Three's Company

A CURIOUS sense of yearning attacked Susan Magnus just as she was going to dive again. She paused to consider it. For a moment she thought she must be on the verge of an inspiration; then light broke on her. ‘Hil!’ she called. ‘I believe I’m going to die a sudden death of starvation. Shall we go in?’

Her husband’s head appeared on the other side of the diving-board. ‘By Jove,’ he said easily, ‘should n’t wonder a bit if we’re jolly late for brekker. Where’s old Binky with her bell?’

They swam to shore.

‘Perhaps she rang it and we never heard,’ said Susan, with an indifference that argued precedents for this supposition. ‘Oh, oh, but I am hungry!’

Lifting her bath-wrap, she ran swiftly up the beach, and Hilary instinctively started in pursuit. In the veranda of the bungalow he caught and kissed her.

‘Praise the Lord for all his mercies,’ panted Susan, ‘including legs.’

‘Certainly; anything you like. But why legs specially?’

‘ Because if I could n’t run away from you, you’d never want to run after me. Such is man — and art. Selah! Oh, Binky, there you are!’ Susan looked in at the studio window. ‘Are we frightfully late? We’re so sorry.’

But for once Miss Bingham did not yield to the disarming charm of Susan’s manner. ‘It’s ten o’clock,’ she said dryly. ‘I’ll make fresh coffee.’

‘Oh, Binky darling, are you wild?’ Susan was instantly upon her, more charming than ever. ‘Truly, honest Injun, we never heard your little bell.’

‘I never rang it,’ said Miss Bingham, even more dryly.

‘Never —? Well, but then —!’ With a relieved gesture Susan cast off all shadow of responsibility.

Miss Bingham faced her stonily. ‘As far as I know, I am paid to have meals ready at certain hours, but not to fetch you in to them. You can both tell the time, I believe?’

Hilary had now added himself as audience, and chuckled. ‘Our Binky, when roused,’ he supplied, with the air of a showman.

‘But Binky,’ murmured Susan, half dismayed, half laughing, ‘how — how coarse of you to refer to payments, like that. As if you did n’t know your price was above rubies! Only we don’t happen to have any.’

‘Oh, yes, you can talk! You can both talk!’ declared Miss Bingham exasperatedly, and stood for a moment considering them with smouldering eyes.

Hilary was dark and slim and lithelooking, with some indefinable heritage of manner from courtly ancestors that persisted attractively through all his personal modesty and a fervor of democratic conviction. ‘I always feel I’m going to fall over his sword,’ Susan had once complained, summing it up. She herself could practically be described as being conspicuously everything that Miss Bingham was n’t. Miss Bingham, although only two years the older, was temperamentally middle-aged, while Susan would remain inconvertibly young. They had been at school together, and there the older girl had mothered (albeit sternly) the bright blossom, the flash of quicksilver, the entrancing sprite that had been Susan. Now she kept house for her — here in the summer, with more state in town throughout the winter.

And in childhood, in youth, in marriage, Susan had been uniformly favored and happy, so that it was easy enough for her now, Miss Bingham sometimes reflected, to get what she wanted by sheer force of never anticipating that she would n’t. (She had got her, for instance, just when she married and would otherwise have been plunged into household management.) Then there were beauty and charm — both among Susan’s birthrights; enough money, no incumbrances, and now Hilary Magnus, a husband who, although undeniably a musician, had been born (again, of course, to oblige Susan) without the temper to which persons of his temperament were known to be lamentably liable. And as if that were not enough, Susan herself—Susan the gay, the charming, the apparently frivolous — had only to stand at an easel for a few hours to produce drawings by which editors singled out for their reception felt themselves incomparably blessed: drawings of a strength, a poise, a very poetry of conception and execution that enchanted every one except those unhappy authors whose work, far from being illustrated, was simply obliterated by them.

Miss Bingham herself had never got what she wanted. Not that she complained of this. She shouldered her manifold burdens — poverty, invalid relatives, a too sturdy figure and an inability to pass examinations — with proud independence. But her lack of all the gifts that had been so royally showered on Susan made her unconsciously cling more and more fiercely to the knowledge that there was one thing in which she excelled — the thing that Susan and Hilary had for two years passed lightly over as beneath notice. Even now, she observed, they had not the least idea that they were perched perilously on the very razor-edge of a crisis. Susan had asked her if she were ‘wild’; Hilary had referred to her as ‘ roused.’ Well, they should see to what extent! Their maddening unawareness of any crisis was precipitating it.

