THE ARRIVAL OF MR. AND MRS. MONTMORENCY

I

ABOUT six o’clock the sound of a motor, collected out of the wide country and narrowed under the trees of the avenue, brought the household out in excitement on to the steps. Up among the beeches, a thin iron gate twanged; the car slid out from a net of shadow, down the slope to the house. Behind the flashing windscreen Mr. and Mrs. Montmorency produced—arms waving and a wild escape to the wind of her mauve motor-veil—an agitation of greeting. They were long-promised visitors. They exclaimed, Sir Richard and Lady Naylor exclaimed and signalled: no one spoke yet. It was a moment of happiness, of perfection.

In those days, girls wore crisp white skirts and transparent blouses clotted with white flowers; ribbons, threaded through with a view to appearance, appeared over their shoulders. So that Lois stood at the top of the steps looking cool and fresh; she knew how fresh she must look, like other young girls, and clasping her elbows tightly behind her back, tried hard to conceal her embarrassment. The dogs came pattering out from the hall and stood beside her; above, the vast façade of the house stared coldly over its mounting lawns. She wished she could freeze the moment and keep it always. But as the car approached, as it stopped, she stooped down and patted one of the dogs.

As the car drew up the Montmorencys unwound from their rugs. They stood shaking hands and laughing in the yellow theatrical sunshine. They had motored over from Carlow. Two toppling waves of excitement crashed and mingled; for moments everybody was inaudible. Mrs. Montmorency looked up the steps. “And this is the niece!” she exclaimed with delight. “Aren’t we dusty!” she added, as Lois said nothing. “Aren’t we too terribly dusty!” And a tired look came down at the back of her eyes at the thought of how dusty she was.

“She’s left school now,” said Sir Richard proudly.

“I don’t think I should have known you,” said Mr. Montmorency, who had not seen Lois since she was ten and evidently preferred children.

“Oh, I think she’s the image of Laura⁠—”

“—But we have tea waiting. Are you really sure, now, you’ve had tea?”

“Danielstown’s looking lovely, lovely. One sees more from the upper avenue—didn’t you clear some trees?”

“The wind had three of the ashes—you came quite safe? No trouble? Nobody at the cross-roads? Nobody stopped you?”

“And are you sure now about tea?” continued Lady Naylor. “After all that—look, it’s coming up now. No, Francie, don’t be ridiculous; come in now, both of you.”

They swept in; their exclamations, constricted suddenly, filling the hall. There was so much to say after twelve years: they all seemed powerless. Lois hesitated, went in after them and, as nobody noticed, came out again. The car with the luggage turned and went round to the back, deeply scoring the gravel. She yawned and looked out over the sweep to the lawn beyond, where little tufts of shadow pricked like reeds from water out of the flat gold light. Beyond the sunk fence, six Kerry cows followed each other across with wading steps and stood under a lime tree. All the way up the house the windows were open; light came diagonally from window to window through corner rooms. Two stories up, she could have heard a curtain rustle, but the mansion piled itself up in silence over the Montmorencys’ voices.

She yawned with reaction. It was simply the Montmorencys who had come; whom all day one had been expecting. Yet she had been unable to read, had scattered unfinished letters over her table, done the flowers atrociously. Sweet-peas had spun and quivered between her fingers from their very importance.... “I apologize for the mauve sweet-peas,” she would have liked to be able to say to Mr. Montmorency. “I don’t care for mauve myself. I can’t think why I ever picked them; there were plenty of others. But, as a matter of fact, I was nervous.” And—“Nervous?” she would wish Mr. Montmorency to ask her searchingly, “why?” But she had her reserves, even in imagination; she would never tell him.

But she had seen at once that Mr. Montmorency, who must be really so subtle, would not take the trouble to understand her.

Her cousin Laurence had gone upstairs with a book when he heard the motor. Now she could hear him knocking out his pipe on a window sill. He leaned out further and asked, pointing down, in a cautious whisper: “Are they all in?”

She signalled a warning, nodding.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“I don’t know. What are you doing?”

“Nothing particular.”

“I thought I’d take the dogs down the beech walk.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I just thought ...”

“Come up and tell me about the Montmorencys.”

She signalled another warning: the Montmorencys were in the hall. To avoid the hall she had to go right round to a side door and up the back stairs. These smelt of scrubbed wood, limewash, and the ducks already roasting for the Montmorencys’ dinner. Pushing open a door at the top she let a gust of this through with her.

“Duck,” said Laurence, sniffing gratefully. It still surprised her that Laurence, who looked ethereal, should spend so much time when he was not being intellectual in talking and apparently thinking about food. She supposed that this was because he had, as he had once said, no emotional life. “I live,” he used to say, “from meal to meal.” When she said, “Why?” he put up his hands and his eyebrows and made a gesture. When he did this in front of Gerald she felt uncomfortable. Soldiers did not talk about food, they ate it. They ate, in fact, rather more than Laurence, but always with a deprecating, absent look.

Laurence had been reading in the ante-room, in one of the circle of not very comfortable shell-shaped chairs that no one took seriously. His room was a floor higher; it had not seemed worth while to go up. He had brought the wrong book and dared not go down for another; otherwise he would not have felt in need of her conversation. Personally, she liked the ante-room, though it wasn’t the ideal place to read or talk. Four rooms opened off it; at any moment a door might be opened, or blow open, sending a draught down one’s neck. People passed through it continually, so that one kept having to look up and smile. Yet Lois always seemed to be talking there, standing with a knee on a chair because it was not worth while to sit down, and her life was very much complicated by not knowing how much of what she said had been overheard, or by whom, or how far it would go.

The high windows were curtainless; tasselled fringes frayed the light at the top. The white sills, the shutters folded back in their frames were blistered, as though the house had spent a day in the tropics. Exhausted by sunshine, the backs of the crimson chairs were a thin light orange; a smell of camphor and animals drawn from skins on the floor by the glare of morning still hung like dust on the evening chill. Going through to her room at nights Lois often tripped with her toe in the jaws of a tiger; a false step at any time sent some great claw skidding over the polish. Pale regimental groups, reunions a generation ago of the family or the neighbourhood gave out from the walls a vague depression. There were two locked bookcases of which the keys had been lost, and a troop of ebony elephants brought back from India by some one she did not remember paraded along the tops of the bookcases.

“Whow—whow—whow!” said Laurence, imitating her panting. “Why do you hurry like that?”

“I suppose it’s a habit,” said Lois, confused.

“What did you want?”

“Well, I came to tell you about the Montmorencys.”

“Oh, all right; go on. Where are they?”

“Having more tea; Aunt Myra made them.... Well, they arrived, as you probably heard, and it was all rather devastating. There was a good deal of emotion. And she would do nothing but say she was dusty, and of course she was dusty, so there was nothing for me to say.”

“So what did you say?”

“And he said he would never have known me.”

“Honest, bluff sort of chap?”

“Oh no,” said Lois and flushed, for really Laurence was too insulting. She laughed and glanced at her finger-nails—the only part of one’s person, she had observed, of which it was possible to be conscious socially. “Haven’t you met him?”

“I think I did once. I think I thought he was rather fatuous. But I was very young at the time—I mayn’t have met him at all.”

“Isn’t it extraordinary,” said Lois confidentially, “the way one’s nails grow—I mean, when one comes to think: yards and yards of inexhaustible nail coming out of one. As a matter of fact,” she added, “I once rather had illusions about Mr. Montmorency—since I was ten. He came to stay with my mother and me when we were at Leamington. After dinner—I was allowed to sit up—Mother walked out of the house and left us. We were trying chickens at that time and I dare say she went out to shut them up and then simply stayed in the garden. Mr. Montmorency and I talked for some time, then he got solemn and went to sleep all in a moment. I sat and watched him in absolute fascination. You know the way men go to sleep after dinner? Well, that wasn’t at all the way he did.... Then my mother came, very much refreshed at having been away from us, and said I was a rather bad hostess, and woke Mr. Montmorency up. I have thought since, anyone might have said she was a rather bad hostess. But everything she did seemed so natural.”

“Oh, she was lovely,” said Laurence, indifferent.

“So you see he is really not bluff, or he wouldn’t have gone to sleep in that perfectly simple, exposed way. He was melancholy and exhausted and wise, which I did appreciate as a child, when most visitors were so noisy at one.”

“Extraordinary,” said Laurence, looking out of the window.

Laurence was comfortable to talk to because of his indifference to every shade of her personality. With him, she felt committed by speech itself to a display of such unfathomable silliness that she might just as well come out—and did—with assertions surprising even to herself. When he yawned, took a book up, said he was hungry or simply went away, she was not discountenanced. It was those tender, those receptive listeners to whom one felt afterwards sold and committed. It is true that when first she had met Laurence again she had wished to impress him as an intellectual girl. But an evening of signal failure when he had told her she should read less and more thoroughly and, on the whole he thought, talk less, had involved a certain re-arrangement of attitude. She had reattained confidence, expanding under his disapproval.

“It doesn’t occur to you,” he said with an air of sinister triumph, “that the Montmorencys may have come up the front stairs while you came up the back stairs and be both in their room, listening?”

Unthinkable, but the very sound of the thing was a shock. Crimson, she ran to the door of the spare room: struggling with unreason, knocked defiantly, rattled the handle. She went in, finally, with a sense of impertinence, for the new arrivals were spiritually in possession.

