anger of the situation. She suspected Anthony of
exaggerating his losses in order to draw out Dorothy and Michael and
Nicholas and John, and wallow in their moral beauty. He, too, was
arrogant. He was convinced that, though there might be girls like
Dorothea, there were no boys like his three Sons. As for the strike in
the building trade, strikes, as Anthony insisted, had happened before,
and none of them had threatened for very long either Frances's peace of
mind or Anthony's prosperity.

The present strike was not interfering in the least with Mrs. Anthony
Harrison's Day, the last of the season. It fell this year, on the
twenty-fifth of July.

Long afterwards she remembered it by what happened at the end of it.

Frances's Day--the fourth Saturday in the month--was one of those slight
changes that are profoundly significant. It stood for regeneration and a
change of heart. It marked the close of an epoch. Frances's life of
exclusive motherhood had ended; she had become, or was at any rate
trying to become, a social creature. Her Day had bored her terribly at
first, when it didn't frighten her; she was only just beginning to get
used to it; and still, at times, she had the air of not taking it
seriously. It had been forced on her. Dorothea had decided that she must
have a Day, like other people.

She had had it since Michael's first volume of Poems had come out in the
spring of the year before, when the young men who met every Friday
evening in Lawrence Stephen's study began to meet at Michael's
father's house.

Anthony liked to think that his house was the centre of all this
palpitating, radiant life; of young men doing all sorts of wonderful,
energetic, important, interesting things. They stirred the air about him
and kept it clean; he liked the sound of their feet and of their voices,
and of their laughter. And when the house was quiet and Anthony had
Frances to himself he liked that, too.

But Frances thought: "If only they wouldn't come quite so often--if only
I could have my children sometimes to myself!"

It was the last rebellion of her flesh that had borne and suckled them.

There was this to be said for Frances's Day that it attracted and
diverted, and confined to one time and one place a whole crowd of
tiresome people, who, without it, would have spread themselves over the
whole month; also that it gave a great deal of innocent happiness to the
"Poor dears." Frances meant old Mrs. Fleming, and Louie