James, aggrievedly. Why should he be burdened with James? He did not mind having him as a brother-in-law, at a convenient distance. Sometimes he was rather proud of the connection. But taking him about was another matter. It made one so horribly conspicuous. Wrapped in these gloomy reflections he arrived in Eaton Square, and, as the car drew up, resolved that his boy should marry an orphan. He would do for his son what no one had done for him; he would see to it that the lad never met any young woman encumbered with surviving relations.

He was relieved not to find John among the chesterfields in the drawing-room. When last he had dined there he had sat for a quarter of an hour with John. Three times he had asked nervously whether there was anything in the evening paper. John had told him thrice, with a kind of abstracted patience, that rubber was still going down. That had been the whole of the conversation between them. Tonight, however, Marian trailed in alone. She wore the kind of informal dinner gown which suggests a solitary meal. She had aged conspicuously during the past months; her elaborate brown hair was now flecked with grey and a settled melancholy made her face look heavier. But she was still a fine woman, with every appearance of vigour and health. Trouble had not bowed her white shoulders or dimmed her little blue eyes. She said that John had gone for a week to Sussex to stay with friends.

‘I like him to get the change and the interest,’ she said, ‘though I feel he’s hardly fit for it. He should really be nearer to good doctors. It would be very awkward if … if he was taken ill or anything when he was staying with people. But he won’t give in, poor boy, or be treated like an invalid. It’s pitiful! Now tell me how Lois is.’

Hubert immediately regretted John, whose presence would have protected him. He said:

‘Lois is very well.’

‘Is she getting about a certain amount?’ asked Marian tenderly.

‘Oh, yes. She seems to be very energetic and active. We go quite longish walks.’

‘She must be careful not to overdo it.’

Marian sounded disapproving, but he rejoined brightly:

‘She’s taking every care of herself, I’m sure.’

‘It must be a very anxious time for you.’

‘Oh, no,’ he protested, ‘I’m not anxious. She seems so well.’

But she was quite determined that he should be anxious, anxiety being, in her opinion, the only proper state of mind for him.

‘If it wasn’t for John,’ she said, ‘I could be with you a great deal more.’

‘Thank God for John,’ thought Hubert,’ he has his uses.’

‘It would be a great relief to me if I could be with Lois and make quite sure …’

‘Dinner is served, my lady.’

‘She’ll begin again in the dining-room,’ thought Hubert as he armed her downstairs.

But he had forgotten the servants. She could not begin again while they were present. Indeed she ate most of her meal in silence, for she was so preoccupied with John’s misfortunes, James’s misdoings, and Lois’s condition as to be really unable to talk of anything else. Hubert was permitted to enjoy the very good food in peace, and when, at length, they were left alone together, he short-circuited a return to Lois by plunging into the question of James.

‘I understand,’ he said, ‘that I am, as it were, to chaperon him at this party?’

‘Oh, Hubert, if you would! And if you’d give him a hint, just a little hint, now and then, how to behave, it would be so kind. I’m so glad he’s been asked; this sort of thing is so good for him. I’m rather disappointed, you know, in the results of the Hampstead move. I had hoped for better things. It was such a piece of work to get them to move at all. He was so stubborn; I don’t think he’d have given in if their landlord at Bramfield hadn’t given them notice. Then I talked to Dorothy, and got her to see all the educational advantages of having the children near London. Just imagine, she and James had contemplated sending them to the little village school near by! I was horrified. I didn’t like to say what I thought to Dorothy, for of course she was at a National School herself, but I spoke to James and asked him how he could think of it. And he said she had been to the school one day to have a look at it herself, and was quite satisfied with it. It was a very small school, and he said’—Marian blushed at such coarseness—‘he said that she only saw one child that she was at all doubtful about, and she caught it coming out and had a look at its head, and was quite reassured.’

‘Not really?’ said Hubert with a grin.

‘I don’t see anything funny in it,’ said Marian. ‘I feel it’s all rather sad. What is to become of those poor little children? Still, I persuaded Dorothy in the end. I pointed out what a much better studio James could have, which she appreciated. She admitted that it was always rather difficult getting models, and so on, when they lived so far out in the country. And, of course, when she saw reason the battle was won. He always does what she wishes.’

‘But you aren’t satisfied with the result?’

‘Well, you see, I wanted him to know more people. You’ve no idea, Hubert, how curious people are about him. People who’ve seen his pictures. I’ve been asked about him so often by people who are anxious to meet him. But I don’t know. It seems hopeless! Living at Hampstead hasn’t done him a bit of good; it hasn’t altered him in the very least. As I say to people … that unfortunate marriage! It will be a drag on him all his life. It makes his house quite impossible. I took Mrs Downsmith there the other day to call, and really that girl has absolutely no idea how to do things. Tea! You should have seen it! Shrimp paste in a pot, and we were offered eggs. And after tea they played us tunes upon that awful gramophone. I really didn’t know which way to look, and I could see that Mrs Downsmith thought it all most extraordinary. Coming home I said what I could about artists’ households being always rather Bohemian, and she said: “Bohemian isn’t the word I’d have used somehow.”’

‘No, it’s the respectability which baffled her, I expect. If James and his family lived in romantic squalor in a one-room studio, they would be much more conventional.’

‘It’s very sad. But I feel that if we could get him right away … away from his wife….’

‘She’s invited tonight.’

‘Oh, is she? I am sorry. That is unfortunate! It’s quite unnecessary that she should be asked to places with him. That is a pity!’

‘But he won’t go anywhere without her.’

‘Oh dear, how difficult it all is! Of course, people can’t be expected to invite her to their houses. She oughtn’t to expect it. Can’t she see what a drag she is on him?’

‘But she’s quite respectable.’

‘Y—yes. But impossible socially. It would have been better …’

Marian broke off and did not state what would have been better. Hubert inferred that Dolly would have been less of a drawback if she had come from a meaner stock or were not properly married.

Coffee came in. Marian had instituted a small coffee-making machine on a wheeled table and brewed the drink herself before leaving the dining-room. Agatha had had one at Lyndon, and there were coffee percolators now at Braxhall and Killigrew’s Croft. But Hubert thought it a pity. They none of them did it properly; even Lois fussed over it. No woman could make coffee as the peccant Agatha had made it, lazy and amused, with one eye on the bubbling percolator and all her attention for her guests. He could even remember tenderly the evening when, absorbed in somebody’s witty conversation (it must surely have been his own), she had forgotten to fasten something or other and the whole thing had blown up, spattering half a dozen shirt fronts. Alas, poor Agatha! It was dreadful to think of her abdication; to imagine her drinking her coffee in some grubby Corsican inn, counting Lyndon well lost for love of the insignificant, the quite undeserving Blair. Hubert would not believe it.

A moment later he learnt that he need not believe it, for Agatha was no longer in Corsica.

‘There is one thing,’ said Marian mysteriously as she poured two cupfuls of water into the percolator, ‘that I wish you’d tell Lois. That is, if you think that it won’t upset her in any way.’

‘Yes?’ he said, hurrying her past Lois.

‘I couldn’t tell her this morning on the telephone, because one never knows what the servants may not overhear. One has to speak so clearly; I’ve often been annoyed about it. But I’ve heard that Agatha and … and her cousin are back in town. I’m keeping it from John, of course.’

‘Oh, really?’ murmured Hubert, feeling uncomfortable, but strangely excited.

‘If it’s true, it’s most inconsiderate of them,’ pursued Marian weightily. ‘The least they could do was to keep away. But I met Lady Peel yesterday, and she told me that she had just been with Ellen, with Mrs Cocks, I mean, and that she said that she was expecting Agatha home shortly. It was most awkward for me because I had just said she would be abroad some months longer. I thought Lady Peel looked a little queerly at me. It’s a pity that Mrs Cocks has not got a more reticent nature. I can never be quite sure how much she tells people.’

‘But perhaps Agatha is coming home alone,’ suggested Hubert.

‘I’m afraid not. I mean I’m afraid they are both coming, and it’s too much to hope that they are not coming together. I was determined to make sure, so I sent Miss Barrington, who is absolutely discreet, round to Harley Street this morning to ask when he was expected back. She saw a parlourmaid who said he was coming today or tomorrow, she believed, but that she didn’t think he was coming there, and he wouldn’t be seeing patients yet awhile, and she could forward letters but couldn’t give an address. So it looks like it.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘It does look rather like it.’

‘Will you tell Lois, or shall I write a note to her?’

‘Oh, I’ll tell her.’

Hubert could not see why the tidings should disturb his wife to any great extent.

‘Of course, it’s hard on John,’ he added with some compunction.

‘I shall keep it from him as long as possible. It’s very upsetting for us all. I only hope Lois …’

‘It’s really time I got off,’ exclaimed Hubert, glancing at the clock. ‘I’d better get to this place punctually, hadn’t I? No knowing what James mightn’t be up to if I left him to himself.’

And he fled.

2.

On his way to Chelsea Hubert’s brain was busy with this new development of affairs. Ought he to tell anybody who inquired tonight that Agatha was now back in London? And what on earth was going to happen next? Of one thing he was certain, knowing the family: there would be scenes and indignant letters and diplomatic discussions. What a confounded nuisance it all was.

Penetrating into the main reception room of Stella Martin’s house in Cheyne Walk, he peered nervously through the heavy fog of cigarette smoke in search of his inconvenient brother-in-law. The heat of the room made him feel rather giddy and he was deafened by the high, staccato symphony of cultured conversation. He could not see Dolly or James anywhere. Freaks he saw, of every sort and size; freaks who would make even James look almost normal. He saw celebrities, and minor celebrities, and people who looked like celebrities but couldn’t be, since he did not know them. At last he saw his hostess and made his way over to her.

Stella Martin was a lively, pretty woman with long earrings and a cigarette perennially falling out of the corner of her mouth. She had been a great friend of Hubert’s in his salad days, but he had begun lately to find her rather boring. She had become Lois’s appendage, and he still liked her well enough when she was not trying too desperately to avoid the commonplace. He often complained to Lois that the woman positively collected shady characters. Lois had disagreed with him and said that Stella surrounded herself with men of talent.

‘But the ladies …’ he had expostulated.

Lois admitted that the ladies were sometimes rather odd, but maintained that they were the kind of ladies who have had, throughout the ages, a particular attraction for men of talent. And anyhow it was very conventional of Hubert to object to them. Hubert, who had begun to discover that there is, nowadays, a certain distinction in conventionality, did not wilt under this taunt as much as she had hoped. He agreed.

‘We have a pretty amusing crowd tonight,’ said Stella. ‘You know most of them, don’t you? I’m sorry Lois couldn’t come, but I think she was very wise not to turn out this wicked night. It’s much too cold. It was nice of you to come, Hubert.’

‘She was very sorry to have to give it up.’

‘She must come up and have tea with me one day when I can have her all to myself. Mr and Mrs Clewer are here, by the way; I don’t see them at the minute, but I know I’ve shaken hands with them.’

‘Oh, they are here?’

‘Yes, or at least they were. You’ll find them if you look. And Lawrence Argony may drop in later on. It will be a great feather in my cap if he does, for you know he never will go to evening parties. Have you seen his portrait of Garry Shandon? I haven’t, but, after all I’ve heard, I’m longing to. Mick says Garry is rather vexed about it. But I don’t know what else he expected, do you?’

She turned to other guests, and Hubert resumed his search for Dolly and James. He came to the conclusion that Stella’s ladies were rather more respectable than usual. Listening to their vehement conversation and watching the bobbing of their bobbed heads, he decided that he was in for an evening with London’s women of talent. Though he saw a few who might be said to have one foot in the demi-monde, he was sure that they had got in tonight upon some intellectual ticket. They must have written an autobiography or a novel or something. Friends greeted him and he found himself pouring forth, a little absently, a small but regular stream of witty remarks. Half of his mind was occupied with the thought of Lois and his nice quiet house where he would rather have been. He was immensely pleased to find that he could think of his home with such a pang, and his impersonation of a man about town at a party in Chelsea was spiced by the thought of the domestic fellow that he really was. Then he caught sight of Dolly, with James beside her, sitting on a distant divan. Very mournful they looked, in this strange galley, and their faces, when they perceived him, lit up with a ludicrous relief. He crossed over to them and they made room for him with alacrity.

