Takes your breath, he said. The stairs.

What! she said. At your age!

Mrs Standish could have run up the stairs. Her figure, she liked to tell herself, was the figure of a girl.

I guess I’ve been around too long, he sighed.

Americans live differently, of course, said Mrs Standish, as a help. Perhaps you’re a victim of the Prohibition.

Yes, he said. Perhaps so.

It sat easily, the disguise. The bloody Yank, Collins, could feel himself expand against his belt.

Yes, she was swell. He sat with the little glass in his hand, swallowing the sherry that she brought, the sherry that he didn’t much like, it brought the liver out. But he felt good, talking to a dame in a room with books and pictures. He looked around him at the furniture and curtains, it impressed in spite of shabbiness, or more perhaps because of this, it had the advantage of long standing, anyone could have the brand-new. Wally was always impressed by the antique, would lower his voice a tone in a Tudor cinema.

Pretty good set-up you’ve got, he said, swilling the sherry round in his mouth.

One has one’s ups and downs, smiled Mrs Standish, sadly. Here you’ll find it’s mainly downs, Mr –?

Collins, he said. Wally Collins.

Mr Collins, said Mrs Standish.

The sherry made her sad and warm.

Here’s to the ups, said Mr Collins.

Really he was kind. Her eyes marked time on his jaw, on what she liked to think was its firm, clean American look. Mrs Standish tried to look the way she imagined you looked drinking a toast with Wally Collins. She quirked up her mouth a little in a smile. She tossed the sherry quickly down, so quickly that a drop trickled out of her mouth, she dabbed in the corner with a handkerchief.

My son will be pleased, she said, to break a silence.

Or would he, you couldn’t tell with Elyot, you had long ago given up trying to read a face. Secretly Mrs Standish cherished a conception of a world of which the main virtue was that she could understand the system by which it worked. Because she was tired, she was tired of groping after other people’s motives, she was tired of having to disguise her own. But above all she regretted what had become the pursuit of the dissolving guitar, the abstract world that eluded, that eluded her, which for so many years had distracted her attention from the comfortable, sensual details among which she felt herself at home. Though even these, she admitted, looking at the jaw of Wally Collins, had been removed by the laws of nature to a point that was almost beyond her reach.

Yes, he said, returning to the room, to a vague and perhaps a shade uneasy commentary that did not touch her thought. Comfortable, he said. It’s the odds and ends as makes a room. And books. I like a good read of a book. Not that there’s time. There’s not very often time, what with the rehearsals and things. We run through the new stuff most always of a morning or an afternoon.