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they’ll stay,’ John assured her.
    ‘I can’t,’ said Daisy. ‘I promised them I’d be back by eleven. If you don’t mind I’ll go and put my things on. It’s all right, Angela; don’t you bother.’ She bustled out of the room. The door banged behind her. I had known it would. Doors invariably banged behind Daisy.
    Angela looked round with an apologetic little smile. ‘Then if nobody minds, I think I’ll…’
    ‘Like me to carry you upstairs?’ Waterhouse asked.
    ‘That’s sweet of you, darling, but I’m not quite helpless yet, you know.’
    Angela rose gracefully from the couch, a slim, straight figure in her exquisitely cut black evening dress, conveying an ethereal effect as much by the extreme pallor of her ash-golden hair as by the general delicacy of her colouring. A greater contrast to the robustness of her husband it would have been hard to find. Angela, I knew quite well, was thirty-six if she was a day, but unlike Rona she looked, at any rate in the heavily shaded light of her own drawing-room, no more than twenty-five. Persistent ill-health since she was a young girl at least had not destroyed her looks.
    She hovered now in the middle of the room, smiling vaguely at all of us and conveying, as somehow she always managed to do, a kind of mild surprise at finding herself where she was and an inability to get elsewhere without help.
    Then Daisy came back in her cloak; and I even welcomed the bang of the door behind her in spite of the patent suffering which it brought to the invalid’s delicate nerves; for when Angela looks like that, I always feel a fool. I don’t know why I do, and there is no reason why I should; but I do.
    ‘Well, goodbye, Angela, and thanks for a topping evening. It’s all right, John, don’t you bother; Harold will see me home, won’t you, Harold?’
    ‘Certainly, Daisy,’ said Harold.
    I like Daisy. She is what is called a real country girl. That is to say, she goes out in all weathers, uses the slang of the last generation, always means what she says but can’t always say what she means, and gets her man in the end.
    3
     
    I suppose I am becoming introspective as I grow older. For instance I don’t think I used to be so much interested in the workings of my inferiority complex as I am now. It amused me that evening, after Harold and Daisy had gone, to notice that there was not a single person left in the room who did not call this inconvenient appendage into play. I am not a particularly humble person, but it may be that I am too quick to discern qualities which I do not possess, and too quick to assess them at a higher value than my own. On the other hand, I am equally quick to recognise my mental inferiors; though perhaps too apt again to despise their powers compared with my own. However it may be, there is the cut-and-dried division, and everyone I know has his or her place clearly defined on one side of the line or the other. Harold Cheam, for instance, is a person who never gives me any feeling of inferiority, and I am in consequence decided that I am Harold’s superior in everything that matters (put like that, the criterion sounds rather a negative one, and perhaps it is); that is not to say that I do not sometimes envy Harold’s temerity in rushing in where I would hesitate to tread – though here again I consider it a mark of superiority to know and observe one’s own limitations.
    There are certain attributes which at once set my own inferiority in action, and I do not suppose I am in any way unique. Feminine beauty, for instance, leaves most men slightly tongue-tied; feminine intelligence is notoriously still more alarming. Achievement is another thing that makes me feel rather humble, never having achieved anything myself – not even a really good peach crop. And before notoriety I feel exasperatingly unimportant. Still more exasperatingly, I cannot resist a feeling of inferiority in the presence of someone better born than myself; against all