She half expected from Milton a flutter of protest, then noticed that she must have lost his attention, he was thinking about something else. He flushed and looked hard at her suddenly.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Haven’t I met you before?’

‘Only last night,’ said she, and grinned at the recollection more or less overtly. Then she wondered whether he knew that by just such a question do young men – at dances and elsewhere – strike for the first time the personal note. It is asked leaning forward intensely with the implication ‘Your ever-remembered face!’ He could not have said this to many young women; he said it this time too awkwardly.

‘Ah yes, last night,’ said he. ‘But surely before? … It occurred to me then.’

‘I don’t think so. Unless you are the sort of person who remembers faces he has sat opposite to in a bus.’

‘Ah well,’ said Milton. ‘It may have been that!’

6

The Kiss

MRS LEE-MITTISON SAT WITH the packets of lunch piled up around her like some homely goddess. She had spread out the mackintosh, on which she hoped she might later persuade Herbert to arrange himself – unobtrusively, for she did not wish to humiliate him before these dear girls who, unlike the girls of her own generation, seemed to be able to sit on questionably dry grass without after-effects. She sat with her hat tilted forward to protect her eyes from the glare, looking down at her work but not knitting, her whole being in a state of happy suspension, a pause as distant from life as a trance. The sun wooed her persistently and at last, with a gesture from her almost dionysiac, she undid and flung open the woolly jacket buttoned across her chest.