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was no fool, and yet had got himself engaged to a pretty nit-wit. You couldn't ascribe all Stephen's vagaries to his boyhood's sick disillusionment. Or could you? Mathilda put down her empty teacup. She supposed adolescent boys were kittle-cattle: people said they were. Stephen had adored another feather-brain, his mother, unlike Paula, who had never cherished illusions about Kitten.
    Kitten! Even her children had called her that. What a name for a mother! thought Mathilda. Poor little Kitten, in the widow's weeds which had suited her so well! Lovely little Kitten, who had to be protected from the buffets of this cruel world! Clever little Kitten, who had married, not once, but three times, and who was now Mrs. Cyrus P. Thanet, indulging her nerves and her extravagant tastes in Chicago! Yes, perhaps Stephen, who had seen through her so reluctantly, and had taken it so hard, had been soured by his discovery. But what the devil possessed him, then, to get engaged to Valerie, surely a second Kitten? He was regretting it, too, if his indecent laughter last night were anything to go by.
    Valerie herself? Resolutely stifling an impulse to write her off as a gold-digger, Mathilda supposed she might have been attracted by those very peculiarities in Stephen which would most quickly disgust her: his careless rudeness, his roughness, the indifferent, sardonic gleam in his deep-set grey eyes.
    Mathilda found herself wondering what Maud thought about it all, if she thought anything: a question as yet undecided. Maud, with her eternal games of Patience, the chatty biographies of royal personages which she wallowed in! Mathilda felt that there must be more to Maud than Maud chose to reveal. No mind could be quite so static, surely! She herself had sometimes suspected that Maud's placidity masked a good deal of intelligence; but when, idly curious, she had probed Maud to discover it, she had been foiled by the armour of futility in which Maud so securely encased herself. No one, Mathilda was ready to swear, knew what Maud really thought about her preposterous husband, about her brusque brother-in-law, about the quarrels that flared up between Herriard and Herriard. She did not seem to resent, or even to notice, Nathaniel's contempt of Joseph; apparently she had acquiesced in the arrangement which made her a guest on sufferance in her brother-in-law's house.
    That Joseph found nothing to irk him in his position as hanger-on could not surprise anyone who knew him. Joseph, thought Mathilda, had a genius for twisting unpalatable truth to pleasing fiction. Just as Joseph saw Stephen as a shy young man with a heart of gold, so he would, without much difficulty, see Nathaniel as a fond brother, devoted (in spite of every evidence to the contrary) to himself. From the day of his first foisting himself and his wife on Nathaniel's generosity, he had begun to build up a comforting fantasy about himself and Nat. Nat, he said, was a lonely man, ageing fast; Nat did not like to admit it, but in reality he leaned much on his younger brother; Nat would, in fact, be lost without Joe.
    And if Joe could see Nat in such false colours, in what roseate mist did he clothe his own, faintly ridiculous person? Mathilda thought that she could read Joe clearly enough. A failure in life, it was necessary to his selfesteem that he should see himself as a success at least in his crowning part of Peacemaker, Beloved Uncle. Yes, that would explain Joe's insistence on this dreadful family gathering.
    A laugh shook Mathilda as she flung back the bedclothes, and prepared to get up. Poor old Joe, trotting from member to member of this house-party, and pouring out quarts of what he fondly believed to be balm! If he did not drive Nat at least to distraction, it would be a miracle. He was like a clumsy, well-meaning St Bernard puppy, dropped amongst a set of people who were not fond of dogs.
    When she walked into the dining-room presently, Mathilda found that her first waking