prefer one sensation,
some the other.

Neville thought "How pretty Gerda looks, pink like that." She was glad
to know that she too looked pretty, in her blue afternoon dress. It
was good, in that charming room, that they should all look agreeable
to the eye. Even Mrs. Hilary, with her nervous, faded grace, marred by
self-consciousness and emotion. And Grandmama, smiling and shrewd, with
her old in-drawn lips; and Rodney, long and lounging and clever; Jim,
square-set, sensible, clean-cut, beautiful to his mother and to his women
patients, good for everyone to look at; Barry, brown and charming, with
his quick smile; the boy Kay, with his pale, rounded, oval face, his
violet eyes like his mother's, only short-sighted, so that he had a trick
of screwing them up and peering, and a mouth that widened into a happy
sweetness when he smiled.

They were all right: they all fitted in with the room and with each
other.

Barry said "I've not been idle while walking. I've secured a secretary.
Gerda says she's coming to work at the office for us for a bit. Now, at
once."

He had not Gerda's knack of silence. Gerda would shut up tight over her
plans and thoughts, like a little oyster. She was no babbler; she did
things and never talked. But Barry's plans brimmed up and over.

Neville said "You sudden child! And in July and August, too.... But
you'll have only a month before you join Nan in Cornwall, won't you?"

Gerda nodded, munching a buttered scone.

Grandmama, like an old war-horse scenting the fray, thought "Is it going
to be an affair? Will they fall in love? And what of Nan?" Then rebuked
herself for forgetting what she really knew quite well, having been
told it often, that men and girls in these days worked together and
did everything together, with no thought of affairs or of falling in
love.... Only these two were very attractive, the young Briscoe and the
pretty child, Gerda.

Neville, who knew Gerda, and that she was certainly in love again (it
happened so often with Gerda), thought "Shall I stop it? Or shall I let
things take their course? Oh, I'll let them alone. It's only one of
Gerda's childish hero-worships, and he'll be kind without flirting. It'll
do Gerda good to go on with this new work she's so keen on. And she knows
he cares for Nan. I shall let her go."

Neville very nearly always let Gerda and Kay go their own way now
that they were grown-up. To interfere would have been the part of the
middle-ag