N OF AUNT ADELAIDE

Sunday at Galvin House was a day of bodily rest but acute mental
activity. The day of God seemed to draw out the worst in everybody;
all were in their best clothes and on their worst behaviour. Mr.
Cordal descended to breakfast in carpet slippers with fur tops. Miss
Wangle regarded this as a mark of disrespect towards the grand-niece of
a bishop. She would glare at Mr. Cordal's slippers as if convinced
that the cloven hoof were inside.

Mr. Bolton sported a velvet smoking-jacket, white at the elbows, light
grey trousers and a manner that seemed to say, "Ha! here's Sunday
again, good!" After breakfast he added a fez and a British cigar to
his equipment, and retired to the lounge to read _Lloyd's News_. Both
the cigar and the newspaper lasted him throughout the day. Somewhere
at the back of his mind was the conviction that in smoking a cigar,
which he disliked, he was making a fitting distinction between the
Sabbath and week-days. He went even further, for whereas on secular
days he lit his inexpensive cigarettes with matches, on the Sabbath he
used only fusees.

"I love the smell of fusees," Miss Sikkum would simper, regardless of
the fact that a hundred times before she had taken Galvin House into
her confidence on the subject. "I think they're so romantic."

Patricia wondered if Mr. Bolton's fusee were an offering to heaven or
to Miss Sikkum.

On Sunday mornings Miss Wangle and Mrs. Mosscrop-Smythe went to divine
service at Westminster Abbey, and Mr. Cordal went to sleep in the
lounge.

Mrs. Barnes wandered aimlessly about, making anxious enquiry of
everyone she encountered. If it were cloudy, did they think it would
rain? If it rained, did they think it would clear up? If it were
fine, did they think it would last? Mrs. Barnes was always going to do
something that was contingent upon the weather. Every Sunday she was
going for a walk in the Park, or to church; but her constitutional
indecision of character intervened.

Mr. Archibald Sefton, who showed the qualities of a landscape gardener
in the way in which he arranged his thin fair hair to disguise the
desert of baldness beneath, was always vigorous on Sundays. He
descended to the dining-room rubbing his hands in a manner suggestive
of a Dickens Christmas. After breakfast he walked in the Park, "to
give the girls a treat," as Mr. Bolton had once expressed it, which had
earned for him a stern rebuke from Miss Wangle. In t