ed old-fashioned mother, and for that part Neville had no
liking. To be her children's friend and good comrade, that was her role
in life.

"It's good of you to have her," she said to Barry. "I hope you won't be
sorry.... She's very stupid sometimes--regular Johnny Head-in-air."

"I should be a jolly sight more use," Kay remarked. "But I can't come,
unfortunately. She can't spell, you know. And her punctuation is weird."

"She'll learn," said Barry, cheerfully, and Gerda smiled serenely at them
over her tea-cup.

4

Barry in the office was quick, alert, cheerful, and business-like, and
very decided, sometimes impatient. Efficient: that was the word. He would
skim the correspondence and dictate answers out of his head, walking
about the room, interrupted all the time by the telephone and by people
coming in to see him. Gerda's hero-worship grew and grew; her soul
swelled with it; she shut it down tight and remained calm and cool. When
he joked, when he smiled his charming smile, her heart turned over within
her. When he had signed the typed letters, she would sometimes put her
hand for a moment where his had rested on the paper. He was stern with
her sometimes, spoke sharply and impatiently, and that, in a queer way,
she liked. She had felt the same pleasure at school, when the head of the
school, whom she had greatly and secretly venerated, had had her up to
the sixth form room and rowed her. Why? That was for psycho-analysts to
discover; Gerda only knew the fact. And Barry, after he had spoken
sharply to her, when he had got over his anger, would smile and be even
kinder than usual, and that was the best of all.

There were other people in the office, of course; men and women, busy,
efficient, coming in and out, talking, working, organising. They were
kind, pleasant people. Gerda liked them, but they were shadowy.

And behind them all, and behind Barry, there was the work. The work was
enormously interesting. Gerda, child of her generation and of her
parents, was really a democrat, really public-spirited, outside the
little private cell of her withdrawn reserves. Beauty wasn't enough;
making poetry and pictures wasn't enough; one had to give everyone his
and her chance to have beauty and poetry and pictures too. In spite
of having been brought up in this creed, Gerda and Kay held to it, had
not reacted from it to a selfish aristocracy, as you might think likely.
Their democracy went much further than that of t