Isabel looked speculatively at these friends of Edward’s, two men so different yet in one way also alike. Professor Fosca radiated warmth, but Damon Phillips, for all his charm, was too restless to give one any sense of real communication. He moved so fast that he had hardly let her finish a sentence at dinner, and even when he became as old as Professor Fosca, he would never be like him, she felt. Yet they were alike in that their faces were both lined, faces on which thought had left visible traces. It was that, she decided, comparing them with her husband’s clear-cut bronze smoothness. They lived hard (she saw it now), harder than a man who played golf and tennis to keep his waistline down. They would not grow old gracefully. They would not, she thought, smiling to herself, perhaps grow old at all.

She caught Professor Fosca’s clear blue eyes watching her. “An indiscreet question, Mrs. Ferrier, but what made you smile such a perspicacious smile just then, you who come to us from the golden untroubled shores?”

“I was thinking an indiscreet thought.”

“I guessed as much.”

“She thinks we’re old fools,” Grace Kimlock said with a sniff.

“And you don’t think so?” Orlando teased his old friend.

“No,” Isabel spoke directly to Grace, “as a matter of fact, Miss Kimlock, I was thinking that none of you would ever grow old.”

“I’m prepared to agree with you,” Damon said gaily, “but why not?”

But this she could not answer. She could not say—Miss Kimlock might be hurt—that they seemed to her childishly passionate. And Isabel was afraid. They were too close to tragedy. They had been walking round it all evening, and, she guessed, they had deliberately spared her. They had not insisted—except among themselves in that violent argument at the dinner table about socialism in Britain, about the Webbs. “I’m not going to answer that,” she said quietly. “We have so little time. Perhaps I’ll never see you again,” she said, looking at them now one by one, Fosca hunched over on the sofa, his delicate thin hands clasping his knees; Grace Kimlock, upright, at bay; Damon Phillips leaning on the back of his wife’s chair and Julia herself plucking a thread from her dress in an absent-minded way. “I must thank you,” she said, and it was like a farewell, “for all you were to Edward, all of you.”

“We didn’t keep him from being desperately lonely,” Grace Kimlock said sharply because she was moved. “Desperately,” she repeated with a tremor in her voice.