MRS. VERMONT ate more hot cakes than she cared to remember, because they were so good and nobody seemed to notice. She went on to chocolate cake, then to orange layer cake, to which she returned again and again. An idea she had had, that one should not eat very much when invited out, languished; she finished up with a plate of raspberries. She put all thought of her figure resolutely behind her. Mother, of course, had filled out terribly, but oneself mightn’t.

“Nummy-nummy,” she said, pointing out the raspberries to David Armstrong who sat beside her. “David have some!”

Livvy Thompson, sitting beyond David, deplored these women who talked baby-talk. She felt that her own appeal to men was more serious. “Mr. Armstrong has got to play in the next set,” she said warningly.

“Hoity-toity!” thought Betty Vermont (she never used the expression aloud, as she was not certain how one pronounced it: it was one of her inner luxuries). Turning to Mrs. Carey (the Honourable Mrs. Carey), who sat on her other side, she said frankly:

“Your scrumptious Irish teas make a perfect piggy-wig of me. And dining-room tea, of course, makes me a kiddy again.”

“Does it really?” said Mrs. Carey, and helped herself placidly to another slice of the chocolate cake. She thought of Mrs. Vermont as “a little person” and feared she detected in her a tendency, common to most English people, to talk about her inside. She often wondered if the War had not made everybody from England a little commoner. She added pleasantly: “This chocolate cake is a speciality of Danielstown’s. I believe it’s a charm that they make it by, not a recipe.”

“Things do run in families, don’t they? Now I am sure you’ve all got ghosts.”

“I can’t think of any,” said Mrs. Carey, accepting another cup of tea. She smiled and nodded across the table to Mrs. Archie Trent, who had just come in. “We have been much more worried lately by people taking away our car. Of course it is always brought back again, but one doesn’t like to think of its being used for nefarious purposes. That is the worst of a Ford.”

Mrs. Vermont opened her mouth to tell Mrs. Carey the latest Ford story, then checked herself because in Ireland they seemed to take Fords so seriously. She observed instead: “All this is terrible for you all, isn’t it? I do think you’re so sporting the way you just stay where you are and keep going on. Who would ever have thought the Irish would turn out so disloyal—I mean, of course, the lower classes! I remember Mother saying in 1916—you know, when that dreadful rebellion broke out—she said: ‘This has been a shock to me, I never shall feel the same about the Irish again.’ You see, she had brought us all up as kiddies to be so keen on the Irish, and Irish songs. I still have a little bog-oak pig she brought me back from an exhibition. She always said they were the most humorous people in the world, and with hearts of gold. Though of course we had none of us ever been in Ireland.”

“Well, I hope you are pleased with us now you have come,” said Mrs. Carey hospitably. “I expect you have all been enjoying this lovely weather?”

“Oh, well—you see, we didn’t come over to enjoy ourselves, did we? We came to take care of all of you—and, of course, we are ever so glad to be able to do it. Not that I don’t like the country; it’s so picturesque with those darling mountains and the hens running in and out of the cottages just the way Mother always said. But, you see, one can’t help worrying all the time about Timmie—my husband—and all the boys: out all night sometimes with the patrols or else off in the mountains.”

“Terrible. And do you find this a tiring climate?”

A word attracted Mrs. Trent’s attention across the table. “Terrible what?” she said. “Terrible who?” She was youngish, brusque and dominant; the high pink colour over her face as from riding hard in a wind gave her a look of zestfulness alarming to Mrs. Vermont. “I shouldn’t worry,” she said to Mrs. Vermont.

Mrs. Vermont replied with a shade of asperity that it was they who were in a position to worry and therefore must not. “’Cause we’re here to take care of you!” The remark, caught in a momentary silence around the table, was received with civility and attention. “That’s splendid!” said Mrs. Trent heartily. She got up, having finished her tea rapidly and went to smoke outside. Her husband was M.F.H. and really, thought Mrs. Vermont, they did not seem to worry about anything but wire. Mrs. Vermont turned for support to David; his ears were scarlet, he rapidly stirred his tea.

