Miss St John had never known what it is to be a slave. Britons never do. She was therefore unaware that her feelings at this piece of news were slavish. She told herself that it was grossly inconsiderate of the Potters, and that the Frys would certainly be a change for the worse. Once or twice she varied the assessment by hoping that the Frys might be a change for the better. The hope was quite as slavish as the dread. Both sprang from the unadmitted realization that she was being handed from one ownership to another, and could have no say in it. Yet when Mr Potter begged to introduce Mr Fry, Miss St John was curtly condescending to her new owner, and opined that the Fry fellow would now realize her value as a Permanent of long standing, even if he had not been made aware of it already.

The Fry fellow was a large pale man with heavy eyelids and a low slow utterance. When he referred to his wife he did so with a particular husbandly smile, as if to admit she was a weakness. Mrs Fry was of the type known as bright. She walked briskly, she smiled often, her head was always bound up in a bright-patterned scarf, and from under the scarf jutted two careful tinted curls whose position never 94varied by a hair’s-breadth from day to day. There was a Dennis Fry, too: an only child, who would shortly be demobilized from the Air Force. Both Frys talked of him constantly, and exhibited photographs. It was plain they doted. Miss St John allowed this to be natural. She herself had been an only child and doted on, once.

Assured that the Frys were, to all intents and purposes, Potters, Miss St John went on being as Permanent as before: snubbing the Transients, occupying the best chair in the lounge, and frowning at anyone who smoked a pipe in that apartment. Cigarettes she had no objection to; she sometimes smoked one herself. So when she returned from a Friday cinema to find a young man sitting in her chair and smoking a pipe, she settled herself on an inferior chair with a kind of bellicose placidity, sure that she would soon cook his goose.

Betty, the waitress, coming in with Miss St John’s teatray, saw the position, and hesitated.

‘Put it down by my usual chair, Betty. Thank you. That will do.’

Betty removed a tobacco-pouch to the mantelshelf, put down the tray, and went out. The tea-tray sat on the usual table. Miss St John sat on an unusual chair. This state of things had gone on for some time when the young man put down his picture paper, smiled at Miss St John, and remarked, ‘I say. Won’t your tea get cold?’

‘As it is not in the nature of tea to remain hot indefinitely, I should suppose it has already done so,’ replied Miss St John. There was a pause, during which the young man knocked 95out his pipe and began to search through his pockets, rolling from side to side of the deep chair. When he had abandoned the search, Miss St John remarked, ‘It’s on the mantelshelf.’