‘I can’t take half,’ said his sister decidedly, ‘because you’ll want more than ten bob for lunches and fares. You give me five bob. That will help, and leave you fifteen.’

‘And if you get in a mess you can come to me,’ said Harry.

‘My suit isn’t paid for yet.’

This suit, which was Francis’s most beloved possession next to his ukulele, weighed upon his conscience. He was naturally quite unaccustomed to using money, because boys are not taught this art at school, and because, like the other two, he had been brought up at home on the fearfully dangerous principle of alternate money-starvation and repletion. His father would give him an unexpected pound, and then no more money for six months, and his mother gave him what she could, but her own financial life was mismanaged in the same maddening way by Dr Garden, and she could not do much.

But from some forgotten, sober ancestor, or from some natural honesty, Francis had derived a horror and fear of debt, and so had Sophia. Neither felt really safe or comfortable unless they had a few shillings put by. As this feeling was united in Sophia with a love of wasting stray sixpences on secondhand copies of Matthew Arnold’s poems, bunches of violets and icecornets or roasted chestnuts she seldom felt financially at ease; while Francis, even at sixteen, was literally tormented by a desire for silkier and richer ties, finer shirts and better cut shoes, and meant to save up savagely for them, secretive and prudent as the French housewife of fiction, and then spend royally.

Thus neither managed to save money, but so far they had kept out of debt.

Harry had as much money sense as one of the red carnations which he loved to buy for his girls. His tastes were calmly lavish. It never occurred to him that he might save money by not riding in taxis, treating acquaintances to double whiskies or buying flowers for women.

Sometimes he had pounds, borrowed or earned; sometimes he had no money at all. Neither state exalted or depressed him … at present. He used money as he used the air he breathed, the ground he walked on; and was adorably generous with it.

He disliked being unwashed, but otherwise he was that rare bird, an unselfconscious bohemian. Francis and Sophia were not. A tidying, constructive, saving little bourgeois streak ran through their natures, and saved them from the pit of financial misery.

‘Old Bartle can wait for his money,’ said Harry tranquilly now. ‘I owe him fifteen, apart from yours. He expects not to be paid. All tailors do. God, who’s he, that I should send him any money? Old Edward says the same. Tailors deserve what they get.’

They were comfortably assembled in the sitting room, Sophia on the lowest stair of the tiny flight which was closed in by a door opening into the living room, as stairs often are in old cottages, Francis sitting upright in a fearfully uncomfortable old wooden chair which Sophia had bought second hand for seven and sixpence, and Harry lying on the big old sofa which was one of the things they had kept among Mrs Carmody’s furniture.