The Blue Room was of course empty; with no one to listen. The trunks had been carried up and set down, unstrapped, at the foot of the wide bed. The room smelt of bleaching cretonnes and ten days’ emptiness; curtains in a draught from the door made a pale movement. Lois had put a vase of geraniums on the dressing-table; now she admired their cubes in delicate balance, spraying against the light. And there was the festival air of those candles, virgin, with long white wicks. Two arm-chairs faced round intently into the empty grate with its paper fan—in them Mr. and Mrs. Montmorency would sit, perhaps, to discuss the experiences of the day. More probably, they would talk in bed. One of the things Lois chiefly wanted to know about marriage was—how long it took one, sleeping with the same person every night, to outlive the temptation to talk well into the morning? There would be nothing illicit about nocturnal talking, as there had been at school; no one would be entitled to open a door sharply with: “Now go to sleep now, you two; that’s enough for to-night,” as had so often happened during her visits to friends. Would conversation, in the absence of these prohibitions, cease to interest? Lois had heard of couples who disturbed each other by breathing and preferred to occupy different rooms: no allowance was made for such couples at Danielstown. The Blue Room dressing-room furniture was marble-topped to allow for spills or breakages of a gentleman’s bottles, and there was a virile boot-rack for every possible kind of boot. Lois, doubtfully, had put moss roses on Mr. Montmorency’s table.

“Didn’t it occur to you,” said Laurence, “that they couldn’t possibly have gone through without my seeing them?”

Lois came out and shut the door of the spare room. “But panic,” she said, “is beyond one. Things like that are so awful. I shall never forget discussing a Miss Elliot—a very musical woman—with Livvy or some one, out here, and, my dear, she was in there the whole time and being English and honourable began to rattle her chest of drawers. I could hardly look at her straight for the rest of the visit. However, she also covered herself with confusion, because she put all her vases of flowers outside her door at night, and Brigid fell over them bringing the morning tea. Aunt Myra was terribly irritated and talked about nursing-homes.”

“I shouldn’t expect there will be anything so very hygienic about Mrs. Montmorency.”

“Damn,” said Lois, looking disproportionately worried and moving off towards her own room suddenly. “I have got letters to finish.” Speaking of Brigid had reminded her that there were letters on regimental note-paper lying about all over her room and that Brigid, who took an interest, would be likely to see them when she came up with the hot water. Not that they mattered really, but at the thought of some letters people wrote her she did feel rather a fool.

Laurence had pale blue, rather prominent eyes that moved slowly, though the rest of his movements were jerky. Looking up at her now with a not unaware kind of blandness, he said: “Do tell me, what do you write about?”

“Life in general.”

“You amaze me—now if I did write letters no one would read them if they were not intelligent. You must have the golden touch.”

“Naturally one is expected to be amusing.”

“And how many subalterns do you write to?”

This was disconcerting, also, she felt strongly, irrelevant. If these young men wrote to her, they were unimportant; besides, she only answered every third letter. These young men, concrete, blocking her mental view by their extreme closeness, moved shadowless in a kind of social glare numbing to the imagination. Whereas Mr. Montmorency came out distinct from the rather rare gloom with which she invested her childhood; her feeling for him provided agreeable matter for introspection. However much he might loom and darken up to the close-up view, he would never be out of focus.

“How many?” said Laurence again, picking up his book but still looking at her inexorably. The unkindest thing he had called her friend Livvy Thompson was—a rather probable channel for the life-force; and really when he asked questions of this kind she did not know what he must think.

But it was reticence as to a lack rather than as to a superabundance that produced her embarrassment.

“Three—no, two,” she said coldly, “because one of them is a captain.”

Going into her room she shut the door. Laurence got up and walked round the ante-room. For the hundredth time he looked disparagingly along the backs of the books in the locked bookcases. Then he heard his aunt and Mrs. Montmorency beginning to come upstairs.

II

THE Naylors and the Montmorencys had always known each other; it was an affair of generations. Hugo had stayed at Danielstown as a boy for months together, and knew the place as well as his own house, he told Francie, and certainly liked it better. He had expressed this preference, which had come as a shock to her, when they were first engaged. She was pained as by an expression of irreligion. She consoled herself, and rehabilitated him secretly, by remembering he had had a stepfather and could never have known the meaning of family life—she had a delicate woman’s strong feeling for “naturalness.” She intended to make up to him for the deficiencies of his childhood, but, almost immediately after their marriage, Hugo sold Rockriver. Now she would always blame herself for not having dissuaded him, but he had been so set at the time on an idea of going to Canada and she so foolishly anxious to compensate him for what she was not by going there with him and thriving. So when the idea of Canada failed, they had no house, and she, after all, no vocation. As for Hugo, he had expected little of life.

Francie had heard all her life of the Naylors of Danielstown, her cousins and theirs had married; but Ireland is large and she had not met them till she came to Danielstown on a bridal visit. Then, of course, they had known each other always; there had been no beginning. She knew she had never in all her life been so happy as on that first visit; time, loose-textured, had had a shining undertone, happiness glittered between the moments. She had had, too, very strongly a sense of return, of having been awaited. Rooms, doorways had framed a kind of expectancy of her; some trees in the distance, the stairs, a part of the garden seemed always to have been lying secretly at the back of her mind.

It was, also, on that first and only other visit, that she had made friends with Myra—that in itself was memorable. Myra was “interesting,” cultivated, sketched beautifully, knew about books and music. She had been to Germany, Italy, everywhere that one visits acquisitively. It had been a bond to discover that Francie and Myra must have been in Germany at the same time, the summer of ’92, though without meeting. Myra was the same age as Francie—they had been presented the same year, though not at the same Drawing-room—and thought of Hugo as quite a boy: she could not help showing it. Sometimes, guessing what she had shown, she would laugh and say something clever and quite irrelevant to cover the awkwardness. For Hugo was ten years younger than both of them, Francie’s husband.

Francie and Myra had had long remarkable talks about almost everything, confidential if not alarmingly intimate—walking, driving, on the seat by the caroline allspice tree, and at the head of the stairs at night—while their candle-flames stooped from their vehemence.

When at the end of that visit the Montmorencys left Danielstown this had seemed to Francie more of a pause than a break in the continuity. “Next spring,” they all four promised each other, shaking hands and kissing at the foot of the steps—it was then autumn, the bronze trees were sifted through by the wind and shivered along the outlines—“Next summer, Hugo,” Myra exclaimed, “at latest!” and the last view they had of her was as standing bright and imperative. Only as they drove away did the trees run, watery, into the sky and Francie’s lids prick: she slipped her hand into Hugo’s under the rug. And, pressing it, he had alone to continue the business of turning, yearning and waving back till a bend in the avenue.

She had felt, perhaps, a chilly breath from the future. Between their smart turning out, with a roll of carriage wheels, through the gates with their clipped laurels, and their swerving in with a grind of motor brakes twelve years afterwards, nothing large was to intervene. Their life, through which they went forward uncertainly, without the compulsion of tragedy, was a net of small complications. There was the drag of his indecisions, the fine snapping now and then of her minor relinquishments. Her health, his temperament, their varying poverty—they were delayed, deflected. She was ordered abroad for successive winters, to places he could not expect to endure. He came and went without her; going for consolation, of course, to Danielstown. The Naylors sent her out wails, injunctions and declarations. They would never, never be happy till she was with them also.

So at last Hugo and Francie returned together. And to-day something—that break in the trees on the avenue, something unremembered about the face of the house, some intensification of the silence surrounding it, or perhaps simply Lois’ figure standing there on the steps—made the place different.

Lady Naylor and Mrs. Montmorency now went upstairs together. Francie looked down at the top step to see if the marks were still there—becoming much excited in the course of an argument about Robert Hugh Benson she had waved her candle and scattered a rain of hot grease. But there was a new stair-carpet. Myra looked down also, but in surprise; she did not remember. She had argued with so many people in twelve years—nowadays she argued about Galsworthy.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said, lowering her voice as they approached the ante-room, “if we found Laurence up here—my nephew. He is with us a good deal, between Oxford. Though I expect it is dull for him. He is not out of doors very much; he is very intellectual. Though, of course, he plays tennis.”

Francie was much relieved, on entering the ante-room, to find that Laurence had gone. “It’s so nice,” she said, “the way you have the house full of young people.” She turned to the right instinctively, to her old door.

“No, this way, Francie, the Blue Room. The rooks on that side of the house disturbed so many people; we’ve changed the rooms round and put Lois in there; she prefers them.”

As they came into the Blue Room, Francie saw their two faces reflected in the tall dressing-table glass, the door swinging behind. “Myra’s aged!” she thought with a shock. Her own face never seemed to have changed at all.

She said: “You look wonderful, you know. I couldn’t think when I was ever to see you again, or Richard either.”

Myra kissed her—a compact, sudden pursing and placing of the lips. It was as though they were meeting again only now. The door swung to with a rush. “It’s been too bad, too bad—not even as if you had been in Canada!”

The linen of Myra’s sleeve was cool to the touch of the dusty Francie. Myra wore a grey linen dress with embroidered panels, a lace scarf twice round the throat and a green hat dipping in front and trimmed with clover. Her bright grey eyes, with very black, urgent pupils, continued in a deep crease at each outside corner. High on the curve of her cheeks, like petals, bright mauve-pink colour became, within kissing distance, a net of fine delicate veins. Her eyebrows, drawn in a pointed arch, suggested tragic surprise till one saw the arch never flattened, the face beneath never changed from its placid eagerness, its happy dissatisfaction. “Has she aged?” Francie thought, glancing closely and shyly again as they parted. Yes, she felt something set now in Myra; she was happier, harder.

