‘Being rational,’ Ronald considered, ‘should take them as far. You see, they can … they can canal the natural forces ——’

‘Oh! But I don’t feel as if I had got any natural forces,’ said Mrs Kerr, alarmed. ‘And – you know, Ronald, you would hate me to be rational. It’s forbidding and horrible in a woman, I think.’

‘But one does want them to understand themselves.’

‘Oh, you know you wouldn’t be attracted by a woman who did!’

‘Do attractions really matter so much?’ asked Ronald in the strained voice of one in whom a whole torrent of convictions banks itself up behind the narrow escape of speech, impending its own exit.

‘My darling … Shall we have to be so very hygienic and bald?’

He could put nothing he felt into words.

His mother took up one of his hands, turned it over thoughtfully, then laying it down on her knee pulled each finger gently, spreading each out and feeling the tip with her own. ‘Nice hands,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I do wish you hadn’t had to go to Germany.’

That ‘hygienic’ had stung Ronald. It was like getting a splash in the eye from a disinfectant. ‘I suppose,’ he said, as though he were speaking to her in the dark and had to guess her position, ‘that you think I don’t like things to be beautiful.’

‘Don’t be chilly with me – I didn’t mean that. I’m frivolous, you see, and I can’t express myself. I only do mean that I think you and Sydney are a little inclined to overestimate the value of what you call “truth” (though I do agree it is very important), and that this does tend to produce in your conversation rather an atmosphere of white tiles.’

‘It must be depressing for you to have a son like an operating theatre,’ said Ronald with bitter mirth, and amended, more fatally apt, ‘or a bathroom.’

Mrs Kerr leaned her head against the wall again and shut her eyes; her lids remained closed as though she already were sleeping, and a faint and very mysterious smile suggested to him for some seconds a profound slumber. With an idea that it might be forbidden to sleep in the drawing-room (could one have imagined it possible to do so) he got protestingly up and stood over her.

‘May I go to sleep?’ she said without moving. ‘Even for you, darling, I can’t do without my siesta.’

‘Tell me before you go quite away,’ he exclaimed, ‘if I’ve been boorish and horrible?’