she did now; on the whole she thought not.  Boys and girls are, for all their high spirits, creatures of infinite solemnities and pomposities.  They laugh; but the twinkling irony, mocking at itself and everything else, of the thirties and forties, they have not yet learnt.  They cannot be gentle cynics; they are so full of faith and hope, and when these are hurt they turn savage.  About Kay and Gerda there was a certain splendid earnestness with regard to life.  Admirable creatures, thought Neville, watching them with whimsical tenderness.  They had nothing to do with the pre-war, dilettante past, the sophisticated gaiety of the young century.  Their childhood had been lived during the great war, and they had emerged from it hot with elemental things, discussing life, lust, love, politics and social reform, with cool candour, intelligent thoroughness and Elizabethan directness.  They wouldn’t mind having passions and giving them rein; they wouldn’t think it vulgar, or even tedious, to lead loose lives.  Probably, in fact, it wasn’t; probably it was Neville, and the people who had grown up with her, who were overcivilized, too far from the crude stuff of life, the monotonies and emotionalisms of Nature.  And now Nature was taking her rather startling revenge on the next generation.

3

Neville ran upstairs, and came down to breakfast dressed in blue cotton, with her damp hair smoothly taken back from her broad forehead that jutted broodingly over her short pointed face.  She had the look of a dryad at odds with the world, a whimsical and elfish intellectual.

Rodney and Kay and Gerda had been putting parcels at her place, and a pile of letters lay among them.  There is, anyhow, that about birthdays, however old they make you.  Kay had given her a splendid great pocket-knife and a book he wanted to read, Gerda an oak box she had carved, and Rodney a new bicycle (by the front door) and a Brangwyn drawing (on the table).  If Neville envied Kay and Gerda their future careers, she envied Rodney his present sphere.  Her husband and the father of Gerda and Kay was a clever and distinguished-looking man of forty-five, and member, in the Labour interest, for a division of Surrey.  He looked, however, more like a literary man.  How to be useful though married:  in Rodney’s case the problem was so simple, in hers so complicated.  She had envied Rodney a little twenty years ago; then she had stopped, because the bringing up of Kay and Gerda had been a work in itself; now she had begun again.  Rodney and she were more like each other than they were like their children; they had some of the same vanities, fastidiousnesses, humours and withdrawals, and in some respects the same outlook on life.  Only Rodney’s had been solidified and developed by the contacts and exigencies of his career, and Neville’s disembodied, devitalised and driven inwards by her more dilettante life.  She “helped Rodney with the constituency” of course, but it was Rodney’s constituency, not hers; she entertained his friends and hers when they were in town, but she knew herself a light woman, not a dealer in affairs.  Yet her nature was stronger than Rodney’s, larger and more mature; it was only his experience she lacked.