‘Yes, that would be the place.’

So brother and sister sat and talked about the arrangement of the house until bed-time. ‘An hour ago,’ I thought, ‘in the black refuge in the box hedge, she wept her heart out for the death of her God; now she is discussing whether Beryl’s children shall take the old smoking-room or the school-room for their own.’ I was all at sea.

‘Julia,’ I said later, when Brideshead had gone upstairs, ‘have you ever seen a picture of Holman Hunt’s called “The Awakened Conscience”?’

‘No.’

I had seen a copy of Pre-Raphaelitism in the library some days before; I found it again and read her Ruskin’s description. She laughed quite happily.

‘You’re perfectly right. That’s exactly what I did feel.’

‘But, darling, I won’t believe that great spout of tears came just from a few words of Bridey’s. You must have been thinking about it before.’

‘Hardly at all; now and then; more, lately, with the Last Trump so near.’

‘Of course it’s a thing psychologists could explain; a preconditioning from childhood; feelings of guilt from the nonsense you were taught in the nursery. You do know at heart that it’s all bosh, don’t you?’

‘How I wish it was!’

‘Sebastian once said almost the same thing to me.’

‘He’s gone back to the Church, you know. Of course, he never left it as definitely as I did. I’ve gone too far; there’s no turning back now; I know that, if that’s what you mean by thinking it all bosh. All I can hope to do is to put my life in some sort of order in a human way, before all human order comes to an end. That’s why I want to marry you. I should like to have a child. That’s one thing I can do….Let’s go out again. The moon should be up by now.’

The moon was full and high. We walked round the house; under the limes Julia paused and idly snapped off one of the long shoots, last year’s growth, that fringed their boles, and stripped it as she walked, making a switch, as children do, but with petulant movements that were not a child’s, snatching nervously at the leaves and crumbling them between her fingers; she began peeling the bark, scratching it with her nails.

Once more we stood by the fountain.

‘It’s like the setting of a comedy,’ I said. ‘Scene: a Baroque fountain in a nobleman’s grounds. Act one, sunset; act two, dusk; act three, moonlight. The characters keep assembling at the fountain for no very clear reason.’

‘Comedy?’

‘Drama. Tragedy. Farce. What you will. This is the reconciliation scene.’

‘Was there a quarrel?’

‘Estrangement and misunderstanding in act two.’

‘Oh, don’t talk in that damned bounderish way. Why must you see everything second-hand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a pre-Raphaelite picture?’

‘It’s a way I have.’

‘I hate it.’

Her anger was as unexpected as every change on this evening of swift veering moods. Suddenly she cut me across the face with her switch, a vicious, stinging little blow as hard as she could strike.