‘Well, I should just hope so,’ Clare said.  She was kneeling by the tin bath with her sleeves rolled up, holding a warmed towel.  Her face was flushed from the fire, and her hair was loosened where Charles had caught his toe in it.  She looked pretty and maternal, and looked up at Gideon with the kind of conventional, good-humoured scorn that girls and women put on when men talk of babies.  They do it (one believes) partly because they feel it is a subject they know about, and partly to pander to men’s desire that they should do it.  It is part of the pretty play between the sexes.  Jane never did it; she wasn’t feminine enough.  And Gideon did not want her to do it; he thought it silly.

‘Why do you hope so?’ asked Gideon.  ‘And why do girls like it?’

The first question was to Clare, the second to Jane, because he knew that Clare would not be able to answer it.

‘The mites!’ said Clare.  ‘Who wouldn’t like it?’

Gideon sighed a little, Clare tried him.  She had an amorphous mind.  But Jane threw up at him, as she enveloped Charles in the towel, ’I’ll try and think it out some time, Arthur.  I haven’t time now....  There’s a reason all right....  The powder, Clare.’

Gideon watched the absurd drying and powdering process with gravity and interest, as if trying to discover its charm.

‘Even Katherine enjoys it,’ he said, still pondering.  It was true.  Katherine, who liked experimenting with chemicals, liked also washing babies.  Possibly Katherine knew why, in both cases.

After Charles was in bed, his mother, his aunt, and his prospective stepfather had dinner.  Clare, who was uncomfortable with Gideon, not liking him as a brother-in-law or indeed as anything else (besides not being sure how much Jane had told him about ’that awful night’), chattered to Jane about things of which she thought Gideon knew nothing—­dances, plays, friends, family and Potters Bar gossip.  Gideon became very silent.  He and Clare touched nowhere.  Clare flaunted the family papers in his face and Jane’s.  Lord Pinkerton was starting a new one, a weekly, and it promised to sell better than any other weekly on the market, but far better.

’Dad says the orders have been simply stunning.  It’s going to be a big thing.  Simple, you know, and yet clever—­like all dad’s papers.  David says’ (David was the naval officer to whom Clare was now betrothed) ’there’s no one with such a sense of what people want as dad has.  Far more of it than Northcliffe, David says he has.  Because, you know, Northcliffe sometimes annoys people—­look at the line he took about us helping the Russians to fight each other.  And making out in leaders, David says, that the Government is always wrong just because he doesn’t like it.  And drawing attention to the mistakes it makes, which no one would notice if they weren’t rubbed in.  David gets quite sick with him sometimes.  He says the Pinkerton press never does that sort of thing, it’s got too much tact, and lets well alone.’