Susan made a last effort to beguile her friend into the way of peace. ‘Binky beloved, I’m hungry!’ she wailed, in heartfelt appeal.

Fora second something in MissBingham leaped to answer that, and a quiver broke the sternness of her features. But she did not yield, except in a material sense. ‘All right,’ she said, and turned to go for the coffee. ‘You can begin on the breakfast buns, while you dress. But of course they’re cold.’

They began joyously. ‘ She brought us breakfast buns in a lordly dish,’ mumbled Hilary with his mouth full; for, if cold, they were still delicious.

‘And then,’ continued Susan under similar disabilities, ‘ she never rang her little bell. (I can say everything but “r” with my mouth full.) Her heart is like the nether millstone, but her breakfast buns came out of the flesh-pots of the Egyptians. No, that’s perhaps an insult, because they’re not stale.'

‘She hath fed,’ Hilary revised, ‘that is to say, she hath fed us on honey-dew buns, and presently we shall drink the coffee and milk of Paradise.’

Unhappily, these tributes were inaudible to Miss Bingham in the kitchen; and as they had paid them merely to please each other, and not in the least with the suspicion that it might be necessary to please Miss Bingham in any way beyond existing in her neighborhood, it did not occur to them to repeat or improve on their efforts when she returned, bearing coffee and a dish that exhaled savoriness. They simply fell upon these blessings and demolished them, conversing cheerfully, as usual, on extraneous matters.

Miss Bingham meanwhile went about picking up stray bath-towels and pebbles. ‘Coffee all right?’ she asked presently, with a carelessness that should have been ominous.

The blinded pair stared.

‘Of course,’ said Hilary.

‘Why should n’t it be?’ demanded Susan, with a deplorable lapse from tact.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Only you did n’t say.’

‘But —do we ever say?’ Susan blundered on, puzzled.

‘No, you don’t.’ There was suddenly a return of grimness in Miss Bingham’s voice.

Hilary and Susan elevated eyebrows at each other.

‘What’s to be done?’ questioned his.

‘Leave her alone,’ signaled hers.

But this, as it happened, was a counsel of disastrous imperfection. It gave Miss Bingham time finally to mature her grievance, and presently it burst upon them like a storm.

‘I’m going,’ she said tensely, gripping a bath-towel with both hands, as though for a tug of war. ‘ I’m going at once. I can’t stand another day of it.’

‘Binky!’ they gasped in unison.

‘Oh, yes, you can Binky me now as much as you like; it won’t make a scrap of difference. I’m going; I’m tired of being treated as though I were something between a child and a dog. Either you forget me altogether, or else you — you just humor me. I don’t want to be forgotten or humored; I want to be appreciated, and so I’m going somewhere where I shall be — where people are n’t so clever that they simply can’t see what other people do. You — both of you — you don’t know you’re born yet! You think a house runs itself. Well, you can just try. Then perhaps you won’t look down quite so much on whoever comes after me to run it for you.’

The storm abated with suddenness, though only, it was plain, to get its second wind.

‘Look down?’ Susan faltered. ‘Oh, Binky, do you really mean you have n’t been happy with us?’

Her eyes appealed to Hilary for help. He was as concerned as she, but his unaccustomed tongue refused to find any but the old, jesting words.

‘Our Binky?’ he murmured in a stunned way. ‘Nursing a secret sorrow? Wanting to lead Her Own Life? And then going and wounding us in an exceptionally tender spot?’ He roused to that. ‘Binky, do you dare to deny, then, that we are enlightened democrats, incapable of treating any one (even your handmaiden, Emmy, who sings flat) as — as beings beneath us?’

‘Yes, I do!’ Miss Bingham asserted. ‘I don’t know or care what Emmy may think, but all the time you treat me like a rather amusing toy; you use me as a conversational ball that you can toss to each other in idle moments. Never for a minute do you take me or the work I do seriously. You keep that for yourselves and each other.’

