In November Neville and Gerda, now both convalescent, joined Rodney in their town flat. Rodney thought London would buck Neville up. London does buck you up, even if it is November and there is no gulf stream and not much coal. For there is always music and always people. Neville had a critical appreciation of both. Then, for comic relief, there are politics. You cannot be really bored with a world which contains the mother of Parliaments, particularly if her news is communicated to you at first hand by one of her members. Disgusted you may be and are, if you are a right-minded person, but at least not bored. What variety, what excitement, what a moving picture show, is this tragic and comic planet! Why want to be useful, why indulge such tedious inanities as ambitions, why dream wistfully of doing one's bit, making one's work, in a world already as full of bits, bright, coloured, absurd bits, like a kaleidoscope, as full of marks (mostly black marks) as a novel from a free library? A dark and bad and bitter world, of course, full of folly, wickedness and misery, sick with poverty and pain, so that at times the only thing Neville could bear to do in it was to sit on some dreadful committee thinking of ameliorations for the lot of the very poor, or to go and visit Pamela in Hoxton and help her with some job or other--that kind of direct, immediate, human thing, which was a sop to uneasiness and pity such as the political work she dabbled in, however similar its ultimate aim, could never be. 3 To Pamela Neville said, "Are you afraid of getting old, Pamela?" Pamela replied, "Not a bit. Are you?" And she confessed it. "Often it's like a cold douche of water down my spine, the thought of it. I reason and mock at myself, but I _don't_ like it.... You're different; finer, more real, more unselfish. Besides, you'll have done something worth doing when you have to give up. I shan't." Pamela's brows went up. "Kay? Gerda? The pretty dears: I've done nothing so nice as them. You've done what's called a woman's work in the world--isn't that the phrase?" "Done it--just so, but so long ago. What now? I still feel young, Pamela, even now that I know I'm not. ... Oh Lord, it's a queer thing, being a woman. A well-off woman of forty-three with everything made comfortable for her and her brain gone to pot and her work in the world done. I want something to bite my teeth into--some solid, permanent job--and I get nothing but sweetmeats, and people point at Kay and Gerda and say 'That's your work, and it's over. Now you can rest, seeing that it's good, like God on the seventh day.'" "_I_ don't say 'Now you can rest. Except just now, while you're run down.'" "Run down, yes; run down like a disordered clock because I tried to tackle an honest job of work again. Isn't it sickening, Pamela? Isn't it ludicrous?"