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  “Not so very much. But at least I’ve nobody dependent on me. And I wasn’t brought up to look on an income as something that was just there, as a matter of course. I always knew I’d have to work for my own living.”

  “Everybody’s supposed to be brought up to that nowadays—girls and boys alike. I wonder what the kids’ll make of it all.”

  “Living in a house like Arling, and going to expensive schools, and knowing well enough that they have more or less everything they want, regardless of the fact that it’s never quite paid for?” she said ironically.

  “I’ve always wondered whether it was better to scrounge and save every penny and never let them have a taste of the fun one had oneself, or to let the future go hang—which it’ll probably do anyway—and at least give them a good time to look back on. Anyway—it’s Claudia that sets the tune. After all, she pays the piper.”

  After that, a long uphill slope and the noise of the aged engine kept them silent.

  Arling stood in a small park, consisting of rough grass-land and clumps of beeches. A shabby wooden gate, badly in need of paint, led into the winding drive and a little further on was another gate and then a gravelled square in front of the house.

  It was a pleasant house, about a hundred and fifty years old, with no especial features. The french windows of the ground floor faced a long straggling garden, where a small stream ran along. by the bottom of the tennis-lawn, overhung by a giant pair of weeping willows.

  Inside, it was roomy, shabby, and sparsely furnished. Of the ground-floor rooms, only three were in use—the library, that ran almost half the length of the house and faced south; a smaller room on the other side of the hall, traditionally called the smoking-room; and a square, cold dining-room at the back of the smoking-room.

  The hall was also square, stone-tiled, and with a stone staircase leading to the floor above. Nine or ten bedrooms were inadequately served by two bathrooms.

  It was a source of satisfaction to the Winsloes, and also to their guests, that Claudia’s parents had put both electric light and central heating into the house before the war. The intermediate owners of Arling, beyond repairing the roof and installing a separate boiler for the hot-water system, had done nothing. They had, however, after twelve years, decided to go and live in the Isle of Wight, and this timely resolution had led to the reinstatement of the late Captain Peel’s daughter in the home of her childhood.

  “I’m not coming in,” said Copper, at the open door. “I’ve got a job in the workshop.”

  He spent a good many hours in his workshop, an outbuilding behind the stables. Sometimes he repaired small pieces of furniture or turned something on a lathe, but on the whole the visible results of the time he expended there were strangely inadequate.

  Sal nodded without speaking and went into the house.

  Her ears were at once assailed by a loud and hilarious outburst of community-singing in German. The wireless was, as usual, turned on full blast in the library, and the door into the hall—also as usual—stood wide open.

  She paused for a moment in front of the round gilt mirror on the wall, took off her hat and ran a pocket-comb through her short satin-black hair, and then went into the room.

  Sylvia was at the tea-table—auburn-haired, blue-eyed, and innocently pretty; Maurice—small, compact, and sandy, eleven years old—crouched upon the floor near the open window, surrounded by snapshots, a pot of paste, an open album, and innumerable sheets of blotting-paper; and Taffy sprawled gracelessly over an armchair, petting an old and moth-eaten black cat.

  The children’s grandmother, Mrs Peel, sat in a sofa corner with The Times. At intervals she read aloud an extract from the news to which nobody paid any attention. Her slim, but undefinably elderly, figure was clad in thin tweed; her grey hair, piled high upon the top of her head, curled tightly into a neat little fringe on her forehead; and she wore steel-rimmed spectacles.

  Standing next to Sylvia, with an awkward air of not knowing what to do next, was a man nearing forty, large and clumsily built, with an ugly, intelligent face and the habitual frown of the extremely near-sighted. This was Andrew Quarrendon.

  Sal greeted them all adequately—Quarrendon obviously had no recollection of her whatever, although they had met several times—and sat down by the open window.

  “Mother and Frances will be here in a minute. They’re only in the garden,” said Sylvia. “I’ve made the tea—we won’t wait.”

  “Sal, do you know His Lordship was thirteen last week?” asked Taffy, petting the cat.

