I walked off quickly, leaving my barenecked husband to his own social confusion. I had myself opted out, I had hardly spoken a word to anyone, having felt the general pointlessness of engaging in such a dualized gathering. I belonged to neither nation, and to speak was to take sides. I was just wondering whether I ought not to get ready to go back and feed Joseph when two people who bore in every attribute the print of town rather than of theatre came up to me and addressed me. How brave, I thought as I saw them stop before me and open their mouths. And then I realized that I knew them.

“Surely,” the woman said, “you must be Emma Lawrence? You won’t remember us, I daresay, but you used to come and stay with us years ago in Cheltenham.”

“Of course I remember you,” I said quickly, and I did. “Mr. and Mrs. Scott, isn’t it? And how is Mary? I haven’t seen Mary for years.”

It all came back to me in one of those film-sequence sweeps of total recall to which I am subject. I had been at school with their daughter, who was for years one of my closest friends. We used to stay with each other during the holidays, to write each other long weekly letters and to share our secrets. And then, since we left school, we had not met or written, except for one occasion in London, when we had lunch together, and had, I thought, mutually realized our total lack of sympathy for each other. Mr. Scott was an extremely well-to-do solicitor and a man of great acidity. I had never dared to converse with him, as he had no scruples about correcting with malicious pleasure the ill-founded notions of fifteen-year-old girls, and although I did not understand the grounds for his corrections, I always understood the malice. Mrs. Scott, on the other hand, was one of those mild-faced professional women whose even features denote a deliberate evenness of life: I remember that despite the lavishness of their means and the careful comfort of their house she managed to avoid any suggestion of extravagance. On the contrary, despite the large prime joints, I always got the impression that their household was governed by a mild and firm economy.