‘Why isn’t that girl at school, Quentin?’

  ‘My dear Clara, I cannot possibly afford it.’

  This was true. The whole of his private income was devoted to the stables.

  ‘You could get her into a school, I don’t say it would be a select school, with what you pay Miss Trigg.’

  ‘Miss Trigg is very useful in other ways.’ So, he might have added, was Jill. Between them they ran the house.

  Miss Morfrey came to a great decision.

  ‘I shall take her for half-fees,’ she said, with something of a sigh for the other half. Miss Morfrey’s school was, and is, famous. The parents’ entrance examination is the most exacting in the country.

  ‘Very good of you, Clara, but you would still be well beyond my means.’

  ‘You are not fair to the girl.’

  ‘She is very happy.’

  ‘That is quite irrelevant. Moreover, I very much doubt if it be true.’ She struggled with herself in silence. The Vicar, back to the fire, flexed his knees, and thanked God once again for his constitution. How many men of his age——

  ‘Quentin,’ said Miss Morfrey firmly, ‘I shall take her for nothing.’

  A hush descended upon that part of Warwickshire. In the words of a forgotten poet, the general pulse of life stood still, and Nature made a pause . . .

  ‘That is extremely good of you, my dear,’ said the Vicar at last, awed to sincerity. ‘After all,’ he added, with the sudden twinkle which made you forgive him so much, ‘you will be hearing my sermon to-morrow for nothing.’

  Jill went to school. She knew that she was being educated for nothing, she resented it, and she was determined to give what she could in exchange. She sought knowledge, received knowledge, and imparted knowledge. You couldn’t say that she was a pupil-teacher, that would not be fair to Miss Morfrey, but as a Prefect, as Captain of this and that, and, ultimately, as Head of the School, she paid her way. She did not ride; riding was an extra, and there were limits to Aunt Clara’s generosity; but she was allowed to teach the children to ride.

  She left school. She came back to the Vicar. Ptolemy and Titus had brought in a dividend at last, and her two sisters were married. A little surprisingly the Vicar announced his own engagement. Perhaps he had been waiting to get the elder girls out of the way, they called attention to his age so clearly. With a wife whose income was in itself sufficient for the stables, with two daughters paid off (‘Bride’s Father to Bride: Cheque and Horse’) he could afford to be generous to Jill. At last he could mount her as a Morfrey should be mounted.

  ‘I think I’d rather earn my living,’ said Jill. ‘Can you give me £200 a year?’

  ‘Is that what you call earning your living?’ chuckled the Vicar. He pulled back his elbows and expanded his chest. He was feeling tremendously fit this morning.

  Jill explained patiently to the Lower Fourth that she had to qualify herself first, and that this would take both time and money. ‘But make it a hundred if you like. I dare say I could manage.’

  The Vicar resisted the temptation to toss her double or quits, and suggested splitting the difference.

  ‘Thank you very much, Father,’ said Jill. She had decided before she came into the harness-room that £150 was what she wanted.

  So she came to London. She learnt typing and shorthand; she qualified as a librarian; she spent a year with a dress-designer; and she took lessons in German and Spanish. Her French was always good; French had not been an extra. Now she was ready to earn money, and she was still only twenty-one. With all her qualifications, with £150 a year settled on her, she felt very sure of herself. . . .

  This was her story. She gave Barnaby an outline of it in the Grill Room of the Savoy, between the oysters and the coffee.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said sincerely. ‘It is delightful of you to make me feel such an old friend of the family.’

  ‘Well, you asked for it.’

  ‘I’m very glad I did. And now—how do you like it?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Life.’

  ‘Very much, thank you.’

  ‘And how much of it are you going to spend at Prosser’s?’

  ‘I ought to be finished by Wednesday at latest.’

  ‘And then we lose you?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got on without me for a long time.’

  ‘Can’t think how we did.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I suppose we ought to be getting back.’ He flicked his fingers for the bill. ‘I’ve enjoyed my lunch, let me tell you.’

  ‘So have I. Do you mind if I go and powder my nose? I’ll meet you outside.’