‘Oh, but I’m glad you’ve come,’ cried Dolly. ‘We were just wondering if it was too soon for us to go. It’s so awkward us not knowing any of these people.’

‘Well, I can introduce you to any amount,’ said Hubert, mindful of his mission and trying not to look at James’s dress-clothes. ‘That’s a friend of mine over there. The man with the eyebrows. Binns, the architect. Shall I effect an introduction?’

‘No, don’t,’ said James. ‘I want to look at him. He’s got a very nice head, especially at the back. I couldn’t see it if I was talking to him.’

‘James says all the people here are out of drawing,’ said Dolly doubtfully.

‘They are certainly a queer-looking lot,’ said Hubert, agreeably convinced that he looked quite normal himself.

‘You may say so,’ she affirmed with more ease. ‘I never saw anything like them. I said to James when we first come in: “Well, the Zoo isn’t in it!” Not but what it isn’t a very nice party,’ she added, remembering her manners. ‘I always tell James it’s good for us to go into company once in a while. But we are still so upside down, getting into the new house; it was quite a job getting here at all tonight.’

‘D’you think my clothes smell too much of camphor?’ asked James. ‘Dolly was very worried about it.’

‘It’s the first time he’s had them on in years,’ she explained. ‘That’s why they fit so sort of loose on the shoulders. In the army they made him hold himself so straight.’

‘And for the same reason they fit sort of tight in front,’ said James.

Hubert sniffed and said doubtfully:

‘I smell something … but it isn’t like camphor exactly.’

‘Oh, I expect that’s Sanitas,’ explained James cheerfully. ‘I sprinkled on a little. I thought it would drown the camphor.’

‘Which was silly,’ commented Dolly. ‘If anybody has to smell of anything, camphor’s better than Sanitas.’

‘And how is the new house getting on?’ asked Hubert.

‘Oh, nicely, thank you. There’s a studio for James that we’ve got ever so nice. Better than anything we’ve had before.’

‘It’s quite a good house,’ said James. ‘And Dolly has made it look exactly like our last one, so there is nothing to worry about. I thought at first I shouldn’t like it, but I do quite.’

‘There’s a basement kitchen, though,’ said Dolly, ‘which is a nuisance. I don’t like the children getting all their meals down there. I said to old Lady Clewer, “Well, I don’t think the kitchen’s very nice.” And she said, “Perhaps you won’t be in it so much now.” But, as I say, wherever else should I be? But, as we’ve a room on the ground-floor that we don’t need, I’m having a nice little electric range put in there, and a sink, and I’ll do most of my cooking there and we’ll get our meals handy. It’s nice and sunny. The garden at the back isn’t up to much, but there’s always the Heath for the children to play on. Sonny has fallen into that pond already, but that’s only what’s to be expected.’

‘We had to paper the whole house,’ said James. ‘Mamma wanted us to distemper it, but we don’t like distemper.’

‘No,’ rejoined his wife. ‘Just like a prison or a hospital! A nice bright paper is ever so much more cheerful. Eh, James! There’s Mr Argony!’

The big gun of Stella’s party was making his way slowly through the room, growling replies to the greetings which washed round him like a tide.

‘He does do it well,’ said James appreciatively. ‘Just like Sissy feeding chickens.’

‘Do you know him then?’ asked Hubert in surprise.

‘Oh, yes,’ Dolly told him. ‘He often comes to tea with us. He and James like to get a good talk. You know what men are! Talk the hind leg off a donkey and then have the face to bring it up against the women. They go on about these pictures of theirs.’

Lawrence had by now perceived them, and, shaking himself free from his ardent acquaintances, he joined their group. Hubert, who knew him slightly, offered his greetings. The great man stared at the trio, his heavy eyebrows shot out in a frown of perplexity. He seemed to find them unexpected. Having revolved them in his mind for a second or two, he exploded:

‘I have it! Brothers-in-law.’

‘Stepbrothers-in-law,’ corrected James. ‘His wife is my stepmother’s daughter.’

‘His wife is your stepmother’s daughter?’ repeated Mr Argony. ‘His … wife … is … your … stepmother’s … daughter? His Wife…. Oh, quite so! Quite so! How are you, Mrs Clewer? I’m glad I found you here, James, for I came especially to find you. Someone told me you’d be here. Can you come round to my place tomorrow? I’ve got to talk to you about something.’

‘Tomorrow is Sunday,’ calculated James. ‘I can’t come in the morning….’

‘Well, don’t come in the morning. Come in the afternoon.’

‘But I could come in the morning,’ went on James laboriously, ‘if I went to chapel in the evening. Dolly, shall we do that?’

‘Oh, settle it between you,’ said Lawrence amicably. ‘Any time will suit me. I shall be in all day.’

‘When are you coming to tea with us again?’ asked Dolly. ‘You haven’t been, not for a long while.’

‘Oh, I’ll come soon,’ he assured her, and was taken away by his hostess.

Hubert was able to put the question which had been burning within him ever since he became aware of an intimacy between Lawrence Argony and the Clewers.

‘I suppose you’ve heard of this portrait of Garry Shandon?’ he said. ‘Nobody’s seen it yet, of course, but …’

‘I have,’ said James.

‘You have?’

‘Yes,’ said James, adding kindly, ‘it’s very good.’

Hubert gave it up and resolved to tell Lois that never again would he undertake the social pilotage of James. It was absurd! It was like a minnow trying to steer a whale. He was relieved when he saw Stella descending upon them with a black and white striped lady in tow.

‘You three have monopolized this divan long enough,’ she declared. ‘I must break you up. Hubert, this is Mrs Taylor, who wants to know if it’s true that you and Lois have been to Madeira, and if it’s nice there. Mr Clewer, there are some people in the next room who are dying to meet you….’

She carried off poor James who, in his dismay, was almost clinging to his wife.

Hubert, marooned upon the divan with the lady who wanted to know about Madeira, found it very difficult to keep his attention fixed. Fortunately she did not require much to set her going. He bent upon her an interested eye, and occupied his mind with the idea of James and Lawrence Argony. If only he could manage to convince Lois that this friendship was of his making, how pleased she would be! But he could not claim to have had any hand in it; James had brought it off without the help of his relations. Still this was, surely, the sort of thing she wanted. She would be glad when she heard of it.

‘In those days,’ said a voice at his side, ‘my state of mind was one of wonder without curiosity.’

‘How very uncomfortable!’ he murmured, noting that he was no longer listening to Mrs Taylor but to a good-looking elderly man with grey whiskers. Stella must have substituted this new one at some moment when he was not attending.

‘Curiosity,’ said the stranger, ‘is necessary before any great work of art can be produced. I trust you agree with me?’

‘Quite!’ concurred Hubert. ‘Exactly!’

His mind reverted to a picture of Dolly blowing the children’s noses, and spreading their jam for them, while James and Argony growled technicalities at each other across the kitchen tablecloth. Or did they have tea in the parlour on these occasions? Perhaps Argony got an egg, being a fellow-worker.

‘But don’t you think,’ said the lady with the Spanish comb (at what point had they absorbed her into the group?), ‘don’t you think that the individual must realize himself before he can create?’

‘He must, indeed,’ said the grey whiskers. ‘There must be no repressions, no inhibitions….’

They seemed to be so beautifully occupied with each other that Hubert thought he could slip away unnoticed. He became aware that Dolly was beckoning to him across the room. She was standing half hidden by a curtain drawn across the door of a small conservatory, and she struck him as being a trifle flushed and in some distress. When he had joined her, her agitation was manifest.

‘I want to go home,’ she said wrathfully. ‘I want to get away from here. Let’s find James and be off.’

‘Come and sit in here,’ said Hubert soothingly. ‘Come and rest a little and let me try and get you an ice or some coffee.’

He moved to take her into the conservatory but she drew back quickly.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t go back in there. He’s inside still.’

‘Who is?’

‘That young fellow.’ A fleeting smile crossed her troubled face.

‘Fact is, we’d better move away. He can’t get out very well till we’ve gone.’

‘But what has he done?’

‘Well … that’s asking! Though it isn’t so much what he’s done as what he said. He ought to be ashamed of himself, and so I told him.’

‘Oh, do please tell me what he said,’ cried Hubert, edging found the curtain to get a look at the young fellow. ‘I’m dying to know.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t! Not to anyone! Excepting only James. But this is a shocking place! It is really. I want to get out of it quick. The sights I saw when I was sitting in that conservatory! I never did.’

‘But it can’t have been anything so very bad….’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I thought when I first come in: Well, they look a godless lot! And I thought right.’

Surveying her comely face and sturdy, supple figure, sharply outlined against the black curtain, Hubert felt a kind of sympathy for the unknown culprit. There was something very attractive about her—primitive but compelling. And it must have been uncommonly difficult to find anything to talk to her about.

‘How did you get there?’ he asked.

‘Oh, Mrs Martin introduced him and took James away. Do let’s find James! I can’t think where he can be. I haven’t seen him this half-hour.’

‘Perhaps he’s in the other room.’

They set off in search and Dolly, perceiving Mr Argony in the middle of a group, ran up to him crying:

‘Oh, Mr Argony! You haven’t seen James anywhere, I suppose?’

The people who were being fortunate enough to engage Mr Argony’s attention were deeply outraged and looked the intruder up and down with amazement. She was so provincial, in her ready-made tea frock; so plainly not of their world. Lawrence, however, beamed and reflected:

‘James, when last I saw him, was sitting with a lady in a small recess on the stairs. A remarkably beautiful lady, as far as I remember. He is probably there still. You’d better look after him, Mrs Clewer.’

Profoundly disturbed, she returned to Hubert and whispered: ‘He’s sitting on the stairs with a beautiful lady! Isn’t that a funny thing for him to do? I’ve never known him do it before. Whatever can have come over him?’

‘Perhaps it’s this godless house,’ suggested Hubert maliciously.

‘It might be. You never know,’ she said mournfully. ‘It’s what I said—this is a dreadful place. He’s usually as quiet … But with all these hussies …!’

She glared at the nearest, but he reassured her.

‘That one is all right. All that powder is only camouflage. She writes history books, and is a notable matron. She has five perfectly good children at home.’

Dolly sniffed. In order to pacify her he suggested: ‘Shall I go and inspect James and his lady? Then I can report on the state of affairs.’

‘He never sat on stairs before.’

‘I rather thought Argony said a recess on the stairs. That is better than actual stairs, don’t you think? More dignified?’

‘I don’t think that’s any better, I don’t.’

‘Oh, yes it is. They are probably sitting on two chairs….’

‘It might be a sofa. There was a sofa in that conservatory….’

‘Well, I’ll go and have a look.’

He made his way out on to the landing where some intelligent person had turned off most of the lights. Upon each stair he fell over a couple of fellow-guests, and his passage through the obscurity was marked by a continual stream of apologies. He became aware that Stella’s party was not entirely confined to the middle-aged. The younger generation was there all right, but it had not favoured the strong illumination of the rooms above. Reaching a view of the recess he perceived that Argony had been perfectly right. Even in that dim light he could identify one of its occupants as James; the large face looming over the crumpled shirt front could belong to no one else. The other, a mysterious feminine presence, was half concealed behind a curtain, but, despite the dark and a distance of several yards, Hubert got the impression that she was a lovely creature. Their attitude was intimate and absorbed—their conversation eager. Hubert hovered uncertainly, a thousand new-born surmises seething in his brain, and then approached them.

A better view of the lady gave him pause, and he jerked backward, speechless, wondering if he could run away. There was no time, however, for she had turned, recognized him, and half risen. He pulled himself together and advanced to greet her, wondering if sisters-in-law are not, on the whole, the most trying sort of relation.

‘I heard you were expected back today or tomorrow,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t think I’d see you here.’

‘I came hoping to find my mother,’ she explained. ‘I went round to South Kensington, but she was out and the maid rather thought she would be here. So, as I know Mrs Martin fairly well, I came straight on. But I hear she hasn’t come. She must have gone somewhere else!’

