Kay and Gerda, with the large-minded tolerance of their years, thought mother’s scheme was all right and rather sporting, if she really liked the sort of thing, which they, for their part, didn’t.

So Neville recommenced medical study, finding it difficult beyond belief.  It made her head ache.

2

She envied Kay and Gerda, as they all three lay and worked in the garden, with chocolates, cigarettes and Esau grouped comfortably round them.  Kay was reading economics for his Tripos, Gerda was drawing pictures for her poems; neither, apparently, found any difficulty in concentrating on their work when they happened to want to.

What, Neville speculated, her thoughts, as usual, wandering from her book, would become of Gerda?  She was a clever child at her own things, though with great gaps in her equipment of knowledge, which came from ignoring at school those of her studies which had not seemed to her of importance.  She had firmly declined a University education; she had decided that it was not a fruitful start in life, and was also afraid of getting an academic mind.  But at economic and social subjects, at drawing and at writing, she worked without indolence, taking them earnestly, still young enough to believe it important that she should attain proficiency.

Neville, on the other hand, was indolent.  For twenty-two years she had pleased herself, done what she wanted when she wanted to, played the flirt with life.  And now she had become soft-willed.  Now, sitting in the garden with her books, like Gerda and Kay, she would find that the volumes had slipped from her knee and that she was listening to the birds in the elms.  Or she would fling them aside and get up and stretch herself, and stroll into the little wood beyond the garden, or down to the river, or she would propose tennis, or go up to town for some meeting or concert or to see someone, though she didn’t really want to, having quite enough of London during that part of the year when they lived there.  She only went up now because otherwise she would be working.  At this rate she would never be ready to resume her medical course in the autumn.

“I will attend.  I will.  I will,” she whispered to herself, a hand pressed to each temple to constrain her mind.  And for five minutes she would attend, and then she would drift away on a sea of pleasant indolence, and time fluttered away from her like an escaping bird, and she knew herself for a light woman who would never excel.  And Kay’s brown head was bent over his book, and raised sometimes to chaff or talk, and bent over his books again, the thread of his attention unbroken by his easy interruptions.  And Gerda’s golden head lay pillowed in her two clasped hands, and she stared up at the blue through the green and did nothing at all, for that was often Gerda’s unashamed way.

Often Rodney sat in the garden too and worked.  And his work Neville felt that she too could have done; it was work needing initiative and creative thought, work suitable to his forty-five years, not cramming in knowledge from books.  Neville at times thought that she too would stand for parliament one day.  A foolish, childish game it was, and probably really therefore more in her line than solid work.