‘There is nothing specifically wrong with you,’ said Davidson, spreading out his long hands. ‘Nothing, I mean, in the sense of your heart being overworked or your lungs at all unsound or any nonsense of that sort. I don’t think you are anaemic. The blood test will clear all that up. But’—and he leant forward and pointed a finger at her—‘but you are very tired. You’re altogether too tired. If I was an honest physician I’d tell you to go into a nursing-home and lead the life of a placid cow for three weeks.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Can’t your daughter come out next year? What about the little season?’

‘Oh, no, it’s impossible. Really. My uncle has lent us his house for the dance. She’s planned everything. It would be almost as much trouble to put things off as it is to go on with them. I’ll be all right, only I do rather feel as if I’ve got a jellyfish instead of a brain. A wobbly jellyfish. I get these curious giddy attacks. And I simply can’t stop bothering about things.’

‘I know. What about this ball? I suppose you’re hard at it over that?’

‘I’m handing it all over to my secretary and Dimitri. I hope you’re coming. You’ll get a card.’

‘I shall be delighted, but I wish you’d give it up.’

‘Truly I can’t.’

‘Have you got any particular worry?’

There was a long pause.

‘Yes,’ said Evelyn Carrados, ‘but I can’t tell you about that.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Sir Daniel, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Les maladies suspendent nos vertus et nos vices.’

She rose and he at once leapt to his feet as if she was royalty.

‘You will get that prescription made up at once,’ he said, glaring down at her. ‘And, if you please, I should like to see you again. I suppose I had better not call?’

‘No, please. I’ll come here.’

‘C’est entendu.’

Lady Carrados left him, wishing vaguely that he was a little less florid and longing devoutly for her bed.

Agatha Troy hunched up her shoulders, pulled her smart new cap over one eye and walked into her one-man show at the Wiltshire Galleries in Bond Street. It always embarrassed her intensely to put in these duty appearances at her own exhibitions. People felt they had to say something to her about her pictures and they never knew what to say and she never knew how to reply. She became gruff with shyness and her incoherence was mistaken for intellectual snobbishness. Like most painters she was singularly inarticulate on the subject of her work. The careful phrases of literary appreciation showered upon her by highbrow critics threw Troy into an agony of embarrassment. She minded less the bland commonplaces of the philistines though for these also she had great difficulty in finding suitable replies.