ust waitin' for you to look after him."

And Violet would own that Granville was pathetic. But she triumphed.
"You wouldn't feel about him that way," she said, "if he was only Number
Forty-seven."

Just at first there was no doubt that Violet was fond of Granville. Just
at first it was as if she couldn't do too much for him, to keep him
spick and span, clean from top to toe, and always with a happy polish.
Just at first he was, as Ranny said, "such a pretty little chap with his
funny purple pillar, and his little peepers winkin' at you kind of
playful, half the time." For the sun shone on him all that August
honeymoon. It streamed down the Avenue between the rows of young acacias
whose green tufts with that light on them put Ranny more and more in
mind of palm trees. He was more and more in love with the brand-new
Paradise. He expressed all the charm of Southfields, of Acacia Avenue,
when he said it was "so open, and so up-to-date." It made Wandsworth
High Street look old and tortuous and grimy by comparison.

But Ranny was more and more in love with Violet; so much in love that he
could never have expressed her charm. And yet he couldn't hide the
effect it had on him. The neighbors knew it was their honeymoon. They
smiled when they saw Ranny and Violet come out of Granville every
morning wheeling the bicycle between them; they smiled when Violet ran
beside him as he mounted; most of all they smiled when Ranny, riding
slowly, turned right round in his saddle and the two young lunatics
waved and signaled to each other as if they would never have done.

No doubt that in those first days Violet was in love with Ranny. No
doubt that she looked after him as much as Violet could look after
anything; every bit as much as she looked after Granville.

But the hard fact was that Granville and all his furniture required a
great deal of looking after.

Ranny too. To begin with, he had what Violet called an awful appetite.
Which meant that a joint and a loaf went twice as fast as Violet had
calculated; so that she found herself driven to pan bread and tinned
meat in self-defense. She had found that for some reason Ranny didn't
eat so much of these. What with his walking and his "biking," and his
sitting, Ranny's activities wore through his ordinary every-day clothes
at a frightful rate. And then his zephyrs and his flannels! Ranny's
mother had always seen to them herself. She had washed them with her own
hands. Ranny's wife se