  “There was a cat in the Daily Mail who lived to be twenty-two,” said Maurice abruptly.

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs Peel.

  This ejaculation was, with Mrs Peel, almost an automatic reaction.

  “Schön sind die Mädeln mit siebzehn, achtzehn Fahr” burst hysterically from the revellers of Leipzic.

  “Must we have the wireless quite so loud?” said Mrs Peel plaintively.

  “Must we have it at all?” Sal enquired.

  “I forgot you didn’t like it,” Maurice remarked leniently, and went to turn it off.

  It was a fine wireless set, of the newest type and very expensive.

  “See when the dance music’s coming on, though,” Taffy besought frantically. “Don’t let’s miss that, whatever we do. You wouldn’t mind the dance music, would you, Sal?”

  “I expect I shall be upstairs, or in the garden.”

  Taffy grinned her understanding of the implication. She was a tall, lanky child of sixteen, of the same loose-limbed build as her father. She had none of Sylvia’s golden prettiness, but her small apricot-tinted face, with wide-apart blue-green eyes set in long, light, curling lashes, was arresting in its air of defiant intelligence. Her straight sandy hair was cut in a Garbo-like bob that reached nearly to her shoulders. It suited her.

  “Here they are,” said Sylvia.

  Her mother and Frances Ladislaw came in by the long window.

  II

  (1)

  The personality of Claudia Winsloe was of a kind that made it almost impossible for her to enter into any group of people without effecting an immediate alteration in the atmosphere.

  In her own home this was markedly so.

  The subtle inner currents running from one person to another seemed somehow accelerated and intensified by her presence, and there was a marked tendency, on the part of her children especially, to refer every manifestation of personality to the bar of Claudia’s judgment. This was done simply and without disguise by Sylvia and Maurice, and even to a certain extent by Mrs Peel. In Taffy it took an oddly inverted form, causing her to disagree sharply with her mother on every point, although usually by implication rather than directly.

  Sal Oliver had formed part of the Winsloe family circle so frequently that her observation of it, though always acute and interested, had become almost a subconscious process. To-day her chief preoccupation lay in watching for Frances Ladislaw’s reaction to it. She had an idea that behind her obvious inability to conduct everyday life on any but rather muddled and ineffective lines, might lie a quite simple and uncomplicated honesty of outlook that would make her judgments neither muddled nor ineffective. The Winsloes included her happily in their conversation. All of them were naturally good talkers, and Frances was, as naturally, a good listener.

  With Andrew Quarrendon they had more difficulty. He did, indeed, appear to listen, but it was with a curious and disconcerting air of intensity, and he turned his large head from one speaker to another as though anxiously awaiting the introduction of some profound thought, brilliantly expounded.

  Claudia did her best for him, begging for suggestions for a literary competition. She set one regularly for a weekly paper.

  “Make them do a parody!” cried Maurice. “Like the time you said ‘A Railway-timetable as Dr. Johnson would have written it.’ “

  “Too difficult,” objected Sylvia, at the same time that Taffy ejaculated “Too easy.”

  Everybo
dy, excepting Professor Quarrendon, offered suggestions or rejected the suggestions of other people. Even Mrs Ladislaw asked: Why not a piece of poetry?

  “People usually think that sounds too difficult, I believe,” said Claudia.

  “A crossword puzzle, then. You do make them up, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “For two papers,” cried Maurice proudly.

  “Claudia!” said Mrs Ladislaw with admiration. “It’s terribly clever of you.”

  “It only needs a very good dictionary and a certain amount of general knowledge. One gets into the knack, and after that it’s easy.”

  Quite true, thought Sal, but in some extraordinary way it sounded as though it wasn’t really true, but just an expression of modesty.

  “Some of Mother’s are marvellous,” put in Sylvia. “She tries them on us sometimes, before she sends them up.”

  “A custom in Sparta. Motto of a famous Corsican,” muttered Frances Ladislaw with wide eyes.

