The Moon out of Reach | Page 2

Nan indignantly.
The other's eyes softened.
"I know you worked," she said quickly. "Like a brick. But all the same you did live on excitement--narrow shaves of death during air-raids, dances galore, and beautiful boys in khaki, home on leave in convenient rotation, to take you anywhere and everywhere. You felt you were working for them and they knew they were fighting for you, and the whole four years was just one pulsing, throbbing rush. Oh, I know! You were caught up into it just the same as the rest of the world, and now that it's over and normal existence is feebly struggling up to the surface again, you're all to pieces, hugely dissatisfied, like everyone else."
"At least I'm in the fashion, then!"
Penelope smiled briefly.
"Small credit to you if you are," she retorted. "People are simply shirking work nowadays. And you're as bad as anyone. You've not tried to pick up the threads again--you're just idling round."
"It's catching, I expect," temporised Nan beguilingly.
But the lines on Penelope's face refused to relax.
"It's because it's easier to play than to work," she replied with grim candour.
"Don't scold, Penny." Nan brought the influence of a pair of appealing blue eyes to bear on the matter. "I really mean to begin work--soon."
"When?" demanded the other searchingly.
Nan's charming mouth, with its short, curved upper lip, widened into a smile of friendly mockery.
"You don't expect me to supply you with the exact day and hour, do you? Don't be so fearfully precise, Penny! I can't run myself on railway time-table lines. You need never hope for it."
"I don't"--shortly. Adding, with a twinkle: "Even I'm not quite such an optimist as that!"
As she spoke, Penelope laid down her sewing and stretched cramped arms above her head.
"At this point," she observed, "the House adjourned for tea. Nan, it's your week for domesticity. Go and make tea."
Nan scrambled up from the hearthrug obediently and disappeared into the kitchen regions, while Penelope, curling herself up on a cushion in front of the fire, sat musing.
For nearly six years now she and Nan had shared the flat they were living in. When they had first joined forces, Nan had been at the beginning of her career as a pianist and was still studying, while Penelope, her senior by five years, had already been before the public as a singer for some considerable time. With the outbreak of the war, they had both thrown themselves heartily into war work of various kinds, reserving only a certain portion of their time for professional purposes. The double work had proved a considerable strain on each of them, and now that the war was past it seemed as though Nan, at least, were incapable of getting a fresh grip on things.
Luckily--or, from some points of view, unluckily--she was the recipient of an allowance of three hundred a year from a wealthy and benevolent uncle. Without this, the two girls might have found it difficult to weather the profitless intervals which punctuated their professional engagements. But with this addition to their income they rubbed along pretty well, and contrived to find a fair amount of amusement in life through the medium of their many friends in London.
Penelope, the elder of the two by five years, was the daughter of a country rector, long since dead. She had known the significance of the words "small means" all her life, and managed the financial affairs of the little ménage in Edenhall Mansions with creditable success. Whereas Nan Davenant, flung at her parents' death from the shelter of a home where wealth and reckless expenditure had prevailed, knew less than nothing of the elaborate art of cutting one's coat according to the cloth. Nor could she ever be brought to understand that there are only twenty shillings in a pound--and that at the present moment even twenty shillings were worth considerably less than they appeared to be.
There are certain people in the world who seem cast for the part of onlooker. Of these Penelope was one. Evenly her life had slipped along with its measure of work and play, its quiet family loves and losses, entirely devoid of the alarums and excursions of which Fate shapes the lives of some. Hence she had developed the talent of the looker-on.
Naturally of an observant turn of mind, she had learned to penetrate the veil that hangs behind the actions of humanity, into the secret, temperamental places whence those actions emanate, and had achieved a somewhat rare comprehension and tolerance of her fellows.
From her father, who had been for thirty years the arbiter of affairs both great and small in a country parish and had yet succeeded in retaining the undivided affection of his flock, she had inherited a spice of humorous philosophy, and this, combined with a very practical sense of justice,