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When people first saw me, even when I was quite young, they felt that I was strange. But I have often seen pretty girls coming in and everybody liking them at once. It is a charming sight,’ she said, smiling at some memory.
    Cordelia laughed timidly. ‘Am I really all right?’ she asked us. She turned towards me and seemed to steel herself, and repeated, ‘Am I really all right?’
    I thought to myself, ‘Why, it is as if she thought that I was always so hard on her that if I say she is pretty it really must be true,’ and I wondered why she should feel like that about me.
    Was I sometimes savage? I was under the impression that I was mild, though often people were savage to me. I thought too how odd it was that she needed reassurance about her looks, considering that when she had played the violin badly at concerts she had exploited her prettiness with what had looked to me like a complete understanding of its effects. Could it be that Cordelia had been so disconcerted by having it proved that she had no musical gift, that she now doubted the existence of the gifts she really possessed? I said, ‘Of course, Cordelia, you are lovely,’ but I do not know if she ever heard me, for at that moment our servant Kate came into the room, followed by Rosamund, and Kate wore her wooden look of consequence, which meant that she thought the family which employed her had gone too far in its path towards folly, and she was about to call them to a halt.
    My mother cried, ‘Kate, you must be gentle with that poor old man.’ She had never learned to recognise the warning in that wooden look.
    ‘What poor old man?’ asked Kate. She held the pause as if some invisible conductor was giving her the beat. ‘Tom Partridge is no poor old man. He is the laundryman’s father-in-law and a great grief to all his family. But I have been gentle with him, to please you.’
    ‘What, have you seen the old man already?’ said Mamma.
    ‘Yes, indeed. I did not wait to make tea for him. Tea is not his drink. I went up and gave him money as you had ordered, but not all you gave Miss Rosamund. Here is five shillings change.’
    ‘What, you gave him fifteen shillings?’ exclaimed Mamma. ‘I am sure you were right, but it is an odd sum. One never says to oneself, “Poor man, I would like to give him fifteen shillings”.’
    ‘I did not give him fifteen shillings. Fifteen shillings for old Tom Partridge! I gave him five shillings,’ said Kate, as much timber as an old sailing ship.
    ‘It was a half-sovereign I took from your case, not a sovereign,’ explained Rosamund. Her tone was bland. I had noticed before that she often spoke of her own actions as if she were reporting something of no interest to her, simply what she had chanced to perceive.
    ‘Oh, Rosamund! That was mean, and not like you!’ exclaimed Mamma. ‘And, Kate, you have been hard! The old man may be a bad character, but he was in some sort of trouble. He was crying, Kate.’
    ‘Yes, ma’m,’ said Kate. ‘He is in some sort of trouble. His trouble is that he is bad. If he was crying, it was most likely because he had drunk too much last night, and, ma’am, since you are so, so, so -’ she wanted to say ‘foolish’, but that would have destroyed the system of relationships to which she was accustomed. ‘So kind,’ she said, ‘he has gone away happy. What he wanted was to get some money out of somebody by a trick, so that he could spend it on drink, and feel how clever he was. If you had given him nothing, then that would have been hard on him, he would have slunk off like a dog, and felt that his day was over. But the smallest sum that he got by his tricks would send him out in good heart. To be sure, he begged for a little more, but I said something that brought our talk to an end without being disagreeable.’
    ‘Oh, Kate, Kate, are you sure it was not disagreeable?’ Mamma begged.
    ‘No, no, it was nothing cruel,’ Kate assured her. ‘I simply said that if