‘The Honourable Mrs Pinkerton would prevent his ever being a bishop,’ said Eileen. ‘How she does hate him! She would bring it up against him just when he was going to be elected that he had once taken somebody else’s bath. It’s a pity, because Sydney would look very well in black, rather hard satin when she’s about forty-five, much more herself than she does now, here. Isn’t it funny that for everybody there seems to be just one age at which they are really themselves? I mean, there are women you meet who are obviously born to be twenty (and pretty at that) and who seem to have lost their way since, and men you do wish you’d known when they were, say, thirty, or twenty-four, or feel sorry you mayn’t come across them when they’re forty or fifty-five, and children like that horrid little Cordelia who are simply shaping up to be pale, sarcastic women of twenty-nine, who won’t, once they’re that, ever grow any older.’

Joan Lawrence looked dreamy; when the tray was set down and Colonel Duperrier asked her to pour out tea and do hostess, she blushed and looked very much startled. She had a glimpse of herself and Colonel Duperrier having breakfast together on some veranda out in the Tropics, face to face with one another over a dish of some very large futurist-looking fruit. She was not sure of her tropical background; she did not travel or read much, so it was sketched in vaguely: there was, as here, a profusion of heliotrope that coloured the scene and their silence, for they did not seem to be moving or saying anything. She was being looked at … he had taken of his topee. She was wearing white muslin; embroidered, beribboned, diaphanous; she did not think she was wearing what was strictly speaking a frock … What a thing to imagine; what an unspeakable liberty to have taken with Colonel Duperrier! She clattered the lid of the teapot, poured boiling water over her fingers, did not dare think any longer and did not know where to look.

‘You don’t like sugar, do you, Colonel Duperrier?’

‘Thank you, no sugar, and I don’t like very much milk.’

She had guessed this, she had known instinctively that he would not take very much milk.

‘This Hotel,’ said Eileen, ‘seems to be producing brides in very large quantities. What a pity we have used up all the men! Do you think any others are likely to come out, Colonel Duperrier?’