‘I can’t think.’ He was wishing it were not impossible to take the Lawrences out separately. This would be all very well if he were simply taking out Eileen. But Joan had withdrawn from the tea-party, she sat and looked a long way away; he felt cheated of her. ‘I must say,’ he went on with an effort, smiling round affably, ‘I think this would be an excellent place to be in love, engaged and so on. It’s a pity we don’t most of us come out here till we’re elderly.’ The tea-garden did for an instant flash on him a something half-remembered or never quite visualized, with its lit-up lawns, its bulging gold lemons and oranges hanging down in the sun. His companions smiled. ‘All this,’ he said, ‘would be ever so jolly.’

‘Where were you in love?’ asked Joan. ‘I mean, what was the scenery?’ Tilting back her head, her hands clasped under her chin, she gazed with a limpidity that might well have been mischievous beyond him and into the sunshine.

‘What a thing to ask!’ Eileen cried saucily. ‘Colonel Duperrier’s travelled a lot.’

Colonel Duperrier at this moment of nervousness and surprise did seem to himself to have travelled a long way. His thoughts went back through the conversation to look for something they had shied away from: what had somebody said about women born to be twenty and what they became? Someone had lost herself, been lost to one, vanished … He knew that all women were born to be twenty – twenty-two, twenty-five possibly: the thing seemed obvious, looking at Joan. Something, however, had become of a Miss Macklean he had met at Darjeeling, and of a subsequent lovely Mrs Duperrier of whom he had asked no more than all she triumphantly promised, to be twenty at any age; he would not have counted the years. Perhaps, in spite of herself, she had eluded him. Lost her way? She was lying alone now up there, up in her room, waiting angrily for the sun to go down and the light to go quite out and the darkness to stifle her, lying with the window thrown open expectantly on to the void of sky, waiting to shiver, tossing to and fro in her poor mind while her body lay rigid, silent though she was so pent up, storing up her cries for him: ‘Oh, here you are, Alec … No, I didn’t really expect you to come in. Why should you have come in? I dare say you were happy down there …’