GERALD walked across the lawn to the lower tennis court, swinging his racquet. Once he put up a hand and touched the back of his head, but with assurance: it was perfectly smooth and round. His flannels were gold-white in the sun; he almost shone. He smiled everywhere. It was nonsense for him to pretend he did not care for parties; he went everywhere, he liked to go out every day.

Everybody was sitting or standing about where the green slatted seats were, at the edge of the shade. No one was playing yet; there were two courts and eighteen players; they were discussing who was to play first, their voices sharp with renunciation. Lois was nowhere; Laurence sat on the ground smoking and taking no part in the argument. Lady Naylor talked eagerly to a number of guests who, holding up parasols very straight in the unusual sunshine and wearing an air of vague happiness, were waiting for play to begin before settling down to conversation. Livvy Thompson was organizing: as Lois’ friend she felt this devolved upon her in Lois’ absence; also, she liked organizing. “You and you,” she said shrilly, stabbing the air within an inch of each player’s chest with a sharp forefinger, “and why not you and you?” But before she had ever finished arranging the second four, the first would become involved again.

“Oh, Mr. Lesworth,” cried Lady Naylor, and waited for him to approach, “if you really are coming out, would you bring some more rugs for some more of the people to sit on?”

He turned and went back to the house. It seemed very odd about Lois—now where could she be?

Livvy Thompson looked after him anxiously. Had not Mr. Armstrong come also? During this temporary absence of her attention two fours arranged themselves and walked hurriedly out to take possession of the courts.

The hall, very dark after sunshine, was full of wraps and racquet presses; shoes had wandered away from each other under the chairs. The rest of Gerald’s party—they had all driven out from Clonmore in a hired motor—were still there, waiting for Mrs. Vermont. Captain Vermont and David Armstrong stood holding her things while she powdered her nose with difficulty before an antique mirror.

“Aren’t women awful?” she cried gaily, as Gerald rejoined them. She knew the subalterns hated going about without her. “My dears, I do wish I knew if we really were asked. Lois is so—I mean, well, you know—vague, isn’t she?”

“Well, they wouldn’t mind, anyhow,” said David, and tried not to sound proprietary.

“Aren’t they hospitable!” Betty Vermont was not disappointed in Ireland after all. She had never before been to so many large houses with so small a sense of her smallness. Of course, they were all very shabby and not artistic at all. Mrs. Vermont used to say she longed to be turned loose in any one of them with a paint-pot—white—and a few hundred yards of some really nice cretonne from Barker’s.

“Half Ireland is here,” said David, looking out at the crowd of cars on the gravel-sweep. “I doubt if we get any tennis.”

“Ah, well, David, there’s plenty of that at the club. Now, Gerald, don’t stand there glaring! You do disapprove of powder, you unkind wretch!”

“Rather not,” said Gerald, beaming. But all the same he did like girls to have natural complexions—he was perfectly certain Lois’s was. He was carrying all the rugs he could find slung over his shoulder and looked, she informed him, just like a Bedouin. This was not a thing she could have said to every man, because really the East had become so very suggestive. But he was the dearest boy, so absolutely nice-minded. They all went out.

“There seem to be many more people here than I thought we’d asked,” Lady Naylor was saying to Mrs. Carey of Mount Isabel. “Lois asks people she meets at the Clonmore club, and then forgets. I have been rather wondering about the raspberries; I’ve sent her out to the garden to see about getting in some more. Colonel and Mrs. Boatley are coming—she was a Vere Scott, a Fermanagh Vere Scott.... Why is it that the Hartigans never will talk to men? I never think they give themselves a chance, do you? Oh, Mr. Lesworth, how kind to think of bringing the rugs out! And now there doesn’t seem anyone left to sit on them.... Look, would you break up that party of girls on the bank; I don’t think they seem to be sitting on anything, and anyhow they look dull and would like to talk. And I am sure they’d be glad if you’d smoke—the midges are terrible. Who is that girl in pale blue who’s just coming out?”

“Mrs. Vermont. She—er—I think Miss Farquar⁠—”

“Oh, well, never mind; it’s a pleasant surprise.” She went over to Mrs. Vermont with enthusiasm. “I’m so glad you could come; it’s delightful.”

