II + 

She tried Barry Briscoe, the weekend he came down and found Nan gone. Barry Briscoe was by way of being interested in people and things in general; he had that kind of alert mind and face. + 

He came up from the tennis lawn, where he had been playing a single with Rodney, and sat down by her and Grandmama in the shade of the cedar, hot and friendly and laughing and out of breath. Now Neville and Rodney were playing Gerda and Kay. Grandmama’s old eyes, pleased behind their glasses, watched the balls fly and thought everyone clever who got one over the net. She hadn’t played tennis in her youth. Mrs. Hilary’s more eager, excited eyes watched Neville driving, smashing, volleying, returning, and thought how slim and young a thing she looked, to have all that power stored in her. She was fleeter than Gerda, she struck harder than Kay, she was trickier than all of them, the beloved girl. That was the way Mrs. Hilary watched tennis, thinking of the players, not of the play. It is the way some people talk, thinking of the talkers, not of what they are saying. It is the personal touch, and a way some women have. + 

But Barry Briscoe, watching cleverly through his bright glasses, was thinking of the strokes. He was an unconscious person. He lived in moments. + 

“Well done, Gerda,” Grandmama would call, when Gerda, cool and nonchalant, dropped, a sitter at Rodney’s feet, and when Rodney smashed it back she said, “But father’s too much for you.” + 

“Gerda’s a scandal,” Barry said. “She doesn’t care. She can hit all right when she likes. She thinks about something else half the time.” + 

His smile followed the small white figure with its bare golden head that gleamed in the grey afternoon. An absurd, lovable, teasable child, he found her. + 

Grandmama’s maid came to wheel her down to the farm. Grandmama had promised to go and see the farmer’s wife and new baby. Grandmama always saw wives and new babies. They never palled. You would think that by eighty-four she had seen enough new babies, more than enough, that she had seen through that strange business and could now take it for granted, the stream of funny new life cascading into the already so full world. But Grandmama would always go and see it, handle it, admire it, peer at it with her smiling eyes that had seen so many lives come and go and that must know by now that babies are born to trouble as naturally as the sparks fly upward. + 

So off Grandmama rode in her wheeled chair, and Mrs. Hilary and Barry Briscoe were left alone. Mrs. Hilary and this pleasant, brown, friendly young man, who cared for Workers’ Education and Continuation Schools, and Penal Reform, and Garden Cities, and Getting Things Done by Acts of Parliament, about all which things Mrs. Hilary knew and cared nothing. But vaguely she felt that they sprang out of and must include a care for human beings as such, and that therefore Barry Briscoe would listen if she told him things. + 

So (it came out of lying on grass, which Barry was doing) she told him about the pneumonia of Neville as a child, how they had been staying in Cornwall, miles from a doctor, and without Mr. Hilary, and Mrs. Hilary had been in despair; how Jim, a little chap of twelve, had ridden off on his pony in the night to fetch the doctor, across the moors. A long story; stories about illnesses always are. Mrs. Hilary got worked up and excited as she told it; it came back to her so vividly, the dreadful night. + 

“He was a Dr. Chalmers, and so kind. When he saw Neville he was horrified; by that time she was delirious. He said if Jim hadn’t gone straight to him but had waited till the morning, it might have been too late.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Too late: quite.⁠ ⁠…” Barry Briscoe had an understanding, sympathetic grip of one’s last few words. So much of the conversation of others eludes one, but one should hold fast the last few words. + 

“Oh played, Gerda: did you that time, Bendish.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Gerda had put on, probably by accident, a sudden, absurd twist that had made a fool of Rodney. + 

That was what Barry Briscoe was really attending to, the silly game. This alert, seemingly interested, attentive young man had a nice manner, that led you on, but he didn’t really care. He lived in the moment: he cared for prisoners and workers, and probably for people who were ill now, but not that someone had been ill all those years ago. He only pretended to care; he was polite. He turned his keen, pleasant face up to her when he had done shouting about the game, and said “How splendid that he got to you in time!” but he didn’t really care. Mrs. Hilary found that women were better listeners than men. Women are perhaps better trained; they think it more ill-mannered not to show interest. They will listen to stories about servants, or reports of the inane sayings of infants, they will hear you through, without the flicker of a yawn, but with ejaculations and noddings, while you tell them about your children’s diseases. They are well-bred; they drive themselves on a tight rein, and endure. They are the world’s martyrs. + 

But men, less restrained, will fidget and wander and sigh and yawn, and change the subject. + 

To trap and hold the sympathy of a man⁠—how wonderful! Who wanted a pack of women? What you really wanted was some man whose trade it was to listen and to give heed. Some man to whom your daughter’s pneumonia, of however long ago, was not irrelevant, but had its own significance, as having helped to build you up as you were, you, the problem, with your wonderful, puzzling temperament, so full of complexes, inconsistencies and needs. Some man who didn’t lose interest in you just because you were grey-haired and sixty-three. + 

“I’m afraid I’ve been taking your attention from the game,” said Mrs. Hilary to Barry Briscoe. + 

Compunction stabbed him. Had he been rude to this elderly lady, who had been telling him a long tale without a point while he watched the tennis and made polite, attentive sounds? + 

“Not a bit, Mrs. Hilary.” He sat up, and looked friendlier than ever. “I’ve been thrilled.” A charming, easy liar Barry was, when he deemed it necessary. His Quaker parents would have been shocked. But there was truth in it, after all. For people were so interested in themselves, that one was, in a sense, interested in the stories they told one, even stories about illness. Besides, this was the mother of Nan; Nan, who was so abruptly and inexplicably not here today, whose absence was hurting him, when he stopped to think, like an aching tooth; for he was not sure, yet feared, what she meant by it. + 

“Tell me,” he said, half to please Nan’s mother and half on his own account, “some stories of Nan when she was small. I should think she was a fearful child.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He was interested, thought Mrs. Hilary, in Nan, but not in her. That was natural, of course. No man would ever again want to hear stories of her childhood. The familiar bitterness rose and beat in her like a wave. Nan was thirty-four and she was sixty-three. She could talk only of far-off things, and theories about conduct and life which sounded all right at first but were exposed after two minutes as not having behind them the background of any knowledge or any brain. That hadn’t mattered when she was a girl; men would often rather they hadn’t. But at sixty-three you have nothing.⁠ ⁠… The bitter emptiness of sixty-three turned her sick with frustration. Life was over, over, over, for her and she was to tell stories of Nan, who had everything. + 

Then the mother in her rose up, to claim and grasp for her child, even for the child she loved least. + 

“Nan? Nan was always a most dreadfully sensitive child, and temperamental. She took after me, I’m afraid; the others were more like their father. I remember when she was quite a little thing.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Barry had asked for it. But he hadn’t known that, out of the brilliant, uncertain Nan, exciting as a Punch and Judy show, anything so tedious could be spun.⁠ ⁠… + 