in fact, it wasn't; probably it was Neville, and the people who had grown
up with her, who were overcivilized, too far from the crude stuff of
life, the monotonies and emotionalisms of Nature. And now Nature was
taking her rather startling revenge on the next generation.


3

Neville ran upstairs, and came down to breakfast dressed in blue cotton,
with her damp hair smoothly taken back from her broad forehead that
jutted broodingly over her short pointed face. She had the look of
a dryad at odds with the world, a whimsical and elfish intellectual.

Rodney and Kay and Gerda had been putting parcels at her place, and a
pile of letters lay among them. There is, anyhow, that about birthdays,
however old they make you. Kay had given her a splendid great
pocket-knife and a book he wanted to read, Gerda an oak box 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