MRS LEE-MITTISON BROUGHT THEIR Continental Daily Mail down to the lounge with her and sat on it. She did not wish to read it herself, but did not dare put it down beside her because she knew that someone would come up and ask just to glance at it – people so soon lose their delicacy in these little matters. They would rumple it up and take the creases out: Mrs Lee-Mittison knew so few people who could look at a paper without rumpling it. Whenever anybody strolled through the lounge with the air of exhausted resources peculiar to this half-hour before lunch-time, she knitted faster than ever and looked unconscious. Life had developed in Mrs Lee-Mittison a fine set of jungle instincts; she could apprehend and be rigid before, looking over her glasses, she had acutally discerned with her usual mildness the approach of the predatory.

‘I do wonder if there is any news this morning,’ said somebody (one of the talkers), drifting about with her wool-work and looking distastefully at each of the chairs. ‘There seems to me to have been no news for a long time.’

‘I do wonder,’ said Mrs Lee-Mittison truthfully. She did not so much as glance at a headline before Herbert had done so – Herbert was upstairs taking off his boots.

‘It’s very odd, nothing definite seems to happen at all – I mean, of course, there is always Politics, but that goes on and on and on, so one begins to lose interest. Especially out here where one cannot see what effect they are having, though one does doubt really whether they do have any effect.’

‘There’s been the pit disaster.’

‘Miners,’ said the lady distastefully, ‘always seem to be getting into trouble. One is so sorry, but it is difficult to go on and on sympathizing, especially out here where one gets on just as well without them – they burn wood, you know, and do everything else by electricity.’

Mrs Lee-Mittison began to count her stitches audibly. ‘Do excuse me,’ she said, ‘but I am turning the heel – Oh, good morning, Mr Milton. Back from the Villa?’

Mr Milton, looking nicer, more unconcerned than when he had first come out, and burnt to a pleasant brick-colour, bowed and sat down at one of the writing-tables. ‘Letters to write before lunch,’ he explained politely, unscrewing the top of his pen. It did not yet seem to him courteous to ignore the ladies he found in the lounge without making some excuse for himself; life, however, had to be lived somewhere, so he had acquired the trick of explaining parenthetically. ‘Chapter to finish.’ ‘Must keep up one’s philosophy.’ ‘Ever read Jacks?’ ‘Working out his beastly acrostic,’ or (showing a bundle of letters) ‘Must just see what my friends ‘ve got to say …’