“Yes—­I’m sure of it.  I remember, the day I went away from home—­when I came in to say good-bye to him, he was writing a sermon for Easter.  It was just Easter then, don’t you remember?  I went to the little church on Kew Green.  He read a bit of it out to me—­something about there being the promise of everlasting life in the rising of Christ from the dead—­and yet I know, in his heart, he was cast down in the very lowest depth of despair.”

Janet shook her head up and down.  Not one of us is too old to learn some new mystery in the inner workings of the human machine.  To Janet it was a fairy tale, what had been life and death to the Rev. Samuel Bishop.  But she had achieved her object.  Sally was quieter after the relation of that little story and, seeing in her mood a good opportunity for suggesting some plans about the future, Janet said quietly—­

“What are your mother and sisters doing now?”

“They’ve gone back to Cailsham.  They’ve got a school there for little boys—­sons of gentlemen—­preparatory for the Grammar School at Maidstone.  The sort of thing that nearly every woman takes up when she gets as poor as mother is.”

Janet left it at that, and set about the getting of a meal, talking all the time in a light and flippant way about her studio; pointing humorous descriptions of the managers of firms with whom she had to deal in her business of designing.

“There’s one man,” she said.  “You know the place up the Tottenham Court Road—­he weighs seventeen stone if he weighs an ounce, and he comes up to business in the morning, all the way from Turnham Green in a motor-car that makes the noise of thirty horses galloping over a hard road, with the power of six of them in its inside.  He asked me down to dinner one night; I went.  It meant business.  His wife weighs the ounce that he ought to weigh if he didn’t weigh seventeen stone, and they sit at each end of a huge table in a tiny room filled with maroon plush against a green carpet, and all through dinner they talk about carburetters and low-tension magnetos, and Mr. Cheeseman discusses what friend living in the row of houses, of which theirs is one, they would get most out of in return for a drive in the motor next Sunday.  ‘There’s one fellow I know,’ I remember him saying.  ’He’s something to do with the stage—­his brother’s in the booking-office at Daly’s.  He might get us some seats if we took him out.’”

Sally laughed.  The first moment that her lips had parted to the sound since Janet had been with her.

“It’s true,” said Janet.  “I’m not making it up.  He got that car—­allowing for his trade discount—­for a hundred and thirty-five pounds—­cape-cart hood and all.  It only costs him thirteen pounds a year in tyres—­and it can do twenty-five miles to a gallon of petrol with him inside, and he reckons he’s been saved five shillings a week regularly in dinners since he got it.  Well, what else do you think a man buys