“About the sea,” said Jay, “I’ll tell you later.”

“Well, tell me first why you found home so suddenly unbearable.  You’ve stood it for eighteen years.”

“I’ve been a child all through those eighteen years.  And to a child just the fact of grown-upness is so admirable.  I wonder why.  But under the fierce light that beats from the eye of a woman suddenly and violently grown old, Cousin Gustus and Anonyma don’t—­well, Kew, do they?”

The dusk filled the room as water fills a cup, and to look up at the light of an outside lamp on the ceiling was like looking up through water at the surface.  Jay wore a dress of the same colour of the dusk, and her round face, faint as a bubble, seemed to float on its background unsupported.

“Didn’t you think about adopting a baby?” suggested Kew.  “That evidently put Cousin Gustus’s back up.”

“I didn’t put Cousin Gustus’s back up so high as he put mine,” answered Jay.  “Oh, Kew, what are the old that they should check us?  What’s the use of this war of one generation against another?  Old people and young people reach a deadlock that’s as bad as marriage without the possibility of divorce.  Isn’t all forced fidelity wrong?”

“What did you do, tell me, and what are you going to do?”

“Oh well, I felt something like frost in the air, and I couldn’t define it.  Really, it was work waiting to be done.  Not work for the poor, but work with the poor.  At home I talked about work, and Anonyma wrote about it, and Cousin Gustus shuddered at it.  You were doing it all right, but where was I?  Three days a week with soldiers’ wives.  My brow never sweated a drop.  I thought there must be something better than a bird’s-eye view of work.  So I took a job at a bolster place....  Oh well, it doesn’t matter now.  I earned ten shillings a week, and paid half-a-crown for a little basement back.  On Saturdays I got my Sunday clothes out of pawn, and came to tea with Nana.  Do you remember the scones and the Welsh Rarebit that Nana used to make?  I believe those things were worth the terror of the pawnshop.  Oh, Kew, those pawnshops!  Those little secret stalls that put shame into you where none was before.  The pawn man—­why is it that when you’re already frightened is the moment that men choose to frighten you?  Because weakness is the worst crime.  That I have proved.  My work was putting fluff into bolsters.  There was a big bright grocers’ calendar—­the Death of Nelson—­and if I could see it through the fog of fluff I felt that was a lucky day.  I had to eat my lunch there, raspberry jam sandwiches—­not fruit jam, you know, but raspberry flavour.  It wasn’t nice, and it used to get fluffy in that air.  The others sat round and munched and picked their teeth and read Jew newspapers.  Have you ever noticed that whichever way up you look at a Jew newspaper, you always feel as if you could read it better if you were standing on your head?  My governor was a Jew too.  He wasn’t bad, but