Five days ago, an R.I.C. barracks at Ballydrum had been attacked and burnt out after a long defence. Two of the defenders were burnt inside it, the others shot coming out. The wires were cut, the roads blocked; there had been no one to send for help, so there was no help for them. It was this they had all been discussing, at tea, between tennis: “the horrible thing.” No one could quite understand why Captain Vermont and the subalterns did not seem more appalled and interested. It was not apparent how the subject rasped on their sensibilities. These things happened, were deplored and accepted, and still no one seemed to look on David or Gerald, Smith, Carmichael or Mrs. Vermont’s Timmie as a possible remedy. Here they all were, playing tennis, and every one seemed delighted. “If they’d just let us out for a week⁠—” felt the young men. David could not look up as he stirred his tea. What was the good of them? This, he felt, every one should be wondering. But the party would indeed have been dull without them, there would have been no young men. Nobody wished them elsewhere.

Lois had been worrying chiefly because Gerald had illusions about her, also, as to whether Aunt Myra noticed the raspberries still would not go round. The guests for which she was responsible were not only unexpected but ravenous. And while she sat watching Aunt Myra, Gerald sat watching herself as though she were an entirely different person, not the sort of person one could describe at all. After tea she played on the upper court with Captain Vermont, against Gerald and Nona Carey. She played well, all her strokes came off; it seemed that worry agreed with her. It could not agree with Gerald, who played badly. Then it occurred to her: he was not worried; she had not the power to worry him. Some idea he had formed of herself remained inaccessible to her; she could not affect it.

By now the upper court was in shadow, they all flickered against the dark screen of the trees like figures cut out of light green velvet. Below, where hot bands of light still blinded the players, there was a suggestion of strain and violence. Whenever she looked down, Mr. Montmorency seemed to be handing balls to his partner in silent anger. She guessed it must be himself who was playing badly, so that while she could not resist looking down, she had to keep looking away from him just as fast.

“You were splendid,” said Captain Vermont when their set finished.

“Oh no, I wasn’t,” said Lois by reflex action, and wished all the other things to which she was always replying, “Oh no, I didn’t,” or “Oh no, I’m not,” were half as true. And she thought what a pity it was that Mr. Montmorency, instead of exerting himself so fruitlessly, had not been sitting there at the edge of the court to watch her.

She walked down the slope from the court with Gerald beside her. Conscious of many people’s attention, she did not know if she seemed enviable or foolish. “I wish you wouldn’t keep looking so pleased the whole time,” she said to Gerald.

“Oh?... but I am.”

“What at?”

“Well, I love coming over here. I think you have such awfully nice parties.”

“Oh, the party.... But David enjoys them, and he hasn’t got the same expression as you have. In fact, he looks rather sick. What can be the matter?”

“Well, we all feel a little rotten about that barrack.”

“Don’t! Do you know that while that was going on, eight miles off, I was cutting a dress out, a voile that I didn’t even need, and playing the gramophone?... How is it that in this country that ought to be full of such violent realness, there seems nothing for me but clothes and what people say? I might just as well be in some kind of cocoon.”

“But what could you have done? You, you⁠—”

“I might at least have felt something.”

“But you do; you’ve got the most wonderful power of feeling.”

“But you never take in a word I say. You’re not interested when I tell you about myself.”

“You know I could listen all day to you talking.”

She thought: “As though you could make me talk all day!” To cover the thought she said earnestly:

“You think we don’t all understand your not being there in time and not doing anything afterwards? We’re not all such idiots. We know it’s most terribly difficult for you and that you must obey orders. It’s bad luck the orders are silly. It’s all this dreadful idea about self-control. When we do nothing it is out of politeness, but England is so moral, so dreadfully keen on not losing her temper, or being for half a moment not a great deal more noble than anyone else. Can you wonder this country gets irritated? It’s as bad for it as being a woman. I never can see why women shouldn’t be hit, or should be saved from wrecks when everybody complains they’re superfluous.”

