She did try for a month to keep accounts, but she never could make what she had spent balance with what she had had, and this depressed her exceedingly. And she was always losing the little penny notebooks which she bought to keep her accounts in and having to buy new ones, and forgetting to put items down and worrying about where that elevenpence halfpenny had gone.

She was also handicapped by a strong secret feeling that it did not really matter a hoot where the elevenpence halfpenny had gone, when once it had gone. She persuaded herself that it mattered, but this was very different from having a fervent feeling that it mattered.

As Freud triumphantly says, ‘There are no mistakes’ – by which the good old man presumably means that if one forgets to do one’s teeth, one does not wish to do one’s teeth. So it was with Sophia and the penny notebooks. She forgot them because she did not want to remember them; and the same reasoning applied to the elevenpence halfpenny.

But her bad management still did not lead her into debt. It merely meant that she had a continual sensation, which was so strong as to be almost physical, of anxiety, confusion and distress about the lack of orderliness and prudence in the life they were leading. This was not shared by her brothers. They were agreeably lulled by the fact that there was always money coming in and parties being given. They did not seem to realize the awful fragility of the economic structure upon which their pleasures rested.

‘We might all starve. Easily. All of us,’ Sophia would sometimes say.

‘Oh nonsense. People don’t. You’re getting melodramatic and Garden-y,’ said Harry. ‘Marriot wouldn’t let us starve. Besides, we shall have the practice money soon.’

‘We haven’t got it yet, and when we have, it won’t last for ever. What about when we’re old?’

‘Well, we aren’t old.’ He made a calculation. ‘We’re only about sixty years old between the three of us.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘Yes we are. Count up and see.’

She was much cheered by this piece of arithmetic; though she did not quite know why.

Apart from the disagreeable feeling of anxiety and insecurity about the future, and her apprehensions about Francis’s delicate health and Harry’s increasing love of gaiety, she was enjoying the summer.

It was delicious to return each evening to the quiet little valley amid the gorgeous summer spaces of the Heath. She knew every tree and path, and had some memory hovering about each.

There was the tree whose thick bough hung over a pool of dark water, in the hollow near the famous fir trees painted by Constable; the very same bough from which Harry had dipped the screaming Celia into the pond, when they were both eight years old. There was the excitingly dark and smelly pipe which conducted the waters of a little stream in the valley near the viaduct. The pipe was big enough for a child to walk through, if the child did not mind stooping, darkness, smells, echoes and mud, and here on a never-to-be-forgotten morning had Sophia, Francis, Harry and Celia bravely clambered through the pipe, encouraging each other with shrieks, and remaining for the rest of the day slightly drunk with their own daring. They still reminded one another of it with complacency, now that they were grown up.