“Well, I haven’t been strong enough.”

Janet’s voice was quietly determined.

“Now you are strong enough, do you want the job or don’t you? You were offered it first. I’m not butting in if you’re going to take it.”

Sheila looked stubbornly in front of her, and then with a cry which had a real ring of suffering in it, she put her head in her hands and burst into tears.

“Goodness!” thought Janet. “We are a lot of cry babies in this house. We’re like Jo and Beth in Little Women. Whatever’s come over us!” Unwillingly she found herself pitying Sheila.

“Come on. Don’t cry. What’s the matter?”

“It isn’t fair!” Sheila wailed. “I ought not to be shut up in a little village being expected to be a governess. The best years of my life are passing and no . . . nobody cares.”

Maggie laughed.

“Don’t be a little goose. You’ve got plenty of best years left at nineteen. It was you who chose Worsingfold, you know.”

“But I didn’t know how things would turn out. I thought it would all be so different.”

Janet stared at Sheila’s heaving shoulders.

“What on earth did you hope would happen here?”

“Never you mind. But I did. And here I am with nobody to see me except a lot of cows.”

Maggie and Janet, though realizing Sheila’s grief to be real, could not help laughing. Maggie patted Sheila’s curls.

“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?”