LADY NAYLOR, who wished for a clear steady light these lengthening evenings, saw to the lamps personally. In big yellow gloves she accurately trimmed the wicks, between the morning’s head-lines and a thorough talk with the cook. But the smell of oil was repugnant to her and now she said with some sharpness:

“You have no conception of love⁠— You are in my light.”

Lois moved from the lamp-room window. “I really have,” she said, “really.”

“Nonsense,” her aunt said, looking round for a rag. Lois began to slide a matchbox about, and her aunt, taking the matches away mechanically, thought how hard it was that a woman like this, who could bring the matter on to an intellectual plane at once, should have to do lamps at all. Anna Partridge, whose brain was all shreddy with rabbit-combing and raffia, had had electric light for years, just from living in England; even the Trents talked of harnessing their waterfall.

“When I was your age I never thought of marriage at all. I didn’t intend to marry. I remember, when I was nineteen I was reading Schiller.”

“I don’t think about marriage, I ...”

“Then you can have no conception ...”

“I read,” said Lois, with dignity.

“Girls nowadays do nothing but lend each other these biological books. I was intensely interested in art.”

“But, Aunt Myra, young men are quite usual.”

“It all comes of dancing and all this excitement.”

“But Gerald is not excitable; he was in love with me the other day before lunch.”

“He was half asleep,” said Lady Naylor. “At the best of times he has not much conversation. Of course, I rate brains so highly; perhaps I am wrong. But remember, you cannot hope to be always in love, and then ...”

“But you said I had no conception ...”

“There you are, in my light again.”

Lois moved further away from the window. She wished she had not started this explanation. She had felt, somehow, that it should be less embarrassing in the lamp-room. She thought of Gerald’s unquestioning shoulder, where she would lean her head. “But I can’t explain,” she said; “I never heard of a girl being asked to explain. I always thought ...”

“Real feeling explains itself,” said Lady Naylor and polished some oil off the base of a lamp triumphantly.

“But if he comes to tea ...”

“Oh, we cannot help that, of course.”

“But if he spoke to Uncle Richard ...”

“Your uncle would be very much worried. Really, Lois, I do think you might be more sensible and considerate.”

Lois saw this point of view only too perfectly. She wrinkled her forehead. She did not want to be hard on her Uncle Richard and she could not help sympathizing with Aunt Myra, who had so much to organize as it was. Feeling did seem to her out of proportion with life, and that this disproportion should be so evident generally, that her aunt should think she was making an irrelevant fuss, strongly discouraged her. But she reassembled herself; she had been led to understand that love ...

“But surely love ...”

“You have no conception of love,” repeated Lady Naylor, and thought again of electric light in Bedfordshire.

“But shall I never do anything?”

“Go to a school of art.”

“Where?”

“It could be arranged.”

“But I don’t think I really draw well.”

“That is no reason why you should marry.”

It was, of course, no reason; acknowledging this, and seeing light from the barred window fall so coldly on the oilcloth top of the lamp-table, Lois felt quite at a standstill.

“However ...” said Lady Naylor. She looked with her brilliant eyes dubiously, almost shyly, at the door behind Lois’s head. She swept the rags and the lamp scissors into a drawer, shut the drawer on their malodour, and pulled off her gloves, sighing. She saw life, perhaps, as a shuffle of setting to partners, then a drawn-out, coupled but somehow solitary curtsying, to him, the other, the rest of the eight. “However ...” she said. And the qualification committed herself and her niece, a shade alarmingly. Lois knew that Gerald might come to tea.

“You do see,” said Lois, and stared at her aunt’s ringed hands which reappeared from the gloves, “that I didn’t want to be clandestine?”

“Oh, of course you were quite right,” said Lady Naylor without enthusiasm. She went down to talk to the cook.

Kathleen, the cook, who resembled her mistress in personality so closely that their relation was an affair of balance, who had more penetration than Lady Naylor and was equally dominant, inferred much of the situation from her mistress’s manner. Herself, she had felt this was bound to occur. For an hour or so, they had countered each other amiably in the lime-washed gloom of the kitchen, over a basin of green-pea soup. Lady Naylor announced with unusual deprecation, there would be an officer coming over to tea. Kathleen, refolding her hands royally, asked, would she slap up a sally-lunn? On the whole, Lady Naylor thought drop-cakes. Kathleen immediately placed the officer. Strolling down the yard in the course of the afternoon to execute a couple of chickens, she watched dispassionately from under the chestnuts Gerald crouch on his motor-bicycle up the avenue. Lois, standing about with the dogs, went down to meet him. For tea, Kathleen sent up an unaccountable iced cake, ironically festive.

Francie was glad Mr. Lesworth was coming to tea. For the day strained with ominousness, as though it were going to burst. Hugo, pacing about on the avenues with The Conquest of Mexico under his arm, disparaged repose. “By the way,” he said once, coming up, “if you should be happening to write to Marda Norton ...”

“Oh, but I shan’t be; not till I send her our little present. Besides, I have nothing to say.”

“She might write to you about the eau-de-Cologne.”

“Oh no, she thanked me.”

