Mrs. Vidler lay in a deck-chair under the oak tree, with Herbert in Sara’s perambulator beside her. She was feeling, she told herself, and would have liked to have told other people had there been anybody about to listen, “lovely in herself”. She was surprised to find herself so lovely for she had not felt anything approaching that state since Herbert had been born and she had slipped inside, giving her a feeling, as she had told her neigh­bours in the Deptford days when there had been neigh­bours, as if she might drop out at any minute, right there on the pavement. But since she had come to Levet, and that Nannie as they called her, and old Mrs. Laurence, and that Annie Martin and that Minnie Sims, let alone that poor girl, Rene, did nothing but say “sit”, her inside had felt suddenly miraculously compact again, for all the world, she thought, as if coming to the country had put a stopper in it somehow. Not that, for all her feeling of well-being, Mrs. Vidler held with the country, she didn’t. It seemed to her that it was a queer life in the house, people were always in a rush and tear, cooking a whole lot of things they didn’t need; of course you couldn’t hope for fish and chips, but what was the matter with tins? Why, they even ate salmon fresh and she’d tasted it, and it wasn’t a patch on the tinned kind, and she didn’t care who knew it; and out of doors where you expected to see a bit of life there wasn’t a soul stirring. Her eye roamed over Levet, but not in admiration. Funny, she ruminated, it’s for all the world like living in a hospital or a workhouse. Why people give them­selves all that space to brush and scrub when they needn’t, beats me. … She looked up at the window behind which she knew Bill was lying and sighed. How dull life was for people like him and that young Mrs. Laurence. No wonder the poor little thing looked all of a jump. She would look all of a jump if she had a lot of women in her house doing her work and not a soul to talk to. They couldn’t even get going about an illness. If Vid had fallen through a window and cut himself the way she heard young Mr. Laurence had cut himself, there wouldn’t have been all this quiet about it. Her eyes gleamed at the thought of the colour and brightness that such an accident would have brought to her street back in Deptford. There would have been none of this emptiness. People would have been coming in all day long, and what a story it would have been to tell. Each cut described, and as for the blood! With a scornful gesture, Mrs. Vidler gave
the pram a little rock.  Why, if it hadn’t been for what the servants had let drop, she might never have known of the accident in the house. Her eye travelled, to the end of the building where, out of sight, the windows of the servants’ hall lay. That was a funny thing. There was that nice hall with those four maids in it all having a good laugh as like as not and the wireless on, and there was that poor little Mrs. Laurence sitting alone with her mother-in-law. Mrs. Vidler threw up a thankful prayer in gratitude for the fact that she had not been born a lady. If being a lady meant that you had to sit for half the day alone with your mother-in-law, when there was a bit of fun going on in your own house, and you couldn’t join in, then how much better not to have been born one.