Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/339

 he thought of his father before his cottage fire, probably reading some bulb catalogue or a book on soils. Sorrell had ceased to care for London; in fact he actively disliked it, and Kit could fancy him thinking the words—even if he did not utter them—"Different in my day." When Sorrell thought of London he thought of it as the London of hansom cabs, and when it was possible to walk along Oxford Street without becoming involved in "that crowd of idle and superfluous women." His mind had become reminiscent. All that appeared ordinary to Kit, the absurd crowding, the noise, the thundering herds of motor buses, seemed strange and alien to the father.

The Rolands were people who contrived to look ahead, ironically, perhaps, but their irony was pleasant. Kit enjoyed these evenings at Chelsea. He had to be very much on the alert there, with a live twinkle in his eyes, his serious workaday tail left behind him. It was a house of laughter, mellow and mischievous and kind, the Punch attitude to life; mature, invaluable. It corrected Kit's too much seriousness. It gave him that very necessary glass of champagne.

Kit sat on Cherry's left. A very pale young man posted somewhere across the table and wearing enormous spectacles and speaking with a slight lisp, said that some book or other was like an aeroplane dropping bombs. Kit was watching the young man's pink, crimped mouth. And Cherry, fingering the stem of a wine glass, glanced at Kit remindingly out of her rogue's eyes.

"Read it,—I suppose?"

"What?" asked Kit.

The Amazon,

"The river?"

"No,—my child, Molly Pentreath's latest."

Kit had not heard of the book.

"I read her 'Broken Pottery.

"Like it?"

"I thought it a beast of a book."

He saw that he had amused her.

"Well—I can't help it, Cherry. I used to know Molly Pentreath as a kid. She raised a bump on my head with a croquet mallet."

"She raises bumps now, my dear."