Crampton Hodnet Read Online Free PDF Page B

rooms in Randolph College, the table was strewn with bills, invitations to luncheons and sherry parties, and even love letters. Or so Miss Morrow, who was highly imaginative, pictured it.
    ‘… son of the late British Ambassador in Warsaw,’ she heard Miss Doggett saying to Mr. Latimer. ‘A brilliant young man. I think dinner is ready now. I hope you can take veal?’
    They walked into the dining-room, talking happily about dyspepsia. Miss Morrow followed, feeling rather young and sprightly.
    After dinner there was more wool-winding and some general conversation about Italian churches, central heating, ravioli, the unemployed, winter underclothes, plainsong chants and various other subjects, which seemed to follow each other quite easily. At ten o’clock they retired to bed.
    Good, thought Mr. Latimer, as he climbed into the high, wide bed, laden with far too many bedclothes; there was a bedside lamp. He had so often in his life had to patter across cold linoleum in bare feet to turn off a light by the door. He believed that he was going to be very comfortable here. Of course Miss Doggett made a fuss of him, as all women did, but he rather liked this, as long as he wasn’t expected to give anything in return except the politeness and charm which came to him without effort. And, after all, what else could he be expected to give to an old woman of seventy? He liked the companion too, an amusing, sensible little woman, who wasn’t likely to throw her arms round his neck, for poor Mr. Latimer had experienced even that. His last thought before he went to sleep was that he liked Leamington Lodge.
    In the Clevelands’ house nobody was asleep, although they were all in bed. Francis Cleveland was shouting through the communicating door to his wife’s room that he had a new pupil called Barbara Bird, who had written a remarkably fine essay on the love poems of John Donne.
    Mrs. Cleveland made some suitable remark and then went back to her calculations about eggs for pickling. They seemed to get through such a lot of everything with these young men always coming to the house. And even when they were in love with Anthea they seemed to have enormous appetites.
    Anthea was lying in bed on her stomach, with her face buried in the pillow. She was, as usual, thinking about Simon, with whom she had been out that evening. She was wide awake and it was no use trying to go to sleep, because even in the dark she saw his bright eyes looking at her. She tossed and turned and then lay on her back, regretting that these romantic evenings with much wine always made one so frightfully thirsty afterwards. She gulped down two glasses of water, then went to the window and leaned out. ‘Is he thinking about me?’ she whispered to the night, solemnly blowing kisses in what she imagined was the direction of Randolph College, but which was actually, and most unsuitably, the nearest way to a seminary for Roman Catholic priests.
    Simon was not thinking about her. He was lying happily awake in his college bedroom, going over a speech he hoped to make at the Union debate on Thursday. Of course he adored Anthea, but “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart”, especially when he is only twenty and has the ambition to become Prime Minister.

IV.  Miss Bird
     

    ‘Now, Miss Morrow, you ought to be in your place at the stall,’ said Miss Doggett sharply, moving about the room giving orders. Every year she made herself the chief figure at the winter Sale of Work, although she did little to help in the preparations beyond knitting a few garments out of inferior wool or sending a quantity of junk out of her house.
    This afternoon she was a regal figure in maroon with a skunk cape, quite alarming in her magnificence, although every woman had smartened herself up a little for the occasion. Even Miss Nollard and Miss Foxe, two dim North Oxford spinsters, were wearing new hats, and Miss Nollard’s hair looked suspiciously as if it had been waved. Only