‘Thank you,’ Milton said helplessly.

‘There is no reason to thank me,’ said Mrs Kerr, looking at him very straight with her wide-opened eyes. ‘What is there to thank me for?’

Milton, abashed by this parade of innocence, looked at Ronald, wishing that he were not there. Mrs Kerr, however, seemed determined to keep him.

‘Now, Ronald,’ she said with amusement, laying a hand on her son’s knee, looking down at it thoughtfully and drawing it away again, ‘feels sorry for people who are going to be married. He cannot believe (isn’t it so?) “in any satisfactory modus vivendi between two people that’s based on an attraction”!’

‘I remain perfectly open-minded,’ said Ronald, biting the stalk off a pear.

‘About love itself,’ said Mrs Kerr, looking respectfully at her son, ‘he is profoundly sceptical. There is a part of life, Mr Milton, that I should be very glad if you could explain to my poor Ronald.’

‘It’s not a part of life,’ said Ronald, ‘it may be a streak in it. People talk as though it were a transverse section.’

‘You see?’ said his mother. ‘But Sydney used to be a sceptic too, you know. I should rather like Ronald to talk to her now.’

‘I don’t think Sydney would like that at all,’ said Milton, and was made to feel he had transgressed some delicate code by this hint of the proprietary.

‘I had an impression,’ said Mrs Kerr diffidently, ‘that Sydney always liked talking about anything she was perfectly sure of.’

‘In spite of being rather a quiet person?’

‘Quite compatibly with being rather a quiet person,’ said Mrs Kerr, illuminating, showing up his petty irritation with her lovely smile. ‘I didn’t, you know propose that poor Sydney, who has so very lately, as one might say, graduated, should deliver to Ronald a kind of extension lecture. I just vaguely conceived that she might make him feel what a silly, immature little gander he still is.’

‘I wish she would,’ said Ronald, ‘it would be so cinquecento; a disquisition on Amor by an inspired young woman.’ He looked carefully at Milton, trying, evidently, to consider him in the role of an inspiration.

‘You have picked up “cinquecento” from Miss Fitzgerald. It becomes a rather silly expression, Ronald dear, when it’s used so often and so indiscriminately. But “an inspired young woman”,’ she decided, turning to Milton, ‘is good. Don’t you find your inspired young woman rather lovely?’

‘Rather lovely,’ echoed Milton, as though learning a lesson.

‘Sydney in love …’ mused Mrs Kerr, and as though stepping back from the brink of some profound experience not her own, she said, ‘I envy you!’