“Not a bit, Mrs. Hilary.”  He sat up, and looked friendlier than ever.  “I’ve been thrilled.”  A charming, easy liar Barry was, when he deemed it necessary.  His Quaker parents would have been shocked.  But there was truth in it, after all.  For people were so interested in themselves, that one was, in a sense, interested in the stories they told one, even stories about illness.  Besides, this was the mother of Nan; Nan, who was so abruptly and inexplicably not here to-day, whose absence was hurting him, when he stopped to think, like an aching tooth; for he was not sure, yet feared, what she meant by it.

“Tell me,” he said, half to please Nan’s mother and half on his own account, “some stories of Nan when she was small.  I should think she was a fearful child....”

He was interested, thought Mrs. Hilary, in Nan, but not in her.  That was natural, of course.  No man would ever again want to hear stories of her childhood.  The familiar bitterness rose and beat in her like a wave.  Nan was thirty-four and she was sixty-three.  She could talk only of far-off things, and theories about conduct and life which sounded all right at first but were exposed after two minutes as not having behind them the background of any knowledge or any brain.  That hadn’t mattered when she was a girl; men would often rather they hadn’t.  But at sixty-three you have nothing....  The bitter emptiness of sixty-three turned her sick with frustration.  Life was over, over, over, for her and she was to tell stories of Nan, who had everything.

Then the mother in her rose up, to claim and grasp for her child, even for the child she loved least.

“Nan?  Nan was always a most dreadfully sensitive child, and temperamental.  She took after me, I’m afraid; the others were more like their father.  I remember when she was quite a little thing....”

Barry had asked for it.  But he hadn’t known that, out of the brilliant, uncertain Nan, exciting as a Punch and Judy show, anything so tedious could be spun....

3

Mrs. Hilary was up in town by herself for a day’s shopping.  The sales were on at Barker’s and Derry and Tom’s.  Mrs. Hilary wandered about these shops, and even Ponting’s and bought little bags, and presents for everyone, remnants, oddments, underwear, some green silk for a frock for Gerda, a shady hat for herself, a wonderful cushion for Grandmama with a picture of the sea on it, a silk knitted jumper for Neville, of the same purplish blue as her eyes.  She was happy, going about like a bee from flower to flower, gathering this honey for them all.  She had come up alone; she hadn’t let Neville come with her.  She had said she was going to be an independent old woman.  But what she really meant was that she had proposed herself for tea with Rosalind in Campden Hill Square, and wanted to be alone for that.

Rosalind had been surprised, for Mrs. Hilary seldom favoured her with a visit.  She had found the letter on the hall table when she and Gilbert had come in from a dinner party two evenings ago.