“I agree with you that, as an unusual type of person, she’s interesting.” “Her choice of songs was interesting, too--that atrocity about cabbage roses--I beg your pardon, Christopher!--and then ‘the Bluebells of Scotland.’ The first one was so exactly what one would have expected, and the second one so exactly what one wouldn’t have expected,” said Sallie. “I like the good old ‘Bluebells of Scotland,’” Christopher said. “We must make her sing it again when we go to Mrs. Fazackerly’s house.” I was glad that he seemed to be looking forward to that pleasantly. Claire and I are not lively people, but we both wanted to make Christopher enjoy himself, although I think Claire resented his Philistine forms of enjoyment a good deal. Both he and Captain Patch went often to play tennis with the Kendals at Dheera Dhoon. “He couldn’t, surely,” Claire said to me, desperately, upon this subject. I know what she meant. Christopher’s possible--or, more probably, impossible--marriage, was always one of Claire’s deepest preoccupations. And she has always been victim to an intensive system under which her hopes and her fears alike leap to gigantic proportions within a few seconds of their conception. I had no doubt that she had already endowed Christopher and one of the Kendals--probably Dolly, the one she dislikes the most--with a family of which all the members would have inherited the Kendal temperament, which Claire finds a singularly unattractive one. “I don’t think he could,” I assured her. She gazed at me out of her enormous, tragical eyes. “I am living upon the edge of a volcano, Miles.” And as, I suppose, my silence appeared to her to be an inadequate rejoinder--as indeed it was--she added, with violent emphasis, the word: “_Literally_.” Poor Claire! The Kendals, than whom no young women in this world have ever been more devoid of a dangerous fascination, continued to exercise their harmless hospitality, and in return, Christopher begged us to let him ask them to the Manor House. They played tennis moderately well, but I found that all of them looked upon it as a matter of course that they should take it in turns to sit by my wheel chair for five or ten minutes and talk to me very brightly and conscientiously. I think they looked upon this exercise as something which cheered up that poor Sir Miles Flower, and no doubt, had they been Boy Scouts, it would have been counted as the One Good Deed, or Kind Act, or whatever it is that Boy Scouts are presumed to perform daily. The Kendals, in reality, are a pre-war survival. “Nothing ever happens to us” might be taken as their motto. They frequently proclaim this negative state of affairs in the tones of aggressive resignation peculiar to themselves, rather as though they resented this absence of drama in their lives, and yet regarded it as a mark of superiority.