What would you say, asked Mrs Standish, if Aubrey were to offer you a job?

Casually enough, it fell like wadding into the saucer of her coffee cup. It was one of those indulgent moments after lunch best suited to diplomacy.

Aubrey wants a secretary, said Mrs Standish. There are the collections. He’s cataloguing the collections. And he’s offered you the job of secretary, she said.

The coffee after lunch, the black coffee in little cups, is an inadequate, irrelevant and slightly insipid drink, felt Eden. And the afternoons, or the job that Aubrey Silk, the house in Regent’s Park, in which the floors are very shiny where the carpets finish, because it gives the servants something to do, polishing the floors. This is the logical outcome of the irrelevance of Eden Standish, something for Eden Standish to do, if not exactly floors.

Well? asked Mrs Standish.

I suppose it’s about my mark, she said.

For Eden Standish, multiplied, there were always the Aubrey Silks. Sometimes she could not lift a hand. She felt she would go to her grave like this, the hand unlifted. Yes, she was altogether futile after lunch. And bourgeois. There was painful satisfaction in knowing this. A newly discovered and impressive label, she plastered it on everything.

You’re such a difficult girl, her mother sighed, with a certain amount of satisfaction.

Relieved also. Mrs Standish complacently held her finger in a metaphoric dike.

There were difficulties for Mrs Standish, the difficulties of children, the difficulties of money and love, Humphrey Butler, for instance, making a scene at Rule’s, because she said she was out of sorts, no, Humphrey, she said, no, and then the scene, of course he was drunk, and Christmas soon, without a warning the tinsel in the shops, and Elyot’s luggage, and Elyot’s voice. But it was intoxicating also, the way they spun around her, the so many faces, as if she were the centre of the universe, she liked to think, as if she were a copper-coloured sun, which was a fascinating thought, sometimes she really was, and it had always been like this, so many subsidiary planets revolving on intricate paths round the orb of Catherine Standish’s sun. It was like this then. And they brought her things. Elyot brought her home a Japanese print, because he was at this stage, the stage of moustaches and Japanese prints, discreet, shadowy enthusiasms from Cambridge colleges. She bought presents herself, a great many presents, with the cheque that Humphrey gave. And she bought lilies and put them about her room.

There, said Mrs Standish. We could almost have a party.

Yes, Mother, Elyot said.

Her enthusiasms often embarrassed him. He preferred to read. He was making notes on the Dramatic Works of Büchner. On the whole people bothered him, the effort, the having to commit yourself, and most of all emotionally. He sometimes shuddered now over the episode of Hildegard. Because this was something over which he had no control. His relationship with Hildegard presented a picture of himself jigging wildly on the end of an invisible rope.