contacts and exigencies of his career, and Neville's disembodied,
devitalised and driven inwards by her more dilettante life. She "helped
Rodney with the constituency" of course, but it was Rodney's
constituency, not hers; she entertained his friends and hers when they
were in town, but she knew herself a light woman, not a dealer in
affairs. Yet her nature was stronger than Rodney's, larger and more
mature; it was only his experience she lacked.

Rodney was and had always been charming; there could be no doubt
about that, whatever else you might come to think about him. Able, too,
but living on his nerves, wincing like a high-strung horse from the
annoyances and disappointments of life, such as Quaker oats because the
grape-nuts had come to an end, and the industrial news of the morning,
which was as bad as usual and four times repeated in four quite different
tones by the four daily papers which lay on the table. They took four
papers not so much that there might be one for each of them as that they
might have the entertainment of seeing how different the same news can be
made to appear. One bond of union this family had which few families
possess; they were (roughly speaking) united politically, so believed the
same news to be good or bad. The chief difference in their political
attitude was that Kay and Gerda joined societies and leagues, being still
young enough to hold that causes were helped in this way.

"What about to-day?" Rodney asked Neville. "What are you going to do?"

She answered, "Tennis." (Neville had once been a county player.) "River.
Lying about in the sun." (It should be explained that it was one of those
nine days of the English summer of 1920 when this was a possible
occupation.) "Anything anyone likes.... I've already had a good deal of
day and a bathe.... Oh, Nan's coming down this afternoon."