  ‘Right. It’s upstairs, if you haven’t—I mean, one hates——Oh, but you probably know.’

  He stood up as she went, wondering if she had a sort of independence complex. She didn’t want to know what her choice was costing him, she didn’t want to see him pay the bill. That Aunt, he thought, must have been a brute.

  He was still thinking of that strange life when a waiter came to his table with a folded piece of paper. But it was not the bill.

  ‘From Miss Marr, Mr Rush. She has just gone.’

  He realized with sudden discomfort that he had not thought of Chloe for an hour and a half.

  ‘Who is she, darling?’ (wrote Chloe). ‘I’m frantically jealous.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  1

  Chloe was up early next morning. She called out from the bathroom: ‘Is that the post, Ellen? Anything exciting?’

  ‘Lot o’ bills,’ said Ellen gloomily.

  ‘We shall have to do something about that one day.’

  ‘One from Mr Rush . . . That Mr Hinge again. . . . There’s a new one, would that be—— Oh, there’s one from Mrs Clavering.’

  ‘Basil, probably. He’s a poet, did I tell you?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it, but I suppose he’d know. That car insurance—and we had the final notice last month.’

  ‘Damn, write a cheque, will you? And bring me Mr Rush’s letter. Leave the rest.’

  Ellen brought the letter into the bathroom. ‘You’ve got the water too hot again,’ she said through the steam.

  ‘Keep my fat down,’ said Chloe, holding out an arm from the bath. ‘Better ring down for breakfast. I shall be out in a minute.’

  Darling One (wrote Barnaby),

  She is a clergyman’s daughter. Her name is Norval; on the Loamshire hills her father feeds his flock with honeyed texts that teach the rustic moralist to die in sober certainty of waking bliss. (Milton, Gray and Co. Arr. by B. Rush.) Now tell me about yours. And don’t forget, my lovely, that we lunch next Thursday.

  Your

  Barnaby

  She read it slowly, first smiling slightly, then frowning. She dropped it on the bathmat; went on with her bath; stretched out a wet hand for it, read it again, and dropped it again. While she was drying, she amused herself by picking it up with her toes, and placing it straight-legged, on the little medicine-cupboard. She did it in reverse with the other foot, which was more difficult; called out ‘Ellen!’ excitedly, and then ‘Oh, never mind’; and returned it to the medicine-cupboard without an audience. Back in her bedroom she tore it up into very small pieces and fluttered them into the wastepaper basket.

  ‘Breakfast coming up. I said an egg, do you good. You’ve got a long time to wait for lunch,’ said Ellen. ‘Did you call just now?’

  ‘Could you pick up a piece of paper with your toes and put it on the little medicine-cupboard in the bathroom without bending your knee?’ She was opening and reading her other letters.

  ‘No,’ said Ellen.

  ‘I can.’

  ‘You’re younger than me. And longer legs.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s it. Just see what I’m doing on Thursday. Lunch.’

  Ellen looked in the book and said ‘Mr Rush’. Chloe seemed surprised.

  ‘Where’s that cheque? I’d better sign it. Put down Croxton for next Saturday, that’s to-morrow week.’

  She laid Kitty’s letter on one side, and opened Basil’s; skimmed over the delicate writing, and pushed it into a drawer of the dressing-table; glanced at the beginning and ending of the Hinge ephemeral, and dropped it into the basket.

  ‘You’d better get dressed, hadn’t you?’ said Ellen. She turned a page of the book, took out the pencil, said, ‘Cross on Sunday,’ and waited, pencil poised.

  ‘Damn, it’s always coming. I believe you put them in anywhere.’

  ‘Don’t be so silly, Miss Marr.’

  ‘The whole thing’s silly if you ask me. Well I’d sooner Croxton than anywhere else. Put it down. Got the cheque?’

  She was dressed, she had breakfasted, she was packed, her car was waiting down below. With a last warning from Ellen to go carefully because she wasn’t insured ‘or they’d say you weren’t’, and an ‘All right, darling. I’ll be good,’ she drove off.