Myra receded now that the kiss was over. There was life to go on with, the duty of love and pleasure fully discharged. She moved round the Blue Room, nodded out of a window to some one distant coming out from some trees—she could never learn how one vanishes in the dark of a house. She glanced intently along the books in the book-trough. “Lois has not changed the books!” she exclaimed. “You know how I like them to be appropriate. Here’s a technical book on rubber a man left behind last summer—it looks ridiculous. She’s a girl who never forgets the same thing twice; always something different....”

“She looks sweet, I think. And surely the image of Laura?”

“She’s not so much like Laura in character. There’s a good deal, I sometimes think, of poor Walter.”

“Wasn’t it terribly sad about Walter?”

“To tell you the truth, it was what we always expected,” said Lady Naylor.

When Francie was left alone she went to the window and shook the dust out of her motor veil. Then—she was so very tired from motoring, everything seemed to rush past—she sat down on the sofa and put her hands over her eyes. Her mind lay back in the silence, but there was a kind of sentinel in her waiting for Hugo. She did not know what she should say if he noticed the drive from Carlow really had been too much for her. She had said beforehand she was afraid it might be too much, and he had said: nonsense, that she was fit for anything nowadays. Flattered by this, she gave in. She was so tired—just for these few moments when she let herself go—she could not bear to realize Danielstown. Her thoughts ached. When she looked out, there were some intolerable trees and a strip of gold field hot on the skyline.

When she heard steps coming she fled to the washstand. Her skin was dry, her hair felt laden and limp, it was so dusty. But that was the fine, the phenomenal weather for which, in this country, one could not be thankful enough. When Hugo came through from his dressing-room she was washing her hands—they turned in the water like gentle porpoises in a slaver of violet soap.

“Well,” he said, looking round the room.

“Well, Hugo ... isn’t it lovely?”

“Richard’s in great form—I thought I’d never get up at all to you.... Not tired?”

“Indeed, no.... Doesn’t it all seem the same as ever?”

“I tell you one thing: Myra’s ageing. Didn’t you notice?”

“Oh,” said Francie vaguely. She stooped her face to the basin, the rain-water comforted, creeping into the pores. “Oh!” She dried her face in damask, among stiff roses. “But then, we all are.”

“She’s got into a terrible habit of shutting doors.”

“Times have been worse down here. Yes, I thought, you know, she had rather a strained look. What does Richard think of the situation?... Oh, and had you any idea that Lois was so grown up? I had imagined her quite a schoolgirl. She’s so pretty, such a ... a frank little face.”

“She’s self-conscious,” said Hugo, “but I dare say most girls of that age are.... I should lie down now for a bit, it will freshen you up—though you don’t need it. Then would you like me to brush your hair?”

Francie got her dressing-gown out of a trunk and lay down on the sofa. She had just relaxed there when Hugo said that the sofa did not look comfortable and she had better lie on the bed. He made a valley for her head between the two pillows—he did not believe it rested anybody to lie with their head high—and she lay down on the bed with her head in the valley. “Oh, but I don’t think I ought to lie on this lovely quilt,” she soon protested.

“They’re not fussy here,” returned Hugo; “do lie and be still.”

So she lay and watched him begin to unpack her two boxes, carry dresses over his arms and lay them along the shelves of the “gentleman’s wardrobe.” She wondered: whatever would Richard and Myra think?—“Uxorious” they would be bound to declare; Richard who could hardly handle a jug without dropping it, and Myra who would not have him otherwise.

“What a disgusting noise,” said Hugo, pausing and listening.

“Somebody playing a gramophone⁠—”

They might well say she had taken the brilliant young man he’d once been and taught him to watch her, to nurse her and shake out her dresses. And she knew she could, now, never explain to Myra what she had failed to explain twelve years ago—when there had been so much less to explain and to justify—how Hugo was too much for her altogether. How she had tried, but had not been able, to keep him—first from marrying her, then from giving up Canada, leaving his friends when she had to go to the south of France, or from brushing her hair in the evenings.

“Hugo, you might leave that blue dress out; I think I’ll wear it.... When was it you were in love with Laura?”

“When I was twenty-two—I was in a sort of way. She was lovely then—though indeed she was always lovely. But she was never happy at all, even here. She never knew what she wanted—she was very vital.”

He hesitated over two pairs of evening shoes. “Leave the bronze ones out,” she suggested. “They go with the blue.” She lay with her eyes shut a moment, then asked, “But why wouldn’t she marry you?”

Francie’s delicacy, her absences from him, her long queer relapses into silence gave her the right to ask curious things, as from a death-bed. Hugo, wandering at the end of the bed, looked at her feet thoughtfully.

“She wanted her mind made up,” he said at last, “and I couldn’t do that—why should I? I had enough to do with my own mind. And she was Richard’s own sister—talk and talk and you’d never know where you had her. And if she thought you had her, she’d start a crying-fit. Then she went up North and met Farquar, and I imagine that that was all fixed up before she knew where she was or had time to get out of it. After that of course she really had got something to be unhappy about. Yet I don’t believe things ever really mattered to Laura. Nothing got close to her: she was very remote.”

“I wonder if Lois is remote?”

“What I think I felt about Laura,” pursued Hugo, interested, “was, she was never real in the way I wanted. Nobody was before you, as you know.... If you get up now, I can brush your hair.”

“It is very dusty,” said Mrs. Montmorency.

She had met Laura in England and been very shy of her. Laura was a success in England, and so quite brilliant—she was too Irish altogether for her own country. Lois had been at school as usual and did not come home because Laura had forgotten which day the Montmorencys were coming. Six months afterwards, without giving anyone notice of her intention, Laura had died.

“It still seems odd,” remarked Mrs. Montmorency, “that I shouldn’t have met Lois.” Seating herself in front of the glass she took out the pins one by one, then shook down her hair round her face—bright bronze threads went in and out, crisply, over the light-grey waves—she ran it through with her finger-tips, shaking her head ruefully. But the dust seemed to have gone, perhaps because she was happier, less tired; or perhaps she had left a drift of it between the two pillows. Her husband, selecting a brush, knocked over the vase of geraniums. “The darlings!” she cried out, mopping with her kimono-sleeve.

“Confusion,” said Hugo, shaking water out of the brush, “on all who put vases on dressing-tables!”

III

LOIS, dressed for dinner, was tidying her writing-table; two stamped letters, her handiwork, leaned on the clock. She shook out her pink suède blotter and started to sort its contents, but had to re-read everything. Gerald, who had written about a tournament, concluded: “You have the loveliest soft eyes.” She was perplexed, thought: “But what can I do?” and snapped the letter, with others, under a rubber band. Then she pulled out a drawer called “general” and swept the rest into it. She had a waste-paper basket, but only for envelopes. Strokes of the gong, brass bubbles, came bouncing up from the hall. She ran to the glass, changed a necklace, had an apprehensive interchange with her own reflection. What of the night?

Mrs. Montmorency and Laurence were in the drawing-room. They looked anxious, nothing showed the trend of the conversation. The pale room rose to a height only mirrors followed above the level of occupation; this disproportionate zone of emptiness dwarfed at all times figures and furniture. The distant ceiling imposed on consciousness its blank white oblong, and a pellucid silence, distilled from a hundred and fifty years of conversation, waited beneath the ceiling. Into this silence, voices went up in stately attenuation. Now there were no voices; Mrs. Montmorency and Laurence sat looking away from each other.

As Lois came in Laurence slapped his pockets over and saying something about a pipe left the room quickly, leaving Lois in the grip of a tête-à-tête. Mrs. Montmorency, seated in a window, held by a corner a copy of the Spectator, that had slipped down against the silk of her dress, as though she must be sure to retain this constant refuge from conversation. Vague presence, barely a silhouette, the west light sifting into her fluffy hair and lace wrappings so that she half melted, she gave so little answer to one’s inquiry that one did not know how to approach. So Lois stood staring, full in the light.

“Oh, you do look sweet!” exclaimed the visitor. “Black is so striking. No, you are not like Laura—I don’t know who you’re like.”

“Aunt Myra isn’t sure about black for girls,” said Lois, sweeping forward for admiration the folds of her dress. “But a white slip lightens it.”

“And I expect you are having a wonderful time now you’re grown up?”

“Oh, well ...” said Lois. She went across to the fireplace and rose on her tiptoes, leaning her shoulders against the marble. She tried not to look conscious. She still felt a distinct pride at having grown up at all; it seemed an achievement, like marriage or fame. Having a wonderful time, she knew, meant being attractive to a number of young men. If she said, “Yes, I do,” it implied “Yes, I am, very⁠—” and she was not certain. She was not certain, either, how much she enjoyed herself. “Well, yes, I do,” she said finally.

“Tell me,” continued Mrs. Montmorency, “wasn’t that your cousin Laurence?”

“As a matter of fact I am Uncle Richard’s niece and he Aunt Myra’s nephew.”

“And isn’t he very intellectual?”

“I suppose he is, really.”

“I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Montmorency, “I had no idea how to talk to him. I suppose you’d never find that difficult. I expect now, Lois, you’re very modern.”

“Oh, well, not really,” said Lois, pleased. Mrs. Montmorency’s expression, condensing now from her outline, was of such affection and interest that Lois was moved to go on: “You could talk to him really about almost anything except about politics. He isn’t allowed any here because the ones he brings over from Oxford are all wrong.”

“Wrong?” cried the visitor with a startled flush, putting up a hand to her face as though to press back the mounting colour. “Wrong—which way? How do you mean, ‘wrong’?”

“Inconvenient.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Montmorency. And upon a recurrence of the puzzled silence that had been the note of Lois’ entrance, Sir Richard came in. Sir Richard was very much worried by visitors who came down early for dinner: evidently he had not expected this of Francie. “Oh!” he exclaimed reproachfully, “this is too bad; I had no idea you were down. Myra’s been delayed—you know yourself how it happens.”