Hilary fairly gaped at this transformed and tempestuous Miss Bingham. ‘Sue, she has been reading Ibsen — if not Shaw — if not both,’ he suggested weakly.

’I don’t need to read anybody,’ retorted Miss Bingham, ‘to see the way you both laugh at me, condescend to me, despise me. You’ve got genius, have you? You’ve—’

‘Now, Binky, be calm.’ Hilary’s eyes kindled a spark of mischief, but he kept his voice grave. ‘You know we have.’

Miss Bingham hesitated. ‘Well, I don’t know about genius; I suppose you’ve got something,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘But—’

‘ Oh, leave it at genius, Binky, please,’ he implored earnestly. ‘It can’t do you any harm, and it bucks us no end. We ask nothing more, do we, Sue?’

Miss Bingham’s look darkened. ‘There you go again. Playing with me. Because I don’t know about your sort of things. Well, has it ever occurred to you that you don’t know about mine? You think anybody can housekeep, and they can’t. Or, anyway, there are as many degrees of housekeeping as there are of picture-painting. And —and’ (in desperation Miss Bingham blew a blast on her own neglected trumpet) ‘mine’s one of the top degrees!’

‘ Binky, of course it is, and you know we can’t possibly do without you!’ reproached Susan sweetly — yet not with that note of supreme conviction for which Miss Bingham yearned. This was just ‘humoring’ once more.

‘Yes,’ she agreed curtly, ‘I know it; the point is that you don’t.’ Her purpose finally hardened. She folded the bath-towel. ‘Well, that’s all,’ she said, with something of a return to her usual balanced and staid manner. ‘ I’m going now. Sorry I made a scene. Good-bye, and many thanks for the things you’ ve both done for me.’

‘Hil,’ said Susan in distress, as soon as the door was shut, ‘ but we can’t let our Binky go like that. Her home — it’s wretched, you know, even if she could afford to stay in it. She ’ll have to look for other work, and she ’ll hate going to strangers, whatever she says, and she is fond of us and we of her, and — oh, have we really been such beasts to her?’

The situation had so many bearings that they were still discussing it when a cab drove past the window that faced the road.

‘Quick!’ Hilary urged, ‘or she’ll be gone.’

They rushed to Miss Bingham’s room and knocked. There was no answer, and then they heard Emmy bringing the cabman for the luggage. They could also hear what he was saying.

‘The lady she just caught the 11.17, miss, and she said for to fetch her trunks and send them on after her.’

Susan and Hilary, exchanging signals of defeat, stole back unperceived to the studio.

‘Oh, Hil, it’s too late. Poor Binky! I — I wish we had n’t upset her, but I really don’t quite know even now what we did; do you?’

‘Have n’t an earthly.’ But his profound meditation on the subject gave way suddenly to a new idea. ‘And I say, Sue, what about us?’

Yet so obsessed had they been by their sense of Miss Bingham’s loss in leaving them that even now it was not anxiety but merely interest that his question voiced.

‘Us? ’ Susan gave the matter only an instant’s thought. ‘Oh, well, there’s still Emmy, you know,’ she reminded him and herself comfortably.

And thus was Miss Bingham justified in her going. For it was as though she, being informed by Susan that all the works of Michael Angelo were destroyed, had remarked, ‘Oh, well, there’s still that man who draws for Fashion’s Forecast, you know.’ Here too, as Miss Bingham had claimed, existed a question of degree.

‘By Jove, so there is,’ returned Hilary, precisely in Susan’s manner. ‘ Better have Emmy in then, I suppose?’

‘Had we? Why? Oh well, yes, there ’ll be lunch and things, won’t there? All right; ring.’

Emmy answered the bell.

‘Oh, Emmy,’ began Susan briskly, ‘ Miss Bingham has — has been called away.’

‘Don’t!’ groaned Hilary, under his breath; ‘it sounds as if she were dead.’

Susan waved him aside. ‘Called away,’ she repeated firmly. ‘And we will have scrambled eggs and apricots and cream for lunch, Emmy, and cakes and things for tea, and — Hil, what shall we have for dinner?’

