have him. I may have been wrong."

Neville leant her forehead on her hands and sighed.

"Or you may have been right. And if you were right, it's the ghastliest
tragedy--for her.... Oh, I shouldn't have let Gerda go and work with him;
I should have known better.... Nan had rebuffed him, and he flew off at a
tangent, and there was Gerda sitting in his office, as pretty as flowers
and with her funny little silent charm.... And if Nan was all the time
waiting for him, meaning to say yes when he asked her.... Poor darling
Nan, robbed by my horrid little girl, who doesn't even want to
marry.... If that's the truth, it would account for the Stephen Lumley
business. Nan wouldn't stay on in London, to see them together. If Lumley
caught her at that psychological moment, she'd very likely go off with
him, out of mere desperation and bravado. That would be so terribly like
Nan.... What a desperate, wry, cursed business life is.... On the other
hand, she may just be going about with Lumley on her own terms not his.
It's her own affair whichever way it is; what we've got to do is to
contradict the stories Rosalind is spreading whenever we get the chance.
Not that one can scotch scandal once it starts--particularly Rosalind's
scandal."

"Ignore it. Nan can ignore it when she comes back. It won't hurt her.
Nan's had plenty of things said about her before, true and untrue, and
never cared."

"You're splendid at the ignoring touch, Pam. I believe there's nothing
you can't and don't ignore."

"Well, why not? Ignoring's easy."

"Not for most of us. I believe it is, for you. In a sense you ignore life
itself; anyhow you don't let it hold and bully you. When your time comes
you'll ignore age, and later death."

"They don't matter much, do they? Does anything? I suppose it's my stolid
temperament, but I can't feel that it does."

Neville thought, as she had often thought before, that Pamela, like Nan,
only more calmly, less recklessly and disdainfully, had the aristocratic
touch. Pamela, with her delicate detachments and her light, even touch on
things great and small, made her feel fussy and petty and excitable.

"I suppose you're right, my dear.... 'All is laughter, all is dust,
all is nothingness, for the things that are arise out of the
unreasonable....' I must get back. Give my love to Frances... and when
next you see Gerda do try to persuade her that marriage is one of the
things that don't matter and that she might just as