Gerald looked round everybody again, carefully. Then he respectfully displaced the Miss Hartigans, spread out a rug on the bank and sat down between them. He was at a disadvantage, he could not remember if he had ever been introduced to them, whereas they were perfectly certain he had been. They were pleased at his coming, though on the other hand they were suffering so terribly from the midges that what they wanted most at the moment was to scratch their legs peacefully.

“I call this a frightfully good party,” said Gerald, breezily.

“Yes, it’s most enjoyable,” agreed Norah Hartigan.

“I don’t think there’s anything like these tennis parties you have in Ireland.”

“We have never been to tennis parties in England,” replied Doreen.

“Oh, you must certainly come over.”

“I dare say we should feel strange,” said Norah and her sister agreed with her. Gerald smiled from one to the other so encouragingly that they told him how a sister of theirs, who was not here to-day, had once stayed for quite a long time near London, and had been taken by an aunt, who was rather what they would call a London Society sort of person, to a very fashionable party—in South Kensington it had been. But their sister had not cared for the party, she thought the English unnatural and said it was extraordinary how their voices sounded when they were all shut up in the one room. “But excuse me,” concluded the elder Miss Hartigan, turning away because she was afraid the talk was becoming personal and scratching her ankle as discreetly as possible, “we should not say this to you.”

“It was splendid of you to forget I was English. Well, we shall all be leaving you soon, I dare say; all we jolly old army of occupation.”

“Oh, one wouldn’t like to call you that,” said Miss Hartigan, deprecatingly.

“—As soon as we’ve lost this jolly old war.”

“Oh, but one wouldn’t call it a war.”

“If anyone would, we could clean these beggars out in a week.”

“We think it would be a great pity to have a war,” said the Hartigans firmly. “There’s been enough unpleasantness already, hasn’t there?... And it would be a shame for you all to go,” added Doreen warmly, but not too warmly because they were all men. In fact, it was all rather embarrassing, they fixed their eyes on the players firmly and wished that the set would finish. They thought how daring it was of Mr. Lesworth to come so far to a party at all, and only hoped he would not be shot on the way home; though they couldn’t help thinking how, if he should be, they would both feel so interesting afterwards. “Poor young fellow,” they thought with particular tenderness because he was so good-looking, and neither of them, with this tenderness in their eyes, dared to look at him.

Livvy was walking along the top of the bank with David Armstrong. She smiled, with a small tooth over her lower lip; the tip of her nose quivered downward with feminine sensibility. “It is really a long time since I have seen you, Mr. Armstrong.”

David was the nicest of all the subalterns; so agreeable. “Why, yes,” he agreed, “I suppose it really must be.” He glanced at the brim of her hat and added: “It has certainly seemed an awful long time to me.”

“Oh, you mustn’t say that,” cried Livvy; she blushed to the chin and laughed.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” said David, alarmed but gratified.

“Well, I mean, you oughtn’t to say it like that!”

“But I can’t help saying what I mean.” His manliness increased with confusion. “I suppose I am that kind of fellow.”

“You are awful!” Livvy laughed so much from the shock of David’s behaviour that people sitting along the foot of the bank looked up expectantly. She would not share him, she hurried him off at an angle and then continued: “Why were you not at the Mount Isabel bicycle gymkhana? I understood you to say that you would be. It was the greatest pity you couldn’t be there, it was a grand gymkhana, and they had a putting competition too. And they had sentries armed in the avenue and made twenty-four pounds for the hospital. And the priest’s niece from Kilnagowan fell off and cut her lip; she bled too dreadfully, but Doreen Hartigan has her V.A.D. certificate. And two hundred people sat down to tea—how was it now that you couldn’t be there?”

“On duty,” said David, and took on a mystic and obstinate look. “I was up with some of the men and an N.C.O. in those mountains the other side of the Madder.”

Livvy felt in her spine, running down it from under her waistband, a sharp little thrill. She felt all the soldiers’ woman, and said in a glow: “Well, I call that too awfully dangerous.” He told her: “It’s what we are here for.” They glanced at each other, then both were embarrassed—and showed it—at what they had seen. She stooped, and her hat was an elegant mushroom. From David’s complexion blushes cleared slowly away—the last having never quite vanished into his hair before another came after it up from his well-fitting collar.

