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.I always remember when I went to Dresden as a girl and attended the American church there, it was the best heated building in the town and there were little gold stars on the ceiling! Anyway, such richness! The secretary of the parochial church Council is called Mr.Mortlake; he is a tall dignified gentleman with the look of an eagle about him and he is also a piano tuner.There seems to be a kind of feud between him and a young man, a bank-clerk who simetimes reads te Lessons.Flora finds him rather attractive, I believe.Oh, to be young again! Then there is Mr.Fabian Driver, a disconsolate widower but very fascinating.I believe he eats the hearts of his victims en casserole.He looks more like a lion, or lyon, so we are surrounded by the noblest of God’s creatures’Prudence read on, for there was much more in the same strain.At the end she managed to disentangle the news that Jane hoped to come up to Town soon ‘ostensibly to visit Mowbrays and buy holy books’, but she insisted that Prudence should meet her for lunch somewhere, when she would tell her all about everything.She put the letter back into its envelope and poured herself a gin and French.She always enjoyed getting home in the evening to her pretty little flat with what Jane called its ‘rather uncomfortable Regency furniture’.When she had finished her drink she went to the kitchen and started to prepare her supper.Although she was alone, it was not a meal to be ashamed of.There was a little garlic in the oily salad and the cheese was nicely ripe.The table was laid with all the proper accompaniments and the coffee which followed the meal was not made out of a tin or bottle.It had been a trying day, Prudence decided, though she could not have said exactly why.No sign of Arthur Grampian, the slightly upsetting lunch — that poor man would be sitting at Madge’s bedside now, leaning slightly forward in his chair, waiting for her pale lips to move in speech — the impudence of Mr.Manifold, the perpetual irritation of Miss Trapnell and Miss Clothier — any one of these things would have been enough and she had had them all.So she decided to go to bed early and read a book.It was not a very nice book — so often Miss Trapnell or Miss Clothier asked her ‘Is that a nice book you’ve got, Miss Bates?’ — but it described a love affair in the fullest sense of the word and sparing no detail, but all in a very intellectual sort of way and there were a good many quotations from Donne.It was difficult to imagine that her love for Arthur Grampian could ever come to anything like this, and indeed she was hardly conscious of him as she read on into the small hours of the morning to the book’s inevitable but satisfying unhappy ending.Chapter FiveJANE kept the thought of a day in London as a treat to buoy her up as she went about doing those tasks in the parish that seemed within her powers.She kept thinking of all the things she would tell Prudence when she saw her and even began to speculate on where they should have lunch and what they should eat.The day after she had written to Prudence, Mrs.Glaze was, for some mysterious reason which Jane did not dare to ask, unable to come, so that the problem of meals had to be solved by Jane herself, as Flora had gone out for the day to visit a school-friend.‘I think, darling, ‘ she said, going into Nicholas’s study just before lunch-time, ‘it would be better if we had lunch out to-day.‘Nicholas looked over the top of his spectacles with a mild, kindly look, obviously not having heard what she said.Mild, kindly looks and spectacles, thought Jane; this was what it all came to in the end.The passion of those early days, the fragments of Donne and Marvell and Jane’s obscurer seventeenth-century poets, the objects of her abortive research, all these faded away into mild, kindly looks and spectacles.There came a day when one didn’t quote poetry to one’s husband any more.When had that day been? Could she have noted it and mourned it if she had been more observant?‘What doth my she - advowson flyIncumbency?’she murmured
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