‘Good!’ exclaimed Sydney with the geniality that endeared her to Tessa. ‘If it’s the menu, you know I should keep that up. It’s an excellent principle and I’m sure the manager respects you for it.’

‘Oh, do you think so?’ said Tessa, and looking up with round eyes thought how untrue it was that intellectual people did not make pleasant companions. ‘But you know I do hate——’

‘Giving trouble? But that’s what they’re paid for … How are you feeling?’ Sydney looked down with solicitude. To think one felt ill, to think only of that, to be so netted down must be terrible.

Tessa, drawing in her chin upon its many duplications, lay still and considered a moment, then began to tell Sydney exactly how she did feel. While she was still talking the gong sounded; she got up and patted her hair again, this time in front of the looking-glass. Breaking off with a sigh she began to powder her nose. Sydney meanwhile pushed open the jalousies; if she did not do this, Tessa would quite contentedly make up her face in the half-light and go downstairs like a nice little clown.

Sydney’s relations had been delighted that she should go abroad with her cousin Tessa. It had appeared an inspired solution of the Sydney problem. The girl passed too many of these examinations, was on the verge of a breakdown and railed so bitterly at the prospect of a year’s enforced idleness that the breakdown seemed nearer than ever. Now an ideal winter had offered itself: sunshine, a pleasant social round. Sydney could be out of doors all day long; she might distinguish herself in tennis tournaments; she might get engaged. And Tessa was so kind; she was forty, married, motherly; she had no nerves, she had no children. Her inside kept her happy and interested, she would be the ideal companion for anybody inclined to be neurotic. She admired Sydney whom she maintained to be cheerful and amusing; it would be good for Sydney to be with somebody who refused to consider her as anything but cheerful and amusing. Sydney seemed as a rule to be so unfortunate in her choice of friends.

Sydney untied the red handkerchief and combed back the hair from her forehead. She frowned at her own reflection: Was this what all these people really saw when they looked at her? She was accustomed to stare at people as from a point of vantage, forgetting she too had a face. They had thoughts, too (with these she often forgot to credit them); did they also think as they looked at oneself? The strangeness is that a cat can look at a king and see him; we kings forget so often that cats are more than objective.