Mr. Nix, in the deep recesses of his soul, pondered over this. He wanted now to get closer to Nancy. He was sure that she felt "our Lance's" death quite desperately, but after the shock of the first month she put on her bright clothes again, and went about to the theatre and entertained her friends. "There's enough misery in the world without my trying to add to it," she would say. "I know some people think it's bad of me to wear these clothes, but it is what Lance would have liked."
As they sat in their cosy little flat, perched high on the top floor of Hortons, evening after evening, Mr. Nix with the paper, Mrs. Nix with a novel, they were both perhaps conscious that the boy's death had made a barrier, and as they lay side by side in their bed at night they were still more conscious of this. The darkness seemed to strip from them that lively exterior life that they had developed. Mr. Nix would lie there and think about Nancy for hours....
In the daytime indeed, his hands were full. The servants alone were problem enough for anybody. First, the men all went away to the war, and he had to have women—women for everything, women for the kitchen, women for the hall, women valets. And then, just as he was getting used to them, the men began to come back—or rather, he had to get new men, men who must be taught their jobs, and learn his rules, and fall in with his ways.
Fortunately he was blessed with a wonderful portress, Fanny. Fanny, on whom, after a time, the whole great establishment seemed to hang. But what did Fanny do but become restless after the Armistice, fall a victim to a conscience which persuaded her that she was, by remaining, keeping a man out of his proper job, and, when he had persuaded her over that difficulty, what should she do then but become engaged to one of the valets, whom she presently married. Then the tenants of the flats were disturbed and agitated by the general unrest. Poor old Mr. Jay was so deeply agitated by the new world that he died of the shock of it, and as though that were not enough, old Miss Morganhurst went out of her mind, and died in a fit.
It became more and more difficult to secure the right kind of tenants. Hortons had always been a very expensive place, and only wealthy people could afford to live there. But how strange now the people who had money! A young man like the Hon. Clive Torby, representative of one of the finest families in England, found suddenly that he had not a penny in the world, and gaily took to house-painting, while on the other side of the shield there were people like the Boddingtons, who simply did not know how to behave, who, wealthy though they were, should never have been in Hortons at all.
Then again, Mr. Nix was most seriously disturbed by the strange new interchanging of the sexes that seemed to have sprung up in this post-war England. "Positively," he said to his wife one evening, "all the men seem to be turning into women, and all the women into men." He read an article in some paper that lamented the rapidity with which women were abandoning all the mysteries that had made them once so charming. How thoroughly Mr. Nix agreed with the writer of the article! He read it all through to Mrs. Nix, who was entirely in accord with every word of it.
"The girls are nothing better than baggages," she declared; "that's my belief."
Hortons, its dignity, its traditions, its morality, was in danger. "I'll save it if I have to die for it," Nix declared.
As the weeks advanced his troubles extended. One strike followed another—coal, food, labour, clothes, all faltered, died, were revived again. Mr. Robsart, the famous novelist, his most eminent tenant, awoke early one morning to find a pipe leaking. His dining-room wall-paper—a very beautiful and exclusive one—developed bright pink and purple spots. It was weeks before anything could be done. Mr. Robsart, who had been led by an excited female public to believe his personality to be one upon which the sun never set, said what he thought about this. The balls faltered in the air, their glittering surfaces menacing and threatening.