And of course he went over to the Hall as often as he got a chance, which was about once a month at best, poor man. Why, she wouldn’t wonder if he hadn’t originally encouraged Gerald and Tommy to come over so often to Gatesley because he wrongly imagined that it was an easy step from that to being invited to the Hall itself. Poor old Ram’s B.

And what did Lily think about it all? Did she know? Surely. But Lily might be capable of knowing or not knowing anything. And if she were told she would probably be very incredulous, and then a little shocked, and then faintly, rather unkindly interested—as though she’d heard about some curious new disease. Yes, a woman of Lily’s sort could be exceedingly cruel.

They all started to sing the first verse of “Abide with Me.” Mary began to feel stiff, and realised that she was very bored with this service. Why couldn’t they have had something much shorter? She wondered what the account of it would sound like in the local paper. She was quite sure that the hymns would have been “very sympathetically rendered.” Would there be a list of the principal “floral tributes”? Poor Ram’s B must be hating theirs. It was horribly awkward to carry, to avoid crushing the lilies or letting the moss moult or getting pricked by the wire. She daren’t look at his face again.

And really, thought Mary, I suppose it’s hateful even to think of laughing here, at this service, for a hundred and three quite decent little men who all got killed stopping Germans flying the two-headed eagle on the Conservative Club. Yes, I do feel that. No, I don’t, she revolted. After all, that’s only snobbery. All this cult of dead people is only snobbery. I’m afraid I believe that. So much so, that the attitude which we’re all subscribing to at this moment seems to me not only false but, yes, actually wicked. Living people are better than dead ones. And we’ve got to get on with life.

The truth is, thought Mary, I want my lunch. And my corns ache dreadfully. And I despise men. Almost from the first, she knew, there’d been other women. Desmond scarcely concealed it after being detected once or twice. As he’d said, he had friends in London. Had she minded? She could scarcely remember. Yes, very much at the beginning. But soon she was used to it. She began to realise that she wasn’t the only one who’d been treated in the same way. And there were the children. And the Chelsea people, whom she’d disliked and mistrusted so much at first, and who turned out to be quite decent and very kind. And there was her little house which she’d loved so dearly.