Harry switched off first one sitting room light, then the second. The sinister glow of the dying fire instantly transformed the room to one in a witch’s house, on whose dark, rich red air the back of the shell-sofa rode glimmering in its gracious curve.

Francis dropped the latch of the little door which closed in the stairs; and in sleepy happy silence they went up to their beds.

CHAPTER X

The economic machine is like a claw which contracts every morning about nine o’clock and pulls its victims into the places where they work, and relaxes every evening about six to release them. Their warm, variable human lives are lived outside the clutch of the claw, lopped and ruthlessly shaped so that they do not interfere with the victim’s response to the contraction-and-relaxation system; and though life within the claw’s grip usually insists on wriggling about and colouring the claw’s scales with the rose red of love and the purple of drama in a reassuring manner, there are nevertheless some actions which it is almost impossible to perform within the claw’s grip.

Sophia, for example, found it possible to write poetry during idle intervals at the Canadian News Agency (known as the C.N.A.), but she did not find it possible to make a cushion cover or to bring the bathroom shelf to the office with her and finish painting it bright blue.

The process of settling into the cottage was therefore done in bits, before breakfast and after supper and at weekends; and it was really painful to Sophia to drag herself away from the cottage at a quarter to nine every morning, when she knew that there were still so many things crying to be done and that someone ought to be at home.

The coal, for example. The firm which sold the coal simply could not be brought to believe that there existed a cottage in the Vale where no one was at home from a quarter to nine in the morning to half past six at night. It was nonsense; it was a try-on; whoever it was was doing it on purpose, and the coal firm knew better than to give way to such caprices.

So they sent coal (it was only two hundredweight, to add insult to injury, for this was all that the cottage’s cellar would hold), for three days running at eleven in the morning, disregarding Sophia’s frantic telephone messages, and then would send it no more.

The same difficulty occurred with the laundry, which, like some puckish sprite, some coy elf of the dells, could never say exactly at what time it would call, but preferred to pop in winsomely whenever ‘the boy was down that way,’ which might be at any time during the day.

Only the milkman and the postman were reliable; and Sophia, Harry and Francis got quite hysterically fond of them both because they always came at the same time, and left nice, fresh milk and interesting letters instead of dirty bits of paper, saying sullenly ‘Laundry called’ or prim, starchy cards announcing that a representative of the Gas Light and Coke Company had been there and, finding no one at home, had gone affronted away.