‘Whenever anybody just says “they”,’ said Sydney, who showed signs of being pleased to see him, ‘one thinks of Lear, doesn’t one? and an infinite perspective of long noses. “They” watched me, too, coming up here, but they didn’t say anything. I am glad to know they were impressed.’

‘They are impressionable,’ said Ronald. ‘If it is Mr Milton you’re expecting, he won’t like those girls a bit. They are a positive barrage. Their conversation was very free.’

‘I expect they liked you,’ said Sydney, glancing at him with indifferent admiration. ‘Also, of course, they wouldn’t be able to imagine why you should want to walk up a valley alone unless there were a woman at the end of it. Unless, of course, you had carried a long gun and wore tight green velvet knickerbockers and showed every sign of going out to shoot linnets.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said Ronald, ‘that’s very English of you.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t like these people at all. I cannot see why they should ever have been born, or why, at least, they should need to go on being born over and over again so frequently.’

‘I dare say,’ said Ronald, ‘they enrich the soil.’

‘I dare say,’ said Sydney. She was sitting on a rock that jutted up sharply out of the river bed; it would once have been a perilous, amusing place to sit. At present it complicated his position rather; if he stayed where he was, they would have to talk in high-pitched voices to be heard above the noise of the water that hurried behind him; whereas if he came across the stones and sat beside her he would be made to feel himself rather tiresomely confidential and forthcoming. The rock, however, was large enough for both of them, and she settled the question by saying matter-of-factly, ‘Here, come and sit down,’ and twisting round so that her legs, which had been stretched out in front of her, could leave more room for him by dangling over the edge. ‘What a lot of energy is wasted,’ she observed, ‘in replacing one lot of people by another exactly the same.’

She remarked this distantly, as though the indirectedness of the stream of things had been brought to her notice passingly but did not concern her. Her attitude seemed to Ronald deplorable; leaning back on his elbow he subjected her profile, covertly, to a perplexed and grieved scrutiny. ‘And does this worry you at all?’ he asked, in the hope that, while preserving an equal detachment, he might make her at least aware of her strange anaesthesia. An intelligent person, Ronald thought, should never be entirely unperturbed. She turned to look at him with the dark attention of wandering thoughts.

‘Worry?’ she said slowly, and tried to recall herself. ‘Why should I worry? I can’t do anything about it all, can I?’

‘My mother, you know, describes you as independent and vigorous.’