Thereafter the Frys came into the lounge every evening—Mr Fry, a methodical man, remarking, ‘Still deep in crime, Miss St John? Don’t be alarmed. We aren’t the police.’ It was his little joke. But after her first abandonment, Miss St John found that she did not really enjoy crime-stories, and now she only read them to shelter herself against Dennis’s questions and repartees. The shelter was not reliable. His manner of speech was so closely modelled upon the style of the stories that there were times when she felt that she was being addressed by the gangster on the page instead of the young man at her elbow, and this impression was strengthened by his choice of subjects. It seemed to Dennis that he was amusing himself by talking to the old stick-in-the-mud about murders and fornications. In fact, he was yielding to a much deeper compulsion. With the savage morality of the young he discerned that Miss St John’s immovable law-abidingness expressed nothing more than the indifference with which one well-cherished vice can afford to disregard the flimsy satisfactions of crime. Completely selfish, she could afford to be completely virtuous. It was with a kind of proselytizing zeal that he set himself to force on her attention acts of lust and violence which she would always be too cautiously and coldly self-regarding to commit. He tried in vain. Her toughened self-satisfaction was more than a match for his young fury, and his attempts to open the old cat’s eyes opened them to nothing more perturbing than a recognition that Dennis was bored to extinction, and 103cramped by a manner of life quite unsuitable for a strong young man. The male subjects of the biographies, while strong and young, led active lives: they climbed mountains, they hunted foxes, they worked devotedly in slums; if their financial circumstances did not permit of such doings, they split rails or worked devotedly in foundries. The doted-on Dennis did nothing but stroll about with his hands in his pockets. Admitting this, and even feeling a kind of rusty compassion, she continued to find him almost insufferable, and snubbed him whenever an occasion offered. But the presence of the elder Frys protected him like a wadding. Mr Fry sat as though at the head of a table, fingering the coins in his pocket and smiling with manly condescension. Mrs Fry blunted the snubs by exclaiming, ‘Now, now, Dennis! You’ll end by making yourself unpopular.’

Even for a mother, Mrs Fry was uncommonly thick-skinned. Nothing could disabuse her of the notion that to know Dennis was to love him, and as the mother of the loved object she now presumed a considerable degree of love towards herself. Her manner had become far too affable by the morning when she said, ‘Hubby and I are so delighted to see what a liking you have taken to Dennis. You and he will be like old friends when the time comes for him to take over.’

‘Take over?’

‘Yes. Dennis is going to take over the Peacock as soon as he feels ready. We are just keeping the place warm for him.’