‘Oh, I don’t know; the old blighter rather amuses me,’ said Veronica tolerantly, and squinted down at the tip of her cigarette. ‘Joan’s off colour; as a matter of fact,’ she suddenly confided, ‘I believe she is keen on Victor Ammering.’

‘But isn’t he——’

‘Yes, he’s keen on me,’ said Veronica indifferently. ‘But you get used to that if you’re three sisters more or less the same age. Between us, we generally manage to keep people in the family.’

Sydney pondered; she had no sisters, and the ethics of the situation were beyond her. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘it would be more trying for Joan if I wanted Victor Ammering?’

‘Oh, I don’t want him, if that’s what you mean,’ said Veronica, with the crudeness of sincerity. ‘Anyone can have him, as far as I am concerned.’ She dangled an imaginary Victor airily, as though he were a marionette. ‘But I can’t imagine what you and poor old Victor would find to say to each other,’ she added.

‘He did once try and kiss me, ages ago, at a dance,’ Sydney said, reminiscently smiling.

‘I know, he told me: he said you were rather annoyed.’

‘I know I was – I hate being messed about.’

‘I said to him at the time: “Victor, you are the limit: you’ve no instinct.”’

‘I should have thought he had heaps.’

Veronica looked at her sideways. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘why didn’t you go for that drive with Mrs Kerr? They must have had heaps of room in the car, and I should have thought——’

‘Oh, I’m sick of motoring,’ Sydney said, and threw her cigarette away into the olive trees. ‘Besides,’ she added sombrely, ‘I don’t know their friends over there.’

‘Didn’t she ask you?’

‘Not exactly – no. Why should she?’

‘Oh, my dear girl, I don’t know why she should!’ Veronica shrugged her shoulders. A queer girl this, Veronica thought, well turned-out, clever, presumably, with a complexion she might have done more with, and awfully jolly feet, to sit brooding cheerlessly on a parapet because a middle-aged woman hadn’t asked her to go for a drive.

‘Well, come on,’ she said, ‘Moses is getting the tribes together.’

Sydney thought this surprisingly witty: she chuckled. ‘What do you think of our Aaron?’ she asked, but Veronica did not hear. Mr Lee-Mittison had swung his leg back over the parapet; his wife was putting her knitting away. They all got up rather unwillingly and began to climb the next path, which left the road only too soon and was steeper than ever.