She could look only just so far into the shallow, yellow eyes. But did not altogether give up hope that recognition might germinate.

‘Will you, Bluey?’ Miss Docker begged, who had always been an optimist.

When the dog turned, and lifted his leg on the suppliant, and walked stiffly off.

The dog went, his tail aslant in the violent wind. The wind tore along the Northern Road, gyrating and swooping, improvising. One exceptionally strenuous gust, on arriving at the hardware, opposite, slapped the plateglass window so that Miss Docker’s reflection began to fluctuate and shudder. Even before her recovery, the wind had burst across the street. It smote the material Miss Docker with all the force of incalculable purpose, but did at least enable her to feel on which one of her best stockings her sentence had been written by a dog.

And dog, she saw for the first time, is God turned round.

Then the tears gushed out of Miss Docker’s eyes. It was the wind, of course, the dust, the grit. She must hurry home at once, and bathe, if the little eye-bath had not got lost, and her a martyr to conjunctivitis. She must not let on, though. She was not the kind to spread despondency, encourage grief. Never ever ever ever.

Miss Docker walked along the empty street.

Being Kind to Titina

First mother went away. Then it was our father, twitching from under our feet the rugs, which formed, he said, a valuable collection. We were alone for a little then. Not really alone, of course, for there was Fräulein Hoffmann, and Mademoiselle Leblanc, and Kyria Smaragda our housekeeper, and Eurydice the cook, and the two maids from Lesbos. The house was full of the whispering of women, and all of us felt melancholy.

Then it was explained to us by Mademoiselle Leblanc that she and Fräulein Hoffmann had gone out and sent a telegram to Smyrna, and soon the aunts would arrive in Egypt. Soon they did: there was our Aunt Ourania, who was less stern than she seemed to be, and Aunt Thalia – she was the artistic one – nobody, said Fräulein Hoffmann, could sing the German Lieder with such Gefühl.

Soon the house began to live again. There were always people on the stairs. There was a coming and going, and music, in the old house at Schutz. That year my eldest sister Phrosso thought she was in love with an Italian athlete, and my brother Aleko decided he would become a film star. The girls from Lesbos hung out of the upper windows after the dishes had been stacked, and tried to reach the dates which were ripening on the palms. Sometimes there was the sound of dates plopping in the damp garden below. The garden was never so cool and damp as when they brought us back from the beach. The gate creaked, as the governesses let us in through the sand-coloured wall, into the dark-green thicket of leaves.