"You wouldn't think he was only nineteen, would you?" said Fred, proudly.
"Nice noise to kick up in the middle of the night," Hubert grumbled. "I dreamt the house was falling down on top of me."
"And it will, too," Fred prophesied, "if I can't soon scrape together some money for repairs. There's a crack as wide as the strand down the back."
Sylvia wondered how so rickety a house was able to withstand the wear and tear of such a fat family when they all, with the exception of Arthur, who lay down on the kitchen table, went creaking up-stairs to bed.
The examination of Monkley's cash-box produced £35; Sylvia felt ineffably rich, so rich that she offered to lend Fred Organ the money he wanted to repair his property. He accepted the offer in the spirit in which it was made, as he said, and Sylvia, whom contact with Monkley had left curiously uncynical, felt that she had endeared herself to Fred Organ for a long time to come. She was given a room of her own at No. 53, for which she was glad, because sleeping with Edith had been rather like eating scented cornflour pudding, a combination of the flabby with the stuffy that had never appeared to her taste. Arthur was given the choice of sleeping with Hubert or in the bath, and he chose the latter without a moment's hesitation.
Relations between Arthur and Hubert had been strained ever since. Hubert offered Arthur a bite from an apple he was munching, which was refused with a too obvious disgust.
"Go on, what do you take me for? Eve?" asked Hubert, indignantly. "It won't poison you."
The strain was not relaxed by Hubert's obvious fondness for Sylvia.
"I thought when I came away with you," Arthur said, "that we were going to live by ourselves and earn our own living; instead of which you let that fat brute hang around you all day."
"I can't be always rude to him," Sylvia explained. "He's very good-natured."
"Do you call it good-natured to turn the tap on me when I'm lying in bed?" Arthur demanded.
"Fun!" said Arthur, darkly. "I shall hit him one of these days."
Arthur did hit him; but Hubert, with all his fat, hit harder than he, and Arthur never tried again. Sylvia found herself growing very tired of him; the universal censure upon his namby-pambyness was beginning to react upon her. The poetical youth of Hampstead Heath seemed no longer so poetical in Colonial Terrace. Yet she did not want to quarrel with him finally, for in a curious way he represented to her a link with what she still paradoxically spoke of as home. Sylvia had really had a great affection for Monkley, which made her hate him more for what he had tried to do. Yet, though she hated him and though the notion of being with him again made her shudder, she could not forget that he had known her father, who was bound up with the memory of her mother and of all the past that, being so irreparably over, was now strangely cherished. Sylvia felt that, were Arthur to go, she would indeed find herself alone, in that state which first she had dreaded, then desired, and now once again dreaded, notwithstanding her bold conceptions of independence and belief in her own ability to determine the manner of life she wished. There were times when she felt what almost amounted to a passionate hatred of Colonial Terrace, which had brought her freedom, indeed, but the freedom of a world too gray to make freedom worth possessing. She was fond of Fred Organ, and she fancied that he would have liked formally to adopt her; yet the idea of being adopted by him somehow repelled her. She was fond of Edith Organ too, but no fonder than she had been of Clara; Edith seemed to have less to tell her about life than Clara, perhaps because she was older now and had read so many books. As for Hubert, who claimed to be in love with her, he existed about the house like a large over-fed dog; that was all, that and his capacity for teasing Arthur, which amused her.