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poems in the past. “I read the moderns.”
    “Oh yes. Who are they?”
    She thought desperately, but every name escaped her. “Sludge,” she said. “Arthur Sludge.” It was the name of their butcher. “I’ve enjoyed his poems very much. He’s probably too obscure for you ever to have heard of him.”
    “Not at all,” he said. He turned his full face towards her, and she thought how ugly he looked. The corners of his mouth were twitching slightly. “I admire Sludge’s work very much. Such a grand sweep, hasn’t it? And such fervour. Such a gift of melody – reminiscent of Swinburne, don’t you think?” She turned scarlet and he stopped abruptly. “Do forgive me,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
    “Not at all.” Her voice was choked, and she thought she was going to cry. She had never been so glad to see brother Edward as when he opened the door at that moment and said grumblingly that he supposed there was no tea left…
    She got up, poured a cup of tea and gave him a little cake, which he ate in two mouthfuls. He took another, and brushed a crumb off his waistcoat. “I feel curiously hungry,” he said. “I hope there’s nothing wrong with me. I thought Shelton was coming to tea. Where is he?”
    “How should I know?” Vicky snapped, and he looked at her in surprise. There was a cry of protesting brakes outside, and feet pounded the steps. “There he is now,” she said, and rushed outside, as much to hide her tears of humiliation as to greet him.
    Her mind came back with a jerk to the diary, and she discovered that her mouth was open. All that was much too painful to put down. He had been perfectly horrid. But when Anthony arrived now…when Anthony arrived… She began to write again.
    “I always get a thrill just from seeing Anthony; he really looks so much like a God walking among men, so ‘magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life’, that it’s exciting just to be with him. But today I was cross with him because he was so late for tea so I gave him a peck instead of a proper kiss, and I said something nasty about his great, clod-hopping feet. I said he’d probably been to watch cricket and he looked guilty for a moment, but it must have been just a reaction, for then he said he’d brought me an engagement present. I’ve told you, dear diary, that I said I didn’t want a ring because rings are so vulgar, and I’d asked him to think of something rather outré. Well, he had! The nicest possible thing. A copy – a first edition! – of grandfather Martin’s poems, Passion and Repentance. I looked at him and he looked back in that shy way he has, not knowing whether I’d be pleased or was still angry with him, and I couldn’t say anything, but I threw myself into his arms and gave him another kiss, a proper one this time. Oh dear diary, he is sweet, and I do love him so. It was the loveliest little book, in a faded blue cover, and I knew it must have cost a lot of money. Anthony said he’d bought it at a sale, and that was why he’d gone up to London.
    “I took him in to see them all – he’d not met Colonel Stone before, or his nephew. Mother fluttered about and poured a cup of tea, and brother Edward asked hopefully if his car had broken down. Then I couldn’t resist saying that Tony had been late because he had been buying me an engagement present, and that it was a book. Brother Edward looked interested at the word ‘present’, but just grunted when he heard it was a book. Colonel Stone said that he thought jewellery would have been more appropriate. Then I told them it was a first edition of grandfather Martin’s poems. I was specially pleased because nobody in the family has got a copy of this first edition except Uncle Jack perhaps, and I was glad to be able to say it in front of this young man Basingstoke, who really had been beastly and superior, like all those Byronic types, while we’d been talking. They didn’t seem much impressed by the news.