after all, walk down to the town unaccompanied. I had gone about two hundred yards, when I heard a bicycle bell behind me, then a scrunching of brakes, and then Megan Hunter more or less fell off her machine at my feet.
âHallo,â she said breathlessly as she rose and dusted herself off.
I rather liked Megan and always felt oddly sorry for her.
She was Symmington the lawyerâs stepdaughter, Mrs. Symmingtonâs daughter by a first marriage. Nobody talked much about Mr. (or Captain) Hunter, and I gathered that he was considered best forgotten. He was reported to have treated Mrs. Symmington very badly. She had divorced him a year or two after the marriage. She was a woman with means of her own and had settled down with her little daughter in Lymstock âto forget,â and had eventually married the only eligible bachelor in the place, Richard Symmington. There were two boys of the second marriage to whom their parents were devoted, and I fancied that Megan sometimes felt odd man out in the establishment. She certainly did not resemble her mother, who was a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health.
Megan was a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen. She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpected charming one-sided smile. Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle thread stockings with holes in them.
She looked, I decided this morning, much more like a horse than a human being. In fact she would have been a very nice horse with a little grooming.
She spoke, as usual, in a kind of breathless rush.
âIâve been up to the farmâyou know, Lasherâsâto see if theyâd got any duckâs eggs. Theyâve got an awfully nice lot of little pigs. Sweet! Do you like pigs? I even like the smell.â
âWell-kept pigs shouldnât smell,â I said.
âShouldnât they? They all do round here. Are you walking down to the town? I saw you were alone, so I thought Iâd stop and walk with you, only I stopped rather suddenly.â
âYouâve torn your stocking,â I said.
Megan looked rather ruefully at her right leg.
âSo I have. But itâs got two holes already, so it doesnât matter very much, does it?â
âDonât you ever mend your stockings, Megan?â
âRather. When Mummy catches me. But she doesnât notice awfully what I doâso itâs lucky in a way, isnât it?â
âYou donât seem to realize youâre grown up,â I said.
âYou mean I ought to be more like your sister? All dolled up?â
I rather resented this description of Joanna.
âShe looks clean and tidy and pleasing to the eye,â I said.
âSheâs awfully pretty,â said Megan. âShe isnât a bit like you, is she? Why not?â
âBrothers and sisters arenât always alike.â
âNo. Of course. Iâm not very like Brian or Colin. And Brian and Colin arenât like each other.â She paused and said, âItâs very rum, isnât it?â
âWhat is?â
Megan replied briefly: âFamilies.â
I said thoughtfully, âI suppose they are.â
I wondered just what was passing in her mind. We walked on in silence for a moment or two, then Megan said in a rather shy voice:
âYou fly, donât you?â
âYes.â
âThatâs how you got hurt?â
âYes, I crashed.â
Megan said:
âNobody down here flies.â
âNo,â I said. âI suppose not. Would you like to fly, Megan?â
âMe?â Megan seemed surprised. âGoodness, no. I should be sick. Iâm sick in a train even.â
She paused, and then asked with that directness which only a child usually displays:
âWill you get all right