But on the difficult evenings, the ease and security of retrospect, like the bland advice of butlers, did not help. You were adrift in your own flimsy personality, on a sea that was not yet candlelight. The details of the room stuck out like rocks emphasized by electricity.

Perhaps – I’m sure, said Adelaide, that Mrs Mounsey will expect to eat peculiar things.

That is her peculiarity, not ours, milady, said the reassuring voice.

Adelaide could have put out her hand and patted Varcoe, like the black, sleek coat of her grandmother’s horse. Instead she touched the back of a chair. Her hand rested on one of the gilded eagles that always jutted into the kidneys, that made conversation at the Blenkinsops’ table a physical experience. But it was solid, the blessed eagle, it had a reassurance, like the life you have already lived, like the portrait of Adelaide’s mother by Sargent, for which Adelaide always apologized while secretly admiring.

Somehow or other her mother’s portrait reminded her, if only by its incongruity, of Eden Standish, who had refused. Adelaide clouded over. The roses drooped. Because Eden despised her instinctively, she felt. Eden made her quiver for her own ineptitude. From the door she glanced back to lose the thread of her discomfort in the table as a whole.

Yes, Varcoe, she said. The roses are splendid. Quite splendid.

Though why, when roses happened as a matter of course, when roses were safe, she did not know. Going across the hall, the discreet black and white of its marble chessboard, she was struck by the full force of her own banality. In the circumstances, Eden Standish would – Adelaide hurried to regain her confidence on the stairs. She was at her best on stairs, at her full, white, transitory best. Her clothes, her jewels told her this, in motion on her skin. Putting her hand over the topaz necklace, she tasted a sharp little triumph that was connected also with the evening, the clever people she would soon command in theory, the evening also the painter brought to her box, exalted her above Wagner, the Thursday, he said, if the light, it made her admit what she had always suspected, the dreariness of Tristan. She had paid. She had paid two hundred guineas. She had caught a cold in a Chelsea draught. But it had remained a kind of topaz triumph, that she resurrected, rather than any occasion of ruby or of diamond, as a concession to interesting people, like Mrs Mounsey, and Muriel Raphael, and Elyot Standish. Touching topaz she was sure of herself. She began to enjoy her own appearance. She was smart, but not too smart, in spite of Molyneux, in white satin. She melted, flowed in white satin, she froze at the shoulders in little sprays of crystalline flowers, she swept across the stairhead in a blaze of somewhat glacial light, contradicted by the hair, the head. Adelaide’s head recalled the remark overheard at Aix in the casino: Cette tête d’Anglaise reconnaît la tendresse que son corps n’a pas connue.