“I can’t think what Lois can be doing.” She peered through gaps in the shrubbery towards the gate of the garden. This concern for her friend she put up and twirled like a parasol between them. She sighed: the expansion of her thin little frame, the rise and fall of her two little points of bosom were clearly visible under her white silk jersey. Her panama hat turned down and light tufts of hair came out in fluttering commas against her cheekbones. From under the brim her eyes looked, slanting slightly up at the corners, with a veiled preoccupied kind of inquisitiveness. She was inquisitive as to so many things her friend Lois hoped one might not have to bother about. David watched her watch the shrubbery for her friend and thought, with a shock, that this really did seem a girl he was to be in love with. He had the fatalism of a recurrent sufferer.

“It will be too bad,” continued Livvy, “if she doesn’t come soon. You would think she might be picking those raspberries herself. You see, all the people she asked from Clonmore have come and were not expected. If she doesn’t come soon I must go—yes, indeed I must, Mr. Armstrong—and see about the two next fours. You see, her cousin Laurence is no good for that, he is so intellectual, and Lady Naylor doesn’t much notice the tennis so long as the party goes off all right. But it seems too bad she shouldn’t see Mr. Lesworth. I expect Mr. Lesworth often speaks to you of her, doesn’t he, Mr. Armstrong?”

“Er—I don’t remember, really.”

“I think it’s wonderful to see a man so much in love. I must say I often wonder what love feels like. I always seem to feel so natural about the men I know. But I suppose that’s because I am so young—or perhaps I was born platonic. Do you believe in platonics, Mr. Armstrong?”

“Plato? Jolly old Grecian—what?”

“No, but listen—do you?”

“Well, what I think,” said David, looking carefully at his racquet and turning it over and over—“of course it is awfully difficult to express, but I think the right kind of girl and the right kind of fellow can be almost anything to each other, if you know what I mean?”

“I think,” said Livvy, “you put it rather wonderfully.” She suddenly waved her racquet. “Ah—there’s Lois!”

Lois came down the shrubbery path from the garden startled, as if at her own great speed, flushed and visibly breathless. A pink unbuttoned cardigan slipped away at the shoulders, she had a hand in both the pockets to keep it on. Her hat flapped back, it rose above her face in surprise, like a wave. Behind her the bushes stirred in an almost visible backwash. Over the laurels, cropped knee-high at the back of the tennis court, her body rose and dipped with her long steps.

“Ah, here she is!” exclaimed several people, and all looked up the bank uncritically and kindly. The dark air of the shrubbery glittered with midges; she jerked her hands from her pockets and waved her way through. Chinks of sunlight darted up her like mice and hesitated away like butterflies. She had been looking down at the party, deployed in all its promise, with greed and eagerness as at a box of chocolates; eyes like a thumb and finger hovering to selection. Now, engaged by its look, she became all profile; her step flattened, she would have liked to crawl. She was, as Mr. Montmorency had noticed, very self-conscious.

The Hartigans said to Gerald: “Here comes Lois; isn’t she very sweet-looking!” They smiled at each other across him.

He said “Rather!” pocketing their tribute gratefully, with simplicity, as a small boy pockets a tip. His directness baffled them, they were shocked—but he thought how nice they were. In his world affections were rare and square—four-square—occurring like houses in a landscape, unrelated and positive, though with sometimes a large bright looming—as of the sunned west face of Danielstown over the tennis courts. He did not conceive of love as a nervous interchange but as something absolute, out of the scope of thought, beyond himself, matter for a confident outward rather than anxious inward looking. He had sought and was satisfied with a few—he thought final—repositories for his emotions: his mother, country, dog, school, a friend or two, now—crowningly—Lois. Of these he asked only that they should be quiet and positive, not impinged upon, not breaking boundaries from their generous allotment. His life was a succession of practical adjustments, into which the factor of personality did not enter at all. His reserve—to which one was apt to accord a too sensitive reverence—was an affair of convenience rather than protection. Pressed for a statement, he could have said, “I love her,” to the Hartigans, Mrs. Carey, anyone there, without uneasiness, without a sense of the words’ vibrations or alarm at a loud impact on something hollow. So he looked up the bank at Lois, while the Hartigans watched him.