‘I haven’t seen her,’ said Hubert. ‘Then you got back to England …?’

‘This morning.’

‘They had an awful crossing,’ appended James. ‘She says Blair boasted all the way across France that he was never sick, and then he was much sicker than she was.’

‘Oh, yes …’ said Hubert uneasily.

Agatha slipped a hand through James’s arm.

‘Is Dolly here?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes! I’ll go and find her and tell her you are here,’ he said joyously. ‘She will be pleased.’

‘Tell her that I’m going in two minutes, but I’d love to see her first,’ Agatha called after him.

Hubert was left alone with her in the recess. Instinctively he drew the curtain further across, shielding her from the observation of passers on the stairs. She laughed a little as she saw his gesture and sank on to her corner of the sofa, motioning him to sit by her side. Her composure relieved him. He had thought distractedly that he would not know what to say to her: he now remembered her facility for silence. He need say nothing at all if he so preferred it. He felt stealing over him that potent serenity which he had almost forgotten, and which was part of the charm she exerted. He told himself that she was beyond criticism; beyond it, at least, when one was with her. In retrospect, when one had forgotten a little what she was really like, it might be possible to condemn her. It seemed to him as though this alcove was too small a place in which to cabin all her marvellous beauty. She was fairer than ever before.

Presently it occurred to her to ask:

‘How’s Lois?’

‘Lois is very well,’ he told her, with a certain hesitation.

‘She’s not here tonight?’

‘No. She’s down at Killigrew’s Croft.’

‘I’m sorry to have missed her.’

He said nothing, and in the pause which followed she pondered upon the hint of reserve with which he had spoken of his wife. Did that mean that Lois was, inevitably, one of the people who must be relinquished? It could only mean that if she wished it herself. Hubert was not the man to coerce his wife in such a matter. But of course it did! She sighed, for she had been fond of Lois. Still … she had come back to face the music….

Clamour without told them of the approach of Dolly and James who, in their rash descent, had fallen foul of the stair haunters. James was heard to ask indignantly:

‘Why are all the lights turned off? It’s impossible to see. Oh! Here’s the switch.’

Light flooded the landing and staircase. Dolly stood, doubtfully, in the entrance to the alcove, looking at Agatha with a face in which perplexity and compassion were mingled.

‘Well, Agatha,’ she murmured, ‘if this isn’t a surprise!’

‘Dear Dolly!’ cried Agatha a little breathlessly,’ aren’t you glad to see me?’

‘Of course I’m glad,’ said Dolly, embracing her with gravity. ‘But I must say …’

She paused, plainly at a loss, and James put in:

‘Come upstairs and find some place where we can sit and have a good talk. It’s so dark here.’

‘I’d rather stay here if you don’t mind,’ said Agatha. ‘There are so many people that I know upstairs, and I’m so tired. I don’t feel up to meeting them all. And, Hubert, I’d give anything for a drink.’

‘I’ll get you a cocktail or something. Dolly, what can I get for you?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say no to an ice, if you could find one. You go too, James, and get us something to eat. I’m quite hungry, now you come to mention it.’

Hubert and James departed and found the illuminated staircase perfectly clear. Faint rustlings and whisperings from the darkness of an upper flight told them whither the youthful horde had migrated. When they returned with plates and glasses, the two women were seated close together upon the alcove sofa, talking with animation. Hubert heard Dolly say:

‘Well, if, as you say, they are wearing them longer in Paris, I suppose they’ll be getting longer over here soon. I must say I’m not sorry. These short skirts don’t suit anybody like me that’s got thick legs.’

They all sat down in the very constricted space and ate their provisions. James observed genially:

‘How the Clewer family do collect into lumps! I’ve noticed we always do it. Draw the curtain further across, Dolly, so that nobody can notice that we are all relations. Then Mrs Martin won’t think she ought to come and break us up.’

On the landing outside hung a picture which had struck Hubert’s attention earlier in the evening. To him it suggested brawn in an advanced stage of decomposition. But to two guests who were coming upstairs it had, apparently, other significances. The party in the alcove overheard the following conversation.

‘Fine thing that!’

‘Very fine! Lowe!’

A third was evidently being summoned upstairs.

‘Come and look at this.’

‘Quite good, yes,’ said Lowe, after a pause for observation.

‘A good bit of colour that, when you see it in the right light,’ pursued the first speaker, coming down to particulars. ‘Decent colours!’

‘Very fine thing … uncompromising sincerity….’

‘Yes … rather nice colours. Let me see …’ Lowe hesitated, ‘… it’s a lobster, isn’t it?’

‘… Er, no…. A Madonna and Child, I believe. But of course that’s immaterial!’

‘Oh, quite! That doesn’t signify. Nice colours!’

‘Yes. Good colour….’

They drifted on.

Hubert and Agatha heard a strange sound which neither of them had heard before in their lives. Dolly was, possibly, more used to it. James was laughing loudly.

3.

Agatha made no long stay at Mrs Martin’s party but returned early to the small hotel where she and Gerald were staying. She found him at the writing-table in their room, deeply absorbed in a publication terrifically entitled Brain, upon which he was making notes. The set of his mouth and the nervous, unconscious tapping of his foot as he read told her that he was working hard. Without an interruption or a greeting she composed herself in an armchair upon the hearth, to wait until he had done. To her surprise a small fire was burning smokily in the grate.

He, jerking himself with an evident effort to a recollection of her presence, inquired abstractedly whether she had seen her mother. She told him of her fruitless quest, and said that she would go round to South Kensington the first thing in the morning.

‘Did she leave a message for you?’ he asked, frowning.

‘No, nothing! But Meadowes seemed to know I was expected back, so she must have got the letter I sent her. No note or anything came for me here, I suppose?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘She might have written,’ muttered Agatha.

‘Was it a nice party you went to?’

‘Quite nice.’

‘You didn’t stay very late.’

‘Not very late. Have you been working all the evening?’

He did not answer and she saw that his attention was returning to Brain. Leaning back in her chair she abandoned herself to the melancholy of undisguised fatigue until he said, without looking up from his page:

‘You’d better get to bed. Don’t wait for me. I shall be some time yet.’

‘I think I’ll wait,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you when you’ve quite finished.’

The silver travelling clock, one of Agatha’s wedding presents, ticked on the mantelpiece; it looked out of place among Gerald’s pipes and tins of tobacco. The sounds of London outside died away into post-midnight silence. Still his pen scratched and the pages rustled. The fire sank together and she tried with a poker to stir it into a remnant of heat. She was exhausted by her long journey, for French second-class railway carriages were still a new experience to her and the crossing had been a nightmare. The disappointment of missing her mother had been the final blow. This chilling silence staggered her; she had been quite unprepared for it. She had expected stormy recriminations and reproaches, together with the blessed assurance that she had an unfailing partisan. Now everything was uncertain, and she dreaded the interview before her.

Too tired to think, she smoked several cigarettes and fell into a sort of chilly doze. Her childish mind, straying unhappily through the void like a lost bird, circled inevitably towards the thought of Lyndon. It was an ark, a shelter of comfort and solace. She could sit dreaming of her lost home by the hour, supporting herself by recollections of its enduring beauty. It gave her escape from sordid discomfort and fretful anxiety. In this bleak London winter she thought of warm sun, and the lawn and cedar tree, and the smell of cut grass. But often, when she had found the Mediterranean too hot and glaring, she had remembered the cold, wet winds of early spring, and daffodils, and rooks blown among the elms by the home farm.

At last Gerald shut up his book, and came across and knelt beside her, spreading cold hands towards the sinking fire.

‘I’m afraid there’s no more coal,’ she said. ‘Are you cold? I’m glad you had it lighted.’

‘Oh, I’m quite warm. I thought you’d be cold when you came in. It’s a bitter night.’

‘You aren’t warm,’ she told him, chafing his fingers gently. ‘You are cold and tired. Would some Oxo warm you up?’

‘Well, it would be rather nice.’

She hunted in the tray of her box and produced a small spirit lamp, a cup, a saucepan, and a tin of Oxo cubes. She rather enjoyed making Oxo, for it was a new accomplishment. Life in small Corsican inns without a maid had taught her several strange things, and it was still a novelty to minister to the needs of another person.

Gerald regarded his mistress with a faintly puzzled amusement, as she busied herself boiling the water. She was not unaware of this, and the beginnings of resentment stirred in her tired spirit. Keenly sympathetic though he might be in life’s more urgent stresses, he was a little obtuse in small things. He could not realize how excessive was the degree of adaptability demanded by her existence with him. According to his ideas they had lived in no small luxury. He had always taken her to far more comfortable inns than he would have selected for himself, so anxious was he to make things easy for her.

‘I saw Dolly and James,’ she said.

‘Oh, did you? What were they like?’

‘As nice as ever. They were at the party. So was Hubert.’

‘Oh! You saw him?’

‘Yes. He was … just flustered.’

‘But you didn’t see your mother?’

‘No. That was what I was wanting to talk to you about. It struck me on the way home that it was just as well I didn’t see her, for I’ve never really settled what to say to her. I’ve always rather counted on her taking the initiative. But, supposing she doesn’t, what line am I to take?’

‘Well, Agatha, say exactly what you like. I mean your relations with your mother are entirely your affair. I’ll back you up in whatever you say, of course. That water’s boiling!’

She began to stir the Oxo.

‘Well, then, I’ll ask her if she has any idea what John is going to do, and why he doesn’t seem to be taking any steps to divorce me. And if she doesn’t know, I’ll try to get her to see Lady Clewer and find out. I may say that we’re going to be married the moment I’m free, mayn’t I?’

‘Of course.’

‘I want to get her to see how much better it would be to end the anomalous position we are in now, at the cost of an open scandal if need be.’

‘Yes.’

The pair paused, while Gerald sipped the Oxo, sitting at her feet. At last he said:

‘Agatha, my dear, would you care to go to America? To New York?’

‘I! Why? Are you thinking of going there?’

‘Yes. I’ve been offered work there. I found the letter waiting for me in Harley Street when I went round there this afternoon. My friend Green, who used to work with me, is running a new sort of clinic and wants me to help him.’

He plunged into a long and highly technical description of the kind of clinic it was. At last she said wonderingly:

‘Then it would be the kind of work you like?’

‘Oh, yes. Quite interesting, I think. Of course, the salary is very small, but it would be enough, with what I’ve got, to keep us in tolerable comfort, I imagine. But I’d only accept it if you cared to go too.’

‘Is it a permanent thing? Does it mean spending the rest of our lives there?’

‘Well, yes. It pretty well amounts to that. It will mean several years there anyhow. I thought it mightn’t be a bad thing, if you approved, that is to say. We could get right away.’

‘But your practice here?’

He gave her a swift, surprised look, and said nothing for a few seconds. Then he replied indifferently:

‘It isn’t the sort of thing I really hanker after. I get too many of the idle rich, and their ailments are so much alike that it becomes monotonous. The proletariat offer a much more varied field.’

‘But my mother … everyone … said that you were getting on so brilliantly well here.’

‘I had a sort of vogue with your mother’s friends. That is because just after the war nervous breakdowns became a fashionable complaint. Soon they’ll take to something else, and where should I be?’

‘I was reading in the paper about the slump in Harley Street and how all the specialists are doing so badly.’

‘Bound to happen with the wealth of the country changing hands so rapidly. The people who used to be ill can’t afford it now. And the New Rich haven’t learnt to be ill yet. They still regard ill-health as a misfortune, probably, and not as an absorbing way of spending money. It will right itself in time.’

‘Then you would really like to go to America?’

‘I should quite. It depends entirely upon your decision.’

She felt at the moment that New York was the last place in the world she would wish to live in. But she replied:

‘I don’t mind particularly where I live. Really I don’t. I’ll go quite happily anywhere that you have to go.’

‘Right! I’m glad you’re so decided. I thought you might rather hate the idea.’

‘Did you indeed? You were right!’ was Agatha’s inward comment.

Why on earth should it be New York? Almost any other place would have been better. She had always disliked the idea of it, a great, noisy, new city, perpetually in a hurry. If it had to be the States, why couldn’t it have been Virginia, or California, or somewhere in the South? She was all for warmth at the moment.

Gerald was saying:

‘Then I’ll find out the particulars of the thing and close with Green if it’s all satisfactory. The only drawback is that he wants me rather soon; almost at once, in fact. I’m afraid I shall have to be off in six weeks at the outside. That would give me time to dispose of my affairs here. You could, of course, come over later, if you didn’t want to leave England so soon. Or you could wait here until the divorce proceedings were through, and then come out. In that case we could be married as soon as you arrived, but it would mean a longish separation.’

‘Does Dr Green know of your … position? I mean would it make any difference to his offer that we shall probably be in the divorce courts?’

He shook his head.

‘No, I don’t think so. I’m almost sure it wouldn’t. But I must find all that out. In fact I expect I’ll have to explain the circumstances to him.’

‘I think I could be ready to leave England in about six weeks. It’s really quite a long time. I’d rather not stay here and be divorced all by myself.’

‘Just as you like. Only I must go then if I’m going at all. He wants my help in getting the thing started. Otherwise, of course, I wouldn’t contemplate leaving you.’

‘No. We’ll consider it tomorrow when I have seen my mother. We shall know better what to do then. I can’t think why John hasn’t divorced me. I made sure he would be very prompt about it. And he should have no difficulties at all; his case is perfectly clear.’

‘Well, you must talk to your mother about it.’

Silence again overtook them, this time prolonged and mournful. The hour was late and the fire quite out, but neither made a move to leave the cold hearth. Their brief, bleak colloquy had given them too much to think about, and they crouched over the ashes, pondering. Gerald was asking himself, with that wearing, secret uneasiness which now so frequently assailed him, whether she would be happy in this new life. He was beginning to feel that this beloved, yet incongruously magnificent creature, whom he had so unexpectedly acquired, was a charge—an obligation. Beholding her at Lyndon, he had raged against the opulence of her setting; but a mere removal had not satisfied him. He now felt that he must himself provide some sort of background for her; she was more inseparable from backgrounds than he had thought. He had already half forgotten that tide of indignant pity which had driven him to snatch her from Braxhall. Though obstinately counting himself a happy man he would sometimes pause and gasp in amazement at what he had done.

Still he loved her intensely, and sustained himself with an impassioned belief in her fortitude. Not many women would take the prospect of exile in an alien, uncongenial country as she had taken it. But he did not tell her this, which was a pity, for she wanted to hear it. She was discovering that he took her virtues for granted and she was not sure whether she liked it. But he would have thought it rather insulting to tell her how noble she was, so he said nothing.

‘That’s not an alarum clock going off upstairs?’ she cried. ‘It must be late! I can’t bear to think of people getting up already; I need to recruit a lot of energy before I can even think of a new day.’

It was indeed late in the following morning when she finally dragged herself from her bed and set out on her anxious pilgrimage to South Kensington. Upon the road she rehearsed all that she must say and it seemed to her that she was quite ready for the encounter. She would point out that she intended to go to America with Gerald, and that, in this case, divorce would be the simplest remedy. She must display no regret, no penitence, and no exaltation. Emotion of any sort would put her at a disadvantage. Calm common sense was the only platform on which to meet her mother.

As she stood on the doorstep she felt that she was very calm and sensible indeed. But she no sooner caught sight of her parent, waiting at the head of the stairs, than a part of her defences began to slip from her. She had been a fool to think herself ready, when her mother would, in every one of life’s emergencies, be always so infinitely more prepared.

‘Well, Agatha … what kind of a crossing? I was afraid it would be rough. So sorry to have missed you last night.’

Meadowes faded away down the hall as Mrs Cocks kissed her daughter. They went into the drawing-room and sat down on a sofa by the fire. The hearth was dominated by a large wooden frame on which was stretched squared canvas, half worked into a thick woolly rug. Mrs Cocks displayed it jubilantly.

‘It’s perfectly fascinating,’ she said. ‘You do it with this little needle, threading it through and through … so! Of course the designs you get in the shop are hideous, but you can do your own. I was in the British Museum the other day, looking at their carpets, and I’ve got several new ideas. I’ve made two already. One I gave to Lady Peel. The other was the first I made; it isn’t very interesting. I put it in that peculiarly draughty place on the landing by the bathroom. It’s just the right size. You must come up and see it after lunch.’

Agatha admired the rug and wondered if her mother was being unexpectedly subtle or more superficial than usual. She had looked for censure on the very doorstep. Was all this talk of rugs merely meant to disconcert her—to put her to the necessity of opening the difficult question herself? Or was her mother really indifferent and incurious? She sat for some time listening to inconsequent gossip, until she could bear it no more.

‘Mother,’ she began, ‘I rather wanted to discuss some of my private affairs with you.’

Her mother’s reply enlightened her not a little, revealing, as it did, a carefully rehearsed attitude.

‘Of course, that is as you please. But unless your plans are of a kind that I can countenance and approve of, the less you tell me the better. As my daughter I don’t want to lose you, so I’d really rather not hear anything that might make things difficult between us. Remember, Agatha, at present I know nothing of what you have been doing lately, except that you have been abroad for a time.’

Agatha recognized this line of argument, for she had heard it before. Mrs Cocks had always been a little inconsistent in her ethical conventions. The line she drew, where the social irregularities of her friends was concerned, had strange curves in it. Agatha often thought that she strained at gnats and swallowed camels. She would exclude one from her house, in rigid disapprobation, and welcome another, equally culpable, with warm cordiality. ‘Of course I know nothing of all that,’ was her plea on these occasions, ‘and I don’t see that it’s my business to know.’ A policy of invincible ignorance. She was now evidently prepared to maintain, in the face of an outraged world, that she knew nothing of her daughter’s misdoings.

Both women were silent for a few minutes and then Mrs Cocks said carelessly:

‘I’ve had a fire lighted in your room, as you will be wanting to unpack this afternoon, I expect. When are your things coming round? You haven’t got a maid with you, I suppose? You’d better let my woman do it for you.’

‘But you weren’t expecting me to stay here, Mother?’

‘Why not? I thought you might like to be here for a week or two.’

‘I don’t think I can leave Gerald, thank you. We are staying at the Talisman Hotel, you know.’

Mrs Cocks flushed with irritation. It was really very tiresome of Agatha to ignore her plea for reticence.

‘I don’t know that I particularly want to hear about that,’ she said with cold distaste. ‘But since you insist upon talking in this way, may I ask how long you intend to continue thus?’

‘Until we can get married. I want John to divorce me. I can’t think why he doesn’t. Mother! I know you think it all very wrong, but …’

‘You can hardly expect me to approve,’ broke in Mrs Cocks, impulsively forgetting her role of cool incuriosity. ‘You’ve dragged my pride in the dust. I can’t possibly hold my own with Marian Clewer now, and you’ve no idea how odious she’s been. I’m quite defenceless. When she brags of her daughters, what am I to say of mine?’

‘I’m very sorry, Mother.’

‘I can’t understand it,’ continued Mrs Cocks bitterly. ‘I cannot understand it. I couldn’t have believed you capable of such folly. To risk your position and reputation like this! Because, even nowadays, you would be considered déclassée by most nice people, if it became generally talked about. Fortunately, hardly anyone does know, outside the family. I think a lot of people guess that you are not on very good terms with John, but nothing worse than that. If you will come to me now, you are likely to get out of it all a great deal better than you deserve.’

‘But, Mother, I want John to divorce me, and then people must …’

‘John is not going to divorce you. And very rightly. He cares for the scandal if you don’t, and he isn’t going to have his name dragged into publicity like this. And allow me to tell you that you will live to thank Heaven that he had such good sense and moderation.’

‘But unless he divorces me, I can’t marry Gerald.’

‘I cannot see why you should be so anxious to rush into a second marriage when you did so badly over your first.’

‘But he has to go to America in six weeks and I want to marry him and go too.’

‘America! In six weeks? My dear child, the quickest divorce that ever was heard of would hardly enable you to remarry in time for that. But what on earth do you want to go to America for?’

‘I don’t want to go there particularly. But Gerald has to go, and I naturally want to go with him. He’s got work there.’

‘Oh, well, of course, if you insist upon living with him, emigration will be his only chance of supporting himself—and you. You’ve probably ruined his career here. Yes! Since he has had the misfortune to love you, my child, he’d better try the States.’

‘Do you really think that?’ murmured Agatha turning pale.

‘Of course I do. It’s obvious to anyone. His practice here will fall to pieces as soon as ever this scandal comes out. Bound to! His best type of patients are exactly the sort of people who would have nothing further to do with him. People that one knows. But tell me … is this work in America well paid?’

‘Not very, I believe.’

‘And have you considered how you will like straitened circumstances in … in … wherever it is….’

‘New York.’

‘New York? Oh, it’s quite impossible! My dear Agatha, you’ve never been there. I have, so I know what I’m talking about. You wouldn’t stand a week of it. It’s the most entertaining place—for the very rich. But only for the very rich. Unbearable otherwise. You surely can’t contemplate such a thing? You don’t know what you are doing.’

‘Well … you see … I love him.’

‘Love him! But eight years ago you loved John.’

‘I was mistaken. I didn’t.’

‘How do you know that this is not a mistake?’

‘I always loved Gerald. But I didn’t always know it.’

‘Then you did very wrong to marry John, that’s all I can say,’

‘I know.’

‘I can’t understand it. But then I never could understand these things. I can’t understand how you, of all people, could be so ill-bred.’

‘Do you think it is ill-bred?’

‘Yes, I do. It’s very vulgar. But it’s the same everywhere, nowadays. In all the books one reads, on the stage, all over the place. All these violent passions! It’s the war, I suppose. But that sort of thing has always rather disgusted me. I daresay I’m out of date, but it revolts me.’

Agatha reflected mournfully upon her recent sentimental journey. It seemed, at that particular moment, to have been all customs houses and rough crossings. She could not remember any violent passions anywhere.

‘I don’t think you are quite fair,’ she said defensively. ‘I don’t think Gerald and I are very passionate people, whatever else we might be accused of.’

‘But if you haven’t even the very inadequate excuse of passion, why in Heaven’s name have you misconducted yourselves in so frightful a manner? Do explain yourself, Agatha! You told me just now, with some fervour, that you love him.’

‘So I do! So I do!’

‘Very well, then. What, exactly, do you mean by that?’

‘Oh, don’t you know what I mean?’

‘I can’t say that I do.’

‘Well …’ began Agatha laboriously, feeling how hopeless was her task, ‘he’s the only person in the world that I’ve ever wanted to … to make happy … to give to … to make sacrifices….’

‘I see!’ said Mrs Cocks drily. ‘And what sacrifices have you made for him so far? Apart, I mean, from the loss of principle, position and reputation, which was, after all, mutual.’

Agatha considered, with a shock of dismay. The past months, reviewed in the light of her mother’s derisive irony, did not seem to be very full of sacrifices, as far as she was concerned. She had in no way requited his unremitting vigilance for her happiness. So far, he had been the victim of their escapade. ‘No,’ she said candidly. ‘I’ve not done much for him as yet. But I’m going to.’

‘No you won’t. You never will. Don’t deceive yourself, Agatha. You aren’t that type of woman, though you may occasionally wish you were. You are the sort of woman who takes, who accepts sacrifice; the prize and privilege of successful men, not the helpmate of the failures. You were expensive to produce and you are even more expensive to … to keep. Don’t wince like that! It’s a very useful type, and stimulates nine-tenths of the culture and civilization in the world. But you are frightfully mistaken if you think you can change your nature. You have never, in all your life, put up with anything you disliked, or done anything you didn’t want to. You can’t begin now.’

‘I’m not so very old.’

‘Too old to change your character. And anyhow it’s unfair to experiment on poor Gerald. If you think you can go with him to America and be a good wife to him in poverty and discomfort, you’ll make the mistake of your life. You haven’t the strength of character. You’ll bring misery and disillusion on him. Have you thought of the consequences, supposing you couldn’t stand it?’

‘Other women …’

‘Other women are trained in harder schools. Just consider for a moment the sort of middle age you are storing up for yourselves.’

