This engagement left Milton free to escape from them, which, while walking decorously enough alongside and keeping back here and there a branch with his walking-stick, it is to be feared that he did. The path, by going up steeply for short distances and only gradually coming down again, presented a clever effect of being Alpine: one felt one must have climbed to a great height. One was humoured in this by being railed away solicitously from small precipices, and by being made to walk dizzily over the arch of bridges from which ravines with water seemed to drop away. Every now and then an artful perspective would be offered, to be veiled once more by trees. Once, in a Corinthian arbour that seemed balanced on the top of a tree like a ball upon a jet of water, he had a glimpse of Miss Fitzgerald talking to Ronald … ‘And I expect,’ she said, after a prolonged and breathless inspection of all the profile he vouchsafed her, ‘that you write poetry, too, don’t you?’ Before his path dipped again he heard Ronald reply in a very nearly extinguished voice, ‘Well, as I said before, you see, my subject is economics.’ Milton, whose sympathies were all with Miss Fitzgerald, ground his teeth. He considered Ronald definitely disobliging in his refusal to give hostages anywhere. He had been prepared for clever indolence or for a cool kind of wantonness in Mrs Kerr’s son, or for polite nullity or resentful dullness in the son of Mrs Kerr’s husband; he had begun to build, successively, on each of these probabilities. But he had not foreseen this refusal to emerge from behind a noncommittal mannerliness, or the long ray to be directed upon them that showed them all up, even Sydney, in the maze of a gnat’s dance, an aimless passionate jiggle apart and together. It had not been in Ronald to precipitate a crisis on any plane: he was not, thought Milton, either vivid or generous enough. He had come to stare, one could only imagine, and Milton had a view of him lounging along a row of cages. He wondered how much Ronald had hurt Sydney, whether she had been able to make her hurt him at all; though she had been so visibly ‘out’ from the earliest word of his coming, to make a juggernaut of her friend’s son. Milton did not know whether, except for that brief encounter in the ballroom, they had ever exchanged a word. The reservation would be enough to engage this perverse girl in still deeper designs on him and to make her, to merely a lover, more inaccessible than before.