‘Oh no, thank you.’ The scissors were in her bedroom, as they both knew. One was drawn up from here out of ken, feet last, into the region of intimacies. ‘And I cannot see why they should expect one to walk up. I shan’t,’ said Mrs Hillier, flinging her gauntlet, to applause, in the face of the Management.

‘I can’t see why they should,’ agreed Miss Fitzgerald, while Mr Miller, sighing over this insoluble enigma, returned slowly to his patience-board. Colonel Duperrier rang twice for the Management, then looked into the dining-room to see whether the head waiter were there and could be asked to do anything. At three o’clock in the afternoon the Management and the personnel seemed to be equally inaccessible. They were perhaps asleep, like many of the visitors.

Sleep, the thin uneasy sleep of daylight, had today been the refuge of many, for cold rain fell ceaselessly past the windows. It was a transparent rain without mist, like summer rain in England, through which trees and buildings for a great distance could be seen distinctly in a Japanese conventionality and flatness. Leaves and long palm-fonds shone and trickled. Curtained in this pale gloom, the Hotel seemed permeated by a sense of the rain’s despairing persistency, against which the reasonable conviction of visitors that the sun, bound by contract with the locality, must soon appear again put up cold walls around an inward emptiness. In many rooms the tick of travelling clocks, the stutter of rain along the balconies, were being listened to attentively.

Mrs Hillier snuggled up her woolly wrap round her ears, nodded to Colonel Duperrier and went back into the drawing-room. She seemed, from the desolation, dusk and excludedness of the lounge, to return at least into something. As she opened and shut the glass doors he heard a kind of gasp of feminine conversation, and saw his wife and many other ladies sitting round in a semi-circle with a firelight on their knees. There was one open fireplace in the Hotel and it was in the drawing-room. She must have told them at once that the lift was out of order, for there arose staccato indignation which the door shut off from him. The lounge with its grouped furniture was of an isolating vastness. A man, from here unrecognizable, sat leaning his back against one radiator; Mr Miller with his patience-board had drawn up as close as possible to another. One longed for the disorder of firelight among the orderly shadows. One missed one’s dog. One missed the tug of association and habit towards one chair: there were too many, groves of chairs through which Colonel Duperrier wandered sadly. He could not even remember where he had been sitting before.