Miss Pym, waiting about in the lounge, glanced back diffidently at the last few minutes, then turned round square and faced them. She was surprised to find herself cool, explanatory and reasonable. Her wait prolonged itself, the minutes seemed interminable; now and then she glanced at the lounge clock. She read the announcements pinned to the notice-board, looked along the letter-rack and read the names on the envelopes stuck prominently on the concierge’s desk to await new arrivals. These long-forecast shadows for ever darkening the threshold of the Hotel excited Miss Pym; for some new arrival that never arrived she was storing up tenderness. She found that they were to expect (quite soon, perhaps) a clergyman, a Rev. J. D. L. Milton – John? Three letters for him and something that looked like a bill (or perhaps a receipt) had been forwarded from an address she knew quite well, a country house in Derbyshire. Gratifying how one’s intimate world contracted itself, how one’s friends wove themselves in! Society was fascinating, so like a jigsaw puzzle!

Miss Pym heard somebody beginning to come downstairs and moved quickly away from the notice-board. Those firm steps coming down unhurriedly in a light, continous, increasing ripple sounded like Mrs Kerr’s; it was Mrs Kerr herself who appeared at the turn of the stairs, drawing her loose white gauntlets over her wrists. Without troubling to look down into the lounge she called ‘Sydney … Sydney,’ as though she did not care to question or need to command but expected Sydney to take form somehow out of a limbo to which forgetfulness had consigned her, and be drawn up the stairs to where her friend stood beautifully, balanced either for advance or immobility.

‘Miss Warren isn’t here,’ said Miss Pym. ‘She’ll have gone on down to the courts, I dare say: she went past me in the corridor with her racquet quite a little time ago.’

Mrs Kerr said ‘Thank you,’ smiled and accepted this; she did not seem really to care whether Miss Warren were there or not, her ‘Sydney … Sydney,’ must have been quite perfunctory. ‘Well, I shall go down to the courts,’ she said, and came on down to take her parasol out of the rack. She was accustomed to leave her nice parasol leaning up in the rack there quite casually, for anybody to borrow, instead of taking it up to her room with her. Miss Pym watched eagerly, and Mrs Kerr must have felt a conjunction to be inevitable, for having made a show of hesitation between three parasols not at all like each other, and feeling Miss Pym still behind her, she asked charmingly, hopefully: ‘And are you going down?’