sipping tea, eating
strawberries and cakes, under the striped sun-blind.

_Norie_ continues: "Do you remember Beryl Clarges at Newnham?"

_Vivie_: "Yes--the pretty girl--short, curly hair, brown eyes,
rather full lips, good at mathematics--hockey ... purposely shocked
you by her outspokenness--well?"

_Norie_: "Well, she's had a baby ... a month ago ... awful rumpus
with her people ... Father's Dean Clarges ... Norwich or Ely, I
forget which ... They've put her in a Nursing Home in Seymour
Street. Mother wears a lace mantilla and cries softly. Beryl went
wrong, as they call it, with an architect."

_Vivie_: "Pass your cup ... Don't take _all_ the strawberries
(_Norie_: "Sorry! Absence of mind--I've left you three fat ones")
Architect? Strange! I always thought all architects were like
Praddy--had no passions except for bricks and mortar and chiselled
stone and twirligig iron grilles ... perhaps just a thrill over a
nude statue. Why, till you told me this I'd as soon have trusted my
daughter--if I had one--with an architect as with a Colonel of
Engineers--You know! The kind that believes in the identity of the
Ten Lost Tribes with the British and is a True Protestant! Poor
Beryl! But how? what? when? why?"

_Norie_: "I think it began at Cambridge--the acquaintance did ...
Later, it developed into a passion. He had already one wife in
Sussex somewhere and four children. He took a flat for her in
Town--a studio--because Berry had given up mathematics and was going
in for sculpture; and there, whenever he could get away from
Storrington or some such place and from his City office, he used to
visit Beryl. This had been going on for three years. But last
February she had to break it to her mother that she was six months
gone. The other wife knows all about it but refuses to divorce the
naughty architect, and at the same time has cut off supplies--What
_cowards_ men are and how _little_ women stand by women! And then
it's a poor deanery and Beryl has five younger brothers that have
got to be educated. Her sculpture was little more than commissions
executed for her architect's building and I expect that resource
will now disappear ... I half think I shall bring her in here, when
she is well again. She's got a very good head-piece and you know we
are expanding our business ... She'd make a good House Agent ... She
writes sometimes for _Country Life_..."

_Vivie_: "Ye-es.... But you can't provide for many more of our
co