"We are giving ourselves another three years,—and then we shall retire."
"And break the great public's heart!"
"Before it breaks ours," said the wife.
Duncan was going to grow fruit. In some ways they Were most amazingly unsophisticated. Fame had disagreed with them, as too many sweets disagree with a healthy child, or too much wine with a work-loving man. Both were the happy victims of an incurable simplicity. They had had a surfeit of sensation, of notoriety, of cheap splendour; they had come to resent being regarded as the spoilt darlings of Demos. It was their very simplicity, their vital sense of fun that made them beloved.
Roland pointed this out, when their child-like intimacies included him in their philosophy of life.
"But—ought you to retire!"
They gave him to understand that it was not "the job" that bored them, but the whole atmosphere in which they were expected to work and play and breathe. It was too horribly artificial, and tainted, and commercialized. They had made up their minds to leave it before the taint spread to their souls.
"For—it does—you know," said the wife; "you may say to yourself, 'It shan't'—but it does. Imperceptibly. Like autumn in a garden. Before you know where you are everything is rotten."
Scott had his own peculiarities. He hated what he called "Being messed about." He had a passion for doing the small things of life for himself, tinkering at his car, making his own early cup of tea. To him a "valeted world" was his idea of Hades. He hated crowds, he—the crowd's filmhero. He liked old clothes and old books, and an old nipe.
"And they expect me to smoke a pipe studded with diamonds—and to dress like their idea of a Bond Street lord! A sort of bastard creature, a mixture of a duke—an actor and a jockey."
They made Roland feel very fatherly towards them, as towards two fortunate but unspoilt children. He bequeathed to the wife his piano and all the flowers in his garden, and to the husband his own little lock-up garage where Duncan could play about in private with the works of the blue two-seater. He provided them with a luncheon basket when
