‘It is amusingly suggestive, isn’t it,’ Ronald said to Milton, ‘of the “Nuit de Portofino Kulm”?’ and was made to feel himself utterly isolated by Milton’s kind, blank stare. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t read —— ‘said Milton. Ronald felt with complacency. ‘Oh …’ said Ronald. He would have liked to discuss also, in the light of his own recent observations in Germany, that mild baron of Charlottenburg who kept snakes in his parlour behind violet silk curtains. He sighed as though a door had been slammed in front of him. Perished civilizations interested Ronald, who had come too late to share a mild distress at their demise. Soon he was thinking fruitfully about Russia, and was glad when Milton again gave him another opening by saying to Mrs Hillier: ‘I often wonder whether the Russians weren’t, after all, the only people with any real notion of aristocracy.’

‘Does that mean you did or didn’t like Russians?’ said Mrs Hillier, looking at him cautiously: while Ronald, almost simultaneously, exclaimed, ‘So real it was that this world was no place for them!’

‘Do you at all mean to suggest,’ asked Milton, giving full attention to this last remark, ‘that they have simply been translated? Because I think that’s very tenable. It strikes me more and more as I live that this world’s no place for anyone with any real notion of anything, and that its expulsion of them must be almost automatic.’

‘Their type was very refined,’ said Mrs Hillier, ‘lovely creatures – but one can never altogether like them.’ She looked about at the garden which, with its profound and hidden hollows around them, seemed to be waiting. ‘I must say,’ she confessed, ‘this is delightful. Shall we go over that bridge? The garden must go on indefinitely —— Look, there’s a seat with steps up to it right on the hill!’ She made for the bridge, appearing, so abrupt was the turn of the path, to have plunged waist-deep into the shiny dark leaves that flopped back, heavy as fishes, from the sweep of her skirts. These plants with their overpowering glossiness must have sprung from wet soil. Milton and Miss Pym went after her; Ronald and Miss Fitzgerald seemed to have been delayed by a short argument – perhaps as to the nature of aristocracy. The garden gave Milton a distinct feeling of nervousness, as though he were being scornfully watched. To allow this was to underrate oneself, so he asked abruptly, ‘If one comes to think of it, what was the good of them?’ There was a pause filled in by the agitation of leaves; then Miss Pym, upon whom an ever-deeper despondency must have been working, replied, ‘If you come to think of it, what is the good of us?’

‘Well, really …’ said Mrs Hillier.