Mrs Brangwen turned round with a slightly puzzled, exasperated look. ‘Oh indeed!’ she said. ‘What is there so very funny about ME, I should like to know?’

She could not understand that there could be anything amiss with her appearance. She had a perfect calm sufficiency, an easy indifference to any criticism whatsoever, as if she were beyond it. Her clothes were always rather odd, and as a rule slip-shod, yet she wore them with a perfect ease and satisfaction. Whatever she had on, so long as she was barely tidy, she was right, beyond remark; such an aristocrat she was by instinct.

‘You look so stately, like a country Baroness,’ said Ursula, laughing with a little tenderness at her mother’s naive puzzled air.

‘JUST like a country Baroness!’