"I suppose you're right, my dear.... 'All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for the things that are arise out of the unreasonable....' I must get back. Give my love to Frances... and when next you see Gerda do try to persuade her that marriage is one of the things that don't matter and that she might just as well put up with to please us all. The child is a little nuisance--as obstinate as a mule." 4 Neville, walking away from Pamela's grimy street in the November fog, felt that London was terrible. An ugly clamour of strident noises and hard, shrill voices, jabbering of vulgar, trivial things. A wry, desperate, cursed world, as she had called it, a pot seething with bitterness and all dreadfulness, with its Rosalinds floating on the top like scum. And Nan, her Nan, her little vehement sister, whom she had mothered of old, had pulled out of countless scrapes--Nan had now taken her life into her reckless hands and done what with it? Given it, perhaps, to a man she didn't love, throwing cynical defiance thereby at love, which had hurt her; escaping from the intolerable to the shoddy. Even if not, even supposing the best, Nan was hurt and in trouble; Neville was somehow sure of that. Men were blind fools; men were fickle children. Neville almost wished now that Barry would give up Gerda and go out to Rome and fetch Nan back. But, to do that, Barry would have to fall out of love with Gerda and into love again with Nan; and even Barry, Neville imagined, was not such a weathercock as that. And Barry would really be happier with Gerda. With all their differences, they were both earnest citizens, both keen on social progress. Nan was a cynical flibberty-gibbet; it might not have been a happy union. Perhaps happy unions were not for such as Nan. But at the thought of Nan playing that desperate game with Stephen Lumley in Rome, Neville's face twitched.... She would go to Rome. She would see Nan; find out how things were. Nan always liked to see her, would put up with her even when she wanted no one else. That was, at least, a job one could do. These family jobs--they still go on, they never cease, even when one is getting middle-aged and one's brain has gone to pot. They remain, always, the jobs of the affections. She would write to Nan to-night, and tell her she was starting for Rome in a few days, to have a respite from the London fogs. 5 But she did not start for Rome, or even write to Nan, for when she got home she went to bed with influenza. CHAPTER XII THE MOTHER 1