It was the impression of a moment. When I looked again it was as if I had been withdrawn from a telescope. She was herself once more. The volcano had shrunk to a diamond twinkle, to a tiny, gesticulating creature with a needle tongue. It was bewildering: while I listened to her I was still thinking—‘Yes, but which is Anita? Diamond or star? What makes the glitter? Frost or flame?’ But that blonde woman in the shadows went off into noiseless laughter that woke the dragons and stirred Mr. Flood to an upward glance. Then he hunched himself closer against her knees, his chin low on his chest, so that his tiny beard and mouth and eyes were like triangles standing on their points. The pose gave him a glinting air of mockery and yet, somehow, you did not feel that he was amused. You only felt—‘Oh, he’s practised that at a looking-glass.’ He drawled out— “The _Life_, dear lady? Enlighten our darkness.” “That,” came the murmur behind him, “is precisely what she is going to do. How dense you are, Jasper!” And at the same moment from Miss Howe— “Be quiet, you two! Tell us, Anita! A life of her? Is that it? Ah, well, I always suspected your note-book. Did she know you Boswellized?” “She?” There was the strangest mixture of scorn and admiration in the voice. “As if one could let her know! That was the difficulty with Madala Grey: she wouldn’t take herself seriously. She had—” a pause and a search for the correct word—“what I can only call a _perverted_ sense of humour. If she’d known that I—noted things, she’d have been quite capable of falsifying all her opinions, misrepresenting herself completely, just to—throw me out, as it were. Not maliciously, I don’t mean that. But she teases,” finished Anita petulantly. “She will do it. She laughs at the wrong things. Of course she’s young still.” “Yes, she’s young—now. She stays young now. She gains that at least,” said the woman in the shadows. Anita made a quick little sound, half titter and half gasp. “Oh!” she cried—and her voice was as grey as her face—“I forgot. Do you know—I forgot! It’s going to be ghastly. I believe I shall always be forgetting.” I glanced up at Kent Rehan. It made me realize that I had been listening with anxiety, that I was afraid of their expressive sentences. They had words, those writing people. They knew what they thought: they could say what they thought: and what they thought could hurt. I didn’t want him to be hurt. I said, under my breath— “Oh, why do you stay here? They aren’t your sort.” But he had heard nothing. He was poring over the long tassel of the blind, weaving it into a six-strand plait. I couldn’t help watching his fingers. He had the most beautiful hands that I’ve ever seen on a man. They looked like two alive and independent creatures. They looked as if they could do anything they chose, whether he were there to superintend or not. And he was miles away. I was glad. Anita’s voice was rising like a dreary wind.