The happiest marriages are sustained by such comforting illusions and Miss Beale’s and Miss Burrow’s very different, but essentially innocent, relationship was similarly founded. Except in this capacity for mutual but unstated admiration they were very different Miss Burrows was sturdy, thick-set and formidable, hiding a vulnerable sensitivity under an air of blunt common sense. Miss Beale was small and birdlike, precise in speech and movement and threatened with an out-of-date gentility which sometimes brought her close to being thought ridiculous. Even their physiological habits were different. The heavy Miss Burrows awoke to instantaneous life at the first sound of her alarm, was positively energetic until teatime, then sank into sleepy lethargy as the evening advanced. Miss Beale daily opened her gummed eyelids with reluctance, had to force herself into early morning activity and became more brightly cheerful as the day wore on. They had managed to reconcile even this incompatibility. Miss Burrows was happy to brew the early morning tea and prepare breakfast and Miss Beale washed up after dinner and made the nightly cocoa.

Miss Burrows poured out both cups of tea, dropped two lumps of sugar in her friend’s cup and took her own to the chair by the window. Early training forbade Miss Burrows to sit on the bed. She said: “You need to be off early. I’d better run your bath. When does it start?”

Miss Beale muttered feebly that she had told Matron that she would arrive as soon as possible after nine o’clock. The tea was blessedly sweet and reviving. The promise to start out so early was a mistake but she began to think that she might after all make it by 9.15.

“That’s Mary Taylor, isn’t it? She’s got quite a reputation considering she’s only a provincial matron. Extraordinary that she’s never come to London. She didn’t even apply for our job when Miss Montrose retired.” Miss Beale muttered incomprehensibly which, since they had had this conversation before, her friend correctly interpreted as a protest that London wasn’t everybody’s choice and that people were too apt to assume that nothing remarkable ever came out of the provinces.