They fell with zest upon so novel an occupation as choosing their own dinner, but presently Hilary noticed that Emmy’s mouth was wide open — a sign that she awaited an opportunity to speak.

‘Yes, Emmy?’ he questioned.

‘ Miss Bingham,’ said Emmy stolidly, ‘was goin’ ter myke termater soup ’n’ cutlets ’n’mashed potato ’n’ a Victoria pudden fer dinner.’

‘Oh!’ said Hilary, descending ignominiously from higher gustatory flights.

‘Then we’ll have that,' declared Susan. ‘Now run away, Emmy, and — and turn out the dining-room and clean the kitchen windows and polish the hall floor and have lunch ready at halfpast one.’

‘Yes, miss — ma’am,’ said Emmy in a dazed way, and departed.

Hilary, swinging on the table edge, cocked his head critically. ‘There’s something wrong about the way you did it, Sue,’ he commented. ‘She’s gone off looking like a sleep-walker, and she never did that to Binky.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Susan complacently; ‘I think I did it frightfully well, considering I had n’t a minute to rehearse.’

Work being clearly out of the question, they went for a walk, and returned not more than three quarters of an hour late for lunch. To their innocent surprise, however, lunch was even later for them. They went in search of Emmy, and found her with her head buried in her arms, which were on the kitchen table. Explosive sobs rent the air at short intervals, and there was an undesirable smell.

‘What is the matter?’ Susan asked, her nose uplifted in investigation.

Emmy raised her head and wailed, between explosions, a comprehensive answer. ‘I never remembered — which wy yer said nothen’, ’n’ so — I ain’t done ’em; ’n ’ I was that ’ ungry, me yed’s — fit ter split; ’n’ so I — remembered what yer — said about lunch, ’n’ I tried ter — scramble them eggs, but they seemed ter—kinder stick.’

Hilary, locating the smell at that instant, examined a frying-pan on the fire. ‘They did indeed,’ he confirmed. ‘Requiescant.’

‘Well, but, Emmy,’ Susan expostulated, ‘what’s the matter? You managed all right with Miss Bingham.’

‘Miss Bingham?' Emmy picked up the name resentfully, like a weapon. ‘She did n’t never tell me all them things at once. She’d sy, “Emmy,” she’d sy, “go ’n’ clean the bedroom winders,” she’d sy, ’n’ I went ’n’ done it. Then she’d sy somethink else, ’n’ I went ’n’ done that. I kin work, I can, but I ain’t no use with me yed. Teacher always said so.’

There was a pause. Then Hilary gave a gasp, and drew Susan firmly by the elbow out of the kitchen. His face was alight with a new intelligence. ‘ Sue! That’s what we ’ve done to Binky. Don’t you see? The monstrous injustice of it! We ’ve practically said, “ She kin work, but she ain’t no use with ’er yed.” (No, what a bore: it has to be “me yed,” does n’t it, or the “y” does n’t fit in nicely.) Whereas you see how things go when Binky’s head is removed, and only Emmy’s body is left.’

‘Oh, do you think it’s that?’ Susan looked at him doubtfully, and decided there was nothing in his theory. ‘No, it’s just an accident, about the lunch and things. She’ll be all right to-morrow. Why, it’s nothing — the work of a bungalow like this! It’s — it’s —’

Her voice failed, and he turned to follow her suddenly stricken gaze. Emmy, jabbing hatpins into a large, limp hat on her head, stood at the door.

' I’m a-goin’ now, ma’am, please,’ she said, in a voice weak from many tears but charged with an immovable purpose. ‘Miss Bingham paid me me wages yesterday, so that’s aw right, thank you, ma’am. I won’t be able ter manage, not be meself, I won’t. I’m sure I hope it’s no ill-convenience, ma’am, but yer see where it is. Miss Bingham, she never engaged me fer ter do it, ’n’ it’d worrit me that awful, what with the cooking ’n’ all, me yed would n’t never stand it. Good-day, ma’am; good-day, sir; ’n’ I’m sure I hope yer’ll soon be suited.’

Hilary gazed after her retreating form. ' " Ill-convenience,” ’ he murmured, trying it over. ‘ “III” — “in”: yes, I vote for “ill” myself, as being more forceful.’

