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But it was a strain upon the heart and upon the nerves; and the effect on Winny's physique was so evident that Ranny noticed it. He noticed that Winny was more slender and less sturdy than she used to be; her figure, to his expert eye, suggested the hateful possibility of flabbiness. He thought he had traced the deterioration to its source when he asked her if she had chucked the Poly. She had.
There were all sorts of things, such as toothbrushes, patent medicines, babies' comforters, that Ranny's father with a Headache, or Ranny himself or his mother could be trusted to dispense at a moment's notice. But the drug strophanthus, prescribed for old Mr. Beesley, was not one of them. It was tricky stuff. He knew all about it; Mercier had told him. Whether it was to do Mr.
He was not yet aware of any soul in him apart from that abounding and sufficing physical energy expressed in Fitness, nor was he violently conscious of any moral sense apart from Decency. And Ranny despised the votaries of intellectual light; he more than suspected them of Weediness, if not of Flabbiness. It made him giddy merely to look at the posters of its lectures and its classes.
"Well did you give her any cause for jealousy?" Ranny's mother struck in. "He wouldn't, John." And his Aunt Randall murmured half-audible and shocked negation. Ranny stared at his uncle as if he wondered where he was coming out next. "Of course I didn't." "Are you quite sure about that?" "You needn't ask him such a thing," said Ranny's mother; and Ranny fairly squared himself.
So precipitate, so venturesome was Ranny, that in a month from that memorable Sunday he found himself married and established in a house. A house that in twenty years' time would become his own. That was incredible, if you like.
Granville, that would have held its own under any treatment less severe, was overpowered by Woolridge's. "What's wrong with it?" said poor Ranny, as they stood together one Saturday evening and surveyed their front sitting-room. He couldn't see anything wrong with it himself. They had been married that morning. Ranny had had to bring his bride straight from her father's house to Granville.
He might have passed for a soldier but for something that detracted, something that Ranny noticed. But even Ranny hesitated to call it flabbiness in so fine a man. Mr. Randall had married a woman who had been even finer than himself. And she was still fine, with her black hair dressed in a prominent pompadour, and her figure curbed by the tightness of her Sunday gown. Under her polished hair Mrs.
"Putney Heath," Ranny said, "be blowed!" "Well, then how about Hampton Court or Kew?" But he was "on to" her. "Rot!" he said. "You've been there." "Well " Obviously she was meditating something equally absurd. "What d'you say to Windsor?" But Winny absolutely refused to go to Windsor. She said there was one place she'd never been to, and that was Golder's Hill. You could get tea there.
It was Violet's presence that had made it possible for her to go in and out with Ranny in his house. She stooped for a final, reassuring look at Baby. "Can you manage with him?" she whispered. He nodded. "I've made him his food in that saucepan. You'll have to heat it on the gas ring in there." "In there" was Violet's room. They went downstairs together.
When she was back in her chair and Quin was leaving, she beckoned to him. "What about Mr. Ranny?" she asked in an anxious whisper. "Was he at the office to-day?" Quin had been dreading the question, but when it came he did not evade it.
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