Adelaide had persisted, over many years. It was as much as anything an apology for what she was, Adelaide’s policy of persistence.

Because you are so completely incomprehensible, my dear. You frighten me. Yes, out of my wits. You’re so – so – yes, destructive. And uncomfortably destructive. Everyone with a mind, Adelaide said meaningfully, and in this category she tentatively lumped herself – everyone with a mind has communist tendencies. But one must draw the line. Otherwise think of the discomfort.

Recoiling and hopeful, Adelaide expected to be wounded. Whether she was or not, the anticipation was delicious, and asking Eden to lunch, and taking her to a matinée where, if you were lucky, you might meet some of your own friends. Because Eden had grown more haggard, interesting maybe, but used up, that thin line of a mouth that uttered the alarming things, or, if it didn’t, there were still the eyes. Eden’s eyes made Adelaide quail. She said so, in fact, to Elyot. I’m terrified of Eden’s eyes.

Adelaide rang, said Mrs Standish, released from the ritual of Sunday lunch. She wants you and Elyot for dinner on Tuesday week.

Secretly, Mrs Standish enjoyed the patronage of Adelaide Blenkinsop. She used it as a backhander to the County. Ever since tea with her mother-in-law, she had wanted to aim a shot like this. And now that she was above it, oh yes, definitely above it, what was the peerage in the nineteen-thirties, she still took her pleasure secretly.

The drawing-room was dusted with Sunday light. Mrs Standish arranged herself in the Louis XV bergère. She watched Elyot absently picking a tooth, irritated first, then soothed by her recollection, a link with the Blenkinsops.

Yes, she said. On Tuesday. A party, it appears.

It was one of the invitations that Eden did not accept, though she kept this decision until later, out of respect for peace. It was good sometimes to sit, to feel the apathy creep into the soles of your feet, to admit a virtue in Sunday after lunch. Elyot sat looking at the floor. Elyot of course would accept the dinner at Adelaide’s. Elyot said the right things, the slightly bookish things that Adelaide expected at her table. Because when she was not being deliciously upset, Adelaide enjoyed a passionless intellectual conversation. This was also approved by Gerald.

Mrs Standish looked at her daughter, decided that her face was haggard, it was working in that awful shop.

She looked, felt washed out. Thank God it was Sunday. To sit with your feet plumped flat on the carpet, the hands only just clasped between the knees. On Friday she had had the letter from Maynard, and the little snapshot of himself at Santa Barbara. Maynard had found fulfilment in California, so he told her, in his own idiom, at considerable length. The face of Mrs Moya Angelotti swam upon the carpet, dissolved in dusty particles. Not for six weeks, she said. This habit of sex that developed with Maynard sprang from a natural desire to please. That was what she liked to tell herself, to explain away, at the age of. Well. And hygiene, the books in Charing Cross Road. But she continued to give herself passionately.