she had
carved, and Rodney a new bicycle (by the front door) and a Brangwyn
drawing (on the table). If Neville envied Kay and Gerda their future
careers, she envied Rodney his present sphere. Her husband and the
father of Gerda and Kay was a clever and distinguished-looking man of
forty-five, and member, in the Labour interest, for a division of Surrey.
He looked, however, more like a literary man. How to be useful though
married: in Rodney's case the problem was so simple, in hers so
complicated. She had envied Rodney a little twenty years ago; then she
had stopped, because the bringing up of Kay and Gerda had been a work in
itself; now she had begun again. Rodney and she were more like each other
than they were like their children; they had some of the same vanities,
fastidiousnesses, humours and withdrawals, and in some respects the same
outlook on life. Only Rodney's had been solidified and developed by the
contacts and exigencies of his career, and Neville's disembodied,
devitalised and driven inwards by her more dilettante life. She "helped
Rodney with the constituency" of course, but it was Rodney's
constituency, not hers; she entertained his friends and hers when they
were in town, but she knew herself a light woman, not a dealer in
affairs. Yet her nature was stronger than Rodney's, larger and more
mature; it was only his experience she lacked.

Rodney was and had always been charming; there could be no doubt
about that, whatever else you might come to think about him. Able, too,
but living on his nerves, wincing like a high-strung horse from the
annoyances and disappointments of life, such as Quaker oats because the
grape-nuts had come to an end, and the industrial news of the morning,
which was as bad as usual and four times repeated in four quite different
tones by the four daily papers which lay on the table. They took four
papers not so much that there might be one for each of them as that they
might have the entertainment of seeing how different the same news can be
made to appear. One bond of union this family had which few families
possess; they were (roughly speaking) united politically, so believed the
same news to be good or bad. The chief difference in their political
attitude was that Kay and Gerda joined societies and leagues, being still
young enough to hold that causes were helped in this way.

"What about to-day?" Rodney asked Neville. "What are you going to do?"

She answered, "Tennis." (Ne