Rodney came out of the house, his pipe in his mouth. He still had the lounging walk, shoulders high and hands in pockets, of the undergraduate; the walk also of Kay. He sat down among his family. Kay and Gerda looked at him with approval; though they knew his weakness, he was just the father they would have chosen, and of how few parents can this be said. They were proud to take him about with them to political meetings and so forth, and prouder still to sit under him while he addressed audiences. Few men of his great age were (on the whole) so right in the head and sound in the heart, and fewer still so delightful to the eye. When people talked about the Wicked Old Men, who, being still unfortunately unrestrained and unmurdered by the Young, make this wicked world what it is, Kay and Gerda always contended that there were a few exceptions.
Nan gave Rodney her small, fleeting smile. She had a critical friendliness for him, but had never believed him really good enough for Neville.
Gerda and Kay began to play a single, and Nan said, "I'm in a hole."
"Broke, darling?" Neville asked her, for that was usually it, though sometimes it was human entanglements.
Nan nodded. "If I could have ten pounds.... I'd let you have it in a fortnight."
"That's easy," said Rodney, in his kind, offhand way.
"Of course," Neville said. "You old spendthrift."
"Thank you, dears. Now I can get a birthday present for mother."
For Mrs. Hilary's birthday was next week, and to celebrate it her children habitually assembled at The Gulls, St. Mary's Bay, where she lived. Nan always gave her a more expensive present than she could afford, in a spasm of remorse for the irritation her mother roused in her.
"Oh, poor mother," Neville exclaimed, suddenly remembering that Mrs. Hilary would in a week be sixty-three, and that this must be worse by twenty years than to be forty-three.
The hurrying stream of life was loud in her ears. How quickly it was sweeping them all along--the young bodies of Gerda and of Kay leaping on the tennis court, the clear, analysing minds of Nan and Rodney and herself musing in the sun, the feverish heart of her mother, loving, hating, feeding restlessly on itself by the seaside, the age-calmed soul of her grandmother, who was eighty-four and drove out in a donkey chair by the same sea.