  2

  Everard Hale was reclining on ‘A’ deck, well wrapped up, drinking his mid-day soup, and talking to Mrs Pont-Padwick. He didn’t particularly like the soup, but he liked the background which it gave to the subsequent cigar, and he liked the idle luxury of it. He didn’t particularly like Mrs Pont-Padwick, but he liked the thought of Chloe which she brought to his mind. In a week he would turn his eyes, and Chloe would be there. He was feeling happier than he had felt for many years.

  Mrs Dora Pont-Padwick was the widow of Padwick’s Elasto-Bend Corsets. As a girl of eighteen it had been her privilege to display the Elasto-Bend ‘in its many dainty varieties’ to interested gatherings of her sex; and though she was supposed to be saying ‘Look what the Elasto-Bend does for the figure’, most of the spectators realized that they were looking at what Dora’s figure was doing for the Elasto-Bend. To make these also Padwick-conscious a plump young woman shared the stage with Dora, embodying the principle of Stoutness Confined with such a smiling emphasis that hope returned to their bosoms; and for a moment Lily and Dora symbolized for them the Before and After between which all scientific research ranges.

  One day there was a gentleman there. Dora came back into the dressing-room to change from Les Sylphides to Violette, giggling ‘Oo, there’s a gentleman there!’ She felt that she ought to have been shocked, and found that she was pleasantly excited. Lily returned in Diane a few minutes later, saying dispiritedly, ‘It’s only old Padwick.’ Mr Padwick had grey hair, a short chin beard, and a complete devotion to his business; but he was human. Violette convinced him that he had been a widower too long.

  They lived comfortably but modestly in a small house in Sutton. When her husband died, Dora was surprised to find that she had an income for life of £2,000 a year. She called herself Mrs Pont-Padwick, substituted some other mode for the Elasto-Bend, and left Sutton.

  ‘Don’t think I’m snobbish about it, Sir Everard,’ she had said, ‘but I just felt I’d had enough of it.’

  ‘My dear Mrs Pont-Padwick, I understand perfectly.’

  ‘Same with the name. Now confess, Sir Everard, when I told you that I was Mrs Pont-Padwick, you never thought of the Elasto-Bend, now did you?’

  ‘In the circumstances you won’t mind my admitting that until to-day I had never heard of, nor, as far as I know, encountered the Elasto-Bend.’

  Mrs Pont-Padwick seemed disappointed, and assured him that a great many ladies in Society wore it.

  ‘They don’t always confide in me to that extent,’ smiled Sir Everard.

  Their chairs were side by side. On the third day out she was making further confidences.

  ‘Funny how I used to mind about things. My father was an analytical chemist. Well, he wasn’t really, he was just a chemist. But I always said he was an analytical chemist. Now I don’t seem to mind somehow.’

  ‘Quite right. You have friends in America, I suppose?’

  ‘Well, no. Not particularly. But Dads had a sea-sick remedy, invented it himself, Pont was the name, so he called it Pontine. Whenever we went to Margate or Southend as children, we’d go by the boat, and we’d try it, for the advertisement if you see what I mean, and we’d go on pleasure trips, what they call pleasure trips, only half the people are sick, but we never were, because of Pontine, at least the others never were, but I never was, anyway, so that’s how I thought I must be a good sailor. So when Samuel died I went round the world and I wasn’t sick once, so then I knew, and now when I’ve nothing else to do I just go to New York and back, it’s better food than you get on land, and healthy, and you meet nice people, so why not, I say?’

  Everard came as near to liking her then as he could ever come. Indeed, for a moment he thought that he liked her a good deal. She was still very pretty, older than Chloe by five or six years, he judged, but well cared-for; and she was original enough to engage in the most monotonous form of travel for the simple reason that she wanted to do so. Why does a chicken cross the road? To get to the other side was always assumed to be the answer. To this extent it could fairly be said that Mrs Pont-Padwick was no chicken. She went in order to come back again, and wasn’t afraid of saying so.

  ‘You are the most sensible woman I have met for a long time,’ said Sir Everard. ‘If it were Chloe next to me,’ he thought, ‘and we were going round the world together’! He looked at his neighbour and thought, ‘Who cares whether she is sensible or not, who cares, anyway?’

