to-day, a necessary part of youth's accomplishment like
tennis, French or dancing. Besides, Neville could never have enjoyed
writing poetry, because for her the gulf between good verse and bad was
too wide to be bridged by her own achievements. Nor novels, because she
disliked nearly all novels, finding them tedious, vulgar, conventional,
and out of all relation both to life as lived and to the world of
imagination. What she had written in early youth had been queer
imaginative stuff, woven out of her childhood's explorations into
fairyland and of her youth's into those still stranger tropical lands
beyond seas where she had travelled with her father. But she hadn't
written or much wanted to write; scientific studies had always attracted
her more than literary achievements. Then she had married Rodney, and
that was the end of all studies and achievements for her, though not the
end of anything for Rodney, but the beginning.

Rodney came out of the house, his pipe in his mouth. He still had the
lounging walk, shoulders high and hands in pockets, of the undergraduate;
the walk also of Kay. He sat down among his family. Kay and Gerda looked
at him with approval; though they knew his weakness, he was just the
father they would have chosen, and of how few parents can this be said.
They were proud to take him about with them to political meetings and so
forth, and prouder still to sit under him while he addressed audiences.
Few men of his great age were (on the whole) so right in the head and
sound in the heart, and fewer still so delightful to the eye. When people
talked about the Wicked Old Men, who, being still unfortunately
unrestrained and unmurdered by the Young, make this wicked world what
it is, Kay and Gerda always contended that there were a few exceptions.

Nan gave Rodney her small, fleeting smile. She had a critical
friendliness for him, but had never believed him really good enough
for Neville.

Gerda and Kay began to play a single, and Nan said, "I'm in a hole."

"Broke, darling?" Neville asked her, for that was usually it, though
sometimes it was human entanglements.

Nan nodded. "If I could have ten pounds.... I'd let you have it in a
fortnight."

"That's easy," said Rodney, in his kind, offhand way.

"Of course," Neville said. "You old spendthrift."

"Thank you, dears. Now I can get a birthday present for mother."

For Mrs. Hilary's birthday was next week, and to celebrate it her
children habitual