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‘It’s a very unexpected sort of room to find in a house like this,’ she said.

‘Is it? Is anything unexpected nowadays?’

‘Well— I should not have expected Norah or Celia Bowen to have chosen those pictures:—they are very modern girls in some ways, no doubt; but their taste has never developed further than Sickert or Wilson Steer.’

‘Oh, they didn’t choose those.—I picked those up, just after the war, in London and Paris.—Will you have a cigarette?—They are not what I call modern girls, those two; they seem to me survivals.’ He held a match to light her cigarette.

‘Of the fittest? I hope you think so.’

‘I don’t know that I think so,’ Captain Ingpen was no longer being vain and boyish; his massive maturity glanced at her dispassionately: ‘They will take what is given to them; they won’t take what they want.—I like the modern girl for doing that;—or trying to.’

‘Perhaps my two are wise enough to know that you can rarely keep what you take. It is what is given that we really keep, I think.’

Captain Ingpen’s eye rested on her; his odd, light, hot eye. ‘That sounds rather religious, you know, he observed after a moment, and Monica, who had