It's just a phase."
"Yes, I suppose so. But I do get worried, Charles."
"Why, dear heart?"
"Really, I suppose, because mother and father never worry.
They're not like a mother and father."
"That may be all for the best.
More children suffer from interference than from noninterference."
"That's true.
You know, I never thought about it until I came back from abroad, but they really are a queer couple.
Father living determinedly in a world of obscure historical bypaths and mother having a lovely time creating scenes.
That tomfoolery this evening was all mother.
There was no need for it.
She just wanted to play a family conclave scene.
She gets bored, you know, down here and has to try and work up a drama."
For the moment I had a fantastic vision of Sophia's mother poisoning her elderly father-in-law in a light-hearted manner in order to observe a murder drama at first hand with herself in the leading role.
An amusing thought!
I dismissed it as such - but it left me a little uneasy.
"Mother," said Sophia, "has to be looked after the whole time. You never know what she's up to!"
"Forget your family, Sophia," I said firmly.
"I shall be only too delighted to, but it's a little difficult at the present moment.
But I was happy out in Cairo when I had forgotten them all."
I remembered how Sophia had never mentioned her home or her people.
"Is that why you never talked about them?" I asked. "Because you wanted to forget them?"
"I think so.
We've always, all of us, lived too much in each other's pockets.
We're - we're all too fond of each other.
We're not like some families where they all hate each other like poison.
That must be pretty bad, but it's almost worse to live all tangled up in conflicting affections."
She added: "I think that's what I meant when I said we all lived together in a little crooked house.
I didn't mean that it was crooked in the dishonest sense. I think what I meant was that we hadn't been able to grow up independent, standing by ourselves, upright.
We're all a bit twisted and twining."
I saw Edith de Haviland's heel grinding a weed into the path as Sophia added: "Like bindweed..."
And then suddenly Magda was with us - flinging open the door - crying out:
"Darlings, why don't you have the lights on?
It's almost dark."
And she pressed the switches and the lights sprang up on the walls and on the tables, and she and Sophia and I pulled the heavy rose curtains, and there we were in the flower-scented interior, and Magda, flinging herself on the sofa, cried:
"What an incredible scene it was, wasn't it?
How cross Eustace was!
He told me he thought it was all positively indecent.
How funny boys are!" She sighed. "Roger's rather a pet.
I love him when he rumples his hair and starts knocking things over.
Wasn't it sweet of Edith to offer her legacy to him? She really meant it, you know, it wasn't just a gesture. But it was terribly stupid - it might have made Philip think he ought to do it, too!
Of course Edith would do anything for the family!
There's something very pathetic in the love of a spinster for her sister's children.
Someday I shall play one of those devoted spinster aunts. Inquisitive, and obstinate and devoted."
"It must have been hard for her after her sister died," I said, refusing to be sidetracked into discussion of another of Magda's roles. "I mean if she disliked old Leonides so much."
Magda interrupted me.
"Disliked him?
Who told you that?
Nonsense.