‘Tut-tut,’ he said. ‘Well, think it over …’ Sydney’s strangeness bothered him; the Lawrences had seemed so glad. From behind a screen that hid the service-lift the waiters with their steaming dishes debouched suddenly and sped like bees to distribute themselves among the tables. Excusing himself quickly, Mr Lee-Mittison hurried back to his own table, where his wife, who rejoiced in Herbert’s popularity, had sat all this time knitting. Now she leant sideways and pulled his chair farther out for him, tucked her knitting away in a bag and gave him all her attention. The return was in the nature of a home-coming; she was the kind of wife who can always create this atmosphere.

‘Well?’ said she.

Behind Tessa the doorway still framed emptiness. The meal clattered on. Nearly everybody here was English: the air was allowed to come in pleasantly through the open windows under green-striped awnings and feel its way, cool-fingered, from flushing face to face. Nobody was hurried or constrained; time put out no compulsion and the afternoon might have stretched ahead, as it seemed to stretch, brightly blank. Over it, however, habit had spun her web of obligations; a web infinitely fine and fragile from which it was yet impossible to break without outrage. Beyond the dining-room, along the expanses of the lounge, people risen early from their tables were awaiting one another, meek under the rule of precedent, to fulfil a hundred small engagements. Leisure, so linked up with ennui, had been sedulously barred away. Each armchair, each palm and bureau had become a trysting-place where couples met to hurry off or groups were reunited.

Meeting, with an air of effort that made her seem to be breasting a current, the desultory trickle of the exodus, Miss Pym came in, very late. She was scarlet-eyed, the last tear must have been recently wiped away. Something wobbled in her throat, round which she twisted and untwisted an anaemic string of turquoise beads. She seemed constrained to look at everybody, then to look quickly away again. Sydney, leaning her cheek on her hand, turned from the door for a minute or two to study Miss Pym. She had never seen what she still called to herself a ‘grown-up person’ so visibly ravaged by emotion. The emotional range of her elders seemed to Sydney narrow and stereotyped; they reacted without variation to stimuli from without. But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within.

Miss Pym looked diffidently at the waiter. She had cut herself off from the omelette, so he shrugged his shoulders and brought her up a plate of macaroni from the servants’ lunch. This the bruised creature pitifully but with evidence of hunger began to eat; the traditional British struggle with macaroni brought her down sharply from tragedy to farce. Sydney sighed impatiently and turned away.