“You don’t understand: it would be ghastly if those things went.”

“Why? I don’t see—and I am a woman.”

Which was, of course, exactly why it wasn’t to be expected or desired she should understand. He smiled, too happy to answer, and tore out a handful of leaves from the privet hedge. She had this one limitation, his darling Lois; she couldn’t look on her own eyes, had no idea what she was, resented almost his attention being so constantly fixed on something she wasn’t aware of. A fellow did not expect to be to a girl what a girl was to a fellow—this wasn’t modesty, specially, it was an affair of function—so that the girl must be excused for a possible failure in harmony, a sometimes discordant irreverence. When he said: “You will never know what you mean to me,” he made plain his belief in her perfection as a woman. She wasn’t made to know, she was not fit for it. She was his integrity, of which he might speak to strangers but of which to her he would never speak.

He tore out another handful of leaves from the hedge and scattered them carefully over the grass. They both laughed.

She was thinking: “When next I write to Viola, can I describe him?” Viola flashed off her men in a phrase, with a sweep of her red quill pen. The red pen had leaned from the Chinese inkpot, against the window, like a thin flame, a leaning flamingo on that day’s sunny mist in the Westminster street. It remained a picture of their intercourse. They had said good-bye in December, a slight day, anxious between the enormous past and future. The parting was hardly real, they had barely kissed. They were impatient, nervous, waiting for the curtain to rise. They had just left school.

They had left school the day before. Yet the new life had been impatient for Viola, drawing her away from Lois in the taxi, appropriating her with certainty. She had stepped from their taxi toppling with school trunks with a kind of solemnity, as on to a carpet stretched for her festal approach from the kerb to the doors of her home. Next day, when they said good-bye, her hair was in place already, woven into her personality. Her pigtail had been the one loose end there was of her, an extension of her that had independence, a puppyish walloping thing with nerves of its own. Now the hair was woven in bright sleek circles over her ears, each strand round like an eel’s body. The effect completed her; Lois knew she had been missing or else discounting something all these years. Viola must have played at being a schoolgirl just as Lois would have to play at being a woman. Two expensive young men’s photographs had risen like suns on her mantelpiece; these young men had loved since last Easter holidays; their position was now regularized magically by the putting up of Viola’s hair. For only little commonalities, she declared, had affairs while still at school. And Lois, after that good-bye so distinct and distant, as at the little end of a telescope, had left her with the composed, knowing photographs and the red pen leaning against the sunshine. She had wondered, going out to a day of shopping and the night mail to be caught at Euston, whether life was to hold for her, too, a man’s passion; and if so, when? And she had bought a dozen pairs of silk stockings and the black georgette Aunt Myra said was “old.”

But a man’s passion was not at all the thing. My dear, too Dell-ish! Viola went to what she supposed one would call her first ball; in tulle she went, smoke blue, with a close gold-leaf round the hair—not bright gold, dull gold. Various people had seemed intrigued, were in fact intrigued rather definitely. There was So-and-so, an absurd person (flash of the red pen), and the aloof, rather mask-like So-and-so—who might intrigue Lois. But when it came to So-and-so (a most brilliant flash of the pen) Viola would admit to Lois she was affected: it really had been affecting. But enough of Viola. “Now, Lois darling, you must tell me about them all: I must know everybody.”

