last. "The
way she talked to the fishermen--one minute snubbing them, and the next,
talking to them as if she were a servant-girl. They didn't like it. Jim
Rattenbury hated it, I know. She wasn't one of us and she wasn't one of
them. A damned in-between, that's what she was. And Uncle Peter used to
get drunk!... I'm awfully sorry, you chaps, I oughtn't to be boring you
like this!"

"That's all right," said Gilbert.

"I was jolly glad when they went," Ninian went on. "Jolly glad! Poor
mother had a hell of a time while they were here!"

"I suppose so," Henry murmured, hardly knowing what to say.

"I can't understand a man marrying a woman like that," Ninian said. "I
mean, I can understand a fellow ragging about with a girl, but I can't
understand him marrying her and ... and upsetting things!"

It was on the tip of Henry's tongue to say something about
Ninian's belief in democracy, for he remembered that Gilbert,
in one of his letters, had declared that Ninian had become a
I'm-as-good-as-you-and-a-damn-sight-better-politician, but he did not
say it.

"The girl isn't happy. Anybody can see she isn't happy, and Uncle Peter
isn't happy, and between them they make us damn miserable. That kind of
marriage is bound to fail, _I_ think. People ought to marry in their own
class!..."

"Unless they're big enough to climb out of it," said Gilbert.

"_She_ isn't!"

It came to Henry suddenly that he was proposing to do what Ninian's
Uncle Peter had done: marry a girl who was not of his class. He listened
to Ninian and Gilbert as they talked of this intimate mingling of
classes, and wondered what they would say if they knew of Sheila.
Gilbert and Ninian were agreed that on the whole it was foolish for a
man to marry that kind of girl. "It doesn't work," said Gilbert, and he
told a story of a man whom his father had known, an officer in the
Indian army who developed communist beliefs when he retired and had
married his cook. "It's a ghastly failure," said Gilbert.

"I'm all for equality," Ninian said, "but it's silly to think that we're
always equal now. We're not!..."

"And never will be," Gilbert interjected.

"I don't agree with you, Gilbert. I think that things like habits and
manners can be fairly equalised!..."

"Minds can't!"

"No, of course not; but decent behaviour can, and it's silly to start
mingling classes until you've done that. You rub each other the wrong
way over little things that don't really matter,