Flat No. 1-old Mrs. Meredith, who went out all bundled up with shawls in a bath-chair. How dreadful to be nothing more than a bundle of shawls. Better to be unhappy, better to be anything that was alive than to have forgotten what it was like to live. Better to break your heart for a dead lover than to have lost the memory of love. She pulled away from that. Mrs. Meredith’s companion, Miss Crane, an easy, tattling person-large round glasses and a plump pale face. Mrs. Meredith’s sour-faced maid who never spoke to anyone. There they were, the three of them, asleep now. She wondered if Packer’s trap of a mouth loosened at all or fell open in sleep.

In the other ground-floor flat, Mrs. and Miss Lemming. She felt sorry for Agnes Lemming, the drudge of a selfish mother. She wouldn’t be so plain if she took any trouble over herself. But it was Mrs. Lemming who had the new clothes, the permanent waves, the facial treatments, and who still carried herself with the air of a beauty and got away with it-lovely white hair, and those fine eyes, and a really marvellous complexion. Poor Agnes, she had a nice smile, but so little use for it-all the work of the flat to do, and endless errands to run besides. “I wish they’d call her up. It would give her a chance to be a human being instead of a slave. I suppose she must be thirty-five.”

Number 3-the Underwood flat. Just now it contained herself, Aunt Mabel, and, in the slip of a maid’s bedroom, Ivy Lord. Uncle Godfrey was away in the north. She loved Uncle Godfrey-quiet, gentle, shy-Wing-Commander Underwood, with a D.F.C. Now how in this world did he come to marry Aunt Mabel? They simply didn’t belong. Perhaps it was because he was shy and she saved him the trouble of talking. Anyhow there they were, nearly sixteen years married and very fond of each other. An odd sort of world.