Mrs. Hilary looked more interested. "Not? Oh, then it may come to
something.... I wish Nan _would_ marry. It's quite time."

"Nan isn't exactly keen to, you know. She's got so much else to do."

"Fiddlesticks. You don't encourage her in such nonsense, I hope,
Neville."

"I? It's not for me to encourage Nan in anything. She doesn't need it.
But as to marriage--yes, I think I wish she would do it, sometime,
whenever she's ready. It would give her something she hasn't got;
emotional steadiness, perhaps I mean. She squanders a bit, now. On the
other hand, her writing would rather go to the wall; if she went on with
it it would be against odds all the time."

"What's writing?" enquired Mrs. Hilary, with a snap of her finger and
thumb. "_Writing!_"

As this seemed too vague or too large a question for Neville to answer,
she did not try to do so, and Mrs. Hilary replied to it herself.

"Mere showing off," she explained it. "Throwing your paltry ideas at a
world which doesn't want them. Writing like Nan's I mean. It's not as if
she wrote really good books."

"Oh well. Who does that, after all? And what is a good book?" Here were
two questions which Mrs. Hilary, in her turn, could not answer. Because
most of the books which seemed good to her did not, as she well knew,
seem good to Neville, or to any of her children, and she wasn't going to