Agatha had a moment’s horrible vision of herself growing old, an inefficient, fretful figure, clouding his life with her querulous demands and eclipsed beauty. Had she that generous love which survives the hard middle years? Hastily banishing the nightmare, she said with decision:

‘There will be hard times, of course. But we shall get along as other people do.’

‘Don’t make the mistake of supposing that you have a noble character because you would like to have one. It’s rank folly.’

‘But I’ve burnt my boats. I’m his, now. I must go where he goes. People may not know it yet, but that doesn’t alter the essential fact. It’s true that I’m taking great risks. But I must. I can’t leave him, Mother, whatever you say.’

‘You must leave him for a little time, at any rate. I’d hoped to persuade you of that without being forced to tell you something which I really have no business to speak of, since I promised not to. But you compel me.’

‘Oh, no, don’t, if you oughtn’t!’ cried Agatha shrinking back.

‘I’m afraid I must, for nothing else will make you see reason. Besides, it’s something which you have every right to know, and which you ought to have been told long ago. In fact I spoke pretty plainly to Marian about it. I said that she had absolutely no right to keep it from us. It … it explains why John is not getting a divorce. I went to see Marian soon after you left Braxhall, to talk things over, you understand, and find out what John meant to do. And after a good many preliminaries I began to gather how ill he really is.’

‘Ill! Is he ill?’

‘Very ill, dear. He has been for some months past. He was when you were at Braxhall. I got it out of Marian that he’d seen a specialist just before that time. It was that old heart trouble, you know.’

‘But I knew he’d seen a specialist. He saw Sir Newman Crawley. But he was quite reassuring.’

‘I’m afraid he wasn’t. You were most unjustifiably kept in the dark. His verdict was very grave.’

‘Grave! … What did he say?’

‘This is bound to be rather a shock to you, dear. He … he practically told John that he was … dying. He gave very little hope of his recovery….’

‘Mother! Oh, Mother! No!’

‘He said that it would probably be quick,’ said Mrs Cocks, looking into the fire. ‘A few months, he said….’

‘But he said all this before we went to Braxhall? Before we went?’

‘Yes. Of course he should have told you.’

‘Before we went….’

‘I consider that you should have been told at once. I suppose he wanted to spare you, poor boy, as nothing could be done. Still, I might have been told. But he only confided in Marian, who of course told Lois, and Hubert, and Cynthia, and Sir Thomas, and Dolly, and James for all I know, but elected to keep it secret from the people most concerned. But had you absolutely no idea of it?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t gape like that! I don’t believe you’ve heard a word I’ve been saying.’

‘I’m sorry. But what have I done? Oh, what have I done! I might have known.’

‘Of course, if you’d known, this … regrettable precipitancy …’

‘Oh, hardly that! We’d been in love for ten years.’

‘And did quite well without each other. It’s a pity you couldn’t keep it up a little longer.’

‘Oh, Mother, don’t! Don’t be so cruel. Anyhow, it’s not that I’m thinking of. But I’ve been so unkind to him. Oh, perhaps it’s not true!’

‘I’m afraid it is, dear.’

Mrs Cocks put a few stitches into her rug. Agatha was walking distractedly about the room, delving into the past.

‘Poor John! Oh, I ought to have known! But why? Why didn’t he tell me? I don’t blame him, though. I know quite well why he didn’t. I was abominable to him and let him see I didn’t love him. Oh, but of course I wouldn’t have left him if I’d known. At least, not like that. But then, what would I have been worth even if I had stayed, if it was only for that? I don’t wonder he didn’t tell me. He would have, if I’d treated him better.’

‘I don’t know that it makes so very much difference to John,’ said Mrs Cocks dispassionately. ‘The injury which you’ve inflicted upon him would be the same, whether he were well or ill. I don’t expect he feels it any more bitterly on that score.’

‘I’m not thinking of that so much as the hateful way I baited him before I left him.’

‘And I’m not really thinking of John at all. And it’s rather sentimental in you, Agatha, to do so at this late hour. If you were going to consider his feelings you should have done so sooner. No! I’m thinking of the perfectly unnecessary way in which you have compromised yourself.’

‘I don’t see what else could have happened really,’ said Agatha dejectedly, as she sat down again. ‘Once it was a declared thing between me and Gerald, I suppose I must have gone to him. Only it would never have come to such a point, that time at Braxhall, if I’d known about John. How horrible it all is! However, it’s done now and can’t be undone. I must try to think what is best to do next.’

‘Quite so. And you have to remember that your reputation is still undamaged. The family will remain silent for John’s sake.’

‘But that can’t last for long.’

‘I hope you’ll see the sense, now, of coming to me here, at least until …’

‘But, my dear Mother, what’s the use of that? If I go to New York in six weeks’ time with Gerald, what’s the use? …’

‘I think you must wait here quietly until you can join him to be married.’

‘Oh, no! We couldn’t be separated like that.’

‘I think you owe it to John. I really do.’ Mrs Cocks was playing her last card and her face bore traces of anxiety. ‘So far you haven’t brought public disgrace on him. And that is what he minds, you know quite well it is. If you leave Gerald now and live here with me for a month or two you will save your husband’s name from dishonour. I think you’ve no right to refuse that to a dying man.’

‘I must see what Gerald thinks,’ said Agatha uncertainly. ‘He will know what is right. He has a finer conscience than I have.’

‘Has he, indeed?’ said Mrs Cocks.

‘I can see your point of view. I’ll put it to him.’

‘I’m sure he’ll think as I do. Let him go out to New York, and you can follow him when you are free. After a decent interval. Surely it would be better, from all points of view? We might both go out; it would look more respectable. And then you could marry him out there. I know it sounds callous to talk about the future in this cold-blooded way, but one must look ahead.’

‘It … it would be bound to be fairly soon, wouldn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes, quite. I gather there is, practically speaking, no doubt about that.’

Mrs Cocks longed to add: ‘You needn’t be afraid your husband will not die,’ but she checked herself in time and continued relentlessly:

‘For one thing, if it’s all decently and respectably done, and you don’t compromise yourselves by rushing off together before you can be properly married, it will be so much easier for you to return to England eventually. Supposing Gerald changed his mind about his work and wanted to come back and take up his London practice? You would infinitely prefer that in your heart of hearts, wouldn’t you? You don’t surely want to spend the rest of your life in New York?’

Agatha shivered.

‘Why invite a scandal when you can avoid it? I should have thought your affection for Gerald would have made you consider his position and career a little more.’

‘You see,’ exclained Agatha, ‘I rather think it is on my account that he has accepted this work in New York. I think he thought, poor dear, that it would be easier for me. And if that is so, I don’t think I ought to let him go without me.’

‘Well, at least, come here until you go. Don’t go on blatantly living with him as long as you are in London. I really think you should have more consideration for all our feelings than to do that. Besides, the Talisman is such a respectable place! It’s where all the head-mistresses go when they come up to attend conferences. I shouldn’t wonder if you got turned out when the management discover who you are. And they are bound to do that before long. How shall you like that?’

‘Oh, it is difficult! I’ll go off now and consult him,’ conceded Agatha.

‘Stay to lunch first. There is plenty of time.’

Mrs Cocks was unwilling to let Agatha go until she had forced her to a decision.

‘But I said I’d be back for lunch. He will wait for me.’

‘Ring him up and tell him you are staying here.’

‘I could do that.’

Agatha went to the telephone. As she waited for Gerald, she said reflectively:

‘It wouldn’t be a long separation. Only six weeks.’

‘What, child?’ Mrs Cocks looked up from her rug. ‘Oh! Oh, no! Not long. The most married people are sometimes parted for as long as that.’

Agatha addressed herself to the telephone:

‘Oh, Gerald, is that you? I’m speaking from South Kensington. I’m stopping to lunch, so don’t wait for me … Oh, not badly…. I’ll tell you when I get back…. I don’t quite know…. If I’m not back by tea-time, ring me up, will you? Good-bye, then.’

She hung up the receiver, and found that her mother was looking her over with approving eyes.

‘You’re in very good looks, my dear. You’ve quite got back your colour. I don’t know when I’ve seen you look better. Corsica has evidently built you up. Come down to lunch.’

The two women strolled downstairs. Agatha stifled a small pang of compunction at the thought of poor Gerald lunching in the hotel all by himself. As a matter of fact he had taken the opportunity to escape from the menu cards and the sweet-peas and maidenhair fern and all the flummery which so exasperated him at an hotel meal. He had sought an eating-house near Guy’s, a haunt of his bachelor days, where he was almost sure of picking up a friend to share his chops and beer.

4.

Hubert, borne as far as Cowper in his passion for the eighteenth century, had re-read the Winter Morning’s Walk. He became enchanted with it and insisted upon reading extracts to Lois in spite of her visible absorption in a volume of Marcel Proust. The next day was bitterly cold and he was very anxious that they should set forth upon a Winter Morning’s Walk of their own, but she would not be persuaded. In the afternoon, therefore, feeling every inch a country gentleman, he set off by himself. He strode through several farmyards and looked severely at some pigs. He thrashed with his stick at such poor weeds as the season had spared. His hope was that if he crossed a sufficient number of fields, and climbed a few score stiles, he might, permeated by the beauties of the wintry landscape, achieve that mood of philosophic reverie which gives distinction to the poets of Cowper’s age. If fields and hedges failed to produce the right effect he might try a country churchyard.

He had observed that the fellows usually begin by cataloguing the scenery, and he obediently scrutinized the view, moving the eye, as the poet directs, ‘from joy to joy.’ But, gaze as he would, he remained cold. Emphatically that, for a bleak, black wind swept from the steely sky and whistled over the stubble, nearly flaying him. His nose turned blue and his eyes began to water; it was the kind of day when no clothes seem thick enough.

‘It needs a frost, I suppose,’ he reflected, ‘and snow, and icicles hanging from the old barn roof, and what not. Something more like a Christmas card.’

He thought sadly of Madeira, where they had intended to spend the winter, and, as a fresh gale came down the hill, he wondered if Madeira would really be warm enough. The shortening afternoon gave him a good excuse for turning homewards.

Having reached his garden, however, he perceived Lois at the window of the living-room, and immediately underwent a recrudescence of the country gentleman. She beckoned to him but he ignored her and began a solemn tour of the estate, minutely examining each much-pruned rose-bush in the bed under the window. He hoped that he did not look too cold and miserable. Lois opened the long window and called to him to come in, but he hardly heard her in the frenzy of excitement with which he stooped over an extremely small bush. Then he straightened himself.

‘Lois!’ he called. ‘Just come and look here!’

‘What at?’ she called back, shivering in the window. ‘Do come in out of the cold. I’ve had a letter….’

‘I do believe …’ he said, in deep concern, ‘… I’m very much afraid it’s the blight!’

‘The what?’

‘The blight! … Er … rose blight.’

‘Is there such a thing?’

‘Of course there is.’

She came out and joined him.

‘I don’t see anything wrong,’ she said.

‘I don’t like that funny reddish colour at the end of that twig,’ he commented anxiously.

‘Aren’t they always like that at this time of year? And anyhow you can’t do anything about it, even if it is. You don’t know what to do.’

Hubert looked pained at such an accusation. He said, with becoming gravity:

‘I’ll have to consult with Saunders.’

‘Now do come in. I’ve something I want to talk to you about….’

He followed her into the genial warmth of the living-room and just managed to suppress a sigh of ecstasy as the window closed behind them.

‘I had a nice bracing walk,’ he told her. ‘Pity you wouldn’t come. Those pigs at the old farm are very fine. I had a look at them.’

But she was so intent upon a communication which she wished to make that she had no time to be a country gentleman’s wife. She did not even notice that he was aggrieved about it.

‘It’s the most extraordinary thing,’ she said, ‘and you will have to speak to James. He pays too little consideration, really, to poor Mother’s feelings, and it’s disgusting after all she’s done for him.’

‘How often have I told you,’ said Hubert furiously, his grievance taking shape, ‘how often have I told you that I will not speak to James about things? Why should I? He’s more trouble than he’s worth. If anything is to be done with him one of you women had better talk to his precious Dolly. That’s the only way to deal with him.’

