Nearly everybody in the room then began to explain how very much he, or she, would prefer to walk to Berry Down. It was a voluble contest in unselfish determination. Then, just as it seemed that Mrs. Leeds was reconciled to the idea of letting some of her guests start on foot, Leeds reduced the whole thing to chaos again by suddenly announcing that he would take Mrs. Harter in his small runabout. “You are taking Lady Flower, dear,” said poor Mrs. Leeds. “We’ve got muddled.” We had indeed. In the end, things were settled contrary to the wishes of almost everybody. Bill Patch and Sallie and Alfred Kendal went off on foot, Christopher, with a face of thunder, declared himself delighted to take Aileen Kendal in his two-seater, and the rest of us were somehow packed into the big cars, all except Martyn, who insisted upon going off on his own motor bicycle and taking Mrs. Harter on the carrier. Mr. Leeds and Claire, mutually dissatisfied, went in our host’s runabout. I do not know exactly what they said to one another, of course, but I do know that Claire is not in the least interested in the celebrities that other people have met. Even the ones that she has met herself appeal to her from only one point of view, which is what she thinks that they thought about her. At all events, when they arrived at the particular clump of Scotch firs indicated, Claire looked utterly exhausted, and Leeds made straight for Mrs. Harter and threw himself down on the dry, heathery turf at her feet and asked for a drink. It was, actually, only the second time that I had seen Mrs. Harter. She looked better than she had looked in evening dress, wearing a thin dark tweed and a purple felt hat properly rammed down over her black hair. (The Kendals had large straw hats, the backs of which almost touched their shoulder blades.) Our host’s voice boomed on without ceasing and I caught the words “cocktails,” “Cairo” and “moonlight” a good many times, but from Mrs. Harter I hardly heard a syllable. She sat and smoked cigarettes, and every now and then she looked across the gorse and heather and bracken to the path along which the walkers would come. The interval during which we waited for them was mostly passed in discussion as to whether we should wait or not. I remember that Mrs. Kendal kept on saying, “I should have thought they would have been here by this time. I should have thought so,” and that each time she said it, one or other of us replied, intelligently, that _we_ should have thought so, too. Then Mrs. Leeds wanted us to begin lunch, and we said, “Oh no, we’d better wait,” and then one by one capitulated, and said, “Well, perhaps we’d better not wait.” And by that time the habit of uncertainty that I had already discerned in Mrs. Leeds had got the better of her again and she said, “Oh well, perhaps we’d better give them a few minutes’ law.”