He could not analyse his feelings clearly, but he knew that he hated this money and wanted to get rid of it.

It was tainted by those dark frightening times he had known as a little boy, when he would hide under the kitchen table with the cloth pulled down to make a tent, and tremble with terror at the noise of his father’s angry shouts upstairs and the slamming doors; and with those awful, helpless moments in which he had seen his mother, the source of all comfort and peace, crying as he cried when he hurt himself, and he had been held close to her warm, wet cheeks so that he was shaken by her crying.

It was all beastly, all the past; miserable and damned boring, and when he thought of how his father had worked for this same money, he wanted even more to chuck it away and buy a good time with it. The work which had made it, amongst dirt and disease and pain, had helped to kill his father whom he had loved. Father knew how to spend, he never saved money like a damned old maid, and I’m going to do the same, decided Harry.

He telephoned Sophia at the C.N.A. when he got home and told her the news.

‘Oh. Good,’ said Sophia without enthusiasm. She did not feel any.

Now that this fairy-tale event had happened, which they had talked about with such anticipatory pleasure six months ago, it seemed oddly flat. It did not seem to be real money, like the fifteen pound notes which were in her handbag and would pay for her holiday in France. It was still phantasmal, as it had been six months ago.

About four o’clock, when the office boy was making the tea, Sophia drearily realized that the two thousand pounds would probably lead to new troubles. Harry would want to spend it. The elders of the tribe would want him to invest it. It would mean even more expensive dissipations with Juan and temporarily remove all sense of proportion and responsibility from Harry’s mind.

She looked so worried and unhappy that Miss Candy noticed it.

‘Something on the old mind?’

‘Have I not! My eldest brother’s just got hold of two thousand pounds.’

Even thus she felt a gloomy pride in the largeness of the sum.

‘Honestly, my dear? I mean, did he come by it honest?’

‘Oh yes. It’s the money for the practice. You remember … I told you.’

‘Of course. But, my dear, how too wizard! You’ll be able to have the most marvellous time while it lasts, and mind you get a hundred or two out of him for yourself. You enjoy yourself while you’re young. One isn’t young for long. Up to twenty-five it’s marvellous and then everything goes phut and the old wrinkles begin a massed attack, so to speak.’

‘I do enjoy myself in my own way, but I can’t when I know this money will be chucked about like water, and none of it saved for our old age.’