"Do you think that little boy was really starving, perhaps?"
"No, no, my child." Philip moved uneasily and glanced at his wife. "People don't starve in England nowadays."
"We won't talk about sad things like that, Lily dear," said Eleanor brightly. "People needn't be poor unless they want to, you know. They can always find work."
"Why hasn't everyone got a house then? Why can't that little boy live in a house like we do?" Lily demanded meditatively.
There was a silence weighty with disapproval.
Then Philip remarked simply and with finality:
"Don't ask foolish questions, my little pet."
Lily knew herself defeated and was guiltily conscious of having deserved rebuke by her deliberate pursual of one of the many topics that, for reasons never explained, should not be talked about.
During the year that had elapsed since Vonnie's death, the number of these subjects seemed to have increased enormously. Not only was Vonnie not to be talked about, but anything connected with death, funerals, and mortality generally must be avoided, and it was a general axiom that what Philip occasionally referred to as "sad, painful, distressing things" were never really fit subjects for discussion.
Curiously enough, the nervous sufferings of Lily's whole early childhood, culminating in the emotional crisis that she had undergone when Yvonne died, at this period deserted her. She was now merely sensitive in a petulant way, subconsciously antagonistic to all her surroundings, and obsessed by a resentful certainty that her father and mother did not understand her.