Mr Lee-Mittison ignored their sacrifice. He was sitting astride on the parapet facing his protégées; now he leant forward, extending and thumping his chest. ‘Look at me!’ he shouted. ‘Sixty-four and never smoked, never touched a drop in my life. Sixty-four, I tell you!’ He stuck out his chest still farther and invited one of the Bransomes to thump it also, but she declined. ‘Regular habits, the fear of God, and water from the spring!’

‘ – Perrier when we are abroad,’ said Mrs Lee-Mittison, knitting.

The olives below the parapet sighed and twinkled; between the branches the party looked down at the miniature roofs of the town and realized how far they had come. Little distinct shadows from branches above their heads shivered over their figures and faces. Veronica moved closer up to Sydney confidentially. She thought Sydney queer, rather interesting, and wondered what she could possibly be thinking so hard about all the time. Sydney’s remoteness intrigued the féted Veronica. She supposed with sincere generosity that the sort of man who did not admire herself might find Sydney very attractive. The absence of such a man here seemed bad luck on Sydney. But then, on the other hand, Sydney had curious ties.

‘I never thought he’d get you,’ said Veronica. ‘You always seem to be doing something else.’ She placed a foot of her own beside a foot of Sydney’s and noted that while Sydney’s was the better-shaped her own must be by half a size smaller. ‘You seem to be wonderfully busy,’ she said with a sigh.

Sydney glanced into the irreverent, sentimental boy’s eyes of Veronica. There was something pleasantly hard about her; at every contact one was conscious of the blade in her deep down with a fine edge on it.

‘Constant dripping,’ she said. ‘For twenty-four hours I seemed to meet no one but Mr Lee-Mittison and every time we met he was so sure —— I wonder if she, or the first wife, ever wanted to marry him, or whether they had to.’

‘How do you mean?’ said Veronica with a spurt of laughter. She never waited to grope for one’s meaning, which instinct generally prompted one to offer her on the flat of the palm, like a lump of sugar to a pony. ‘I can’t think,’ she continued, ‘why he’s so determined to have you. You don’t effervesce. You’re not breathlessly modern (on his level!) every minute like we are. You can’t think how tired we get. That’s why Joan struck at coming this morning. She said she felt old …’

Sydney looked along at Mr Lee-Mittison. ‘Ape!’ said she. Mr Lee-Mittison was trumpeting like an elephant and waving an imaginary trunk at the delighted Bransomes.