‘Dolly is as bad as he is. She’s worse. They are both disgusting, but he has some excuse. He’s always been eccentric, and anyhow, men have different standards. But Dolly shouldn’t countenance it. At least, one expects people of her class to value respectability. One would think she would be more particular.’

‘What have they been doing now? I thought Dolly was too respectable, if anything. That was your mother’s view when last we discussed her.’

‘Mother writes that she really can’t go there any longer. She can’t countenance the way they receive Agatha. She says that Agatha is up at Hampstead so often that one can never be really quite sure of not meeting her.’

‘But Lois … I told you that at the Martins’ party the other week we all …’

‘That’s different. That’s in public. Of course, in a private family affair like this, one has to behave civilly in front of people. Dolly and James did quite right: I was glad to hear that they had that much savoir-faire. But it’s quite a different thing asking her to their house.’

‘It’s rather funny, when you think how very lately it was Agatha we all blamed for receiving them. But really, my dear, I think it’s entirely their business who they ask to their house.’

‘Have their family no claims? When you think of what we have all done for them! Where would they be if it wasn’t for us? You’d think James would have more feeling of loyalty to his brother. You’d think a respectable creature like Dolly would draw the line somewhere.’

‘I daresay she does.’

‘I tell you she doesn’t. If, knowing the facts, she can go on asking Agatha to her house, it shows that she doesn’t.’

‘I don’t see that follows,’ argued Hubert. ‘It merely shows that she wouldn’t draw the line where you do. Her conventions are not the same as yours.’

The word convention drew her fire, as he knew it would. She plunged after it, off the main track of her indignation.

‘Conventions? Who is talking of conventions? I don’t consider myself a very conventional person….’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No, I don’t. As people go I should say I was very tolerably broadminded. Anyhow, I’m much less conventional than you are.’

‘Very possibly,’ agreed Hubert in an irritating voice.

‘So you can’t talk.’

Hubert said nothing, but picked up the evening paper and settled himself in a comfortable chair by the fire. Lois, finding herself in a cul-de-sac, made one of those unexpectedly swift returns to the main issue which so often surprised him:

‘Anyhow this question of James and Dolly has nothing to do with convention.’

‘I should have thought it had.’

‘It’s … it’s simply a matter of decent feeling.’

‘Same thing …’ Hubert was heard to mumble.

‘It’s not. It isn’t at all the same thing.’

‘I think it is.’

‘I say it isn’t.’

‘What attitude,’ demanded Hubert, after a pause, ‘should decent feeling have prompted Dolly to adopt towards her sinning sister?’

‘Don’t be flippant, Hubert! I feel very strongly about this.’

‘I observe that you do. But I’m not joking, Lois. I want to know. How should Dolly behave to Agatha?’

‘She should make it quite clear … as soon as she has the opportunity to do it privately, I mean … she should make it obvious that she disapproves of her.’

‘But, I just put it to you, supposing she doesn’t disapprove?’

‘Well, then, she should.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, Hubert! How can you ask? And she pretends to be religious!’

‘But her kindness to Agatha may be on religious grounds, you know. Eating with publicans and sinners, even with scribes and pharisees, has been sanctioned by an unimpeachable precedent.’

‘Yes, perhaps. But it isn’t only religion. It’s the flagrant disregard of all social …’

Since convention was the only word which suggested itself to her, Lois left this sentence unfinished and went on to the third item in her charge.

‘They ought to remember what they owe to the family.’

‘But what do they owe?’

‘What does anyone owe? If I had treated you as Agatha treated John, would you like to see your relations welcoming me with open arms?’

Hubert was struck by this.

‘No, I can’t say I should,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘A little hurt, I should be.’

‘And for Dolly and James especially, when you think of everything that has been done for them. Mother, and John, and you and the Bragges. If you think how we’ve all helped in James’s career! You don’t remember, because you didn’t know us then, but I do, how Mother worried herself getting him good lessons and sending him to Paris and all. It’s really rather wonderful when you think she isn’t his real mother. And she had to stand no end of criticism from his own relations for not sending him away to school; that old Major Talbot and Mrs Gordon Clewer—all quite odious about it, and insinuating all sorts of things. They none of them could see that she was keeping him at home because she thought he would develop better there, and that a boy of his temperament couldn’t be treated like the average. And then think how John let him go on living at Lyndon, just letting him paint and go his own way without a word of criticism! Not many young artists have such obliging brothers. And then his marriage! I don’t see how he could possibly have married if the family hadn’t been so nice about it. He never considered, I suppose, when he was allowed to marry with so little trouble, what a blow it was to all of us. We all had to make sacrifices. And then think of the trouble you took to get him work! And Cynthia and Tom and the way he treated them. And the whole business of the Hampstead move. Mother was up there every day for a week, seeing about it. And you taking such trouble to introduce him to people; turning out on cold nights to take him to evening parties which bored you frightfully. Oh, I know it’s a privilege to have him in the family, but it’s a great burden too! And he’s not a scrap grateful!’

Hubert meditated on this catalogue in some awe and said:

‘He certainly has a good deal to thank us all for. But do I understand that your mother actually met Agatha at Hampstead?’

‘Yes. She went up to see Dolly about a servant or something. And James calmly took her into the sitting-room, where she found Agatha helping Dolly to make herself a blouse, if you please! You’d have thought they’d have the sense, under the circumstances, to show Mother into another room. It was most awkward.’

‘And what happened?’

‘I’ll read you what Mother writes.’

Lois picked up a letter and read:

‘Though I was very much taken aback, I was not, on the whole, sorry to have an opportunity of expressing my feelings. I was a little afraid lest my manner at Mrs Townshend’s might have been misunderstood….’

‘You see,’ explained Lois, ‘they had met before. Mrs Cocks, since she got Agatha to go back to her, has taken her about a good deal. She wants to whitewash her as much as possible, I suppose. And Mother met them at an “At Home” and had to be civil, or people would have thought it odd.’

She resumed her reading:

‘I said nothing. I just said: “Oh, Dorothy, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll come another time. Or perhaps, if Lady Clewer is not going to be here for long, I could wait in the studio until she is gone.” Just like that, taking no direct notice of her at all. James, as you may imagine, failed to grasp my meaning, and said: “Why do you call her Lady Clewer?” But I think his wife understood. I went and sat in the studio. Would you believe me, I was there for twenty minutes before Dorothy came in. Even then she did not apologize. I said very little; I told her that I could not visit at Hampstead while such disagreeable things are likely to happen. She tried to excuse herself, of course, by saying that they had not expected me. But, as I said, that only makes it worse. It’s admitting that they do these things behind my back.’

‘She just ignored her,’ said Hubert thoughtfully. ‘If it had been you, Lois, what would you have done? Would you have done the same?’

‘I think so. If I had had the presence of mind. But I’d have got flustered; Mother is always so sure of herself.’

‘But I don’t understand. I don’t quite get your point of view. I’ve known you receive people who, to put it baldly, were no better than Agatha, and who had fewer claims on your affection. And, after all, the scandal has never been public and she’s living quietly with her mother now.’

‘Yes, but it’s the family side of it….’

‘You mean that you are ready to accord a toleration outside the family which you withhold inside it?’

‘Of course, I might have known that you would take Agatha’s part,’ cried Lois angrily. ‘All men do, it seems.’

‘Oh, good heavens!’ groaned Hubert. ‘Why can’t you keep to the point, Lois? These digressions make all our discussions so lengthy.’

‘That’s exactly like you! When I bring up an argument you can’t answer, you always call it a digression. You know quite well that you can’t be unbiassed about Agatha. You can’t deny it.’

‘I don’t deny it. But I deny that it has anything to do with the point. I want to extract from you some explanation of your most unreasonable definition …’

‘Very well, then, if you admit that you are biassed where she is concerned, it seems to me that your whole position is unsound….’

‘Your most unreasonable definition of toleration as …’

‘Hubert! I wish you’d listen to me and not try to interrupt so constantly. It’s very bad manners, and we’d get on so much better if you ever listened.’

‘On the contrary, you interrupted me. But we’ll let that pass. I’ll listen in silence until you’ve quite finished, if you will try to abstain from hurling unanswerable but perfectly irrelevant truths at me and asking me to deny them. It gives you a specious air of victory, but it doesn’t in the least disprove my point, you know.’

‘I’m glad you admit that they are truths. Since you admit that, where Agatha is concerned, you are not qualified to hold an opinion …’

‘I’ve admitted no such thing!’

‘Hubert! You are perfectly impossible! If you won’t let me speak, I won’t try.’

And Lois bent to poke the fire with hands that shook with wrath.

‘Since you must drag personalities into this discussion,’ went on Hubert, more gently, ‘I’d like to say this. It doesn’t seem to me that you can be very friendly with a person, fond of them and accepting kindness from them, and then suddenly chuck them. Agatha has been very kind to us both, Lois, and we have been fond of her. It seems to me to give her a claim on us. And I expect Dolly feels that way too. She owes a lot to Agatha. You don’t mean to tell me that you can, at a moment’s notice, forget the friendship of years? It’s so unlike your usual generosity of temper.’

She said nothing, but kept her face averted. He was suddenly aware that she was on the point of tears, and he instantly grew remorseful. The quarrel became insignificant, and he asked himself angrily why she should not be unreasonable if she wished. He cursed himself for having lost his temper and was glad when tea appeared, since it would give him an opportunity of ministering to her.

‘Wouldn’t you like to have it on the sofa?’ he suggested. ‘Let me pour out.’

She refused coldly and they began the meal in an uncomfortable silence. She was wondering whether any man ever ends any argument with his wife without suggesting a cup of tea or a lie down. She wondered this because it simply did not occur to her that husbands have more forcible weapons at their command. The occasion of James and the window, the only occasion in her life when she had not been treated like a lady, had faded from her mind. It did not lead her to speculate why it was that Hubert never boxed her ears when she annoyed him.

He was seeking for a topic which might mollify her. At last he inquired equably if her mother’s letter had any news of John.

‘Gone down to shoot at Lyndon,’ said Lois shortly.

‘Has he got friends with him?’

‘I believe so.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought it was very good for him, should you?’

‘No.’

‘But I suppose it’s a change for him.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Damned uphill work!’ he protested inwardly.

Her humours, however, were seldom long-lived. She was not a sulky woman. When, after tea, he came to light her cigarette for her, she unbent and retained him with a caress.

‘I hate quarrelling,’ she murmured.

‘So do I.’

‘What do we do it for, then?’

‘I shouldn’t think we are worse than anyone else.’

‘We quarrel about such silly things. James!’

‘Not James particularly. It might have been the new tennis courts or a railway time-table. It was merely a little ebullition of the sex discord.’

‘No, it’s generally James. At Lyndon it was the same; he was at the bottom of every family row I can ever remember. He’s so different from us! Like a cuckoo in a sparrow’s nest.’

‘I was thinking the other day … you know, I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if he set a fashion. A cult of domesticity. I expect all talented young men in the next generation will marry housemaids and wheel their children out in perambulators on Sunday afternoons, and talk in words of one syllable. It’s always the accidental, the chance result of education and surroundings, which makes an impression on the second-rate mind. They’ll copy his work, of course, but that’s nothing to the way they’ll copy his personal eccentricities.’

‘Hampstead and Chelsea will look very odd when they are full of people modelled upon James. Dull too!’

The telephone bell rang and Lois went to answer it:

‘Hello! Hello! Yes, it’s me! Lois speaking! Oh, yes, I’ll tell him.’

She turned to Hubert.

‘It’s Mother. She wants to speak to you.’

Hubert took the receiver from her.

‘Yes! … Yes? Oh! Oh, yes, what is it? … Oh! … Oh, I’m very sorry! Where did you say? Oh, yes, I’ll tell her. Yes, I’ll be careful.’

He put his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to her. ‘She wants me to break to you that John died at Lyndon this afternoon,’ he said in an aggrieved voice. ‘I can’t see why she couldn’t tell you herself. Shall I offer to go up? She was speaking from Eaton Square. They’d ’phoned from Lyndon.’

‘Yes, you’d better.’

He turned to the telephone again.