“Indeed, yes,” said Francie warmly. She would never have been in time herself if she had had a home of her own. Only the little blanks and rifts in her life accounted for her punctuality.

Sir Richard, touching his tie vaguely, wandered about the room, displacing with some irritation the little tables that seemed to spring up in his path, in the pent-up silence of a powerful talker not yet in gear.

“Very fine weather,” he said at last, “warm at nights—or would you like me to shut that window?” He was bothered; he could not remember how well he had once known Francie, or decide at just what degree of intimacy he was expected to pick her up again. “Lois has grown up, hasn’t she?” he continued, pointing out his niece with an air of inspiration. “She seems to me to have grown up very fast. Now how long is it since you saw her over in England?”

“But I never did see her.”

“That was extraordinary,” said Sir Richard, looking from one to the other. “Didn’t you meet poor Laura?”

“I did, but Lois was out.”

“That was too bad.” Sir Richard’s bother increased, with a suspicion of something somewhere. He observed rather flatly: “Then it can hardly be such a surprise to you that she’s grown up.”

“Not in the same way.”

“We can all sit out on the steps to-night,” said Lois, determined to check the couple in their career of inanity. She went across to a window and folded her arms on the sill.

The screen of trees that reached like an arm from behind the house—embracing the lawns, banks and terraces in mild ascent—had darkened, deepening into a forest. Like splintered darkness, branches pierced the faltering dusk of leaves. Evening drenched the trees; the beeches were soundless cataracts. Behind the trees, pressing in from the open and empty country like an invasion, the orange bright sky crept and smouldered. Firs, bearing up to pierce, melted against the brightness. Somewhere, there was a sunset in which the mountains lay like glass.

Dark had so gained the trees that Lois, turning back from the window, was surprised at how light the room was. Day, still coming in from the fields by the south windows, was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen of the wall-paper, so that the room still shone. Mr. Montmorency had come in and was standing where she had stood, his shoulders against the mantelpiece.

“We can sit out on the steps to-night, can’t we?” persisted Lois. And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her, she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. “I must break in on all this,” she thought as she looked round the room.

“Do you still go to sleep after dinner?” she asked Mr. Montmorency.

“It’s a thing that I never have done,” he said, annoyed.

“But it’s what I chiefly remember about you.”

“I’m afraid,” he said, tolerant, “you are mixing me up with some one else.”

“Listen, Richard,” said Francie; “are you sure we will not be shot at if we sit out late on the steps?”

Sir Richard laughed and they all shared his amusement. “We never have yet, not even with soldiers here and Lois dancing with officers up and down the avenue. You’re getting very English, Francie! Isn’t Francie getting very English? Do you think maybe we ought to put sandbags behind the shutters when we shut up at nights?”

“No, but Richard, seriously⁠—” began Francie then, as they all stared, laughed and had to give up and go on laughing. Now in County Carlow they had said things were bad round here, that she made a grave mistake in coming at all. But then, as Richard would certainly say, that was County Carlow all over.

Lady Naylor came in arm-in-arm with Laurence and said they were all very punctual. “The gong’s only gone three minutes, also I could be certain I never heard any of you go down. But I was delayed, as I told Richard to tell you. Shall we go in?”

“Francie wants to know,” said Sir Richard, offering Francie his arm, “if we haven’t got a machine-gun?”

“Ah, you’re too bad!”

“Do you dance on the avenue?” said Mr. Montmorency to Lois.

“Only once, for a bet. I and a man called Mr. Lesworth danced to the white gate, and the man that we had the bet with walked after us carrying the gramophone. But naturally, I don’t as a rule.”

“It would come hard on your shoes, I expect,” said Mr. Montmorency distantly.

“And the men we know can’t get over here in the evening, now.”

“Still, I expect you have a very gay time,” said Mr. Montmorency, and turned away.

In the dining-room, the little party sat down under the crowd of portraits. Under that constant interchange from the high-up faces staring across—now fading each to a wedge of fawn-colour, and each looking out from a square of darkness tunnelled into the wall—Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, their nephew, niece and old friends had a thin, over-bright look, seemed on the air of the room unconvincingly painted, startled, transitory. Spaced out accurately round the enormous table—whereon, in what was left of the light, damask birds and roses had an unearthly shimmer—each so enisled and distant that a remark at random, falling short of a neighbour, seemed a cry of appeal, the six, in spite of an emphasis of speech and gesture they unconsciously heightened, dwindled personally. While above, the immutable figures, shedding on to the wash of dusk smiles, frowns, every vestige of personality, kept only attitude—an outmoded modestness, a quirk or a flare, hand slipped under a ruffle or spread airily over the cleft of a bosom—cancelled time, negatived personality and made of the lower cheerfulness, dining and talking, the faintest exterior friction.

In Laurence’s plate of clear soup six peas floated. Six accurate spoonfuls, each with a pea in it, finished the soup. He glanced right in his aunt’s direction, left in Mrs. Montmorency’s: both were talking. Mr. Montmorency, listening to Lady Naylor, seemed to be looking across at Laurence, but he sat with his back to the light so that Laurence, short-sighted, could not be sure—he preferred uncertainty.

Lady Naylor spoke of the way things were, with her pointed spoon poised over her plate. She noticed the others were waiting, and with a last bright emphatic look in Hugo’s direction bent to finish her soup. He said at once to Laurence: “And what do you think of things?”

“Things? Over here?”

“Yes—yes.”

“Seem to be closing in,” said Laurence, crumbling his bread detachedly; “rolling up rather.”

“Ah!” nodded Mr. Montmorency, in significant comprehension.

“Ssh!” exclaimed Lady Naylor, running out a hand at both of them over the cloth. She frowned, with a glance at the parlourmaid. “Now you mustn’t make Laurence exaggerate. All young men from Oxford exaggerate. All Laurence’s friends exaggerate: I have met them.”

“If you have noticed it,” said her nephew, “it is probably so.”

Lois, on his other side, leant eagerly to Mr. Montmorency. “If you are interested, would you care to come and dig for guns in the plantation? Or if I dig, will you come as a witness? Three of the men on the place here swear there are guns buried in the lower plantation. Michael Keelan swears he was going through there, late, and saw men digging. I asked him, ‘What were they like?’ and he said, ‘The way they would be,’ and I said, why didn’t he ask them what they were doing, and he said, ‘Sure, why would I; didn’t I see them digging, and they with spades?’ So it appears he fled back the way he had come.”

“—Ah, that’s nonsense now!” Sir Richard exploded. “Michael would see anything: he is known to have seen a ghost. I will not have the men talking, and at all accounts I won’t have them listened to.”

“All the same,” pursued Lois, “I feel that one ought to dig. If there is nothing there I can confound Michael for the good of his soul, and if there should be guns, Uncle Richard, just think of finding them! And surely we ought to know.”

“And why would we want to know? You’ll have the place full of soldiers, trampling the young trees. There’s been enough damage in that plantation with the people coming to sight-see: all Michael’s friends. Now I won’t have digging at all: do you understand?” said Sir Richard, flushed.

Francie felt torn in herself, dividedly sympathetic. “I expect one can’t be too careful.... The poor young little trees ... and besides,” she added to Lois, “one might blow oneself up.”

“This country,” continued Sir Richard, “is altogether too full of soldiers, with nothing to do but dance and poke old women out of their beds to look for guns. It’s unsettling the people, naturally. The fact is, the Army’s got into the habit of fighting and doesn’t know what else to do with itself, and also the Army isn’t at all what it used to be. I was held up yesterday for I wouldn’t like to say how long, driving over to Ballyhinch, by a thing like a coffee-pot backing in and out of a gate, with a little brute of a fellow bobbing in and out at me from under a lid at the top. I kept my temper, but I couldn’t help telling him I didn’t know what the country was coming to—and just when we’d got the horses accustomed to motors. ‘You’ll do no good,’ I told him, ‘in this unfortunate country by running about in a thing like a coffee-pot.’ And those patrols in lorries run you into a ditch as soon as look at you. They tell me there’s a great deal of socialism now in the British Army.”

“Well, it’s difficult for them all,” said his wife, pacific, “and they’re doing their best, I think. The ones who come over here seem quite pleasant.”

“What regiment have you now at Clonmore?”

“The 1st Rutlands.”

“And there are some Field Gunners and Garrison Gunners too,” added Lois. “Most people seem to prefer the Garrison Gunners.”

“The Garrison Gunners dance better,” said Laurence to Mrs. Montmorency. “It would be the greatest pity if we were to become a republic and all these lovely troops were taken away.”

“Fool,” said Lois across the flowers. Mr. Montmorency looked at her in surprise.

