a stone mask. After a moment he remarks to the girls, "Giddy-up! Mama's imagination appears to have run away with her again."
They giggle obediently.
"Silly Mama."
Her tongue feels thick with hatred. "Very well, I can tell the topic's a sensitive one, given your position."
His coal-black bushy eyebrows go up. "My—"
"Your current lack of one, I mean."
"My superiors consider me entitled to a restorative period after seven years of ceaseless application," he says, a muscle standing out on the side of his neck.
"No no, let's drop it. I'll read the paper, and you and the girls can entertain yourselves by practising faints on the rug."
Nan and Nell laugh, with the eyes of nervous fillies.
She reaches for the Telegraph.
"I haven't finished, as it happens," says Harry, moving it out of her reach and re-erecting it. "Here's an interesting fact for you, girls. Did you know there's a house in Bayswater that's only a false facade, constructed to cover a railway tunnel?"
"Why?" Nell wants to know.
"It looks more harmonious that way, I suppose. Otherwise people walking down that street would suddenly glimpse a train rushing past under their feet."
"That would be sensational!"
"Aunt Fido had a fit of asthma on the Underground Railway, didn't she, Mama?"
Helen's startled that Nell remembers. "That's right, after she and I ran into each other on the street."
"I still don't see what the two of you were thinking, travelling on the Underground, when we can afford to hire cabs," remarks her husband.
"My mistake," says Helen under her breath. "You blew so much steam when I asked about keeping a carriage, I had the impression we were on the brink of bankruptcy." Then she catches sight of the girls' faces, and regrets it. "Mama's joking, my sweets."
"Grown-up jokes aren't very funny," observes Nell.
"Indeed they aren't," says Harry, glaring.
"She gave me a tour of her famous press last week," Helen remarks, testing the waters.
A snort from her husband. "I wasn't aware that you took an interest in industry."
"Well, one must pass the days somehow; town will be quite moribund till January."
Today's cold silence from Taviton Street suggests that Helen's strayed across a line. If Fido was willing to counsel her friend through a thwarted romance with the handsome colonel, it appears she feels quite otherwise about a consummated one. Hypocrite, Helen snaps at Fido in her head. Sex looms so large in the pinched minds of spinsters. Do some snatched pleasures on a sofa really make all the difference between right and wrong?
"You could always spend time with the girls, improve their French and music," Harry remarks, crossing his long legs.
"Isn't that exactly what we pay Mrs. Lawless for?"
He quietly corrects the pronoun. "I hired her to teach them for certain hours of the day, yes, but surely it's their mother who should be preparing them for their future role in life."
"I do, as it happens," says Helen. "I take them out looking for wallpaper, let them sit in the cab when I'm paying calls..."
"I was thinking more of domestic duties."
"What, boiling a leg of mutton?"
"Now you're being silly again. Supervisory duties, I meant."
"Mrs. Nichols and her underlings boil mutton perfectly well, and wouldn't care for the three of us standing round the kitchen and goggling at them."
"My point is that there's no substitute, morally, for maternal care."
"If you mean to talk cant, I really must insist on reading the paper..." Helen holds out her hand for it.
"Don't, Mama," says Nan, hanging on her arm. "This press of Fido's, tell us why it's famous."
So young, and already expert in the feminine art of distraction. "For employing girls to set the type," Helen tells her.
What if Fido doesn't write back, not today, not next week? The buried friendship, which Helen's gone to considerable trouble to dig up and dust off, might have slipped through her fingers already.
Harry's smile is small. "Bourgeois female employment is a pure novelty, I'm afraid, as much as the stereoscope. These printers and nurses and telegraphists and bookkeepers, they'll die away like birds in winter."
"I'll be sure to pass on your encouragement the next time I see her." I won't let her drop me, Helen decides with a sudden fury. I can fix this; I can make her remember how much she cares about me.
"Speaking of our stereoscope, Papa, we've had all our views a very long time," Nell puts in.
"Meaning, a month," says Helen, sardonic.
"There's a set of photographs of Japan on tissue paper. That would be educational," Nan adds.
"Well, you may show me the catalogue," says their