k, but the
function amused them, especially when they were the entertainers). She
did suggest it one day, but Miss Varley, it seemed, had other
engagements. Mrs. Venables came, with Miranda. Miranda was being
educated; she was being introduced to the life of the people. The people
did not interest her at all, but she liked the Crevequers, whose
function was that of go-between. She would have liked to make a friend
of Betty. She and Tommy were, of course, 'rotters'; they both talked
much too much, and usually the most awful rubbish, and their absurd
stammer made it sound sillier still, and you never knew when they meant
a thing and when they didn't; and they neither knew nor cared anything
about games or sport.

But, all this said, Miranda was left in an attitude of half-puzzled
admiration, of which she could not have quite explained the reason. Her
frequent 'I say, you are rotters, you two!' conveyed a little
bewilderment, a touch of contempt, and an immense attraction. This
attraction put Mrs. Venables into a position of rather annoying
inconsistency. She was not strait-laced; she would have been beyond
measure distressed had prudery, or any conventional limitations, been
attributed to her--had she, in anyone's mind, been termed _bornee_.

Nevertheless, below her aesthetic self--the self which was struck, which
designed Liberty dresses and wrote novels (those novels which the
Crevequers had decided to put off reading till they were thirty-two and
thirty-three)--there lurked a self more ordinary, to whom the artistic
issues were obscured, who could become, on occasion, purely the
disapproving, very reputable censor of conduct. It was the existence of
this self, side by side with the other, which made Prudence Varley sit
in judgment on her attitude towards the Crevequers and their kind; it
was the existence of this self which made the position of Miranda
something of a problem.

Theoretically, it was right and desirable that Miranda should see life
as it was lived; practically, Mrs. Venables hesitated a little when
confronted by the atmosphere so corrupt and so disreputable--she could
not phrase it otherwise--in which Maddan Crevequer's children moved--an
atmosphere that seemed to hang about them, jarring so incongruously, and
at times (but not to Mrs. Venables) so laughably, with their great sad
eyes and their flow of childlike nonsense.

So, half ashamed, Mrs. Venables held Miranda back from personal
friendship, k