'There seems to have been plenty to do, one way and another,' Tommy said, still gently fingering the banjo-strings.
They spoke languidly. The tiredness of their faces seemed to slur over the delicate discriminations that really existed between them. They were, as a matter of fact, not quite exactly alike at ordinary times. For example, Betty had a dimple, when she laughed, in her left cheek; Tommy's indentation, rather fainter, was in his right. Both had blue eyes glinting to grey, but the longer sweep of Betty's lashes made hers oftener approach to black. When their eyes flickered from melancholy to sudden laughter, as they did rather often, and usually on quite unexpected and incongruous occasions, they had a trick of narrowing to blue slits. The slant of the black brows of both was up, slightly, from left to right; they were quick brows, that flickered a little with their speech.
'Let's get on our dressing-gowns and brush our hairs,' Betty suggested.
She went into one of the two adjoining rooms, and returned with a red dressing-gown and a hair-brush, and curled herself up in her chair.
'Tommy, you really have done that faun's right leg so very badly—it's getting a bad dream to me.'
Her voice died away drowsily. The brush slipped from her hand down among the piled contents of the chair; she yawned softly and fell asleep, her hair hanging in two dark, unbrushed strands over either shoulder, her cheek pillowed on one thin, scarred, childish hand. It was a curious scar, crossing the back of her left hand, a white diagonal, drawn from the knuckle of the fore-finger nearly to the wrist-bone.
Tommy, his face turned complacently ceilingwards, fell asleep too. He was very tired. They were both very tired. Betty's assertion that it had not been a particularly busy day was doubtless correct, using the word busy in its accepted sense. But, as Tommy had said, there seemed anyhow to have been a good deal to do. There was usually for the Crevequers a good deal to do, because, though they only at times and reluctantly conformed to the law that those who would eat must work, they did homage, thorough and without reservation, to the much more insistent command of their being, that those who would live life as it should be lived must make of it an exciting game, the object being to cram into the space of each twenty-four hours as many amusements as could by straining be confined therein. The number of points thus possible to score each day they had discovered to be large; the chances they did not devise for themselves by the ingenuity of their wits were devised for them by affectionate acquaintances (the Crevequers were very popular). They might be said, in fact, thoroughly to understand the art of living; to understand, rather, one aspect of it—that which is concerned with the receipt of pleasure. Their lack of means, though deplored by them, did not very seriously incommode them. It only meant, after all, that one had to practise a certain selection, and one could select the right things, meaning thereby life's pleasing superfluities, and leave the necessities to take care of themselves. The necessities did not invariably take care of themselves; the Crevequers were sometimes in winter cold (they liked immensely and above most things to be warm), and sometimes remained hungry during a longer period than seemed good to them, and were very often weary of foot, and usually without the clothes they would have liked (mildly) to have been wearing. But these times balanced themselves by occasional periods of luxury and riotous living, particularly at the beginning of the year, when their income figured before their ever-sanguine eyes, untouched, infinite and inexhaustible in its possibilities. For they had a little besides professional earnings; only it happened somehow that they spent always rather more than they had, superfluities being so essential to their existence. Lent, of course, came in opportunely, just when the first riotous flush of the year was subsiding; in Lent one could not live in luxury and go to theatres, even if one could afford it. The iron hand of necessity clasped the more pliable fingers of duty, forcing them to an unrelaxing hold. The Crevequers' confessor would, no doubt, have approved of youth thus constrained.
But, with all its inconveniences, life was a charmingly entertaining game. In the faces of the children asleep, there was, besides sheer weariness, a youthfulness almost ridiculous. They might have been fourteen and fifteen. They were always young—very young—but when they slept they were as two twin babes. Their youth, their childhood, seemed somehow to obscure an aspect of them; there might have been also in it, to the sentimentalist, a touch of pity, and to the moralist a vague rising of dubious hope.
Tommy, waking at a quarter-past two, stretched himself, yawned, and threw an empty cigarette-box into Betty's lap.
'Come to bed,' he said.