Gerald Blenkinsop stroked the shoulders of his coat, almost as if he were loving himself. He would go down. He would find Adelaide in the drawing-room, gathering together the first brittle fragments of conversation made by nervous guests.

It was such fun, Desmond Harcourt was saying, as he warmed his hands, a cold but moist ball, at the drawing-room fire.

What was fun? Gerald asked.

Oh, Ge-Gerald, don’t make me jump! quaked Mr Harcourt. I was telling Adelaide about the pictures at Lizzi Maurer’s amusing show.

Adelaide began to laugh, perhaps at something foregone in the interrupted narrative, or perhaps it was part of her showmanship, she was showing Mr Harcourt off.

She had pictures? Gerald said.

Oh yes, pictures too. And then, you’d die, quite ravishing clowns and things. Real clowns. She wanted a seal. A real seal. But I said: No, Lizzi, dear, we know you’re nuts, dear, but not seals, they’re wet!

Desmond Harcourt giggled.

Ravishing clowns, he murmured.

It came up like a faint asthmatic echo out of the regions of his shirt.

Living for things that matter, he was in fact music critic on one of the advanced weeklies. He could also turn his hand at a pinch to painting or to literature. He could discuss the proletarian novel. But almost the only points at which the proletariat was allowed to leave the abstract for human dimensions, these were at the Marble Arch and Chatham. Desmond occasionally dined at Adelaide’s. No, not Tuesday, I’m dining with Adelaide Blenkinsop, he told his friends across the telephone. His life was one long ravishment, his conversation a series of arpeggios which, when settled down, became a recitative of reported speech.

Adelaide swam forward. They began to arrive. Adelaide wove backward and forward, the interweaving of the white satin, and the little flat white phrases that she caught and dexterously fastened together, just as they left the mouths of the members of her still unconsolidated party.

Elyot, she said, this is so nice.

It was specially for him, she meant it, and her hand.

You know Desmond, she said. Elyot Standish, Mrs Mounsey, Miss Raphael.

Standing on the edge of so many deliberate, hostile smiles, it was difficult to choose one, they swam, the smiles and the voices, the brilliant aquatic form of Adelaide in satin. In the comparatively twilit depths faces announced a wall, the faces of portraits, and the formations of furniture, like baroque grottoes, offering no shelter from the conversation. But it was splendid, this, like the roses, and equally forced, that Adelaide fanned with her hand, with her whole attentive body. It was altogether splendid. He had chosen it. To plunge, head forward, into the aquarium.

Mrs Mounsey screamed with laughter. Somewhere a shivering of glass.

Literature pay! shouted Mrs Mounsey. Literature’s a pain. Literature’s a disease, a smoker’s cough, a husband’s curse, the jiminy-piminies. Anything you like. Does literature pay!

Mrs Mounsey went off again, right into one of the colder smiles on Gerald Blenkinsop’s face. Flashing, dashing, Irish, Mrs Mounsey took the opportunities given her by birth. Irish, then make use of it, was Mrs Mounsey’s attitude. Especially in a house like this. Still, the dinner was free.