  “That would be Napoleon,” said Mrs Peel unerringly.

  “Oh yes, I suppose it would. But I didn’t really mean anything. I was just thinking about crossword puzzles, and clues. I can’t ever imagine being able to make them up.”

  “Claudia works too hard,” said Mrs Peel mournfully.

  Still the Professor, gazing through his thick lenses at everybody in turn, said nothing and seemed to listen for something.

  Sal Oliver could see that Claudia was growing anxious about him. She had brought him to Arling—pleased and dazzled, no doubt, as so many people were, by her brilliant efficiency, her charm and good looks—and now it was obvious that family life and family conversation were proving too much for him. Sal knew already that he was unmarried, and lived by himself.

  She turned to him.

  “Do you do crossword puzzles?” she enquired.

  Quarrendon shook his head.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Neither do I,” Taffy remarked in a detached tone. “I wish I did, but I can’t see the fascination of them.”

  Claudia smiled at her daughter.

  “That’s all nonsense, really. You ought to be very good at them.”

  Taffy smiled back, though shaking her head as if to show that she did not relinquish her point. Quarrendon, turning his eyes on Taffy, this time allowed his gaze to dwell there for a moment, reflectively.

  The air had vibrated with a faint hint of hostility during the brief interchange of words between Claudia and her younger daughter. Perhaps it was that, Sal thought, which had arrested his attention. She wondered whether he was slightly in love with Claudia. A good many people were.

  The conversation went on—inconsequent, cheerful, and allusive.

  “Claudia,” Mrs Ladislaw was saying, “you write as well, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You must tell me where to find your things. I’ve been away so long—I don’t know anything. Six years!”

  “Oh dear—these children must have changed a great deal” their grandmother suggested.

  (Taffy and Maurice scowled, and even the gentle Sylvia looked indignant.)

  “Yes. They have, of course. But Claudia hasn’t. She doesn’t look a day older.”

  “She looks thin,” said Mrs Peel. “Yes, darling, you do. You work too hard.”

  “Hard work never hurt anybody yet,” said Claudia abruptly. “Besides, there isn’t any alternative.”

  For a moment her face looked older, and hard.

  There was a smothered shriek from Taffy. Hastily, although with kindness, she shoved His Lordship off her knee and rushed to the wireless.

  “There’s something I frightfully don’t want to miss,” she explained, with an apologetic look at Sal. “I’ll put it on quite softly.”

  She flung herself onto the floor and began to manipulate knobs.

  “You hadn’t got a wireless when I saw you in London years ago,” said Mrs Ladislaw. “I suppose everybody has one now.”

  “Nearly every cottage in the village has one,” Sylvia replied.

  “That,” said Mrs Peel regretfully, “is perfect nonsense.”

  Nobody paid the slightest attention to the remark. Of course, thought Sal, it was exactly the kind of thing that one would expect her to say. Women like Mrs Peel had been talking and thinking—in so far as they could be said to think—in that way for years. The difference now was that nobody ever troubled to argue with them, or contradict them.

  “If I love again,” proclaimed a thin voice from the ether.

  Everybody went on talking.

  Even Taffy, without altering her position on the floor, joined in.

  Then Copper slouched into the room.

  Almost at once he turned to his younger daughter.

  “Switch off that row,” he directed.

  Taffy, looking sulky, obeyed.

  “Tea, dear? Maurice, let Father have that chair.”

  Maurice obeyed.

  “Don’t give me that strong tea!” exclaimed Copper. “For God’s sake, how long has it been standing? Can’t we have some fresh?”

  “Of course,” said Claudia equably. “Please ring, somebody.”

  The whole atmosphere of the room had altered.

  Taffy had gone quickly out through the window, carrying the cat with her.

  Maurice, in a lowered voice, was muttering to Sylvia about his snapshots.

  Presently he let a number of them slip to the floor. But he uttered no exclamation. Helped by Sylvia, he began to pick them up, crawling cautiously about amongst the chair-legs behind his father’s back.

