well put up with to
please us all. The child is a little nuisance--as obstinate as a mule."

4

Neville, walking away from Pamela's grimy street in the November fog,
felt that London was terrible. An ugly clamour of strident noises and
hard, shrill voices, jabbering of vulgar, trivial things. A wry,
desperate, cursed world, as she had called it, a pot seething with
bitterness and all dreadfulness, with its Rosalinds floating on the top
like scum.

And Nan, her Nan, her little vehement sister, whom she had mothered
of old, had pulled out of countless scrapes--Nan had now taken her
life into her reckless hands and done what with it? Given it, perhaps,
to a man she didn't love, throwing cynical defiance thereby at love,
which had hurt her; escaping from the intolerable to the shoddy. Even
if not, even supposing the best, Nan was hurt and in trouble; Neville
was somehow sure of that. Men were blind fools; men were fickle children.
Neville almost wished now that Barry would give up Gerda and go out to
Rome and fetch Nan back. But, to do that, Barry would have to fall
out of love with Gerda and into love again with Nan; and even Barry,
Neville imagined, was not such a weathercock as that. And Barry would
really be happier with Gerda. With all their differences, they were
both earnest citizens, both keen on social progress. Nan was a cynical
flibberty-gibbet; it might not have been a happy union. Perhaps happy
unions were not for such as Nan. But at the thought of Nan playing that
desperate game with Stephen Lumley in Rome, Neville's face twitched....

She would go to Rome. She would see Nan; find out how things were. Nan
always liked to see her, would put up with her even when she wanted no
one else.

That was, at least, a job one could do. These family jobs--they still go
on, they never cease, even when one is getting middle-aged and one's
brain has gone to pot. They remain, always, the jobs of the affections.

She would write to Nan to-night, and tell her she was starting for Rome
in a few days, to have a respite from the London fogs.

5

But she did not start for Rome, or even write to Nan, for when she got
home she went to bed with influenza.

CHAPTER XII

THE MOTHER

1

The happiness Mrs. Hilary now enjoyed was of the religious type--a deep,
warm glow, which did not lack excitement. She felt as those may be
presumed to feel who have just been converted to some church--newly
alive, and sunk in