"Ah, the Graingers. She was a nice woman. A friend of your mother's, I think."
Again that fleeting, unpleasant smile crossed Muriel's face. "Was she?" she said. "Oh, I suppose so."
"You know, you're a little hard on Marshington in war-time," he continued. "Did you never think of Mrs. Pinden carrying on her husband's business, of Dickie Weathergay, of Bobby Mason, of the women who sent their children to school, kept their homes together and spent their spare time doing all that they could at the depot and hospital although the postman's arrival was an hourly torment and the sight of every telegraph boy turned them sick? It may have been all rather small and petty, but it was a multiplication of that spirit that formed the bulwark of civilization."
"Oh, yes, of course," acquiesced Muriel, but her face seemed to ask "Is civilization then worth saving?"
"My daughter Delia, you know, was working in the Women's Army at the end of the war. She said that it was a revelation to her—the possibility for development among trivial-minded, half-grown, half-educated girls—a pity that it should have been left to war-time."
"Yes, wasn't it?"
The vicar could not face it. Conversation with Muriel was like conversation with a gramophone. There was something almost indecent in her apathy. She could not even uphold her own opinions.
"I am unhappy about Delia," he continued, experimenting. "She is working herself to death, living in one of these terrible clubs, and enjoying a diet almost exclusively composed of boiled eggs and fish kedgeree, as far as I can discover. She is very thin."
"She never was fat, was she? But I dare say that she will look after herself all right. She was always very capable."
"Since Martin Elliott's death," remarked the vicar meditatively, "she seems to have been capable of almost anything but sanity about her personal surroundings."