‘I know – I was horrified. One of the pussies!’

‘Oh, is she? She seemed intelligent. She was telling me she is a Hedonist.’

‘A how-much?’

‘A Hedonist.’

‘How Victorian!’ Sydney said crossly, and hacked at the toe of her shoe with her racquet.

‘Do you think so?’ said Mrs Kerr. ‘I suppose,’ she confessed, ‘one forgets: we are rather old pussies.’

‘Don’t be so——’

‘My dear child, I’m her age. We do date when we talk. She had quarrelled, I think, with her friend, the other artistic one. I came on her down in the lounge, nearly crying, and the other, still nearer it, was out in the road. You know, women’s lives are sensational. Aren’t you inclined to be intolerant with us all?’

Sydney seemed surprised at this quick little gush of humanity. She stared at her friend, who was brilliantly earnest, then turned away gloomily. ‘Oh, women’s lives …’

‘Well, I suppose it’s inconsistent of me,’ said Mrs Kerr. ‘I’m not a Feminist, but I do like being a woman.’

Any approach to the personal seemed to be difficult. Sydney said airily: ‘Oh, of course if one’s one kind of woman —— ’

‘Well, so are you,’ said Mrs Kerr, looking abstractedly at her young friend. Sydney, at a probable twenty-two, had a clear pallor and regular features of which the lines were now, as too often, strained and broken up by an expression of over-eagerness. An exaggerated attention to what was being said or suggested would arch up the eyebrows tragically, harden the eyes and draw in the mouth to a line that prefigured maturity’s. The forehead was broad and lovely and could have been bland. The scarlet handkerchief bound round the head accentuated her darkness and pallor; it had in common with other details of her dress and appearance a faint kind of nervous swagger.

‘You could be charming,’ said Mrs Kerr. ‘But I daresay an indifference to one’s company which doesn’t comprehend the desire to please is really the safest – won’t you go and play tennis?’

‘I’m waiting for the people on E Court to finish,’ said Sydney, and got up slowly, not quite knowing whether to resent this as a dismissal. Mrs Kerr, with the air of a return to solitude, a cheerfulness rather suggestive of release, leant forward and signalled to someone below who had been looking up for a long time trying in vain to catch her eye. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, ‘do go and play tennis. Surely it wasn’t wise to come away from your partner when you were expecting a court?’