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Malcolm finished his meal and left the room. He usually spent the evenings pottering about with his car or at the local club, where the young men of the neighbourhood gathered for mysterious manly purposes. Deirdre was reminded of the African men’s associations which she had read about in the course of her studies. But the object of many of these seemed to be to intimidate the women, whereas here women were allowed to belong to some sections of the club and might almost be considered as one of its amenities. Perhaps they intimidated the men. Certainly they often led them captive in marriage and Malcolm had recently become engaged to a girl he had met when playing tennis. Deirdre almost spoke her thoughts aloud, but then she realized that neither her mother nor her aunt would appreciate her points and would think she was trying to be ‘cynical’, which they thought a pity in a young woman of nineteen with a happy home and all her life before her.
    When they had finished the meal Deirdre offered to help her mother with the washing-up.
    ‘No, dear, don’t you bother,’ said Mabel. ‘You’ve been working all day, Rhoda and I can manage it.’
    ‘You always say that, Mabel,’ Rhoda reminded her when they were alone together at the sink. ‘ What will she do when she has a home of her own?’
    ‘I expect she’ll leave everything until she has no more clean crockery left,’ said Mabel, who sometimes felt as if she would like to do this herself.
    ‘I can’t settle down to listen to the wireless when I know there’s washing-up to be done,’ said Rhoda. ‘It really worries me.’
    ‘But there are worse things to worry about,’ said her sister.
    ‘Worse things?’
    ‘Yes, things going on in the world, bigger things.’
    Rhoda’s face looked grave for a moment. She knew that there were worse things, but she also knew that her sister did not really worry about them. It was the same writh books and programmes on the wireless. There were the books they felt they ought to read and which they sometimes put down on their library lists; but they were secretly relieved when each time they went to get a book the librarian handed out yet another novel. For i£ by any chance she should produce that heavy work of politics or literary criticism it never happened to be the right time for reading it; it was not suitable for a week-end or a holiday or a hot summer or cold winter afternoon. And so it came about that, like many other well-meaning people, they worried not so much about the dreadful things themselves as about their own inability to worry about them.
    When they had finished in the kitchen they took their seats by the wireless in the drawing-room, each with some sewing or knitting.
    ‘There’s a talk on the Third Programme,’ said Rhoda, as if to make amends for worrying about such a trivial thing as unwashed dishes, ‘something about the betrayal of freedom. It might be … she stopped and began tuning the wireless set, for she had been going to say ‘ interesting ‘, but the word seemed inadequate. ‘I think it’s already started, but I expect we’ll soon get the thread.’
    They sat back in their chairs and a torrent of words rushed at them. A man seemed to be talking, at phenomenal speed, about tables and why they did not rise up into the air.
    ‘I suppose this is the right programme,’ said Rhoda doubtfully. ‘ He must be thirsty, talking so fast and for an hour, too. Still, I suppose he would have a glass of water by him.’
    ‘It is a recording,’ said Mabel, consulting the Radio Times.  ’Perhaps they have put it on too fast.’
    They listened for a little longer and then Mabel said tentatively, ‘It would be a pity to miss the beginning of the play.’
    Without a word her sister altered the tuning of the set. ‘I dare say Malcolm and Deirdre might have understood some of it,’ she said. ‘ We cannot hope to now.’
    There was a certain tragic dignity in her utterance. What had freedom to do