"Most people aren't decent. You think they are. You've not lived in my set--nor in Rosalind's. You're still fresh from Oxford--stuck all over with Oxford manners and Oxford codes. You don't know the raddled gossip who fishes for your secrets and then throws them about for fun, like tennis balls."
"Oh, Rosalind's not the only one, though she'll do. Anyhow I've trapped you into saying an honest and unkind thing about her, for once; that's something. Wish you weren't such a dear old fraud, Pammie."
Frances Carr came back, in her dressing gown, looking about twenty-three, her brown hair in two plaits.
"Pamela, you _mustn't_ sit up any more. I'm awfully sorry, Nan, but her head...."
"Right oh. I'm off. Sorry I've kept you up, Pammie. Good-night. Good-night, Frances. Yes, I shall get the bus at the corner. Good-night."
The door closed after Nan, shutting in the friends and their friendship and their anchored peace.
Off went Nan on the bus at the corner, whistling softly into the night. Like a bird her heart rose up and sang, at the lit pageant of London swinging by. Queer, fantastic, most lovely life! Sordid, squalid, grotesque life, bitter as black tea, sour as stale wine! Gloriously funny, brilliant as a flower-bed, bright as a Sitwell street in hell--
"(Down in Hell's gilded street Snow dances fleet and sweet, Bright as a parakeet....)"
unsteady as a swing-boat, silly as a drunkard's dream, tragic as a poem by Massfield.... To have one's corner in it, to run here and there about the city, grinning like a dog--what more did one want? Human adventures, intellectual adventures, success, even a little fame, men and women, jokes, laughter and love, dancing and a little drink, and the fields and mountains and seas beyond--what more did one want?
Roots. That was the metaphor that had eluded Nan. To be rooted and grounded in life, like a tree. Someone had written something about that.
"Let your manhood be Forgotten, your whole purpose seem The purpose of a simple tree Rooted in a quiet dream...."
Roots. That was what Neville had, what Pamela had; Pamela, with her sensible wisdom that so often didn't apply because Pamela was so far removed from Nan's conditions of life and Nan's complicated, unstable temperament. Roots. Mrs. Hilary's had been torn up out of the ground....