He became friendly, comfortably and without attraction, with Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Pym. These two in spite of their experience of clergymen could not ‘place’ him. From his moustache, one would have been inclined to take him for an Evangelical; on the other hand, it is Anglicans who step with fewest scruples into secular clothes. He had attended the conferences of neither party and remained irresponsive to the shibboleths of both. Miss Pym wrote, on an inspiration, to ask particulars of him from the friend in Derbyshire that he and she had early discovered to be mutual. But the friend in Derbyshire was an Anglo-Catholic and did not acknowledge the finer shades; she simply wrote back that he was a delightful man, adding a string of messages for him that gave no key. Colonel Duperrier also liked Milton; they exchanged stories about fishing in Donegal, discussed Europe and respected one another’s reserves. The Lawrences made him an apple-pie bed and used to send him suggestive Italian picture post cards anonymously to see how much he would stand.

But he was still avid for popularity. Though devoid of the more odious kind of vanity, he had been given to understand that as an unattached, personable man he must be persona grata anywhere: and he was troubled to find that this was not the case. He had avoided Sydney since that day of the Lee-Mittisons’ picnic: for some reason that he could not explain it was impossible to think of her without embarrassment, though at times she was nothing more to him than some curious picture whose worth he could apprehend but felt unable to analyse. It was with some unavowed idea of a circuitous approach to her that he sought out her friend Mrs Kerr; preparing to find himself to a degree, but not beyond that degree, disturbed by her.

He was oppressed by some patent hostilities.

‘I am afraid,’ he said to Miss Fitzgerald, as during the half-hour before lunch they sat together in the Hotel garden in iron chairs under an orange tree, ‘that I have done something to offend Mrs Pinkerton.’

‘Oh, I don’t see how you could have. Anyhow she’s a fearful old snob,’ said Miss Fitzgerald, who knew all about the bathroom but had neither the face nor the heart to tell him.

‘Oh, do you think so? She is the sort of old lady I have so often been asked to lunch with that I cannot help wondering why we do not get on.’

‘She is the patroness of a living ——’

‘Well, I don’t want the woman’s living,’ said Milton indignantly. ‘Does she think I’m going to pick her pocket for it?’

‘How ridiculous you are!’ laughed Miss Fitzgerald, who was exhilarated by violence. ‘You know she would make a splendid Lady Catherine de Bourgh.’