2

She tried Barry Briscoe, the week-end he came down and found Nan gone.  Barry Briscoe was by way of being interested in people and things in general; he had that kind of alert mind and face.

He came up from the tennis lawn, where he had been playing a single with Rodney, and sat down by her and Grandmama in the shade of the cedar, hot and friendly and laughing and out of breath.  Now Neville and Rodney were playing Gerda and Kay.  Grandmama’s old eyes, pleased behind their glasses, watched the balls fly and thought everyone clever who got one over the net.  She hadn’t played tennis in her youth.  Mrs. Hilary’s more eager, excited eyes watched Neville driving, smashing, volleying, returning, and thought how slim and young a thing she looked, to have all that power stored in her.  She was fleeter than Gerda, she struck harder than Kay, she was trickier than all of them, the beloved girl.  That was the way Mrs. Hilary watched tennis, thinking of the players, not of the play.  It is the way some people talk, thinking of the talkers, not of what they are saying.  It is the personal touch, and a way some women have.

But Barry Briscoe, watching cleverly through his bright glasses, was thinking of the strokes.  He was an unconscious person.  He lived in moments.

“Well done, Gerda,” Grandmama would call, when Gerda, cool and nonchalant, dropped, a sitter at Rodney’s feet, and when Rodney smashed it back she said, “But father’s too much for you.”

“Gerda’s a scandal,” Barry said.  “She doesn’t care.  She can hit all right when she likes.  She thinks about something else half the time.”

His smile followed the small white figure with its bare golden head that gleamed in the grey afternoon.  An absurd, lovable, teasable child, he found her.

Grandmama’s maid came to wheel her down to the farm.  Grandmama had promised to go and see the farmer’s wife and new baby.  Grandmama always saw wives and new babies.  They never palled.  You would think that by eighty-four she had seen enough new babies, more than enough, that she had seen through that strange business and could now take it for granted, the stream of funny new life cascading into the already so full world.  But Grandmama would always go and see it, handle it, admire it, peer at it with her smiling eyes that had seen so many lives come and go and that must know by now that babies are born to trouble as naturally as the sparks fly upward.

So off Grandmama rode in her wheeled chair, and Mrs. Hilary and Barry Briscoe were left alone.  Mrs. Hilary and this pleasant, brown, friendly young man, who cared for Workers’ Education and Continuation Schools, and Penal Reform, and Garden Cities, and Getting Things Done by Acts of Parliament, about all which things Mrs. Hilary knew and cared nothing.  But vaguely she felt that they sprang out of and must include a care for human beings as such, and that therefore Barry Briscoe would listen if she told him things.