Constance was helping Mr. Povey to mussels and cockles.  And Mr. Povey still wore one of the antimacassars.  It must have stuck to his shoulders when he sprang up from the sofa, woollen antimacassars being notoriously parasitic things.  Sophia sat down, somewhat self-consciously.  The serious Constance was also perturbed.  Mr. Povey did not usually take tea in the house on Thursday afternoons; his practice was to go out into the great, mysterious world.  Never before had he shared a meal with the girls alone.  The situation was indubitably unexpected, unforeseen; it was, too, piquant, and what added to its piquancy was the fact that Constance and Sophia were, somehow, responsible for Mr. Povey.  They felt that they were responsible for him.  They had offered the practical sympathy of two intelligent and well-trained young women, born nurses by reason of their sex, and Mr. Povey had accepted; he was now on their hands.  Sophia’s monstrous, sly operation in Mr. Povey’s mouth did not cause either of them much alarm, Constance having apparently recovered from the first shock of it.  They had discussed it in the kitchen while preparing the teas; Constance’s extraordinarily severe and dictatorial tone in condemning it had led to a certain heat.  But the success of the impudent wrench justified it despite any irrefutable argument to the contrary.  Mr. Povey was better already, and he evidently remained in ignorance of his loss.

“Have some?” Constance asked of Sophia, with a large spoon hovering over the bowl of shells.

“Yes, please,” said Sophia, positively.

Constance well knew that she would have some, and had only asked from sheer nervousness.

“Pass your plate, then.”

Now when everybody was served with mussels, cockles, tea, and toast, and Mr. Povey had been persuaded to cut the crust off his toast, and Constance had, quite unnecessarily, warned Sophia against the deadly green stuff in the mussels, and Constance had further pointed out that the evenings were getting longer, and Mr. Povey had agreed that they were, there remained nothing to say.  An irksome silence fell on them all, and no one could lift it off.  Tiny clashes of shell and crockery sounded with the terrible clearness of noises heard in the night.  Each person avoided the eyes of the others.  And both Constance and Sophia kept straightening their bodies at intervals, and expanding their chests, and then looking at their plates; occasionally a prim cough was discharged.  It was a sad example of the difference between young women’s dreams of social brilliance and the reality of life.  These girls got more and more girlish, until, from being women at the administering of laudanum, they sank back to about eight years of age—­perfect children—­at the tea-table.

The tension was snapped by Mr. Povey.  “My God!” he muttered, moved by a startling discovery to this impious and disgraceful oath (he, the pattern and exemplar—­and in the presence of innocent girlhood too!).  “I’ve swallowed it!”