“I don’t want birds in my bath,” said Leslie. “Perhaps she’ll slit her throat if they don’t draw the blinds. I don’t care what happens so long as it’s interesting.”

She slip-slopped round a corner into an avenue where the neat trees were sighing and the cosy windows shone.

Hermione turned in at number thirteen, Beach-view.

“You can see the beach all right,” Leslie said, “if you got a periscope.”

We waited on the pavement opposite, under a bubbling lamp, as Hermione opened her door, and then we tip-toed across and down the gravel path and were at the back or the house, outside an uncurtained window.

Hermione’s mother, a round, friendly, owlish woman in a pinafore, was shaking a chip-pan on the kitchen stove.

“I’m hungry,” I said.

“Ssh!”

We edged to the side of the window as Hermione came into the kitchen. She was old, nearly thirty, with a mouse-brown shingle and big earnest eyes. She wore horn-rimmed spectacles and a sensible tweed costume, and a white shirt with a trim bow-tie. She looked as though she tried to look like a secretary in domestic films, who had only to remove her spectacles and have her hair cherished, and be dressed like a silk dog’s dinner, to turn into a dazzler and make her employer, Warner Baxter, gasp, woo, and marry her; but if Hermione took off her glasses, she wouldn’t be able to tell if he was Warner Baxter or the man who read the meters.

We stood so near the window, we could hear the chips spitting.

“Have a nice day in the office, dear? There’s weather,” Hermione’s mother said, worrying the chip-pan.

“What’s her name, Les?”

“Hetty.”

Everything there in the warm kitchen, from the tea-caddy and the grandmother clock, to the tabby that purred like a kettle, was good, dull, and sufficient.

“Mr. Truscott was something awful,” Hermione said as she put on slippers.

“Where’s her kimono?” Leslie said.

“Here’s a nice cup of tea,” said Hetty.

“Everything’s nice in that old hole,” said Leslie, grumbling. “Where’s the seven sisters like starlings?”

It began to rain much more heavily. It bucketed down on the black backyard, and the little comfy kennel of a house, and us, and the hidden, hushed town, where, even now, in the haven of the Marlborough, the submarine piano would be tinning “Daisy,” and the happy henna’d women squealing into their port.

Hetty and Hermione had their supper. Two drowned boys watched them enviously.

“Put a drop of Worcester on the chips,” Leslie whispered; and by God she did.

“Doesn’t anything happen anywhere?” I said, “in the whole wide world? I think the News of the World is all made up. Nobody murders no one. There isn’t any sin any more, or love, or death, or pearls and divorces and mink coats or anything, or putting arsenic in the cocoa …”