We were six at table. The pink Colonel with the yellow creases under his blue eyes sat opposite me, like an old boy with a liver. Next him sat Lady Lathkill, watching from her distance. Her pink, soft old face, naked-seeming, with its pin-point blue eyes, was a real modern witch-face. Next me, on my left, was the dark young woman, whose slim, swarthy arms had an indiscernible down on them. She had a blackish neck, and her expressionless yellow-brown eyes said nothing, under level black brows. She was inaccessible. I made some remarks, without result. Then I said: "I didn't hear your name when Lady Lathkill introduced me to you." Her yellow-brown eyes stared into mine for some moments before she said: "Mrs. Hale!" Then she glanced across the table. "Colonel Hale is my husband." My face must have signalled my surprise. She stared into my eyes very curiously, with a significance I could not grasp, a long, hard stare. I looked at the bald, pink head of the Colonel bent over his soup, and I returned to my own soup. "Did you have a good time in London?" said Carlotta. "No," said I. "It was dismal." "Not a good word to say for it?" "Not one." "No nice people?" "Not my sort of nice." "What's your sort of nice?" she asked, with a little laugh. The other people were stone. It was like talking into a chasm. "Ah! If I knew myself, I'd look for them! But not sentimental, with a lot of soppy emotions on top, and nasty ones underneath." "Who are you thinking of?" Carlotta looked up at me as the man brought the fish. She had a crushed sort of roguishness. The other diners were images. "I? Nobody. Just everybody. No, I think I was thinking of the Obelisk Memorial Service." "Did you go to it?" "No, but I fell into it." "Wasn't it moving?" "Rhubarb, senna, that kind of moving!" She gave a little laugh, looking up into my face, from the fish. "What was wrong with it?" I noticed that the Colonel and Lady Lathkill each had a little dish of rice, no fish, and that they were served second--oh, humility!--and that neither took the white wine. No, they had no wine-glasses. The remoteness gathered about them, like the snows on Everest. The dowager peered across at me occasionally, like a white ermine out of the snow, and she had that cold air about her, of being good, and containing a secret of goodness: remotely, ponderously, fixedly knowing better. And I, with my chatter, was one of those fabulous fleas that are said to hop upon glaciers. "Wrong with it? _It_ was wrong, all wrong. In the rain, a soppy crowd, with soppy bare heads, soppy emotions, soppy chrysanthemums and prickly laurestinus! A steam of wet mob-emotions! Ah, no, it shouldn't be allowed." Carlotta's face had fallen. She again could feel death in her bowels, the kind of death the war signifies. "Wouldn't you have us honour the dead?" came Lady Lathkill's secretive voice across at me, as if a white ermine had barked.