‘Ronald has been with our party,’ said Milton, ‘up at the Villa.’ Sydney, standing on the mat vaguely, was looking towards him as though she had something to ask. He had an instinct to go over to her, with an urgent feeling that it lay with him to do something he could not at the moment recall. The glass doors behind and beside her flashing as they opened and shut, the staircase going up and down and doubling off at angles into oblivion, and the way the lift came sliding down the shaft to wait behind the latticed gates were all like so much expressionist scenery, emphasizing the effect she gave of being distracted, mechanical and at a standstill.

He did not like the Lee-Mittisons to see her so much at a loss, and even hoped that he might distract their attention by his own awkwardness, which he felt to be palpable, as he towered, his hands on a chair-back, over the writing-table, not quite liking to sit down again. The Lee-Mittisons were startled, obviously, by her so uncharacteristic willingness – it seemed eagerness – to linger there and to bestow herself upon them; she was known to proceed from point to point in her days with impatience and without hesitancy. They repeated that she had come back very early and asked her to sit down with them. She came over, smiling.

‘Look,’ she cried, ‘at my beautiful new beads! They were a present this morning – Mrs Kerr gave them to me.’ She took off the beads and passed them round to her friends, who held them up to the light and exclaimed at the colour. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she repeated, as though she could not be satisfied with everybody’s praise.

‘Beautiful,’ Milton said obediently, weighing the beads in his hand and hating them, hating the amethysts. He gave them back with an appearance of reluctance and thought she had been valued at so much; just these were what she was worth. He watched her slip them over her head again and turn in a kind of glittering animation, like a poplar in a gale, to Mrs Lee-Mittison.

‘I have always wanted amethysts, dreamed of them!’ she declared, and fingered the beads restlessly.

‘Very nice of your friend Mrs Kerr,’ said Mrs Lee-Mittison, thinking nothing or everything, watching the heel carefully, knitting away.

Mr Lee-Mittison, who had never given Sydney credit for being so good-looking, decided to have a good look at her; turned half round in his chair and crossed his legs comfortably in order to do so. ‘Who’s a lucky girl?’ said he, and wagged a forefinger. ‘Won’t this be a day to remember?’