Anyhow, here they were, just returned to Potter's Bar, Herts (where Mr. Percy Potter, liking the name of the village, had lately built a lordly mansion). Excellent friends they were, but as jealous as two little dogs, each for ever on the look-out to see that the other got no undue advantage. Both saw every reason why they should make a success of life. But Jane knew that, though she might be one up on Johnny as regards Oxford, owing to slightly superior brain power, he was one up on her as regards Life, owing to that awful business sex. Women were handicapped; they had to fight much harder to achieve equal results. People didn't give them jobs in the same way. Young men possessed the earth; young women had to wrest what they wanted out of it piecemeal. Johnny might end a cabinet minister, a notorious journalist, a Labour leader, anything…. Women's jobs were, as a rule, so dowdy and unimportant. Jane was bored to death with this sex business; it wasn't fair. But Jane was determined to live it down. She wouldn't be put off with second-rate jobs; she wouldn't be dowdy and unimportant, like her mother and the other fools; she would have the best that was going.
3
The family dined. At one end of the table was Mr. Potter; a small, bird-like person, of no presence; you had not thought he was so great a man as Potter of the Potter Press. For it was a great press; though not so great as the Northcliffe Press, for it did not produce anything so good as the Times or so bad as the Weekly Dispatch; it was more of a piece.
Both commonplace and common was Mr. Percy Potter (according to some standards), but clever, with immense patience, a saving sense of humour, and that imaginative vision without which no newspaper owner, financier, general, politician, poet, or criminal can be great. He was, in fact, greater than the twins would ever be, because he was not at odds with his material: he found such stuff as his dreams were made of ready to his hand, in the great heart of the public—the last place where the twins would have thought of looking.
So did his wife. She was pink-faced and not ill-looking, with the cold blue eyes and rather set mouth possessed (inexplicably) by many writers of fiction. If I have conveyed the impression that Leila Yorke was in the lowest division of this class, I have done her less than justice; quite a number of novelists were worse. This was not much satisfaction to her children. Jane said, 'If you do that sort of thing at all, you might as well make a job of it, and sell a million copies. I'd rather be Mrs. Barclay or Ethel Dell or Charles Garvice or Gene Stratton Porter or Ruby Ayres than mother. Mother's merely commonplace; she's not even a by-word—quite. I admire dad more. Dad anyhow gets there. His stuff sells.'
Mrs. Potter's novels, as a matter of fact, sold quite creditably. They were pleasant to many, readable by more, and quite unmarred by any spark of cleverness, flash of wit, or morbid taint of philosophy. Gently and unsurprisingly she wrote of life and love as she believed these two things to be, and found a home in the hearts of many fellow-believers. She bored no one who read her, because she could be relied on to give them what they hoped to find—and of how few of us, alas, can this be said! And—she used to say it was because she was a mother—her books were safe for the youngest jeune fille, and in these days (even in those days it was so) of loose morality and frank realism, how important this is.
'I hope I am as modern as any one,' Mrs. Potter would say, 'but I see no call to be indecent.'
So many writers do see, or rather hear, this call, and obey it faithfully, that many a parent was grateful to Leila Yorke. (It is only fair to record here that in the year 1918 she heard it herself, and became a psychoanalyst. But the time for this was not yet.)
On her right sat her eldest son, Frank, who was a curate in Pimlico. In Frank's face, which was sharp and thin, like his father's, were the marks of some conflict which his father's did not know. You somehow felt that each of the other Potters had one aim, and that Frank had, or, anyhow, felt that he ought to have, another besides, however feebly he aimed at it.
Next him sat his young wife, who had, again, only the one. She was pretty and jolly and brunette, and twisted Frank round her fingers.