“You’re mad!” sobbed Grace, running tears of shock.

“Fools!” said Tufts fiercely to Edda and Kitty both. The white-faced Reverend Thomas Latimer was too occupied in dealing with his second wife, in rigid hysterics, to do what he longed to do — comfort his wonderfully brave daughters.

The screams and cries were dying down now, and the terror had diminished sufficiently for some of the more intrepid women to cluster around the snake and inspect its mortality for themselves — an enormous thing! And for all that Mrs. Enid Treadby and Mrs. Henrietta Burdum assisted the Rector in soothing Maude, no one except the four twins remembered the original purpose of this ruined gathering. What mattered was that that strange creature Edda Latimer had killed a lethally venomous old man snake, and it was time to run home, there to perpetuate Corunda’s main feminine activity — Gossip and her attendants, Rumour and Speculation.

The four girls moved to an abandoned trolley of goodies, poured tea into frail cups and plundered the cucumber sandwiches.

“Aren’t women fools?” Tufts asked, waving the teapot. “You would swear the sky was going to fall in! Typical you, though, Edda. What did you plan to do if the chair leg didn’t succeed?”

“Then, Tufts, I would have appealed to you for an idea.”

“Huh! You didn’t need to appeal to me because our other brilliant thinker and schemer, Kitty, came to your rescue.” Tufts looked around. “Stone the crows, they’re all going home! Tuck in, girls, we can eat the lot.”

“Mama will take two days to recover from this,” Grace said cheerfully, holding out her cup for more tea. “Rather beats the shock of losing her four unpaid Rectory housemaids.”

Kitty blew a rude noise. “Rubbish, Grace! The shock of losing her unpaid housemaids looms far larger in Mama’s mind than the death of a snake, no matter how big or poisonous.”

“What’s more,” said Tufts, “the first thing Mama will do when she has recovered is serve Edda a sermon on how to kill snakes with decorum and discretion. You created a rumpus.”

“Dear me, yes, so I did,” Edda said placidly, smearing rich red jam and a pile of whipped cream on top of a scone. “Yum! If I hadn’t made a rumpus, the four of us would never have managed to get a scone. All Mama’s cronies would have gobbled them.” She laughed. “Next Monday, girls! Next Monday we start lives of our own. No more Mama. And you know I don’t mean that against you and Tufts, Kitty.”

“I know it well,” said Kitty gruffly.

It wasn’t that Maude Latimer was consciously awful; according to her own lights she was a saint among stepmothers as well as mothers. Grace and Edda had the same father as her own Tufts and Kitty, and there was no discrimination anywhere on the remotest horizon, Maude was quick to tell even the least interested observer of Rectory life. How could four such gorgeous children be irksome to one who adored being a mother? And it might have worked out in reality as it had within Maude’s mind, were it not for a physical accident of destiny. Namely that the junior of Maude’s twins, Kitty, had a degree of beauty beyond her lovely sisters, whom she surpassed as the sun dims the brilliance of the moon.

From Kitty’s infancy all the way to today’s leaving home party, Maude dinned Kitty’s perfections in every ear that came into hearing distance. People’s private opinions were identical to Maude’s public ones, but oh, how tired everybody got when Maude hove into view, Kitty’s hand firmly in hers, and the three other twins walking a pace behind. The consensus of Corunda opinion was that all Maude was really doing was making three implacable enemies for Kitty out of her sisters — how Edda, Grace and Tufts must hate Kitty! People also concluded that Kitty must be unpleasant, spoiled, and insufferably conceited.

But it didn’t happen that way, though the why was a mystery to everyone save the Rector. He interpreted the love between his girls as solid, tangible evidence of how much God loved them. Of course Maude usurped the praise her husband gave to God as more fairly due to her, and her alone.

The Latimer girls pitied Maude quite as much as they disliked her, and loved her only in the way that bonds females of the same family, whether there be a blood tie or not. And what had united the four girls in their unshakable alliance against Maude was not the plight of the three on the outer perimeter of Maude’s affections, but the plight of Kitty, upon whom all Maude’s affections were concentrated.

Kitty should have been a brash and demanding child; instead she was shy, quiet, retiring. Twenty months older, Edda and Grace noticed well before Tufts did, but once all three saw, they became very concerned about what they recognised as their mother’s effect on Kitty. Just how the conspiracy among them to shield Kitty from Maude gradually began was lost in the fog of infancy, save that as time went on, the conspiracy became stronger.

It was always dominant Edda who took the brunt of the major upheavals, a pattern set when the twelve-year-old Edda caught Kitty attacking her face with a cheese grater, took it off ten-year-old Kitty, and hied her to see Daddy, who was the sweetest and kindest man in the world. And he had dealt with the crisis wonderfully, approaching the problem in the only way he knew, by persuading the little girl that in trying to maim herself, she was insulting God, Who had made her beautiful for some mysterious reason of His own, a reason that one day she would understand.

This held Kitty until the beginning of her last year of school, at the Corunda Ladies’ College, a Church of England institution. By postponing the start of his elder twins’ education and advancing that of his younger, all four girls went through primary and secondary school in the same class, and matriculated together. The headmistress, a dour Scot, welcomed the eleven girls who stayed at school into their final year with a speech designed to depress their expectations from life rather than encourage them.

“Your parents have permitted you to enjoy the fruits of two to four extra years of education by keeping you at C.L.C. until you matriculate,” said she in the rounded tones of one educated at Oxford, “which you will do at the end of this Year of Our Lord 1924. By the time that you matriculate, your education will be superb — as far as education for women goes. You will have university-entrance grounding in English, mathematics, ancient and modern history, geography, basic science, Latin and Greek.” She paused significantly, then reached her conclusion. “However, the most desirable career available to you will be a suitable marriage. If you choose to remain single and must support yourself, there are two careers open to you: teaching in primary school and some few secondary schools, or secretarial work.”

To which speech Maude Latimer added a postscript over lunch at the Rectory on the next Sunday.

“What drivel!” said Maude with a snort. “Oh, not the suitable marriage! Naturally, girls, you will all achieve that. But no daughter of the Rector of St. Mark’s needs to soil her hands by working for a living. You will live at home and help me keep house until you marry.”

In September 1925, when Edda and Grace were nineteen and Tufts and Kitty eighteen, Kitty went to the Rectory stables and found a length of rope. Having fashioned a loop in one end and flung the rope over a beam, Kitty put her head through the loop and climbed onto an empty petrol drum. When Edda found her, she had already kicked the drum over and hung, pathetically quiescent, to rid herself of life. Never able to understand afterward where she found the strength, Edda got Kitty free of the choking rope before any real harm was done.

This time she didn’t take Kitty to the Rector at once. “Oh, dearest baby sister, you can’t, you can’t!” she cried, cheek on the silky mop of hair. “Nothing can be this bad!”