  “Have you seen the evening paper, Copper? Sal brought one down. I saw it in the hall, and put it in the smoking-room.”

  Claudia, evidently enough, was endeavouring to distract her husband’s attention from the youthful clumsiness of their son. For a little while she succeeded, by dint of manufacturing remarks about the contents of the evening paper. But Maurice’s perambulations, unskilfully conducted, brought him into contact with the leg of his father’s chair.

  “What the—what a clumsy little owl you are, Maurice! Here—hop it.”

  “Just let him get his photographs, Copper.”

  “He can get them later. I want my tea.”

  Maurice looked at his mother. She smiled reassuringly at him, but signed to him to go out.

  Sylvia followed him, by the window.

  “Poor little things!” exclaimed Mrs Peel.

  Copper Winsloe scowled.

  “Here’s some fresh tea,” said Claudia. “Look, you’ve got green sandwiches at your elbow.”

  She might have been dealing, kindly and wisely, with a spoilt child—and indeed, it was as a spoilt child, and a disagreeable one, that Copper showed in his wife’s drawing-room. He was not the same person as the man who had met Sal at the station, and talked with her on the way to Arling. Sal had seen this metamorphosis of Copper Winsloe before, many times. It never failed to rouse her to mingled regret and exasperation.

  The conversation, now, was a completely artificial affair carefully kept by Claudia on lines adapted to the ill-humour of her husband.

  Claudia’s own unruffled calm remained admirable. Equally effective was the dramatic suddenness with which the light had left her face and the eagerness fled from her voice and manner.

  Words, even tears, could not have served better to underline the boorishness of Copper Winsloe’s behaviour.

  It was all quite clear to everybody, thought Sal bitterly—including Copper himself.

  Quarrendon, she saw, was observing them both. In the gentle grey eyes of Frances Ladislaw was to be seen a puzzled and deeply disturbed expression.

  (2)

  “Have you brought down anything that I ought to see to at once, from the office?” Claudia enquired of her partner.

  “Nothing much. Mrs Ingatestone has fixed up one or two things—I’ve brought down notes. And there are some cheques for you to sign.”

  “I’ll do those at
once,” said Claudia, getting up.

  “You needn’t. And it won’t make any difference. No one will get them before Tuesday.”

  “I’d rather have them now.”

  Claudia’s desire to get things done at once was an obsession. Every night before going up to bed she pulled the day’s leaf off the tiny calendar that hung on her desk, so that the next day’s date should confront her in the morning.

  “Can’t you give the office a rest?” Copper enquired.

  Claudia shook her head.

  “I daren’t,” she said simply. “If once I let things begin to pile up——”

  She threw a look at Quarrendon.

  “You know what it is?”

  “Oh yes,” he agreed. “I know. But I’m afraid in my case things are allowed to pile up. They’re doing it now.”

  It was the longest speech that Sal had heard from him, and she was struck by the charm of his voice, so much more distinguished and agreeable than was his appearance.

  He had risen as he spoke, and moved to the window, where he stood looking out at the August garden. Sylvia went by.

  “Do you play tennis?” she called out.

  “Very badly, and I’ve no racquet.”

  “Never mind, we’ll lend you one. Come along.”

  He obediently went.

  Sylvia came and stood by the window. Her uncovered hair stood out in a bronze halo round her head, and she wore a faded mauve cotton frock that showed the outline of her tall, lithe young figure. She looked incredibly young and slight, lovely with that soft, ephemeral bloom that passes with the last vestige of childhood.

  Sal wondered how much the Professor noticed of that enchanting prettiness.

  “Frances, will you play too?” Sylvia enquired of her godmother.

  “I should like to come and look on, if I may. I won’t play now.”

  “You will to-morrow,” said Sylvia contentedly.

  They went off to the court.

  “Get me those cheques, Sal, if you please,” said Claudia—not in the tone of one who was concerned with what anybody pleased.

  “For God’s sake, Claudia, let up. It can’t make any difference if they’re signed to-night,” groaned her husband.