Sophia went into the bathroom, which was disagreeably moist and full of wet towels, and made a discovery.

‘Oh god, have you fused the geyser?’

‘I’m afraid I may have. Something snapped in a queer way with a blue spark. I’m terribly sorry, my dear. I’ll pay for it.’

‘It’s not that, but I do wish you’d be more careful. It’s too sickening, Francis. This is the second time in three months. And it takes days to get it mended and costs fifteen and six and now I can’t have a hot wash and I’m coal-black.’

‘I’ll put a kettle on for you,’ and he obligingly did.

‘Thank you. I’m sorry I was cross, but I do wish you would turn it off in the order it says – first two turns to the left, then the water, and then the last turn to the right. You will do it all at once, and then turn on the water. That’s what fuses it.’

‘Nonsense. It doesn’t make any difference.’

‘Yes it does. The man said so when he came to repair it.’

‘After you asked him if it did, I suppose.’

Sophia was silent. She felt too cross, too tired, too worried about Francis’s thinness and Harry’s increasing passion for parties and beer, and the uncertainty of their future, to go on with their argument.

Oh, why was it not possible to live from day to day, taking life as it came, without anticipating misfortunes which might never arrive? Why was it not possible to pray, and put her burdens into the hands of God? Some people did, but she could not. She had been taught her prayers as a little girl by her mother, but she had stopped praying when she was sixteen for what had seemed to her good reasons, and now she was alone. She must go on, and manage everything by herself.

But after she had washed in the kettleful of hot water and gone upstairs to her bedroom and leaned out of the window to stare at the deepening evening, she felt better.

She looked into the may tree, which so strangely had one branch of white flowers amid its red ones, and her spirit lifted gently, exactly as though she had sighed with relief.

It was untrue to say that she was alone, when the sight of a star or a tree could give her such peace; and she believed that nothing could ever take this comfort away from her.

She decided to cheer herself up by putting on her new black silk dress, with a delicate breadth of white lace round the low neck, and it looked surprisingly well. The piece of lace was real; there was a yard of it and it had cost seventeen and sixpence of the article money.

Then she combed her straight fair fringe and the hair which just came below her ears, and tucked the hair and some lavender water behind those same ears, and went rustling downstairs, rather pleased with herself.