She knew vaguely that her sense of proportion was disorganized. She was a woman of thirty-one, and her faults, her judgments and appreciations, even her mistakes, were those of an ill-regulated, unbalanced child of morbid tendencies.

When Pamela came back to Clevedon Square, Alex was first of all afraid of her, and then became jealous of her.

She was jealous of Pam's self-confidence, of her enormous security in her own popularity and success, jealous even of the innumerable common interests and the mutual love of enjoyment that bound her and Violet together.

She was miserably ashamed of her feelings, and sought to conceal them, none the less as she became aware of a certain shrewdness of judgment underlying all Pamela's breezy vitality and _joie de vivre_. She and her sister had nothing in common.

To Pamela, Alex evidently appeared far removed from herself as a being of another generation, less of a contemporary than pretty, sought-after Violet, or than little Rosemary in her joyous, healthy play. Pamela could accompany Violet everywhere, always radiantly enjoying herself, and receiving endless congratulations, thinly disguised as raillery, on her universal popularity and the charm that she seemed to radiate at will. She could play whole-heartedly with Rosemary, thoroughly enjoying a romp for its own sake, and making even Cedric laugh at her complete _abandon_.

"Don't you like children?" Pamela asked Alex, looking up from the nursery floor where she was playing with her niece.

"Yes, I like them," said Alex sombrely.

She had been reflecting bitterly that she would have known how to play with a baby of her own. But with Pamela and the nurse in the room, she was afraid of picking up Rosemary and making a fuss with her as Pam was doing, afraid with the terrible insecurity of the self-conscious.

And she never would have babies of her own now. The thought had tormented her often of late, watching Violet with her child, and Pamela with her own radiantly-secure future that would hold home and happiness as her rights.

But Alex concealed her thoughts, even, as far as possible, from herself.

The married woman who is denied children may lament her deprivation and receive compa.s.sion, but the spinster whose lot forbids her the hope, must either conceal her regrets or know herself to be accounted morbid and indelicate.

"I like babies while they're small," Pam remarked. "Don't I, you little horror of a niece? Other people's, you know. I don't know that I should want any of my own--they're all very well when they're tiny, but I can't bear them at the tell-me-a-story stage. I make it a rule never to tell the children stories at the houses where I stay. I always say, the very first evening, that I don't know any. Then they know what to expect.

Some girls let themselves be regularly victimized, if they want to please the children's mother, and get asked again. I must say I do hate that sort of thing myself, and I don't believe it really does any good.

Men are generally frightfully bored by the sort of girl who's 'perfectly wonderful with children.' They'd much rather have one who can play tennis, or who's good at bridge."

Pamela laughed comfortably at her own cynicism. "I must say I do think it pays one to be honest in the long run. I always say exactly what I feel myself, and don't care what any one thinks of me."

Alex felt a dull anger at her sister's self-complacent statement of what she knew to be the truth. Pamela could afford to be frank, and her boast seemed to Alex to cast an oblique reflection on herself. She gazed at her without speaking, wretchedly conscious of her own unreason.

"Look at Aunt Alex, Baby!" mischievously exclaimed Pam in a loud whisper. "We're rather afraid of her when she pulls a long face like that, aren't we? Have we been naughty, do you think?"

Alex tried to laugh, contorting her lips stiffly. Pamela jumped up from the floor.

"Really and truly, you know, Alex," she gravely told her sister, "you ought to try and make things less _au grand serieux_. I think you'd be much happier, if you'd only cultivate a sense of humour--we all think so."

Then she ran out of the room.

Alex sat still.

So they all thought that she ought to cultivate a sense of humour. She felt herself to be ridiculous in their eyes, with her eternal air of tragedy, her sombre despair in the midst of their gay, good-humoured conventions, that admitted of everything except of weighty, unseasonable gloom.

Pamela's spontaneous and unwearied high spirits seemed to her to throw her own dejection into greater relief; her own utter social incompetence.

She began to long for the end of July, when the household in Clevedon Square would be dispersed for the remainder of the summer.

Pamela talked incessantly of a yachting invitation which she had received for August, and spoke of the difficulty of "sandwiching in"

country-house visits for autumn shooting-parties, and Alex knew that Violet's people were taking a house in Scotland, and wanted her and Cedric and the baby to make it their headquarters. She wondered, with a sense of impending crisis, what would happen to her.

At last Cedric said to her:

"Have you any particular plans for August, Alex? I want to get Violet up north as soon as possible, she's done so much rushing about lately. I wish you could come with us, my dear, but we're going to the Temples'--that's the worst of not having a place of one's own in the country--"

"Oh," said Alex faintly, "don't bother about me, Cedric. I shall find somewhere."

He looked dissatisfied, but said only:

"Well, you'll talk it over with Violet. I know she's been vexed at seeing so little of you lately, but Pamela's an exacting young woman, and chaperoning her is no joke. I wish she'd hurry up and get settled--all this rushing about is too much for Violet."

"I thought she liked it."

"So she does. Anyhow," said Cedric, with an odd, shy laugh, "she'd like anything that pleased somebody else. She's made like that. I've never known her anything but happy--like sunshine." Then he flung a half-smoked cigarette into the fireplace, looked awkward at his own unusual expression of feeling, and abruptly asked Alex if she'd seen the newspaper.

Alex crept away, wondering why happiness should be accounted a virtue.

She loved Violet with a jealous, exclusive affection and admiration, but she thought enviously that she, too, could have been like sunshine if she had received all that Violet received. She, too, would have liked to be always happy.

She had her talk with Violet.

There was the slightest shade of wistfulness in Violet's gentleness.

"I wish we'd made you happier, but I really believe quiet is what you want most, and things aren't ever very quiet here--especially with Pam.

I simply love having her, but I'm not sure she is the best person for you, just now."

"I don't feel I know her very well. I mean, I'm not at all at home with her. She makes me realize what a stranger I am to the younger ones, after all these years."

"Poor Alex!"

"You're much more like my sister than she is, and yet a year ago I didn't know you."

"Alex, dear, I'm so glad if I'm a comfort to you--but I wish you wouldn't speak in that bitter way about poor little Pamela. It seems so unnatural."

Violet's whole healthy instinct was always, Alex had already discovered, to tend towards the normal--the outlook of well-balanced sanity. She was instinctively distressed by abnormality of any kind.

"I didn't really mean it," said Alex hurriedly, with the old fatal instinct of propitiation, and read dissent into the silence that received her announcement.

It was the subconscious hope of rectifying herself in Violet's eyes that made her add a moment later:

"Couldn't Barbara have me for a little while when you go up to Scotland?

I think she would be quite glad."

"Of course she would. She's often lonely, isn't she? And you think you'd be happy with her?"

"Oh, yes," said Alex eagerly, bent on showing Violet that she had no unnatural aversion from being with her own sister.

But Violet still looked rather troubled.

"You remember that you found it rather difficult there, when you first got back. You said then that Barbara and you had never understood one another even as children."

"Oh, but that will all be different now," said Alex, confused, and knowing that her manner was giving an impression of shiftiness from her very consciousness that she was contradicting herself.