Lord Robert hurried away. It took him some time to get round the ballroom and as he edged past dancing couples and over the feet of sitting chaperones he suddenly felt as if an intruder had thrust open all the windows of this neat little world and let in a flood of uncompromising light. In this cruel light he saw the people he liked best and they were changed and belittled. He saw his nephew Donald, who had turned aside when they met in the hall, as a spoilt, selfish boy with no honesty or ambition. He saw Evelyn Carrados as a woman haunted by some memory that was discreditable, and hag-ridden by a blackmailer. His imagination leapt into extravagance, and in many of the men he fancied he saw something of the unscrupulousness of Withers, the pomposity of Carrados, and the stupidity of old General Halcut-Hackett. He was plunged into a violent depression that had a sort of nightmarish quality. How many of these women were what he still thought of as ‘virtuous’? And the débutantes? They had gone back to chaperones and were guided and guarded by women, many of whose own private lives would look ugly in this flood of hard light that had been let in on Lord Robert’s world. The girls were sheltered by a convention for three months but at the same time they heard all sorts of things that would have horrified and bewildered his sister Mildred at their age. And he wondered if the Victorian and Edwardian eras had been no more than freakish incidents in the history of society and if their proprieties had been as artificial as the paint on a modern woman’s lips. This idea seemed abominable to Lord Robert and he felt old and lonely for the first time in his life. ‘It’s the business with Donald and this blackmailing game,’ he thought as he twisted aside to avoid a couple who were dancing the rumba. He had reached the door. He went into the lounge which opened off the ballroom, saw that Evelyn Carrados was not there, and made for the staircase. The stairs were covered with couples sitting out. He picked his way down and passed his nephew Donald who looked at him as if they were strangers.

‘No good trying to break that down,’ thought Lord Robert. ‘Not here. He’d only cut me and someone would notice.’ He felt wretchedly depressed and tired, and was filled with a premonition of disaster that quite astonished himself. ‘Good God,’ he thought suddenly, ‘I must be going to be ill.’ And oddly enough this comforted him a little. In the lower hall he found Bridget O’Brien with a neat, competent-looking young woman whose face he dimly remembered.

‘Now, Miss Harris,’ Bridgie was saying, ‘are you sure you’re getting on all right? Have you had supper?’

‘Well, thank you so much, Miss O’Brien, but really it doesn’t matter—’

Of course, it was Evelyn’s secretary. Nice of Evelyn to ask her. Nice of Bridgie to take trouble. He said: