‘And what do you propose to do?’ asked Mr Custance, when it seemed he must surrender.

Mrs Custance watched her own hands cutting a piece of recalcitrant crust.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I will tell you. What I would like to do is to ask Miss Docker to accept’ – she chose the word with particular care – ‘to come and live in our little glassed-in veranda-room. She could repay us by helping with the chores. Not rigidly,’ she hastened to add. ‘I would not make a slave of anyone. Otherwise she would be quite free. And is in such demand. She is always hemming and mending, and sitting with the old or young. We shall hardly notice she is here.’

Ted Custance freed his teeth. It had to be admitted he was not so well acquainted with Miss Docker. He was a silent, grizzled man, above all suspicious of the human animal.

‘No one else in Sarsaparilla,’ Mrs Custance continued to persuade, ‘can equal Miss Docker at doing good.’

Mr Custance made a tired noise through his moustache.

‘Provided it is not you,’ he said, ‘who are having a fly at doing good, I shall not worry all that much.’

Mrs Custance blushed, for it was her secret wish to justify herself in the eyes of God, and this, she suspected, promised to be her greatest opportunity.

‘Oh, Ted!’ she said.

Her blush made her look younger, not that she was old, somewhere midway. Mentally she went and sat in his lap, and began to stroke his roughish skin. She had never done such a thing, of course, but would wait for those occasions when he reached out, then she would submit to whatever Ted decided on.

Now they were both a little chilled by apprehension.

‘We must not expect our lives to remain unchanged,’ she ventured.

Ted Custance grunted.

Their lives. Hitherto they had remained intact. No children, thanks to an absentminded surgeon. Could have sued, I expect, said Ted. But they hadn’t. They were too decent. Besides, all the embarrassment. The reporters. They had continued to live, in the one envelope, as it were, which nobody had bothered to tear, because no one was sufficiently interested.

‘Oh dear, I am really quite excited!’ Mrs Custance exclaimed in a rush. ‘At last we are doing something !’

He did not answer. Could it be that her husband was selfish? She looked at the hard skin round his nails. Ted Custance was so handy he could never get his nails cleaned up by Monday, to start counting out the notes again at the Wales.

The same Sunday, as the light was growing a deeper green, she called to him:

‘Ted? What are you doing?’

He did not answer till she went to see. Then he said:

‘I was sticking up some sort of shelf for her to put her bloody books on.’

Then he was not selfish, and she was riotous with gratitude.

‘How clever!’ she said, as though she had just that moment discovered.