‘Ye-es,’ said Milton thoughtfully, wondering who should be his Charlotte. He resumed: ‘Another person I should like an explanation with is Mr Lee-Mittison. He took me up a mountain my first day here, lost me and has been looking daggers at me ever since. He seems to have forgiven the Lawrences and Miss Warren who were equally his victims, and I cannot see why I am singled out. After all, I was stranger to the hills than any of them.’

‘I am very sorry for his wife,’ said Miss Fitzgerald, sighing pleasurably.

‘I don’t know. I think he’s her fault. She mayn’t seem a very buoyant woman, but I don’t suppose she’d like to be.’

‘It’s very curious,’ said Miss Fitzgerald, turning to look at him, ‘most men, I have noticed, are hardest on men, but with you it seems just the opposite. I don’t know whether it’s personal prejudice’ – she sweetened the impertinence with a smile – ‘or the curious sombre rigidity of some old school of thought; perhaps Pauline?’

‘I can’t think,’ Milton said vaguely. At this particular hour of the morning he did not want to talk about himself and was still less interested in St Paul.

‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, ‘you are brought too much into contact with women, the tiresome type. A clergyman’s life——’

‘It never really strikes me that there’s very much difference. I mean, there are a certain rather limited number of ways in which people can be idiotic – or, if you like, wicked – and men and women seem to fall into them indiscriminately. It always irritates me to see anybody being bolstered up in their own particular kind of insufferableness by the friend who ought to be helping them, and I do think women (for their own ends, which makes it unpardonable) are worse about doing this than men. If that’s what you mean by my being severer on women? Otherwise I can’t see that, in my department, at any rate, men and women are noticeably different.’

‘Or in any department,’ said Miss Fitzgerald, earnestly rallying to her standard. ‘And it interested me to hear you use the word “friend” in that context. Meaning that friend and husband – or wife, as the case may be – should be synonymous.’

‘Practically,’ said Milton, looking round and wondering whether it would be possible to order an apéritif, and wishing, since he feared this was not possible, that he had gone down to the town. ‘I suppose,’ he continued conscientiously though with a slight effort, ‘that you think I am intolerant?’

‘Oh no, not that: too, too acute … One feels at a disadvantage. I suppose one is oneself too much in the habit of generalizing.’ She broke off and reached up suddenly in apparent confusion to pluck a small, still rather sickly orange from a branch above her. This, without looking at him again, she bit, right into the peel.