Pearl understood the import of this very well. She was in charge of Reference, and that included a locked section of the book-stacks called Permanently Reserved, where books were kept which could only be read on the spot, upon presentation of a permit signed by the Librarian. Jessie plainly thought that Pearl had won Solly by subtle arts learned from the Hindu Books of Love, and from Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex.

All of the girls had congratulated her, in one way or another, within an hour of opening time. Some of them seemed genuinely glad that she was to make her escape from the Library. And Pearl had said nothing to arouse further curiosity. Was this wise? But with Daddy talking about lawyers and suits she did not know what else to do; there would be trouble enough in time. She had trembled, when she overheard some of the girls talking in whispers about arranging a shower for her.

A shower! She had intimate knowledge of these affairs, at which the friends of an engaged girl lavished everything from handkerchiefs to kitchenware upon her. What would she do if she suddenly found herself the recipient of twenty handkerchiefs, or a collection of candy-thermometers, lemon-squeezers and carrot-dicers? As Tchaikovsky moaned his last, Pearl cowered in the armchair, licking the sugar from the last doughnut off her fingers, and sweated with fright.

Suddenly the light flashed on in the dark room. It was old Mr Garnett, the Library janitor, with his trolley of cleaning materials.

“Sorry. Didn’t know anybody was here.”

“It’s all right, Mr Garnett. I’ll just put away these records, and then I’ll be through. Please go ahead with your work.”

“OK, Miss Vambrace. Looks pretty clean in here anyways.”

“There wasn’t any class this afternoon. I was listening to some music alone. You won’t tell anybody, will you?”

“I never tell what ain’t my business. You got a right to be alone, I guess. Won’t be alone much longer, I hear.”

“I’ll put these records away at once.”

“That’s what they say about marriage. Never alone again. Well, that can be good, and it can be pure hell, too. Ever think of it that way?”

“I’ll just throw this bag right into your wastepaper box, shall I?”

“What’s the fella’s name?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The fella. The fella you’re engaged to? Somebody mentioned it, but I forget, now. One of our fellas, isn’t it?”

“Oh, you know how people talk, Mr Garnett.”

“It was in the paper. That’s not talk. When it’s in the paper, you mean business. What’s the fella’s name?”

“Oh. I forget.”

“What? How can you forget?”

“Oh—well—the name in the paper was Mr Solomon Bridgetower.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Young Bridgetower. Well, I knew his father. I’ve seen worse.”

Pearl had replaced the records, and she fled. Oh, what despicable weakness! She had named him, as her fiance, to someone outside the family! What would father say? How would she ever get out of this hateful, hateful mess?

In twenty-five years of marriage Professor Vambrace and his wife had never reached any satisfactory arrangement about food; she was preoccupied, and thought food a fleshly indulgence; he liked food, but disliked paying for it. In consequence they lived mainly on scraps, and bits. Now and then Mrs Vambrace would parch, or burn, or underdo a large piece of meat, and the recollection of it would last them for two or three weeks. They never had sweets, because the Professor did not like them, but they ate a good deal of indifferent cheese. They never had fruit, because the Professor considered it a dangerous loosener of the bowels, though he made an exception in favour of stewed prunes which he thought of as regulators, or gastric policemen. Their refrigerator, which seemed to be in permanent need of de-frosting, and smelled, was always full of little saucers of things which had not been quite finished at previous meals, and they always seemed to be catching up with small arrears of past dishes. They were great keepers of bowls of grease in which, now and again, things were fried. They tended also to fall behind with their dish-washing.

Nevertheless the Professor, as became a cousin of Mourne and Derry, firmly believed that there was a formal programme which governed their eating, but which they had temporarily agreed to set aside. The most substantial meal of their day was always eaten at one o’clock, give an hour or so either way, but he would not permit it to be called dinner, for only common people ate dinner then. It was luncheon. Not lunch; luncheon. If he chanced to be at home during the afternoon he always suggested that they skip tea. They had never actually had tea in years. Supper, he maintained, was a meal which one ate before going to bed, and as the food they ate between six and eight could not possibly be called dinner, it was usually referred to as “the evening meal.”

When Pearl came home after her music-and-doughnut orgy at the Library it was well after six o’clock, but nothing had yet been done about the evening meal, so she prepared it. As she had acquired her notions of housekeeping from her mother, and as the cloth and such things as salt and pepper and sugar were never removed from the dining-table, this did not take long. She called her mother, who had been having a nap on her bed, and tapped at the door of her father’s study, and the evening meal began.

For a time no one spoke. Pearl, glutted with doughnuts, worried a plate of stewed prunes and some bread. Mrs Vambrace ate a kind of cardboard which her doctor had recommended to her years before, as a bread substitute during a brief illness, and took a little jelly which had been left from luncheon two days ago, and which had withered and taken on a taste of onion in the refrigerator. The Professor, as became a man, was a heavier eater, and he had a saucer of cold macaroni and cheese, upon which he poured a little milk, to liven it; he followed this with the remains of a custard, the component parts of which had never really assembled, but which had a splendidly firm skin. Hunger partly satisfied, he was ready to talk.

“I have struck the first blow in my campaign, today,” he announced.

“Yes, dear?” Mrs Vambrace had a calm and sorrowful face, which belied her character, for she was inclined toward hysteria. She had also a low and pretty voice.

“It is a good policy to carry the war into the enemy’s camp. I have instigated a suit against The Bellman.”

“Oh, Walter! A lawsuit?”

“Of course a lawsuit. What other kind of suit could I possibly mean?”

“But Walter! A lawsuit can be such a dreadful thing.”

“You should know, Elizabeth. Your family have been lawyers for long enough.”

“Did you talk to Ronny?”

“Yes, and little good it did me. Ronny shares your opinion, Elizabeth. He too thinks that a lawsuit is a dreadful thing. I would think that with his objection to suits he would get out of the law and find some other profession.”

“But Walter, I am sure that if Ronny advised against a suit he meant to spare you pain. Father always said that Ronny was a very good lawyer, for all his flippant way.”

“Your father himself enjoyed a great reputation as a lawyer, Elizabeth, and much of it was founded on his habit of persuading people not to go to law. He was a sentimentalist, I fear. It is the curse of a certain type of Irishman. Ronny would naturally appeal to him.”

“If you don’t consider Ronny competent, Walter, why did you go to him?”

“That is a ridiculous question, Elizabeth. He is one of the family. Of your family, that is to say. Family means something. Not much, but something. My own family is not entirely inconsiderable, though I do not attribute a pennyworth of my own success in my chosen career to that. Still, there is the connection with Mourne and Derry. There is what I suppose may be called the aristocratic tradition, which is chiefly a tradition of not allowing oneself to be trampled over by a pack of louts and cheapjacks. So far as family gives one courage to resist what is vulgar and intrusive and impertinent, family is a very good thing. Ronny may not understand that, but his senior partner certainly does so.”