Dangerous Ages

smoothly taken back from her broad forehead that jutted broodingly over her short pointed fa

forty-five, and member, in the Labour interest, for a division of Surrey. He looked, however, more like a literary man. How to be useful though married: in Rodney's case the problem was so simple, in hers so complicated. She had envied Rodney a little twenty years ago; then she had stopped, because the bringing up of Kay and Gerda had been a work in itself; now she had begun again. Rodney and she were more like each other than they were like their children; they had some of the same vanities, fastidiousnesses, humours and withdrawals, and i

news of the morning, which was as bad as usual and four times repeated in four quite different tones by the four daily papers which lay on the table. They took four papers not so much that there might be one for each of them as that they might have the entertainment of seeing how different the same news can be made to appear.

dney asked Neville. "Wh

plained that it was one of those nine days of the English summer of 1920 when this was a possible occupation.) "An

y all proceeded to get and impart other things out of letters,

sive, had no patience with his children's unsophisticated leaning to a primitive crudeness. He told them they were young savages. So Ger

one side of her mouth, a buttercup in the other, mumbled "Pene

brows lazi

e doing with a baby? I didn

dn't I tell you about Penelope? S

in the sight of heave

to the human eye (as being more readily dissoluble when fatiguing) and many advantages over no marriages at all, which do not increase the population, so depleted by the Great War. When they spoke in this admirably civic sense, Neville was apt

ement, "I do very much hope that neither of you will ever perpetra

o say," Kay s

men than men in this country, it stands to reason that some

ing. Dreadfully usual. It's so much mor

wenty years ago, she and her friends had seemed always to be discussing the Limitations of Personality, the Ethics of Friendship, and the Nature

ains. How absurd it all was, and how tragic too. One might react back to the remaining choice-no love at all-and that was absurder and more tragic still, since man was made (among other ends) to love. Looking under her heavy lashes at her pretty young children, incredibly youthful, absurdly theoretical, fiercely clean of mind and frank of speech, their clearness as yet unblurred by the expediencies, compromise and experimental contacts of life, Neville was stabbed by a sharp pang of fear and hope for them. Fear lest on some fleeting impulse they might founder into the sentimental triviality of short-lived contacts, or into the tedium of bonds which must out-live desire; hope that, by some fortunate chance, they might each achieve, as she had achieved, some r