“There was a point I wanted to clear, about Metternich—you remember that argument? I’ve just come on a book—I suppose I had better write myself.”

“But no one knows her address; Myra lost the letter.”

“Ah yes, of course.... That settles it.” He smiled—one would have said with relief. Francie, looking down in despair at her blouse as he walked away, saw that the jabot was crumpled. She could not understand how a woman who travelled with suitcases could look as smooth as Marda. But then, she was all outlines: detail seemed to collect and obtrude in the middle of Francie. She went up to change, glad that Gerald was coming, sounding with some attention the silence under the avenue trees. For the fact was, life attenuated to the snapping-point; in Gerald’s continuity, in Lois’s, she must invest her own.

Gerald propped up his motor-bicycle, looked up carefully at the closed windows—in one, from behind a blot of light, Francie was nodding—and said that he should not really have come. Troops had been fired on coming back into Clonmore, near that level-crossing. The situation was tightening; there was a lot to do.

“Oh. Then it is a pity you came,” said Lois.

Gerald said nothing; his ears faintly coloured.

“Clonmore!” said Lois with indignation, and thought of the little friendly town with its tennis club.

“So it happened,” said Gerald, looking at her. “It might have been anywhere else.” He whistled and greeted the dogs, her dogs.

“Then ... it was dangerous coming?”

“Oh no, not to speak of.”

The house so loomed, and stared so darkly and oddly that he showed a disposition—respectful rather than timorous—to move away from the front of it. They walked to the tennis courts and round one court in a circle. “Lois ...” She veered off quickly, Laurence was working up there in his window. Gerald waved, but had no response. “Doesn’t he concentrate!” he said wistfully.

“I suppose so.... Does Laurence matter?”

“You know you ...”

“Gerald, you are the frightfully concentrated person, really.”

“But I can’t read.... Where can I ... where could we⁠—?”

“—Here comes Mr. Montmorency.”

Hugo, coming up to shake hands with Gerald, said it seemed a long time since they had met. The young man, by his way of standing and looking clearly and being positive, strongly connected himself with Marda. With an unexpected and crooked stab of nostalgia, Hugo thought of the trees, the morning mountains, the tinkling and knocking stream. Of all of her he had kept and had never had and must try to regain appeared most sharply the moment of that encounter: irrelevant moment, when, outside something, he had watched light run down her hair as she stooped for Gerald to light her cigarette. The quality of their silence, their separation after Gerald had left them—pressing on up to the house to look for Lois—now seemed the very ground of his closest approach. But he knew how the scene was perishable, how having drawn up into itself for life, like a plant, any reality that there was in him, it would die of his barrenness. Until finally, by even the same conjunction of mountains and light and trees, it would not be evoked again.

“No shaving under a hedge this morning?” he said genially.

“Oh no,” said Gerald, surprised. Why should there be?

Lois, encouraged to find that by some growth of womanhood in herself her attitude was already a wife’s, at once proud and deprecating, stood there watching Gerald, most grateful for the repose of this interposition and willing that Mr. Montmorency should be detained. She knew, from a glance they both gave her, that she must have been startled by some sort of consciousness into beauty, and a particular placidness, a sense of being located, warmed her surroundings, the smooth lawn and heavy trees. Balancing, foot behind foot, on a line of the court faint from rain, she constructed a life in China—most regimental, alert and pleasantly surfaced—from Japanese prints she had ignored in shops, an idea of odd, angular archways and some strips of vertical writing. He must no doubt some day be a captain, and “captain’s lady” had a ballad-like cadence. She almost took Gerald’s arm.

“You find us diminished,” said Hugo, “and a good deal quieter. Miss Norton has gone.”

“Oh?”

“Marda,” she hastily prompted.

“She was awfully nice and amusing,” said Gerald, beaming out like the sun from behind a moment’s perplexity. “I’d have loved to have met her again.”

She explained to him afterwards, taking him off through the shrubberies, how things were at present with Mr. Montmorency: he was a ruined man. Gerald went rigid, something shut like a door on his sensibilities—the thing reeked of adultery. He produced an appalled silence. But about Lois’s mother, he brought out finally, hadn’t one heard he had once been ...?

“But a thing can’t be final,” said Lois. “Not while one’s alive.”

Was this what she read? “But there’s Mrs. Montmorency....” It seemed fixed here, the Montmorencys’ conjointness, among the stately furniture and long mild meals—earth to Lois’s roots.

“But one can’t arrange oneself; one doesn’t altogether live from inside: Marda just happened.”

“And did she ...?” cried Gerald, appalled. Above this extraordinary undercurrent, it seemed to him his Lois was poised too perfectly.

Lois, in pink linen, perfectly sophisticated and cool, said: “No. She was just regretful. Also, she is engaged, you see.”

“Is she? I should never have thought ...”

“... Her engaged? Well, how ought she to look? Like a kind of hen bird, all dim?”

“She was all herself. Doesn’t love kind of finish people off ... with something that isn’t them, in a way you can feel?”

She understood him, but did not know how to agree. What must one then be for him? She was shy of his uncomprehension of a particular notion of living she seemed only now to have formed. Did she give out an untrue ring to his touch? Where was the flaw? Or was Gerald, sublimely, the instrument of some large imposture?