And there arose, recurrently, the difficulty in describing Gerald. Who else had been intrigued, Lois was not certain. How much was somebody intrigued when they wished to sit out in a car in the barrack square for four dances? Might not Viola consider sitting out in a car at all rather Dell-ish? When some one tried to kiss you with whisky-ish breath, how much were they intrigued and how much was whisky? She thought a major proposed to her, though he seemed rather old, but he was so much confused and had such a mumbly moustache she could not be certain. And later on at the Clonmore Club a lady was pointed out to her as, she was almost certain, that major’s wife. David had seemed intrigued, but then he himself intrigued Livvy so very definitely and did not a young man under these conditions become slightly sordid? So Lois became so very general in her references that Viola was suspicious: she asked, was there really anyone? Then she began to write in a married-womanish tone of encouragement, which considering she could be married at any moment was really justified. Lois was forced to state, there was a man in the Rutlands, a Gerald Lesworth, whom she found affecting. She supposed there was no question as to his being intrigued; people seemed to notice. So Viola wrote back, she must hear all about him, should have heard before: her Lol was really the final Sphinx. She wanted to know, to see, to hear him, even to smell him—because all the nicest men did smell, didn’t they, indefinably but divinely. One noticed it when one was dancing or, sometimes, sitting out. So now, please, everything; by return.

Viola did not like moustaches, but some men did qualify their moustaches, surely? Gerald’s lay like a fine dark shadow, so that his lip seemed to curl up more than it did. It answered his eyebrows somehow—that had a way of drawing together while he spoke—and some soft edgeless darkness about his eyes. If one mentioned his teeth so white that his smile seemed a long slow flash in the tanned face, didn’t it make him sound like Fairbanks? For he was not, at all. He had a way of looking down while he spoke, as though his thoughts were under his eyelids. From his look she had sometimes turned in impatience, never in discomfort. There was emotion there unclothed in the demi-decency of thought; nakedness, not a suggestive deshabille. If he was looking away and one spoke, his eyes returned with an extraordinary look of welcome. He had a good chin, cut sharply away underneath with a strong shadow. His head was pleasant with bumps, that made planes of light and shadow over his polished hair. And she knew she liked something about the back of his neck: it was a personal neck—not just a connection, an isthmus—with skin fitting closely over the muscles.

As she stood looking at Gerald by the privet hedge, he emerged from the mist of familiarity, clear to her mental eye. She saw him as though for the first time, with a quick response to his beauty; she saw him as though he were dead, as though she had lost him, with the pang of an evocation. While she could hold him thus—before he receded or came too closely forward—she wanted to run indoors and write to Viola. Viola would be certain to tell her she loved him, and by that declaration, to be expressed with vigour, Lois was too certain to be affected. She was afraid at the thought of it.

She would have loved to love him; she felt some kind of wistfulness, some deprivation. If there could only be some change, some movement—in her, outside of her, somewhere between them—some incalculable shifting of perspectives that would bring him wholly into focus, mind and spirit, as she had been bodily in focus now—she could love him. Something must be transmuted.... Or else, possibly, if he would not love her so, could give her air to grow in, not stifle imagination.

He said: “What’s the matter? Bothered?”

“Thinking—about you, in a kind of way.”

“Good.”

“I was describing you. How would you describe me?”

He was surprised, he needed time to think of this; he did not know. “I must just go in,” she said—“do you mind?—and write a letter. It’s so important. Will you post it for me at Clonmore?”

But meanwhile, they had been irritating Lady Naylor, who seeing Lois stand so vaguely down by the privet hedge, disclaiming implicitly the party given for her amusement, was goaded to the point of an interruption. Now she called: “Lois—Lois!”

Lois sighed and went to her.

“I want you to take the Trents and Maguires and Boatleys round the garden,” she said as her niece approached. “I shall be coming later”—she murmured: “when some more of the people have gone. Mrs. Trent wants a cutting of the allspice and would like to see if there’s anything else she would like. Tell Donovan.” She murmured again: “And don’t let Mrs. Boatley get with Mrs. Maguire, she is a Christian Scientist and will talk of it, and you know the Maguires’ little nephew died of that. And if the Boatleys like the peaches give them some; let Donovan pack them.” She added in a still lower tone of reproach: “Because I don’t believe there were raspberries for them at tea.”