And one evening while Sophia was away, Harry had driven over to Aunt Grace’s in a car with another young man and a girl, and they had taken Angela out to some dreadful night-club and brought her home at three in the morning the worse for liquor.

Sophia was reluctantly compelled to grin at this picture.

‘Aunt Grace shouldn’t have let her go. She ought to have known what would happen.’

‘Your aunt naturally assumed that Harry would be responsible for his cousin.’

But then my aunt is an ass, thought Sophia while the tide of words flowed over her. She could imagine silly Aunt Grace’s excitement at the arrival of the two lordly young gods in the car, and Angela hurrying into a bright pink frock and repeating how thrilled she was, and Aunt Grace watching them drive off with all kinds of fond and foolish hopes. It was silly but it was also sad. And whether Angela had enjoyed her evening or no, they ought not to have let her get drunk, because there was heredity, in the shape of Uncle Oliver, to remember. There was no harm in Harry showing himself off to the relations if he could not resist so doing, but he ought to remember heredity …

‘And apparently this young man, this Gorales or whatever his name is, insulted Angela.’

‘How?’

‘He … I understand that he kissed her. Not at all in a nice way, Sophia. Yes.’

I’ll bet she liked it though, thought Sophia. All Gardens (except, apparently, herself) liked kissing and its inevitable developments. They pretended to be shocked by it, but they liked it all the same. Too much.

But the Angela scandal, though very important and shocking, was as nothing beside the two thousand pounds scandal; and altogether Uncle Preston was on the telephone for nearly three-quarters of an hour. Sophia refused to discuss it. She would only say ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ and make non-committal statements; and in the midst of one of these came a precise knock at the front door, and there was Mr Pell, punctual to the second.

Sophia hastily abandoned Uncle Preston, but not before he had made her promise to go and see him on Sunday, the following day, to discuss matters.

Mr Pell was large, square, and owlish. He had made the mistake of bringing Jimmy Barrell with him, who, to Sophia’s great surprise and pleasure, rose to the occasion and greeted her as a friend. This did not soothe Mr Pell.

‘The dog knows you, I see,’ he said with the gloomiest suspicion in his voice as he stepped over the threshold. He implied that Jimmy Barrell had often chased Sophia over the Heath with strings of stolen sausages.

‘Yes,’ said Sophia crisply. ‘Do sit down, won’t you. What do you want to see me about?’

Now Mr Pell chiefly wanted to see Sophia and the inside of the cottage because curiosity was the breath of his nostrils and the reason why he disapproved of everybody’s goings-on. Disapproval gave you a right to poke and interfere and find out; it gave these actions the lustre of duty rather than the meretricious glitter of pleasure. But of course he could not say so. Indeed, he did not himself know what his true motives were. He thought that they were a sense of duty and the desire to assist his neighbours.