Sydney, trying to get down a mouthful of pastry that became like sawdust, had a sense of being widely yet concentratedly glared at, though whether she had really attracted attention or this were merely the sun striking down through the awning she did not dare to determine. Certainly the conversations around had subsided, and the general turning away of eyes from their table, the fixed stares – across the street or back into the shop or down on to plates – of which, with a glance round, she assured herself, were elaborate enough to be studied. Little staccato remarks here and there seemed to prick up through a tensity. She suspected that Mrs Kerr, by her unusually bland expression of basking in reverie, the unconcern of her movements and her solicitude that Sydney should finish her pastry, must be ‘passing off’ something. Sydney in an effort to further this continued to eat pastry quickly, in spite of a frightened feeling each time that she might not be able to swallow. She could not help a shaken kind of exaltedness such as a child feels when it has upset a table of china.

Presently she let herself fall back on an outside consciousness of their both being well-dressed, distinguished-looking and leisurely, and thought how plainly this must appear from the other side of the street and how, if she were someone else, she would stand on the pavement and look at them. She would admire their graceful air of being friends, of being completed by one another, and go away distracted by a memory of them both sitting there in the temperate shade of the awning. ‘I think,’ she said conversationally, affected by the thought of this admiration, ‘that this is a very good way of filling up a morning abroad.’

‘I think so … shall we look for carnations? Shall I buy some for you?’

‘Shall I buy some for Ronald?’ Sydney looked into Mrs Kerr’s face with a smile, but impersonally, as though it were a picture. Mrs Kerr seemed to meet something hard in her eyes, for she raised an eyebrow infinitesimally.

‘He would love that, it would be quite new to him. I don’t think people like to give him things usually. He doesn’t, I dare say, give the impression of being in any sense very receptive. Poor Ronald, I wish he could learn to be likeable. I thought once that you might have done something for him, but I don’t see now that you very well can.’