‘It was that evening when she and Mrs Alleyn drove down to the chemist’s and brought back the children’s medicine. Cedric and Paul and Aunt Pauline were dining out, I’d got a cold and cried off. I’d been doing the drawing-room flowers for Aunt Milly and I was tidying up in a sink-room where the vases are kept. It’s down some steps off the passage from the hall to the library. Grandfather had had some orchids sent for Sonia and she came to get them. I must say she looked lovely. Sort of sparkling, with furs pulled up round her face. She swept in and asked in that ghastly voice for what she called her bokay, and when she saw it was a spray of absolutely heavenly orchids she said: “Quite small, isn’t it? Not reely much like flowers, are they?” Everything she’d done and everything she meant at Ancreton seemed to sort of ooze out of her and everything I felt about her suddenly boiled over in me. I’d got a cold and was feeling pretty ghastly, anyway. I absolutely blazed. I said some pretty frightful things about even a common little gold-digger having the decency to be grateful. I said I thought her presence in the house was an insult to all of us, and I supposed that when she’d bamboozled Grandfather into marrying her she’d amuse herself with her frightful boy-friends until he was obliging enough to die and leave her his money. Yes, Mummy, I know it was awful, but it just steamed out of me and I couldn’t stop it.’

‘Oh, my poor Fen!’ Jenetta Ancred murmured.