Dangerous Ages

as a bad job; the best because they hoped on, hoped ever, the worst because of the pickings that fall to such as they out of the collapsing ruins. But Barry, from the very heart of the ruin, would cry “Here is what we must do,” and his eyes would gleam with faith and resolution, and he would form a committee and act. And when he saw how the committee failed, as committees will, and how little good it all was, he would laugh ruefully and try something else. Barry, as he would tell you frankly⁠—if you enquired, not otherwise⁠—believed in God. He was the son of a famous Quaker philanthropist, and had been brought up to see good works done and even garden cities built. I am aware that this must prejudice many people against Barry; and indeed many people were annoyed by certain aspects of him. But, as he was intellectually brilliant and personally attractive, these people were as a rule ready to overlook what they called the Quaker oats. Nan, who overlooked nothing, was frankly at war with him on some points, and he with her. Nan, cynical, clear-eyed, selfish and blasé, cared nothing for the salvaging of what remained of the world out of the wreck, nothing for the I.L.P., less than nothing for garden cities, philanthropy, the W.E.A., and God. And committees she detested. Take them all away, and there remained Barry Briscoe, and for him she did not care nothing.

It was the oddest friendship, thought Neville, observing how, when Barry was there, all Nan’s perversities and moods fell away, leaving her as agreeable as he. Her keen and ironic intelligence met his, and they so understood each other that they finished each other’s sentences, and others present could only with difficulty keep up with them. Neville believed them to be in love, but did not know whether they had ever informed one another of the fact. They might still be pretending to one another that their friendship was merely one of those affectionate intellectual intimacies of which some of us have so many and which are so often misunderstood. Or they might not. It was entirely their business, either way.

Barry was a chatterbox. He lay on the lawn and rooted up daisies and made them into ridiculous chains, and talked and talked and talked. Rodney and Neville and Nan talked too, and Kay would lunge in with the crude and charming dogmatics of his years. But Gerda, chewing a blade of grass, lay idle and withdrawn, her fair brows unpuckered by the afternoon sun (because it was July, 1920), her blue eyes on Barry, who was so different; or else she would be withdrawn but not idle, for she would be drawing houses tumbling down, or men on stilts, fantastic and proud, or goblins, or geese running with outstretched necks round a green. Or she would be writing something like this:

“I
Float on the tide,
In the rain.
I am the starfish vomited up by the retching cod.
He thinks
That I am he.
But I know.
That he is I.
For the creature is far greater than its god.”

(Gerda was of those who think it is rather chic to have one rhyme in your poem, just to show that you can do it.)

“That child over there makes one feel so cheap and ridiculous, jabbering away.”

That was Barry, breaking off to look at Gerda where she lay on her elbows on a rug, idle and still. “And it’s not,” he went on, “that she doesn’t know about the subject, either. I’ve heard her on it.”

He threw the daisy chain he had just made at her, so that it alighted on her head, hanging askew over one eye.

“Just like a daisy bud herself, isn’t she,” he commented, and raced on, forgetting her.

Neat in her person and ways, Gerda adjusted the daisy chain so that it ringed her golden head in an orderly circle. Like a daisy bud herself, Rodney agreed in his mind, his eyes smiling at her, his affection, momentarily turned that way, groping for the wild, remote little soul in her that he only vaguely and paternally knew. The little pretty. And clever, too, in her own queer, uneven way. But what was she, with it all? He knew Kay, the long, sweet-tempered boy, better. For Kay represented highly civilized, passably educated, keen-minded youth. Gerda wasn’t highly civilized, was hardly passably educated, and keen would be an inapt word for that queer, remote, woodland mind of hers.⁠ ⁠… Rodney returned to more soluble problems.

IV

Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama came to Windover. Mrs. Hilary would rather have come without Grandmama, but Grandmama enjoyed the jaunt, as she called it. For eighty-four, Grandmama was wonderfully sporting. They arrived on Saturday afternoon, and rested after the journey, as is usually done by people of Grandmama’s age, and often by people of Mrs. Hilary’s. Sunday was full of such delicate clashings as occur when new people have joined a party. Grandmama was for morning church, and Neville drove her to it in the pony carriage. So Mrs. Hilary, not being able to endure that they should go off alone together, had to go too, though she did not like church, morning or other.

She sighed over it at lunch.

“So stuffy. So long. And the hymns.⁠ ⁠…”

But Grandmama said, “My dear, we had David and Goliath. What more do you want?”

During David and Goliath Grandmama’s head had nodded approvingly, and her thin old lips had half smiled at the valiant child with his swaggering lies about bears and lions, at the gallant child and the giant.

Mrs. Hilary, herself romantically sensible, as middle-aged ladies are, of valour and high adventure, granted Grandmama David and Goliath, but still repined at the hymns and the sermon.

“Good words, my dear, good words,” Grandmama said to that. For Grandmama had been brought up not to criticise sermons, but had failed to bring up Mrs. Hilary to the same self-abnegation. The trouble with Mrs. Hilary was, and had always