“I know an old actress,” he continued. “She’s the mother of four. They are all on the stage and they’ve all made their mark. The youngest was born in her dressing-room, just after the curtain had fallen. She was playing the Nurse to your mother’s Juliet. She is still the best Nurse that I know. ‘Jack’s always worrying me to chuck it and devote myself to the children,’ she confided to me one evening, while she was waiting for her cue. ‘But, as I tell him, I’m more helpful to them being with them half the day alive than all the day dead.’ That’s an anecdote worth remembering, when your time comes. If God gives woman a drum he doesn’t mean man to take it away from her. She hasn’t got to be playing it for twenty-four hours a day. I’d like you to have seen your mother’s Cordelia.” “Don’t you be put off by his seeming a bit unresponsive,” Mrs. Phillips would explain. “He’s shy with women. What I’m trying to do is to make him feel you are one of the family.”!

The little flame died out. She could feel his body trembling. Folk’s words came back to her: “And poor Jack Allway. Tell him I thank him for all those years of love and gentleness.” She gave him the message.

“Oh yes there is,” said Madge. “Love has lent him gilded armour. From his helmet waves her crest,” she quoted. “Most men look fine in that costume. Pity they can’t always wear it.” “Perhaps you are right,” she admitted. “Perhaps that is why He made us male and female: to teach us to love.” Joan’s eyes followed. It was certainly an odd collection. Flossie, in her hunt for brains, had issued her invitations broadcast; and her fate had been that of the Charity concert. Not all the stars upon whom she had most depended had turned up. On the other hand not a single freak had failed her. At the moment, the centre of the room was occupied by a gentleman and two ladies in classical drapery. They were holding hands in an attitude suggestive of a bas-relief. Joan remembered them, having seen them on one or two occasions wandering in the King’s Road, Chelsea; still maintaining, as far as the traffic would allow, the bas-relief suggestion; and generally surrounded by a crowd of children, ever hopeful that at the next corner they would stop and do something really interesting. They belonged to a society whose object was to lure the London public by the force of example towards the adoption of the early Greek fashions and the simpler Greek attitudes. A friend of Flossie’s had thrown in her lot with them, but could never be induced to abandon her umbrella. They also, as Joan told herself, were reformers. Near to them was a picturesque gentleman with a beard down to his waist whose “stunt”—as Flossie would have termed it—was hygienic clothing; it seemed to contain an undue proportion of fresh air. There were ladies in coats and stand-up collars, and gentlemen with ringlets. More than one of the guests would have been better, though perhaps not happier, for a bath.