The three young women leaning over the gate had admired Ronald, loudly and in every detail. They had spoken so very distinctly he could only suppose that they meant him to understand; he had slowed down in an effort not to seem to be trying to escape them; his ears changed colour, they remarked on this – it had been quite appalling. Their eyes had licked him up and down like the eyes of the American lady at Württemberg, who had compared him to a Donatello, and he could not revenge himself on them by making out a kind of mental chart of their repressions because one couldn’t well suppose that girls who behaved in this way had any repressions. Which, of course, as Ronald told himself without enthusiasm, was excellent. They gave him, quite disinterestedly, all sorts of encouragement and good advice.

The man who stared also had shouted a word of encouragement, the same mystifying reference to some ‘bellissima’. Then the solitude had come slowly to grips with him: there was nothing but the deserted bed of the river, the vague disorderly gardens like some half-memory and, now and then, a bird flying slowly across the sky. Ronald had nothing but a little lonely gleam of intellectual pride to sustain him; he felt that it must be good for him to be here, but he was very depressed. He felt trapped; if he turned to run back down the valley there would be nothing but valley to run to. ‘O Solitude,’ he exclaimed in a thin voice, ‘ton sein vigoreux et morne déjà j’ai pu l’adorer …’ He could not remember the rest of the paragraph, and besides, had not Barrès lapsed from this to the excesses of nationalism? What unaccountable lapses, thought Ronald, precede maturity which they are even believed to constitute. He suddenly gave up clattering among the stones, did not speak any more, and hugging the side of the valley away from the river walked on the turf quietly, because it appeared to him that one could best enforce oneself on this noisy solitude, not by more noise, but by silence. So quite quietly he rounded the turn of the valley and came in sight of the rock where Sydney was sitting looking up the valley away from him. After gazing for some moments at her apparent unconsciousness, he said slowly, ‘Oh … you?’

‘Oh, you?’ she exclaimed, mystified, but not startled.

‘I hope I didn’t alarm you!’

‘No. I heard you coming, but I didn’t turn round because I thought I knew who it was. Were you expecting to find anybody in particular?’

‘Well, no, not really anybody. They all told me to hurry up because there was a bellissima Inglese, but I imagined that that, you know, was just a general allusion to the “not impossible She” and thought nothing more of it.’

‘They?’

‘Some girls at a gate and a man doing nothing particular.’