Her own books were small masterpieces of psychology, subtly ironical. A shudder, half-humorous, half-despairing, came over her at the idea of Hal Willoughby, bored and mystified, ploughing his way through one of her books. “Never mind about my books,” she repeated. “I’d rather you thought of me as a girl than as a writer.” She felt wildly daring in so speaking, partly because she had called herself a girl, although she was thirty, and partly because it was the first time that she had ever attempted what she supposed to be a flirtation. Her reputation for cleverness had always been so great and so terrible that young men had never dared to approach her. She supposed that must be the reason for their aloofness, since she had always been passably pretty; and even now, by artificial light, she looked five years younger than she was. Her hair and her colouring were charming in a subdued and unvivid way, her features straight and very clean-cut. She hardly realised how much too thin were the lips of her tiny mouth, how intense and over-prominent her large hazel eyes. “I never can imagine how anybody can write a book,” said Willoughby. Adela moved uneasily. She could tell what was coming. “Do you think of a plot first, or do you just make it up as you go along?” “It all depends.” She made the meaningless reply that had so often served her before. “I should never know what to make the people say next. Aren’t conversations awfully difficult?” “Sometimes.” “I suppose you are always on the look-out for people to put into your books--under invented names, of course.” “I don’t think I am.” “Oh, but I expect you are! I expect really you sit there, taking it all in, you know.” Why did people always think it necessary to talk to her like this? “You ought to write a play. They say it pays like fun.” “But, you see, I’m not a dramatist.” “Oh, rubbish! If you’re clever enough to write books, of course you could write a play. I should, if I were you--really I should.” His voice was charged with encouragement. “No, I couldn’t. Don’t let’s talk about that.” “Why not? I want to hear about these books of yours. I’ve never met a literary lady before.” It was of no use. He would not talk to her as she was almost sure that he would have talked to any other woman in the room, given those distant sounds of music from the ballroom, that hazy moonlight above the bench beneath the syringa-bushes. Adela grimly sacrificed her art, perjuring her soul away. “I expect you think it’s very funny of me to write books,” she said, desperately adapting her vocabulary to his own. “I really do it mostly--a good deal--because it brings in money.” She tried to laugh, and hated herself for the artificiality of the sound. “I suppose girls are always glad of extra pocket-money,” he assented indifferently. A girl--that was how he thought of her.