Susan wriggled her shoulders, as though discarding a weight. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said, in a surprised voice, ‘what a day of fusses — all about nothing! Come on, Hil; we’ll have to get lunch ourselves.’

Miss Bingham’s intention was to walk to the front door of the bungalow and ring the bell. It was therefore curious, as she noted herself, that she should be cautiously creeping along the seaward veranda, and peeping in, as she passed, at one of the studio windows. It was also curious that her heart should be thumping so unmanageably, for had she not known Susan, if not Hilary, all her life; and had she not been a thousand times justified in leaving them, and was she not, nevertheless, magnanimously returning? In spite, however, of the impregnable position in which all these facts placed her, Miss Bingham was forced by her ridiculous heart to press herself for a breathing-space against the outer wall between the two open studio windows. For anything might have happened in three weeks! They might even be happy and comfortable without her, in which case she could retire, perhaps, without exposing herself to bitter humiliation.

Various sounds reached her as she hesitated. Hilary’s whistle was accompanied by a scraping noise, and she gathered (not without a pang) that he was shoveling up ashes on the hearth. Suddenly both sounds ceased, and he burst loudly into a tune of his own composition.

he postulated, and paused expectantly. From a little farther off (Miss Bingham judged it to be Susan’s bedroom) returned instantly the antistrophe: —

Miss Bingham had an unexpected feeling. This kind of thing had always been one of their pet games, and she had secretly envied them their dexterity at it, as she had envied them so much else. But it was not dexterity that she noticed now, or envy that she felt. It was a thrill of pride. They were alone, then — without even Emmy — in difficulties; (and who but she should know how insuperable they would find such difficulties?) Yet they could still build for their voyaging this gallant bark of words. It was a thing, then, suited, not only to summer seas, but to winter and rough weather? Their gayety, their carelessness, their charm of manner and sweetness of temper — these were not, as she had disparagingly thought, but the easy fruits of too easy living and achievement? They were something inherent in them — something that even her sudden defection, with the havoc it must have wrought in their days, had not been able to shake?

Miss Bingham was conscious — although, indeed, to her great indignation — of a sense of guilt. For her thoughts were groping their way to a new truth. And thereupon, because expression was so difficult to her, there fell on her out of the past a group of words still riddled with the manifold bullets of examination — parsing, analysis, paraphrase, translation; but now the words came strangely to life, supplying her need. ‘Those who have not suffered are shallow, but he who has not happiness will scarcely know how to give it. . . . What we owe to others is not our hunger and our thirst, but our bread and our wine.’

Those who have not suffered are shallow: she had stopped short, in considering Susan and Hilary, at that. Yet who was she to say that they had not suffered? Her former blindness now amazed her. Were there no griefs but the material and visible? Were there not adventures of the soul? Having left the bungalow for the one, and being on her return involved in the other, she knew now that there were. And could they, unless they, too, had experienced these, have drawn into the service of art either beauty or humor, either understanding or strength? No! What she had missed had been their philosophy of life. They had known hunger (they must have known it to be what they were and do what they did), but it was their bread, not their hunger, that they shared with others; they had been athirst, but it was of their wine poured out that they made a feast. . . .

Susan’s voice broke in opportunely on these somewhat exhausting reflections, and her remarks were interspersed with calculations of which Miss Bingham could at first make nothing.

‘Before next Monday, Hil, (seven — eight) we shall have committed suicide, shan’t we? So anyway (nine — ten — eleven) I shall never (twelve) have to count the (thirteen — fourteen) laundry again. Hil, did you know I had a million cotton frocks, all dirty?’

‘Rather! At least, I know you have n’t a clean one. But why count the laundry even now, on that account? There are still our bathing things.’

‘Yes, but the man’s coming.’ Susan was now in the studio, too, and absorbed, as was her custom, in the subject of the moment. ‘And this is the third week, and both the other times I forgot.’

‘Why did n’t you make him wait while we did it, then?’ Hilary inquired easily.

‘Last week I did try. I offered him some coffee while he waited. But either he smelt that the milk was just the teentiest bit burnt, or else he felt that I had a rather too coming-on disposition. Anyway, he went, and I was given to understand that he would murder me if it was n’t ready to-day.’

