She got that out of a letter. Nan was her youngest sister. They all
proceeded to get and impart other things out of letters, in the way of
families who are fairly united, as families go.

Gerda opened her lips to impart something, but remembered her father's
distastes and refrained. Rodney, civilised, sensitive and progressive,
had no patience with his children's unsophisticated leaning to a
primitive crudeness. He told them they were young savages. So Gerda kept
her news till later, when she and Neville and Kay were lying on rugs on
the lawn after Neville had beaten Kay in a set of singles.

They lay and smoked and cooled, and Gerda, a cigarette stuck in one side
of her mouth, a buttercup in the other, mumbled "Penelope's baby's come,
by the way. A girl. Another surplus woman."

Neville's brows lazily went up.

"Penelope Jessop? What's _she_ doing with a baby? I didn't know she'd got
married."

"Oh, she hasn't, of course.... Didn't I tell you about Penelope? She
lives with Martin Annesley now."

"Oh, I see. Marriage in the sight of heaven. That sort of thing."

Neville was of those who find marriages in the sight of heaven
uncivilised and socially reactionary, a reversion, in fact, to Nature,
which bored her. Gerda and Kay rightly believed such marriages to have
some advantages over those more visible to the human eye (as being more