Sydney felt herself beaten back by something that in spite of nature’s whole precedent she knew for a falsity; an imposture her immaturity sensed but could not challenge. She knelt down again in bewildered, still angry, submission by the side of her friend. ‘Of course I don’t mean that you shouldn’t be glad. On the other hand, you know that to me the conventions don’t seem to fit you, and bar the conventions, why should I assume that you are? You see, I’m not a mother and I don’t know any mothers well.’

She allowed herself to be reconquered as Mrs Kerr, putting a hand out and vaguely touching her hair, said thoughtfully, ‘No, you aren’t, and you don’t; that’s quite true. Well, won’t you be generous enough to take me for granted?’

10

Mr Milton

FOR JAMES MILTON, AFTER his first few days in the Hotel, everybody with whom he had exchanged a word or a glance or been brought even indirectly into contact had already divided themselves into his friends or enemies. Those who had not yet detached themselves hung about the outskirts of his consciousness as a kind of mist behind which possibilities were for ever stirring, to be glimpsed for an instant, then subsiding again. He suffered, as he did at last confess to himself, and began to wonder why he had ever left his parish, where the crippling sensitiveness of his childhood had at least been deadened by the activity of every day, and where in the assured retreat of office he had had no need to ask what he was. But the place was beautiful and completely satisfied him once he had been able to reconcile what he saw with what he had imagined, and to recognize that while an ultimate Riviera could only have existence in the mind of God, this was as fair an imitation as it was reasonable to expect. He walked for the allied pleasures of coloured experience and of hardening his muscles; he tried to talk Italian to the natives, to be answered incomprehensibly in patois or the local French; he played tennis not so badly, and was to be surprised, in consequence, by the friendliness of the Lawrences, and he admitted to some vague attractions which it entertained him to discuss with himself.