Sydney felt wise, but it is poor satisfaction to be wise with the masses. She asked, ‘Do you never mean to involve yourself?’ Perhaps he never would, perhaps it was possible not to – a chilly suspicion.

‘Oh, I just mean to live in a rather simplified way and not to leave off being reasonable. Now it’s a mistake, I’m quite sure, to deny an attraction. One should cultivate it and be amused at oneself. Then one would be civilized.’

‘And what about other people?’ said Sydney; ‘what about your mother, for instance?’

‘My mother? She is very civilized.’ Puckering their lids up in the sunless glare his eyes gazed past her, pale with a reflection of the sky.

‘I know, that is her great advantage. But don’t you think wherever she was she’d be civilized alone? Do you think she would promote your kind of civilization?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Ronald. ‘She is not an earnest woman. I can’t imagine her “promoting” anything.’

‘She wouldn’t promote that, she wouldn’t want to. She isn’t at all modern, like you and me, you see. It isn’t necessary for her.’

Ronald remembered what his mother had said about ‘white tiles’. He felt annoyed with Sydney and rounded on her: ‘I say, you don’t dislike my mother, do you?’

‘No, you know I don’t.’

‘I wondered – people do, you know. Does Mr Milton?’

‘Why ever should he? I – I’ve never asked him.’

‘He looks at her so – carefully.’ Quite without malice Ronald imitated Milton’s expression. ‘Of course, I think he seems a most discriminating man,’ he concluded politely. He had been gathering together, while he spoke, small pebbles and fragments which had accumulated on the top of the rock, reaching out for them negligently in all directions and heaping them up beside him. Now, suddenly, he sat bolt upright and began to hurl them one after another down the valley with a great effect of mascularity and science. The pebbles skipped, the fragments of rock rebounded on the boulders of the riverbed with little sharp distinct sounds, pin-pricks above the sound of the water. The hills seemed to peer forward. This little tempest of exertion on Ronald’s part, into which he seemed to have been surprised in spite of himself, dishevelled the stillness of the valley, which unstressed by lights and shadows and unstirred by wind hung gravely round them like a curtain.

‘Oh, do look out,’ cried Sydney angrily. ‘You may hit James; he may be coming up.’

‘I suppose he may,’ admitted Ronald, but he could not keep himself from sending off his last three stones. ‘Then why doesn’t he come?’ he said, relapsing on to his elbow again. ‘What is the matter?’