Ursula felt a womanly compassion and was silly enough to express it. ‘I can’t bear to think of you toiling and moiling with dustpans, Horace. It’s no way for you to live. Besides, when all’s said and done, you’re only fighting a losing battle. Wouldn’t it be wiser to say goodbye to the house before it’s turned into nothing but a burden and a misery? Part friends with it, you know.’

‘I’ll part friends with it when the time comes,’ he said. ‘And that will be when I come out of it feet foremost. Losing battle, eh? Loss of value, that’s what you mean. Nothing to me! I shan’t be here when it’s put up to auction.’

‘Horace, you really are intolerable.’

‘In that case, you needn’t suffer when you think of me moiling with dustpans. Shall we have lunch?’223

Even the turkey figs were soured for her under his inflexible hospitality, and after lunch she drove herself away in such a fury that she forgot her gloves. Returning for them a few minutes later, she saw her pillows being vehemently shaken from the porch room window. Absorbed in purification, Horace did not notice her brief return.

‘She upsets me,’ he grumbled to himself. ‘Damn her, she upsets me! A woman like that would wind an elephant.’

He was indeed horribly breathless. His legs shook under him, and his upper lip felt as though a skin of plaster of Paris had been laid over it. When all traces of Ursula had been removed, he went and sat under the lime trees to cool off. Fatigued, he sat too long, and caught a chill on his liver.

Ursula continued to visit him. Each time, Horace foiled her good intentions. But it was always at cost to himself, for either he would buy something ostentatious in order to flout her, and this would discompose his finances, or, in a fervour of self-sufficiency, he would clean the house from head to foot and become perfectly exhausted. This was the worse; by pinching and scraping one can catch up with a brace of pheasants, but every inroad on his physical resources mortgaged more of his independence to the fear of bodily decay. Privately of the opinion that by dint of hard work and spare living Horace would live to be a nuisance at ninety, Ursula did not immediately understand why Basil, the gardener, should write to her, on a picture postcard, ‘Hop you can soon Come Down as it get a Bitt much for me.’ The doctor’s telegram was more explicit: Horace had pneumonia.224

Shaken by illness and further shaken by the up-to-date brutality of the drugs used in curing him (till now, his pharmacopoeia had not stretched much beyond calomel and ammoniated quinine), Horace clung to Ursula when he was convalescent, and relapsed every time she spoke of going away. Her presence screened him from his thoughts. She stayed and was kind to him—at first, rather fractiously and as a matter of duty; afterwards, with an amiability which was not like the usual Ursula. The usual Ursula had always blown bracingly on anything like nervous fears. The new Ursula was sympathetic to them, sympathetic and serene. With a cool, autumnal serenity, she spoke of making the best of things, of adapting oneself to old age, of the tapering pleasures that remain when health and strength have gone. And from time to time she told him about friends of hers, friends who were blind, or paralysed, or rigid with arthritis, or careful hosts to a thrombosis, and all of them almost penniless, and quite forsaken except for occasional visits from Ursula, and who yet managed to be wonderfully happy in a quiet way. After a month of this regimen, she took Horace for a little drive, and on the way back she pointed to a small house on the outskirts of the village, a house with a good hedge round its garden, bright windows facing south, and an air of sturdy well-being. ‘I always think that’s such a dear little house,’ she said.