‘You paya to me,’ said the girl ferociously and when Sophy had done so, presented her with a ticket and a cackle of inexplicable laughter. Sophy laughed jauntily if senselessly in return, desiring, as always, to be friendly with all and sundry.

She continued to walk about Rome and to anticipate with feelings she would have been quite unable to define, Saturday, the twenty-sixth of April.

III

‘I must say,’ Lady Braceley murmured, ‘you don’t seem to be enjoying yourself very madly. I never saw such a glum face.’

‘I’m sorry, Auntie Sonia. I don’t mean to look glum. Honestly, I couldn’t be more grateful.’

‘Oh,’ she said, dismissing it, ‘grateful! I just hoped that we might have a nice, gay time together in Rome.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated.

‘You’re so—odd. Restless. And you don’t look at all well, either. What have you been doing with yourself?’

‘Nothing.’

‘On the tiles, I suppose.’

‘I’ll be all right. Really.’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have pranced out of Perugia like that.’

‘I couldn’t have been more bored with Perugia. Students can be such an unutterable drag. And after Franky and I broke up—you know.’

‘All the same your parents or lawyers or the Lord Chancellor or whoever it is will probably be livid with me. For not ordering you back.’

‘Does it matter? And anyway—my parents! We know, with all respect to your horrible brother, darling, that the longer his boychild keeps out of his life the better he likes it.’

‘Kenneth—darling!’

‘As for Mummy—what’s the name of that dipso-bin she’s moved into? I keep forgetting.’

‘Kenneth!’

‘So come off it, angel. We’re not still in the ‘twenties, you know.’

They looked thoughtfully at each other.

His aunt said: ‘Were you a very bad lot in Perugia, Kenneth?’

‘No worse than a dozen others.’

‘What sort of lot? What did you do?’

‘Oh,’ Kenneth said, ‘this and that. Fun things.’ He became selfsuffused with charm. ‘You’re much too young to be told,’ he said. ‘What a fabulous dress. Did you get it from that amazing lady?’

‘Do you like it? Yes, I did. Astronomical.’

‘And looks it.’

His aunt eyed herself over. ‘It had better,’ she muttered.

‘Oh lord!’ Kenneth said discontentedly and dropped into a chair. ‘Sorry! It must be the weather or something.’

‘To tell you the truth I’m slightly edgy myself. Think of something delicious and outrageous we can do, darling. What is there?’

Kenneth had folded his hands across the lower half of his face like a yashmak. His large and melting brown eyes looked over the top at his aunt. There was a kind of fitful affectation in everything he did: he tried-on his mannerisms and discarded them as fretfully as his aunt tried-on her hats.

‘Sweetie,’ he said. ‘There is a thing.’

‘Well—what? I can’t hear you when you talk behind your fingers.’