But Frances thought:  “If only they wouldn’t come quite so often—­if only I could have my children sometimes to myself!”

It was the last rebellion of her flesh that had borne and suckled them.

There was this to be said for Frances’s Day that it attracted and diverted, and confined to one time and one place a whole crowd of tiresome people, who, without it, would have spread themselves over the whole month; also that it gave a great deal of innocent happiness to the “Poor dears.”  Frances meant old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie and Emmeline and Edith Fleming, who figured as essential parts of the social event.  She meant Mr. and Mrs. Jervis, who, in the inconceivability of their absence on Frances’s Bay, wondered more than ever why their daughter Rosalind found them so impossible.  She meant Mr. Vereker and Mr. Norris from the office, and their wives and children, and Anthony’s secretary, Miss Lathom.  If Miss Lathom were not engaged to young George Vereker, she soon would be, to judge by the behaviour of their indiscreet and guileless faces.

Frances also meant her brother-in-law, Bartholomew, home from India for good, and cherishing a new disease, more secret and more dangerous than his cancer; she meant her brother Maurice, who was genuinely invalided, who had come back from California for the last time and would never be sent out anywhere again.

Dorothea had said:  “Let’s kill them all off in one awful day.”  Frances had said:  “Yes, but we must do it decently.  We must be kind to them, poor dears!”

Above all they must be decent to Grannie and the Aunties, and to Uncle Morrie and Uncle Bartie.  That was the only burden she had laid on her children.  It was a case of noblesse oblige; their youth constrained them.  They had received so much, and they had been let off so much; not one of them had inherited the taint that made Maurice and Emmeline Fleming and Bartie Harrison creatures diseased and irresponsible.  They could afford to be pitiful and merciful.

And now that the children were grown up Frances could afford to be pitiful and merciful herself.  She could even afford to be grateful to the poor dears.  She looked on Maurice and Emmeline and Bartie as scapegoats, bearers of the hereditary taint, whose affliction left her children clean.  She thought of them more and more in this sacred and sacrificial character.  At fifty-two Frances could be gentle over the things that had worried and irritated her at thirty-three.  Like Anthony she was still young and strong through the youth and strength of her children.

And the poor dears were getting weak and old.  Grannie was seventy-nine, and Maurice, the youngest of that generation, was forty-nine, and he looked sixty.  Every year Frances was more acutely aware of their pathos, their futility, their mortality.  They would be broken and gone so soon and so utterly, leaving no name, no sign or memorial of themselves; only living in the memories of her children who would remain.