Milton had spent the evening propped against the empty fireplace wishing he could dance. The high mantelpiece caught him uncomfortably just between the shoulders, giving him a slight stoop forward. He was dissatisfied, but did not wish to take a seat along the walls among the women and the very old gentlemen. The men of his age were all dancing and his isolation irked him, yet he could not tear himself away from the music and the lit-up, hypnotizing circulation of the dancers. He had noticed Ronald at once and wondered whether he ought to go across and speak to him, but there was something about Ronald at once remote and ominous which forbade the hazards of so public an encounter. He resembled, in the cool, wide stare across which the dancers were allowed to sweep, while it never singled out or followed any of them, in the backward tilt of the head which sent the stare down over the protrusion of the cheekbones, and in a droop down at the corners of the mouth that lengthened the chin, a supercilious young Florentine among the retinue of the Magi standing apart and Gallio-like on its fringe, staring out of the picture. Ronald was not, however, at any one moment entirely superb; he could achieve a slouch in any attitude, and the lock of hair tumbling slantwise across his forehead towards one eyebrow broke up the design of his features into something irregular and rather baffled. There was a glitter about him which betrayed a cropping-out of the Shelley from behind the mask of Hellenic remoteness so carefully worn.

‘Snubbed!’ smiled James Milton, watching Sydney, with a swirl of the red skirts, turn on her heel and return to her partner. The only sentiments she did not at present arouse in him were those of protectiveness or of pity. His own sensitiveness, however, made him turn away from her at this crisis of discomfiture, and he caught instead the eye of Eileen Lawrence, who, disconcerted at finding herself without a partner, was advancing towards him with the undulation of a Spanish dancer. She looked in her bright black so very striking, so very unlike the sort of young woman over whom he had even permitted his imagination to linger, that he was gratified at her coming up to strike an attitude before him. She said with a glance which in spite of his armour of subtlety did elate and disturb him: ‘Now then, Mr Milton, you’re very diffident: aren’t you going to dance with me?’

‘There’s nothing I should like better, but I don’t, unfortunately.’

‘Oh, tut,’ said Eileen. ‘But what a relief – I had been afraid we weren’t beautiful enough for you. Very well, then, take me out for a stroll in the garden.’