world clear to General Levallois, to whom such classification would obviously be of relative, although in this case not intrinsic, importance.
"How you must have hated leaving Paris. Though, two years before the war, one didn't imagine what was going to happen to France."
"It's an extraordinary thing about the French——" said the General.
The French, so gently introduced by Valentine, slid into the place of the Southern Irish.
Lonergan assented, dissented where it would obviously be easy for the General to prove that his dissent was founded on inadequate knowledge, and felt that he had known Coombe, and all that made up existence there, for years.
It actually gave him a sense of shock when Primrose came into the hall, at her most slouching pace, three minutes after dinner had been announced.
What had she to do, he almost asked himself, with these surroundings?
She belonged to a background of Bloomsbury flats, always untidy and generally dirty, hot and crowded bars—parties that reeked of smoke, intellect, blasphemy, love-making—and the dark interiors of rattling taxis and motor-cars.
Yet, except for her make-up, she did not really look out of place at Coombe, he had to acknowledge it.
She still wore her dark-blue travelling-dress and, divorced from the blue coat, it revealed itself as straight and simply-cut, with sleeves that stopped short above the elbows and a collar of which she had pulled down the zip fastener so as to show her long neck and small, delicate collar-bones.
She looked once at Lonergan—it was a look that revealed nothing at all beyond forcing him to observe that she never looked directly at anybody else—and did not speak until they were seated, cold, and apprehensive of further cold, in the dining-room.
"I thought there was a Captain Sedgewick," she said.
"Captain Sedgewick telephoned to say he wouldn't arrive much before nine o'clock," Valentine said.
"He's gone to Plymouth," announced Jess. "Sorry I'm late." She slid into her seat. "What were all those special exercises and things that all your men were doing yesterday?" she asked Lonergan.
He replied, with a number of reservations, and was surprised by the extent of her knowledge and understanding of the activities of some portion at least of the British Army in war-time.
He liked Jess, and was pleased that she presently subsided and left the conversation to her elders, with an absence of self-assertion that Lonergan thought well suited to her youth. General Levallois looked at the menu-card,—Good God, a menu-card, thought Lonergan whose views of the catering at Coombe were already of the lowest description—muttered something that was inaudible but clearly and deservedly uncomplimentary about the cooking—and talked, to himself rather than to anybody else, about the state of agriculture.
Lonergan was prepared to look as though he were listening and to make all the necessary rejoinders, but he found that Valentine could give what he recognized with some astonishment as being a genuine attention to the General's monologue although from sheer lack of imagination he made whatever he talked about seem uninteresting.
Once or twice Valentine appealed to Primrose, and once she brought the conversation round to the London background with a direct question, but she got no response.
Primrose let fall some sounds—they seemed hardly even to be recognizable syllables—from the corner of her mouth and pushed her plate away, the food on it left almost untouched.
"I can't hear a word you're saying, Primrose," remarked the General. "Why don't you speak up?"
Primrose made no reply whatever and Valentine, speaking gaily, said:
"You're very difficult, Reggie dear. You tell Jess not to scream because you can't hear a word she's saying, and now you tell poor Primrose to speak up, for the same reason."
At that Primrose, for the first time, looked her mother full in the face.
"For God's sake don't start standing up for me, there's nothing I loathe more, or need less."
The sense of shock imposed by the tone in which she spoke, no less than by the words themselves, kept them all silent for an ice-cold second.
Then Jess, in a high key, began an exclamatory "I must say——" checked by her mother's low, distinct voice.
"Very well, Primrose darling," said Valentine—and there was even something in her tone that hinted at a smile. "I won't stand up for you if you'd rather I didn't." She turned her head towards Lonergan and went on with exactly the same placidity.
"Why does one generation always accuse the next one of speaking indistinctly? An ear-trumpet can't be the sole solution."
"I'd be sorry to think so," he agreed, with such lightness of tone as her own had been. "Otherwise I'd be looking for an ear-trumpet myself. Not that I believe people use them now, unless it's on the stage. My poor sister Nellie, who's very deaf indeed, has a most peculiar little invention."
He went on to describe it.
Valentine listened, commented, General Levallois asked in what part of Ireland Lonergan's sister lived, and, on being told that it was in the South, was immediately moved to put what he described as a question but what was, in reality, an embittered series of condemnations.
The bad moment was over—averted. Lonergan could have told the precise instant at which Valentine, gently unplaiting the fringes of her shawl from the arm of her chair, let the tide of pain that Primrose had loosed, rise within her. It was not a sharp, violent pain, he felt it must be too familiar for that. Rather must it be the recurrence of some deep-rooted misery that twisted in her heart and against which she had long ceased to rebel because rebellion was so useless.
He wondered very much at the skill with which she had handled that brief, intolerable minute of tension.
Was it just part of a social training that instinctively served her and would always serve her, or was it one way of protecting herself from facing a bitter truth? Did she always oppose the smooth, unreal self-effacement of the super-civilized to the onslaught of real emotion?
"There's a great deal in what you say, sir," he assured the General. "At the same time, Dev has done quite a lot for his own people according to his lights. I could tell you of instances——"
He noticed, with a pleasure that he felt to be rather irrational, that Valentine was not now seeking, as she had sought earlier in the evening, to avert the General's foolish spate of assertions and counter-assertions on the subject of Ireland.
She was leaving Lonergan to deal with them, taking for granted his ability to do so without discomfiture to himself—for she would never, he felt certain, run the risk of allowing a stranger to endure discomfiture.
He and she, however, were most certainly not strangers.
On that conviction, Lonergan let his analysis of the situation rest temporarily.
When dinner was over, and they had moved out of the cold dining-room to the comparative warmth of the hall, Primrose said to him curtly:
"Have you seen the room that's supposed to be your office?"
"Yes.
