And Frances, even with the strike hanging over her, was happy.  For the children, at their first sight of possible adversity, were showing what was in them.  Their behaviour made her more arrogant than ever.  Michael and Dorothea had given up their allowances and declared their complete ability to support themselves. (They earned about fifty pounds a year each on an average.) She had expected this from Dorothy, but not from Michael.  Nicholas was doing the chauffeur’s work in his absence; and John showed eagerness to offer up his last year at Oxford; he pressed it on his father as his contribution to the family economies.

Veronica brought her minute dividends (paid to her every quarter through Ferdinand Cameron’s solicitors), and laid them at Frances’s and Anthony’s feet. ("As if,” Anthony said, “I could have taken her poor little money!”) Veronica thought she could go out as a music teacher.

There were moments when Frances positively enjoyed the strike.  Her mind refused to grasp the danger of the situation.  She suspected Anthony of exaggerating his losses in order to draw out Dorothy and Michael and Nicholas and John, and wallow in their moral beauty.  He, too, was arrogant.  He was convinced that, though there might be girls like Dorothea, there were no boys like his three Sons.  As for the strike in the building trade, strikes, as Anthony insisted, had happened before, and none of them had threatened for very long either Frances’s peace of mind or Anthony’s prosperity.

The present strike was not interfering in the least with Mrs. Anthony Harrison’s Day, the last of the season.  It fell this year, on the twenty-fifth of July.

Long afterwards she remembered it by what happened at the end of it.

Frances’s Day—­the fourth Saturday in the month—­was one of those slight changes that are profoundly significant.  It stood for regeneration and a change of heart.  It marked the close of an epoch.  Frances’s life of exclusive motherhood had ended; she had become, or was at any rate trying to become, a social creature.  Her Day had bored her terribly at first, when it didn’t frighten her; she was only just beginning to get used to it; and still, at times, she had the air of not taking it seriously.  It had been forced on her.  Dorothea had decided that she must have a Day, like other people.

She had had it since Michael’s first volume of Poems had come out in the spring of the year before, when the young men who met every Friday evening in Lawrence Stephen’s study began to meet at Michael’s father’s house.

Anthony liked to think that his house was the centre of all this palpitating, radiant life; of young men doing all sorts of wonderful, energetic, important, interesting things.  They stirred the air about him and kept it clean; he liked the sound of their feet and of their voices, and of their laughter.  And when the house was quiet and Anthony had Frances to himself he liked that, too.