Mr. Montmorency sat on the ground with his knees apart, holding his ankles limply. His grey flannel coat-collar was turned up over his white shirt, as though a strong wind were blowing. He was being talked to by ladies who sat above him on high green chairs, and though he looked up to answer, it was never higher than their knees. He had more than ever his waxen blinking look, as though exposed unnaturally to the sunshine. His nostrils contracted slightly, as though the smell drawn up from the roots of the grass in a perpetual hot shimmer were more offensive than he cared to explain. He was to play in the next set, and Laurence looked forward to a melancholy exhibition of departed proficiency. A wiry tenseness and setting of teeth there would be, Laurence anticipated, then balls going straight and cleanly into the net. He would be the magnificent player of ten years ago, with little painful grunts as point after point was given away. Laurence guessed that Mr. Montmorency hated parties and conversation as much as he himself did, but being less adept at evasion or honouring less fiercely the virginity of his intelligence, could not escape from talking and being talked to.

Laurence achieved this escape by sitting always with a social alert expression between two groups, when one tried to claim him he could affect to be engaged by the other.

A net had been carefully stretched behind the seats to prevent balls going through to the shrubbery. But it was full of rents, and these the balls, driven with force from the further back line, discovered unerringly. To meet these deficiencies children up from the lodge were on duty in the shrubbery; they stared and rambled, pushing among the laurels. They got their teas, an excellent view of the party and a halfpenny for every ball they recovered. Those who did not find any balls and seemed disappointed were given halfpennies also. So why, as Lady Naylor said, bother? She hated to see her guests go round the net, smearing their nice white flannels.

But now, as three balls in succession fled through the leaves, she broke off a conversation and cried: This was too much! Would some kind person—she looked at Laurence—go round and help? He rose, reluctant: simultaneously Mr. Montmorency went gratefully round the net at the other end. He was followed by an anxious little boy called Hercules, the only child among the guests and gravely de trop. They all three met in the middle.

Laurence said—beating the bushes vaguely—“Imagine, sir, a small resurrection day, an intimate thing-y one, when the woods should give up their tennis balls and the bundles of hay their needles: the beaches all their engagement rings and the rivers their cigarette cases and some watches. The sea’s too general, an affair of furniture and large boilers, it could wait with the graves for the big day.... Yes, Hercules, that is a tennis ball, but it is pre-war. Put it back in the rabbit hole for the children to find; it is worth a halfpenny to them.... Last term I dropped a cigarette case into the Cher, from the bridge at Parson’s Pleasure. It was a gold one, left over from an uncle, flat and thin and curved, for a not excessive smoker. It was from the days when they wore opera cloaks and mashed, and killed ladies. It was very period, very virginal; I called it Henry James; I loved it. I want to see it rush up out of the Cher, very pale, with eyeballs, like in the Tate Gallery. It wants a woman to be interested in a day like that, to organize; perhaps the Virgin Mary? Don’t you think, sir?”

Mr. Montmorency, startled at this address, replied: “I have never been to the Tate Gallery.”

“Talking of being virginal, do you ever notice this country? Doesn’t sex seem irrelevant?”

“There certainly are a great many unmarried women,” said Mr. Montmorency, looking doubtfully through the net at the Miss Hartigans.

“It is: ‘Ah, why would we?’ And indeed why should they? There is no reason why one should not, so one never does. It applies to everything. And children seem in every sense of the word to be inconceivable.”

“My mother has five,” said Hercules, “I am the youngest. Hercules is a family name because I am the only boy, but when I go to school I shall be called Richard after my godfather, as everybody says that Hercules even as an initial would be such a disadvantage to me, though not nearly so bad as being afraid of bats.”

“I wonder you aren’t at school now,” said Mr. Montmorency.

“It would be holidays now anyhow, so I should be bound to be here. That is my eldest sister, playing tennis. They do not see how I can possibly go to school till I have got over being afraid of bats. Besides, I am using up the end of my sisters’ governess.”

“Nobody could possibly be sorrier for you than I am, Hercules,” said Laurence. “This is an unreal party.”

“Well, nobody brought you, I suppose,” said Hercules.

