“Ignore it.  Nan can ignore it when she comes back.  It won’t hurt her.  Nan’s had plenty of things said about her before, true and untrue, and never cared.”

“You’re splendid at the ignoring touch, Pam.  I believe there’s nothing you can’t and don’t ignore.”

“Well, why not?  Ignoring’s easy.”

“Not for most of us.  I believe it is, for you.  In a sense you ignore life itself; anyhow you don’t let it hold and bully you.  When your time comes you’ll ignore age, and later death.”

“They don’t matter much, do they?  Does anything?  I suppose it’s my stolid temperament, but I can’t feel that it does.”

Neville thought, as she had often thought before, that Pamela, like Nan, only more calmly, less recklessly and disdainfully, had the aristocratic touch.  Pamela, with her delicate detachments and her light, even touch on things great and small, made her feel fussy and petty and excitable.

“I suppose you’re right, my dear....  ’All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for the things that are arise out of the unreasonable....’  I must get back.  Give my love to Frances... and when next you see Gerda do try to persuade her that marriage is one of the things that don’t matter and that she might just as well put up with to please us all.  The child is a little nuisance—­as obstinate as a mule.”

4

Neville, walking away from Pamela’s grimy street in the November fog, felt that London was terrible.  An ugly clamour of strident noises and hard, shrill voices, jabbering of vulgar, trivial things.  A wry, desperate, cursed world, as she had called it, a pot seething with bitterness and all dreadfulness, with its Rosalinds floating on the top like scum.

And Nan, her Nan, her little vehement sister, whom she had mothered of old, had pulled out of countless scrapes—­Nan had now taken her life into her reckless hands and done what with it?  Given it, perhaps, to a man she didn’t love, throwing cynical defiance thereby at love, which had hurt her; escaping from the intolerable to the shoddy.  Even if not, even supposing the best, Nan was hurt and in trouble; Neville was somehow sure of that.  Men were blind fools; men were fickle children.  Neville almost wished now that Barry would give up Gerda and go out to Rome and fetch Nan back.  But, to do that, Barry would have to fall out of love with Gerda and into love again with Nan; and even Barry, Neville imagined, was not such a weathercock as that.  And Barry would really be happier with Gerda.  With all their differences, they were both earnest citizens, both keen on social progress.  Nan was a cynical flibberty-gibbet; it might not have been a happy union.  Perhaps happy unions were not for such as Nan.  But at the thought of Nan playing that desperate game with Stephen Lumley in Rome, Neville’s face twitched....

She would go to Rome.  She would see Nan; find out how things were.  Nan always liked to see her, would put up with her even when she wanted no one else.