Juley told herself that this was a happy arrangement for Joanna during Georgie’s absence. The two boys, now fourteen and twelve, lived apart in a world of their own. School claimed them all day, and lessons most of the evening; and on Saturdays they went off to football, returning mud-coated, and arguing about “half-backs” and “scrums,” “fouls” and “forwards.” But in reality it was Juley herself, in dire need of sympathy, who fastened on Mabel when she came. Mabel was nothing if not sympathetic, and her aunt poured into her ready ears much that had better have remained unspoken, while in return Mabel imparted many of the confidences she had at various times received from Georgie and Joanna. Juley, already admiring her niece’s choice of a profession, was impressed by a maturity in the girl quite lacking in her own daughters. She attributed it to the fact that Mabel was an orphan, and she rejoiced in the good influence Mabel was bound to exercise over Joanna, whose bedroom she was to share.

IV

The remarkable thing was that Joanna, receptive as she was at this time, remained immune to this same influence. Seven years earlier both she and Georgie had taken a passive pleasure in Mabel’s fertile invention in the field of childish indecencies; but in their later girlhood they had provided a disappointing market for her primitive ancedotes. Georgie in fact had warned her sister that there were others like their cousin at the school in Bristol, and that all that kind of thing was detestable as one grew older. And now Mabel at nineteen, returning to the charge with a smattering of physiology, a great store of bald tales, and some grotesque confidences of the hospital, found Joanna unresponsive.