They neither spoke again till they came to the bridge, from the other side of which the busses started. “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.”!

“I heard him at the Albert Hall last week,” said Flossie. “He’s quite wonderful.” He lapsed into silence: his almost transparent hands stretched out towards the fire.

“What do you advise me?” he asked. “I haven’t decided yet.” “There are more important things than saving men’s bodies. You think that, don’t you?” he asked. Joan laughed. “You don’t somehow suggest the rat,” she said: “rather another sort of beast.”