Lady Naylor continued: “From all the talk, you might think almost anything was going to happen, but we never listen. I have made it a rule not to talk, either. In fact, if you want rumours, we must send you over to Castle Trent. And I’m afraid also the Careys are incorrigible.... Oh yes, Hugo, it’s all very well to talk of disintegration; of course there is a great deal of disintegration in England and on the Continent. But one does wonder sometimes whether there’s really much there to disintegrate.... I dare say there may have been.... And if you talk to the people they’ll tell you the whole thing’s nonsense: and after all what is a country if it isn’t the people? For instance, I had a long conversation this morning with Mrs. Pat Gegan, who came down about the apples—you remember her, Hugo, don’t you, she always asks after you: she was really delighted to hear you were coming back—‘It is the way the young ones do be a bit wild,’ she said, and I really agreed with her. She said young people were always the same, and wasn’t it the great pity. She is a most interesting woman: she thinks a great deal. But then our people do think. Now have you ever noticed the English? I remember a year ago when I was staying with Anna Partridge in Bedfordshire—she is always so full of doing things in the village, little meetings and so on. Well, I went to one of her meetings, and really—those village women sitting round in hats and so obviously despising her! And not a move on their faces. I said to her afterwards: ‘I do think you’re splendid, Anna, the way you throw yourself into things—but really what you can do with people with so little brain⁠—’ She seemed quite annoyed and said that at least they were loyal. I said they hadn’t got any alternative, and if they had an alternative I didn’t suppose they’d see it. She said they had hearts of gold if they didn’t wear them on their sleeves, and I said I thought it was a pity they didn’t—it would have brightened them up a bit. She said that at least one knew where one was with them, and I said I wouldn’t live among people who weren’t human. Then I thought it seemed a shame to unsettle her, if she really likes living in England.... Oh, and I said to Mrs. Gegan this morning: ‘Some of your friends would like us to go, you know,’ and she got so indignant she nearly wept. And the Trents were telling me⁠— Oh, Hugo, the Trents are coming over to tennis to-morrow, specially for you and Francie. And the Thompsons are coming, and I believe the Hartigans. The Hartigan girls are still all there, you’ll be surprised to hear. Nobody seems to marry them—and oh, a Colonel and Mrs. Boatley are coming, and three or four of the Rutlands⁠—”

“Five,” said Lois.

“—Anyhow, several Rutlands. Every one’s so delighted to hear that you and Francie are back.”

“The Trents,” said Lois to Mr. Montmorency, with indignation, “swear that you and they are related. But you are not, surely? It is a perfect obsession of theirs.”

When he said he supposed that he was, through an aunt’s marriage, she became pensive. It seemed odd that even the Trents should have a closer claim than she had. Though it was she who had been humming with agitation the whole morning. The sweet-peas in the urn before them bore evidence to her agitation: they all slanted to the west like a falling haystack. It was true she now hoped nothing more of him, but he still was in shadow, faintly, from the kindly monolith of her childhood. What he might have been, what he persisted in being, met in her mind with a jar, with a grate of disparity. The face she had watched sleeping—wiped clear of complexity, quiet but so communicative in stillness that, watching, she seemed to have shared in some kind of suspense, stayed—like the bright blur from looking too long at a lamp—over the face now turned to her, intelligent, dulled, with its sub-acid smile. She was likely to think of him now as a limitation, Mrs. Montmorency’s limitation; something about Mrs. Montmorency that was a pity. The Trents could have him.

“I expect,” she said slightingly, “you are related to every one.”

“The longer one lives in this country,” he all too agreeably said, “the more likely that seems.”

Yet she had been certain she felt him looking at her while she argued with Uncle Richard about the guns. Seeking a likeness, perhaps. It was this consciousness that had lent her particular fervour—though she was interested in the guns. Though when she turned round his profile was turned away—in, it seemed, the most scornful repudiation.

He had, as a matter of fact, been looking at her, but without intention and with a purely surface observation of detail. When she turned away, light from behind her ran a finger round the curve of her jaw. When she turned his way, light took the uncertain, dinted cheek-line where, under the eyes, flesh was patted on delicately over the rise of the bone. Her eyes, long and soft-coloured, had the intense brimming wandering look of a puppy’s; in repose her lips met doubtfully, in a never-determined line, so that she never seemed to have quite finished speaking. Her face was long, her nose modelled down from the bridge then finished off softly and bluntly as by an upward flick of the sculptor’s thumb. Her chin had emphasis, seemed ready for determination. He supposed that unformed, anxious to make an effect, she would marry early.

“Danielstown can’t have been so exciting when you were here before,” said Lois to Mrs. Montmorency.

But Mrs. Montmorency, in an absence of mind amounting to exaltation, had soared over the company. She could perform at any moment, discomfitingly, these acts of levitation. She was staring into one of the portraits.

IV

LOIS was sent upstairs for the shawls; it appeared that a touch of dew on the bare skin might be fatal to Lady Naylor or Mrs. Montmorency. On the stairs, her feet found their evening echoes; she dawdled, listening. When she came down everybody was on the steps—at the top, on the wide stone plateau—the parlourmaid looking for somewhere to put the coffee tray. Mrs. Montmorency sat in the long chair; her husband was tucking a carriage rug round her knees. “If you do that,” Lois could not help saying, “she won’t be able to walk about, which is the best part of sitting out.”

No one took any notice: Mr. Montmorency went on tucking.

“Haven’t you got a wrap for yourself?” said Lady Naylor. Lois took a cushion and sat on the top step with her arms crossed, stroking her elbows. “I shouldn’t sit there,” her aunt continued; “at this time of night stone will strike up through anything.”

“If you don’t get rheumatism now,” added Francie, “you will be storing up rheumatism.”

“It will be my rheumatism,” said Lois as gently as possible, but added inwardly: “After you’re both dead.” A thought that fifty years hence she might well, if she wished, be sitting here on the steps,—with or without rheumatism—having penetrated thirty years deeper ahead into Time than they could, gave her a feeling of mysteriousness and destination. And she was fitted for this by being twice as complex as their generation—for she must be: double as many people having gone to the making of her.

Laurence, looking resentfully round for somewhere to sit—she had taken the only cushion—said: “I suppose you think ants cannot run up your legs if you cannot see them?”

Mr. Montmorency surprised her by offering a cigarette. He had a theory, he said, that ants did not like cigarette smoke. The air was so quiet now, the flame ran up his match without a tremble. “The ants are asleep,” she said, “they disappear into the cracks of the steps. They don’t bite, either; but the idea is horrid.”

“Don’t you want a chair?” When she said she didn’t, he settled back in his own. Creaks ran through the wicker, discussing him, then all was quiet. He was not due to leave the ship in which they were all rushing out into Time till ten years after the others, though it was to the others that he belonged. Turning half round, she watched light breathe at the tips of the cigarettes; it seemed as though everybody were waiting. Night now held the trees with a toneless finality. The sky shone, whiter than glass, fainting down to the fretted leaf-line, but was being steadily drained by the dark below, to which the grey of the lawns, like smoke, as steadily mounted. The house was highest of all with toppling immanence, like a cliff.

“I don’t think,” said Francie, “I remember anything so—so quiet as evenings here.”

“Trees,” said Laurence, shifting his pipe. His shirt-front was high above them, he stood by the door with his foot on the scraper.

“This time to-morrow,” said Lady Naylor, “we shall want to be quiet—after the tennis party.” She let out a sigh that hung in the silence, like breath in cold air.

“Oh yes, the party! The tennis party ...”

“Francie, did I tell you who were coming?”

“You told her,” said Laurence. “I heard you.”

“It is the people who don’t play tennis who make it so tiring.”

Something about the way, the resigned way, Francie’s hands lay out on the rug gave her the look of an invalid. “It is a good thing,” said Sir Richard, “you two never went out to Canada. I never liked the idea myself; I was very much against it at the time, if you remember.”

“I was divided about it myself,” said Hugo. “It seemed worth trying, and yet there was so much against it. I don’t know that I should have done very much good—I wonder.”

They wondered with him, with degrees of indifference. Lois stroked her dress—the feel of the stuff was like cobwebs, sticky and damp. There must be dew falling.

“Oh!” cried Francie. “Listen!”

She had so given herself to the silence that the birth of sound, after which the others were still straining, had shocked her nerves like a blow. They looked, from the steps, over a bay of fields, between the plantations, that gave on a sea of space. Far east, beyond the demesne: a motor, straining cautiously out of the silence. A grind, an anguish of sound as it took the hill.

“Patrols,” said Laurence.

Hugo reached out and pressed a hand on to Francie’s rug. “Patrols,” he told her, translating the information.

Sir Richard explained severely: “Out every night—not always in this direction.”

“They’re early; it’s half-past nine. Now I wonder ...”

The sound paused, for a moment a pale light showed up the sky in darkness. Then behind the screen of trees at the skyline, demesne boundary, the sound moved shakily, stoopingly, like some one running and crouching behind a hedge. The jarring echoed down the spines of the listeners. They heard with a sense of complicity.

“A furtive lorry is a sinister thing.”

“Laurence, it isn’t furtive!” said. Lady Naylor. “Can’t you be ordinary? If it wouldn’t be taken in some absurd kind of way as a demonstration, I should ask the poor fellows in to have coffee.”

“They’re careful enough,” said Hugo impatiently. It seemed that the lorry took pleasure in crawling with such a menace along the boundary, marking the scope of peace of this silly island, undermining solitude. In the still night sound had a breathlessness, as of intention.

“The roads are so rough,” said Lois: she could see the wary load lurching into the hedges. “I wonder now,” she added, “who is with the patrol to-night?”

“Some one you know?” cried Francie. But Sir Richard, who did not like his friends to be distracted from him by lorries any more than by introspection or headaches or the observation of nature, bore this down with one of his major chords:

“The lower tennis court, Hugo”—waving sideways into the darkness—“is not what it used to be. Some cattle got on to it after the rain and destroyed it. It’s had rolling enough to level a mountain, but it won’t be the same for a long time. D’you remember the fours we had on that court that summer—wasn’t it nineteen-six—you and I and O’Donnell and poor John Trent?”

“I do. Now was it James O’Donnell or Peter that went to Ceylon?”

“That was a great summer; I never remember a summer like it. We had the hay in by the end of June.”

