‘I haven’t got a point of view,’ said Eileen indignantly. ‘I’m simply talking plain sense. Look here: if you look at a bun you don’t just think about its being a bun, do you? You wonder what you feel about it and whether it would be nice to eat, and whether it is somebody else’s bun and there would be a row if you did. And with a person or anything else it’s the same thing.’

“Ah well,’ said Ronald, ‘if that’s what you call thinking, I dare say it may be private, very private indeed. You see, I don’t know anybody else who thinks like that; I had no idea——’

‘I don’t suppose many people would take the trouble to explain to you how they do think. They’d just let you run on with your own ideas and nod and smile and say “How lovely!” and think about something else all the time.’

Joan, while the privacy of her thoughts was being battled for, had remained since her one intervention abstracted, her gold hair spread out scroll-wise over the mounting folds of her scarf. ‘Feel my wrist, it’s like ice,’ she said suddenly. ‘It must be awfully cold.’

‘My dear child!’

‘Oh! I don’t suppose it is cold really.’ Joan felt as though of her own accord she had dropped a crystal and smashed it. “Don’t let’s go,’ she begged with pathetic eyes of Colonel Duperrier. ‘I don’t know why I said that at all – it was only my wrist.’

‘I don’t want to, I’m sure.’ He looked around the garden regretfully, as though they were not to come here again; it seemed a better garden than he had realized, more friendly and intimate. ‘But we can’t have you frozen,’ he said, and looked at Joan helplessly, because it would be ultimately beyond his province whether she were frozen or not.

‘Idiot!’ cried her sister. ‘Where are your gloves?’

‘These evenings,’ explained Ronald, ‘come down like the knife of a guillotine. I must be getting on anyway after my mother.’ He rose and looked down at them thoughtfully: a queer (he seemed to think) and never entirely satisfactory group. ‘Are you coming my way?’ he asked Eileen.