Somebody’s going to be the mug.

She heard him talking through the towel. It was meant to be funny, she knew, he knew, and funny it was though you didn’t let on. This was part of the Barnett technique. Privately, Mrs Barnett was given to thinking that Joe was a one.

Go on, Joe! said Mrs Barnett. You’re always ready to believe the worst.

He came out looking rather solemn, still mottled by the cold water, but pleased with his contributed repartee. Actually Mrs Barnett was wrong. Though this was also part of the technique. For Joe was frequently sold a pup, and once he was sold a literal one, the liver spaniel that became a hound, and went off finally in a fit. Joe Barnett liked to believe. He was born with a faith in faith. He liked to believe in people. He liked to smile at a face in the bus, if he liked the look of that face, but often enough he was deceived, by more than an appearance in a bus. Finding himself deceived, that simplicity didn’t pay, he continued all the same to put his faith in simplicity. He moved slowly. He moved in a world of images and facts, propelled by his own conviction that, even if something had gone wrong, man in himself was right enough.

Julia said Joe was a bit too soft. He was full of fancy notions. But secretly she admired him. Not that she would have let on. With Mrs Barnett she was agreed on that.

Hello, Auntie, hello, Joe, Julia called when she came in. Sundays found them sitting in the kitchen, or when she came in late of an evening, she called out through the banisters.

Julia Fallon and the Barnetts enjoyed each other’s company, best of all on a Sunday, when Julia arrived after lunch, when the steam in Mrs Barnett’s kitchen rose to quite its highest pitch, and a bit of music on the wireless was in tune with the comfort of a cup. Julia sat with her legs apart, plump, and deliberate, and questioning. Julia Fallon liked to believe, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t believe what the wireless, what the paper said. There was no fact in which she could believe that had not touched on her own life. She shook her head, amazingly, over earthquakes in Japan. Did you ever! said Julia Fallon. Even so, with suspicion in her voice.

She was suspicious of people, she was suspicious of things, most emphatically she was suspicious of her own emotions, that none the less tied her mysteriously to Clerkenwell and Ebury Street. Through her mind moved the people there, intermingling and yet distinct, protected by her own peculiar insight into the suspicious motives of the world. Respectful of the people she defended in their absence, she was somewhat contemptuous of them in their presence. As if they were her own making, as if she were responsible. But Julia was mostly very content surveying her own works of art.