  He had cabled to Chloe to say that he was landing at Southampton on Friday, was spending the week-end at Chanters, and would like Wednesday evening if she could possibly spare it. While Mrs Pont-Padwick was still fluttering under his compliment, a reply was brought to him from the wireless room.

  ‘Leaving for Southampton on Friday and by a strange coincidence spending the week-end at Chanters. I could give you a lift, all my love Chloe.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, trying to focus Dora. ‘You were saying——’

  ‘Not bad news, I hope?’ said Dora. He looked so strange.

  ‘No no. By no means. I must send a cable or two, but there’s no immediate hurry.’

  The horizon rose to meet the rail of the deck, and dipped again, and rose and dipped. Just to lie here and watch it— up, down, up, down, lazily, lazily—lie here and think of Chloe. . . . God, how he hated this woman. Why had she ever left Sutton? But she would go soon, and then he would be alone with Chloe.

  He was tall, and so was she. Their eyes met over the chattering crowd, and Everard’s said, ‘I love you, I love you, my darling,’ and Chloe’s eyes said, ‘How lovely to see you, darling’; so much the same words, but so different. Extravagant affections filled the space between them. Passengers with no background became family men and women again, with welcoming mothers, husbands, wives, with children to be inquired after, wide-eyed children to greet; and in contact with these strange voices the personalities which one had known became subtly different, taking on a new colour, and classifying themselves in the reflection of their company. England had come home, and was resolving into her component parts; America had landed in a foreign country, and her diverse states were federated. Only Mrs Pont-Padwick remained what she had been. She was down below, waiting for the boat to turn round.

  They smiled at each other, Chloe’s smile saying, ‘What a crowd! I can’t move! How brown you are!’—his saying, ‘I could stand here for ever looking at you. I shall never be as happy as tills again.’ Indeed, they were more together then than they would be for some time after their first touch of hand. Not until final good-byes had been repeated, final arrangements unnecessarily confirmed, and all the formalities of leave-taking and arriving gone wearily through, were they able to talk to each other as more than acquaintances; not until they were alone in her car, and on the road to Chanters.

  ‘Thank you for coming to meet me, Chloe.’

  ‘Well, darling, I was on my way to Chanters, so it seemed silly not to.’

  He laughed and shook his head at her, saying, ‘There’s no one there, you know.’

  ‘Mrs Lambrick.’

  ‘I was forgetting Mrs Lambrick.’

  ‘She won’t be shocked?’

  ‘She certainly won’t look it, and she certainly won’t mention it. I can’t swear to more than that.’

  ‘Anything the young master does is right, is what I say.’

  ‘Well, more or less, I suppose.’

  ‘Darling, you aren’t putting me off? You were glad to get my cable?’

  ‘So glad that—— Oh, that reminds me. You don’t happen to be wearing a Padwick Elasto-Bend Corset?’

  ‘No, darling. I’m wearing a little belt which I bought at a little belt shop called Elise. This is a very strange conversation, and we must wait to see how it develops. Go on, sweetie.’

  Everard smiled at her contentedly, saying, ‘It’s a great pleasure to talk to you again. There was a woman on the boat——’

  ‘Was that what she was wearing?’

  ‘She used to be a mannequin for them. Then she married the inventor, and when he died she left off wearing them.’

  ‘Tragic,’ said Chloe. ‘Or something. What does she wear now? Was she pretty? How old was she? Oh, and what about all those Brazilians?’

  ‘There were only seven. Don’t exaggerate.’

  Chloe gave him her smile and slipped her left hand into his. She drove like this in silence for a little, and then said, ‘You get arrested for this, and it all comes out in the papers. Do you mind?’

  ‘Not a bit.’

  After another silence she said, ‘I wish things had been different.’

  ‘They never are.’

  ‘No. Who manages it all?’

  ‘God, I suppose; but I don’t know who he is.’

  ‘Neither do I. I don’t know what, he’s doing. I don’t know what he’s got to be proud of.’

  ‘We can’t blame it all on to him.’