"I know exactly what you mean," agreed Betty. "I felt the same when we were living in a flat in town. It was simply tiny—literally you couldn't move in it—and I used to say to Clive that I felt absolutely cooped up."

"I don't think actual space matters so much as room for one's Essential Ego to expand," said Rosemary a trifle loftily.

"Yes, I do utterly agree with you there," replied Betty. "Atmosphere means a most frightful lot to me too. I mean, I'm awfully sensitive to beauty—and, funnily enough, both my children are, too, even Peter, who's only three and a half. I mean, if a picture is out of the straight, I simply can't rest until I've put it right. It seems to kind of hurt me."

"I'm afraid," said Rosemary, with a faint, superior smile, "that I shouldn't even notice a crooked picture."

"Yes, I'm frightfully absentminded too. I seem to go into a sort of dream, and I forget simply everything. I often think that's where my Jennifer gets it from—it's quite extraordinary the way that child daydreams! I mean, everybody says so, it isn't only just me. The children absolutely love coming down to stay with Granny and Grandpa by the sea. They simply live on the sands. Of course it's just coming home to me, and Clive feels exactly the same, really far more so than with his own people. It's quite a joke in the family!"

Rosemary looked fairly disgusted by this sample of the humour prevalent in the Mansell household and said in a voice of suppressed passion: "How odd that you should be glad to come here while I would give my soul to get away! The sameness! . . . Doesn't it get on your nerves? But perhaps you don't suffer from your nerves as I do."

It was not to be expected that Betty Pemble would allow so insulting a suggestion to pass unchallenged, and she replied warmly that, as a matter of fact, she was One Mass of Nerves.