‘Yes. Very patient.’

‘That seems a curious quality to attract you.’

‘Anyone else would have killed me this morning. I suppose he had learnt to be patient: that wife——’

‘Poor woman!’

‘It would be kinder if neurotics were to be chloroformed – did you admire my service?’

‘My dear child, don’t be heroic! I don’t remember it as anything terrible. I don’t know, of course, how well you can play.’

Sydney was silent, stung by a sudden suspicion that Mrs Kerr did not really believe in her tennis at all. If she did not exist for Mrs Kerr as a tennis player, in this most ordinary, popular of her aspects, had she reason to feel she existed at all? It became no longer a question of – What did Mrs Kerr think of her? – but rather – Did Mrs Kerr ever think of her? The possibility of not being kept in mind seemed to Sydney that moment a kind of extinction. Mrs Kerr had many friends; all these demi-gods would leap up at a reference to one of the least of them, shadowy and menacing. Men and women of supreme distinction and beauty, they never appeared in person, were never described and so were never allowed to diminish. The very fact that Mrs Kerr never praised them – seemed, in fact, rather flatly to take them for granted – was fresh reason for self-laceration. ‘A delightful woman … rather a charming person … I thought, an amusing man …’ These haunted Sydney, aloofly inimical, these friends of her friend. People one did not know remained on a different plane, inaccessible to one’s criticism. Sydney professed herself (to friends of her own age) a Realist, and it was perhaps because of this that her imagination, which she dealt with austerely, was able to revenge itself obliquely upon her.

After a pause she said, ‘Well, you know one thing now about my play – if it interests you. You do know how bad it can be. I think that was the depths.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ her friend said benevolently. ‘Will you kindly choose me another book?’

‘Did you finish that last?’

Mrs Kerr shook her head and looked sideways at Sydney in a way of her own. She sighed, her eyelids delicately and sadly fluttered – she was a lovely thing.

‘Oh,’ said Sydney, in a secret ecstasy, ‘you are incorrigible. Then why do you go on asking me to choose you books?’

‘I know there must be something in them.’ The way this was said might have stamped out of being, for Sydney, for ever the friends of her friend. ‘I know, you see, there has to be something. I want so much to be able to read them – I hope so much that I may.’

‘I shall give up choosing you books.’

‘Oh no, don’t do that … Sydney darling. I suppose I may be incorrigible. I still seem to read for amusement.’