“Europe isn’t Mambles,” she said with some sharpness, and she offered Elise London; but the mere thought of London petrified Elise. She had a dread of its indiscriminate, sophisticated rabble, its precedences and pitfalls, its stiff old families and their lax young offshoots. The life of a social circle had always petrified Elise, but Hermione, even when she was almost dead, thought of people in circles. Mercifully Papa said that when Elise wanted London she could go to Harrod’s Stores; he wasn’t going to live in a place where you could get everything, including air raids, at first hand when he didn’t need to. “If you want to be quick,” he explained, “you go to a quick country and you naturally take the quickest place in it. But if you want to be slow, you go to a slow country and you go to the slowest place in it. I’ll hunt about till I find the slowest place in England.” At length Papa had found Mambles. A very few country people called on the Bretts slowly and as if it didn’t matter. They talked about wasps, and how the best plan was to get the milkman to bring your coal from the station on the milk cart. They were chiefly old ladies who called, and they seemed quite satisfied with being old ladies, indeed they made Elise feel as if she ought to be rather apologetic for being so young, but as if they would agree to overlook it on account of her not being at all noisy. Elise was very quiet. She had no American accent, and only the faintest interrogative note at the end of her sentences, which sounded submissive. In her loveliness and her quietness with her enormous expectations and her extraordinarily small claims, Elise won a place for herself in the neighbourhood which, if she had known it, was as rare as it was enviable. Nobody who didn’t play games had ever been so liked before.—When John came in at the window Elise looked up at him over her embroidery as if it were his usual time. Her eyes were very wide and blue, as blue as the azure delphiniums in front of the drawing-room window. They were set some distance apart, the shape of her small face was oval, and her little mouth was tenderly curved and very sensitive. It was without humour. “It must have been very hot in London,” Elise said gently. “Is Papa all right in the garden?” “It’s heavenly to be here,” said John, “and anywhere that isn’t here is as bad as London. I had to go first to Mr. Brett, but I came as soon as I could. Yes, he’s all right. He says he can just sit in the sun without an overcoat, so he expects to read in the paper that the heat is tropical.” “I hope the tea isn’t cold,” said Elise, devoting herself to the tea table. John didn’t want any tea, but he watched her with fascinated eyes.