‘Oh, I’ve told Lois, Lady Clewer. Yes, she’s quite all right. I don’t think you need worry about her. Shall I come up? I can come at once. Are you alone? … Oh! … Well, ring us up if there is anything that we can do, or if you want me for anything…. Oh! … Yes, I will if you like. But I really think there is no need to worry.’

He put up the receiver and rejoined his wife by the fire. ‘The Bragges are with her,’ he said. ‘And she says I must on no account leave you. I’m to ring her up last thing tonight and reassure her about you. She seems dreadfully afraid that you’ll be very much upset.’

Lois was looking as if she could have wished herself a little more upset. She said gravely:

‘Poor John. It’s very sad.’

Hubert agreed that it was.

‘I wonder if he was shooting this morning. This cold day….’

Hubert nodded.

‘Poor Mother! She was as fond of him, you know, as if he had been her own son. It will be very hard for her.’

The tears which she could not shed for John rose into her eyes as she thought of her mother’s distress.

‘I’ll go up tomorrow,’ she said, ‘and help her about getting her things. I’ll need clothes myself.’

Her mind was occupied with the subject for some moments, and then she said lamely:

‘Of course, expecting it as we have been for the last few months, it’s less of a shock….’

It was as though she were excusing herself for not feeling more.

‘It’s a queer thing,’ said Hubert, ‘to think of James at the head of the family. I wonder if he’ll live at Lyndon!’

Lois looked really shocked.

‘Oh, Hubert! Isn’t it awful! But it must be faced, I suppose.’

‘There are bound to be great changes.’

‘I wonder what Agatha will do now, Hubert.’

‘Do? Why she’ll marry Blair of course.’

‘I’m not quite sure,’ said Lois thoughtfully. ‘I think her mother is working against it, you know. I think, now she has got hold of Agatha, she will throw all her influence to delay the marriage in the hope that it won’t come off.’

‘I should have thought that it was quite inevitable.’

‘Well, you know, Agatha’s position is quite assured. She isn’t publicly compromised; she won’t have to marry him. She’s young and beautiful and well off. Her jointure must be ample. Mrs Cocks might well think she could do better for herself than many Mr Blair.’

‘Mrs Cocks might, but I doubt if Agatha would. I won’t believe it. I can’t believe she’d chuck Blair now. I think you do her an injustice, Lois.’

‘Well … we’ll see.’

‘But could you forgive her if she turned him down?’

‘No. I don’t think I could.’

‘She’d brand herself as a light woman,’ he said gravely.

Lois blushed at so outspoken a definition, and said quickly: ‘I don’t want to be unjust to her. It all depends, I think, upon the influence of Mrs Cocks. I don’t want to be hard on Agatha, really I don’t. But I feel she has every virtue except character. She has no real principles, only nice manners. When you first get to know her you think that such charm and kindness must have something fundamentally fine at the bottom of it. But you gradually grow impatient with her and you end by thinking that all her goods are in the shop window. But I’m sorry I spoke in that petty way of her before tea.’

‘Oh, that’s nothing. I’m sure I was most insufferable.’

‘We must try not to quarrel when we have a family to educate.’

‘Indeed we must! If I forget myself you will have to say: “Hubert! And before the children too!”’

Lois laughed and they drew in closer to their bright fire. The bitter gale outside moaned among the larches, but they did not hear it, so entranced were they with their own living future. The storm swept the wintry land and sang a dirge in the void chimneys of Lyndon, swaying the tapestries in that room where John lay, so soon forgotten, in the chilly magnificence of a bed which had once belonged to Agatha.

5.

Mrs Cocks watched her daughter tear up her fourth attempt at a letter, and refrained from suggesting that there was a block of scribbling paper in the writing-table drawer. It was certainly a waste of good note-paper, but it would not do to interfere at this point. Agatha took a fresh sheet, wrote some kind of invocation at the top, and paused despairingly.

Mrs Cocks bent over her rug to hide a smile. She suspected that this letter was to Gerald, and, if it was difficult to write, so much the better. The more often Agatha tore up her beginnings, the more likely was she to say the very things which it was most desirable that she should say.

‘My dear!’ declaimed the mother to herself, recounting the history of this crisis to an imaginary familiar, ‘I did nothing. Absolutely nothing! I said nothing. I just sat still and let it work. And at the last moment, without a word from me, she came to her senses. I never felt more strongly how wise it is not to interfere in other people’s affairs. As one grows older one learns the folly of it.’

It struck her that Agatha’s mourning was really a little too much modified, even for these days of flighty widowhood. As soon as the crucial point of Gerald Blair was settled she must have a campaign with clothes and insist upon their being blacker. But not just yet. Essentials must be fought out first.

‘There is nothing like Providence,’ she reflected. ‘When you think of the risks the child has run, she is really likely to come out of them very well.’

Agatha was reading Gerald’s letter over again. He wrote:

‘DEAREST LOVE,

This is an impossible situation to comment on, isn’t it? I shall never, for the rest of my life, escape from remorse when I think of poor Clewer, and I expect you feel pretty much the same. I’m desperately sorry about it, and I don’t wonder if his relations feel inclined to shower all sorts of curses on our heads.

But now about us, since it’s no use maundering over follies which can’t be remedied. Dearest, I can’t help being very glad that we can get things put straight before I sail, though it sounds brutal to say so. I’m arranging about a special licence immediately and would like to see you as soon as possible, for we shall have a good deal to talk over and settle. When can you see me? I’m not supposing that you can possibly manage to sail as soon as I do, since it’s such short notice, so I’m taking no steps about fixing up your passage until I hear from you. Is that right? I have in fact made up my mind to do without you for some months longer, but you must try to come over as soon as ever you can, for you’ve no idea how much I miss you all the time.

I’m getting intensely keen on the job, you’ll be glad to hear; the more I learn of it the more I like it, which is uncommon luck.

Ever yours,

G.’

It was such a confident letter. Not even ‘Shall I see about a special licence?’ but ‘I am arranging about a special licence immediately.’ Its confidence appalled her. She felt totally unable to tell him that she was unsure in her own mind; that she doubted her power to be happy in New York or to make him so. She took a fresh sheet and wrote:

‘MY DEAR LOVE,

I’m glad you’ve been so prompt about all arrangements. Come and see me early tomorrow. I rather think I could manage to be ready to sail when you do, if it’s possible to book my passage as late as this. I cannot endure a further separation if it can be avoided. But we will discuss that when you come.

Always your loving

AGATHA.’

She then reverted to an earlier page, on which she had written ‘Dearest Gerald,’ and added:

‘I’m afraid you’ll think I’m failing you horribly, but I really think it would be a pity for us to get married in such a hurry. We must allow a decent interval to elapse. My leaving you and coming here was a concession to the proprieties, and having gone that far, we might as well do the thing thoroughly. Couldn’t you go out for a year or eighteen months, and then, if you liked the work, I could join you and we could be married? Or you could come back if you had decided against remaining in New York. I don’t want to make you feel I’m backing out, my dear, but I think it’s rather a pity to let ourselves be rushed in any way. There is no need. We have behaved badly about John and I feel that it would be bad taste, under the circumstances, to force things blatantly upon the world by getting married the moment I am free.

I can see you any time. I go out in the afternoons occasionally for a short walk, but otherwise I’m pretty sure to be in, as I’m not, naturally, going about very much just now. I do want to preserve decorum, as far as possible, in this very difficult position.

Ever yours most affectionately,

AGATHA.

(Don’t be angry with me for feeling all this, Gerald dear.)’

These letters she placed side by side and looked from one to the other helplessly. Then she rewrote the second, leaving out the words ‘There is no need,’ for she blushed when she thought of Gerald reading them. But still, she could not decide which to send. The second letter, even when amended, was a contemptible production; she knew what Gerald would think of it. But she considered that it would be even more cowardly to send the first unless she was sure that she could live up to it. She would be jeopardizing his happiness in order to sustain her own self-esteem.

Glancing furtively at her mother she blessed the rugs which were apparently so all-absorbing. Advice and interference at this moment would be the last straw. But her perplexities had evidently passed unnoticed. She sat weighing one letter against the other until the maid came in with the afternoon post. There was a note directed to her in Dolly’s neat board-school hand:

‘MY DEAR AGATHA,

Can you come up some time, quite soon, please, and see James and I? We are very much upset about something, and would like your advice. We would come to you only James is working very hard all day now and in the evening it’s difficult for us both to get away as the girl goes out. So we hope you won’t mind us asking you to come, dear Agatha, and that you are feeling alright and not too much worried by the Trouble in the Family.

With very much love from us both, yours affectly,

DOLLY AND JAMES CLEWER.’

Agatha determined to go up to Hampstead that very afternoon. Also she would postpone her decision about these letters she had written until after her visit. It struck her that her point of view depended enormously upon domicile, and a few hours in another milieu might throw fresh light on the situation. She reacted to life so differently in different places, and the most decisive step of her career had been taken because she had been at Bramfield and at Braxhall upon the same day.

She put the two letters into two envelopes and tucked them away into her handbag. She would post one when she got back from Hampstead. Then she said to her mother:

‘I’m just off to see Dolly and James.’

‘Oh?’ said Mrs Cocks doubtfully. ‘All the way to Hampstead? How will you go?’

She had reason to suspect the influence of Dolly and James.

‘I can go by Tube.’

‘I don’t know that I quite like that. After all, child, you are, in the eyes of the world, a very recent widow. It isn’t quite the thing to go rushing round London in Tubes like this.’

‘It’s very unlikely I’ll meet anyone we know. I’ll keep down my veil. I’m afraid I must go.’

‘Very well,’ sighed Mrs Cocks, who was afraid to draw the rope too tight. ‘But I think you ought to be back for tea. It isn’t really decent that you should be going out at all, except for a little exercise in the gardens. Of course it’s dull, but one must observe some forms. Why don’t you occupy your mind with some solid reading? When your father died, I remember, I read all through Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico during the first few weeks of mourning. Of course it’s a little heavy. But why don’t you read Mdm de Sévigné? She’s very amusing. I’ll look her out for you.’

‘I’ll try to be back for tea,’ conceded Agatha, and escaped.

An unpleasant wind, icy and dusty, blew in her face as she picked her way up the hill from the Tube station. It was an unbecoming day and she felt blue and pinched; she had a suspicion that she looked old. Hampstead, usually so pleasing a place, seemed to her dirty, noisy, and incredibly cold. She tried to sustain herself with memories of the warmth of Corsica; of long days by the sea, watching its blue glint through the arbutus trees. But then, the South could be squalid too. Remembering the smell in the inns and the flies on the ceilings, she thought that it could be worse. On the whole squalor in warm countries was more intolerable than squalor in cold. New York, so she understood, was given to extremes of climate; torrid in summer, frigid in winter, it was probably squalid all the time.

Turning a corner by South Kensington Station she had caught a glimpse of herself in a long glass by a shop door. She had seen a pallid, disgusted-looking lady, well over thirty, whom she had scarcely recognized. She had never known that it was possible to look so commonplace, and the idea nauseated her. She tried to believe that Venus herself would appear insignificant in such unkind weather, and then remembered a young woman of about her own age who had passed her a moment later and whose beauty was preserved by a closed car and Russian sables.

When she had entered upon the silent residential quarter in which Dolly and James were established she unfastened her handbag and drew forth the first letter that she had written to Gerald. She glanced through its honest, loving sentences, and then tore it up into very small fragments. These she scattered to the implacable wind to be blown for ever about the Heath from the grey ruffled pond to Parliament Hill.

Then she mounted James’s doorstep and rang the bell. The girl admitted her and said that Lady Clewer had just run round to the grocer’s, but Sir James was in his studio. James at the same moment appeared at the end of the passage and greeted her joyfully.

‘Dolly’s out,’ he said, ‘but she’ll be in in a minute. Come into the studio where it’s warm. We have a fire there.’

He led her down the hall where Clewer mackintoshes hung in symmetrical rows, through a covered passage, into the large comfortable studio which had been built out into the yard behind. She paused on the threshold with a cry of surprise, for against the wall, in a good light, there leaned that portrait of James’s mother which had once hung in Eaton Square.

