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Pepa had blushed, and then laughed, and said, “Well, you see I wanted Ursula Noble” (Ursula Noble’s father was a celebrated Hellenist) “to think that we had a brainy father too!”

Then, how bustling and important she had been when, shorty after her début, she had become engaged to Harry Sinclair—a brilliant Trinity Don, much older than herself, and already an eminent Mendelian—how quickly and superficially she had taken over all his views—liberalism, atheism, eugenics!

Oh, yes, there had been much that had been irritating in Pepa; but, though Teresa had recognised it mentally, she had never felt it in her nerves.

She was suddenly seized with a craving for Pepa’s presence—dear, innocent, complacent Pepa, so lovely, so loving, with her fantastic, yet, somehow or other, cheering plans for one’s pleasure or well-being—plans that she galvanised with her own generous vitality.

Yes, Pepa had certainly been very happy during her six or seven years of married life at Cambridge: cultured undergraduates pouring into tea on Sundays, and Pepa taking them as seriously as they took themselves, laughing delightedly at the latest epigram that was going the round of Trinity and Kings’—“Dogs are sentimental,” or “Shaw is so Edwardian”—trolling Spanish Ladies or the Morning Dew in chorus round the piano; footing it on the lawn—undergraduates, Newnham students, Cambridge matrons, young dons, eyeglasses and prominent teeth glittering in the sun, either a slightly patronising smile glued on the face, or an expression of strenuous endeavour—to the favourite melodies of Charles II.; suffrage meetings without end, lectures on English literature, practising glees in the Choral Society; busy making cardboard armour for the Greek play, or bicycling off to Grantchester, or taking Anna to her dancing class, or off to Boots to change her novels—a Galsworthy for herself, a Phillips Oppenheim for Harry.