Neville got up to meet Grandmama, put a hand under her arm, and conducted her to her special chair beneath the cedar.  You had to help and conduct someone so old, so frail, so delightful as Grandmama, even if Mrs. Hilary did wish it were being done by any hand than yours.  Mrs. Hilary in fact made a movement to get to Grandmama first, but sixty-three does not rise from low deck chairs so swiftly as forty-three.  So she had to watch her daughter leading her mother, and to note once more with a familiar pang the queer, unmistakable likeness between the smooth, clear oval face and the old wrinkled one, the heavily lashed deep blue eyes and the old faded ones, the elfish, close-lipped, dimpling smile and the old, elfish, thin-lipped, sweet one.  Neville, her Neville, flower of her flock, her loveliest, first and best, her dearest but for Jim, her pride, and nearer than Jim, because of sex, which set Jim on a platform to be worshipped, but kept Neville on a level to be loved, to be stormed at when storms rose, to be clung to when all God’s waters went over one’s head.  Oh Neville, that you should smile at Grandmama like that, that Grandmama should, as she always had, steal your confidence that should have been all your mother’s!  That you should perhaps even talk over your mother with Grandmama (as if she were something further from each of you than each from the other), pushing her out of the close circle of your intimacy into the region of problems to be solved....  Oh God, how bitter a thing to bear!

The garden, the summer border of bright flowers, swam in tears....  Mrs. Hilary turned away her face, pretending to be pulling up daisies from the grass.  But, unlike the ostrich, she well knew that they always saw.  To the children, as to Grandmama, they were an old story, those hot, facile, stinging tears of Mrs. Hilary’s that made Neville weary with pity, and Nan cold with scorn, and Rosalind happy with lazy malice, and Pamela bright and cool and firm, like a woman doctor.  Only Grandmama took them unmoved, for she had always known them.

6

Grandmama, settled in her special chair, remarked on the unusual (for July) fineness of the day, and requested Neville to read them the chief items of news in the Observer, which she had brought out with her.  So Neville read about the unfortunate doings of the Supreme Council at Spa, and Grandmama said “Poor creatures,” tolerantly, as she had said when they were at Paris, and again at San Remo; and about General Dyer and the Amritsar debate, and Grandmama said “Poor man.  But one mustn’t treat one’s fellow creatures as he did, even the poor Indian, who, I quite believe, is intolerably provoking.  I see the Morning Post is getting up a subscription for him, contributed to by Those Who Remember Cawnpore, Haters of Trotzky, Montague and Lansbury, Furious English-woman, and many other generous and emotional people.  That is kind and right.  We should not let even our more impulsive generals starve.”