“Cheer up, child, and eat your supper. As a matter of fact you and I have been thinking exactly the same thing. It’s time you got away and took a job, you . . .”

Sheila’s head shot up.

“Now! Why should I? I’ve put up with this dead and alive hole for months; it would be idiotic to go now.” Maggie placidly sipped her tea.

“Why, dear? Do you mean because it’s summer time? But wars don’t wait because it’s summer. I think you ought to go into one of the services.”

“Me!”

Janet lost her temper.

“Yes, you! Why not? You sound as if there was something special about you which kept you from working like an ordinary person.”

Sheila turned on her.

“So there is. You’d know it fast enough if I’d gone on the pictures, and was as famous as Vivien Leigh.”

Anger died in Janet, to be replaced, as it had so often been before, by a feeling of helplessness. You couldn’t treat Sheila as an ordinary person, she was wrapped round in an armour-plated sheath of belief in herself, in her beauty and charm, and it cut her off from common everyday people as if she were actually of different clay. She finished her egg before she spoke, and then used a quiet, reasoning voice.

“You don’t want to stay here doing nothing, do you?”

“Where, as you say, nobody but the cows see you,” Maggie added.

Sheila looked from Janet to her mother with a hunted expression.

“Of course I don’t. But it won’t go on. I mean the war might finish, or—or anything.”

“Even if it did, which at the moment doesn’t seem very likely, I shouldn’t think Worsingfold would be a riot of gaiety.”

“The quickest way to finish the war is for everybody to get down to working,” Maggie pointed out.

Sheila looked more hunted than ever.

“Of course, if you’re going to drive me out.”

Maggie laid aside her egg-cup, and helped herself to some jam.

“Don’t talk nonsense, dear. You always understood that you had to work for your living.”

“Only for six months, and then I was going into pictures.”

“Yes, if there hadn’t been a war,” Maggie agreed.

“If you hadn’t made that idiotic fuss and made me learn to type, I’d have been in pictures before the war started.”

“Don’t let’s have all that again,” Maggie pleaded. “The point is the war did come. I don’t know what the position of actresses is, but I feel sure only the very high-ups are allowed to go on working; the rest, together with all you other girls, will sooner or later be called up like the men, and only fair too, if you ask me.”

“Then Jan will have to go too. She won’t be able to stop round in the country teaching one kid.”