The lorry ground off east towards Ballyhinch; silence sifting down on its tracks like sand. Their world was clear of it and a pressure lightened. Once more they could have heard a leaf turn in the trees or a bird shifting along a branch. But they found it was now very dark. Francie shivered, and Lady Naylor, rising formally, said she thought they should go in. “Poor John Trent,” she added, gathering up her cushions, “never got over that trouble he had with the Sheehans over the Madder fishing. It went into court, you know, and of course he lost. We always told him to keep it out of court. He was very obstinate.”

“He was indeed,” said Sir Richard. “He made an enemy of Sheehan and it’s not a good thing to have made an enemy. Though of course he’s dead nowadays, so it may not matter.”

“It may to the Archie Trents.... Laurence, help Uncle Richard in with the long chair, and remember to bring in your own chair afterwards.”

“I never had a chair.”

“Oh, they haven’t lighted the lamp in the hall. That is too bad! I am lost without Sarah—do you remember Sarah, Francie? She died, you know.”

Lois, sitting still among rising, passing and vaguely searching figures, cried: “But it’s only just beginning! You’re missing the whole point. I shall walk up the avenue.”

Francie went in, groping; trailing her rug. The three men, carrying wicker chairs, converged at the door: the chairs jostled. They all put them down and apologized. Lois repeated: “I shall walk up the avenue.” But having arranged an order of procedure they all passed on into the house, creaking and bumping. She walked down the steps alone: she had wanted to be alone, but to be regretted.

“Mind you don’t get locked out!” her uncle shouted after her. The glass doors shut with a rattle.

Lois walked alone up the avenue, where she had danced with Gerald. She thought what a happy night that had been, and how foolish Mr. Montmorency now thought them. He had seemed annoyed at her being young when he wasn’t. She could not hope to explain that her youth seemed to her also rather theatrical and that she was only young in that way because people expected it. She had never refused a rôle. She could not forgo that intensification, that kindling of her personality at being considered very happy and reckless, even if she were not. She could not hope to assure him she was not enjoying anything he had missed, that she was now unconvinced and anxious but intended to be quite certain, by the time she was his age, that she had once been happy. For to explain this—were explanation possible to so courteous, ironical and unfriendly a listener—would, she felt, be disloyal to herself, to Gerald, to an illusion both were called upon to maintain.

Just by the lime, in that dancing night, she had missed a step and sagged on his arm, which tightened. His hand slid up between her shoulders; then, as she steadied back to the rhythm, down again. They had set out laughing, noisy and conscious, but soon had to save their breath. Gerald’s cheek, within an inch of her own, was too near to see. All the way up, he had not missed a step; he was most dependable. And remembering how the family had just now gone into the house—so flatly, so unregrettingly, slamming the glass doors—she felt that was what she now wanted most—his eagerness and constancy. She felt, like a steady look from him, the perfectness of their being together.

“Oh, I do want you!”

But he was very musical, he conducted a jazz band they had at the barracks: while reaching out in her thoughts she remembered, the band would be practising now. She was disappointed. To a line of tune the thought flung her, she danced on the avenue.

A shrubbery path was solid with darkness, she pressed down it. Laurels breathed coldly and close: on her bare arms the tips of leaves were timid and dank, like tongues of dead animals. Her fear of the shrubberies tugged at its chain, fear behind reason, fear before her birth; fear like the earliest germ of her life that had stirred in Laura. She went forward eagerly, daring a snap of the chain, singing; a hand to the thump of her heart, dramatic with terror. She thought of herself as forcing a pass. In her life—deprived as she saw it—there was no occasion for courage, which like an unused muscle slackened and slept.

High up a bird shrieked and stumbled down through dark, tearing the leaves. Silence healed, but kept a scar of horror. The shuttered-in drawing-room, the family sealed in lamplight, secure and bright like flowers in a paper-weight—were desirable, worth much of this to regain. Fear curled back from the carpet-border.... Now, on the path: grey patches worse than the dark: they slipped up her dress knee-high. The laurels deserted her groping arm. She had come to the holly, where two paths crossed.

First, she did not hear footsteps coming, and as she began to notice the displaced darkness thought what she dreaded was coming, was there within her—she was indeed clairvoyant, exposed to horror and going to see a ghost. Then steps, hard on the smooth earth; branches slipping against a trench-coat. The trench-coat rustled across the path ahead, to the swing of a steady walker. She stood by the holly immovable, blotted out in her black, and there passed within reach of her hand, with the rise and fall of a stride, a resolute profile, powerful as a thought. In gratitude for its fleshliness, she felt prompted to make some contact: not to be known seemed like a doom: extinction.

“It’s a fine night,” she would have liked to observe; or, to engage his sympathies: “Up Dublin!” or even—since it was in her uncle’s demesne she was straining under a holly—boldly—“What do you want?”

It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry; down from the mountains, making a short cut through their demesne. Here was something else that she could not share. She could not conceive of her country emotionally: it was a way of living, an abstract of several landscapes, or an oblique frayed island, moored at the north but with an air of being detached and washed out west from the British coast.

Quite still, she let him go past in contemptuous unawareness. His intentions burnt on the dark an almost visible trail; he might well have been a murderer he seemed so inspired. The crowd of trees, straining up from the passive disputed earth, each sucking up and exhaling the country’s essence—swallowed him finally. She thought: “Has he come for the guns?” A man in a trench-coat had passed without seeing her: that was what it amounted to.

She ran back to tell, in excitement. Below, the house waited; vast on its west side, with thin yellow lines round the downstairs shutters. It had that excluded, sad, irrelevant look outsides of houses take in the dark. Inside, they would all be drawing up closer to one another, tricked by the half-revelation of lamplight. “Compassed about,” thought Lois, “by so great a cloud of witnesses....” Chairs standing round dejectedly; upstairs, the confidently waiting beds; mirrors vacant and startling; books read and forgotten, contributing no more to life; dinner-table certain of its regular compulsion; the procession of elephants that throughout uncertain years had not broken file.

But as Lois went up the steps breathlessly, her adventure began to diminish. It held ground for a moment as she saw the rug dropped in the hall by Mrs. Montmorency sprawl like a body across the polish. Then confidence disappeared, in a waver of shadow, among the furniture. Conceivably, she had just surprised life at a significant angle in the shrubbery. But it was impossible to speak of this. At a touch from Aunt Myra adventure became literary, to Uncle Richard it suggested an inconvenience; a glance from Mr. Montmorency or Laurence would make her encounter sterile.

But what seemed most probable was that they would not listen.... She lighted her candle and went up to bed—uncivilly, without saying good night to anyone. Her Uncle Richard, she afterwards heard, was obliged to sit up till twelve o’clock. He had not been told she was in, so did not think it right to lock up the house.

V

GERALD walked across the lawn to the lower tennis court, swinging his racquet. Once he put up a hand and touched the back of his head, but with assurance: it was perfectly smooth and round. His flannels were gold-white in the sun; he almost shone. He smiled everywhere. It was nonsense for him to pretend he did not care for parties; he went everywhere, he liked to go out every day.

Everybody was sitting or standing about where the green slatted seats were, at the edge of the shade. No one was playing yet; there were two courts and eighteen players; they were discussing who was to play first, their voices sharp with renunciation. Lois was nowhere; Laurence sat on the ground smoking and taking no part in the argument. Lady Naylor talked eagerly to a number of guests who, holding up parasols very straight in the unusual sunshine and wearing an air of vague happiness, were waiting for play to begin before settling down to conversation. Livvy Thompson was organizing: as Lois’ friend she felt this devolved upon her in Lois’ absence; also, she liked organizing. “You and you,” she said shrilly, stabbing the air within an inch of each player’s chest with a sharp forefinger, “and why not you and you?” But before she had ever finished arranging the second four, the first would become involved again.

“Oh, Mr. Lesworth,” cried Lady Naylor, and waited for him to approach, “if you really are coming out, would you bring some more rugs for some more of the people to sit on?”

He turned and went back to the house. It seemed very odd about Lois—now where could she be?

Livvy Thompson looked after him anxiously. Had not Mr. Armstrong come also? During this temporary absence of her attention two fours arranged themselves and walked hurriedly out to take possession of the courts.

The hall, very dark after sunshine, was full of wraps and racquet presses; shoes had wandered away from each other under the chairs. The rest of Gerald’s party—they had all driven out from Clonmore in a hired motor—were still there, waiting for Mrs. Vermont. Captain Vermont and David Armstrong stood holding her things while she powdered her nose with difficulty before an antique mirror.

“Aren’t women awful?” she cried gaily, as Gerald rejoined them. She knew the subalterns hated going about without her. “My dears, I do wish I knew if we really were asked. Lois is so—I mean, well, you know—vague, isn’t she?”

“Well, they wouldn’t mind, anyhow,” said David, and tried not to sound proprietary.

“Aren’t they hospitable!” Betty Vermont was not disappointed in Ireland after all. She had never before been to so many large houses with so small a sense of her smallness. Of course, they were all very shabby and not artistic at all. Mrs. Vermont used to say she longed to be turned loose in any one of them with a paint-pot—white—and a few hundred yards of some really nice cretonne from Barker’s.

“Half Ireland is here,” said David, looking out at the crowd of cars on the gravel-sweep. “I doubt if we get any tennis.”

“Ah, well, David, there’s plenty of that at the club. Now, Gerald, don’t stand there glaring! You do disapprove of powder, you unkind wretch!”

“Rather not,” said Gerald, beaming. But all the same he did like girls to have natural complexions—he was perfectly certain Lois’s was. He was carrying all the rugs he could find slung over his shoulder and looked, she informed him, just like a Bedouin. This was not a thing she could have said to every man, because really the East had become so very suggestive. But he was the dearest boy, so absolutely nice-minded. They all went out.

