it matter? It's all
in the course of nature, and the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep.
Middle age will be very nice and comfortable and entertaining, once one's
fairly in it.... I go babbling about my wasted brain and fading looks as
if I'd been a mixture of Sappho and Helen of Troy.... That's the worst of
being a vain creature.... What will Rosalind do when _her_ time comes?
Oh, paint, of course, and dye--more thickly than she does now, I mean.
She'll be a ghastly sight. A raddled harridan. At least I shall always
look respectable, I hope. I shall go down to Gerda. I want to look at
something young. The young have their troubles, poor darlings, but they
don't know how lucky they are."

2

In November Neville and Gerda, now both convalescent, joined Rodney in
their town flat. Rodney thought London would buck Neville up. London does
buck you up, even if it is November and there is no gulf stream and not
much coal. For there is always music and always people. Neville had a
critical appreciation of both. Then, for comic relief, there are
politics. You cannot be really bored with a world which contains the
mother of Parliaments, particularly if her news is communicated to you
at first hand by one of her members. Disgusted you may be and are, if
you are a right-minded person, but at least not bored.

What variety, what excitement, what a moving picture show, is this tragic
and comic planet! Why want to be useful, why indulge such tedious
inanities as ambitions, why dream wistfully of doing one's bit, making
one's work, in a world already as full of bits, bright, coloured, absurd
bits, like a kaleidoscope, as full of marks (mostly black marks) as a
novel from a free library? A dark and bad and bitter world, of course,
full of folly, wickedness and misery, sick with poverty and pain, so that
at times the only thing Neville could bear to do in it was to sit on some
dreadful committee thinking of ameliorations for the lot of the very
poor, or to go and visit Pamela in Hoxton and help her with some job or
other--that kind of direct, immediate, human thing, which was a sop to
uneasiness and pity such as the political work she dabbled in, however
similar its ultimate aim, could never be.

3

To Pamela Neville said, "Are you afraid of getting old, Pamela?"

Pamela replied, "Not a bit. Are you?" And she confessed it.

"Often it's like a cold douche of water down my spine, the thought of it.
I reason and mock at mysel