“Then why not take a paid job?” he suggested.
“Because other women”—she thought of Miss Macpherson—“not only need the money more than I, but can do the work a great deal better.”
By now they had cleared the heat-haze which brooded over inner London. Up and out from his cloud-veils, clambered the sun. The laburnum trees in the little suburban gardens were all a-bloom with yellow. It promised a glorious day.
And promise fulfilled itself. They left the last tram-lines of Brentford astern; emerged mile by mile into the full splendour of England’s Maying. The home-counties unrolled beneath their questing wheels in vista upon vista of young green fields, of pink and white hedgerows, of orchards all alight with blossoms, of silver river-reaches, of pleasant homes where pigeons fluttered dazzingly to age-reddened roofs and the lilac bloomed palest amethyst over the glowing emerald of close-clipped lawns.
But there was never a pleasant home among those which Patricia’s house-agents had persuaded her to visit!
§ 4
“Never mind, Pat. It’s been a topping drive,” said Francis consolingly.
It was nearly four o’clock; and his cousin’s wife had just emerged from her last disappointment—a drainless waterless abomination of mouldy stone-work, with acres of unkempt gardens, ten miles from anywhere among the bleak hills beyond Ipsden.
“Where now?” he went on.
“Home, I suppose,” said Patricia, drawing her map out of its case. “We’d better make for Henley, I think.”