“There seem to be many more people here than I thought we’d asked,” Lady Naylor was saying to Mrs. Carey of Mount Isabel. “Lois asks people she meets at the Clonmore club, and then forgets. I have been rather wondering about the raspberries; I’ve sent her out to the garden to see about getting in some more. Colonel and Mrs. Boatley are coming—she was a Vere Scott, a Fermanagh Vere Scott.... Why is it that the Hartigans never will talk to men? I never think they give themselves a chance, do you? Oh, Mr. Lesworth, how kind to think of bringing the rugs out! And now there doesn’t seem anyone left to sit on them.... Look, would you break up that party of girls on the bank; I don’t think they seem to be sitting on anything, and anyhow they look dull and would like to talk. And I am sure they’d be glad if you’d smoke—the midges are terrible. Who is that girl in pale blue who’s just coming out?”

“Mrs. Vermont. She—er—I think Miss Farquar⁠—”

“Oh, well, never mind; it’s a pleasant surprise.” She went over to Mrs. Vermont with enthusiasm. “I’m so glad you could come; it’s delightful.”

Gerald looked round everybody again, carefully. Then he respectfully displaced the Miss Hartigans, spread out a rug on the bank and sat down between them. He was at a disadvantage, he could not remember if he had ever been introduced to them, whereas they were perfectly certain he had been. They were pleased at his coming, though on the other hand they were suffering so terribly from the midges that what they wanted most at the moment was to scratch their legs peacefully.

“I call this a frightfully good party,” said Gerald, breezily.

“Yes, it’s most enjoyable,” agreed Norah Hartigan.

“I don’t think there’s anything like these tennis parties you have in Ireland.”

“We have never been to tennis parties in England,” replied Doreen.

“Oh, you must certainly come over.”

“I dare say we should feel strange,” said Norah and her sister agreed with her. Gerald smiled from one to the other so encouragingly that they told him how a sister of theirs, who was not here to-day, had once stayed for quite a long time near London, and had been taken by an aunt, who was rather what they would call a London Society sort of person, to a very fashionable party—in South Kensington it had been. But their sister had not cared for the party, she thought the English unnatural and said it was extraordinary how their voices sounded when they were all shut up in the one room. “But excuse me,” concluded the elder Miss Hartigan, turning away because she was afraid the talk was becoming personal and scratching her ankle as discreetly as possible, “we should not say this to you.”

“It was splendid of you to forget I was English. Well, we shall all be leaving you soon, I dare say; all we jolly old army of occupation.”

“Oh, one wouldn’t like to call you that,” said Miss Hartigan, deprecatingly.

“—As soon as we’ve lost this jolly old war.”

“Oh, but one wouldn’t call it a war.”

“If anyone would, we could clean these beggars out in a week.”

“We think it would be a great pity to have a war,” said the Hartigans firmly. “There’s been enough unpleasantness already, hasn’t there?... And it would be a shame for you all to go,” added Doreen warmly, but not too warmly because they were all men. In fact, it was all rather embarrassing, they fixed their eyes on the players firmly and wished that the set would finish. They thought how daring it was of Mr. Lesworth to come so far to a party at all, and only hoped he would not be shot on the way home; though they couldn’t help thinking how, if he should be, they would both feel so interesting afterwards. “Poor young fellow,” they thought with particular tenderness because he was so good-looking, and neither of them, with this tenderness in their eyes, dared to look at him.

Livvy was walking along the top of the bank with David Armstrong. She smiled, with a small tooth over her lower lip; the tip of her nose quivered downward with feminine sensibility. “It is really a long time since I have seen you, Mr. Armstrong.”

David was the nicest of all the subalterns; so agreeable. “Why, yes,” he agreed, “I suppose it really must be.” He glanced at the brim of her hat and added: “It has certainly seemed an awful long time to me.”

“Oh, you mustn’t say that,” cried Livvy; she blushed to the chin and laughed.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” said David, alarmed but gratified.

“Well, I mean, you oughtn’t to say it like that!”

“But I can’t help saying what I mean.” His manliness increased with confusion. “I suppose I am that kind of fellow.”

“You are awful!” Livvy laughed so much from the shock of David’s behaviour that people sitting along the foot of the bank looked up expectantly. She would not share him, she hurried him off at an angle and then continued: “Why were you not at the Mount Isabel bicycle gymkhana? I understood you to say that you would be. It was the greatest pity you couldn’t be there, it was a grand gymkhana, and they had a putting competition too. And they had sentries armed in the avenue and made twenty-four pounds for the hospital. And the priest’s niece from Kilnagowan fell off and cut her lip; she bled too dreadfully, but Doreen Hartigan has her V.A.D. certificate. And two hundred people sat down to tea—how was it now that you couldn’t be there?”

“On duty,” said David, and took on a mystic and obstinate look. “I was up with some of the men and an N.C.O. in those mountains the other side of the Madder.”

Livvy felt in her spine, running down it from under her waistband, a sharp little thrill. She felt all the soldiers’ woman, and said in a glow: “Well, I call that too awfully dangerous.” He told her: “It’s what we are here for.” They glanced at each other, then both were embarrassed—and showed it—at what they had seen. She stooped, and her hat was an elegant mushroom. From David’s complexion blushes cleared slowly away—the last having never quite vanished into his hair before another came after it up from his well-fitting collar.

“I can’t think what Lois can be doing.” She peered through gaps in the shrubbery towards the gate of the garden. This concern for her friend she put up and twirled like a parasol between them. She sighed: the expansion of her thin little frame, the rise and fall of her two little points of bosom were clearly visible under her white silk jersey. Her panama hat turned down and light tufts of hair came out in fluttering commas against her cheekbones. From under the brim her eyes looked, slanting slightly up at the corners, with a veiled preoccupied kind of inquisitiveness. She was inquisitive as to so many things her friend Lois hoped one might not have to bother about. David watched her watch the shrubbery for her friend and thought, with a shock, that this really did seem a girl he was to be in love with. He had the fatalism of a recurrent sufferer.

“It will be too bad,” continued Livvy, “if she doesn’t come soon. You would think she might be picking those raspberries herself. You see, all the people she asked from Clonmore have come and were not expected. If she doesn’t come soon I must go—yes, indeed I must, Mr. Armstrong—and see about the two next fours. You see, her cousin Laurence is no good for that, he is so intellectual, and Lady Naylor doesn’t much notice the tennis so long as the party goes off all right. But it seems too bad she shouldn’t see Mr. Lesworth. I expect Mr. Lesworth often speaks to you of her, doesn’t he, Mr. Armstrong?”

“Er—I don’t remember, really.”

“I think it’s wonderful to see a man so much in love. I must say I often wonder what love feels like. I always seem to feel so natural about the men I know. But I suppose that’s because I am so young—or perhaps I was born platonic. Do you believe in platonics, Mr. Armstrong?”

“Plato? Jolly old Grecian—what?”

“No, but listen—do you?”

“Well, what I think,” said David, looking carefully at his racquet and turning it over and over—“of course it is awfully difficult to express, but I think the right kind of girl and the right kind of fellow can be almost anything to each other, if you know what I mean?”

“I think,” said Livvy, “you put it rather wonderfully.” She suddenly waved her racquet. “Ah—there’s Lois!”

Lois came down the shrubbery path from the garden startled, as if at her own great speed, flushed and visibly breathless. A pink unbuttoned cardigan slipped away at the shoulders, she had a hand in both the pockets to keep it on. Her hat flapped back, it rose above her face in surprise, like a wave. Behind her the bushes stirred in an almost visible backwash. Over the laurels, cropped knee-high at the back of the tennis court, her body rose and dipped with her long steps.

“Ah, here she is!” exclaimed several people, and all looked up the bank uncritically and kindly. The dark air of the shrubbery glittered with midges; she jerked her hands from her pockets and waved her way through. Chinks of sunlight darted up her like mice and hesitated away like butterflies. She had been looking down at the party, deployed in all its promise, with greed and eagerness as at a box of chocolates; eyes like a thumb and finger hovering to selection. Now, engaged by its look, she became all profile; her step flattened, she would have liked to crawl. She was, as Mr. Montmorency had noticed, very self-conscious.

The Hartigans said to Gerald: “Here comes Lois; isn’t she very sweet-looking!” They smiled at each other across him.

He said “Rather!” pocketing their tribute gratefully, with simplicity, as a small boy pockets a tip. His directness baffled them, they were shocked—but he thought how nice they were. In his world affections were rare and square—four-square—occurring like houses in a landscape, unrelated and positive, though with sometimes a large bright looming—as of the sunned west face of Danielstown over the tennis courts. He did not conceive of love as a nervous interchange but as something absolute, out of the scope of thought, beyond himself, matter for a confident outward rather than anxious inward looking. He had sought and was satisfied with a few—he thought final—repositories for his emotions: his mother, country, dog, school, a friend or two, now—crowningly—Lois. Of these he asked only that they should be quiet and positive, not impinged upon, not breaking boundaries from their generous allotment. His life was a succession of practical adjustments, into which the factor of personality did not enter at all. His reserve—to which one was apt to accord a too sensitive reverence—was an affair of convenience rather than protection. Pressed for a statement, he could have said, “I love her,” to the Hartigans, Mrs. Carey, anyone there, without uneasiness, without a sense of the words’ vibrations or alarm at a loud impact on something hollow. So he looked up the bank at Lois, while the Hartigans watched him.

