“Read them—­yes,” Nan returned laconically to Gerda’s question.

“What,” enquired Gerda, perseveringly, “did you think of them?”

“I said I’d read them,” Nan replied.  “I didn’t say I’d thought of them.”

Gerda looked at her with her wide, candid gaze, with the unrancorous placidity of the young, who are still used to being snubbed.  Nan, she knew, would tease and baffle, withhold and gibe, but would always say what she thought in the end, and what she thought was always worth knowing, even though she was middle-aged.

Nan, turning her lithe body over on the grass, caught the patient child’s look, and laughed.  Generous impulses alternated in her with malicious moods where these absurd, solemn, egotistic, pretty children of Neville’s were concerned.

“All right, Blue Eyes.  I’ll write it all down for you and send it to you with the Ms., if you really want it.  You won’t like it, you know, but I suppose you’re used to that by now.”

Neville listened to them.  Regret turned in her, cold and tired and envious.  They all wrote except her.  To write:  it wasn’t much of a thing to do, unless one did it really well, and it had never attracted her personally, but it was, nevertheless, something—­a little piece of individual output thrown into the flowing river.  She had never written, even when she was Gerda’s age.  Twenty years ago writing poetry hadn’t been as it is to-day, a necessary part of youth’s accomplishment like tennis, French or dancing.  Besides, Neville could never have enjoyed writing poetry, because for her the gulf between good verse and bad was too wide to be bridged by her own achievements.  Nor novels, because she disliked nearly all novels, finding them tedious, vulgar, conventional, and out of all relation both to life as lived and to the world of imagination.  What she had written in early youth had been queer imaginative stuff, woven out of her childhood’s explorations into fairyland and of her youth’s into those still stranger tropical lands beyond seas where she had travelled with her father.  But she hadn’t written or much wanted to write; scientific studies had always attracted her more than literary achievements.  Then she had married Rodney, and that was the end of all studies and achievements for her, though not the end of anything for Rodney, but the beginning.

Rodney came out of the house, his pipe in his mouth.  He still had the lounging walk, shoulders high and hands in pockets, of the undergraduate; the walk also of Kay.  He sat down among his family.  Kay and Gerda looked at him with approval; though they knew his weakness, he was just the father they would have chosen, and of how few parents can this be said.  They were proud to take him about with them to political meetings and so forth, and prouder still to sit under him while he addressed audiences.  Few men of his great age were (on the whole) so right in the head and sound in the heart, and fewer still so delightful to the eye.  When people talked about the Wicked Old Men, who, being still unfortunately unrestrained and unmurdered by the Young, make this wicked world what it is, Kay and Gerda always contended that there were a few exceptions.