The strong and dreadful smell of laurels made them all irritable. Hercules tore off the tips of bland leaves which kept slapping against his forehead. Laurence came with a ball on his racquet to Mr. Montmorency and said: “I am sure this is one that you lost with Uncle Richard and poor John Trent and the man who did not go to Ceylon in the summer of ’06.”

“Whereas, I did not go to Canada.”

“No, you never did, did you?”

Lady Naylor came and looked at them through the netting. “If between you you cannot find any balls,” she said, “Laurence, you had better please fetch that other box from the back hall. They are beginning a new set with only three.”

“I have two here that seem quite clean, but they haven’t much bounce,” said Hercules.

“Oh, that is splendid, you are a good little boy!” She took the balls from him through a hole. “Here are a nice lot to go on with,” she called out hopefully, rolling them to the court. Mr. Montmorency and Laurence went on searching.

“Now take Aunt Myra; what does she think she’s doing?”

“If it comes to that,” said Mr. Montmorency, nettled, “what do you think you’re doing? Why are you here at all if you don’t like it—as Hercules said? I was happy here at your age, I was full of the place, I asked nothing better. I ask nothing better now.”

“Oh,” said Laurence.

“However, I have no doubt you are right in being dissatisfied; I dare say it is progress,” said Mr. Montmorency angrily. “I dare say it is good for the race.”

Laurence, who did not consider that he had anything to do with the race, replied with some indignation: “I have no money; where do you expect me to get any money from? I was to have gone to Spain this month with a man and last year I should have gone to Italy with another man, but what do you expect me to go on? I have to eat somwhere, don’t I, and here it is simply a matter of family feeling.”

“This is one of the balls; I shall throw it over.... I had no idea that you were such a materialist.”

“I can’t help my stomach. Besides, I like eating, it is so real. But I should like something else to happen, some crude intrusion of the actual. I feel all gassy inside from yawning. I should like to be here when this house burns.”

“Quite impossible; quite unthinkable. Why don’t you fish or something?... Nonsense!” he added, looking warningly at the house.

“Of course it will, though. And we shall all be so careful not to notice.”

“Are you the undergraduate of to-day?”

“I should love to be quite, quite abstract.”

Mr. Montmorency, offended by all this clever conversation, felt more than ever his isolation, his homelessness. Life was to him an affair of discomfort, but that discomfort should be made articulate seemed to him shocking. The over-fine machinery of his mind ceaselessly strained and caught and was agonizingly jerked over details. His refuge was manly talk: he suspected Laurence. He said: “You are fortunate. There was never a time when I had not other people to think about.”

Laurence, who immediately thought this womanish, said: “Oh yes, love.” He flicked out and studied the word indifferently—coin of uncertain value.

“Not entirely. One had a certain debt ...”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

Laurence became more formal, very much better mannered. He recalled that the man was married, had given away his integrity, had not even a bed to himself. The husband, glancing a last time through and under the bushes, was negligible, diffused even a certain staleness. Laurence sheered away mentally, moved further off through the shrubbery. He had been talking foolishly, in his vein of the third or fourth quality, and regretted now having talked still. He felt there had been something morbid about his intrusion, as in a visit to a prison.

“I was to have played in that second set,” said Mr. Montmorency. “It seems to be nearly over: perhaps I shall play in the third.”

“Tea will be coming, never forget tea.” Indeed, a move was being made to the house already. Tea was too grave an affair to be carried out; besides, one wasn’t accustomed to stability in the weather.

“Oh, Hugo, come out now, dear,” cried Francie, walking past with Mrs. Hartigan. “I am sure it doesn’t matter about the balls. And the Trents have come—don’t you see them? We are just going back to the house to meet them now.”

“Archie? Splendid!” He burst from the shrubbery at the other side, gained the path and hurried towards the house. At a turn of the path, in an arch cut under some holly, he saw Gerald and Lois standing; talking, looking down earnestly at their racquets. With her head bent, Lois was like her mother. He stared, then passed them quickly.

But Lois did not notice him going by. She was saying: “I feel certain you have illusions about me; I don’t believe you know what I’m like a bit.” And while she spoke she counted the crimson strings in her racquet: three down, six across.