“Complete—you mean finished?... Perhaps she is not really in love.”

“But surely she isn’t that sort ... she wouldn’t just marry?”

“I don’t think what Marda does matters; she simply is.”

He looked desperate suddenly, as though she were behind bars. “Look here, no one matters. Don’t let’s talk ... I mean ... don’t let’s talk. Lois, there’s so little time now, I’m desperate. I don’t see when I am going to see you, ever. Lois, this miserable waiting; even happiness never lets one alone. When shall we be quiet?”

“But, Gerald, we’re quite young.”

“I want nothing to happen but you. You are everything. I want so much of you.”

She stood, perplexed, at the edge of the path; he kissed her with frightened violence. The laurels creaked as, in his arms, she bent back into them. His singleness bore, confusing, upon her panic of thoughts, her physical apprehension of him was confused by the slipping, cold leaves. Her little sighs elated then alarmed him.

“What’s the matter?” he said, his lips close to her face.

“I don’t like the smell of the laurels. Let’s come out of here.” They went back, she put up anxious hands and asked him about her hair. “Is it twiggy and awful?” “Lovely.” She wished that he were a woman. As they approached the steps where her aunt and uncle and Francie composed an abstracted group, she told him: “Aunt Myra wants me to go to a school of art.”

“Oh ... Can you draw?”

“Gerald ...!”

“Darling, I’ve never seen them. How could I know?”

Lady Naylor exclaimed how delightful it was that Gerald had come over. Now they would hear some real, real news, she said: they always relied on Gerald. Sir Richard, taking his pince-nez off in amazement, could hardly believe it was Gerald again; he still thought subalterns came in rotation. Surely, he said candidly, it was yesterday they had had that interesting talk about the Militia? Gerald was given a chair of such voluptuous depth that his chin came barely above the edge of the tea-table. They congratulated him on the Rolfes’ dance. In fact, they united to carry off the situation with such brilliance that Gerald might well have been a dun or a tax-collector. Then, at a moment when talk seemed precarious and Marda obtrusively absent and Lady Naylor sat eyeing Lois’s hair, the Trents arrived unexpectedly. They brought over another friend, this time from County Clare, to whom still more had happened. Gerald went into joyous eclipse; the Danielstown party sat breathless—hardly a chair creaked—the Trents looked at their friend complacently while the Trents’ friend curdled the tea in one’s mouth with tales of assault and cattle-driving.

“Well, I suppose we’ve a certain amount to be thankful for,” smiled Mrs. Archie Trent as their friend, having been put through his hoops, settled down to tea. And she told Lois that she was looking remarkably well, and they hoped they would see her out with the Ballymoyles this winter. And meanwhile, what about cubbing?

“Lois is going to a school of art,” said Lady Naylor.

“That seems a pity,” said Mrs. Trent.

The friend, finishing his tea, said all the Irish art schools ought to be searched. He wouldn’t say for certain, but he had a pretty shrewd suspicion what you would find there. If it came to that, he said, casts were hollow and you could keep a good deal inside the Venus of Milo. Sir Richard looked vaguely offended.

“I should go to the Slade,” said Lois.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Archie Trent, “not Rome, I suppose? Well I shouldn’t do anything of that sort in a hurry.”

“Art is long,” said Laurence, who liked conversation of this sort. The Trents’ friend asked him how he liked Cambridge; he himself had a nephew who hoped soon to be going up. Laurence said he had heard that Cambridge was very nice.

The Trents’ friend took Gerald aside after tea, to explain to him where the Army was going wrong. Mrs. Trent at once drew closer up to the teapot and said, in a loud voice of confidence, she had heard Livvy Thompson was really engaged to that young Armstrong. “Nonsense,” said Lady Naylor.

“But they were seen in Cork having tea, and the aunt denies it too vigorously. After all, it would be something for the Thompsons.”

Lois, who was unfortunate, blushed; both ladies looked hard at her. “To begin with,” declared Lady Naylor, “these young men are not at all marriageable. Besides, to tell you the truth ...”

“But I don’t see what else the girls are to do. I mean, look at the Hartigans.”

“There’s a future for girls nowadays outside marriage,” said Lady Naylor inspiringly. “Careers—how I should have loved one. One reads so much about ...” She was an advanced woman: Mrs. Trent, who did not read, paused in respect but preserved an honest, bright-pink expression of incredulity. She pictured those indoor women with clutched little bags getting hurriedly into the Dublin trams. It was no life. Her friend seemed, moreover, unwisely persistent in encouraging art for Lois: this, for young girls, often resulted in worse than spinsterhood. “All the same,” she said, returning, “Livvy seems set on the young man. And she has a great deal of character.”

“Well, if I were her aunt and her father, I’d never hear of it.”

“Dear me,” cried Mrs. Trent, kicking the table cheerfully, “we’ve made Lois blush at the very idea.”

“Lois knows better,” said Lady Naylor. And she gave Lois one of her rarest, most charming, direct and personal glances.

And indeed what a friend, thought Lois, going out to the steps to escape them all, if one had only just met, might Aunt Myra be.