Milton encountered Ronald’s clear, rather curious eye; they stared at one another profoundly. ‘One is fortunate,’ Milton said, and a stabbing sense of this irony made him shut his eyes sharply for a moment, as though the light were too much. When he looked up again Mrs Kerr’s son was still searching him, and put forward in explanation of this: ‘Do excuse me, please, staring so awfully, but I’ve never heard anyone point-blank profess themselves happy before.’ It was on the tip of the clergyman’s tongue to protest that he hadn’t; however, he merely said blandly: ‘Oh, indeed? If you care to, do certainly look!’

‘You ought,’ Ronald said, ‘to feel very responsible.’

‘ – Ronald darling, you’re not Mr Milton’s father.’

‘But I didn’t propose,’ said her son, flushing hotly, ‘to apply the remark to Miss Warren. I merely meant he must feel very responsible for himself. A state of mind ——’

‘Exactly,’ said Mrs Kerr briskly and waved him aside. She appeared to be rather oppressed by her Ronald; the boy became pompous. She looked at his overcast face in perplexity, puzzling herself again, it appeared, over some ancient error. Far back in the faraway history of Ronald – possibly in the espousal of Ronald’s father – there had been a mistake. She looked down the lounge. ‘Look, Ronald,’ she cried with a happy inspiration, ‘there is one of the Lawrences, one of your curious girls. She is standing and looking too languishing, down by the door. She has seen you, and worse, she has seen you having something to eat. It would be nice to go over and talk to her, if you don’t mind. I don’t like to look selfish, you know.’

She watched her son threading his way down the lounge, however, with such wistfulness, such an air of bereavement, and returned her attention to Milton with so courageous a smile, and with eyes for an instant so vacant, that he could not but believe that she had made a real sacrifice in sending Ronald away. He reproached himself for a suspicion of being closed in on, and of their oasis of silence, light and solitude having become for him a rather remote and dangerous island. Her personality had a curious way of negativing her surroundings, so that unless one made instant resort to one’s senses the background faded for one and one conjured up in one’s half-consciousness another that expressed her better, that was half an exhalation from herself. The crude and vivid glitter of the lounge, the hard light striking with an impact almost audible on glazed stuffs, noisy colours, reddened skins, the urgent hum of talk, all these relaxed their grip on Milton’s consciousness, subsided. A feeling was produced in him of tempered light and clear gloom and of window open on profoundly dark and rather restless trees as Mrs Kerr said thoughtfully: ‘Religion, I suppose, is an immense outlet for gratitude.’