Mrs. Brown bent over Mrs. Glenn with one of her quick gestures. “Darling—before we go in to lunch do let me fluff you out a little: so.” With a flashing hand she loosened the soft white waves under Mrs. Glenn’s spreading hat brim. “There—that’s better; isn’t it, Mr. Norcutt?”

            Mrs. Glenn’s face was a curious sight. The smile she had forced gave place to a marble rigidity; the old statuesqueness which had melted to flesh and blood stiffened her features again. “Thank you … I’m afraid I never think …”

            “No, you never do; that’s the trouble!” Mrs. Brown shot an arch glance at me. “With her looks, oughtn’t she to think? But perhaps it’s lucky for the rest of us poor women she don’t—eh, Stevie?”

            The colour rushed to Mrs. Glenn’s face; she was going to retort; to snub the dreadful woman. But the new softness had returned, and she merely lifted a warning finger. “Oh, don’t, please … speak to him. Can’t you see that he’s fallen asleep?”

            O great King Solomon, I thought—and bowed my soul before the mystery.

            I spent a fortnight at Les Calanques, and every day my perplexity deepened. The most conversable member of the little group was undoubtedly Stephen. Mrs. Glenn was as she had always been: beautiful, benevolent and inarticulate. When she sat on the beach beside the dozing Stephen, in her flowing white dress, her large white umbrella tilted to shelter him, she reminded me of a carven angel spreading broad wings above a tomb (I could never look at her without being reminded of statuary); and to converse with a marble angel so engaged can never have been easy. But I was perhaps not wrong in suspecting that her smiling silence concealed a reluctance to talk about the Browns. Like many perfectly unegoistical women Catherine Glenn had no subject of conversation except her own affairs; and these at present so visibly hinged on the Browns that it was easy to see why silence was simpler.

            Mrs. Brown, I may as well confess, bored me acutely. She was a perfect specimen of the middle-aged flapper, with layers and layers of hard-headed feminine craft under her romping ways. All this I suffered from chiefly because I knew it was making Mrs. Glenn suffer. But after all it was thanks to Mrs. Brown that she had found her son; Mrs. Brown had brought up Stephen, had made him (one was obliged to suppose) the whimsical dreamy charming creature he was; and again and again, when Mrs. Brown outdid herself in girlish archness or middle-aged craft, Mrs. Glenn’s wounded eyes said to mine: “Look at Stephen; isn’t that enough?”

            Certainly it was enough; enough even to excuse Mr. Brown’s jocular allusions and arid anecdotes, his boredom at Les Calanques, and the too-liberal potations in which he drowned it. Mr. Brown, I may add, was not half as trying as his wife.