Madame will realize it is not my fault if I tell what 1 think I ought, Mme Adorée said.

Because it was time she said something to the Anglaise, standing with her hand on the knob. She felt she had been cheated out of an emotional display.

Yes. You were quite right, Mrs Standish said. Quite right, Mme Adorée, she said, slowly.

Then she went upstairs. Her knees still shook.

This’ll be a bore, she said to Willy, talking over her shoulder as she dressed. Malcolm will tell us about his boat.

It was unimportant what she said. She felt stiff. And the stiff words that slid ungainly along her tongue.

If we hang on long enough, it’ll be over, Willy said. Even the Wilcoxes.

She could hear the rustle of his collar in the dressing-room next door. It was a strange, detached ritual, the taking off and putting on of clothes for the eating of meals. In the kitchen at Norwich they sat down to cod balls on Sunday. She remembered the grain of the kitchen table, the channels she had dug with the prong of a fork. Before the pantomime. She had acted herself into a series of parts, some of them verging on the Guignol. At home there was a cupboard under the stairs into which she had crept when frightened.

There, she said brightly. Do you like Mother in her new dress?

She stood smoothing it over her hips. In a corner of the room the little boy, his cot, where he sat turning a picture book, he had slept there since his bronchitis, when they moved him down. He sat looking at her gravely over the picture book.

Yes, he said softly, strangely attentive, yet removed, his face still pale from bronchitis. When will it be over? he asked, fretfully turning the pages of the book.

Soon, she said. You won’t notice. You won’t even notice Mother’s been gone.

I wish it was over, he said. I wish it were morning.

She went across and put her hand on his forehead. She trembled a little, she couldn’t stop it. And sensing this, he looked at her, wondering, he was half afraid.

Ten more minutes, she said. Then Julia will put out the light.

He looked at her going out of the room. She could feel his wondering eyes, that made her hold herself too straight, as protection against the child’s eyes.

It was much as you expected, in the dining-room, in the drawing-room, the things you said to the Wilcoxes, and Eve’s cure, and Malcolm’s boat. But the ball flew, from custom, with mechanical agility. You almost had time to think, if you let yourself, if your mind abandoned the easy ball. Willy did this sort of thing with conviction. He made Malcolm Wilcox feel gauche, even while grateful for the attention, that arm round the shoulder, and the intimate flash of teeth. Malcolm had a boat on Southampton Water. He went there at weekends, to return full of technical terms for his friends. The skin was stretched tightly over your face after an evening with Malcolm’s boat.