5

Grandmama, waiting for them on the esplanade, was angry with Mrs. Hilary.

“My dear child, didn’t you hear me call?  You’re perfectly blue.  You know you never stay in more than five minutes.  Neville, you should have seen that she didn’t.  Now you’ll get your rheumatism back, child, and only yourself to thank.  It’s too silly.  People of sixty-three carrying on as if they were fifty; I’ve no patience with it.”

“They all swam out,” said Mrs. Hilary, who, once having succumbed to the impulse to adopt this attitude, could not check it.  “I waited for them.”

Grandmama, who was cross, said “Very silly of you and very selfish of the children.  Now you’d better go to bed with hot bottles and a posset.”

But Mrs. Hilary, though she felt the red-hot stabbings of an attack of rheumatism already beginning, stayed up.  She was happier now, because the children were making a fuss of her, suggesting remedies and so on.  She would stay up, and show them she could be plucky and cheerful even with rheumatism.  A definite thing, like illness or pain, always put her on her mettle; it was so easy to be brave when people knew you had something to be brave about, and so hard when they didn’t.

They had an early tea, and then Gilbert and Rosalind, who were going out to dinner, caught the 5.15 back to town.  Rosalind’s departure made Mrs. Hilary more cheerful still.  She soared into her gayest mood, and told them amusing stories of the natives, and how much she and Grandmama shocked some of them.

“All the same, dear,” said Grandmama presently, “you know you often enjoy a chat with your neighbours very much.  You’d be bored to death with no one to gossip with.”

But Neville’s hand, slipping into her mother’s, meant “You shall adopt what pose you like on your birthday, darling.  If you like to be too clever for anyone else in the Bay so that they bore you to tears and you shock them to fits—­well, you shall, and we’ll believe you.”

Nan, listening sulkily to what she called to herself “mother’s swank,” for a moment almost preferred Rosalind, who was as frank and unposturing as an animal; Rosalind, with her malicious thrusts and her corrupt mind and her frank feminine greediness.  For Rosalind, anyhow, didn’t pretend to herself, though she did undoubtedly, when for any reason it suited her, lie to other people.  Mrs. Hilary’s lying went all through, deep down; it sprang out of the roots of her being, so that all the time she was making up, not only for others but for herself, a sham person who did not exist.  That Nan found infinitely oppressive.  So did Pamela, but Pamela was more tolerant and sympathetic and less ill-tempered than Nan, and observed the ways of others with quiet, ironic humour, saying nothing unkind.  Pamela, when she didn’t like a way of talking—­when Rosalind, for instance, was being malicious or indecent or both—­would skilfully carry the talk