“I see.  Has she children?”

“Three.  A daughter, married in London—­Mrs. Egerton-Thomson—­a son at Cambridge, and a daughter, Muriel, at home.  I think it must be very bad for the Duff-Whalleys living in such a vulgar, restless-looking house.”

Pamela laughed.  “Do you think all the little pepper-pot towers must have an effect on the soul?  I doubt it, my dear.”

“Still,” said Jean, “I think more will be expected at the end from the people who have all their lives lived in and looked at lovely places.  It always worries me, the thought of people who live in the dark places of big cities—­children especially, growing up like ’plants in mines that never saw the sun.’  It is so dreadful that sometimes I feel I must go and help.”

“What could you do?”

“That’s what common sense always asks.  I could do nothing alone, but if all the decent people tried their hardest it would make a difference....  It’s the thought of the cruelty in the world that makes me sick.  It’s the hardest thing for me to keep from being happy.  Great-aunt Alison said I had a light nature.  Even when I ought to be sad my heart jumps up in the most unreasonable way, and I am happy.  But sometimes it feels as if we comfortable people are walking on a flowery meadow that is really a great quaking morass, and underneath there is black slime full of unimagined horrors.  A paragraph in the newspaper makes a crack and you see down:  women who take money for keeping little babies and allow them to die, men who torture:  tales of horror and terror.  The War made a tremendous crack.  It seemed then as if we were all to be drawn into the slime, as if cruelty had got its fangs into the heart of the world.  When you knelt to pray at nights you could only cry and cry.  The courage of the men who grappled in the slime with the horrors was the one thing that kept one from despair.  And the fact that they could laugh.  You know about the dying man who told his nurse some joke and finished, ‘This is the War for laughs.’”

Pamela nodded.  “It hardly bears thinking of yet—­the War and the fighters.  Later on it will become the greatest of all sagas.  But I want to hear about Priorsford people.  That’s a clean, cheerful subject.  Who lives in the pretty house with the long ivy-covered front?”

“The Knowe it is called.  The Jowetts live there—­retired Anglo-Indians.  Mr. Jowett is a funny, kind little man with a red face and rather a nautical air.  He is so busy that often it is afternoon before he reads his morning’s letters.”

“What does he do?”