Mr. Montmorency sat on the ground with his knees apart, holding his ankles limply. His grey flannel coat-collar was turned up over his white shirt, as though a strong wind were blowing. He was being talked to by ladies who sat above him on high green chairs, and though he looked up to answer, it was never higher than their knees. He had more than ever his waxen blinking look, as though exposed unnaturally to the sunshine. His nostrils contracted slightly, as though the smell drawn up from the roots of the grass in a perpetual hot shimmer were more offensive than he cared to explain. He was to play in the next set, and Laurence looked forward to a melancholy exhibition of departed proficiency. A wiry tenseness and setting of teeth there would be, Laurence anticipated, then balls going straight and cleanly into the net. He would be the magnificent player of ten years ago, with little painful grunts as point after point was given away. Laurence guessed that Mr. Montmorency hated parties and conversation as much as he himself did, but being less adept at evasion or honouring less fiercely the virginity of his intelligence, could not escape from talking and being talked to.

Laurence achieved this escape by sitting always with a social alert expression between two groups, when one tried to claim him he could affect to be engaged by the other.

A net had been carefully stretched behind the seats to prevent balls going through to the shrubbery. But it was full of rents, and these the balls, driven with force from the further back line, discovered unerringly. To meet these deficiencies children up from the lodge were on duty in the shrubbery; they stared and rambled, pushing among the laurels. They got their teas, an excellent view of the party and a halfpenny for every ball they recovered. Those who did not find any balls and seemed disappointed were given halfpennies also. So why, as Lady Naylor said, bother? She hated to see her guests go round the net, smearing their nice white flannels.

But now, as three balls in succession fled through the leaves, she broke off a conversation and cried: This was too much! Would some kind person—she looked at Laurence—go round and help? He rose, reluctant: simultaneously Mr. Montmorency went gratefully round the net at the other end. He was followed by an anxious little boy called Hercules, the only child among the guests and gravely de trop. They all three met in the middle.

Laurence said—beating the bushes vaguely—“Imagine, sir, a small resurrection day, an intimate thing-y one, when the woods should give up their tennis balls and the bundles of hay their needles: the beaches all their engagement rings and the rivers their cigarette cases and some watches. The sea’s too general, an affair of furniture and large boilers, it could wait with the graves for the big day.... Yes, Hercules, that is a tennis ball, but it is pre-war. Put it back in the rabbit hole for the children to find; it is worth a halfpenny to them.... Last term I dropped a cigarette case into the Cher, from the bridge at Parson’s Pleasure. It was a gold one, left over from an uncle, flat and thin and curved, for a not excessive smoker. It was from the days when they wore opera cloaks and mashed, and killed ladies. It was very period, very virginal; I called it Henry James; I loved it. I want to see it rush up out of the Cher, very pale, with eyeballs, like in the Tate Gallery. It wants a woman to be interested in a day like that, to organize; perhaps the Virgin Mary? Don’t you think, sir?”

Mr. Montmorency, startled at this address, replied: “I have never been to the Tate Gallery.”

“Talking of being virginal, do you ever notice this country? Doesn’t sex seem irrelevant?”

“There certainly are a great many unmarried women,” said Mr. Montmorency, looking doubtfully through the net at the Miss Hartigans.

“It is: ‘Ah, why would we?’ And indeed why should they? There is no reason why one should not, so one never does. It applies to everything. And children seem in every sense of the word to be inconceivable.”

“My mother has five,” said Hercules, “I am the youngest. Hercules is a family name because I am the only boy, but when I go to school I shall be called Richard after my godfather, as everybody says that Hercules even as an initial would be such a disadvantage to me, though not nearly so bad as being afraid of bats.”

“I wonder you aren’t at school now,” said Mr. Montmorency.

“It would be holidays now anyhow, so I should be bound to be here. That is my eldest sister, playing tennis. They do not see how I can possibly go to school till I have got over being afraid of bats. Besides, I am using up the end of my sisters’ governess.”

“Nobody could possibly be sorrier for you than I am, Hercules,” said Laurence. “This is an unreal party.”

“Well, nobody brought you, I suppose,” said Hercules.

The strong and dreadful smell of laurels made them all irritable. Hercules tore off the tips of bland leaves which kept slapping against his forehead. Laurence came with a ball on his racquet to Mr. Montmorency and said: “I am sure this is one that you lost with Uncle Richard and poor John Trent and the man who did not go to Ceylon in the summer of ’06.”

“Whereas, I did not go to Canada.”

“No, you never did, did you?”

Lady Naylor came and looked at them through the netting. “If between you you cannot find any balls,” she said, “Laurence, you had better please fetch that other box from the back hall. They are beginning a new set with only three.”

“I have two here that seem quite clean, but they haven’t much bounce,” said Hercules.

“Oh, that is splendid, you are a good little boy!” She took the balls from him through a hole. “Here are a nice lot to go on with,” she called out hopefully, rolling them to the court. Mr. Montmorency and Laurence went on searching.

“Now take Aunt Myra; what does she think she’s doing?”

“If it comes to that,” said Mr. Montmorency, nettled, “what do you think you’re doing? Why are you here at all if you don’t like it—as Hercules said? I was happy here at your age, I was full of the place, I asked nothing better. I ask nothing better now.”

“Oh,” said Laurence.

“However, I have no doubt you are right in being dissatisfied; I dare say it is progress,” said Mr. Montmorency angrily. “I dare say it is good for the race.”

Laurence, who did not consider that he had anything to do with the race, replied with some indignation: “I have no money; where do you expect me to get any money from? I was to have gone to Spain this month with a man and last year I should have gone to Italy with another man, but what do you expect me to go on? I have to eat somwhere, don’t I, and here it is simply a matter of family feeling.”

“This is one of the balls; I shall throw it over.... I had no idea that you were such a materialist.”

“I can’t help my stomach. Besides, I like eating, it is so real. But I should like something else to happen, some crude intrusion of the actual. I feel all gassy inside from yawning. I should like to be here when this house burns.”

“Quite impossible; quite unthinkable. Why don’t you fish or something?... Nonsense!” he added, looking warningly at the house.

“Of course it will, though. And we shall all be so careful not to notice.”

“Are you the undergraduate of to-day?”

“I should love to be quite, quite abstract.”

Mr. Montmorency, offended by all this clever conversation, felt more than ever his isolation, his homelessness. Life was to him an affair of discomfort, but that discomfort should be made articulate seemed to him shocking. The over-fine machinery of his mind ceaselessly strained and caught and was agonizingly jerked over details. His refuge was manly talk: he suspected Laurence. He said: “You are fortunate. There was never a time when I had not other people to think about.”

Laurence, who immediately thought this womanish, said: “Oh yes, love.” He flicked out and studied the word indifferently—coin of uncertain value.

“Not entirely. One had a certain debt ...”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

Laurence became more formal, very much better mannered. He recalled that the man was married, had given away his integrity, had not even a bed to himself. The husband, glancing a last time through and under the bushes, was negligible, diffused even a certain staleness. Laurence sheered away mentally, moved further off through the shrubbery. He had been talking foolishly, in his vein of the third or fourth quality, and regretted now having talked still. He felt there had been something morbid about his intrusion, as in a visit to a prison.

“I was to have played in that second set,” said Mr. Montmorency. “It seems to be nearly over: perhaps I shall play in the third.”

“Tea will be coming, never forget tea.” Indeed, a move was being made to the house already. Tea was too grave an affair to be carried out; besides, one wasn’t accustomed to stability in the weather.

“Oh, Hugo, come out now, dear,” cried Francie, walking past with Mrs. Hartigan. “I am sure it doesn’t matter about the balls. And the Trents have come—don’t you see them? We are just going back to the house to meet them now.”

“Archie? Splendid!” He burst from the shrubbery at the other side, gained the path and hurried towards the house. At a turn of the path, in an arch cut under some holly, he saw Gerald and Lois standing; talking, looking down earnestly at their racquets. With her head bent, Lois was like her mother. He stared, then passed them quickly.

But Lois did not notice him going by. She was saying: “I feel certain you have illusions about me; I don’t believe you know what I’m like a bit.” And while she spoke she counted the crimson strings in her racquet: three down, six across.

VI

MRS. VERMONT ate more hot cakes than she cared to remember, because they were so good and nobody seemed to notice. She went on to chocolate cake, then to orange layer cake, to which she returned again and again. An idea she had had, that one should not eat very much when invited out, languished; she finished up with a plate of raspberries. She put all thought of her figure resolutely behind her. Mother, of course, had filled out terribly, but oneself mightn’t.

“Nummy-nummy,” she said, pointing out the raspberries to David Armstrong who sat beside her. “David have some!”

Livvy Thompson, sitting beyond David, deplored these women who talked baby-talk. She felt that her own appeal to men was more serious. “Mr. Armstrong has got to play in the next set,” she said warningly.

“Hoity-toity!” thought Betty Vermont (she never used the expression aloud, as she was not certain how one pronounced it: it was one of her inner luxuries). Turning to Mrs. Carey (the Honourable Mrs. Carey), who sat on her other side, she said frankly:

“Your scrumptious Irish teas make a perfect piggy-wig of me. And dining-room tea, of course, makes me a kiddy again.”

“Does it really?” said Mrs. Carey, and helped herself placidly to another slice of the chocolate cake. She thought of Mrs. Vermont as “a little person” and feared she detected in her a tendency, common to most English people, to talk about her inside. She often wondered if the War had not made everybody from England a little commoner. She added pleasantly: “This chocolate cake is a speciality of Danielstown’s. I believe it’s a charm that they make it by, not a recipe.”

“Things do run in families, don’t they? Now I am sure you’ve all got ghosts.”