‘Sue! Then to-day it will be necessary for me to have his blood.’

‘Oh, well, not really, of course,’ she modified. ‘He only looked his daggers. What he actually said, I remember, was that ’e’d gotter get a move on, ’e ’ad. (Has any one, do you think, ever written an article on how hard it is to drop your h’s?) So I promised for to-day, only I find I simply can’t hold more than fourteen dresses on one arm while I pick up some more with the other hand, and then I drop the lot, and have to begin again.’

But this was too much for Miss Bingham. She entered by one of the windows. ‘What do you want to hold them for at all?’ she cried despairingly. ‘ Can’t you put them down somewhere as you count them?’

‘Put them down?’ For the moment the vivid light cast by this suggestion blinded Susan to the unexpected source from which it sprang. ‘Why — do you know, if I’d gone on counting all day, I don’t believe I’d ever have thought of that. Binky, how clever of you! Put them down. Of course.’ That being settled, her glance wavered, in recognition of the circumstances. ‘But, Binky — you ? ’

‘Come to gloat over us, of course,’ supplied Hilary, in amiable resignation. ‘You can’t deny she has a right to. Well, then, Binky,’ — with a wave of his arm he made her free of the appalling apartment that had once been an attractive studio, — ‘gloat.’

‘I’ve not come for that!’ Miss Bingham retorted furiously, because her heart ached. ‘I — I hoped you were getting on all right. Why have n’t you got some one to take my place?’

They stared, first at her, then at each other. Clearly, the answer seemed to them so obvious that they had difficulty in framing it.

‘Well, but of course,’ Susan managed at last, ‘we did n’t know how!’

Of course: Miss Bingham perceived it to be the literal truth. Advertisements, agencies, registry offices — they might never leave heard of them for all the impression such things had been able to leave on that part of their brains which recorded impressions. And that meant, then, that they really could not do without her? They actually were defenseless (as she had maintained, yet not wholly believed) unless she defended them? Something swelled and burgeoned in Miss Bingham’s heart, — the divine flower of the maternal root, — and although she did not give it a name she bowed to it in an ecstasy of surrender.

‘Besides,’ Hilary amplified, and again it was a simple statement of fact, ‘we know now that there never could be any one to take your place.’

‘So we just hoped you’d come back before we had to commit suicide,’ Susan concluded.

‘Oh!’ said Miss Bingham. For this she had starved; on this she could thrive and achieve miracles of administration for them both. Her blunt exclamation, therefore, was no match for the gladness in her eyes.

‘Binky!’ Susan dared to voice their trembling hope. ‘You have come back — to stay?’

‘ I never said so! ’ declared Miss Bingham, instantly on the defensive again.

‘But Binky, when we admit it all!’ implored Susan. ‘All!’

‘That your genius is superior to ours,’ Hilary contributed.

‘That it’s your life that is real and earnest, Binky—’

‘And we are but infants crying in the night without you —’

‘That housekeeping such as yours is a science — an art—an inspiration—’

‘That you can live without us — ’

‘ Whereas we can’t live without you! ’

‘Oh, yes!’ Miss Bingham stemmed the rising tide of extravagance. ‘It’s easy for you to talk like that just now.’ She was, in fact, innocently bursting with gratification, as two such pyschological experts could not fail to see; yet she succeeded in giving each in turn a defiant glance. ‘But if you want me to stay,’ she threatened darkly, ‘you’ll have to keep it up, you know.’

‘Keep it up?’ murmured Susan, inexplicably blighted.

‘Do it — this sort of thing — with a purpose ? ’

Hilary weighed the ultimatum. Each of them sought the other’s eyes; both of them were suddenly awkward, distressed— Miss Bingham could not really make out what, though she felt it was not fair that they should be it, whatever it was. Why should n’t they be willing to do for her occasionally such a small thing as keep it up? At the same instant, however, she was being attacked (most unfairly, she considered) by a sturdy demon of truthfulness that resided in her nature. For a while she struggled, but the demon prevailed. Yet, though she paid the price of defeat, she could not rise to doing it without bitterness.

