“Man has more interests,” Joan argued, “a thousand other allurements to distract him; we must cultivate his finer instincts.” “We’ve never had a home exactly,” explained Mrs. Phillips, during their journey in the tram. “It’s always been lodgings, up to now. Nice enough, some of them; but you know what I mean; everybody else’s taste but your own. I’ve always fancied a little house with one’s own things in it. You know, things that you can get fond of.”!

Joan was troubled. She was rather looking forward to occasional restaurant dinners, where she would be able to study London’s Bohemia. “I’m just running round to the doctor’s,” she whispered. “His medicine hasn’t come. I shan’t be long.”

“You mean it?” said Flossie. “Of course you will go on seeing him—visiting them, and all that. But you won’t go gadding about, so that people can talk?” “I wonder how many of my ideals will be left to me,” sighed Joan. “I always used to regard the Press as the modern pulpit.” With the elders it was sense of duty that prevailed. That, at all events, was English. The country must be saved. To their sons and daughters it was the originality, the novelty that gradually appealed. Mrs. Denton’s Fridays became a new sensation. It came to be the chic and proper thing to appear at them in shades of mauve or purple. A pushing little woman in Hanover Street designed the “Denton” bodice, with hanging sleeves and square-cut neck. The younger men inclined towards a coat shaped to the waist with a roll collar.