2

She tried Barry Briscoe, the week-end he came down and found Nan gone.
Barry Briscoe was by way of being interested in people and things in
general; he had that kind of alert mind and face.

He came up from the tennis lawn, where he had been playing a single with
Rodney, and sat down by her and Grandmama in the shade of the cedar, hot
and friendly and laughing and out of breath. Now Neville and Rodney were
playing Gerda and Kay. Grandmama's old eyes, pleased behind their
glasses, watched the balls fly and thought everyone clever who got one
over the net. She hadn't played tennis in her youth. Mrs. Hilary's more
eager, excited eyes watched Neville driving, smashing, volleying,
returning, and thought how slim and young a thing she looked, to have all
that power stored in her. She was fleeter than Gerda, she struck harder
than Kay, she was trickier than all of them, the beloved girl. That was
the way Mrs. Hilary watched tennis, thinking of the players, not of the
play. It is the way some people talk, thinking of the talkers, not of
what they are saying. It is the personal touch, and a way some women
have.

But Barry Briscoe, watching cleverly through his bright glasses, was
thinking of the strokes. He was an unconscious person. He lived in
moments.

"Well done, Gerda," Grandmama would call, when Gerda, cool and
nonchalant, dropped, a sitter at Rodney's feet, and when Rodney smashed
it back she said, "But father's too much for you."

"Gerda's a _scandal_," Barry said. "She doesn't care. She can hit all
right when she likes. She thinks about something else half the time."

His smile followed the small white figure with its bare golden head that
gleamed in the grey afternoon. An absurd, lovable, teasable child, he
found her.

Grandmama's maid came to wheel her down to the farm. Grandmama had
promised to go and see the farmer's wife and new baby. Grandmama always
saw wives and new babies. They never palled. You would think that by
eighty-four she had seen enough new babies, more than enough, that she
had seen through that strange business and could now take it for granted,
the stream of funny new life cascading into the already so full world.
But Grandmama would always go and see it, handle it, admire it, peer at
it with her smiling eyes that had seen so many lives come and go and that
must know by now that babies are born to trouble as naturally as the
sparks fly upward.

So off Grandmama rode in her wheeled c