Anne Strange stood in the middle of the great Regency drawing room, looking around her and trying for the hundredth time to appreciate her own good fortune. It was a beautiful room, beautiful in its proportions, its gracefully panelled walls, and its long windows with their view of Regent’s Park across the road. The room was furnished, too, with pieces of its own period, fine rosewood and mellow mahogany fashioned by craftsmen who followed the great traditions of Sheraton and Chippendale. To have such a living room and other rooms almost equally beautiful, in postwar London was a good fortune accorded to few. Anne knew all about the “prefabs,” the “pathological flatlets,” and the “positive pigsties” in which the majority of young married people lived today: she often made a genuine effort to be grateful for her own living conditions, but below that dutiful effort there smouldered a dull resentment. “If only Tony could realise my point of view,” she said to herself. “After all, he’s my husband and he only seems able to remember that he’s her son. Oh, these jokes about mothers-in-law . . . Little did I know when I came here. It’s not my home. It’s hers.”