‘Oh, well, if you want to know,’ she said in a hard voice, aware that she was madly relinquishing her one precious advantage, ‘I lied to you just now. You don’t have to keep it up. You said you could n’t live without me. Well, it’s just as true that I can’t live without you — much truer, probably.’

‘Binky! Because we’re geniuses?’ surmised Hilary hopefully. ‘You may remember that we left it at that?’

‘No!’ she said, with the fierce shame of one baring her heart against her will. ‘ Because you ’re children — my children — the only ones I shall ever have. Oh, yes, it’s true! You need n’t trouble to contradict. I’m not old yet, but I shan’t marry; I’m not the sort men choose. I’ve got — I’ve got a talent for marriage and for home-making and for children; but I have n’t got — glamour. And every man wants that.’

‘Oh, not every, Binky!’ Hilary protested. ‘ There are quite a lot of intelligent men like me nowadays who look before and after glamour, so to speak.’

‘There are n’t! There’s about one to every ten thousand women, and when I find him he’s always married.’

Hilary swaggered. ‘You hear that, Sue? I am married, as you will admit. I leave you to draw the flattering inference.’

Susan picked up a cushion to throw at him, but it was never thrown. For Miss Bingham, they both noticed, was suddenly gazing with a strange concentration at Susan’s easel, where the faint outlines of a drawing hung dustily by one drawing-pin.

‘Is that,’ Miss Bingham asked, as though short of breath, ‘the one you were doing when I went?’

Susan came up behind her to look. ‘Yes, I believe it must be,’ she admitted casually. ‘Why, Binky dear?’

Miss Bingham did not answer that. ‘What was it going to be?’ she asked, still as though some one were trying to choke her.

It was so rare for her to ask anything of the sort that Susan frowned in the intensity of her polite effort to remember. But it was useless. ‘ I’m so sorry,’ she said apologetically, ‘but I’m afraid it’s quite gone. I can’t think in the least what it was going to be.’ Not a breath of reproach was in her voice, not a thought of injury in her mind, Miss Bingham recognized, and writhed the more under the blinding light of self-revelation.

So this was what she had done! Three weeks ago there had been in Susan’s mind a drawing — a thing touched with the tenderness, the humor, the strength that was Susan’s and no other’s, and now it was dead, killed by her. Nothing could bring it back. The dusty paper was like a ghost: no, not that, either; ghosts had at any rate once had life. Only a dream, only the unborn robbed forever of the right to life could smite with this intolerable poignancy.

It was Hilary who understood that thus did Miss Bingham feel, although thus she would have been abashed and furious to have her feeling put into words. ‘It’s all right, Binky,’ he said, and squeezed her arm comfortingly as he slipped his through it. ‘She’ll do some more, you know. She’s made of them.’

But even that light touch on her unbearable thought was anguish. She started, and shook him off. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Hilary? Only look at the dust on it! So now, if you’ll be good enough to walk to the village and tell Mrs. Fisher I’m back and shall be glad of her help, that’s all I ’ll need. You must get lunch somewhere, but you can come home to dinner. I’ll be ready for you by then.’

‘Oh, Binky!’ sighed Susan in ecstatic gratitude. ‘The dirt!’

‘Is this the face,’ inquired Hilary in song, ‘ that launched a thousand meals? It is — it is! And oh, Binky, we have lived on Tins from time immemorial.’

Miss Bingham, affecting indifference, smiled with the calm of assured generalship. Nevertheless, there was a sweetness in these tributes to which she felt it would be dangerous to accustom herself.

‘Oh, you don’t have to keep it up, you know!’ she reminded herself rather than them, a little wistfully. For it was hard. Why should she be bereft of her only hold on them, just because she could not live without them?

Again they exchanged one of the looks that Miss Bingham had come to recognize. It meant that they were either going to be astounded by the discovery of something that every one else in the world knew (as in the case, for instance, of how to count the laundry), or that they were going to astound her by knowing something that had never occurred to her. This time it was the latter.

‘Blessed, beloved, benighted Binky!’ cried Susan, as she hugged her and supplied her with another blinding light, ‘but don’t you see that’s just why we can ? ’