‘How did that get here?’ she said.

‘Mamma made me bring it back after the … the funeral,’ he explained. ‘I’m very glad to have it. It’s good, don’t you think?’

‘I’ve always thought it good.’

He looked at it attentively and then pronounced: ‘Too many of them altogether.’

‘What? Portraits?’

‘No. Lady Clewers. There’s this one, and there’s Mamma, and there’s you, and now there’s poor Dolly, who detests it. That’s too many.’

‘There certainly does seem to be rather a crowd of us.’

‘It’s a good thing you won’t be one for much longer. I suppose you will be getting married soon?’

‘Well … yes … sometime, I suppose.’

‘It will be nice for you to be an honest woman again,’ said James kindly.

Agatha agreed that it would be nice, recognizing some conjecture of Dolly’s in this artless repetition.

‘You’ll find you are much happier altogether when you have got out of the family,’ he assured her. ‘Did Dolly tell you how worried we are?’

‘No. She only said something….’

‘There she is back! I heard someone at the back door. I’ll just call to her that you are here.’

He leant out of a window which gave him a view of the tradesmen’s entrance and shouted:

‘Dolly! Dollee! Agatha’s here! Oh, it isn’t Dolly, it’s a man. What is it? Oh, the Gas! Oh, yes, can’t you come again when my wife is in? I don’t know where it is, do you? Very well, then, I’ll let you in. Can you show me how to do it or do you do it yourself? You’d much better wait till my wife comes in. Yes, I’m Sir James Clewer all right. Oh, Dolly! There you are! Agatha and the Gas are here.’

Dolly dealt with the Gas and came up into the studio. She wore a new black dress of far more lugubrious appearance than Agatha’s grey furs and looked unexpectedly bereaved. She kissed Agatha with a perplexed mournfulness and dragged a chair up to the fire for her.

‘How nice of you to come so quick,’ she said. ‘Has James been telling you? What do you think?’

‘I haven’t told her yet,’ said James, fetching chairs for himself and Dolly. ‘It’s Mamma’s newest idea, Agatha.’

‘It isn’t as if it wasn’t bad enough us coming into a title we never wanted,’ began Dolly wearily. ‘We don’t like being Sir James and Lady Clewer all of a sudden. It isn’t what I expected when I married James. It doesn’t suit our style of living. But what must be, must, and since it’s the will of God I suppose we oughtn’t to complain.’

‘I don’t suppose it’s the will of God at all,’ interposed James. ‘Why should it be? Why should He want to make me a baronet, I should like to know?’

‘If He hadn’t, He wouldn’t of let your poor brother die,’ explained Dolly severely. ‘But what I mean to say is this. We don’t want to let it upset us more than we can help, do we?’

‘You see,’ continued James, ‘Mamma came up here yesterday and wanted to know when we were going to move into Lyndon.’

‘You could have knocked me down with a feather,’ said Dolly. ‘Just when I’d got that range put into the back parlour and the whole house papered. I didn’t want overmuch to come here: I didn’t think it near so healthy for the children. But since we are here I’d sooner stay. There’s no question but it’s better for James and his painting.’

‘Yes, this house suits us,’ said James. ‘We’ve got everything here how we like it. Do you think it’s fair to make us live at Lyndon, Agatha? She says that it’s my duty now to keep up my position.’

‘And the worst of it is, there’s a lot in it,’ said Dolly sadly. ‘I sometimes think that he ought to go. There ought to be some of the family live at the House. I quite see that.’

‘What I feel,’ said the hopeful James, ‘is that it’s so much more your house than ours, Agatha. It’s just the place for you, and you and Blair would do much better there than we would. Now you are going to be married, couldn’t you go and live there and be the family for us? You like Lyndon, don’t you? Better than any other place? I know you do. Then do please go!’

‘Oh, dear James, it’s quite impossible….’

‘Wouldn’t Blair like it?’

‘He’s going to America in a fortnight,’ she said quickly. ‘What? For ever and ever?’

‘For some time, I’m afraid.’

‘But aren’t you going too?’

‘N—not yet….’

‘But you will eventually, I suppose. Oh, dear! Then that puts an end to my best plan,’ said James dolefully.

Dolly was almost tearful.

‘Oh, Agatha, I am sorry! We shall miss you ever so! I don’t really know however we’ll get on without you, so kind as you’ve been. But you must write to us a lot.’

Agatha felt too jaded and dejected to tell them that she had practically decided not to go. It would have needed so much explanation. They had supported and encouraged her in every vicissitude, so far, believing that she was bound to Gerald as they were bound to each other. This deliberate desertion they would never understand. She could picture quite clearly Dolly’s look of startled disapprobation and James’s compassionate gravity. She wondered why she knew so well how James would look. Hadn’t he, once before, looked on her with pity and proffered advice which she had not taken? Her mind swung back to her wedding day and she remembered that he had said:

‘Don’t go if you don’t want to…. They are very silly, you know, but you shouldn’t pay any attention to them. I don’t….’

Bending her head towards the fire, so that they might not see her twisting face, she said to James and his wife:

‘No, I’m afraid you must count me out as far as a tenant for Lyndon goes. But really, I don’t see why you should worry. I shouldn’t let them make you go if you don’t want to. You’ve always been the most sensible person I know, James, about refusing to let other people interfere with you. You’ve never allowed them, so far, to distract you from anything you want to do, or confuse your ideas as to the essential things for your own happiness. Why should you allow it now? I certainly wouldn’t go and live at Lyndon if I were you. It would upset your life horribly. Oh, you’ve done so well up till now! Don’t let them persuade you against your will! You mustn’t go.’

‘I don’t want to,’ he said. ‘But Dolly thinks …’

‘Goodness knows I don’t want to neither,’ broke in Dolly. ‘But there ought to be the family living in a place like that. James has got a duty towards it. He’s a rich man now and, of course, he’ll find it much harder to know how to act right. It says in the Bible that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle …’

‘That isn’t as bad as it sounds,’ interrupted James in an instructive voice. ‘Miss Barrington explained it to Cynthia and me once. And she said that the eye of a needle was really a gate in the walls of Jerusalem….’

‘If the Lord had meant that He’d of said so,’ replied Dolly with conviction. ‘Anyhow the meaning’s plain. It’s much more difficult for James to go to heaven now than it used to be, so we’ve got to be more careful how we behave. We are the Family now. We don’t want to be, but we are. And we’ve got this house; we don’t want it but we’ve got it. It’s the state of life to which we have been called.’

‘Well, I’m not going,’ announced James, who had evidently made up his mind. ‘Nobody can be called to two states at once and I shall stay here and paint. You can go if you’d like, Dolly; I won’t interfere with what you think is right.’

‘James Clewer! What a shocking thing to say! We can’t be parted, and you didn’t ought to speak of it, not even in fun.’

‘I’m not in fun.’

He rose and crossed to the wall where his mother’s picture stood. After looking at it for a few seconds he said again:

‘I’m not in fun. You ought to know that. You know, you both know, how I hated that place! Even after you came, Agatha, it was never the sort of place I like, though it was better. Things were quite different for me when once I got away from it. It may be very beautiful, and so on, but it isn’t my sort of house and never will be, not if I’m the Family fifty times over. I won’t have my children living there. I’ve got away and got my own place for them, and if we went back they’d never have a free moment. We’ve got a duty to them. I’m sorry, Dolly; I know I generally do what you want, but this time I’m not going to.’

Dolly, after the shortest of pauses, signified a tranquil acquiescence in a decision which she saw to be irrevocable. She turned to Agatha and asked:

‘And what do you think we should do with the house, then?’

‘What about your stepmother, James?’ asked Agatha. ‘She’s the person who has always run it really. Would she like to go on there?’

‘We hadn’t thought of her,’ said James.

‘After all,’ pursued Agatha, ‘she’s lived there a great number of years. And done it very well. Couldn’t you ask her to stay on for a bit? Later you might feel differently about going back yourselves.’

‘That would be almost as bad as letting it,’ objected Dolly. ‘I mean, I’m sure she’s a kind woman and very good to the poor and all, but I don’t like her way of doing things. She doesn’t do them quite like the lady of such a house ought to do. She isn’t like you, Agatha, for instance.’

‘Dolly, I think you are much too feudal. You want to put the clock back. You want to revive a state of things which is past and gone for ever. What did I do for Lyndon when I had it? I enjoyed it very much; it suited me to live in it, but I did nothing for it and in the end I disgraced it. I know I belong by race to the “Bless the Squire and His Relations” galley, but it’s out of date, all that sort of thing. I never made the smallest attempt to uphold it. It’s she, with all her modern activities, and her dairies, and her laundries, and village institutes, who is ready to shoulder responsibility. I know she domineers, but think how she works! Think of all the dull hard work she’s done since she came to Lyndon! She’s what is called middle class, but she’s ready to take on all the unpaid public work, she and her like. Lyndon’s hers. I belong to a class which is of no account now.’

‘They do say that these people, what made their money in trade, are getting into all the old houses nowadays,’ agreed Dolly.

‘If we went to live there ourselves, you know, Dolly, we couldn’t push her out of it. She’s dug herself in all right,’ said James, ‘and how should we like that?’

‘Well, we needn’t decide all in a minute,’ concluded Dolly. ‘Let’s think it over. I daresay you are right, Agatha. I wish you didn’t have to go to America all of a sudden. I’d been counting on you to set us right in quite a lot of things. We’ll often need someone to advise us now. Oh, dear!’

She sighed lengthily. Agatha had never seen her so unsure of herself.

‘What date are you sailing?’ asked James suddenly. ‘Couldn’t we all come and see you off?’

‘I don’t quite know,’ replied Agatha. ‘It’s such very short notice.’

‘Why aren’t you going when he is?’

‘Well, my passage isn’t booked for one thing….’

‘Oh, I see!’ he exclaimed enlightened. ‘You wouldn’t have gone if John hadn’t died.’

‘Hush, James!’ admonished Dolly.

‘But I don’t see why,’ he complained. ‘If she could go to Corsica, why not to America?’

‘There are plenty of reasons,’ said Dolly tactfully, ‘which might not occur to a gentleman. But I do wish you could go same time he does, Agatha. It will be a job for you to go alone. I should hate it if James was to go and leave me to get there by myself.’

Agatha had a vision of the courageous Dolly and her children, harassed but indomitable, loaded with strange luggage and armed with third-class tickets, setting forth to the ends of the earth in pursuit of James. She jumped up and began to pull her furs round her.

‘You’ll stay to tea, won’t you?’ exclaimed Dolly. ‘If you’ll excuse me while I get it. I sent the girl out with the children when I came in.’

‘No, do you know I don’t think I can. I said to my mother that I’d be in for tea.’

Agatha’s heart was as bleak as the skies outside and she wanted to escape from Dolly and James, and their insufferable security in each other. Some of her misery was written in her face, for James said quickly:

‘I’ll walk with you down to the station.’

Dolly stood on the doorstep and watched them to the corner of the street. The wind, swirling in bitter gusts, blew her bright hair round her face and fluttered her black skirts, revealing the serviceable green petticoat beneath. When the strange couple, James broad and shambling, Agatha slim and elegant, had disappeared, she sighed and turned into the house to get James his tea.

‘Aren’t your feet very cold?’ asked James, seizing Agatha’s arm and piloting her down the hill. ‘You ought to wear woollen stockings like Dolly does.’

Agatha did not reply: she was much embarrassed by the long veil which hung from her little hat. It blew all ways at once, and wound itself round James’s neck, and round every lamp-post that they passed. They came to a pillar-box and she reflected that, with the fountain pen in her bag, she could have addressed her letter. She would have posted it if she had been alone: but such a deed could scarcely be perpetrated on the arm of the upright James.

At the station he took her ticket while she tucked her loosened hair under her hat and redraped her veil becomingly. He put her into the lift and stepped back, waiting to see the last of her. He gave her a painstaking, reassuring smile; a mute kindness spoke in it, and she had a sudden desire to run back to him and lay all her case before him.

The impulse came too late. She had barely sketched a movement forward when the iron gates clanged between them and she was plunged into the abyss.