AFTER that Sophy Brent came to visit me nearly every day. She irritated me unbearably most of the time: she smoked incessantly and never used an ashtray; she followed me into the kitchen while I made tea or coffee or supper and helped herself to the children’s orange juice; she made a great hit with Flora, who would hang around her for hours and refer to her lovingly as “Sofa”; and she was always talking about David and asking me where he was. I could not decide why she chose my company, although I realized that nobody else paid her very much attention. She was very unfortunately placed, at the age of nineteen, in that she was straight out of drama school and in this, her second job, she was required to play a leading part in a company of fairly distinguished and experienced actors. They would not have liked her much even if she had been good, and as from all accounts she was not good they took every opportunity to run her down. I think she thought that I was the only person around who was both disconnected from the theatre and tolerably smart: to associate with me was not, at any rate, to step down the scale. And for my part, although I was irritated by her I did not dislike her: there was something genuinely disarming in her effusiveness, and she had such physical charm that with me she could get away with anything. She was nice to have round, like flowers or a bowl of fruit. And I did not find her childish, as the others claimed to find her: I saw in her the beginnings of some rare high verbal duplicity. There was nothing wrong with her, I maternally thought, that time would not put right. It annoyed me that I should see so much of her, but she was not the first silly girl that I had seen much of.