Barbara glanced at her. Huia laughed richly, lifting her short upper lip. ‘I shall never understand them,’ Barbara thought. Aloud she said: ‘Mightn’t it be better if you just pretended not to hear when Mr Questing starts those—starts being—starts teasing you?’

‘He makes me very angry,’ said Huia, and suddenly she became childishly angry, flashing her eyes and stamping her foot. ‘Silly ass,’ she said.

‘But you’re not really angry.’

Huia looked out of the corners of her eyes at Barbara, pulled an equivocal grimace, and tittered.

‘Don’t forget your cap and apron,’ said Barbara, and left the sweltering kitchen for the dining-room.

III

Wai-ata-tapu Hostel was a one-storeyed wooden building shaped like an E with the middle stroke missing. The dining-room occupied the centre of the long section separating the kitchen and serveries from the boarders’ bedrooms, which extended into the east wing. The west wing, private to the Claires, was a series of cramped cabins and a tiny sitting-room. The house had been designed by Colonel Claire on army-hut lines with an additional flavour of sanatorium. There were no passages, and all the rooms opened on a partially covered-in verandah. The inside walls were of yellowish-red oiled wood. The house smelt faintly of linseed oil and positively of sulphur. An observant visitor might have traced in it the history of the Claires’ venture. The framed London Board-of-Trade posters, the chairs and tables painted, not very capably, in primary colours, the notices in careful script, the archly reproachful rhyme sheets in bathrooms and lavatories, all spoke of high beginnings. Broken passe-partout, chipped paint and fly-blown papers hanging by single drawing pins traced unmistakably a gradual but inexorable decline. The house was clean but unexpectedly so, tidy but not orderly, and only vaguely uncomfortable. The front wall of the dining-room was built of glass panels designed to slide in grooves, but devilishly inclined to jam. These looked across the verandah to the hot springs themselves.