But Miss Ulick, Miss Bates, Miss Cannard and Miss Forbes still thought of the three young Gardens as tragic figures, and were kinder to Francis than ever.

So he was happy in his job, and could therefore forget about it when he was not there and devote all his spare time and energy to finding the girl, the adoring and quiescent girl with perfect teeth.

For he had not yet found her. But he was not in so forlorn and girl-less a state as he had been two months ago, because Harry was steadily collecting a posse or charm of girls, young actresses who did crowd work and occasional small parts at Elstree and Twickenham, whom he asked back to the cottage after the show, in twos and threes (but three was not a popular number, somehow) and Francis came in for some of their favours.

He kissed them, for instance. He was surprised to find how easy it was to kiss them, and how alike they all tasted. They looked like brilliantly enamelled and exotic little flowers, so fragile that a kiss would probably blur their bloom, as the sheen on a petal can be spoiled by a breath, and they seemed as unapproachable as queens because of their beauty. But Francis took no notice of these impressions reported by his eyes and his youthful inexperience. He made straight for the exotic flower queens, quietly and masterfully, and kissed them. They liked it; and when Harry told them with laughter that Francis was not quite seventeen, they looked at Francis with respect, not with shame because they had allowed a kid just out of school to get fresh with them. From the superior peak of their eighteen, nineteen or twenty years, the flower queens looked kindly upon Francis and prophesied that he would do well.

All this was rather deplorable. It is possible that Francis was a horrid boy. But his upbringing had not taught him to be afraid of kissing young women. He had been familiar with the idea of doing so from an early age, just as Harry had; they had heard jokes from their father, and had there not been the incident with Miss Leadlay which Sophia had seen through the sitting room window and reported to her brothers? It was really impossible for the Garden boys to look upon young women as unbodied angels and fear to approach them. Their upbringing had made them, so far as one can be in extreme youth, realists.

But Francis dreamed, nevertheless, of love. So did Harry, in a different way. Francis soon became bored by the little flower queens. ‘Nice kid but dumb,’ Francis would say of some gorgeous girl. ‘God, isn’t she marvellous!’ Harry would retort, in a dazed voice like that of a man who wades slowly through swathes of flowers with bells of blue and yellow dragging their showers of dizzying pollen over his eyelids and lips. On he went, lifting a petal here, a tendril there, and seeking for perfect love, ultimate romance.