‘More like a ghost, I think. She is to be seen on the stairs – still, I dare say, if my mother hasn’t already gone out with her.’

‘An hotel, you know, is a great place for friendships.’

‘Musn’t that be,’ said Ronald, ‘what people come out for?’

‘Perhaps some ——’

‘But are there really people who would do that?’ asked Ronald sharply, in a tone of revulsion, as though he had brought himself up more squarely than he had anticipated to the edge of some kind of abyss. ‘You mean women?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Milton, smiling across at the agitation of Ronald, very secure and avuncular.

‘There is nothing now to prevent women being different,’ said Ronald despondently, ‘and yet they seem to go on being just the same. What is the good of a new world if nobody can be got to come and live in it?’ Sitting above his impassive and pale reflection, crumpled forward on his folded arms, he remained immobile while the echoes of his last exclamation still seemed palpably to hang about under the slant of rock that roofed him into a cave. The decay of the garden must have seemed to him for a dark instant to have profited nothing. Such a collapse at a mere glance at feminine frailty into the most profound despair suggested, more than loss of balance, a sharp assault from the rear by some exterior, malignant force. Milton justified his own silence, his unwillingness to go to the rescue of Ronald, by a feeling that this collapse had its austere fitness and that the garden had been, after all, fully entitled to revenge itself.

17

Pâtisserie

THE PÂTISSERIE HAD a dozen little blue tin tables dotted about under a happy-looking striped awning. Hither many people gravitated early in the day. Mrs Kerr, who had insisted they should visit the shops, had for the last half-hour’s slow parade of the plate-glass given her companion about a quarter of her attention and a little less than her quarter-face. She had meanwhile chosen for Sydney and presented charmingly a string of dull amethysts, saying it seemed too good to be believable that they should be together again. When she saw the little tables and the English people round them sitting sideways and eating pâtisserie off the tips of their forks with an amused air of concession, she exclaimed with pleasure and her attention became entirely distracted. The scene appeared to delight her and she concentrated her delight into each of the smiling nods she sent across to acquaintances.

‘Do look, Sydney – how civilized!’

‘How greedy!’ said Sydney, who was trying to direct her friend to the older end of the town, where she would at least find nothing but fruit shops.

‘Yes, that’s just what I mean – how civilized! Anybody can eat at meal-times. Come over – oh, Sydney, we must!’

‘But we’re not hungry!’