The thought of Rodney stabbed her.  If Rodney were to get to care less ... to stop making love to her ... worse, to stop needing her....  For he did need her; through all their relationship, disappointing in some of its aspects, his need had persisted, a simple, demanding thing.

Humour suddenly came back.

“This, I suppose, is what Gerda is anticipating, and why she won’t have Barry tied to her.  If Rodney wasn’t tied to me he could flee from my wrinkles....”

“Oh, what an absurd fuss one makes.  What does any of it matter?  It’s all in the course of nature, and the sooner ’tis over the sooner to sleep.  Middle age will be very nice and comfortable and entertaining, once one’s fairly in it....  I go babbling about my wasted brain and fading looks as if I’d been a mixture of Sappho and Helen of Troy....  That’s the worst of being a vain creature....  What will Rosalind do when her time comes?  Oh, paint, of course, and dye—­more thickly than she does now, I mean.  She’ll be a ghastly sight.  A raddled harridan.  At least I shall always look respectable, I hope.  I shall go down to Gerda.  I want to look at something young.  The young have their troubles, poor darlings, but they don’t know how lucky they are.”

2

In November Neville and Gerda, now both convalescent, joined Rodney in their town flat.  Rodney thought London would buck Neville up.  London does buck you up, even if it is November and there is no gulf stream and not much coal.  For there is always music and always people.  Neville had a critical appreciation of both.  Then, for comic relief, there are politics.  You cannot be really bored with a world which contains the mother of Parliaments, particularly if her news is communicated to you at first hand by one of her members.  Disgusted you may be and are, if you are a right-minded person, but at least not bored.

What variety, what excitement, what a moving picture show, is this tragic and comic planet!  Why want to be useful, why indulge such tedious inanities as ambitions, why dream wistfully of doing one’s bit, making one’s work, in a world already as full of bits, bright, coloured, absurd bits, like a kaleidoscope, as full of marks (mostly black marks) as a novel from a free library?  A dark and bad and bitter world, of course, full of folly, wickedness and misery, sick with poverty and pain, so that at times the only thing Neville could bear to do in it was to sit on some dreadful committee thinking of ameliorations for the lot of the very poor, or to go and visit Pamela in Hoxton and help her with some job or other—­that kind of direct, immediate, human thing, which was a sop to uneasiness and pity such as the political work she dabbled in, however similar its ultimate aim, could never be.

3

To Pamela Neville said, “Are you afraid of getting old, Pamela?”

Pamela replied, “Not a bit.  Are you?” And she confessed it.