Free Before the Fact by Francis Iles Page A

the clouds. Joyce was always most surprised that Lina’s house should be as efficiently run as her own.
    But Lina’s mental laziness remained.
    It was not a good, hearty laziness, which was proud of itself and informed the rest of the world that it could go hang. It was the nagging kind. Lina felt all the time that really she ought to be getting up and doing something useful, but that, on the other hand, she simply could not bear, just for the moment, to be mixed up in all these horrible village activities. And the moment when she might feel she could bear it never seemed to arrive.
    So that she very much admired Janet, who was always getting up and doing useful things.
    For Janet Caldwell was a serious soul. So, in her way, was Lina, though it was a different way. There was, however, an intellectual bond between them which was quite strong enough to allow such deviations without weakening. Lina had not been in Upcottery two months before she realized that Janet Caldwell was the only person in the place with any real intelligence whatsoever – not excepting Johnnie.
    Lina still did not know whether to be disappointed with Johnnie in that respect or not. While they were still engaged she had persuaded herself that Johnnie had a Mind, undeveloped though it might be, which under her ministrations would bud and flower after marriage into as capable a blossom as any in Joyce’s own set. It appeared that she had been wrong. If Johnnie had a Mind, he did not encourage it. Lina felt that it was a pity. She had seen herself in the rôle of mental horticulturist, and she had liked it.
    It did, she felt, leave a gap not to be able to discuss passionately with Johnnie the new books or get pleasantly excited over completely academic topics; for Johnnie did not even read the new books, unless they happened to be detective stories, and would have seen nothing to get passionate about in them if he had; while as for academic topics, Johnnie simply could not understand his wife’s interest in them – and where Johnnie did not understand, he laughed. But then Lina got so much from Johnnie, so much that was red-blooded and vital, that a pallid intellectualism super-imposed might have seemed positively out of place: for contrasted with the things for which Johnnie stood to her, intellectualism did look pallid.
    In the passionately protective love with which she now surrounded everything that was Johnnie and Johnnie’s, Lina not only sympathized with, but at times even envied, his simple philistinism. Johnnie was her child; and what have children to do with abstractions? Food and drink and love and bodies, the raw meat of life, those are their concerns; not its civilized complexities.
    But since Lina herself did not happen to be constituted that way, Janet Caldwell adequately filled the gap, which might otherwise have become a serious one.
    Janet was a graduate of St. Hugh’s, Oxford.
    She had taken a third in Honour Mods. and a second in History. Contrary to the practice of so many otherwise intelligent women, she did not consider it necessary to impair her appearance in order to prove her intellectual capacity. This was the more fortunate since she was something rather more than good-looking: her broad white forehead, black hair parted in the middle, and large gray eyes gave her a classical appearance which her rather large, full-lipped mouth could not spoil. Her voice was so gentle as to be often almost inaudible. She was half-a-dozen years younger than Lina, unmarried, and lived with her widowed mother in an extremely red, square little house on the top of a small hill, which she herself called The Doll’s House.
    Lina’s early experiences in friendship had left her diffident. She was always a little surprised, and a little grateful too, when anyone seemed to like her. Janet had shown her preference from the first, and Lina had reciprocated it at once. Each of the two had recognized in the other the only person in the neighbourhood