ir children couldn't. Michael and
Dorothy were acquiring a taste for him and for the people he knew; and
he knew almost everybody who was worth knowing. To be seen at the
parties he and Vera gave in St. John's Wood was itself distinction. Vera
had never forgotten and never would forget what Anthony and Frances had
done for her and Ferdie when they took Veronica. She wanted to make up,
to pay back, to help their children as they had helped her child; to
give the best she had, and do what they, poor darlings, couldn't
possibly have done. Nicholas was all right; but Michael's case was
lamentable. In his family and in the dull round of their acquaintance
there was not anybody who was likely to be of the least use to Michael;
not anybody that he cared to know. No wonder that he kept up his old
attitude of refusing to go to the party. Lawrence Stephen had promised
her that he would help Michael.

And Frances was afraid. She saw her children, Michael, Nicholas and
Dorothy, swept every day a little farther from the firm, well-ordered
sanctities, a little nearer to the unclean moral vortex that to her was
the most redoubtable of all. She hid her fear, because in her wisdom she
knew that to show fear was not the way to keep her children. She hid her
strength because she knew that to show it was not the way. Her strength
was in their love of her. She had only used it once when she had stopped
Nicky from going into the Army. She had said to herself then, "I will
never do that again." It wasn't fair. It was a sort of sacrilege, a
treachery. Love was holy; it should never be used, never be bargained
with. She tried to hold the balance even between their youth and
their maturity.

So Frances fought her fear.

She had known that Ferdie Cameron was good, as she put it, "in spite of
everything"; but she had not seen Lawrence Stephen, and she did not know
that he had sensibilities and prejudices and scruples like her own, and
that he and Vera distinguished very carefully between the people who
would be good for Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy, and the people who
would not. She did not know that they both drew the line at Desmond.

Vera protested that it was not her fault, it was not Lawrence's fault
that Nicky had met Desmond. She had never asked them to meet each other.
She did not deny that it was in her house they _had_ met; but she had
not introduced them. Desmond had introduced herself, on the grounds that
she knew Dorothy. Vera